Barrett (Rousseau), C. (2025). Leading from beyond: Awakening beyond the separate self in Aotearoa New Zealand’s public sector – An intuitive inquiry [Unpublished Master’s thesis]. Alef Trust & Liverpool John Moores University.
This study explores the lived experience of awakening to ‘something beyond’ the separate self among individuals working with or within the public sector in Aotearoa New Zealand, and examines how this awakening influences selfhood, leadership, and service. The research employed Intuitive Inquiry (Anderson & Braud, 2011), a qualitative transpersonal methodology that integrates intuitive and intellectual ways of knowing, unfolding across five iterative cycles of interpretation. Seven preliminary lenses were identified as the researcher’s initial ways of understanding the phenomenon. Seven participants engaged in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using Sultan’s (2019) heuristic approach, drawing on indwelling and focusing exercises, incorporating the researcher’s drawings, soundscapes, and movements to surface impressions of the data. Individual portraits of each participant’s experience were crafted and then integrated into a composite portrait from which seven core themes were identified. Through recursive engagement with the data, these evolved into fifteen revised lenses, from which four overarching meta-patterns emerged: (1) foundations for awakening and transformation; (2) the relational nature of awakening and transformation; (3) leadership as transformation of the separate self through practice; and (4) service as the creative outpouring of a deliberate developmental process contributing to the wellbeing of the whole. The findings suggest that transformational leadership and service arise through a deliberate inner developmental process—integrating the separate self, enabled and supported by relational, cultural, and systemic conditions. The study concludes that inner transformation might expand leaders’ capacity for presence, humility, and service, offering practical implications for embedding inner development within public service leadership frameworks.
