Heal to Lead

2Low-Conscious Leaders Are Everywhere

WOUNDED LEADERS ARE easy to spot, aren't they? In business, they lead with fear-based tactics like dominance, aggression, and rigidity. In politics, they succumb to the interests of a few despite detrimental impact to the whole. Low-conscious leaders make decisions without any input from the collective above which they find themselves perched—or worse, they ask for input and decide against the majority anyway. They take credit for other people's ideas. They prefer to keep others feeling small, preventing them from surpassing their own individualistic legacy. Does this sound like a boss you once had, a former president of the United States, a Floridian governor, or the CEO of an electric vehicle company who also tanked a once-popular social media platform?

Low-conscious leaders either use force to acquire power or they don't stand up for what most other people agree is best. Both are rooted in unintegrated trauma. From a Buddhist perspective, this is typically associated with wounded or unhealed energy. Synonymous with low-consciousness, unconscious leaders are often described as reactive—in that they “react from a ‘story’ about the past or an imagined future, and their personality, ego, or mind takes over. They are not free to lead from creative impulse, nor are they tuned in to what the moment is requiring of them.”¹

Looking at low-conscious leadership through the lens of neuroscience, “we now know that trauma compromises the brain area ...