Love As A Force For Change

Welcome to the Dr Sam Collins podcast. Today, what are we going to talk about today? Well, today I want to talk about something that probably will sound completely weird and out of place in a serious conversation about leadership and business and women and feminism and organisations and change. Today, I want to talk about love. Oh yes. We’re going to talk about love today. Okay, stay with me, all right? Not romantic love, not for this podcast, and not sentimentality, and I’m not talking about being endlessly people pleasing, unagreeable, and I’m certainly not talking about accepting difficult behavior and just loving everybody, all right?
So, no, that’s not what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about love as a force for change. I started doing an online course over the weekend and it’s just changing my life. I know it’s a bit, it’s a bit sad, but my husband went away for the weekend with my older son and my other son stayed behind, but he sort of did video games for most of the weekend, which sort of let it go.
All right. And I was like, whoa, I have a whole weekend. And you know, whereas some people might sort of go shopping or, you know, partying with their friends. I do a course called Love and Social Justice. Well, love is a force for social justice. And it was just really like the most fun I’ve had for ages. I know. I know that I am. I just love what I do. I even went on the treadmill for a little bit listening to it.
So I was quite pleased with myself there.

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So anyway, I wanted to share some of that because I thought it was really super interesting and I’m still sort of forming my ideas around it, but I do want to talk today about love as a force for change. Very excited about it because I think that there’s so much doom and gloom going on and, and we’re all tired and we’re all stressed and of course, but love, I mean, who cannot like a podcast about love, but love today as a leadership practice.
Let’s talk about that. Love as a form of what we might call peaceful resistance, love as a way of entering the difficult meeting, facing the dominant power player, you know who I’m talking about, challenges injustices even, protecting your own energy and refusing, refusing to let fear decide who you are going to become. So let’s let love in and fear, bye bye, see you later. Well, we assume, don’t we, that leadership is not really like a love thing.
It’s a power thing. But what if leadership is actually about love? What if the most powerful leaders are not those who make people afraid, but those who make people feel loved? I realise that this may sound radical, a bit utopian, but perhaps it should. Perhaps it should. Keep listening. You know, years ago, and now this was some years ago, this was still in the years of I worried about what shoes I was wearing, what dress I had on and what I looked like.
And I remember being asked to speak at this panel. In fact, no, I wasn’t asked to speak at this panel. I received an invitation to attend a leadership conference. All right. And it looked really interesting because it was about more like conscious leadership in business. And I was like, okay, this looks really interesting. And I remember looking at the panel, really super accomplished, amazing people on the panel, but they were all men.
And as I do, I sent my little email and I was like, this looks really interesting. Did you, are you aware? Are you aware? That’s a little phrase, are you? Are you aware that it’s all men on your panel? I’m sure. I don’t think they went like, we’re only going to have men on our panel. They were probably like, oh, I know this guy is great. And this guy is great. And it’s sort of this unconscious bias thing.
I know that’s a bit of a pass, isn’t it? Unconscious bias sometimes. But anyway, I know the guy was running it, lovely, lovely, lovely guy. So I said, did you realize, are you aware? This woman on your panel. I mean, didn’t know him that well, but wouldn’t I send an email, you know? So I got this email back and it said, oh, you know, thank you for making me aware. Would you like to speak? would you like to be on the panel too?
And I thought, oh, that wasn’t what I was really saying. Uh, but, uh, okay. Why not? I thought I did feel a bit intimidated by that idea and a bit like, what have I got myself in for? But I thought, nope, Sam, get your dress out, get your heels out. It’s all going to be well. Like I said, it was a few years ago where dresses and heels were important. And so I remember trotting onto this panel.
And I remember it very, really vividly. And any women that have done panels will know what I’m talking about, where there’s those three or four panel chairs, you know, there’s the facilitator and then there’s the chairs and you have to kind of like hike up onto the top of this chair. And if you do have a dress and heels on, it’s really not easy. So it’s not designed for women in mind at all.
But I remember getting myself up there anyway. And Uh, looking to my left and looking to my right and seeing these, um, these guys, the first thing I remember noticing actually that I was the only person wearing any colors. I thought, Oh, well at least I stand out. And I was also the youngest and I was female. So I was like, okay. All right, Sam, these are, these are, these are positives.
These are strengths, these are positives, these are strengths, these are positives. You know how you do. Anyway, so there’s, um, probably about a hundred people in the audience and who are mostly women. I thought that’s really interesting, but anyway. mostly women who were in the audience, but the panel’s male. Well, some things still happen the same way. And the facilitator, she started off and she started off with her question and she said, what is the number one skill of leadership?
I’d like to ask the whole panel. And I thought, oh God. And I’m starting to rehearse in my head what the most accomplished answer I could think of is, you know, are you thinking, okay, is it vision? Is it strategy? Is it courage? Is it communication? Is it innovation? Cause I wanted to sound like I was, I knew what I was talking about and that I belonged on the platform with the male CEOs around me.
Anyway, sitting next to me was a chief executive called Casey Sheehan, who was at that time leading Patagonia and

