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Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

Living with Head and Heart
By ROBERT W. COLE

  Robert W. Cole
 

Robert W. Cole
Managing Editor
and Senior Associate

A great many years ago, not long after I got out of the Air Force, a woman who had been a neighbor in Idaho came to visit. Sharon (the former neighbor) had never been out of Idaho before; the rest of the world was pretty much a mystery and a marvel to her. The first evening she arrived at our home in Bloomington, Indiana, she was standing at the kitchen window gazing into the back yard when she turned, wonder and some fear in her eyes.

“What’s that out in your yard?” she exclaimed, as astounded as if she had glimpsed a herd of unicorns.

“What? Where?” we said, rushing to stand beside her and peer nervously over her shoulder into the dim mystery of our once-familiar yard. We saw nothing strange, nothing that wasn’t in the normal order of things.

“There!” she exclaimed impatiently, jabbing her finger in the direction of the Unknown. “Don’t you see them? All those tiny lights blinking on and off!”

“Oh, those!” we laughed, relieved, fear and wonder dissolving. “Why, those are just lightning bugs. You know, fireflies!”

“Fireflies…?” Sharon echoed faintly, sounding like Flower the skunk in Bambi.

And just that quickly the wonder of fairy-lights was reduced to a word, to a known quantity—something still to be enjoyed and appreciated, certainly, but no longer a mysterious phenomenon. Sigh…

So often, it seems, we find ourselves standing at the shadowy divide between the realms of head and heart. Is it necessary to relinquish a heart-centered world of wonder for an Adult world of utter practicality? Gerard Manley Hopkins foretold a doleful trend: “[A]s the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder….” The result of a loss of wonder: The thundering orchestra of cicadas in the summer night becomes a bunch of annoying bugs mating furiously. Is it inevitable that we forsake the habit of wonder? Of course not! Mystery is always available to us at any moment if we look for it and invite it in. Wonder walks through the door in the merest blink of an eye. We are separated from miracles by only the thinnest membrane.

However, every moment of every day need not find us standing in awe of the miraculousness of the Universe and our place in it. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. So it is with choosing to employ the equally useful counsel provided by the head and the heart.

Experienced leaders learn (often the hard way) that differing circumstances in any organization call for different tactics, different styles of leadership. Timing and sensitivity to context are essential. There’s a time for lecture and a time for listening, a time to apply pressure and a time for forbearance, a time for processing all available data using the brain and a time for heeding the urging of one’s heart. And certainly there are many vitally important times when a wise leader sits in quiet counsel with both head and heart and weighs the best decision.

Which mode you choose, head-centered or heart-centered—in any given context, in any given part of your day—is entirely up to you. You make the rules. Sometimes sharing your own heartfelt feelings is the best way to reach an employee who has come to you with a personal problem. Sometimes you’re negotiating with the union president, or meeting with the district attorney, or facing a challenging meeting, fully aware that all of your analytic powers will be necessary—though the heart of you might vastly prefer to be standing, soaked, in a sudden summer shower, head lifted to the sky, smelling the rain on thirsty earth. Heart or head? Your choice. Choose the one that works best for this situation, this moment of your day. But don’t lose sight of the fireflies. They’re waiting for you.


Center for Empowered Leadership ®
Email: info@cfel.org
Phone: 1.609.259.7911