Heart-Centered Leadership: Realizing Untapped Collaborative Potential
When embraced and practiced, the approach is reliably linked to high performing teams and impactful organizations.
Leadership is a Journey we take together.
For many, the nature of the human experience is characterized by a dual state of being — internal and external. Internal encompasses all aspects identified as “me” — thoughts, feelings, and physical attributes. External encompasses all aspects identified as other, all that is “not me” — other beings, the natural world, and inanimate objects.
It can be said that the junction where the internal and external world intersect is where an individual’s ego resides. Reality occurs at this crossroad. Heart-Centered Leadership enables one to awaken to this fundamental understanding and realize untapped collaborative potential. We can apply precepts and protocols to acknowledge those out-of-balance areas, and learn to reharmonize the duality of our systemic being.
Heart-Centered Leadership focuses on dedicated relationship building — making a commitment to developing a healthy intentional relationship with both self and others. Leadership evolution incorporates self-realization, learning, and personal development. On this journey, we find two fundamental components: 1) The Relational Dimension and 2) The Achievement Dimension. The former is characterized by how one interacts with themselves and the world around them. The latter is characterized by the co-creative output of those relationships.
The Relational Dimension is governed through the qualities of Mindfulness, Empathy, and Compassion, while the Achievement Dimension is governed by Passion, Conscience, and Competence. In our natural state of being, humans are instinctively creative and individually productive. This tendency is encouraged and rewarded by social constructs, leading us to become preoccupied with personal success and egoic fulfillment. When we switch off the mind’s auto-pilot and shift our awareness away from the unconscious habits of our upbringing, each action becomes one of powerful intention.
We can consciously reprogram our ego using the heart-brain to guide us away from the survival brain’s self-preservative fear response: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop. Practicing this compassionate approach, allows us to create deeply intimate and enriching interpersonal relationships of mutual trust, respect, and appreciation. These high-value relationships can create a sense of support and community.
The result of this dynamic is a positive physiological effect on the entire human body; highlighted by an ability to engage the prefrontal cortex — the complex and collaborative center of our brain. Building and maintaining this state of being lies at the core of practicing open, heart-centered leadership. Although we all have that ability, it takes time, patience, focus, balance, foundational habits, an above average measure of persistence, a deep commitment to sacrifice, and being in service to others to experience such transformation.
When imbued with an appropriate leadership orientation, individuals gain an appreciation for timeless truths, in that: the path to developing enduring authentic leadership capacity starts with a journey through the heart — as has always been the case. As such, all forms of self transcendence travel along an inward-outward, upward-downward path to expand our frame of reference. We begin with ourselves to cultivate trustworthy character, fundamental well-being, and noble intentions before we can interact with others to attain quality outcomes. Leaders who embrace the authenticity of the heart have greater potential for building and sustaining balance between the Relational and Achievement Dimensions. When embraced and practiced, this approach reliably produces individuals with extraordinary stage-state-capacity linked to high performing teams and impactful organizations.
Turquoise is a 2023 Post Growth Fellow.
Heart-Centered Leadership is a perspective, practice, and praxis co-developed at Dyer Global Solutions by Turquoise Sound and Michael Dyer.
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