Neuropsychologist Dr Julia DiGangi
Dr Julia DiGangi is an expert in the connection between the brain, leadership, and emotion. She is also the author of Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power. In an interview with Forbes India, she shows leaders how to harness the power of the brain to lead teams better and grow their organisations. Edited excerpts:
Q. What’s the leadership perspective you are trying to build through Energy Rising?
As a neuropsychologist, I wrote Energy Rising to give leaders a step-by-step guide on the neuroscience of building extraordinary teams. At its core, leadership isn’t about the things you are doing. It’s about the energy of who you are being. You can try the most brilliant strategy in the world, but if you’re taking action in the wrong energy, it won’t work. This is because your brain does not run on strategy; it runs on energy.
Very often, leaders come to me, after having spent millions of dollars on new, shiny strategies to motivate or engage their employees. Too often, these efforts fail—not because the strategy was bad—but because the emotional energy was.
Q. How can emotional pain possibly serve as the path to emotional power?
One of the most powerful—and counterintuitive—truths for leaders to understand is that emotional pain is the precise path to greater emotional power. By emotional power, I mean all of the things you need to be a transformational leader: Confident, connected, resilient, and authentic. What I help leaders understand is that their leadership does not break down because their problems get too hard. Their leadership breaks down because their feelings get too big—when people feel too frustrated, too angry, too overwhelmed or too uncertain. Very often, leaders try to fix situational factors—they try to begin another initiative, launch a new app, or try a new communications strategy. More often than not, these efforts fail because leaders have not remedied the underlying emotional pain—like distrust, fear, anxiety and uncertainty—that already exists on their team. Leaders become exponentially more powerful when they understand how to regulate their own painful emotions and show other people how to regulate theirs, too.
If emotional pain is ‘self-division’, then emotional power is ‘wholeness’. Could you elaborate on this?
The emotions and behaviours generated by your brain run on real electrochemical energy. When the energy that powers your emotions aligns with how you behave, you are at your most powerful because the energy that fuels your emotions naturally fuels the energy of your behaviour. However, people often divide their energy in ways that weaken them. In Energy Rising, I call this the pain of “self-division”.
Imagine someone asks you to work on a project that you don’t need to do but you feel like you should. You want to politely say no but instead of listening to the truth of your emotional energy, you say yes. When you now have to do the thing that you already didn’t want to do, the energy of ‘no’ is still very much alive inside of your body. You have split your behaviour from your emotion. In this scenario, there’s no way you can bring the full force of your energy to your life because you have divided your energy—there’s one part of you acting in one direction while another part is feeling in the exact opposite direction.
Also read: ‘Weak leaders tend to jump the gun, strong ones pause to think’
Q. Who’s an empowered leader?
An empowered leader is a leader who understands how to remain energetically authentic, meaning they know how to align the energy of their emotions with the energy of their behaviours, especially in challenging situations.
Take Greg, the CEO of a large consulting firm who oversees thousands of employees. With a strong reputation as a leader, Greg is highly effective precisely because others want to follow his lead. He specifically credits his leadership success to the energy of his authenticity—his own willingness to repeatedly show up as he is. To be an authentic leader, Greg realised there were powerful energies that must be resisted: “There’s this gravitational force that wants you to spend time with only senior people. So I fight that gravity with intention every day, every week, every month, every year.” In a leadership landscape where it’s so easy to try to perform for other people’s approval, Greg attributes much of his success to doing the opposite: He actively does not try to be liked. “What my wife would tell you is that one of the things that makes me capable of leading a big team, particularly in moments of pain, is that I don’t agonise over what people think… ”
Q. What’s the ripple effect when leaders lead from an emotionally disempowered place?
When leaders lead from an emotionally disempowered place—when they feel negative, uncertain, judgmental, or anxious—quickly, members of the team “catch” this disempowered emotional energy. This isn’t metaphysical or even metaphorical. This is neuroscientific. Neuroscience research shows us that emotions are an energy of contagion.
One of the biggest mistakes I see leaders make is they try to think about the emotions of their team before they think about their own. For example, they try to inspire others while they are feeling uninspired. Or they try to motivate others while they are feeling frustrated. These efforts tend to fail because the core energy in this dynamic is the leader’s own disempowered emotional energy.
Overworking, overcommunicating, overthinking, and the like—what triggers this behavioural pattern?
As a neuropsychologist, I often find myself helping people understand the effects of self-defeating behaviours that I call the Overs, which include behaviours like overworking, overachieving and overgiving. We engage in the Overs in a flawed attempt to create psychological safety for ourselves. They are a maladaptive form of nervous-system regulation. Feelings of anxiety, stress, or uncertainty leave your nervous system dysregulated and you feeling out of control. The Overs are your attempt to regain control. You may work because you enjoy your job, but you only overwork because you feel afraid. Perhaps you fear that your boss will be mad at you or you will lose your chance at success.
Often, the Overs become a primary source of psychological danger. In my work with high-achieving individuals, they often agree that all their overfunctioning feels bad to them, but they insist they need to continue overdoing it to stay safe—or, as they put it, to stay “relevant” or “on top”. Regardless of the semantics, the underlying neurobiology is the same: Overdoing is a form of self-protection.
Q. What can be done to reduce these unwanted behaviours?
One of the most powerful things you can do to reduce the pain of the “Overs” is to understand the difference between danger and dislike. For example, if you stop overaccommodating your family and co-workers, they may become frustrated with you. While it’s natural to dislike this, it does not mean you are in actual danger. Research shows that people overestimate the negative consequences of their decisions.
Additionally, when you chronically overdo it in your life, you are harming yourself. If you want to become more powerful in your life, it’s important to think intelligently about pain. Ask yourself: Is it more painful for me to continue to reject my own desires and injure my body by overworking? Or is it more painful for me to imagine that someone else may be temporarily upset if I say “no”. Although we may think facing our feelings is dangerous, the opposite is true: We find relief when we’re able to distinguish real danger from mere dislike.