“Many organisational leaders still subscribe to the myth that if we sever the heart (vulnerability and other emotions) from our work, we’ll be more productive, efficient, and (don’t forget) easier to manage.” -Brene Brown, Dare to Lead
I’ve been doing a lot of feeling lately, more than I’m used to. I’ve had some personal heartbreak and trauma, which has been really hard to deal with. But alongside that, I’ve been experiencing my emotions significantly dialled up and it’s led me to realise how much I don’t allow myself to feel.
I find it strange and uncomfortable to be writing those words. I consider myself to be an emotionally attuned individual. A friend of mine refers to me to her friends as “the tall one who talks about his emotions.” I’m in no way a stereotypical buttoned-up, emotionally repressed man.
And yet this belief that we should conceal our emotions for the sake of efficiency - that emotions are somehow ‘unprofessional’, that work is about doing and not about feeling – has me in its grasp just the same. My wife said to me recently, “You never show any doubt.” I was like, “Don’t I? Because I have lots of it.” But she was right. I might talk about my feelings, but I tend not to show them – except to a very small circle in very specific circumstances. On the outside, I’m very controlled. Inside, I’m deeply sensitive, tender, easily moved, with a tendency to feel things very deeply indeed. When did I learn not to show that to the world, and instead to show how clever I am?
Brene Brown’s quote at the top doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just about organisational leaders subscribing to the myth. This myth is a feature of our Western culture. It’s part of the social training we receive. (I feel like referencing the song Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure here.) Just this year, I’ve been told in a work context, “Let’s take the emotion out of this.” When I got upset in a team meeting last year, one of my colleagues later told me her immediate reaction was, “He shouldn’t have done that.” This myth pervades us all and, I don’t know about anyone else, but it’s really hurting me.
The work I do is incredibly emotionally challenging. It is working in uncertainty 98% of the time. It involves trying to imagine things that don’t exist yet, trying to challenge accepted practices and assumptions that no-one has asked you to challenge, and many people don’t want you to challenge. It takes so much out of me that I simply couldn’t do it without my amazing co-conspirators, Abby and Lara, and with my wider network of supportive, loving people.
There’s another quote in Dare to Lead that really made me sit up and take notice. It’s this one:
“In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future they’ll be about the heart.” – Minouche Shafik, London School of Economics
I am slowly (so slowly) realising that the work I do is about heart and about wholeness, but the cultural forces within me keep pulling me to make it about brain, about insights, about cleverness. I am trying to share my heart more in my work.
My coach has a lovely phrase: ‘showing up with open, broken hearts.’ On the few occasions I’ve crafted that have allowed me to really do this, the reaction has been incredible. Sharing my heart has immediately connected other people to me in ways unlike anything else I’ve seen. Sharing my heart has given other people permission to share theirs, to open up about what things are really like for them, to speak about the weight of the burdens they’re carrying. It is showing me and other people that a different way of being is possible, a way that doesn’t feel like this.
When learning about learning with Fondation Botnar, I chose to lead with my heart rather than with my clever ideas. The result was the entire space transformed, and I received such love and support from a bunch of strangers that I didn’t even know was possible.
When talking to another bunch of (mostly) strangers, about ‘the inner work needed to change systems’, opening up about my inner struggles with things like my power as a middle-class white man and my emotional experiences of working (recruitment practices and management behaviours reducing me to tears on multiple occasions) led to one of the most genuine conversations I’ve ever been part of. Other people came close to tears at finally being given ‘permission’ to talk about all this stuff that our current system tells us to conceal and not feel.
“The problem is that when we imprison the heart, we kill courage.” - Brene Brown, Dare to Lead
Why are our institutions and organisations so risk-averse? This is a question our activities and our experiments keep butting up against. I won’t feign to give any kind of a complete answer to that question here, but I do feel I’ve just seen a glimpse of something I’ve never seen before. I know of so many passionate, committed, incredible people working in organisations and institutions, wanting to make the world a better place but feeling absolutely trapped and deadened by the structures and policies that hold them in place. They started their work for the best of reasons with the best of intentions. Over months and years, they’ve learnt to keep their heads down, do what they’re told, don’t rock the boat. And so, their desire to make things better is whittled down to the practice of maintaining the status quo.
What if ‘severing the heart’ is the root cause of institutional risk aversion? We need vulnerability if we’re to build things like trust, innovation, and creativity. When we sever the heart for the purposes of productivity and efficiency, we’re cutting ourselves off from vulnerability and, in so doing, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We do what’s safe because we’ve denied ourselves the conditions that would allow us to do anything else. And so, we lock ourselves into the status quo, even while wishing it could all be different.
Maybe reconnecting to our hearts and sharing our hearts is what we need and, in turn, what our institutions, structures, systems, and organisations truly need too.
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