Heart and head, and leadership

Something I come across fairly often is the framing of a contest between thinking and feeling - i.e., head (thoughts) vs. heart (emotions). 

That is a mis-framing. 

For best function in all of life, we need both to work together. 

In situations of extreme stress, the conflict proponents often say something along the lines of “but we need to be calm!” 

Yes. And calmness is an EMOTION.

Being loud and/or aggressive about the need to be calm is exhibiting other emotions - possibly including panic, anger, overwhelm, and fear - fear of emotions, specifically - or even hysteria (especially some of the old male dinosaurs I have had to work with during my former engineering career).

Karla  McLaren is, in my opinion, probably the best source on the lessons that emotions have for us, but consider the following points: 

• the person with experience at working constructively with emotions will be far more likely to be faster at achieving a state of calmness in an emergency, and will be far more likely to do so with less emotional damage to themselves and/or others; 

• the person who is competent with emotions is less likely to get businesses into trouble through amathiac misconceptions about “having to be tough” in their decision making; 

• the person with experience at working constructively with emotions will be far more likely to build stronger, adaptable and more effective teams, as they will be better suited to the reality that people are all different;
  

• the person who is competent with emotions is going to be far better at being aware of, identifying, and managing dangerous, destructive or problematic emotions - such as the various forms of bigotry, dangerous risk taking, and toxic characteristics.
  

There are lessons for this in activism as well, in my opinion (such as adapting messages to the audience, avoiding emotional traps [especially civility traps], and mutual respect to avoid doing the work of the oppressor), but that can wait for another post.

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

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Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/