Investigation of energy of the core ingredient of leadership impact

When having conversations about leadership styles or leaders’ personalities, we talk about their achievements, the extreme range of their behaviors and their outcomes. And when we go to business schools or other leadership development seminars, energy is something we touch upon, but do not necessarily investigate or explore in depth.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to work with thousands of people and many of the conversations I had with those people have been about them recognizing their energy and what they could do with it in relation to other people’s energy.

So in this material, I would like us to spend a bit of time to transcend the more traditional way of talking about energy and leadership and merge or appreciate the collapse between the source of your energy and its impact when you allow it.

There are three parts of this topic that should be considered here. Number one is about the range of energy. Number two is about the range of impact from individual to systemic. And number three is about the degree of consciousness of awareness that we have of the energy which is informing our everyday movements and behaviors. I will start with the last one since we live in a world which is quite unconscious, and unaware and a big part of life is an experience of becoming more and more aware. The more aware we become of ourselves and what’s driving us, the more we start to access energy flowing through us and the emotions informing the way we relate to each other.

Many coaching sessions I have are geared towards allowing people to sit with the energy available within them. We sometimes use terms like, for example, the word ‘rounded emotion’ since emotion is nothing else but the energy in motion. And we try to relax our minds so that we can be with the quality of the energy which is crossing through us in our roles on a daily basis. So the more you work with yourself or with a coach, or anybody else at recognizing the quality of the energy in yourself, without pushing it away or trying to grasp it, the easier it will be for you to have an impact and also to recognize other people’s impact.

We can go into more depth here, but I think it’s enough for this part. 

I’m addressing this topic here as a leader in organization, but also a leader in life, as a citizen, as a family member, and as a friend. What is truly liberating here is our capacity to welcome the range of all the energies we have access to. It’s a little bit like a rainbow of colors, our eyes. We use our eyes to see many colors, but what we see is only what the construct of our eyes is able to see. My view of colors is very different from yours. Similarly, the energy and the way I relate to my energy are very different from yours. When we were young, you and I, learned to label sensations very differently. Those sensations have been labelled in our society and through education very differently based on how people have labelled them in their own family structures and societies. Therefore when we meet and our energies are having a bit of a dialogue through our brains so that we can connect, sometimes it’s difficult, but the more you learn to remove the label of what you’re feeling and be with what you’re feeling, the easier it is then to be informed by what’s happening through you so that you can be in a relationship with your other human beings in front of you or around you.

Let’s shortly discuss the degree of impact at the individual, collective and systemic levels. We have seen that energy is what’s inhabiting your body, you as a form. Your system is fueled by this amount of vital energy, which is allowing you to sing, feel, look, hear, inform your five senses and then relate to everything else. That’s just the beginning because when we start to be in a relationship with our own energy, do the necessary work and practice to develop some nuances about what’s happening inside of us, we become able to read the energy field, as it is sometimes spoken about in some forums, which is also instructing or guiding the conversation and the behaviors of people around us. 

And Similarly, how is that informing the way we behave as a much larger system, whether it’s a company or a community of practice, a community of people, or society. 

So paying attention to energy at the individual level is actually liberating our co-creative capacity at the collective and systemic levels. It helps us liberate our creative, our imaginative, our genius capacity as a collective, a system of human beings, since organizations are not seamless, but rather represent the coalition and association of human beings that form tribes, teams or even very complex systems, the only job of which is to allow the emergence of products and services sold to human beings. And the more this is done in consciousness, the higher the quality of the fruit will be. 

The third point I wanted to reveal is what practice is and how you practice it. What is the practice? How do you really practice working with your energy? What do you do? Do you do Tai chi? Do you meditate? Do you look inside someone’s body? Well, how does that work? I think it’s actually a bit of all those things. My experience suggests that it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Having access to energy is allowing us to get out of our mind, out of our brain for a little while and access our natural self, reconnect with our origins as natural beings and have deliberate practice and discipline of exploring who and what we are as humans so that we can then have access to all of the nuances. 

Some places of the world and some ancient traditions are extremely versed in the relationship between energy across different planes. Luckily, the world of business is now opening itself up to be more inclusive at the human level, but also more inclusive of what nature is. I think from a general trajectory perspective, the relationship we have with the definition of nature now has to shift for many reasons. But in many ways when we reclaim a more holistic and healthy relationship with nature, we are also learning to be more inclusive and accepting of the natural relationship we have with energy at the human level. 

I’m also really curious to learn more from you about how these impacts are relevant to your approach and to your perspectives as well since I want to be in conversation with you. Don’t hesitate to share what you think.