and create things that we can love. At a basic level, we learn to operate from a place of love that is in action. When we see people who have this energy flowing through them, we will see it in their eyes. We will hear it in their voices. We will feel it through their actions.
We have a choice as leaders, whether we will spend our time trying to get other people to do things and see things in a certain way, or to generally accomplish goals that are of our own making. When we look at leaders who have found their inspiration and have connected in that deep way of being and knowing, we see that they are on a journey and are setting their own pace. These people truly lead by creating the spiritual, emotional, and cognitive journey toward their highest aspirations. They do not propel others in that direction. They compel others to want the same things. That is the deep and profound difference of this leadership style.
The people around this type of leader pick up this energy and literally begin to feel the inspiration as well. They start to respond and move their energy in a like direction and look to their “emotional leader” as a bellwether for what is important on the horizon and how to respond to situations in the here and now.
LEADERSHIP AND THE LIMBIC SYSTEM
Here is where we begin to understand the biomechanical aspect of inspirational presence. Our limbic system is a system of organs, nerves, glands, and portions of our brain that function together to govern our emotions. The significant feature for leadership is that it is an open-loop system—that means that it can take input from outside of the system. In a social group, the interaction of a group of people’s limbic systems is referred to as social contagion (from the same root as the word contagious), one of the most pronounced and obvious being laughter. If we go to a comedy club and sit in a room full of people who are laughing, the show likely will seem uproariously funny. If we were to watch the same routine on television, however, we probably would not have the same response because we would be missing the group experience of shared emotion.
This example shows how people experience contagion that is spread across a crowd. There are many different ways that contagion can be played out, although some of the most widely known are somewhat negative—mass hysteria, riots, and other greatly heightened group emotional reactions. The positive effect is felt in group meditations, peace marches, or other times when people share a collective intention and expand on a shared positive emotion. When we move into the same physical space and share emotional experiences, we see the effects of contagion.
We know that we humans connect through the open loops of our limbic systems, as we send and receive energy to everyone and everything around us. It is easy to know, from an intuitive sense, that we actually experience other people’s energy and their emotional states, and we can find ourselves influenced by others around us. Most people can relate to having been with another person whose energy and emotional state was so uplifting that they began to feel uplifted as well. Similarly, most people can relate to spending time around a person who is depressed, soon finding their own energy dwindling to match the other person’s energy.
This sort of empathic response has a deep physiological origin. To truly understand what is happening, it is helpful to remember that modern people have evolved from primeval packs and tribes. The original social unit was quite small, and early humans lived together to survive. Our earliest survival instincts are embedded deeply within a social structure. This survives in today’s family unit, where we have a basic system of interdependency into which most of us are born. This structure is literally part of our physiology, as our nervous system has developed in such a way as to take advantage of others around us for protection, companionship, and security.
Our brains have evolved in such a way as to rapidly process this information and act upon it. The oldest portion of the brain is at the juncture of the spinal cord and the brain and is called the amygdule. It is also referred to as the “reptilian brain” or the primitive brain. This portion of the brain developed millennia before the frontal lobes and the higher order processing that is handled there. The amygdule has some very basic functions. It looks at information in front of us and processes it through survival functions. Is it something we need to kill, eat, mate with, or ignore? This is the location for “fight, flight, freeze, or follow.” These primordial functions are what kept humans alive and the species perpetuated.
Through the years, the frontal lobes developed to a point of taking over most of the higher-order processing and dealing with the world in a more rules-based and rational fashion. This, however, has not taken the amygdule out of the equation. It is still alive and well and wired into our hormonal system to provide us with all the energy we need to chase down a mastodon or flee a saber-toothed tiger. Its evolutionary path has been slow and has maintained its old focus through the millennia.
Our emotions are associated with hormonal states in our bodies. There seems to be a correlation effect, not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship. In other words, emotions and hormone levels tend to be predictably associated. One can expect that with certain hormonal changes, predictable emotions will follow. For instance, if an athlete begins taking steroids and bringing up his testosterone levels, it is fairly predictable that emotional outbursts (’roid rages) will follow.
Another example of this is related to fear. If we watch a particularly scary movie, we begin to feel the fear in our bodies. If it is strong enough, we will even begin to taste the adrenaline response. Our hearts will race; our breathing will quicken. To take that even farther, days later, just thinking about that movie may produce the same effect. The brain does not really know the difference between something fearful being in front of it or our just thinking about something frightening. Let’s expand this even more. After we’ve watched the really scary movie, it is possible that that night will be filled with noises and unidentified shapes that can quickly be identified as terrible threats (usually imagined). The point here is that our hormonal systems and our brains are joined in ways that work together to create our reality. If we get scared, our brains will quickly begin finding more threats. At the same time, if we get calm and trusting, our brains will quickly begin finding opportunities and possibilities. A fearful mind looks for bad things, and a calm mind looks for good things.
Going back to the correlation effect, if we start thinking about threats, our bodies will correspondingly create the hormonal reactions that are associated with fight-or-flight. If we start thinking about creative opportunities, we get an altogether different hormonal response. Our stress levels go down, we relax more, and our thinking becomes more expansive.
Furthermore, we also know that consistently living in specific emotional states, such as anger, also are followed by a physiological change. Ultimately, we will change at a biological, or cellular, level to be consistent with an overall recurring emotional state. For example, when a cell that has been loaded with the peptide response to anger divides, it creates a new cell that “wants” that same level of anger peptides. At that point, the biological need will trigger the brain to look for reasons to be angry in order to satisfy the cellular need for the hormonal response to anger. By the same token, if we have developed a body that lives in heightened states of happiness, our cells will call out for events that will fill the cellular need for happiness. Either one can impact the other, or they work both ways. Our bodies can become habitually tied to a hormonal and emotional state, and therefore, it becomes the energy that we project to others, just by getting close to them.
What does this have to do with leadership, and why are we talking about it now? The answer goes back to the social evolution of a tribe. While we are talking about the individual phenomenon of the emotional/mental/physical connection, there is also a group connection of the same sort. This is another function of the limbic system.
To fully make the connection to leadership, we need to remember the social aspect of tribal living, with deep similarities to how pack animals operate. We are born with our limbic systems attuned to our mothers. That
