Connection: the heart of life
Musings on Heart Powered Human Human Leadership
Connection. I think in the end this is what we all long for. A sense of connection. With ourselves, each other and something bigger. Connection seems to be a deeply human yearning.
Our sense of connection is what gives our life meaning.
When we are feeling connected, we don’t feel separate. We belong in that moment; welcomed just as we are. I have been on a journey for the past 30 years in my work as a leadership coach, trainer and mentor — to facilitate connection. I think so much is resolved when people feel connected — especially when you consider what happens when the opposite is at play — the challenges of disconnection.
When we feel separate it brings out the worst in us. It can trigger feeling bad and the ego’s survival needs kick in — where we want to feel secure, in control and approved of — and will do anything to get that. A lot of pain comes from feeling separate. In particular a sense of isolation and loneliness that can be debilitating and send us spiralling. The effects of a lack of connection.
In contrast, look at the benefits of a sense of connection — although I hardly have to spell these out — they are the treasured desires of each human heart.
To feel seen and heard, to be met. To be close and bonded. To be held. To belong, united and at One.
On my leadership programs I often ask participants: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want? After teasing out what having that thing will ultimately give them, people will usually say something along the lines of Freedom, Peace, Fulfilment or Love — to me these all have the feeling of being At One —having a sense of deeper Connection.
I love the dictionary definition and origin of words, they can be illuminating. Definition of Connect: to join, link, or fasten together; unite or bind.
Connection has a sense of welcome, warmth and safety in it. Humans are social animals — we started out in tribes — relying on others to provide what we couldn’t provide ourselves. Interdependence was a natural survival strategy; this way of operating has helped us navigate dangers and enable synergy — achieving more together than we can alone.
It makes perfect common sense that we thrive when we feel connected.
Our natural state is connection. You can see this with babies and young children. We are designed to meet the world with an open heart, trusting others will take care of us. When we are young, we are most alive with the life force running through us and in that state we can feel connected to anything and everything.
What happens to us that can make connection so hard?
Around age seven our critical thinking capacity kicks in and we start getting ideas about who we are - this generates our self-image. Our identity starts becoming formed and we can evaluate and compare. They are inferior, I am inferior — you can see how the beginnings of a pattern of feeling separate can easily start here. Comparison with siblings, with friends, with other students. Even with heroes and role models you admire.
We can get ideas about who we are that instead of a random thought we once had one day, can end up being held in our minds consciously or even subconsciously as The Truth about who are, creating habitual patterns of thought that we have conditioned into ourselves — we believe this thought so much — it isn’t ‘just a thought’ it is our reality.
Essentially we are then left with one main question that we all seek to desperately have answered: Am I lovable?
And the accompanying fear of what might make us unlovable. As hard as it is to really define Love — I have come to think of Love as being: a powerful, positive connection — uniquely experienced, yet we each know it when we do experience it. Love is always the quest, the riddle and the resolution.
We do better together when we feel connected, we create more, collaborate more, have more productivity, enjoy more — basically it is the oil that makes the cogs of industry go around.
Love belongs in business.
Latest Science knows connection matters too — connection creates co-operation. The survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition.
Roberto Cazzolla Gatti who began to be interested in the role of cooperation in evolution since 2011, published a paper titled Evolution is a cooperative process: the biodiversity-related niches differentiation theory can explain why
“These theoretical findings, confirmed by empirical approaches, should motivate our species to think before it is too late about how human competition, for the first time in the history of life on Earth, has been systematically leading to the extinction of animals and plants.
If humanity does not stop its ‘unnatural’ competitive spirit in the massive elimination of species, more billions of years could be needed before the diverse set of living beings that we now call biodiversity can be regenerated.”
In his great work the book Loveability: Knowing How to Love and Be Loved by Robert Holden says:
“All the happiness, health, and abundance you experience in life comes directly from your ability to love and be loved. This ability is innate, not acquired.
Love makes you conscious. It switches a light on in your mind. This light brings everything into view. Love exposes the fears you identify with, the secret shame you haven’t forgiven, the old wounds not yet released, and every other unloving thought that blocks the awareness of love’s presence.
“I ask you to consider that the goal of your life is not just to find love; it is to be love. Love is the real work of your life.”
Ok, yes I want more Connection — but how?
To be intimate with love, you have to move beyond words, leave behind self-concepts, empty your mind of learned ideas, stop being so religious, and let yourself dissolve into love.
― Robert Holden, LoveabilityYour task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. — Rumi
One of the keys that can help you remove those barriers is understanding your past and the stories you have told yourself and believed.
“You can only be held back by your past if you use it to reject yourself in the present.”
― Robert Holden Loveability
Reflecting on this for yourself can help you bring into the light and then move on from your old stories of feeling separate: ‘ You and Love’ — to tell a new story of being connected — ‘You are Love ‘ This becomes effortless when we connect with our Core, when we are connected with the energy of all things —when we are simply being who we are.
Our past inheritance may not incline us to believe or accept this — and yet it is true. We may have to do the work to see through the shadow of our unresolved past self to bring what we most fear about ourselves into the light, and yet in the space of our own loving awareness we will watch dissolve all that is not real.
At Core, we are already whole and complete — we are not broken — the essence of who we are is already ok and at One. We are Love; Loved and Loving.
We each glimpse moments of this every day — it is there to see in the big and the little things — if we care to notice them. The gentle hand that touches us, the food made with love, the garden tended. The genuine welcome as we enter the store, the text or person asking us: How are you doing? The baby’s birth, the wedding day, the perfect stillness of a death bed.
Whenever our busy, inquiring mind settles. When we are not concerned with who we are and our ideas of ourselves, when we are present fully with this moment and who and what we find in right in front of us — we all fall — dissolve into Love.
It is what remains of us when all else falls away.
To know that is to know we are always Connected to ourselves, others, the earth, the Divine —it is to know that we belong to the very beating heart of life itself.
For leaders who want to lead with humanity, heart and wisdom.
Get inspiration / Work with me one to one; in-person on retreat
