Emotions are still misunderstood among business leaders. They are mostly unknown to almost everyone else in society too. Ironically, emotions seem to be most confusing to emotional experts themselves, if only because many of us tend to remain closed off behind our theories around emotion most of the time.

So here are four crucial things I have learned about emotion in my 20 years of examining this phenomenon. Anyone trying to lead should keep these points in mind:

1. Emotion is wild in nature
2. Emotion is like a wave that we need to surf, rather than suppress or block
3. It’s more important to know how to come out of an emotion, than how to go into it
4. All you need are three tools: attention focus, breath and (involuntary) movement

Firstly, emotion is wild in nature. It’s like a lion. Unpredictable, magnificent and invigorating, it can chew your head off in a split second. Daniel Goleman coined the expression “emotional intelligence” in the nineties, which was surely better than previous emotional stupidity or ignorance. Still, being intelligent about our feelings would make it sound like we can put them into boxes, label them, add them up or subtract them, plan them and control them.

But emotions, sensations and feelings are like a wild lion. If you put it in a cage, it’s no longer inspiring or thrilling, and it often ends up just sleeping around all day. Today, too much psycho mumbo-jumbo about caging and controlling emotions at will is written about and TED-talked on stage. Nice theory though.

If you’re serious about learning to handle emotion – both yours and your followers – you’re going to have to see them as the wild, unpredictable animals they are. You can befriend them, you can learn to trust them, and you can do marvelous, incredible things with them. But they may betray you in a split second at any moment for reasons you could never have anticipated. And when they do bite your head off and kill you, well, you’ll be born again to a bigger, better you.

Secondly, we need to surf the wave of emotion rather than block it. Every sensation in the body behaves like a wave of energy. It comes in, builds to a climax, and then pulls out. This may happen very slowly, over hours, days or even weeks – like all those complicated family conflicts we’re emerging from over the festive season! Or it may happen within a couple of seconds.

Like real waves in the ocean, you can surf a two-meter wave or find yourself riding a tsunami. Your ability to face the latter obviously stems from many hours spent on the board, mastering the slow, tiny waves first. The wild nature of these waves is from the complete randomness of how they arrive, where they arrive from, how fast they reach you, and how easily they can topple you over when least expected.

In our society, however, spurred on by ignorant psycho-babble about controlling or changing what we don’t like about ourselves, we try to stop the wave instead of surfing it. We get stuck, blocked, or disconnected. Our minds start turning round too quickly in never-ending circles and we behave compulsively, sabotaging our own goals and repeating old, well-known and severely self-reprimanded mistakes.

If you want to surf these waves of energy, you need to go soft instead of hard. As muscles and joints tense up with the increase of emotional energy, you need to soften them again. And yes, a mind that won’t shut up is behaving exactly like an emotionally charged muscle. Try to soften up and surf your way through the current of energy.

Which leads me to my third point: It’s more important to find your way out of an emotion than to get into it. It takes emotional experts a long, long time to learn this one!

It’s called “grounding,” and it means that once a sensation takes over your body, you have resources, techniques and (if needed) lifesavers, to help you come back down to the ground where you feel safe and sound. When other drivers anger you, breathe yourself back to calm. If shareholders and investors, through their own fears, pull out capital investments, breathe yourself back to calm optimism and positive thoughts.

A few well-known emotional experts think its super productive to take a client to their worst place of fear or pain during a seminar. It’s what we see in typical hotel facilities full of desperate souls manipulated into letting it all out. When all the crying, screaming and pouting is done, most of them can’t explain what they’ve learned, and some of can’t find their grounding for days or weeks afterwards.

More importantly, if you do touch on a sensitive wound from the past, with overflowing emotion you don’t know how to contain, it can scare you so much that you won’t want to go back there ever again. There is nothing scarier than getting stuck in a horrible emotion you can’t come out of. It makes you dependent on magical big-mouths who promise they can fix your problems, and can  end up costing a lot of money.

Practice with smaller emotions and sensations first. Build a tool box of resources that work for you and as you get good at coming back to the ground, try more intensive adventures. Never do anything that feels fundamentally wrong or unsafe, no matter how many people in the room are cheering you on.

And how do we surf our waves of wild, unpredictable emotion in such a way we can ground ourselves as often as needed? By learning to use our attention focus, breath and (involuntary) movement. Every meditation and mindfulness technique in the world is based on the use of these three tools.

