Stop Telling Women What to do or Wear

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

This summer my mother read one of the great classics of Spainish XIXth century literature: “La Regenta” by Leopoldo Arias Clarín. Over this same period, I watched Lena Dunham’s award-winning series “Girls”. The two of us have spent a few late evenings, chatting and comparing notes on the two, in Madrid’s sweltering heat.

Meanwhile, the international media have spent all summer debating burkini’s, and cultural Spanish traditions were tainted by a filmed gang-rape in Pamplona, among other sexual aggressions. So what’s going on with women? Have we advanced as much as we’d like to think? Are we really, really free?

What a mess. As a woman it’s really hard to say whether we’ve changed substantially or only just redecorated our lives. Nearly two hundred years separate Clarín’s female character, Ana Ozores, from Dunham’s fictional incarnation of herself as Hannah. Ana married a socially convenient husband and lives in a small provincial town called Vetusta. Hannah has confused sexual relationships with a number of young men in Manhattan, while pursuing a writing career. Both women long for something they can’t quite define.

It’s fascinating to realize that two centuries ago women still had to marry as an act of economic survival in Spain. When Ana, whose close confidant is – of course! – the town priest, eventually falls prey to the local womanizer, the entire city gangs up against her. Women around her seem to be chosen by destiny to live one of two lives: A live-in maid who is expected to silently comply with their male bosses’ sexual desires (both fathers AND young sons) or a wife who is morally superior, yet sexually frustrated and professionally irrelevant.

Hannah, on the contrary, has so much sexual freedom she doesn’t know quite what to do with it. Her three friends are no better. Explicit sex and revealing nudes populate every episode. Hannah is at once refreshing, endearing, disturbing and hilarious. She continuously rants about her unconventional body type – and yes, she does show it off to the camera in all kinds of sexy lingerie. She defends feminist ideals and complains about how men try to shut women up. She then proceeds to run back to her clumsy and socially inept boyfriend for comfort. Despite all the apparent freedom to be herself, she’s still under lots of social pressure to have a nicer body, get married (to the right guy!), have beautiful kids and be successful at her job.

And now back to the filmed gang-rape by five, twenty-something-year-old boys from Seville, during a night of booze during Pamplona’s Saint Fermin celebrations. They picked up a girl and walked her to her car. As they passed an open doorway, and in their drunken logic, they pushed the girl inside and used a mobile phone to record the cheering violence that ensued. Sexual aggression seems to be more frequent over the summer’s many festivals and celebrations across Spain. They were normal boys. One of them was studying to become a police officer. What got into them? Do they believe the porn they watch is what real women want?

Hundreds of articles have raved over the liberty or oppression that a burkini represents on a European beach. We European women feel very free because we can wear whatever we want.

We condemn Muslim and Arab women because they need to wear a veil or cover their entire bodies to play sports at the Olympics or swim in a pool. But… we fret about our own bodies all day long. We feel too fat, too short or too old to be accepted into a society that worships a very specific set of measurements. If this is freedom maybe we should all wear a burkini and be happy nobody is staring at our cellulite or gossiping about our sagging tummies. Would a burkini have protected girls from sexual assaults during the festive summer nights in Spain or even on an American campus?

Women’s forums love to criticize men as enforcers of limitations to our freedom. But do men really have so much power over us? Or are there too many women contributing to the demonizing of the female body in its wild, tumultuous imperfection? Are the women’s magazines we go to for inspiration and learning pushing us to be morally superior, stylishly slim, “lean-in,” multi-faceted mothers, sexually proficient lovers and industry-dominant CEOs? Have we honestly advanced as much as we think we have, or do we suffer as much pressure and judgment as Ana Ozores did in little Vetusta back in 1885?

Taryn Brumfitt is currently promoting her debut documentary “Embrace” because she doesn’t want her daughter to be part of the 91% of women who hate their bodies. A hundred women were asked for one word to express how they felt about their bodies. Responses ranged from disgusting, to loathing, fat, wobbly, stumpy, geriatric, gross or imperfect. They were all free women from the most advanced western societies. Free to hate their bodies. Free to hate themselves. Free to feel as marginalized and misunderstood as XXIst century Hannah and XIXth century Ana Ozores.

There is something deeply wrong in the way we all approach womanhood in today’s global awareness.

We have this awful, hidden lack of respect or appreciation for the amazing fountain of abundant fertility, sexual pleasure, motherly love and creative efficiency that is a woman.  We’ve become mortally accustomed to brutalizing it, starving it, abusing it, criticizing it, buying and selling it, aesthetically altering it and hating it.

Maybe we’ve forgotten what a woman is supposed to be. Maybe we’ve killed, raped, lynched and witch-hunted every single female leader there ever was in our quest to impose great civilizations and technology over primitive tribes. Maybe we’re all wearing a highly-sophisticated cultural version of a burkini after all.

If this summer’s news is what female advancement and progress look like… we’re going to have to stop kidding ourselves and get real. Stop telling other women what to do or wear, and focus on what we’re doing as women that’s enabling the sale of our freedom at far too cheap a price.

 

Women: Don’t Try and Find Your Power in the Games of Men

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

In February of 2012 I sat under an almond tree and watched a sunset over Madrid. An idea came to me: to start a foundation to help people “Embrace The Wild.” I worked on building a foundation for a year, but it never really took off. Embracing the Wild, on the other hand, has become my life mission.

One of the biggest obstacles I’ve encountered these past four years is the negative, pejorative and fearful images our society has attached to words like wild, animal, beast, brutal, and savage. All these words are used to depict bad things, excessive people and terrible acts of violence. To the point that I now see a clear connection between humanity’s incarceration of everything wild and a parallel movement to subdue women and strip us of everything that makes us truly feminine.

Civilization has destroyed women’s strength at its roots by erasing the wild from our lives. Impulse, instinct, attraction, sensation, emotion and feeling ARE the wild within us.

Women were always exceptionally good with emotion, uncertainty and cycles. While men are physically stronger, women can express and contain intense emotion at greater levels. There is something about a woman’s body and its chaos of hormones that make her love connection, seek emotion, thrive in darkness and manage several layers of information through feeling. The body of a woman dances with death at every pregnancy and birth. Humanity’s first Gods were female. Our first shamans were women. Women led our tribes through unpredictable nature because we instinctively tuned in to the same patterns, mechanisms and rhythms followed by everything wild. Until our tribes were killed, conquered, subdued and civilized.

