What is the essence of Heart-Centered Leadership?
Let’s start by nailing this down: a heart-centered leader is kind and compassionate, however, she or he is not the best grandma of all, walking around the office with a huge plate of freshly baked cakes every day. Still, sometimes they do!
A heart-centered leader is definitely not a ‘yes-man’. They are open to different opinions, consider and discern them thoroughly. When you are talking to them you can feel their genuine presence. They are open and let you speak, express your ideas, they ask to understand you better and to help you to elaborate your views more clearly. However, you might not get a quick decision, and that could be frustrating for you. They understand your unease and would be willing to sit with you to give space for your emotions, but they stick to their needs and will not compromise.
Why are they doing so? How can these seemingly contradictory behaviors get together? Being compassionate, open hearted and rigorously strict and seemingly selfish on the other hand? Is this normal?
Yes, it is absolutely normal, although what we tend to call normal in our days got very far from normality. In our competitive, go-go-go societies we have forgotten to respect our boundaries, our most innate and basic needs. We continuously exploit ourselves, our colleagues, and our environment. And now we are confronted with the consequences, the multiple crisis around us. Is this really what we are here for?
The horse behavior
Let’s dive a little deeper into the behavior of horses. As we all know horses are prey animals with a well-developed fight-or-flight response. Their first reaction to a threat is often to flee, although sometimes they stand their ground and defend themselves or their offspring in cases where flight is untenable.[1]
The fight-or-flight response involves nervous impulses which result in hormone secretions into the bloodstream. When a horse reacts to a threat, it may initially “freeze” in preparation to take flight.[4] Once the horse has removed itself from immediate danger, the body is returned to more “normal” conditions via the parasympathetic nervous system.[10]
The role of the lead mare
Contrary to the popular belief, the herd stallion is not the “ruler”, rather, the horse that tends to lead a wild or feral herd is most commonly a dominant mare.[24] The mare “guides the herd to food and water, controls the daily routine and movement of the herd, and ensures the general wellbeing of the herd.”[25]
When the dominant mare feels safe, all the horses feel safe.
Besides all the above, the main task of the dominant mare is to protect the herd by guiding them to the safest place in case of danger. Horses can intuit danger from several, sometimes 100s kilometres ahead, but they do not do anything until the dominant mare is starting to run. They look at the leading mare and if she is OK, they are OK, too.
Mirror-neurons and our stress responses
We might think we are more evolved than horses but our basic biology regarding our stress responses is quite similar. Since we have been living in a world that is constantly fighting for our attention and we have been bombarded by tons of information daily, our nervous system cannot digest them. If we do not allow ourselves to “rest and digest”, the stress hormones accumulate in our bodies and even we cannot feel it, our stress level rises, that undermines our mental and physical health.
Whether we like it or not, with this constant higher stress we become prey animals, just like the horses. We tend to fall into fight-or-flight responses often simply because we feel attacked. Our anxiety rises, and although we try to avoid acting out, the mirror-neurons in the frontal cortex of others can sense this and everyone around us gets anxious, too. Anxiety is a social emotion and is contagious. Have you ever entered a room where there was a clash before? I bet you could have told it right after you stepped into. Again, it is all about our energies that we radiate into our environment. What happens when we feel attacked, and we want to protect ourselves?
Self-protecting mechanisms at the workplace
We cheat.
We blame.
We ignore.
We numb ourselves.
We judge.
We overdo.
We do not say: I don’t know.
We do not ask for time.
We do not say NO. – and the list can be endless…
How to step out of our autopilot and respond from a grounded place?
As I have described in my article the two leadership superpowers are:
- self-regulation
- co-regulation
What is self-regulation?
During each emotional wave, we have 90 seconds to deal with the hormonal effects that occur. During this time, we can observe the emotion, the changes in our body, ground ourselves to restore emotional balance. That’s the time-frame we only have, because if we go beyond 90 seconds, the hormones flooding our bodies will take over our thoughts. If we ground ourselves first, we can make decisions from a more emotionally stable place and then start to communicate, being aware of how our actions affect others.
To summarize the above, in any situation that causes frustration, we must first bring ourselves back into a state of equilibrium, this is what self-regulation is, and only then do we become capable of co-regulation. In this way, we can manage the emergence of emotional waves in the team, without unnecessary interference and without creating even bigger storms.
And why is it essential to become the most relaxed person in the room?
Elizabeth Gilbert puts it beautifully. There is power in calm.
“Every martial artist knows that the most relaxed person in the room is the one who holds all the power,” she says. “It isn’t the richest one, it isn’t the strongest one, it isn’t the whitest one, it isn’t the male-ist one, it’s the one who is embodying themselves in perfect peace who is the one who has real power.”
Just like dominant mares in the herd.