Albert Einstein once said, "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of
course, powerful muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve."
Leaders know and science has discovered emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other's minds. Emotion is the messenger of love;it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one
brimming heart to another.
Because human beings remember with neurons (the cells of nerve tissue), we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought.
Within the brain, every mental activity consists of neutrons (electrically neutral subatomic particles) firing in a certain sequence. An "Attractor" is an association of ingrained links that can overwhelm weaker information patterns. If incoming sensory data provoke a quorum of the Attractor's units, they will trigger their teammates, who flare to brilliant life.
An Attractor can overpower other units so thoroughly that the network registers chiefly the incandescence of the Attractor, even though the fading, firefly traces of another pattern initially glimmered there. A network then registers strikingly new sensory information as if it conformed to past experience. In much the same way, our sun's blinding glare washes countless dimmer stars from the midday sky.
The limbic brain (i.e. the emotional brain) contains its emotional Attractors, encoded early in life. Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural systems that view the emotional world and conduct relationships. If the early experience of a limbic network exemplifies healthy emotional interaction, its Attractors will serve as reliable guides to the world of workable relationships.
No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought. And in human beings, an Attractor's influence is not confined to its mind of origin. The limbic brain sends an Attractor's sphere of influence exploding outward with the exuberance of a nova's gassy shell. Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is part of a local network that shares information--including Attractors.
Limbic Attractors thus exert a distorting force not only within the brain that produces them, but also on the limbic networks of others--calling forth compatible memories, emotional states and styles of relatedness in them. Through the limbic transmission of an Attractor's influence, one person can lure others into his emotional virtuality. All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.
The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable---the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. Ongoing exposure to one person's Attractors does not merely activate neural patterns in another--it also strengthens them.
Business Leadership Emotions
Business has a long tradition of ignoring emotions in favor of rationality. Feelings are dismissed as messy, dangerous, weak and irrelevant to day-to-day operations.
But a growing body of evidence reveals that subconscious feelings drive decisions. Psychologists, neuroscientists and behavioral economists now agree that leaders who fail to understand how emotions drive actions will ultimately fail.
Emotionally astute leaders leverage feelings to gain employee commitment, engagement and performance, according to Dan Hill, CEO of Sensory Logic and author of Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success (Kogan Page, 2008).
Similarly, experts featured in a Time magazine cover story (January 17, 2005) confirmed the link between satisfaction and productivity, citing a 10 percent improvement in job performance among fulfilled employees.
A company’s emotional climate may account for up to 30 percent of job performance, according to Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee authors of Primal Leadership. CEOs, they note, are responsible for creating more than 50 percent of this climate.
“Leadership isn't something you do writing memos, you've got to appeal to people's emotions. They've got to buy in with their hearts and bellies, not just their minds” Lou Gerstner, former CEO, IBM
Dan Hill D.V: Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success
Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, Richard E. Boyatzis: Primal Leadership
Realize the power of emotional intelligence in becoming an effective leader.
Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon: A General Theory of Love