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He answered first. He said, I’d like to answer. Oh, thank God. It gives me a little bit more thinking time. And he said, boldly to the audience, love. And then he stopped. Like there was no explanation. There was no like, well, let me tell you what I mean by that. He just sort of said, love. And, uh, I was like, well, uh, you know, completely interrupted my train of thinking. It completely floored me actually.
Um, and the audience was just like staring at him with big wide eyes. So this was not sort of a spiritual teacher speaking at a retreat or something like this, you know, or like a coach or a trainer or, you know, someone that, you know, activists, some of them might perhaps talk about love in business. I don’t know. This was the chief executive of a global corporation. Love seemed counter-cultural, almost dangerous as a credible business answer.
Yet he spoke about it with complete and utter seriousness as part of, or the biggest part of, how he led and importantly, how he made difficult decisions. And he went on to talk about, and we have there published accounts of his leadership describing a moment during the economic downturn where layoffs, redundancies appeared really likely. And his wife, of course, his wife. Anyway, another story. His wife asked him whether the decision he was making or trying to make was being made from fear or love.
And that question changed the way he saw the choice. He wanted to make a choice based on love and not based on fear. And years later, by the way, he had amazing success and… Profits went up during that time and he didn’t lay people off and it’s, you know, terrific story. But even years later, his one word answer has stayed with me. And perhaps because it’s exposed how much business has edited love out of its official language, even while people at work do use the word every day, don’t you?
I hear people say, I love my work. I love my work. I love this place. I love what I do. I love my team. I love this project. Or they might say the opposite, like, I hate my job. Yeah. So it’s love or hate. They don’t always say, yeah, my job’s okay. I mean, some people don’t. Most people don’t. Maybe they’re like, oh, I love it. Oh, I really can’t stand what I do.
I’m just sort of doing it because I have to. Nobody’s really shocked by these sentences because they signal enthusiasm and motivation and belonging and commitment. But notice where we reserve using the word. We use it for what we enjoy, for people we like, for teams where we feel good and accepted and organisations where the values… resemble our own, or we like what the organization does. You know, we can see the link to our own values, or we can see the link to our own purpose, or we sort of feel intellectually challenged, or we’re using our skills that we train for, so we love what we do, all right?
But we don’t use the word love for the meetings that we dread. We wouldn’t be like, oh. I love that there’s a meeting coming up that’s going to be horrible and test me. We don’t say, I love the politics in this place. We don’t say, I love the person who highly intimidates me and makes me feel small in every meeting. We just, we wouldn’t, sounds weird, right? We wouldn’t say, I love the leader who interrupts and postures and dominates every meeting.
We’d find them irritating and… and we get angry or annoyed and we feel smaller or perhaps dismissed. So we don’t normally love the person or the people that are not like us and may not even like us. So this is where I’d like our inquiry to begin today, all right? What do you think about that? So, if love only appears when something or someone pleases us,

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It is not yet a force for change. It’s simply a preference. Now, this terrific course I’m doing and someone that I think is a phenomenal, extraordinary woman in how she thinks and the work that she’s done is a course by Anne Firth Murray at Stanford. And it’s an online course you can get and it’s called Love as a Force for Social Justice. She talks about agape love. and describes agape in the context as compassion and kindness used as a force for social justice, service and positive change.
Now I looked up this word agape and it comes from ancient Greek. So it’s had this sort of ethical and religious, spiritual development over time. And it’s come to be thought of as an expression of a deliberate self-giving love directed towards the good of another. So it’s different from sort of romantic or passionate love or love that we might associate with our friends or mutual affection. So this is really, really fascinating, I think, because agape is therefore not principally about whether I like you, you like me.
It’s not dependent upon attraction, similarity or reciprocity. It’s a commitment to recognise your humanity and to will your good, even when the relationship is difficult. Now, isn’t that interesting? I think that’s so interesting. Because when we are living in so much division, how do we create reconciliation when we are around people that we don’t like or we don’t get on with or we don’t have the same beliefs as. So look, this doesn’t mean that you’re surrendering your discernment and it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re tolerating abuse or abandoning your boundaries or refusing any accountability, so don’t go there, all right?
Because love without truth just becomes appeasement and truth without love can become cruelty. What Agape asks us to do is to hold both dignity and courage together. And I just love that, alright, because when she was creating this course, Murray’s wider life and work, she’s really been confronting throughout her entire career some of the darkest realities facing women and girls. She founded the Global Fund for Women and she has taught international wealth, human health, women’s health and humans rights, which is essentially human wealth, including issues of discrimination, poverty and violence her entire career.
So, you know, when she’s talking about it, she’s saying that she was actually thinking about her work on violence and injustice when she put together this course.

