What Is The Link Between Emotion & Leadership?

After The Three Levels of Leadership came out in 2011, readers followed up with questions on leadership, leadership psychology and self-mastery – all of them interesting.  So interesting, in fact, that I’m releasing my answers here as they supplement the “Three Levels” material and others may find them useful.  Here’s the twelfth in the series.   I’ll post the others over the coming months…

Q12. What is the link between emotion and leadership?

You Are More Than Your Mind

“You as a Self have a mind, but you are not your mind, you are more than your mind – as you experienced in the exercise this afternoon when I asked you to concentrate on an object.  Your mind is your creative tool.  It’s the sandbox in which you play; in which you connect with others, express yourself, learn and grow as you go through life.

Four Levels of Mind

Now I explained that in the model I use with clients (the model I’ve described in chapter 8 of The Three Levels of Leadership) your mind has four levels: Higher Mental Mind, Lower Mental Mind, Emotional Mind and Physical Mind.

You could see these as four grades of mental energy, vibrating, if you like, at different rates, but interpenetrating the same space, just like the energies of the electromagnetic spectrum.  For example, you have TV and radio signals passing through your bodies right now.

Higher mental mind is where you create and store your most abstract, fundamental beliefs about yourself and the world.  It is also the source of your ability to think abstractly – to handle abstract concepts like love, freedom, leadership and beauty – and see patterns and connections among what would otherwise be separate pieces of data.
Lower mental mind is where you create and hold your beliefs about your capabilities; about what you are capable of doing and achieving in this world.  It’s also the source of your ability to think more concretely, to colour in the detail of your abstract thinking.
Emotional mind is where your lower and higher mental thought energy is put into motion – which is what enables you to act on your thoughts.  Emotional mind is also the source of your beliefs about what is right and wrong.  Emotion exists to give intensity, direction and texture to your thoughts and beliefs so they feel real, so you want to act on them.  But emotion is also there to give you information because if you’re feeling something, that gives you clues to your underlying thoughts and beliefs.  (By the way, the fact that your emotions offer you information comes as a surprise to many managers, in my experience.)
Physical mind is where mind meets brain.  This is where you have the electro-chemical activity of the brain.  And physical mind houses your field of conscious awareness – the thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and so on that you are aware of from moment to moment.

A Tool of the Self

Now with this background in mind I hope you can see that emotion is simply one of the four levels of mental energy.  It’s essential for helping you translate thoughts into actions.

So what’s the link between emotion and leadership?  It is an essential tool of the Self.  For it allows you to connect with others by helping you feel what they are feeling.  It is therefore the foundation of empathy.

It also allows you to connect with the more unconscious levels of your mind by telling you something about yourself – usually about something you believe in relation to what’s happening around you.

And, of course, it’s essential to connect with your emotions if you want to translate your ideas into action and, indeed, want others to act on your ideas – which will mean you will need emotional content in how you communicate.  For if you want others to act, you will need to move them emotionally.  In other words, you will need to have an emotional effect on them.

All this is popularly known as emotional intelligence.  Good leaders realise the importance of emotional intelligence intuitively even if they don’t understand it consciously.”

 

The author is James Scouller, an executive coach.  His book, The Three Levels of Leadership: How to Develop Your Leadership Presence, Knowhow and Skill, was published in May 2011.  You can learn more about it at www.three-levels-of-leadership.com.  If you want to see its reviews, click here: leadership book reviews.  If you want to know where to buy it, click HERE.  You can read more about his executive coaching services at The Scouller Partnership’s website.