Why the Mind Can’t Lead Us into the Future – Without the Heart

 

Victor Hugo once wrote, “The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds.” I believe that’s as true in business as it is anywhere else.

I know plenty of people would argue with me. They’d point to current trends that put profits over people, short-term gain over long-term organizational health. To businesses doing quite well despite practices that look, frankly, inhumane.

But we’re talking about the future here. And the future health of anything requires a heart.

The heart is the engine

The heart is the organ that powers every other organ in the human body. The same is true in organizations. You can have the best strategy, the most incredible IP, the most reliable processes, the most advanced equipment, and the most impressive knowledge in the room – but without the hearts of the people using those things in service of other people, none of it sustains itself over the long haul.

Heart is what differentiates real leadership from management and authority – from planning, organizing, executing, controlling. Leadership that carries us into the future puts people first: encouraging commitment rather than demanding compliance, inspiring people toward something they want to be part of rather than something they do out of obligation or fear.

The heart keeps people engaged long after the mind gives out – it’s what lets people tap into strength they didn’t know they had. It’s what allows someone to get knocked down, get back up, and get back in the game. And it runs on fuel that’s not just sustainable, but renewable.

The heart runs on appreciation, compassion, imagination, love. And here’s the strange thing about that particular fuel: using it creates more of it. It’s the only fuel that doesn’t deplete itself.

That’s exactly the fuel we need right now. Fuel that unites instead of divides. Fuel that asks “what’s possible?” instead of “what’s at stake?” Fuel that gives people a reason to get up again, and a reason to believe they’re capable of more. Fuel that tells people they’re vital and indispensable – not despite their differences, but because of them.

Love gets us past our differences to what we all actually care about, and toward accomplishing it together. It doesn’t try to make any one person the hero. It helps each of us find the hero already in ourselves, and in each other.

Why the mind alone can’t carry us anymore

None of this is a knock on the mind. Our minds are impressive machines. But without the heart calling the shots, the mind alone isn’t enough to carry us into the future. The mind runs on logic – it’s like a computer replaying what we’ve done before, warning us what we stand to lose, suggesting a course based on variables it already knows.

And we’re living at a moment where yesterday’s approaches don’t address today’s challenges. Despite every best practice out there, we’re having to learn to intuit entirely new ways of working, leading, and living. We can’t look to solutions that worked in the past to solve problems that look nothing like the ones we face now.

Leadership driven purely by the mind has leaders believing they need all the answers – to navigate every challenge with unshakeable confidence and a definitive solution, to know exactly what to do and get everyone else to do it without question.

But things are changing too fast, and there’s too much uncertainty, for any one person to have all the answers, or to make decisions that meet the needs of everyone who has a stake in them. When the mind is calling the shots, leaders go looking for certainty in a world that doesn’t have any to offer. That has them clinging to solutions that may not work, or putting enormous pressure on themselves to find ones that will. It inflates their sense of responsibility, and it can trigger the kind of ego-driven response that convinces a leader they need to be the hero – which, paradoxically, tends to produce behavior that looks like anything but leadership.

The leadership that takes us into the future will be powered by the heart.

What the research actually shows

The insight required to meet today’s emerging challenges takes a level of presence – a way of intuiting things – that goes beyond what our heads, our linear way of moving through the world, can offer on their own.

Creative work depends on the heart. Making something that hasn’t existed before requires going outside the bounds of the mind and feeling your way into something new. That matters right now specifically because the problems we’re facing need genuinely new solutions.

The heart tunes into something the head can’t reach. It’s attuned to possibility – it dreams, it envisions, it shows us a way forward when every other way has failed.

This isn’t just a nice metaphor. Research from the HeartMath Institute has found that the heart has its own independent nervous system – at least 40,000 neurons, what they call “the little brain in the heart.” The heart actually sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

Negative states – stress, worry, fear, impatience, indecision – create noise that knocks the brain’s neurons out of sync, showing up as energy drain, mental fog, and difficulty focusing, remembering, or deciding anything at all. Positive states – love, kindness, appreciation, gratitude – do the opposite: they create a calming, coordinated cooperation between the heart, brain, and hormonal system that lets us think clearly, solve problems creatively, and make intelligent choices, while even strengthening our immune systems.

The heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the human body – measurable from several feet away, and roughly 100 times stronger than the brain’s. Research shows that people in proximity to each other can actually synchronize this way, a kind of social coherence. My own belief is that the ripple effects of thoughts and actions generated by the heart reach even further than that.

Where this leaves us

Victor Hugo wrote that the future belongs to hearts even more than minds. A century and a half later, the research is starting to catch up to what he already sensed. The heart isn’t the soft, secondary organ we’ve been trained to treat it as in the business world – it’s the one generating the strongest signal in the room, the one capable of synchronizing people around something bigger than any single mind could construct alone.

The leaders who shape what comes next won’t be the ones with the most airtight strategy or the most confident answer. They’ll be the ones willing to lead from the organ that never runs out of fuel.

If you’re ready to build that kind of leadership in yourself – not just understand it, but actually practice it – I’m building something this fall for people who want to go deeper than an article can take them. More on that soon.

What I Wish I’d Known Before Writing a Book Called “The Pinocchio Principle”

 

When I tell people I wrote a leadership book called The Pinocchio Principle, they usually assume it’s about honesty.

It’s not.

Or rather — it’s about a different kind of honesty. Not the honesty of telling the truth to others, but the far more difficult honesty of telling the truth to yourself. About who you are. What you want. Where you’ve been performing a version of leadership that looks good from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

Pinocchio, in the original story, starts out as a puppet — animated but not alive. Capable of movement but controlled by strings he can’t see. And the journey of the story, at its heart, is about what it takes to become real.

That metaphor has never left me. Because I’ve lived it.

How the book began

I didn’t set out to write about Pinocchio. I set out to solve a problem I kept encountering in my work: the gap between how capable leaders appeared and how alive they actually felt.

I had been working in organizational effectiveness and leadership development for over a decade. I’d worked with executives at Fortune 100 companies, facilitated culture change initiatives, designed and taught leadership programs. I had seen every kind of smart, accomplished, well-intentioned leader you can imagine.

And so many of them were exhausted in a way that went deeper than workload. They had achieved what they had worked for — the title, the influence, the results — and found that it didn’t feel the way they thought it would. Something vital was missing.

I recognized that feeling. Because somewhere along the way, I had started living it too.

I was running a consulting practice, raising three kids, trying to do everything well — and I had slowly become a very efficient version of myself who wasn’t sure she was living her own life anymore. I was effective. I was competent. I was, by most external measures, successful.

But I wasn’t what I would call real.

What I discovered

What I came to understand — through my own journey and through the privilege of accompanying hundreds of leaders through theirs — is that the most transformative shift available to any leader isn’t a new strategy or a better system.

It’s a return to themselves.

Not a romanticized, everything-is-easy version of themselves. But the grounded, wise, genuinely engaged version that exists beneath the accumulated weight of expectation, performance, and fear.

I call that version the Genius. And I wrote The Pinocchio Principle as a roadmap for finding it.

The book came out in 2011. In the years since, I have had leaders tell me that reading it gave them permission to want something different. That it named something they had been experiencing but couldn’t articulate. That it started a conversation with themselves they hadn’t known how to begin.

Those conversations are why I do this work. They are, in a very real sense, the whole point.

Why I’m still here

I share all of this not to tell you about a book, but to tell you about a conviction.

I believe the indomitable strength of the human spirit is essential to the future of business — and that it is, right now, largely underutilized. I believe there is a version of leadership that is both more effective and more sustainable than the one most of us were taught. And I believe it begins with the same question Pinocchio was trying to answer:

What does it take to become real?

That question is as alive for me now as it was when I wrote the book. It’s what animates every coaching conversation, every program I design, every piece I write here.

If it’s alive for you too — welcome. You’re in exactly the right place.

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You can find The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader on Amazon here.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, The Real Leader Academy is where that journey continues.

 

 

 

What a Really Bad Day Taught Me About Leadership

I once arrived at a client meeting with coffee in my lap.

I was running late, reached for my coffee while pulling out of the driveway, misjudged the lid, and poured a generous amount of very hot coffee directly onto myself. I didn’t have time to go back inside and change. I arrived flustered, damp, and not exactly radiating executive presence.

