A leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected. Vision is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomenon, depending more on a leader’s capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree.
For the endeavor to gain more regulation over one’s own reactive mechanisms requires commitment to the lifetime project of being willing to be continually transformed by one’s experience. Frankly, it is easier to focus on data and technique. Yet, at this point, I am convinced that to the extent leaders of any family or institution are willing to make a lifetime commitment to their own continual self-regulated growth, they can make any leadership theory or technique look brilliant.
To be a leader, one must both have and embody a vision of where one wants to go. It is not a matter of knowing or believing one is right; it is a matter of taking the first step.
One of the major limitations of imagination’s fruits is the fear of standing out. It is more than a fear of criticism. It is anxiety at being alone, of being in a position where one can rely little on others, a position that puts one’s own resources to the test, a position where one will have to take total responsibility for one’s own response to the environment. Leaders must not only not be afraid of that position; they must come to love it.
The conventions through which we try to understand human relationships today may be as misoriented as was the medieval view of heaven and earth. Thus to suggest that gender, ethnicity, and psychological profiles are not the stuff of human relationships, or that the concentrated focus on data, method, feelings, and togetherness is misguided, can sound as counterintuitive today as it would have been in Columbus’s time to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun. On the other hand, from the perspective of the emotional process view of reality that I shall develop here, the way most leadership programs understand the human phenomenon is tantamount to still assuming that the world is flat.
A leader’s major effect on his or her followers has to do with the way his or her presence affects the emotional processes in the relationship system. A leader’s major job is to understand his or her self. Communication depends on emotional variables such as direction, distance, and anxiety. Stress is due to becoming responsible for the relationships of others. Hierarchy is a natural systems phenomenon rooted in the nature of protoplasm.