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because she wanted to see how the ideas and teaching on love and agape really can help to forward these issues. Fascinating, isn’t it? So can love survive in the presence of violence, oppression and injustice? This is a very different question from asking whether love can survive in a kind team with a supporting manager. because it probably can. But can love remain alive when someone is trying to diminish you? Can compassion exit when we resist oppression?
Can we confront injustice without allowing hatred to dominate us, to determine our own actions, to defeat us, to make us feel exhausted and hopeless? That’s why non-violent communication and non-violent movements matter when I talk about this in this conversation. I picture this woman and you may have seen these phenomenal images before. You know the woman who is standing quietly in front of the armed police or soldiers. She’s looking gently and compassionately at him.
She’s not passive. She’s not consenting. Her body, her spirit and her mind are saying no. Her presence is an act of resistance, yet she refuses to reproduce the violence she is opposing. She is an example to us all. I think also of larger historical role models. Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, whatever your views are of any of these historical figures, I associate them with service and non-violence and sustained proximity to the darkness of human suffering.
They did not only love in these very uncomfortable circumstances, but they faced fear, oppression, illness. conflict and darkness every day. And yet, before your next meeting, would you ask, how am I going to evoke my inner Gandhi or Mother Teresa today? It almost sounds absurd, but perhaps it should not. I remember years ago, I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was in Kinshasa.

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And I was on my way to visiting my adopted daughter. And, uh, unbeknown to me and certainly not intentional by me, I became caught up in a political riot. So we were, I was with a few other people and we were on our way to where I was staying. And we were in a minivan and we were trying to reach our destination safely. And, and people in the minivan I remember saying, she should get down, she should get down.
And I was sort of on the base floor of this minivan with my purple hoodie over my head, I remember. And I was absolutely terrified, I have to say. I was like, how the heck did I get to this point? This is really not what the kid from… council of state and farmers should be doing right now. How did I get here? I do think that quite a lot. Like, how did I get into this situation?
And I remember being on the ground of this minivan, the floor of the minivan, you know what I mean? And I got out my phone and I was writing in the note. I started to write a note to my husband in the note section. And I thought, well, you know. the forensic examination of my phone would find this note. And I remember writing things like, you know, sorry, you’ve got to look after the kids now, didn’t mean it.
Well, it’s absolutely ridiculous. I just sort of tried to get through this. I could hear like, literally could hear like gunshots going off as we’re driving through this, this riot. And I just thought, keep your head down. So just keep your bloody head down. Anyway, because I can’t keep my head down, I don’t know why, it’s just not natural to me. I thought, I’ll just have a quick look up and see what’s going on.
And so I came out of my purple hoodie, which was so hot, so hot in that hoodie anyway. So I took it off my head and just kind of like slowly like mouse-like put my nose up and then put my head up to the window. The window was wide open. I remember thinking, that’s not that smart to have the window wide open. And I looked out the window and I’m like in the scene of sort of a War movie or something and Beside me if you can picture it.
There’s a truck. Well, there’s lots of trucks and cars and stuff and There is one truck very close It’s got to be ten feet away and in the back of this truck is all these young men with guns firing like actually flipping firing the guns and I think oh dear God and I remember I looked up and it was so quick I looked up and I saw this young man, and he clocked me, saw me, and he turned, he sort of turned around, if you can picture it, and as he turned, of course, his gun is pointing right at me, so him and I lock eyes, and I think, and I just don’t know what happened, but I had been absolutely terrified, but in that moment, something really, really unexpected happened.
I felt completely and utterly at peace. I looked at him. I don’t know, it was one of those moments. And my compassion was immense. I didn’t summon it up or rehearse it. It simply arrived. He couldn’t have been more than, I don’t know, maybe, you know, like 16, 18 years old. And I looked at him and I thought, what could have brought him here? What could he have… Witness what’s been done to him that he’s on the back of this truck We’ve a gun, you know What sits bit beneath all of that?
Fear and grief or coercion that he’s got that weapon and he’s firing away And I mean what must have it felt like a long time But it was probably an absolute split second where we locked eyes He looked to me and I could see looked really like intense and angry And then within that split session, he also looked really surprised. He probably thought, who’s this white woman with red hair and purple jacket looking at me from a mini man in the middle of a riot?
So I don’t know whether it was my compassion that saved me or my red hair, but he just turned away. He didn’t fire at me. He turned away and fired somewhere else. Now, did compassion save my life? I do not know, and I don’t need to claim whether it did or it didn’t. What I do know is that fear did not have the final word in that moment. And I did think it was my last moment, by the way.
I did not, I didn’t see only a gun. I saw a kid, I saw a child or someone very close to childhood or maybe never had a childhood, caught inside forces. that were very complex and perhaps he would never understand or none of us would ever understand. So compassion didn’t remove the danger necessarily. It changed my relationship to it. And perhaps this was the ultimate test for me. Could love survive in the presence of violence?
And for one small instant, it did. Now.

