Exploring the Connection between Energy and Leadership

That’s one of the things that keeps me busy every day. There are three things that need to be explored here. Number one is the conscious and unconscious way of leading. Number two is the individual and systemic type of leadership from an energy perspective and the changes it may cause. Finally, I want to talk about worldviews. There is no particular order in which those things should be addressed because we could talk about any of these points in any order we want. Yet I believe there are useful perspectives when we talk about energy, which is after all the raw material that could be both conscious and unconscious. If you’re reading this or if you are working with us, you know that we leverage a framework called the leadership circle where we organize interviews and 360 with our client. What I really like about this framework is that it helps leaders to chart, and pass on a journey from their active tendencies to the activation of their creative competencies. 

A leader is someone who invites, and suggests others to follow certain perspectives and tries to organize the followership, and makes people engaged in a specific conversation. So the more creative and constructive my energy is, the easier it is for people to connect and relate to it. At the same time, the more reactive and unconscious I am, the harder it is for people to connect with me and follow me accordingly. It’s all about rejection and ignorance in their own reactive tendency. 

What is meant by reactive tendencies? Those are the unconscious reactions or responses we have which generate unconscious behavior such as trying to control things, trying to distance ourselves from intellectual superiority perspective, or being very compliant and obedient in fear that the relationship we have with others depends on our probation, our obedience, compliance to the situation, which are very valid strategies for us as children, but much less valid for us as adults. So the more conscious we are about our energy, the more we learn to observe, and the more we can relate to people and to the project we have in a conscious way. Having that, we can be more assertive and deliberate in the manifestation of the vision we have for the world. 

What exactly does it look like? Think about yourself as a boss when you are managing your team or trying to work with your current boss. What kind of emotional impact might you have on people or what kind of emotional impact do you have when you work with your boss? How do you feel? How does this person make you feel? Is this something warm and confident when you feel safe psychologically? Or do you feel a sense of pushing things away? Do you feel smaller than you should be or even unsafe in that relationship? All these are emotional tones or energetic nuances which are going to form the way you think, the way you behave, and therefore the way you relate with others and propagate or amplify that energy. So for every leader, every leadership position you have, whether you are leading an organization, part of it, or even for those being outside of any organization, the way you relate and leverage the quality of your energy is going to liberate the way you manifest your vision into the world. So in many ways, the quality of your energy defines the quality of your mind and the quality of your mind defines the quality of your energy. 

After clarifying this conscious and unconscious aspect, we can address the second one which is what it means at the individual level, and what that means at the systemic level. In a coaching conversation, we often work on a one-on-one basis, as well as on a team or group level. So when you work on yourself to develop, structure, and organize your energetic compound and the ideas with it, you have more and more trust in yourself and in your inner dialogue and are able to be a bit more accurate in the aspect of relationships with people you’re working with, namely the members of your teams. If you’re a leader, the quality of the energy you bring in, the conversation you have with your people is going to influence their conversations with their teams and therefore amplify that energy and make it trickle down. There is nothing revelatory here. Just ask yourself: when was the last time that you were more interested in the quality of the energy you brought to a conversation than in the idea you brought? Where does the idea come from? Do you believe that the relationship you have with people is based on you solely or them solely? Or is it something transactional and very tangible when you pay attention to the quality of the energy that is manifesting between the two, five, or ten of you, that generates further rapport? 

Having addressed the conscious and unconscious aspects of energy, I would like to connect it to another framework or to another life experience that you might have, which is how energy manifests itself in people according to the views they have of the world and the maturity level or stage that they are currently at in life. What I mean by this is that from the beginning of life and until its end, we navigate through stages. Let’s view it as an assumption. We navigate through stages and according to each stage of our adult development, our worldview evolves and is getting more and more inclusive of the diversity available in the world. In many ways, it’s like seeing the world in two dimensions, then starting to see things in three, then four, five, six dimensions, and more. The more dimensions you are able to see, the more you see of the world and its diversity and the way things can be included, relate together, and be less and less separated unless you have the limitation between concepts, ideas, people, and things. 

Yet how does that relate to energy? At each of these stages, we have a different point of focus and interest in life. For instance, there is a stage of life where we are very concerned with our safety within a group and we’re trying to really conform to what’s going on around us with some type of behavior. This is commonly observed at school. You may see this in your children, or look back at your own childhood or teenage years. The only thing that mattered to us during that period is to be part of our community, to be part, and to safely stay within the rules which may be stipulated or not. This may sometimes be observed in some organizations where doing things the same way others do generates a lot of safety. Being in this energy, you might encounter someone who is at a slightly later stage where their safety comes from the recognition of them being slightly better, slightly more competent than their teammates and community. As an expert in the community, this person is because they support and create value for the community. The people with a more conformist approach would have a harder time being someone who behaves a bit like an outliner or someone who is slightly more eloquent or more intellectual etc. 

This is what happens at every single stage. Think about the last time you had a very warm and interesting exchange with someone when you felt like you were resonating with a person in front of you. Who was that person? What made that person different besides whether you came from the same school or from the same country or from the same city? What was different about their worldview? How did you know about the way they were looking at the world? What would happen if you could look at the world through their eyes? How aware are you of the way you see the world and how divergent or similar it is to your neighbor or your team members? So the energy also resonates on a different level according to the different worldview people have. And by worldview, I don’t necessarily mean opinions. It’s literally worldviews, the view we have of the world at that moment. And the number of nuances, and dimensions we are able to relate and connect with from where we are. Typically, the more inclusive your worldview is, the more extended timeframe you can play with, the more diverse ideas you can play with, and the easier for you it is to navigate and deal with ambiguity, and complexity, and the more interest you will have in the diversity of the world beyond humans: you will be interested in animals, nature, the rest of the planet and its ecosystem. All of that is inclusive. The more grounded we are, the easier it is for us to be open to other perspectives and other worlds. Not necessarily because we are meditating on top of the mountain, but more because we are more available to the variance, to the differences of energy available around us. 

When you lead an organization or when you want to achieve something, the key to your success is often your capacity to leverage the resources available within you and around you. And the more you can relate to different levels of maturity, different levels of education, and different levels of personal and professional trajectory, the easier it will be for you to invigorate, motivate, engage, and inspire talent to express self through the people who are working with you and for you and working together and for each other. That is all energy-related. You can have the most beautiful ideas in the world, yet if you’re not able to convey those ideas in a way that is compelling and engaging and make people feel safe and recognized, those ideas are not going to be carried over, at least not for a very long time. And I think that’s a very compelling reason to explore the various types of energy available within you to the same level of interest and to the same level of focus that you would have about the ideas and the intellectual, rational, and conceptual perspective that you might have about life and the world in general. These two elements need to be managed constantly so we can simply play and have fun together.