There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.John Lennon
Power of Love Leadership is a way of thinking. It is a model of leadership that will help us to be more effective in leading ourselves, in leading others and in leading our lives. Power of Love Leadership will help us to identify the things that are getting in the way of our ultimate success and happiness, and to adopt a specific way of thinking and behaving that will enable us to overcome those things. The results are truly amazing, and if you follow the model, and persevere with the strategies, you will be astounded by the changes you will see and feel.
Power of Love Leadership can be used in any challenging or difficult situation. It helps us to see what is blocking our path to more successful outcomes and provides strategies that we can use to achieve them. For many years now I have been using the model for myself, my family and my clients, and it has achieved 100 per cent success every time.
The Power of Love Leadership model
Chapter 4 will take you through the steps you can take to use Power of Love Leadership. For now, to understand the model at its simplest, look at the diagram. It has four distinct parts.
First, look at the arrows at the top. These are outcomes that we want to achieve for ourselves and/or others. They are shown as the â8 Benefits of using Power of Love Leadershipâ within Chapter 2.
Second, along each side of the model and above the fear section, are the â8 Power of Love Leadership Principlesâ (shown in Chapter 3) that support the Love-Based Strategies and help us to get the outcomes we want.
Next, looking at the bottom of the model, you will see what gets in the way of achieving the â8 Benefits of using Power of Love Leadershipâ: fear. Fear comes in the form of fear-based thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Examples of these, like frustration, doubt and worry, are shown in the bottom arrows. Fear is explained further in Chapter 5.
Finally, through the middle are the 7 Love-Based Strategies that will enable us to overcome those fear-based feelings and achieve the outcomes shown at the top of the model. Each strategy is described within Chapters 6 to 12.
How can we use the Power of Love Leadership model?
We can use the Power of Love Leadership model initially to identify and understand our own and/or othersâ feelings. We can then assess how helpful those feelings are, and whether we want to do something to modify them. At work, we can use the model to facilitate a discussion about what people in the team are feeling (relating this to the fear-based thoughts, feelings and behaviours at the bottom of the diagram), and what specific things have led to them feeling that way. We can then look at the Power of Love Leadershipâs Seven Love-Based Strategies to ascertain how each of them could be used in a particular scenario, and which of them it would be beneficial to implement.
The model enables us to understand fear-based emotion and how it is impacting us. If we can acknowledge our fears, and process them, we find the path to more successful outcomes. These two factors, the acknowledgement and the processing of our fears, are the foundation for eradicating fear-based behaviour when it has become unhelpful, that is, when it is preventing us from feeling or being our best. We all have these fear-based emotions in some shape or form (whether we want to recognise that we have them or not), and they have the potential either to help us to be ultimately successful or to prevent us from achieving that success.
Is the model just for leaders?
The methodology of Power of Love Leadership is specifically aimed at leaders and teams within businesses, but you can still benefit enormously from this book if you are not currently a leader of a team within a business. That is because we are all leaders of ourselves and others in different ways. We also influence those around us, and Power of Love Leadership helps us to do that better too. Therefore, even if you are not a leader in the workplace, when I talk about âleadershipâ in the book, think of how you lead yourself, in all areas of your life; when I talk about âteamsâ, think of the ways you interact with and influence others.
Why do we need to understand our fear-based emotions?
Healthy human beings have fear-based emotions that are instinctive, and these have made an important contribution to our speciesâ survival. However, the limbic system of our brain processes fear according to our previous experiences, and this means our responses can be instantaneous and irrational. Although our fear-based feelings (such as anger, shame, envy, worry and resentment) are natural and feel justified, they are often unhelpful for us and can bring about negative outcomes for ourselves and others.
Power of Love Leadership is important in managing our emotional and mental health. In our society generally, problems associated with poor emotional health are increasing, and we are struggling to meet the growing demand for support. Managing our emotional health is crucial if we are to become more resilient and retain that resilience. It helps us to build effective and trusting relationships. It helps us to be more creative, more open to change, and happier and healthier. It helps us to be more motivated and personally effective in everything we do as well as to make better decisions. These are things we all want for ourselves and for others around us. They are critical in business, both for leaders and within teams. And it is important that we support those who will be our leaders in the future to manage their emotional health too. So, as leaders, we need to be using this model not just to be the best leaders we ourselves can be, and to make our organisations the best they can be, but to make future leaders and future organisations the best they can be too.
I have given examples throughout the book to illustrate how you can use the model. All the examples are from real life. Some of them are from my clients, whose experiences I have re-told using invented names to retain confidentiality. Some of them are from my own life to show how applying the model to my personal and business experiences has enabled me to continue to be the best leader for others that I can be. Some of them are from people who have been influenced by the model and the strategies, including real-life situations experienced by my daughter: at the time of writing this book, she is twelve and we have been using these strategies together since she was five years old. The examples are all relevant for leaders because they illustrate use of the model in everyday situations. This learning can be applied to all leaders and all teams in the workplace.
