The body - and heart - keep score.
Your body, your heart, and your head are all keeping score. Which scoreboard are you paying attention to?
We have three intelligence centers. First, our body is constantly speaking to us through gut feelings, tension that we hold in our muscles, cortisol responses, etc. Second, our heart gives every experience an emotional quality that tells us something important - whether we’re aware of it or not. And finally, our head is giving us all kinds of thoughts, ideas, and analysis about what we’re experiencing.
All of them guide us. All of them keep score. But at least within my leadership, I was conditioned to focus on the scoreboard in my head. Am I meeting my performance goals? What will the next “organizational health survey” say about my leadership? What will my manager think about this decision?
Looking back at my time as a school leader or Chief Talent Officer - which was only four years ago - I don’t think much about those goals any more, if I’m honest. But what sometimes comes to me in moments of stillness are what I call “shame memories.” They’re little moments in my career when I ignored a gut feeling, or followed my head when it didn’t actually sit well in my heart. Like when my head said, “this will be a good way to get buy-in,” even as my heart knew that I was eliciting fake input about a decision I’d already made.
Unfortunately, those gut feelings and heart wounds didn’t disappear when I ignored them. They just went into storage, waiting for me, and won’t go away until I deal with them and learn from them.
Ignoring my heart had consequences for my leadership at the time, too. Often when I moved ahead with decisions or actions that didn’t actually feel right to me, they didn’t feel good for others either, and ended up breaking trust or diminishing safety. Now, I understand that our hearts and bodies are truly “intelligence centers” – operating with a level of sophistication that took millions years of evolution to achieve. They guide us in powerful ways, and we ignore them at our peril.
Yet ignoring them is precisely what we’re conditioned to do. We’re led to believe that good leadership is something we have to learn how to do in our heads. And then we end up leading with our heads. Learning to listen to your heart and your body - in addition to your head - is something that requires “deconditioning” and takes time. We’re launching a yearlong cohort next school-year to support leaders in doing that. If this speaks to you, consider joining us.
Because listening to your heart and body won’t just make you a more effective leader now, it will make you a happier human being later.
