Founder – My Approach

Jon Rubenstein

My life and work have taught me a new way to unlock individual and collective potential.

Jon-HeadshotWho I am Today
Social change is my passion. For the past 20 years, I’ve put that passion into practice, helping to develop leadership in social change organizations. Ten years ago, I began to focus my attention on the self-imposed limits that leaders encounter in their work, and on what it takes to liberate access to core leadership qualities that can help them create powerful, lasting transformation. Through my extensive work with change leaders, I’ve seen that they have a tremendous capacity to overcome the challenges they face if they are able to access these qualities. The good news is that they exist within all of us, there’s no need to search outside of ourselves for them. These qualities are innate, we simply have to learn to tap into and cultivate them. The more we do so, the easier our paths to becoming powerful and effective leaders. And the more they manifest in our life and work, the greater the change we can create in our organizations and our communities.

I’ve devoted the last decade of my working life to helping others access these natural leadership qualities and realize their full potential. Before I could do this, though, I had to go through my own personal journey of discovery. Click here to read about Jon’s personal Journey

A Transformative Approach
My approach draws on wisdom and principles from the worlds of coaching, psychology, and spiritual practice. At the same time, I uphold central principles from the community organizing tradition, of which I was a part for the first decade of my career. These principles include:

  • How to build successful public relationships through understanding people’s self-interests
  • How power and relationship-based constituency building are critical to creating effective change
  • How individual adversity, pain, and suffering can become powerful fuel for creating social change when leaders have the appropriate resources and mentorship

In doing this work, I’ve been fortunate to support a broad range of social change leaders and organizers. What I’ve discovered in myself, I’ve also discovered in those I’ve worked with—that the more we experience our natural leadership qualities, the more we come to see them as just that: natural. We don’t have to struggle to embody them, we only have to clear out what’s getting in the way and allow these inherent qualities to develop and mature. Click here to read more about Our Process. This, of course, takes a commitment to heightened self-awareness, the courage to work through the obstacles that keep us stuck, and the discipline to sustain practices that cultivate our essential qualities. The upside to this work is that we become leaders who are more naturally able to transform our organizations and communities.

Our Invitation
Immanent Leadership believes that profound transformation and social justice in our political and economic systems will only occur if change leaders can work through their personal challenges and access deeper sources of power.
Throughout the coaching process, we focus on the implications of this kind of power for both individual leadership and the building of powerful constituencies for change.