Your attention must focus on the problem, the pain or the tension if you’re going to resolve it. Thinking of other things doesn’t help, and escaping only makes it bigger. Once you are looking at it, breathing can help you connect to the sensations it contains: size, texture, location, frequency, images and memories it brings back, etc. Finally, movement, especially the kind that is not ordered by our brain, but initiated by the body itself, will bring fluidity to unblock and surface emotions withheld there.

Leading through emotion is the only real way of leading people. We can only harness the best version of themselves when we give them the space and the opportunity to express their talent freely, which means emotions flow all over the place. So start by learning to manage your own emotions and surf your own waves… in time you will see others learn by following your example. And the better you get at managing tsunamis, the more people will follow you trustingly wherever you dare to go!

 

Everyone reaches a point in life when they realize that size doesn’t matter. That moment comes sooner to some and later to others. Judging by the way we are wrecking the planet, it comes much too late in life to way too many people.

One day you wake up and feel that you’ve reached as big, tall, meaningful and beautiful as you’re ever going to be. It’s a terrible morning. It seems like life is all downhill from there.
Sound familiar? It’s like the best part of your life is behind you. And it’s the awful truth (if all you care about is size, importance, relevance or attention). But guess what: none of that matters. When you reach this point, you should be ready for round number two!

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You’re now ready to live life to the fullest: You can stop pursuing size to open yourself to the enormity of depth. When you let go of scale, and all the associated competition and expectation – the sheer effort of it all! – You descend to a lower angle of perspective. Your perception changes forever as you see the world, yourself and everyone else in a new light – profound meaning, connection and transcendence.

When you reach these new, darker (yet more profound) levels of yourself, it will take a while for your eyes to adjust to the scarcity of “superficial” light. Slowly but surely you’ll become less in need of it. You’ll stop whining to everybody about being “the best football player in the history of football,” (to be read in a childish, bewildered, jokingly ironic tone of voice) like Ronaldo did recently. You stop tweeting compulsively from dawn to dusk in a frantic desire to conquer and possess the world’s center of attention; like someone we all know.

The day you finally become your deepest self, size becomes irrelevant. Curiosity and wonder abduct you regularly. You choose only what makes you deeper as a leader, a person, and human being. You become amused by the dumb things people tweet; naughty, playful giggles bubble up inside of you continually.

Once you commit to this depth, you bump into your inner wisdom. You know without knowing. You are at one with the universe. Your judgments and opinions about how to make it all better have dissolved. You trust life the way a newborn child trusts its mother. Your eyes shine with wonder. You walk with a spring in your step. Your heart sings with joy.

For this very reason I “help people and their organizations grow, not in size but depth.” Despite the many troubles it has brought in the past. It would have been much easier to make money by promising others size, success, wealth and the like. But then I wouldn’t have grown in depth the way I have. It’s also why my work is my pleasure and my pleasure is my work. Size is not important – I kid you not.

Have a deep new year!

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It never ceases to surprise me: the world is full of dreamers willing to pay anything to those who promise they can make our dreams come true. A great example of this is the best-selling book The Secret.

The book promises that “Everything is possible, nothing is impossible. There are no limits. Whatever you can dream of can be yours, when you use The Secret.” and “Ask. Believe. Receive.” Well, sorry to break it to you folks, this is not the way the secret works! Rather, it’s the other way around. And getting it right is the difference between being a dreamer and a leader.

The main idea behind the book is the law of attraction. We attract people and events in our lives that respond to what we carry inside ourselves. There’s no mystery here. This pearl of wisdom is included in most spiritual lines of thought, and depicted on ancient cave walls, traditional pots and paintings the world over. The inference that we can control or choose what we attract, however, has turned out to be a very profitable distortion of the original law.

I wonder if money and fame were what the author was unconsciously trying to attract when she “Asked. Believed. Received.” Or more likely, whether the excessive attention that comes with money and fame was the secret her heart truly desired. The genuine secret is that our life experience is a mirror of what we don’t want to know about ourselves. Life does not give us what we choose or ask for. Many of us would be incredibly good-looking millionaires if asking and believing were enough.

