The Emotional Brain and Leadership That Resonates

The term “Resonate Leadership” reminds me of the ability it requires to play my piano skillfully. When I play the notes in harmony, it is soothing and harmonic. When played out of alignment and ignorantly, instead of music to my ears, it becomes unpleasant noise. This concept of “Resonance and Dissonance” is a good metaphor for skillful—or not—leadership and relationship skills. Feelings have a “vibe.” They are transmissible.

Even when a person utters words with his mouth, it is getting easier to feel if they are lying or being inauthentic. At the root of this arena is emotional intelligence. I think we are making progress; it wasn’t long ago that the word ‘emotional’ was not even uttered alongside the word ‘intelligence’, as if emotion was unintelligent. Little did they know how wrong they were.

Feelings will hijack logic if you do not know how to self-manage all those feelings that are stuffed in your body’s closet in the form of cellular memory. Better yet, learning how to release and manage your emotional backlog in present time is even more emotionally intelligent. Your physical body will also love you for it.

Those repressed emotions make you more susceptible to stress. If you are not self-aware enough to manage your emotion as a leader, you are seriously handicapped. Perhaps that’s why I often hear quoted that very skillful leaders compose only about 10% of leadership pools when assessed. As long as we continue to hear ideas such as the following from leaders, it is little wonder there is a leadership crisis:

1. “Leave emotions at home or check them at the door when you come to work.” (Seriously? The answer is not in denial.)
2. “The emotional brain is primitive.” (Oh yeah? Perhaps it is our lack of understanding at work here.)
3. “Personal development is touchy-feely, and to be avoided.”

Denial is dangerous. What you don’t know can hurt you. If you are reading this, you have feelings and emotion moving through your body. E-motion—energy or thought in motion—is simply a part of what makes us human. We are human so we feel and think. It is our lack of understanding that keeps us stuck.

Until we honor all aspects of our self, emotional brain included, we will not evolve as leaders or human beings. An abundant whole life requires wholeness of mind/emotion, body, and spirit. By the way, emotion is also managed by the crowning glory Neo-Cortex—the ‘higher brain.

To me, a more appropriate label would be “the most recently evolved level of our brain” in referring to the Neo-Cortex. There is nothing primitive about our magnificent mind/brain. Putting emotion and the emotional brain down is simply another example of hierarchical judgment that does not serve us. I don’t think it is done with malice; it is just that what most people don’t understand they tend to fear, which is another emotion/feeling.

In fact, it is the granddaddy of the low-vibe emotions. Instead of running away, it’s time to muster up the courage, rise to the occasion, and take back the steering wheel of our mind. Since I have embraced my emotions and learned to manage them MUCH more skillfully, the quality of my life has radically improved. It’s worth the effort to understand how to retrain your Emotional Brain.

Do you have the guts? It’s not as ‘bad’ as you think. It just takes some skill at learning how to increase your resonant emotion and decrease your dissonant emotion. Like playing the piano, or any business skill, it can be learned with a little motivation. To be a resonant, emotionally intelligent leader takes practice—and courage. Are you game?