What it means to be a Leader — it’s not titles, it’s love — What most people don’t get about leadership
We call people in positions of power leaders. They were often promoted because they delivered — or appeared capable of delivering — results. But that really just makes them managers. People who can delegate and get work done.
Leaders are something else. And unfortunately, many so-called leaders aren’t trained to be actual leaders.
Managers get work done. Leaders empower their people to do this work.
They are focused on the human side.
Leadership is all about relating. It’s all about love.
The Indo-European root of the word lead means “to go forth“, ”to cross the threshold” and even “to die” (or at least to transform) — and by that “going before as a guide”.
When we relate, we cross a threshold.
We cross the threshold that separates our sense of self from something we consider other.
That could even be aspects of our own self.
That is why leaders lead themselves first. They consciously relate to their self.
“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” ― Erich Fromm
Leaders relate to self first
Who is this self?
There are at least three different aspects to your self:
- your small “i” or me, comprised of your body, your emotions, and your thoughts
- your larger “I”, your higher self and potential — what the Romans called genius: your unique self-expression, your vision, your capacity to see beyond what is, and your ability to create reality consciously,
- and your observer, your point of perception, the part that is experiencing itself through these two domains.
The lower or gross aspects of self are pretty loud, the subtle higher aspects of our self take more attention and a more conscious connection to engage with.
Take a moment to ask yourself: “who is I?”
I purposely did not write “who am I?”.
The latter is about the stories we tell ourselves about our life, the experiences we had and the labels we choose to associate with the label that is our name.
When we ask who “is” I, we actually break down the different elements of our Human Operating System (HOS).
Relating to “i”, your lower circuits
Most of our daily experience is affected by the gross aspects of ourselves: our body, our emotions and our thoughts.
Unfortunately, we mostly notice them, when things are not okay: when our body aches, when we feel “negative” emotions, or when our thoughts are running on repeat and driving us nuts.
Relating to “i”, leading “me”, starts with paying attention to these lower circuits of our Human Operating System.
Relating to the body
Take a moment to scan through your body: How are you sensing your feet right now, your legs, your hips, your torso, your arms, your head? Are parts of you tense, or relaxed? Are there any pains? Are you warm, cold? Or maybe you are warm in some places of your body, cooler in others. How are you sensing the air on your skin? Are you hungry?
[Here is a short meditation to support you in this]
Proprioception, also known as kinesthesia, is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and its location.
Proprioception, consciously relating to your body, is the foundation of many spiritual practices: sensing your body, scanning for the state of your muscles, sensing your heartbeat, sensing the blood running through your vessels, sensing the air flowing in an out of your respiratory system.
Regularly checking in with your body is key to staying connected to it, and not just tuning it out until it is signaling so loudly that you can’t ignore it anymore.
If our body is not okay, even if e.g. your gut bacteria, your microbiome is unbalanced, it will affect your emotions.
Relating to emotions
We have them all day long, emotions are our shortcuts to experiencing and evaluating the reality around us.
Emotions tell us to get in motion, to advance or retreat.
When you watch little kids especially before they learn language, they express their emotions fully. They will be angry and frustrated one moment, only to laugh and giggle with joy in the next moment. They have not learned to hold on to these emotions and turn them into feeling, into a state of being we can hold on to.
Emotions guide us when we acknowledge and engage with them, when we consciously relate to them.
Anger, e.g. lets us know that a boundary was crossed, that someone infringed on our sense of self or sense of justice and order.
Key is to relate consciously to your emotions and thus process them. Not to depress them, nor to get stuck in them.
It starts with noticing them, then labeling them, so we can consciously, rationally process them. Labels are the domain of thought.
Relating to our thoughts
According to recent studies we have about 6,000 thoughts a day (it is pretty difficult to measure, in this study, they used an fRMI to identify when a new thought occurs).
Most of these thoughts are repetitions and many are self-defeating.
We spend a lot of time questioning whether we are okay, whether we did alright or not, often rooted in the past, or projecting into the future.
Take a moment to notice your thoughts. What have you been thinking about today? While reading this article?