Nope, life gives us what we need in order to help us face hard facts about ourselves. About our family history, our unconscious feelings and our hidden desires. Life’s learning is not in getting what we want. It’s in getting precisely what we don’t want. Get it? If we go back to Freud’s terminology, the secret would be the gap between the “super-ego” and the “id”. The super-ego is the perfect image we formulate about ourselves. It’s the best possible version of ourselves we try to fulfill.

The id, on the contrary, is the hidden, wild animal within us. It’s the part of us we try to control and discipline into civilized behavior. It’s the sum of our unexpressed frustrations, trapped desires and unspeakable whims. Freud concluded that our behavior, or as he called it, our “ego”, was the result of our lifelong battle between these two extremes. Repression was the name of the game. Pleasure was guilty. And very, very secret! Back to the bestseller fantasies of our internet era.

Byrne’s book promises we can magically materialize our super-ego’s intolerant requirements if we try very, very hard to believe them…. if we quash all our inner fears of impossibility. Reality, however, guarantees just as many problems, sabotages and traps to help us acknowledge and express the deeper truth of our own panic in order to release it. I frequently laugh at how it took me two full years of failure in a saddle to recognize and release my own fear of riding (and anything else that moved before I gave an instruction!). The secret, in fact, is on us: all we need to experience effortless abundance is to fall in love with the wild emotions and impulses within us. Without judgment or intolerant ideals. Rather than repress and deny what we feel deep inside, reality pushes us to let it all out for once and for all. That is the end of subjugation, control and wishful perfection.

Because utopian dreams become irrelevant when you’ve come to embrace the person you really are. Repression and strict discipline are no longer needed when you let go of your own cruel judge. In leadership terms, the secret is the gap between the idealized fantasies of success, the super-performance we try to live up to every day and the deep, hurtful realities about our jobs we try to leave behind. Unsuccessfully. As long as we strive for the pretty future in order to hide from the ugly present, the law of attraction keeps us trapped in endless repetition. We find ourselves reliving the same patterns over and over and over: same conflicts with the boss, similar predicaments around finance, familiar issues in our teams.

Let’s look at Steve, an international activist, for example. He has founded many projects and NGOs to fight against the ugliness of our world: plastic pollution, animal cruelty, political corruption and other images that mirror humanity’s lower imperfections. Steve describes the sublime, super-ego definition of what he does: He passionately believes that his activism is like a nurturing mother caring for her baby: endless patience, a loving response to all desires, and gradual guidance towards the right direction. Steve likes to think of himself as someone who changes the world with the power of nurturing love and irresistible charm.

Zero violence whatsoever. Steve’s reality, however, is quite the opposite. He bans any caterer who packs food with plastic. He will not do business with companies that rely on animals in captivity, and he writes many abrasive articles against politicians he suspects of corruption. While such behaviors are apparently consistent with his business goals, his ban on plastic actually cripples many families’ current income models in several third world countries.

His refusal to work with attraction parks using animals does little to change the way such parks think or operate. Quite on the contrary, many of them go out of their way to contradict him with defensive ad campaigns. And his insulting articles have won him a pretty acid reputation among colleagues and peers. Steve’s demeanor and language are quite aggressive in general. His eyes have a steely-hard shine to them, and his voice cuts off harshly at the end of each sentence.

Steve wants to be nurturing and tender like a mother. But icy violence is contained in his words and actions. Which of course brings him no shortage of entrepreneurial explosions, exhausting battles in court, and distasteful public attacks at events. The world brings Steve exactly what he needs to unveil the secret of his own personality: he is not the loving mother he would like to become. He behaves much more like the violent father he tries to forget.

Life, and its fundamental law of attraction will continue to bring conflict, attack and hardship on Steve until he comes to terms with his past reality. So if he asks you for your investment, well, what do you want me to say? Simply be aware that if you strongly feel like you should give him your money after reading all this, it’s because your secret means you need to lose some money in order to uncover something valuable about yourself! ;-)!

The secret to your leadership is right in front of you. Just look at what life offers you here and now, and stop dreaming of something else. This is who you are. The day you fall in love with this, here and now, is the day you’ll be ready to lead others. Your secret will be unveiled.

Years ago we talked a lot about being more touchy-feely in the workplace. Generation X inherited a work culture of distance, hierarchical authority and denial of any and all feelings. Business cases in MBA schools depicted classical grey, brainy and rather curt bosses as losers.

Real leaders, in contrast, were colorful, fashionable, sporty and creative, and very touchy-feely. It was like when color appeared in television for the first time! Wow!

