The Science of Leadership: Your Brain and Self-Focus

How the inner voice, open awareness, and cognitive control combine to set the foundation for great leaders

In his seminal 2013 piece for Harvard Business Review, Dr. Daniel Goleman, a pioneer in the study of emotional intelligence, asserts that the primary task of leaders is to capably influence and direct the attention of their teams. But to do that successfully, they must first learn to master the skill of focusing their own attention on three key areas:

• The self
• Others
• The outside world

Together, these focal points comprise what Goleman calls “the triad of awareness.”

“A failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.”

Here, we’ll explore the first part of the triad: Focus on the self.

Focus on the self

As a building block of effective leadership, focus on the self can be broken down into three parts:

• The inner voice
• Open awareness
• Cognitive control

The inner voice

To some, the idea of connecting with your inner voice may seem like psychobabble, but it’s firmly rooted in cognitive science.

Tucked behind the frontal lobes of your brain, the insula is a “receiving zone that reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions…that keep the body in a state of internal balance. Information from the insula is relayed to other brain structures that appear to be involved in decision making.”

This tiny region of your brain governs social emotions, moral intuition, and empathy, contributing to your understanding of what it is to be human and how you communicate with your inner self.

When you have a “gut feeling,” your inner voice is responding to physiological cues from the insula — otherwise known as somatic markers — that tell you whether something “feels” right or wrong. This is your brain’s way of streamlining the decision-making process by influencing your attention toward more preferable options. As Goleman says, “They’re hardly foolproof (how often was that feeling that you left the stove on correct?), so the more comprehensively we read them, the better we use our intuition.”

Open awareness

Goleman defines open awareness as the ability to “broadly notice what’s going on around us without getting caught up in or swept away by any particular thing. In this mode we don’t judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive.”

For leaders, open awareness requires receptivity to feedback from peers and colleagues. Importantly, being receptive is not the same as being reactive. Not all feedback is valuable or worthwhile, but an awareness of and openness to it is critical for leaders. Why? Because in combination with your aptitude for recognizing the internal sensory impressions of your inner voice, a receptivity to the opinions of those closest to you helps form a more coherent view of your authentic self. Without a proper understanding of your authentic self, communicating to your team authentically is fundamentally impossible. And an inability to communicate authentically results in negative consequences for teams and organizations.

Cognitive control

Colloquially known as “willpower,” cognitive control is the ability to focus attention where you want it despite temptations, distractions, or setbacks. Governed by the prefrontal cortex as one aspect of your brain’s executive function (which also includes working memory and flexible reasoning), cognitive control is an essential skill for leaders operating inside ambiguous or continuously changing business environments. This same neural circuitry is also responsible for how you regulate emotions. Leaders with strong cognitive control are more likely to remain calm during times of crisis, navigate complex challenges, and recover from defeats.

🔑 Key takeaways

• A strong connection to the physiological messages of your inner voice fosters greater self-understanding and more straightforward decision-making.
• Open awareness to feedback from peers and colleagues allows for a better understanding of your authentic self and, by extension, greater leadership and performance potential.
• Robust cognitive control permits single-minded focus despite distractions and the ability to self-regulate emotions in the face of challenges.

For more insights like these, get the Knowable app and join 40,000+ founders, creators, and everyday go-getters building new skills and fueling their ambitions with daily audio lessons on business, startups, self-improvement, and more. Find it in the App Store and on Google Play.