The semantic circuit of our HOS evolved with language. Once we had words, labels for our experience, we created time. By labeling something, we create persistence of objects, and with that can think about something in the past or future. Children develop object permanence around the age of 12–18 months and fully around 2 years old, when they develop language. Before, something is either there or not there. Curiously, we also find this in some indigenous cultures that don’t have past and future as part of their language.
Learning to calm the mind, still the thoughts, letting them pass by without buying into them is also key in most esoteric and spiritual practices.
When you learn to consciously relate to your thoughts, you also remind yourself that you are the master of your thoughts, not their slave as the Buddhists say.
Once we learned to consciously relate to our lower self, we also realize that there is more to us, that we can use these lower circuits to do something with, to express ourselves and create consciously in service to a higher vision.
Relating to “I”, your higher circuits and genius
Our genius takes some coaxing. While it is sending us signals at all times, we tend to ignore them distracted by our experience in the physical realm.
Your genius is made up of your three transpersonal circuits.
Relating to your self-expression
Each of us is unique, has a unique voice and self-expression. While we all live out certain archetypal patterns — and in that there are not that many of us — , each instance, each individual incorporation of these archetypes is unique.
You are unique.
Take a moment and connect to your individual expression. How are you unique? What makes you different from other people you have met? What is your particular way of expression?
And what are you putting your expression, your leadership in service to?
Relating to your vision
We all have the ability to imagine and vision. Beyond mere projection of circumstance into the past or future — more a feature of your third circuit thoughts and mind — we can vision that which is bigger than ourselves. We can imagine a way of life, we can relate to a future that we want to bring about.
Take a moment and envision your future. Where do you want to be in five years? In ten years? At the end of your life?
What can you see for humanity? For the planet? For our collective future? What are you creating through your leadership?
Relating to your creative ability
Once you realize that you can use your lower circuits consciously to express your unique talents, and you have gone beyond the narcissistic aspect of that, and decided to put your vision in service to something larger than yourself, you can relate to your creative ability, to your ability to consciously create reality.
This highest incorporated circuit is what has been associated with magick in the past. Science has by now shown pretty clearly that we can affect reality with our mind. Our thoughts do indeed become things.
Taught in initiatory societies for millennia, the ability to consciously relate to creation allows us to also consciously participate in its unfolding.
As a leader, how you look at reality matters.
Your ideas of your people, what you see or do not see possible for them affect their reality — even beyond the Pygmalion effect.
Allow me to share an example: I once worked with a leadership team where one of the leaders sought my advice about two team members. One was an extroverted thinker, brimming with enthusiasm for exploring ideas, while the other was a pragmatic introvert, focused on tangible outcomes and intolerant of any “bullshitting”. Frustrated, the leader asked me: “What can I do about them? They’ll never see eye to eye.”
I proposed a shift in perspective. “What if,” I suggested, “you let go of the need for immediate agreement and instead hold space for the possibility of alignment?”
The following day at lunch, I noticed the three of them sitting together. The extrovert and the introvert were deeply engrossed in an animated and joyful conversation. The leader caught my eye, his expression a mixture of wonder and realization. I responded with a knowing smile, letting the moment speak for itself.
Whether we believe something can happen or something can’t, we increase respective probabilities. We do have an effect on “other”, either way.
Leaders consciously relate to “other”
Leaders relate to reality in conscious ways.
The word reality comes from Latin “res ales” — other things.
We learn about reality when we learn words to describe it. Consequently, our reality is also made up of the distinctions we have been taught and learned, and the beliefs and connotations these distinctions hold for us.
For example, if you don’t know much about wine, it will be either red or white wine for you. A sommelier on the other hand will look at wine very differently, identifying the region it came from, the grapes used to make it, and even the year it was cultivated. Having more distinctions available to them, they also have more ways to distinguish the reality of a bottle of wine.
Out distinctions are fraught with cognitive bias and fallacies.
None of us experiences reality “as it is”. We experience an internal projection based on the interpretation of the signals our senses send us, and the attached beliefs.
Leaders know this. They know that they are responsible for their experience of reality, and that this experience might be wrong. They are open to feedback and learning, knowing that they only have their perception to go with, but that this perception is not “the truth”.
Consequently, they meet their people with curiosity, openness and from a place of listening. In that, they hold for the potential of either party to evolve.