Four years later my advances are still discrete. It may seem like I’m wasting my time to many of today’s speed-crazed global citizens. My family certainly thinks so! But this is a first critical lesson of the wild: it moves slowly. Every rapid reaction we see in nature has been building energy for a very long time. This is true for a “sudden” earthquake or a volcanic eruption, but also for a lion lunging for its prey. Hours of careful observation go into choosing the most effective time. And who knows how long energy builds up inside a volcano before it finally explodes?

When I look back at the profound things that take place in the back of peoples’ minds before we see a tangible change, I recognize this same pattern. Many businesses require years of hard work, trial and error and many expensive losses before it takes off. Couples often take several years to finally admit that their relationship is over. Most people need decades to become aware of what they really wanted to pursue all along, buried under the clutter and noise of everyday work.

So the first step to #EmbraceTheWild is about slowing down. The second step is to face, and give in, to our own emotions. Our emotions are like that underwater section of an iceberg. We occupy that part above the water. We know perfectly well what it looks like.

Our awareness walks around our own little ice island every day. We know very little of what sits in darkness below the water. When somebody asks how we feel, we can only connect to a very small, superficial part of what we actually feel. There’s plenty more, frozen below, waiting to come to the surface. It’s called our unconscious, and it’s so wild that everybody fears it, cages it, denies it, tries to escape from it.

Freud pioneered the first discovery mission of this unknown wilderness of the human soul. Psychology has thoroughly analysed our mysterious, underwater darkness, that we call our unconscious. But nobody dares plunge into the water. It’s safer to talk, label and discuss emotions from the safety of our minds, couches, and scientific studies. As long as our brain is analyzing emotion, we are still fighting it and subduing it. It is only when we stop talking, thinking, fixing, analyzing and planning; only when we actually breathe deep in silence to relax our muscles and give in, that our hidden emotions defrost. They become liquid, they move around our body as sensations, we finally feel them.

The wild moves like water. The energy of our wildest essence timidly appears to us when we get comfortable with it. Like a wild animal, that’s been held behind bars for too long, it tests our intentions, before letting us in on its secrets: our childhoods, our parents, our family histories and our destinies. Like a virginal bride, our unconscious unveils itself in a slow ritual of deception, with complicit giggles and brave, tremoring revelations. Emotional rhythms are playful in their spontaneous chaos: ripples of calm transform into colorful storms of tears, small whimpers give way to full blown growls or screams. The wild has no linear order. It’s all curvy, cyclic, full of surprise, changing beats and provocations. It’s what we’ve always labelled as “feminine.” – to its deepest, most essential core.

When we understand our own wild unconscious, we learn how to interact seamlessly with animals, plants and the Earth. We no longer try to control uncertainty. Rather, we learn to ride it, like a magnificent, yet moody and demanding, stallion. Here lies the source of women’s power. In our intrinsic ability to seduce and befriend the wildest, most unpredictable horse of them all.

I was born in a generation of domesticated women who try and find their power in the games of men.

I was educated in a culture of liberation that pushed me to study engineering and to strive for a top job at a multinational. For decades I honed my talents and perfected my skills. Only to find that men would always be better at men’s power games than me. I realized a cold, hard fact: their games bored me anyway.

Every day I am more convinced that my strength, my influence and my ability to lead the world lies not in my mind and the strategies I devise, but in my heart, and the emotions it can contain. It’s taken a lifetime to uproot and erase all the ideas and disciplines in today’s mindset that condemn and insult everything wild or truly, deeply feminine. I’m done with this ridiculous game of pushing me to be more linear, predictable and competitive.

I’ve embraced the wild. It’s made me more powerful than I ever was, in a soft, mischievous and selfless, loving way. It gave me back my womanhood. For once and for all. Do you #EmbraceTheWild?

 

Women: Don’t Try and Find Your Power in the Games of Men

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

In February of 2012 I sat under an almond tree and watched a sunset over Madrid. An idea came to me: to start a foundation to help people “Embrace The Wild.” I worked on building a foundation for a year, but it never really took off. Embracing the Wild, on the other hand, has become my life mission.

One of the biggest obstacles I’ve encountered these past four years is the negative, pejorative and fearful images our society has attached to words like wild, animal, beast, brutal, and savage. All these words are used to depict bad things, excessive people and terrible acts of violence. To the point that I now see a clear connection between humanity’s incarceration of everything wild and a parallel movement to subdue women and strip us of everything that makes us truly feminine.

Civilization has destroyed women’s strength at its roots by erasing the wild from our lives. Impulse, instinct, attraction, sensation, emotion and feeling ARE the wild within us.

Women were always exceptionally good with emotion, uncertainty and cycles. While men are physically stronger, women can express and contain intense emotion at greater levels. There is something about a woman’s body and its chaos of hormones that make her love connection, seek emotion, thrive in darkness and manage several layers of information through feeling. The body of a woman dances with death at every pregnancy and birth. Humanity’s first Gods were female. Our first shamans were women. Women led our tribes through unpredictable nature because we instinctively tuned in to the same patterns, mechanisms and rhythms followed by everything wild. Until our tribes were killed, conquered, subdued and civilized.

Four years later my advances are still discrete. It may seem like I’m wasting my time to many of today’s speed-crazed global citizens. My family certainly thinks so! But this is a first critical lesson of the wild: it moves slowly. Every rapid reaction we see in nature has been building energy for a very long time. This is true for a “sudden” earthquake or a volcanic eruption, but also for a lion lunging for its prey. Hours of careful observation go into choosing the most effective time. And who knows how long energy builds up inside a volcano before it finally explodes?

When I look back at the profound things that take place in the back of peoples’ minds before we see a tangible change, I recognize this same pattern. Many businesses require years of hard work, trial and error and many expensive losses before it takes off. Couples often take several years to finally admit that their relationship is over. Most people need decades to become aware of what they really wanted to pursue all along, buried under the clutter and noise of everyday work.

So the first step to #EmbraceTheWild is about slowing down. The second step is to face, and give in, to our own emotions. Our emotions are like that underwater section of an iceberg. We occupy that part above the water. We know perfectly well what it looks like.