As generation Y has now been replaced in our discussions by the newer and flashier millennials, touchy-feely leadership styles have gone all out. Our newest kids on the block get everything they want when they want it, otherwise they may change jobs before we have time to say goodbye. They wear what they want, they expect companies to motivate them at all times, they are seriously addicted to cell phones and they are the touchiest crowd you ever met. And that just shows you how very little they know or understand about leadership, let alone the essentials of real life social interaction.

I met two little girls with their nanny on the street yesterday. I was walking my dog Peca, which is Spanish for freckle. The two girls immediately looked at me with a question in their eyes: Could they pet my dog? I said “yes, but slowly. Always approach animals slowly.”

They probably approached Peca at the maximum slowness they were capable of. Maybe it was the first time anybody had asked them to slow down. Still, they were so fast that Peca retreated behind my legs. The little girls kept going. Peca retreated further, now circling around me as the little girls chased her with impatient enthusiasm to touch her. This is our new culture of touching. Today it seems that nothing happened if you didn’t get to touch it.  Taking a picture is another way to touch things. It’s like collecting experiences or grabbing parcels of life. Touch, touch, touch!

These little girls are no different from most adults today.We grab things. We touch stuff. We invade other people’s space.

We just ego our way into everything and everyone. We take all we want. We leave lots of trash behind. And never look back, busy as we are planning the next touchy-feely conquest on our list.Wildlife tourism is no longer about enjoying unexpected surprises in Nature. It’s about getting as close as possible to any animal we spot, taking a picture of it, and happily ignoring rules or even breaking the law in order to touch it.

Babies historically went through a touchy-feely phase during which they needed to touch and suck everything they found. Once they had licked and tasted the floor, all their toys, all their parents’ toys, and of course, all the dog’s toys too, they learned to make friends. They played with peers by hugging, grabbing, pinching, hitting and pushing each other every year after that. By the time they became teenagers, touching and being touched was an essential social skill to be applied with careful discernment. Today’s kids skip over a lot of childhood touching social games, having substituted them with video games and snapchats. Emerging young adults seem to be compulsive touchers of the world, while allergic to being touched. Whaaat?

Yes. Our new generations need to touch everything and everyone, but they are unable to respond naturally to being touched. It just feels weird, unplanned, invasive and way more intimate than the Gameboy machine ever was. Oh my! Are we in trouble!

So sex, of course, is a problem. It’s becoming a performance of pornography, carefully studied through a screen and insensitively applied to real persons with zero understanding of how it feels to them. No empathy and no ability whatsoever to read others’ signals of distress. Picture the little girls chasing my dog around my legs while the poor beast shivers, ducks its head and tries to scream “stop!” with only her doggy body language. Too many young kids are feeling as cornered, scared and helpless as my dog did that day.

But sex is the least of it. What can we expect from global generations of young adults with no inkling of basic animal territorial cues?

I explained to the two girls that if a dog retreats it means it is scared of you. If you advance anyway it may attack you out of fear. Invading another’s space is cheeky or tactless until it’s openly aggressive. Every animal on the planet knows and applies this basic rule of socialization. Except modern humans.

Wildlife worldwide is suffering this total lack of respect for others’ vital space. Whales are chased by motorized watercraft off the Canadian coast, and Migaloo, the famous albino humpback whale, had to be escorted by local coast guards this summer to fend off invasive tourists. Petting farms draw crowds of unsuspecting tourists to touch lion cubs whose later destinies are far from humane. As if there weren’t enough menaces on wild animals already, our touching obsession is becoming lethal to them as well. 

Real leaders touch many people’s lives every day. We impose our ideas and plans on others’ intentions, schedules and lives. We love change as long as it’s coming from us. But we need to understand how it feels to be touched physically in many different contexts in order to anticipate how our employees, clients, and other stakeholders are affected by our presence and push. We need to read other peoples’ reactions to know how fast we can go, how much strength we must apply, when we need to go soft.

Being touched is one of life’s most beautiful experiences when it is done with care, shared closeness and rigorous respect. It’s like being seen or being heard. It feels intimate, meaningful and loving. When it is done in a way that feels the effect it creates.

To touchy-feely leaders, it’s time you gave less and got a whole lot more touching. Animals and people everywhere will like you more. And Migaloo will be happy to swim in peace!