There’s a leadership quality coming to light, through new scientific discovery, which will naturally identify a different type of leader. These leaders can increase the performance of every person in an organization, and they can do so without saying or doing anything. They set the emotional tone of the organization.
The Power of Positivity
Groups of people who work together share an underlying emotional bond, and it determines their success. There’s a huge body of research showing that when people are in a positive emotional state, their ability to analyze information, think of creative solutions, and solve problems is greatly enhanced, as is their memory recall and intuitive discernment. These are the very traits that a modern organization needs to thrive, and natural leaders are able to create the required positivity.
Transmitting Emotions
As humans, we have the ability to positively or negatively influence the emotions of people around us. The human heart generates and emits a powerful rhythmic electromagnetic field, which changes depending on the person’s emotional state. Positive emotions, such as love and acceptance, create an electromagnetic field that is organized and coherent, and a person emitting such a field is said to be in a state of coherence. In contrast, negative emotions, such as anger and frustration, generate an electromagnetic field that is chaotic and incoherent. The heart’s field has been proven to extend at least ten feet from the body, and it can influence the emotional tone of an entire organization.
The human body is a sophisticated sensory organism that is capable of sensing emotional energy, where our entire nervous system acts as an antenna tuned to the electromagnetic fields of the hearts of other individuals. Scientists have found that the signals transmitted by one person’s heart can automatically alter the mood-generating physiology of another person, such as their hormone levels and cardiovascular functions. So in essence, we can impact each others’ moods without doing or saying a thing. Experiments have shown that three strangers can be in close proximity and within a couple of minutes, the most emotionally active person will have transmitted their mood to the other two. When a person is in a state of coherence, they have the strongest ability to transmit their mood to others, as well as the most beneficial mood to transmit.
Becoming Coherent
So how does a person become coherent? Simply trying to be positive and exude happiness can become exhausting over time. A better approach is to have it naturally arise from within. This can be fostered by practicing a technique such as meditation, which is designed to create a nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. However, not just any meditation practice will put you in a state of coherence. It must include a focus of attention on the heart, and it must include the generation of positive emotion. Meditation practices that focus attention in the mind generally do not induce coherence. The ongoing practice of a coherence-building technique will re-pattern a person’s neural architecture so that positivity becomes the new norm.
Learning coherence-building techniques can be facilitated with the use of a feedback monitor, and I can personally vouch for the HeartMath emWave. I just attach it to my earlobe or put my thumb on its sensor, and it gives me instant feedback on my level of coherence by displaying an indicator light of green (coherent), blue, or red (incoherent). Optionally, it will also sound a periodic tone corresponding to the light color. I can even hook it to my laptop to record my performance during a session. I know from experience that all it takes is a fleeting moment of taking my awareness off of my heart or feeling a negative emotion to quickly turn the light from green to red.
It’s often said that leaders are the ones who set the emotional tone in the group. However, we now know that the person setting the emotional tone is often not the one with the title. Whether you have the title or not, you can exert the most influence by becoming the one who is the most emotionally coherent.
As we learn more from neuroscience about the incredible power of group emotions, we see reasons to adopt techniques beyond the ordinary. For more on shaping team emotions to increase creativity and performance, including research references, get notified of the upcoming book Primal Teams: Harnessing the Incredible Power of Group Energy or sign up for a monthly summary of articles.