Our awareness walks around our own little ice island every day. We know very little of what sits in darkness below the water. When somebody asks how we feel, we can only connect to a very small, superficial part of what we actually feel. There’s plenty more, frozen below, waiting to come to the surface. It’s called our unconscious, and it’s so wild that everybody fears it, cages it, denies it, tries to escape from it.

Freud pioneered the first discovery mission of this unknown wilderness of the human soul. Psychology has thoroughly analysed our mysterious, underwater darkness, that we call our unconscious. But nobody dares plunge into the water. It’s safer to talk, label and discuss emotions from the safety of our minds, couches, and scientific studies. As long as our brain is analyzing emotion, we are still fighting it and subduing it. It is only when we stop talking, thinking, fixing, analyzing and planning; only when we actually breathe deep in silence to relax our muscles and give in, that our hidden emotions defrost. They become liquid, they move around our body as sensations, we finally feel them.

The wild moves like water. The energy of our wildest essence timidly appears to us when we get comfortable with it. Like a wild animal, that’s been held behind bars for too long, it tests our intentions, before letting us in on its secrets: our childhoods, our parents, our family histories and our destinies. Like a virginal bride, our unconscious unveils itself in a slow ritual of deception, with complicit giggles and brave, tremoring revelations. Emotional rhythms are playful in their spontaneous chaos: ripples of calm transform into colorful storms of tears, small whimpers give way to full blown growls or screams. The wild has no linear order. It’s all curvy, cyclic, full of surprise, changing beats and provocations. It’s what we’ve always labelled as “feminine.” – to its deepest, most essential core.

When we understand our own wild unconscious, we learn how to interact seamlessly with animals, plants and the Earth. We no longer try to control uncertainty. Rather, we learn to ride it, like a magnificent, yet moody and demanding, stallion. Here lies the source of women’s power. In our intrinsic ability to seduce and befriend the wildest, most unpredictable horse of them all.

I was born in a generation of domesticated women who try and find their power in the games of men.

I was educated in a culture of liberation that pushed me to study engineering and to strive for a top job at a multinational. For decades I honed my talents and perfected my skills. Only to find that men would always be better at men’s power games than me. I realized a cold, hard fact: their games bored me anyway.

Every day I am more convinced that my strength, my influence and my ability to lead the world lies not in my mind and the strategies I devise, but in my heart, and the emotions it can contain. It’s taken a lifetime to uproot and erase all the ideas and disciplines in today’s mindset that condemn and insult everything wild or truly, deeply feminine. I’m done with this ridiculous game of pushing me to be more linear, predictable and competitive.

I’ve embraced the wild. It’s made me more powerful than I ever was, in a soft, mischievous and selfless, loving way. It gave me back my womanhood. For once and for all. Do you #EmbraceTheWild?

 

Brave Face. Of Wrinkles and Leaders

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

Spanish elections are driving the country crazy. We’ve done two rounds already and we may find ourselves having to vote again.

But what nobody’s talking about are wrinkles. Or rather, the absence of them among our so-called political leaders. What happened to our wrinkles of wisdom?

The answer is photography. When we invented a camera to reproduce the wonders our eyes could see, we overlooked the fact that eyes don’t only record images. They also feel. Human eyes, and most animal eyes, interpret the images they record through feelings. The eye is the mirror of the soul: It chooses what details to focus on in a politician’s speech. It is moved to tears by the feelings and authenticity impersonated by the eyes it looks into. It interprets movements and gestures in a much more humane way than scientifically objective camera will ever do.

Today’s celebrities struggle to convey pure perfection in front of omnipresent cameras. We all do, in fact. We know that the camera will miss out on the subtle sway of our hips which elicits attention from a room. Indiscreet lenses will show up every imperfection in our silhouette, no matter how much our expensive dress or suit was designed to hide them among real life’s shadows, twists and turns. Most cameras, in short, will simply erase everything that makes us memorable in real life. It takes a very skilled photographer, a master of human Nature, weakness and unconscious disguise, to really capture a person’s essence in a photograph or a video.

So we see many women in politics showing off shiny, wrinkle free faces. Men too. Their skin shines on camera as if they were my four-year-old niece’s chubby cheeks. Every inch of their faces has been carefully plumped up with hyaluronic acid to appear youthful. Sagging chins are rounded up. Falling eye-lids are held back up in place with a little botox here and some other awful substance there. The appearance of youth has kidnapped authenticity, wisdom and leadership. But hey! Everybody looks great on Instagram!

This may all seem the smallest of details to pass over. You may think it has no importance whatsoever. Let them all spend their salaries on a race against age that they will eventually lose anyway. If it makes them successful and happy, why not?

Well. If only because they are our leaders and they seem to have lost their own leadership. Cameras may prey on visual perfection. People don’t. People only follow those who inspire them, move them, make them feel cared for. People focus their human, non-scientific eyes on those whose own eyes convey a deep, knowing connection. The eyes of a leader are full of wrinkles and lines of expression, just like the eyes of a parent who supports you during the worst moments of your life, when nobody else dares to look you in the face. Through sickness, through loss, through personal ordeals that business meetings try to ignore and parties stay silent about. Only wrinkled eyes and skin faded like an old leather couch will look at you with love, compassion and utter faith in your ability to pull through it all. Such are faces which inspire millions to follow them into scary futures.

Because our eyes, our face, our very skin…they are the painter palettes of our own artistry in life, of our past experiences and how we’ve overcome them, what we’ve learned from them, how they will determine our response to future crisis, lead our people, build our societies. The rich texture our skin acquires as we live one decade after another is the outer reflection of what we come to understand about life’s layers of difficulty. Weathered cheek bones, somber brows or deeply imprinted foreheads express so much more complexity and wisdom with every gesture than the rigid, flat surface of a botoxed, hyaluronized face. Ironically, it is precisely what least flatters us on camera which makes us most interesting, memorable and humane. A leader without wrinkles is a robot nobody can feel secure or connected with.

I love to look at my niece’s innocent, glowing skin. Her shiny eyes full of surprise and wonder at every little thing she discovers in life. I laugh when I remember the time she tested me in the bathroom mirror as I washed my hands one day. She was barely two at the time. She had walked in to the bathroom behind me. “Pino I love you!” she said, purposefully spreading her mouth into a smile. I smiled back at her in the mirror and chirped in glee. “Pino I hate you!” was her next sentence. A small, pouting mouth and barely angry eyes underlined the turn in conversation. I followed her game and made crying sounds with my mouth sagging on both sides. And back to “Pino I love you!” This went on for several minutes as she thoroughly enjoyed the effect that different emotions could have on me.

