Building Coherence In Leadership: It Starts With A Deep Breath

Have you ever taken a moment to consider how truly coherent your leadership team is, both as individuals and as a unit? And have you considered the flow-on impact that has through the rest of the organisation?

In recent weeks we’ve been looking at the “4C’s” of the Team Development Model (you can find a useful summary of them here). Today I want to highlight the last C: Coherence.

As a HeartMath practitioner, trained by HeartMath an organisation founded by Doc Childre, Coherence has always been something that I’ve thought closely about. Here’s a quick summary of my thoughts on the matter:

Heart coherence is a state in which the heart, mind, and emotions are synchronised and balanced. This state is associated with feelings of well-being, relaxation, and improved cognitive function.

That state of Coherence is valuable for when all of us and our teams are dealing with challenging and high-stakes issues. It allows us to jointly approach those issues with a sense of optimism, lowered stress and improved cognitive function. I also believe it puts us in touch with our intuition and enhances our decision-making capability, to be more discerning and nuanced.

The simplest way to draw yourself into a more coherent state is by focusing on the breath. In the book, Heart Intelligence, the authors Childre et al., highlight a simple breathing technique The Heart Lock-In Technique?;

• Step 1 - Focus your attention in the area of heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
• Step 2 - Activate and sustain a regenerative feeling such as appreciation, care and compassion.
• Step 3 - Radiate that renewing feeling to yourself and others.

?This is unbelievably effective in action. I’ve seen some outstanding results when executives simply take a few moments before a meeting to get centred and focused by using this technique. It doesn’t just need to be about the big meetings too. Maintaining that centred approach is a good starting point for working well with together. The technique can be used prior to a difficult one-to-one session or tough conversation to help ensure that the key information is shared quickly, and it can be used to reset before moving to the next hot topic, to ensure that whatever else is going on, the person can focus on this particular issue in isolation.

I personally use it to reset at home after a challenging day and find that it is useful as a circuit breaker.

Another excellent resource on this subject for further reading is Dr Alan Watkins’ book Coherence - The Secret Science Of Brilliant Leadership. For those interested in the science. this book and the resources made available by HeartMath are great jumping-off points.

As a final note: Coherence is not going to happen instantly. Building the techniques that will help you to be able to stay centred and clear takes time. The breathing exercise mentioned above is a good and effective one, but it needs to become a habit before you’ll really start to appreciate what it brings to your leadership style. There’s no better time to start on this journey than now, however!