Lead with Love
There’s a funny thing that happens when you start walking the kindness talk. People seem to crave it. Recently, I’ve been asked to speak at various companies and organizations — from accounting companies to human services, from high net worth investment firms to public schools. What’s the common denominator? I’d like to think this trend is about how we each can be more of the human we want to be: caring, wholehearted and generous. That’s part of it, of course. That’s the bright side of such a talk. But underneath is a deep need to understand what gets in the way. That’s the shadow side.
We need to become friends with the shadow side.
This is easier than you might think. The dark side of corporate culture reveals itself in the face of fear and threat — meeting deadlines, KPIs, profits, career advancement, and all the usual suspects that arise when real or imagined survival is at stake — at the expense of human connection and compassion.
The paradox at the heart of this matter is that it’s okay to be competitive AND cooperative at the same time. It’s more than okay. It’s necessary. It requires awareness in how humans respond to the world, through three emotion motivational systems espoused by the British compassion researcher and psychologist Paul Gilbert. I wrote about it in The Kindness Cure in chapter 10 (Emotional Paradox).
The paradoxes you can experience in your own mind are clashes between the “old brain/mind” and the “new brain/mind.” Your “old brain/mind” is the “base model” of human emotional regulation and hasn’t changed much over millennia. Its job is to serve your basic survival instincts as soon as possible and to seek out pleasure and comfort. It is speedy and reactive. Here is a simple way to picture these three emotion regulation systems (because color coding is easy to remember):
• A threat and self-protection system (red) that senses threats quickly and activates the fight- flight-freeze- faint response in your limbic system. This is like your home surveillance system.
• An incentive and resource-seeking system (blue) that propels you to seek pleasure, consume, play, strive/achieve, and mate. It’s like an Energizer Bunny scurrying about, looking for fun or success in life. Or, think of this as striving for the “blue ribbons” of success.
• A soothing and contentment system (green) that seeks balance, rest, and connection, and is strongly linked to affection, bonding, caregiving, kindness, and compassion. This is the calm and connect system, and it is a bit slower to come online, but when it does, it gives you a sense of overall wellbeing—like a baby’s snuggly or a rocking chair.
As humans evolved the brain became more complex. Like machine learning the brain’s neural networks are helping to predict what will happen next as you rub up against the daily challenges in life. These amazing networked regions in the brain allow you to work things through, compare, contemplate, mull things over, create, innovate, imagine, seek knowledge, strive for goals, and develop an identity. This allows for quick learning, exchanging information from among groups, and passing on these adaptive genes to future generations. Importantly, this sophisticated upgrade allows you to be aware that you exist and have a sense of self. You can be aware of your awareness, unlike any other animal, and observe your own mind. This is, of course, both a blessing and a curse.
When your “new brain/mind” is pulled by the fears and passions of the “old brain/mind,” you can get stuck in unkind behaviors (toward yourself or others). The brain can make some unwise predictions. This is the unfortunate bug in the system, so to speak.
Workplace Woes, Compassionate Action
I have lots of conversations about leadership and cultivating practices that can lead to productivity, profits and happier workplaces. So often is is an “inside job,” meaning within the leader. I talk about befriending the inner critic at work and gathering positivity allies to counteract the negativity that even one nasty person can evoke. It takes commitment because systems take time to change. Of course, it helps when leadership and management adopts and embodies the values of caring and compassion as integral to company goals, even if you are selling widgets or crunching numbers. I like to think of this as cultivating inner worth, inner humanity and inner leadership. See more at my KindMinds.co.
Here’s to growing a kind mind.