Two years later my niece is still beginning to understand the six basic emotions depicted in Pixar’s “Inside Out” movie. That is all her primal expressions can come close to: joy, sadness, disgust, fear, anger –oops! It appears the movie left out surprise, our sixth basic emotion according to Paul Ekman –. The soft, smooth skin of our childhood reflects the rigid flatness of emotion we are equipped to express and comprehend.

Of course there is an irresistible magnetism to the innocent glow of youth. It reminds us of who we were before we got lost in intellectual endeavors and social masquerades. Before we faced trauma or grief. But to trust our futures into the hands of childish adults without worries, wrinkles or texture in their faces and hearts would be foolhardy. Idiotic, irresponsible, and only possible in the world of viral trends imposed by the collective ignorance of internet. It is wiki-stupidity. Pure and simple.

Melancholic joy. Sad acceptance of a difficult past. Pride in who we’ve become overshadowed by twinges of guilt on Sunday evenings. Deep love for a man who hurt us many times. Longing for a woman who knows how to be cruel, funny and irresistible all at once. These are the emotions of adults. These are the textures of middle age. This is what we need to share, express and read on our leaders’ faces. Both women and men.

Our beautiful Nature is brimming with ugly trash. Our planet full of abundance fails to feed millions while hundreds grow fat and idle. Our times of peace are more shaken than ever with terrorist attacks. Our financial markets live in a permanent turmoil we’ve begun to call normality. Our politicians can’t decide whether they want to be popular celebrities or wise pillars of our globalized society.

Our world is more complex than it’s ever been before. We need wrinkles, deep lines and weathered skins. Let’s remind ourselves every time we look in the mirror. Let us feel pride of the rich skin tissue we show the world, and the life, brimming with paradoxical emotions, that it reveals every time we smile.

Why I’m Over TED Talks. Except for This one…

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

Today I received a link to Dan Pallotta’s latest TED talk, “The dream we haven’t dared to dream”, delivered a couple months ago at TED2016. It was full of wonderful quotes I won’t repeat. I don’t want to wreck it for you. Let me just say it looked and sounded the way leadership should.

Once fascinated by TED talks, I’ve become terribly bored with them over the years. Especially now that we are invaded by innumerable TEDx versions, polluting the internet with over-coached, standardized-to-death accounts of scientific nonsense. They’re linear and forgettable when they’re not delusional. If I have to see another eight-year-old teach me lessons about how to be a better human being I might vomit on my laptop. But Dan was different.

He wasn’t linear. His voice upped and downed, croaked with feeling, shushed with gravity. You can’t practice how to be yourself in front of a hungry TED global audience. You just are or you aren’t. And Dan most definitely was. This is the first symptom of true leadership that rarely presents itself in today’s mass media.

He wasn’t triumphant. He wasn’t patronizing, he wasn’t there to show us how smart he was or how much he had achieved. What a relief! What a wonderful surprise to hear a person just talk about his dreams and his hopes and his pains like any one of us. He showed us pictures of his family, he shared his memories, his dreams and miracles. He was humble. Another symptom of true leadership that has fallen from grace.

He wasn’t trying to change the world. No need to make more money, grow more of this or improve more of that. No mumbo-jumbo about success, trying hard, studying this or investing in that. Thank goodness for a TED talk with somebody who knows that life isn’t so much about changing other people as it is about changing yourself. About discovering who you are under all that jazz. This used to be the way leaders were a long time ago. Unassuming, serene and completely devoid of concerns about how to conquer the world.

He’s always been brave. We all love brave, until brave gets hit in the face. Then we become more cowardly about it. But Dan got hit in the face, fell down, got up, kept going. It takes a brave man to speak openly about “a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which idealists most often succumb: activism and overwork”. It takes a brave man, in fact, to get up in front of a TED audience and say all the truths he said on that stage. Bravery is, we all agree, completely essential to any leader.

And last but not least, his speech was full of wisdom. Deep inner wisdom of the kind you only get when you plunge down into your own darkness, face your demons and cry out your most secret pains. This too should be a sign of true leadership that is sorely missing among most TED talkers, Fortune 500 CEOs and other business celebrities today.

Maybe true leadership is precisely about broken dreams. Maybe it’s a quality of being that requires a lot of wandering through the darkness, bathing in doubt, suffering through insufferable choices that others don’t seem to have had to make. Early human societies used to consider rites of passage essential to personal growth. Everybody in a tribe had to go through rites that tested their resolve, their strength, their ability to dream, their resistance to pain and hardship. Only those who could undergo the toughest, most demanding ordeals could aspire to lead the tribe. Only the strongest, bravest and most humane could rule everybody. Leadership wasn’t inherited, or passed on. It wasn’t even something you made your goal and tried to get. No. It was a gift you found within yourself and something everybody recognized.

In a society that constantly and compulsively prioritizes results, success and popularity, it’s inspiring to find a soul like Dan Pallotta on stage. He has this kind of weathered appearance full of expression that half cries and half laughs at the ironies of life he hears himself share. He looks at stuff that nobody else is looking at and thinks about it, learns from it, becomes a teacher of it: stuff like the illogical, unbearable price of our dreams.

A good friend once told me that ballerinas who had little trouble at the beginning of their careers rarely became great. It was those who had overcome great obstacles in their first years who later became world renowned artists, breathtaking dancers on stage. Broken dreams and failure are the world’s way of putting us through our ancient, forgotten rites of passage. It is in these sore episodes of existence that we become deep, humane, inspiring leaders. It is in our nightmares that we learn to look into other people’s hearts.

Dance away, Dan. Keep thinking, keep writing, keep talking, keep growing. Keep throwing light on what others fail to see or care about. It’s much harder to lead people through the dark than it is to sit on a Fortune 500 board.  Everybody knows it. Deep inside, we all really, really do.

And when the going gets tough, as it very surely will, we’ll all be searching for true leaders to guide us through uncertainty. When we all quit playing these dumb games of power against a world we mean to control, change and “make a difference to,” joy, humanity, presence and true leaders will rule again.