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Most of you, I hope, are not facing a rifle before we begin the working day. But you are facing a meeting, perhaps a negotiation, a teams call, a committee, a difficult client, a political colleague, a boss that makes you do work you shouldn’t have to do. And over the years, I’ve encountered what I sometimes call the silverback. You know what I’m talking about? Those big characters of organisational life, the dominant power players, the ones that are very adept at politics.
They’re very polished and they’re often very suave, very charming quite a lot of the time. They’re skilled at saying the right thing. They are very quick to anger, like banging a lot of tables, I’ve noticed. And they’re quite difficult to read. They can fill a room with status and threat. And the expected response to them is fear and appeasement or defensiveness or one of those battles for dominance. And what I have found is that a, well let’s now call it an agape love response is really powerful.
What I do is I use my intuition to try and sort of tune in a little bit to what’s sitting beneath this outer facade. What might they be feeling? What are they protecting? What are they afraid of losing? What pressure is driving their performance on behaviours? What human being exists beneath this armour that they have created? Now these are much more powerful questions in my mind than, will they like what I say?
If I say something, will I lose my job? Will they think I’m intelligent, credible, professional? I don’t ask those sort of stupid questions anymore. So this isn’t mind reading and intuition should never be treated as mind reading, but it’s more like a sort of prompt for curiosity rather than a verdict. And instead of deciding that I absolutely know what their motives are, I become Very observant. Ask better questions and listen, listen for what’s not being said.
Listen between the lines. All right. And for the feelings of things, the emotions of things. It’s called emotional intelligence. People have been talking about this for years, but the implementation of it is a little bit more tricky. So compassion and empathy helped me communicate much more effectively because I’m no longer speaking only to the performance or to the power. I’m trying to reach the person beneath it. Now, it can also be incredibly disarming because dominant people may expect, don’t they, they expect the familiar reactions.
They expect you to be intimidated or submissive or angry or emotional. And calm curiosity does not follow their script. It’s harder to control because, you know, you’re not frightened anymore and you’re not aggressive anymore. And crucially, crucially it protects your energy because people like that can be incredibly draining, right? Incredibly stressful. So this love as a force for change can be both systemic, progressing in your outcomes of things you need to do, but also it can really be a force to protect your own energy and your own change because Fear drains energy, stress drains energy, anger drains a huge amount of energy, doesn’t it?
And rehearsing every possible attack before a meeting is exhausting and not as exhausting as reliving it afterwards. Did I do that right? What did I wonder what they thought? I didn’t get any feedback. Like reliving it over and over again afterwards is also equally exhausting. So stopping yourself doing that and giving yourself some self-compassion as well as compassion for the other person. It helps us to remain grounded rather than reactive. And the great news about this is it’s a skill that we can absolutely develop.
All right, we can absolutely get better at it when we… choose to stand in your full power and choose to put your compassion with another person or persons or group in order to understand them. Now remember, this doesn’t mean that you have to like everything they’re doing, you agree everything they’re doing, you probably won’t, but it will give you some very, very useful information.