In the parking lot, sitting in my car collecting myself before going in, I noticed something interesting: how much worse I was making it.

The coffee was a fact. The spill happened. Nothing about my narrative in that parking lot was going to change it. But what I was telling myself about it — what it meant, what it said about the kind of day I was going to have, what the client would think, whether I could possibly recover — was a story. And it was a story I was choosing to tell, even if it didn’t feel like a choice.

The story underneath the event

This is something I work on with leaders constantly, because it applies to everything. Not just spilled coffee but failed launches, difficult conversations, critical feedback, restructures, disappointments, and the hundred small indignities of a demanding professional life.

Every experience has two layers. The first is what actually happened — the fact, the event, the words that were said. The second is the meaning we assign to it. And while we often can’t control the first layer, we have extraordinary influence over the second.

The problem is that most of us don’t realize we’re operating in the second layer. We experience our interpretation of events as if it were the events themselves. The story feels like reality. And when the story is “this is a disaster” or “I can’t recover from this” or “this always happens to me,” the story shapes everything that comes after it.

What I did instead

In the parking lot, once I noticed what was happening, I tried something different. I asked: what’s actually true here?

What was true: I was late. I had spilled coffee. I was late. The client was waiting.

What was a story: that this meant the meeting was ruined before it started. That I was incompetent. That today was destined to be a disaster.

When I separated the fact from the story, something shifted. Not magically — I was still a little rattled. But I walked into that meeting present enough to actually be useful. And as it turned out, the client barely noticed I was late. What they noticed was that I was fully there when it mattered.

The leadership application

You don’t have to spill coffee to use this. You can use it the moment you notice that your reaction to something feels bigger than the thing itself. That’s usually a sign the story is running.

Ask: What is actually, factually true here? What am I adding to it? And what would be available to me if I set the story down for a moment?

The leaders I’ve worked with who navigate difficulty with the most grace aren’t the ones who don’t get rattled. They’re the ones who notice when they’re rattled — and choose, intentionally, what they do next.

That’s not a talent. It’s a practice. And it starts in the parking lot.

 

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I wrote more on navigating the stories that run our leadership in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

Why Running on Autopilot Is Costing You More Than You Know

 

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how many hours you’ve worked.

It’s the exhaustion of going through the motions. Of making it through your day – back-to-back meetings, decisions, emails, conversations – and arriving at the end of it feeling like you somehow weren’t really there for any of it.

If you’ve ever driven home and couldn’t remember a single thing about the drive, you know what I mean. Your body showed up. Your autopilot showed up. But you, the thoughtful, intentional, alive version of you, had checked out somewhere around 2 p.m.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because I keep hearing some version of the same thing from leaders I work with:

“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing. So why does it feel like I’m disappearing?”

That question deserves a real answer.

What autopilot actually costs you

We tend to talk about autopilot as a productivity problem…  you’re not getting things done, you’re procrastinating, you’re distracted. And sure, those things show up. But what I’ve observed, both in my own life and in working with executives for over thirty years, is that autopilot is really an identity problem.

When you’re running on autopilot, you’re not actually leading. You’re reacting. You’re executing. You’re managing the inbox of your life. But the deeper, more purposeful part of you – the part that has vision, that asks “why does this matter,” that can read a room and feel what’s really needed – that part goes quiet.

And here’s what makes it so insidious: it happens gradually enough that you don’t notice it happening. One day you look up and realize the last six months were a blur. That you can’t remember the last time you felt genuinely excited about a project. That your best ideas stopped coming.

That’s not a scheduling problem. That’s a signal.

The three signs your leadership is on autopilot

1) You’re doing more, but feeling less. You’re technically more productive than ever – more efficient, more organized, more responsive. But something feels flat. You finish things and feel relief instead of satisfaction. The work has stopped feeding you.

2) You’ve stopped asking the question underneath the question. Leaders operating from their fullest capacity are always curious. They’re asking not just what needs to get done, but why it matters, who is affected, and what’s really going on beneath the surface. When you’re on autopilot, you stop going below the surface. You take things at face value because you’re moving too fast to look deeper.

3) Your relationships feel transactional. Not because you don’t care – you do. But when you’re in autopilot mode, interactions become things to get through rather than opportunities to genuinely connect. People can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.