 

Why I’m Over TED Talks. Except for This one…

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

Today I received a link to Dan Pallotta’s latest TED talk, “The dream we haven’t dared to dream”, delivered a couple months ago at TED2016. It was full of wonderful quotes I won’t repeat. I don’t want to wreck it for you. Let me just say it looked and sounded the way leadership should.

Once fascinated by TED talks, I’ve become terribly bored with them over the years. Especially now that we are invaded by innumerable TEDx versions, polluting the internet with over-coached, standardized-to-death accounts of scientific nonsense. They’re linear and forgettable when they’re not delusional. If I have to see another eight-year-old teach me lessons about how to be a better human being I might vomit on my laptop. But Dan was different.

He wasn’t linear. His voice upped and downed, croaked with feeling, shushed with gravity. You can’t practice how to be yourself in front of a hungry TED global audience. You just are or you aren’t. And Dan most definitely was. This is the first symptom of true leadership that rarely presents itself in today’s mass media.

He wasn’t triumphant. He wasn’t patronizing, he wasn’t there to show us how smart he was or how much he had achieved. What a relief! What a wonderful surprise to hear a person just talk about his dreams and his hopes and his pains like any one of us. He showed us pictures of his family, he shared his memories, his dreams and miracles. He was humble. Another symptom of true leadership that has fallen from grace.

He wasn’t trying to change the world. No need to make more money, grow more of this or improve more of that. No mumbo-jumbo about success, trying hard, studying this or investing in that. Thank goodness for a TED talk with somebody who knows that life isn’t so much about changing other people as it is about changing yourself. About discovering who you are under all that jazz. This used to be the way leaders were a long time ago. Unassuming, serene and completely devoid of concerns about how to conquer the world.

He’s always been brave. We all love brave, until brave gets hit in the face. Then we become more cowardly about it. But Dan got hit in the face, fell down, got up, kept going. It takes a brave man to speak openly about “a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which idealists most often succumb: activism and overwork”. It takes a brave man, in fact, to get up in front of a TED audience and say all the truths he said on that stage. Bravery is, we all agree, completely essential to any leader.

And last but not least, his speech was full of wisdom. Deep inner wisdom of the kind you only get when you plunge down into your own darkness, face your demons and cry out your most secret pains. This too should be a sign of true leadership that is sorely missing among most TED talkers, Fortune 500 CEOs and other business celebrities today.

Maybe true leadership is precisely about broken dreams. Maybe it’s a quality of being that requires a lot of wandering through the darkness, bathing in doubt, suffering through insufferable choices that others don’t seem to have had to make. Early human societies used to consider rites of passage essential to personal growth. Everybody in a tribe had to go through rites that tested their resolve, their strength, their ability to dream, their resistance to pain and hardship. Only those who could undergo the toughest, most demanding ordeals could aspire to lead the tribe. Only the strongest, bravest and most humane could rule everybody. Leadership wasn’t inherited, or passed on. It wasn’t even something you made your goal and tried to get. No. It was a gift you found within yourself and something everybody recognized.

In a society that constantly and compulsively prioritizes results, success and popularity, it’s inspiring to find a soul like Dan Pallotta on stage. He has this kind of weathered appearance full of expression that half cries and half laughs at the ironies of life he hears himself share. He looks at stuff that nobody else is looking at and thinks about it, learns from it, becomes a teacher of it: stuff like the illogical, unbearable price of our dreams.

A good friend once told me that ballerinas who had little trouble at the beginning of their careers rarely became great. It was those who had overcome great obstacles in their first years who later became world renowned artists, breathtaking dancers on stage. Broken dreams and failure are the world’s way of putting us through our ancient, forgotten rites of passage. It is in these sore episodes of existence that we become deep, humane, inspiring leaders. It is in our nightmares that we learn to look into other people’s hearts.

Dance away, Dan. Keep thinking, keep writing, keep talking, keep growing. Keep throwing light on what others fail to see or care about. It’s much harder to lead people through the dark than it is to sit on a Fortune 500 board.  Everybody knows it. Deep inside, we all really, really do.

And when the going gets tough, as it very surely will, we’ll all be searching for true leaders to guide us through uncertainty. When we all quit playing these dumb games of power against a world we mean to control, change and “make a difference to,” joy, humanity, presence and true leaders will rule again.

 

Lack Of Gender Equality Holding You Back? Become a Witch!

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

If you look up the term “witch” on Google, you’ll get a lot of images of green, old ladies. Ugly, dirty, with long yucky nails, all dressed in black. Witches get really bad press, but when you realize how powerful a woman in her own feminine strength can be, you’ll understand why.

A few years ago I had a huge fight with a male friend who told me I was a “bad, evil witch!” He was screaming at me in the middle of the street, right outside an event we’d both attended. Much as I tried to argue that I wasn’t that dark and evil, my low-cut red dress and shiny red lips didn’t support my claim to innocence. Well, guess what? He was right!

What’s worse, I’ve become convinced witches will reign again. And if you’ve followed my previous stories here, you may have figured out there was a witch inside of me long before I did. About a year ago I wrote about the witch-hunts conducted against pagan women leaders of rebellious tribal societies in Northern Spain. While visiting the valley of Baztan in Navarra I had been blown away by the energy of mystery, ancient battles and obvious persecution of those who did not submit to mainstream thinking. I felt entirely at home, as if I was in my mother’s own country: Ireland.

When I was a child I spent many summers in Ireland. Legends of leprehauns and fairies seduced my imagination all the time. I distinctly remember riding in the car up North, looking out the window at rainbows and cows. A pot of gold was supposed to await at the end of a rainbow, and if you found a leprehaun in a forest, he could lead you to the treasure if he didn’t find a way to trick you first. I spent hours anticipating strategies against those wise old magic men. Then I grew up and became an engineer. I forgot everything magical or mystical. Until now.

Ancient tribal societies were often lead by women. Not only were the first deities female, but many a shaman and druidess were to be found in pagan tribal societies, all the way up to the emergence of patriarchal societies around 3.000 years BC. Women were biologically designed to connect with the cycles of life and death seen in nature. Women had a different way of looking at survival challenges than men. They had an intangible kind of strength that made up for their lack of physical muscle. Women were deeply emotional, instinctive, cyclical, passionate creatures.

More importantly, women were mysterious. The hidden beauty in womens’ eyes was just as feral and full of its own will as a sudden storm in the jungle. Life was a mystery to be admired, enjoyed and surrendered to. Women were too.