How leaders relate to “Other”
The German poet Goethe once wrote that we can never perceive the divine directly. We could perceive it through nature, e.g. a tree, or we could perceive it through a poem about that tree.
Whether you believe in some divine reality doesn’t really matter. You can still hold for the potential of your employees, seeing not just them for who they are now, but seeing them as who they could be — conscious co-creators of reality. Seeing their genius, even if they cannot yet see it themselves.
This is where leaders practice Transformational Relating. Transformational Relating is about encountering every interaction with curiosity for what wants to emerge, who each participant could become through the interaction. They understand that emergence, creativity, innovation all happen in the space in between — it happens in our relating and in how we relate to the world around us.
Leaders relate to the world
While management is about getting results, about efficiency, leadership is about efficacy, about meaning, about purpose, about bringing about a world these results are in service to.
Leaders understand that they impact the world — that through their actions they create our collective future.
Especially in times of transformation as the current one, where planet, politics, supply chains, organizations and people are in the liminal space between what was and what will be, leadership matters more than ever.
Right now, management is less important than leadership.
Management requires a specific target to accomplish.
Leadership is about emergence, about navigating uncertainty and the unknown.
It is about taking that step across the threshold into the darkness and bringing your light to it.
In that, leaders are guides of an exploratory mission. Unlike a tour guide, who knows the details of the place they are taking people to, leaders are guides for when there might be a north star to orient on, but where the path is not always clear.
They make the path as they go, taking their people with them by enabling them to be leaders in their own right, so that we can collectively build a future that works for more people.
Leaders create leaders. And they create a leaderful future, in which we consciously relate and create from a place of love for ourselves, each other, and the world.
What’s love got to do with it?
Love is an overused word, and in that a bit meaningless. Most of the time, it’s related to eros, to the romantic delusion of finding our “other half” so we can feel whole. Whether it is a lover, a new job, or a product that is being peddled to you by abusing this force of pull.
But there are other kinds of love.
In Greek they separated these into different words:
- There is eros, the powerful emotional force that seeks to connect with what makes us feel whole (and conversely hate, when we avoid that which makes us feel us separate).
- There is also philia, the love we have for a friend, where we understand that they are separate, and maybe even very different from us, but we appreciate them for who they are and what unfolds in our relating to them.
- Then there is agape, the kind of love that truly transcends. Agape is “unconditional love, charity; the love of God for person and of person for God.” (Wikipedia) Or the love for a partner, who we might at times not find attractive, who we might not even like at times, but who we are committed to and therefore find ever new ways to engage with.
Agape is also the love of the leader.
It is the love that transcends the boundaries of I and expands our sense of self.
Love then is defining self beyond the boundaries if I.
When you realize other is also kin, also your kind, someone to be kind to.
In that, real leaders are lovers.
They see the potential leader in everyone, they understand that we are all part of #teamhuman, and that we are here to support each other in our development.
In doing so, they give of themselves fully, they empower people, lift them up, so they can grow in their own power to create.
Leaders create the future
Relate in Latin originally means to bring back. Like religio, which means to re-connect, it is about bringing back a wholeness — needed now more than ever in a fragmented world divided by labels and the thinking of our semantic circuit.
In order not to fall back into the trap of eros, yearning for something outside of us to make us whole and become irrational, we need to become trans-rational, connect to our relational intelligence, that fourth circuit that is key to authentic transformational leadership.
We stand at the edge of an emergent future, where management suffices no longer as a focus, and leadership must rise and become a priority.
It is time to ask yourself:
How will I lead?
How will I relate to myself and “other”?
How will I cross thresholds, not just for results, but for meaning?
In doing so, you transform not only yourself, your people, or your organization, but the very fabric of humanity’s collective story.
After all, you will die one day, and only your love survives.
Bridging the philosophical with the practical, I empower leaders to cultivate strategies and foster cultures that drive meaningful transformation and spark innovation. Together, we’ll build the relational intelligence and resilience you and your team need to navigate complexity and co-create a future rich with purpose and potential.
If you’re intrigued by the power of relational intelligence or are ready to master the art of transformation, let’s connect. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, explore my insights on my website, or connect with LUMAN to discover how we can collaborate to elevate your leadership and accelerate your impact.