What I know to be true

There’s a part of you that is wiser, more creative, and more capable than the version of you that shows up on autopilot. I call it your Genius. It’s not some idealized fantasy of who you could be under perfect conditions. It’s actually more available to you than your autopilot self – it just requires that you show up for it.

The good news is that breaking out of autopilot doesn’t require a sabbatical or a personality transplant. It usually begins with something much simpler: noticing that you’re on it.

That noticing is the first act of real leadership.

Something to sit with this week

What is one thing you keep meaning to get to, one piece of work that feels genuinely important to you, that has been getting pushed to tomorrow for longer than you’d like to admit?

Don’t answer that question in your head. Write it down. And notice how it feels to let it land.

That feeling is information. It’s your Genius, signaling.

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If this resonates and you want to go deeper, I wrote an entire book about the journey from autopilot to authentic leadership: The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader

 

I couldn’t find what I needed, so I created it

 

It was summer of 2004. I had 3 kids under the age of 7. I was working full time. And I was under the illusion that I could be all things to all people. It was a “success formula” that had helped me get ahead for the majority of my life, and I had doubled down on it again and again.

But it wasn’t working anymore.

I was the lead on several prime projects – stuff I’d always dreamed of working on. I’d been given a promotion to do high profile work. I was blessed with a happy marriage and beautiful, healthy children who I love more than anything in the world. By all appearances I was successfully juggling a multitude of balls in the air and seemed to have it fairly well handled.

What most people could not see is that I was struggling… working harder than ever but not really getting anywhere.

I was exhausted. My mind felt dull. Everything took longer. Decisions were harder. And the work I once loved began to feel like a giant burden that was sucking the life out of me.

I didn’t know what to do about it.

As a lifelong learner, I sought solutions that would help me out of my funk. The traditional leadership development resources not only failed to deliver but made me feel worse. I became even more compelled to keep digging the hole that I feared would completely swallow me up.

It’s been said that sometimes you need to create what you most want to be a part of.

I didn’t realize what I was experiencing back then was the precursor of what my life’s work would ultimately have me doing. I had to find guidance in less obvious places and learn to mine my experiences for the insights that would ultimately become keys to my freedom.

And since that time, I’ve had the distinct honor and privilege of working with multitudes of high-achieving executives who are having (or are on the verge of) soul sucking experiences just like mine – and those who want to proactively keep that from happening altogether.

Reflecting on what I’ve seen in my own life and those of the people I’ve been blessed to work with over the years has led me to a realization that becomes stronger each and every day…

The time has come for us to find and institute a better way of living, working, and leading.

That truth has guided me in developing my most recent offering, The Real Leader Academy. I filmed a 6-minute video about it that you can check out below. Be sure to watch the last half as that is where you’ll get all the details and a peek inside the Academy.

It is possible to do great work, enjoy your life both on and off the job, and lead in ways that inspire others to rise to new levels along with you.

Here’s to your success!

Diane

P.S. For more details on the Academy, go to www.RealLeaderAcademy.com.

Life is meant for more than checking boxes…

 

Can you remember the last time you were so excited about something that you could feel the hair on your arms or the back of your neck stand up? Or the giddiness of a five-year-old at the prospect of visiting an amusement park?

Maybe it got you out of bed in the morning or put a little spring in your step.

When the promise of a future state brings a smile to your face or makes your heart beat a little faster, lean in. Give yourself to the dream – and the dream will give itself to you, taking on a life of its own in ways that will surprise and delight you.

Author, philosopher, and civil rights activist Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Over the last couple years, I’ve been working on a passion project of my own – a career’s worth of seemingly disjointed but synchronistically connected experiences that have come together in delightful ways. You can check it out here.

What is calling to you right now? And how can you make the space necessary for it to reveal itself to you in all its grandeur?

Here’s to pouring some life into your passion projects!

 

Why SMART Goals are Often Dumb

 

Goals are something we are encouraged to stick to. But sometimes the goals we set for ourselves no longer match the direction we find ourselves wanting to go.

Early in my career I (like many driven professionals) was prone to setting SMART goals. You know, “Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timebound”. It’s the conventional teaching we have all heard before.