But for ages, women have been domesticated, controlled and suppressed. Humans slowly became smarter and more ambitious. We conquered Nature. We conquered animals. And we also conquered women. The more men antagonised and centralized patriarchal civilizations, the harder we chased these unfortunate tribal leaders. The term ‘witch’ became tainted with all sorts of moral judgments which guaranteed hell, evil cruelty and demonic curses. Female healers, tribal leaders, property owners and spiritual guides were mortified, humiliated, raped morally and physically until they surrendered or died.

All kinds of non-linear logic were forbidden. Visions, gut feelings, strange dreams and superstitions – anything that couldn’t be explained with strict intellectual logic – was denied. Simple herbal remedies and fortune-telling methods became the language of the devil. Unruly passions were whipped to purify the soul. Disturbing torture machines were invented and exported to the most remote corners of emerging civilizations. Humanity discovered the psychopathic pleasure of observing another’s most desperate pain.

So monstrous was our persecution of the wild, that many generations later we still don’t dare to even look at the unconscious in our own bodies. Our current relationship with wild Nature, sadly trashed to near extinction, betrays how we relate to the wild within ourselves: our feelings, our unpredictable passions, our chaotic dreams and the sudden certainties we feel about the future. We don’t dare tell anybody what we’ve heard our dead father tell us this morning, or how we felt undisputable certainty in the dream we had last night that was way more than just a dream.

Everybody I talk to describes experiences and recollections that can’t be explained by science. They tell me like it’s an ugly dark secret not to be confessed to anybody else. Just as embarrassing and ugly as I found divination methods a few years back. Little fascinating rituals we all play into when nobody’s looking. Astrology, tarot, I Ching, tea-leaves in a cup, lucky socks or winner ties, and the many folkloric customs still alive today in every single corner of our planet. Myth, emotion and mystery abound beyond the limits of our hyper-rational internet clouds.

It comes as no surprise, then, to witness how modern women have issues with themselves. We can’t scream, we can’t cry, we can’t follow an intuition we had this morning while feeding the baby. We can’t look old, we can’t fall in love with penniless artists, we can’t make a scene at the office when we’ve been insulted beyond belief by ignorant idiots who only think of money. We can’t even bear our babies without drugs and total medical intervention, for God’s sake! We can’t do anything that may be construed as remotely similar to pagan witchcraft. Unless we want to be publicly humiliated and burnt on a stake by sorely manipulated crowds.

Men can’t either, by the way. This isn’t about women. It’s about the feminine, the self-willed, the indomitable, the rebellious… the mysterious, the seductive, the exciting, the life-motivating. This is what we’ve lost as a species. This is what we’ve been told is bad, cruel, demonic and surely leading our souls to Hell.

Today, as we fight over who sells weapons to whom, which terrorists are funded where, who spreads the most trash and who’ll be the first to stop burning fossils, wild nature sits silently watching this global confusion and fear. Because the day we burned our witches we became orphans to the unknown.

Our future is uncertain. Tomorrow seems obscure. Chaotic changes await us as global warming creeps up on our cities, tourism-exploited beaches and over-monetized crops. All our masculine big data, scientific knowledge and over-inflated egos are useless in the face of curvy, feminine, unruly and unrelenting rhythms of angry nature.

Yes, my friends, it’s time to find the witch within. They were never cruel or ill-intended. They were our best translators to the planet’s symbolic language of life. Spiritual, magical, unpredictable and completely at ease in complete obscurity, witches will help us figure out which fact to follow, just as they helped our earliest ancestors choose their hunting strategies in hidden caves, tens of thousands of years ago.

Follow your dreams. Surrender to your passions. Trust your hearts. The witch of wild wisdom within you will slowly emerge to guide you when everything else fails.

 

The Enormous Truth Buried Inside Every Ancient Society

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

We live in a world that punishes truth and praises lies. Our deepest truths come from the heart in unwritten feelings and sensations which may remain dormant or out of reach for decades. Our minds, however, are experts at fabricating words to fill in the gaps. Whatever it takes. Is it any wonder that the meaning of leadership itself has become so corrupt?

My lifelong study of leadership has brought me to nature. As I brushed away the dirt that I came across in so many books and studies, I found an enormous truth buried deep inside every ancient human society. Animals and nature follow the rules of leadership way better than we do. The logic of this original, true leadership permeates the entire animal kingdom, and is most visible among the largest, most complex of creatures: our mammal friends.

Through working with dolphins and horses, I began to discover a fundamental fact that seems to have disappeared beneath the worlds’ pyramids and buried temples. Leadership is an act of love. Not an impulse to get rich or famous. It’s not about getting respect or being remembered. It’s not about Forbes rankings. It’s not about the ideas we read about daily in magazines, books or elite university research papers. It’s about love. Deep, beautiful, selfless, complex, life-thirsty love.

In Ireland the Hill of Tara bears witness to very sexual ceremonies in which 142 High Kings of Tara were selected and crowned by Celtic kings. The ancient Egyptian Turin Erotic Papyrus graphically shows how sexual energy was closely tied to the Gods and to the afterlife for the Egyptians. Cave paintings and less sophisticated representations from primitive tribes also remind us that before we became so intellectually smart we knew that business was not too far away from erotic pleasure and love.

I used to be a very brainy industrial engineer with huge ambitions. I was a product of our times. I was told to study hard and reach for the stars. I believed it. Thirty years into this game, however, my heart started beating a different tune. Confused and bewildered, I needed more than a decade to figure out what it was trying to tell me, without any words. Now that I get it, none of the business gibberish we all talk makes any sense to me. It seems like a huge lie at the service of the few… the few willing to break every rule of life in order to get to the top.

In many mammal species the leader of the pack is female. The first human Gods were female, as so many ancient figurines symbolise – without words. This female style of leadership is about having everybody’s back. And I mean everybody: Fast hunters, young studs, innocent teenage girls, child-bearing women, wise old men. Wild animal leadership is about being last, behind everyone, the first one to be discovered by a chasing predator.

This heart-driven leadership serves life at any cost. It follows a logic of economy in which no one is killed for any reason other than promoting life itself.

No conflict is sparked for dumb reasons like money, power, conceptual beliefs or ego. A clean worthy heart is venerated above every other possible trait. Beauty, charisma, intelligence, business savvy and physical strength fall short, way below this intrinsic ability to love your people so much that you will give yourself over in order to promote their wellbeing.