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help you to communicate, help with diplomacy, help to improve, build bridges, help to get you the things that you want and the things that you’re trying to do. I want to be really clear. So love and leadership is not just being nice, all right? It’s not people pleasing. It’s not avoiding conflict or accepting aggression. It’s really asking, how do I protect protect dignity while telling the truth? How do I resist behaviour without dehumanising the person?
How do I use power without becoming intoxicated by it? And sometimes the loving act is a boundary. Sometimes it’s a challenge. Sometimes it’s leaving. Sometimes it’s bringing in allies or formal support. So non-violence does not mean non-action. Very important. It means refusing to make destruction our method. Imagine that. If we didn’t make, the world didn’t make, countries didn’t make, groups didn’t make destruction their method. Now the workplace is a amazing microcosm for this.
The divisions inside organisations often resemble the divisions in the wider world. We sort people into camps, don’t we? Leadership and workforce, head office and region, commercial and purpose-led, old guard and new generation, people like us and people unlike us. Busyness, I call it busy disease. This intensifies the divide immensely. We move from call to call. message to message, deadline to deadline, we become efficient at transactions and careless with human beings. You may express real care for the colleagues you like, but what about those who are different from you?
What about the person whose communication style irritates you, whose politics is different from you?

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whose background you do not understand, or whose power makes you wary. Teams and departments are small human ecosystems, aren’t they? They are places where the patterns of the wider world are repeated. But they can also be places where different patterns are practices. They become beacons, lights of something new, something different. What’s going on in that team? Everyone seems so happy and is also performing well. What’s happening in that department when everyone is working 24-7 in this culture?
They seem to leave on time but also deliver their outcomes. What’s going on? What if your workplace became a rehearsal space for a less divided, more inclusive world? Not because everyone agrees with you, but because disagreement no longer requires contempt. Not because power is going to disappear overnight, but because we use that power in the service of human flourishing. Not because conflict is going to end tomorrow, but because we learn to engage without stripping one another of dignity.
Now, you have a very distinctive opportunity here. But you should not turn compassion into another unpaid expectation or thing you have to do on your already very long to-do list. This is not a call for you to soothe every difficult person, absorb every wound or repair every destructive culture. I’m not looking for you to become even more exhausted. I’m asking that this kind of leadership is brave, for you and somewhat counter-cultural.
It will also come with a risk. You may be labelled emotional, naive, difficult, insufficiently commercial, not very professional. You will need allies to reinforce your contribution, challenge others’ aggression, redistribute the emotional labour. and help create safety for your truth-telling. Love becomes organisational and a business practice when it moves beyond your own private realm, yes, into a more collective practice. How you chair meetings if you do. How your voice is heard and how you allow other voices to be heard.
Importantly, how you handle disagreement. What behaviour you reward.

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and what you refuse to tolerate. This is what I want you to think about. This is love in practice at work. I want to leave you with a practice for one real working situation. So let’s think about how you really could apply this. Choose a meeting or a conversation that perhaps you’ve got coming up that you’re not looking forward to. Can you think of one? Maybe you could think of more than one, but let’s just think of one.
So I’m not talking about something like an easy relationship. I want you to choose a place where compassion and kindness is genuinely difficult. Can you do that? We’ve got that in your mind. Okay. So I’m going to give you some steps and I want you to try them before this next interaction. And you can work through them in your head now. Number one, name the threat.

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Name the threat. So before the meeting, write down, what are you afraid might happen? Be really precise, okay? So you can say, I’m afraid of being interrupted or ignored or losing control of the meeting, not knowing what I’m talking about. I really suggest that you do write it down because it’s nothing you don’t need to share with anyone, it’s just for you. Naming the fear helps prevent it from silently happening, all right?
So you just go, okay, this is what it is. Step two, I want you to do two columns. In the first column, note what you have directly observed. And in the second, note the meaning that you have attached to it. Now this is really important. So in the first column, you would say, you would note, I have observed that when I say something that people don’t respond, they’re silent. Yes. And then in the second column, you could say, I’m assuming that that means that they don’t agree with me.
I mean, I learnt years ago that in my workshops, when people were frowning at me, it meant they were trying to understand what I was saying. I thought it meant they didn’t agree with me and they hated me and they didn’t like me and they thought I was stupid. No, because I actually asked them in the end, I was like, you’re really frowning. And I just wanted to find out what was going on.
And they said, oh no, it’s really interesting. I was just concentrating. So, you know, assumptions. Okay. Number three.