But after time I came to realize that this approach leaves much to be desired – that in fact, it can actually keep us from getting where we most want to go.

When a goal no longer serves you and you stop wanting to pursue it, you may feel as though you’ve failed. However, the real failure might well be what happens when you stick to a goal that is no longer a fit with what you want, who you are, and the person you are becoming.

Getting where you want to go requires that you have an intense desire to get there. The pleasure and satisfaction of your destination — and your journey — needs to be greater than the pain and discomfort you will endure to get there.

What might start out as a very compelling goal may lose its appeal when your priorities change, and your very preferences and passions begin to change and evolve as well. Sometimes goals that were relevant and appropriate at one point in time will no longer serve you at another.

People grow and evolve at a pace that may not be aligned with the time frames identified in a SMART goal. When you lock yourself into achieving a particular goal, it can become a blinder that keeps you from recognizing and acting on a course of action that is far more aligned with who you really are and want to be.

If you are someone who regularly sets goals, take a moment to determine whether your current goals are working for you. Do they reflect what you really want? …how you are evolving as a person? Do they inspire you — or constrain you?

And whether you have set goals or not, consider the essence of what you most want to achieve, create, or become. Perhaps it is not yet concrete, but rather an inkling of something that is calling to you.

There is wisdom in your desire, even if you cannot yet quantify it, break it down in tangible ways, or even articulate it. In fact, sheer inklings and aspirations can become powerful seeds for the most innovative and ground-breaking accomplishments.

If you’d like more on how to gain the clarity necessary to envision and chart a path to your desired future, download my special report, “Why Real Leaders Don’t Set Goals (and what they do instead)”.

 

Do You Dare to Dream?

 

As children, most of us received mixed messages. You may have been encouraged to follow your heart and give life to your dreams in addition to being conditioned to be practical, hedge your bets, and take the safest route. Over time, many of us have allowed the roar of public opinion – that often tells us our dreams are frivolous, selfish, and unlikely to come to fruition – to silence that small still voice within.

But those among us who have risen against their odds have learned to reverse that process and believe in themselves and their dreams despite the overwhelming evidence around them that would suggest that success is improbable.

Listen closely to the silent whispers of your heart that beckon you to think bigger and act bolder – and to bust out of old paradigms that feel stale or stagnant.

Do what you can to gain clarity on what they are telling you.

And then take action.

For more on taking steps to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be – and to receive updates on an upcoming webinar that’ll help you make the most of 2026, download my special report, “Why Real Leaders Don’t Set Goals (and what they do instead)”.

Harness the Power of Your Heart’s Desire

 

We are often encouraged to set goals before we even have a vision of what we want to accomplish. But doing so deprives us of the dream that provides the fuel necessary to achieve those goals.

As you contemplate the year ahead, consider the essence of what you most want to achieve, create, or become.  Perhaps it is not yet concrete, but rather an inkling of something that is calling to you.

Every great accomplishment begins with a dream and a vision.  It requires imagination and an openness to receive its gifts.  As Albert Einstein once told us, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

And imagination is big and amorphous – it’s not easily captured, quantified, or broken down.  It is something that must be welcomed and nurtured.  The reward of having done so is that it will reveal itself to you in ways that make you feel alive with possibility.

There is wisdom in your desire – even if you cannot yet quantify it, break it down in tangible ways, or even articulate it. In fact, sheer inklings and aspirations can become powerful seeds for the most innovative and ground-breaking accomplishments.

What is your vision? And how can you breathe life into it?

If you’d like more on how to gain the clarity necessary to envision and chart a path to your desired future – and to receive updates on an upcoming webinar that’ll help you make the most of 2026, download my special report, “Why Real Leaders Don’t Set Goals (and what they do instead)”. 

 

 

Do it because you LOVE it

 

This week’s video was recorded in the spur of the moment – when I was hit with an epiphany about what allows people to be both successful AND happy. It felt worth sharing, despite the background noise and absolute lack of makeup.

When you click on the image below, you’ll be taken to my LinkedIn page, where the video is posted.

While you’re there, connect with me if you haven’t already. It would be wonderful to have you as part of my professional network.

Here’s to happiness and success – and doing what you love because you love it!

Diane