If we look at human history, and evolution itself, we see that the Homo Sapien species appeared two million years ago. The oldest Goddess figurines found, the Tan Tan Venus in Morocco and the Berejat Ram Venus of the Golan Heights, could be as old as three to 500,000 years old. Homo Sapiens, our own species, is only 200,000 years old.

War, violence, degradation of women and chieftain-based leadership, in contrast, are no more than 7,000 years old. A mere hiccup in our Evolution! It’s true that without war, human societies would not have developed as miraculously as they did. We have to admit that the dynamics set in motion by those first Indo-European invaders about 4500 B.C.E. in Europe, replicated in Middle-East and America, did push humanity to overcome gigantic challenges. Business strategy still praises Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” treaty, and many of our daily comforts and technology applications come from inventions developed by the military.

But for some reason we have let this hunger for domination and supremacy blind us to the invisible cost of war and violence.

Recent Jihadist attacks come as a painful reminder to modern societies. Violence destroys life. It kills many lives in one fatal blow and alienates future generations with unbearable doses of shock, fear, vengeful anger and guilt. Guilt-ridden successors of great historic conquerors have always been weak, depressed, addicted and perverted. The cost of war is multi-generational. It takes many, many, lives to overcome the incomprehensible wounds left by meaningless death.

To our essentially mammal hearts it makes absolutely no sense to kill anyone for a reason that is not life or death. Like any other animal on our planet, it would choose first to avoid or escape the conflict, and it would only attack if it had no other choice. What’s more, if it had no chance at all, it wouldn’t even fight. It would go straight into shock to minimize pain, once again eliminating meaningless violence.

The heart is female and the mind is male. Yin and Yang. Moon and Sun. Love and Sex. Creation and destruction. In nature there is an intrinsic balance between the male and female principles that pushes life forward. But we humans have become so strategic, so brainy, so blinded by the delusional lies of our very own grey matter, that we have broken that balance. We are slowly killing nature. Animals are becoming extinct, resources are running out, trash is polluting everything.

Who will remind us that loving hearts must again rule over fearful minds? Heart’s follow mind when mind serves heart’s purpose.

Men and women who ignore their heart plant death and grow destruction around them because their minds lose all sense of purpose. They become blind to the logic of life – that nature and animals will obey at any cost.  They become leaders of hatred and worshippers of meaningless rankings. And so they become slaves to a Godless, robotic system of endless competition with each other.

It’s frustrating to fall out of the profit-making machinery of corporations. It’s alienating to choose projects that make sense, rather than money. It’s very lonely to speak from the heart in a society that can’t remember what it feels below  the neckline. As I’ve shared often on Real Leaders, it’s scary to see myself invest year after year of my career into “bringing love to the darkest, most loveless of places.”

For a very long time I was scared that I might be wrong. I seemed to be the only one talking this way. Punished once and again by people who were blind to their own hearts’ logic of life, I’ve become surprisingly strong. I’ve come to see that when you serve truth you don’t need violence. Truth is irresistible. True love is untamable. True leadership loves so deeply and effortlessly that violence and punishment melt in her presence. And a woman who rules from a heart full of love is a force of nature – a fair, wild, strong leader, a chaos of emotion full of wisdom. A woman who fully trusts her heart becomes a Goddess.

 

Why Instinct is Important for Leadership

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

What do you feel right now? Where do you feel it in your body? Can you score your body tension between one and ten? These are questions I ask clients every day. At first, they answer in monosyllables, like “fine” or “uh?” Today’s CEOs think they are good leaders. But if they are caught off guard by questions like these, it means their leadership is more theoretical than real.

We know that instincts are important to leadership. It’s an intuitive truth that we’ve read about forever, but how can we follow our instincts if we don’t know how our body feels? And how could we, in a society that does nothing to teach us the importance of looking inside ourselves from time to time?

Instincts are felt as bodily sensations. Your gut tightens up with a contraction against a certain person or situation. Your skin may crawl, as the expression goes, or it may constrict in a way that makes your hair go up in spikes. Our breath is also quick to change in the face of unexpected events, and our heart may miss a beat or beat faster than usual. All of these cues tell us that our body is reacting to something right here, right now – something that is critical to our present survival or our future progress. In a culture that medicates us to subdue every inkling of discomfort or pain, body reactions can go unnoticed.

I’m presently thinking about this because we separated a two year old foal from his brother last Sunday. Both horses had been separated from their mothers about six months ago, and after a couple of very stressed days, had settled into the new routine of sharing a big box like flatmates. As a new baby came to the moment of separation from its mother, my foal was taken to an adult horse box to live alone for the first time in his life.

Suddenly alone in this new space, he is acutely sensitive to every little noise or sound happening around him. If an airplane goes by, he pricks his ears up and tenses his eyes until the engines stop disturbing the quiet of the fields. If his caretakers wheel a barrow across the lawn, he again reacts nervously. His entire body posture and his breathing immediately betray his level of tension. It rises and falls with the smallest change in the environment. So my question is: shouldn’t we be doing the same?

Nothing is happening to this horse that wasn’t going on before. The difference now is that he is not distracted, or comforted, by the company of another horse. And while their is no real danger to his survival, his most feral instincts are completely alert, just in case. Watching him I realized how humans should be paying a lot more attention to the sounds, changes and tiny cues triggering around them in order to survive and thrive. Nobody’s survival is more threatened than that of a CEO.

But our CEOs are busy analyzing market trends, or looking at multiple screens with data, or focusing on complex negotiations all the time. Rarely are they simply noticing how their own body is reacting underneath all those intelligent and strategic words.

A client of mine, Ryan, for example, came out to get some feedback from our horses last week. He went to the stable door to pet one of the younger mares. His right hand was held up front, petting her on the head, while his left shoulder kept yanking back every time she moved her head. If the mare had been his boss, or a client, or even his team, Ryan would have been forcing himself to keep up a strategy that his body was very uncomfortable with. Ryan’s focus on the content of his own words, the words he was getting back and the mental plans he was trying to materialize was making him blind to his body’s instincts.

When I pointed out the yanking shoulder, I helped Ryan step back to a distance where his body stopped shrinking away. Then I asked him to think of how he could advance in a way that felt comfortable, and I suggested protecting his space with his left hand at all times. A few minutes later he was hugging the mare over the fence. Ryan was forgetting to protect his own position while advancing, with the mare.

