Center for Leadership
Studies

Alan Seale is an award-winning author, inspirational speaker, leadership and transformation coach and a spiritual mentor. His global workshops spring from his published works, all of which aid people in understanding their missions in a personal, professional and global context. When Seale was brought in to the MAOL, it was very apparent that he’d filled an important space previously unoccupied: Seale was “the soul guy.”

“Leaders have conversations going on inside of themselves—deep, personal conversations that they often have no place to bring outside. I am that place,” Seale explains. “I help candidates understand that who you are and what your mission in life is can also show up at work with you. It doesn’t need to be this thing you deal with and hide and bring out once you go home. We find ways to bring it out in a way that makes life and work life much richer.”

At the MAOL, Seale guides MAOL candidates into discovering how they fit into evolutionary flow and the global community on an intimate, mission-based level. By giving people proven emotional and spiritual tools for self-awareness work, Seale shows candidates how to work through energy and honor their own intuitive development. To a large extent Seale’s work is in inviting people to explore experiences that they have already lived, tapping into moments in which they have felt connected to a passion and a bigger picture, then dropping below the surface of the experience to find out what bigger talent and drive is fed through those experiences.

“When you move into service in the world at the level of where these candidates are, they have pretty significant places in their organizations, they’re going to make a difference,” Seale says. “The questions we explore are not what do I want, or what does the company want, but instead what is wanting to happen here, through me? How do I in my life fit into a much bigger picture?”

In a sense, Seale explains, everyone in the program is a participant – candidate and faculty: everyone has a mission and learning to bring, and everyone is engaged. Unlike a business school, Seale explains, here candidates learn from who the faculty actually is, and that faculty has been out in the world, involved in business and organizational change for years. Furthermore, the conversations that occur in the MAOL classroom are evenly owned and driven by candidates as they explore leadership.

“Leadership is about helping people be the best they can possibly be,” Seale asserts. “It’s about tapping into a flow in the greater consciousness that is guiding the path for us. It involves stepping beyond ‘What do I want?’ and recognizing how what you want is very much a part of that much bigger flow of ‘what’s wanting to happen.’ As leaders it’s about being able to hold a vision about what’s needing to happen in that arena in life and playing your part.”