Whatâs love got to do with it?
People donât mind being challenged to do better if they know the request is coming from a caring heart.Ken Blanchard
Tina Turner posed an important question in the 1980s with her song âWhatâs Love Got To Do With It?â. Fear is the root cause of many negative issues within your business and love is the antidote. Iâm not talking about romantic love here, but the type of love that leads to care, empathy, honesty, confidence, passion, ambition, creativity, learning, resilience and productivity.
Most human barriers in your organisation are the result of fear, and they show themselves in your workplace every day. They show themselves in those feelings already mentioned â anger, shame, envy, worry, resentment and so on. Power of Love Leadership is based upon the premise that there are two fundamental human emotions from which all other feelings stem: fear and love.
When you experience any situation that did not turn out as you wanted, the outcome is often influenced in some way by your own or othersâ fear-based behaviour. Fear is needed in some circumstances and can be a critical success factor when responding to a situation, but most of the fear-based behaviour that we exhibit is the result of over-imagining, and can become a habit. We rarely take the time to realise this, so we keep doing the same things, not understanding what needs to change, or blaming others for the outcome we didnât want. These patterns of behaviour can potentially become âderailingâ behaviours. In other words, they can become behaviours which might hijack our leadership effectiveness or our teamâs performance, and even more so when weâre under pressure or when weâre feeling frustrated.
When we focus on love-based behaviours, however, we are developing and using strategies that transform our fear into something positive. For example, we might develop strategies to replace fear-based âprocrastinationâ with love-based âhopeâ, or to replace fear-based âworryâ, say when giving presentations, with love-based âenthusiasmâ, or to replace fear-based âI am always rightâ with love-based âhumilityâ and âlearningâ.
In her book Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom and Wonder (2014), Arianna Huffington quotes John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., who sums up his vision of compassionate management like this: âWe must bring love out of the corporate closet.â
Why is love so powerful?
It is more courageous and impactful to show love than it is to show fear. Fear comes from a personâs insecurities and a place of weakness. Fear is a mistaken, irrational and misguided kind of power, founded upon the need to survive without the realistic consideration of the facts. For example, if someone criticises your work in front of others, you can feel intimidated. In that moment it can seem as if that person is more powerful than you because you may feel embarrassed, ashamed, worried or angry.
However, that personâs behaviour is based on fear. Belittling others is a strategy certain people may use to make themselves feel better. If they felt enough love for themselves, they would not have any gaps that needed filling by anotherâs misery or pain. Egos can get misguided, and it may be that some people sometimes try to fuel their own fulfilment through othersâ perceived weakness. However, this doesnât fill the hole (which a person can only fill for themselves with self-love and self-esteem), so the behaviour is repeated, and unconscious patterns are formed. When a person doesnât know how to build self-love, these patterns of behaviour can also become addictive. In the workplace they may manifest as dishonesty, failure to take responsibility, the blaming of others, unkindness, anger, disloyalty and lack of empathy, all of which tend to be repeated again and again.
The feeling that leaders and their teams get when they use the model and overcome challenges posed by fear-based emotions has an enormous positive impact: it feels powerful to overcome fear. And they are not feeling powerful by exerting power over others, but because they have found power over themselves â power to feel more in control of a challenging situation, power to take action and so feel more confident and happy at work, power to help others succeed, and power to achieve positive results, through themselves and through others.
Leaders and teams using Power of Love Leadership will have greater success in the workplace. When teams are overwhelmed by stress, negativity, lack of confidence and demotivation, they will not be as productive, they will not work as hard for your customers and they will not represent your company brand in the most positive way, perhaps speaking negatively about how they feel to others, internally and externally. These behaviours can spread uncontrollably. Focusing on the Power of Love Leadership behaviours as leaders and teams can lead to a significant shift to more positive, productive, confident, creative and enthusiastic behaviours. This has the power to help a business go from struggling to surviving, from surviving to good and from good to great.
What is leadership?
Leadership is a behaviour. A way of being in the world. If you do it with kindness and care, regardless of your role, gender or experience, youâll leave everyone you encounter better off for having met you.Gill White
There are thousands of books, training courses and articles about effective leadership, but it boils down to how you behave and how you impact others around you. At the heart of any successful business is a set of meaningful and trust-based relationships. If you invest time in building relationships, youâll have more successful business outcomes. The relationships you have with managers, co-workers, team members, clients, customers and suppliers are the means for achieving your goals.
No matter what your business is, you donât work in isolation; you must work with others to achieve successful outcomes. The sum of our trusting and effective relationships provides the foundation for our achievements. We need other people to provide their services, to add their ideas, to get things to work in a certain way and to make things happen. We also need people to lead, guide and support us, to motivate us to reach our goals.
Positive, trusting, supportive and love-based behaviours are at the heart of any successful relationship, and so, whether we are conscious of it or not, we tend to be happier at work and perform at our best when we feel good about our work relationships. Love-based behaviours from leaders impact our emotions and...