His negotiating position was unstable and thus his rivals could take advantage of him. His attempts at making his own team feel safe were not successful because his team sensed his own yanking back in small details: a dumb comment here, a bad joke there, a tricky email, a way of phrasing instructions that betrayed a feeling of discomfort.

Horses and all mammals in general help us focus back on our instincts, body feelings or reflexes. There is an age-old wisdom to them that protects us even if we are distracted thinking of something else. Being mindful of all these little warning signs and alerts is critical to incarnate strong leadership.

So ask yourself these questions every few hours or every time you remember to: what do you feel? Where do you feel it in your body? What level is your tension now? By turning your attention to your body a few times a day you may begin to notice your yanking shoulder, tightening guts and crawling skin. What’s more, you’ll begin to realize there is a connection between what your body expresses and the business challenges you’re facing

This is what meditation is all about. And it’s way more useful than forcing yourself to sit in silence for twenty minutes in the morning. Trust me. Effective leadership is about “right here right now”… all day long!

 

How to Perfect the art of Passive Conflict

Posted on by Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

There is one fundamental fact of leadership that we modern, performance-obsessed executives struggle with: repetition of ‘wrongful’ patterns. However, the path to perfection runs through every instance of imperfection.

2016 has begun with an explosion of political controversy in Spain. The Catalan region finally appointed its new governor, who swears they will become an independent nation from Spain in 18 months time. Meanwhile, the entire country has agonized as several ruling parties fight about putting together the needed majority of votes to choose a new president, or repeat the elections. Social networks and newspapers sizzle with anger, indignation, disgust and all kinds of violent, though strictly verbal, confrontations.

You could say we are repeating the same sanguinary conflicts that drove us to our civil war in 1936. Only we’ve brought it down a notch: from gunshots to verbal insults, from bomb explosions to economic manipulations, from exiles and murders to political humiliations. It feels just as horrible, but people aren’t dying.

As I turned in my last article to Grant, the editor of Real Leaders, he shared how uncertain and painful the current situation in South Africa is these days. Racism seems to be peaking again. On the other side of the world the United States has recently experienced several episodes of outrage at police brutality with Afro-Americans. And circling back to Europe, we’ve seen Germans and Dutch citizens coming out on the street to express their opposition to immigration policies concerning war refugees. It feels like every region of the planet is repeating their worse and most gruesome historic episodes. And this scares us. As it should.

Maybe the world is going to hell. And maybe we’re only repeating what happened in the past in order to finally resolve it.

We release old, trapped emotions on all sides of conflicts, wars, persecutions, genocides and all those truly awful things we humans have been doing to each other for the last seven thousand years. My hopeful guess is that all this verbal violence will not go further than a few isolated incidents of physical brutality. By reliving it we may appreciate how much our parents and grandparents paid to help us grow into more sophisticated people, understanding and supportive of the subtle differences found in others.

Because having gone through two world wars and hundreds, if not thousands, of awfully destructive conflicts on local levels. We have grown as a species. We have understood that there are two sides to every story. We have heard our families cry for those who died finding food or safety for their loved ones. We have written books and made films that interpreted what was going on. We attributed evil motivations to enemies who were just as scared and lost as we were at the time. We’ve read articles and watched documentaries about how very much it hurt them too.

Around the globe in many, many families, we have carried the victims’ angry impotence and the conquerors’ awful guilt.

Now we know what happens when you resort to violence. Now we know that nobody wins and everybody loses. Even if we forget from time to time.

Grant and I attended the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates here in Barcelona on the exact day of the terrorist attack in Paris last November. I remember sitting in the beautiful halls of a centric historical building that Friday, listening to wise, articulate people demand peace. “But peace can’t come without a lot of painful emotional release… a lot of hard work on all sides!” I thought to myself. It’s so easy to act peaceful. It’s so hard to actually be at peace.

It’s like a marriage. Both parties want the marriage to work. They both want to find the sexy closeness they once enjoyed. They both want the fighting to stop. And yet, many end in divorce. Some even go as far as having one last baby in a desperate effort to save and restart a mutual feeling that simply won’t come back. It’s not until many years later, once they’ve rebuilt their lives with new spouses, that they find the original peace and intimate friendship they once lost. Once they’ve worked through all their anger, frustration, fear and negativity about each other, they may come out the other side as allies, sharing the upbringing of their kids, listening to each other’s marital problems, and remembering why they once loved each other. More importantly, they will have recognized, accepted and owned their own roles in the destruction of the marriage.

This is the price of peace. Of real peace. We can stop a war, dress up, have a huge party and announce to the world we’re done fighting.

But until we surface all our pain, until we clean out all our wounds… Until we can truly look at our enemy in the eye with deep authentic gratitude for how much he or she helped us grow personally and spiritually, we will only be trying.

Looking at the world today it becomes apparent we’re on our way to finding that deeper, authentic state of true, grateful peace. We’re not there yet. And that’s why we need to repeat our conflicts. We need to vent that ancient anger we’ve been holding onto – on a personal, family and national level. It has to come out. There is no other way of resolving the past. As somebody once said, “the only way forward is through.”

Let us all become aware of what we’re feeling and experiencing. Let us all find safe spaces to express our anger, resolver our pain, release our fear. I send many clients to do kickboxing or other sports which involve kicking, screaming, hitting and growling. It allows them to release anger without hurting anybody. It helps them come to terms with the fact that they do feel terribly, horribly angry. And that there are plenty of good reasons for that anger when they look back at the history of their families. It’s only after kicking and growling that they can start talking about it.

Let us all repeat our ugly rants against historic enemies in situations which minimize the pain we inflict on others.

If we are wronged by those who blindly repeat their own destructive patterns, let us repeat the pattern of victims with acute self-awareness. Because every tear we cry will bring us closer to those who were wronged before us in our families. Every spasm of pain we surrender to will release the patterns of injustice… for ourselves, and also for our children.

I have no crystal ball. I know not where this climate of verbal violence will carry us. What I do know is this: no death is meaningless. Every tear and every loss is deeply significant, honorable and worthy. Physical destruction builds and enlarges future consciousness just as death creates new life. Let us honor and respect every price paid by humanity in order to give us, here and now, the chance to live in truly deep, conscious and effortless peace.

 

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