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Look beneath the armour. Now, this is the more difficult part. I want you to try and sort of tune in a little bit and ask yourself some good questions. What pressure might this person be under? What could they be protecting? What fears might they have? Hold your answers lightly, because you know, you may or may not be right, but I just think that it’s… It helps, these possibilities help you to be a bit more curious and understand, you know, I might have made an assumption on it, but it may actually not be true at all.
Number four, set a loving boundary. Decide in advance what dignity requires from you. What will you challenge? What will you not accept? What sentence can you use calmly? If the boundary is crossed. All right. So for example, I want to hear your concern and I also need to finish the point without interruption. Ooh, that’s, you know, that’s not always something like that. It’s not always so easy to say. It’s not but it’s and like that little tip there.
I want to hear your, and be sincere as you’re saying, like, I want to hear your concern and I need to finish my point without interruption. Okay.

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So, you know, it’s not just always what you say, it’s how you say it. So you want to say it with all the presence you can muster. Dignity. Number five, choose your energy. I love this. Remember back, going back to the example of Casey Sheehan when he was asked by his wife, of course, um, are you making this decision from love or fear? So before entering the meeting, so this could be online meeting before you click, you know, like join meeting, or it could be as your opening the door to go into an in-person meeting room if it’s a meeting or maybe it’s a job interview or maybe it’s a performance review or maybe it’s a client meeting or whatever it is.
Slow your breathing and place both feet on the floor. Even if you’re doing this teams or whatever, pose both feet on the floor and ask, am I entering from fear or love? Love doesn’t mean that you’re liking the situation. It means

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You’re choosing the good you want to create in it. Don’t you love that? That is so powerful. All right. Nobody can bring you down with that. All right. Like that is so powerful. And number six, you still with me? So we’ve got number six, then number seven. Number six is practice one act of agape during that meeting or interaction. Okay. So during the meeting, do one deliberate thing. So ask a sincere question, acknowledge a pressure, invite a quieter voice, reflect back what you heard.
So you’re actually practicing that compassion. And I particularly like doing this when I’ve heard something really good, because I think that people will respond when they don’t agree with something, but they don’t respond much when something good has been said, so valuable has been said. And so acknowledge what the good, acknowledge what you’ve heard. And by the way, it’s a fantastic thing to do if you don’t agree with something as well.
You acknowledge the good thing before you talk about the thing you don’t agree with. Anyway, so acknowledging and being compassionate and kind and asking those good questions. So practice one act of agape. And then the final piece, number seven, is to protect and restore.

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All right, so afterwards, notice, you know, just take a minute to reflect on how you did and what you said and what you’re pleased about. Don’t go straight into any disaster scenarios. And maybe you, you know, there was a trusted ally in the room and you could ask them, how was it? You know, what did I do well? Don’t be like, can I have feedback? Because if you say, can I have feedback, I’ll tell you all things you didn’t do well.
So you say, what did I, you know, what did I do well? And notice also like in your body a little bit in your energy and what helped you to stay grounded. And when you started to feel drained, what you did to bring yourself back and think about what is the small change you can make for next time. All right. So this is sort of a constant and never ending improvement thing where Compassion includes care for yourself and constant learning.
So the next time you have one of those meetings, you remember, I did really well last time, but I didn’t quite do well on that bit. And that bit, that person always triggers me when they say that. So that’s the part where I need to put in even more compassion, you know, really lean in more to the compassion. And then after a while, you’re going to get really good at this and you’re going to be just invincible.
You’re going to be like, give me the most difficult person. I love it.

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And then you’re going to be like negotiating world peace, which we really need you to do, by the way, all right? No joking aside. So at work, we often reserve the word love for what we enjoy, don’t we? Like, I love what I do. People are great. But perhaps the real test of love is not how we respond to the people we already like. It’s how we remain human in the presence of people and systems that are often inviting us not to be.
Can love survive in the presence of violence, oppression and injustice? Can it survive in the boardroom, in organisational politics, in the difficult teams meeting, in the relationship that is fractured, in a moment where somebody tries to make us afraid? Now, love does not guarantee the other person is going to change. It doesn’t guarantee safety, agreement or a happily ever after, but it does give you choices about the force you bring into the room.
And perhaps the next evolution of leadership is not about becoming harder, tougher, more aggressive and winning. Perhaps it’s about becoming brave enough to love, where love is least expected. Not instead of power, but perhaps a more transformational way of using that power. Not instead of resistance, but as a form of resistance.

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not as a sentiment, but as a real tangible action. What if leadership is actually love? What if the most powerful leaders are not those who make people afraid, but those who make people feel loved and empower them to love others? What about that? Thank you for listening. Until next time, with love.

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