Lived Experience and the Importance of the Heart

I’ve recently become very interested in the head, the heart, and the gut as different and complimentary sources of knowledge. The gut is the centre of our intuition. It tells us when something is not right, when we shouldn’t really trust someone - “I just felt it in my gut.” It also guides us towards positive outcomes but in ways that are probably impossible to put into words. Many successful leaders speak of learning to “trust their gut.”

The heart is the centre of our emotions. When we suffer a significant loss – be it a loved one, a relationship, or a passion project – we describe ourselves as being “heartbroken”. When we are encouraged to speak our raw, unfiltered truth, we are “speaking from the heart”. As part of my renewed interest in this, I have been trying to tune into my body more, listen to ‘the wisdom of the body’, and recognise where in my body I’m feeling things. I’ve learnt that I tend to experience stress as a knot in my gut while anxiety is a tightness in my chest.

The head is our logical, rational part. It’s the part we tend to use the most, understand the best, and feel most comfortable with. We also tend to identify ourselves with our heads. We might advise someone to “listen to your heart” or “listen to your body”. We’d never tell someone to “listen to your head” because implicit in this is that it is the head that is doing the listening.

This identifying ourselves with our heads (and not with the rest of our body) is a core feature of Western culture. Our culture makes a value judgement that the head is more important than the heart or the gut. We talk about “the head of the organisation” or “the head of the family”, picking out the person with the most power. But we don’t talk about or structure our organisations around them having a heart or a gut.

This value judgement is reflected in the types of information we pay attention to and esteem. We live in the era of Big Data. We want our strategies and our decisions to be “evidence-led” or “evidence-based.” The sort of things we allow to count as valid evidence tend to be numerical, quantifiable, measurable, impersonal, analysable. In a word, they tend to be ‘head’ things. Qualitative data is definitely treated as the poor cousin to quantitative data – I’ve heard it described as “the thing to bring colour to the data”, with the implication being that the ‘black and white’ figures are the ‘real’ data.

Who I am depends on who else is in the room

In a recent, wonderful round table about learning that I was lucky to be part of, I listened to a colleague say, “Who I am depends on who else is in the room. Do I trust these people enough to share an intuition?” That description spoke perfectly to my experience. I have on many occasions withheld my perspective because I couldn’t give a rational justification for it and I believed, rightly or wrongly, that the people in the room would dismiss it in the absence of rational justification. And on those occasions, withholding those perspectives was almost always coupled with things subsequently going pear-shaped.

In my recent blog post, The Real Cost Of A Stiff Upper Lip, I explored how our culture requires us to ‘sever and imprison our heart’ (and, I would add, our gut too) and the phenomenally damaging consequences of doing so. Our heart and our gut are sources of great wisdom. Over the past six months or so, I have been trying to lead with my heart, and the result has been like magic. I’ve been getting into the most wonderful, profound conversations. I’ve been connecting emotionally with people I’ve only just met. Together, we’re reaching greater levels of honesty and speaking more truly to one another than perhaps I’ve ever experienced.

The depth of conversation brought about by that kind of honesty has itself changed the nature of what I am learning. It expands the form of my perspective. By creating conditions for honesty and deep conversations, I find my felt experience and understanding of the world broadening also. And that, in turn, informs the person I continue to become and what I do as that person.

Alongside this, I’ve been trying to tune into body, largely my gut, and pay attention to those physical sensations. That knot in my stomach, that pervading weariness even after 8 hours sleep, they are telling me things. I am trying to counter my habitual tendency to simply ignore them and get on with the urgent tasks at hand. Instead, I am viewing them as vital signs that something is out of balance, something which cannot remain out of balance for long before it will send me to the floor.

My gut and my heart are sources of wisdom about health, balance, and connection to other living things. And we operate in a culture that devalues these things because the information they produce is not numerical, quantifiable, measurable, impersonal, analysable.

Lived experience

Let me now pivot starkly to the topic of ‘lived experience’. Our most-read blog post is this one on why the term ‘Lived Experience’ fails people’s lived experience. It’s been read twice as many times as any other post. Something about it has resonated with people.

In that piece, I made the following three points:

1. The language of ‘lived experience’ reinforces the damaging distinction between ‘the helper’ and ‘the helped’. You have ‘lived experience’ (i.e. you’re broken). I am a professional (i.e. I can fix you). This is a damaging Us-and-Them dichotomy, where the reality is that we all have (lived) experience of a range of issues.

   
   

2. The term ‘expert by experience’ tries to force ‘experience’ into our ‘expertise’-shaped models. I don’t like the term. I think it tries to force people’s experiences into a framework that only truly values expertise. Expertise and experience are different things. A mental illness specialist has knowledge that is fundamentally different from a mental illness sufferer. Both are valuable – but they are differently valuable. A job advert that says, “Must have five years’ experience of working with mental health issues” is saying something very different to one that says, “Must have experienced mental health issues for five years.”

   
   

3. While we’re trying to value lived experience in ways we didn’t in the past, we continue to say that it’s less valuable than professional expertise. This is why we feel the need to present folks with experience of issues as ‘experts’ – because expertise is what we believe has value.

Our experiences reside in the head, heart, and gut. We may recall and be able to describe what happened to us (head). The emotional impact of the experience – the trauma it may have caused – is likely to be the most pervasive aspect of the experience (heart). And these experiences will also have shaped how we see things and how we react to them (gut). I would say that experience is more about the heart and the gut than the head.

We operate in a culture that only really values head knowledge. When we talk about ‘experts’, we are almost always talking about people with significant head knowledge of a particular subject. Expertise is always (Michael Gove aside) seen to be of value in our culture. But our culture devalues the knowledge of the heart and the gut because the information they produce is not numerical, quantifiable, measurable, impersonal, analysable, and therefore we do not allow these other forms to count as valid evidence. We sever the heart and the gut.

As long as our culture only values head-knowledge and continues to require us to sever the heart and the gut, we will remain unable to treat lived experience – a form of heart and gut knowledge – as anything other than the poor cousin of professional expertise. And our well-meaning attempts to value it in an expertise-centric model will continue to try to turn it into a form of head-knowledge – and in so doing will miss and distort the tremendous value that truly lies in lived experience.

Learning to value our Zahras

I believe that lived experience is tremendously important. My friend, Zahra, and I were talking recently about some personal trauma I went through last year. Zahra is from Iran originally and knows what it is like to leave her family behind and live as a migrant. She works with a lot of refugees and asylum-seekers, and she does so in the most beautiful, relational way. She told me that, if I let it, if I tune into my feelings, my trauma will help connect me to other people. It will grant me empathy, compassion, understanding, patience.

This has been her experience, and the experience of many of the people she has worked with. Zahra’s lived experiences have helped to make her a wonderful, sensitive, generous human being and an amazing colleague. She is able to sense and respond to things in other people in a way that defies any kind of logical expertise.

We need more Zahras in the world.

We need to value our Zahras.

But we need to do so in a way that doesn’t try to turn her into an ‘expert’, which she is not and doesn’t profess to be. It's her heart, her gut, her wholeness that are of value. And in so much of the work we do together, I would value Zahra’s perspective over the biggest heap of head data you can put in front of me.