We work with leaders in organisations, guiding and supporting them in creating emotionally healthy environments
We have been working with emotional health levels in business environments for over twenty years across the private, professional, not for profit, community and public sectors. Throughout, our main focus has been the development of leaders alongside transformational change in their teams and organisations.
We are known for our capacity to engage at the strategic level in organisations.
We do this through strategic planning, cultural transformation and alignment, and board governance and performance.
With the engagement and sponsorship of the executive and senior leaders, we translate strategy into action. We aligning the behaviours, symbols and systems in organisations to better reflect their purpose and strategic direction. This can include leadership and team transformation and development, executive coaching, achieving results through others (leader as facilitator), building and strengthening leadership brand, and creating collaborative cultures.
Underpinning all of this is the creation of emotionally healthy environments characterised by everyone taking personal responsibility for the way in which they work, engage and enable others, that is, being ‘above the line’.
Emotionally healthy environments have positive impacts outside an organisation
These ‘above the line’ environments contribute to raising the emotional health levels of others across the organisation and, further, into the community. They generate active participation, increased resilience and greater levels of confidence - all markers of emotionally healthy cultures and communities.
In raising the emotional health levels of people across the globe, we increase the capacity and desire of others to support the communities in which they live and operate and, beyond that, become stewards of the wider world.
Letting go of limits on our thinking and perceptions
Most leadership development is skills-based, or ‘horizontal’. The focus is on the delivery of knowledge and skills such as conflict management, facilitating effective meetings or managing priorities. While these are still very valuable, they are not enough on their own.
Such programs often fail to consider that the person doing the learning does not operate in isolation: that they will need to involve others in any changes they want to make, that those changes will affect others, and that those changes will also be affected by other change occurring around them.
Vertical development focuses on the individual, along with their interactions with others
The impact we have in our work is based on an approach focused first and foremost on ‘vertical development’. Vertical development is about building our ability to comprehend and let go of limits on our thinking and perceptions, and in doing so more genuinely relate to and engage with others and the wider world around us.
Vertical development lies at the heart of building emotional health, which is not about teaching leaders a set of new skills but instead helping leaders to better understand and appreciate themselves and the impact they have on others.
Taking personal responsibility and thinking with the whole body: building blocks of emotional health
Two frameworks are central to our work around raising emotional health levels. We call these frameworks the ‘line of choice’ and the ‘centres of intelligence’.
Choose your reaction in response to unexpected situations
When confronted with an unexpected or challenging situation, we all have a tendency to act ‘automatically’, impulsively, without thinking. These default responses tend to be emotionally unhealthy, characterised by blame, defensiveness, denial or self-justification. We describe such automatic responses as being ‘below the line’
Increasing our emotional health enables us to take personal responsibility for our reaction to such situations. Instead of allowing our automatic response to ‘take over’, we proactively choose a thoughtful and constructive response. That is, we choose to act ‘above the line’
Thinking with the whole body
Ancient eastern philosophy teaches us that clear, effective thinking involves a lot more than using our brains to do all our thinking with us. Emotional health derives from a balance of what we call the three ‘centres of intelligence’: the body or ‘gut’, heart and head. Put very simply: ‘head thinking’ is rational, fact-based thinking; ‘heart thinking’ is thinking with feeling; and ‘gut thinking’ is thinking based on instinct – what we often call ‘gut feel’.
All of us tend to lean towards one of the three centres. However, our most effective thinking is achieved using the ‘whole body’, that is by integrating and balancing all centres. Generally we are most able to do this when we are ‘present’ or in ‘flow’, though we can achieve it more often when our emotional health is high.
Resources for understanding emotional health
Emotional Health & Leadership
Download our free pocket guide to emotional health, introducing the key principles we work with in developing emotional health in individuals and teams.
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Working with Emotional Health and the Enneagram
Written by Global Leadership Foundation co-founders, Gayle Hardie and Malcolm Lazenby, this book brings together 25 years of experience and knowledge.
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Mastering Emotional Health online course
Our ‘Mastering Emotional Health’ app takes you on a journey towards understanding, strengthening and ultimately mastering emotional health to enhance your wellbeing
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