We didn’t evolve from the laid-back apes. Our evolutionary ancestors who saw danger around every corner are the ones who avoided becoming prey, which allowed them to survive and pass their anxious tendencies on to us. In a world where lions and tigers don’t lurk around every corner, we are still influenced by our ancestors, but a survival instinct based on life in the wild no longer serves us in the same way.
Review: In "Boundless Leadership," Joe Loizzo and Elazar Aslan show us a path to move from the default survival mode of our distant ancestors to the thriving mind required of compassionate leaders to cultivate a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy world.
Today, this default mode wreaks havoc with our perception of the world and our response to it. In Boundless Leadership: The Breakthrough Method to Realize Your Vision, Empower Others & Ignite Positive Change, Joe Loizzo and Elazar Aslan show us a path to move from the default survival mode of our distant ancestors to the thriving mind required of compassionate leaders to cultivate a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy world.
If you would like to dive deeper in your capacity to practice and embody compassionate leadership, Boundless Leadership is for you. The book takes us on a journey through three foundational disciplines: the disciplines of mind, of heart, and of body. These three areas have been covered in different combinations in recent years, including strong work on the integration of mind-based and heart-based leadership as well as work on embodied leadership. The authors bring a unique perspective on each of these three dimensions, as well as integrating all three in an effective and balanced way.
With its third discipline of embodied leadership, Boundless Leadership weaves in polyvagal theory as well as other scientific evidence to teach leaders to shift their natural response to the world from stress and survival to social thriving. By consciously paying attention to what has often operated unconsciously, boundless leaders can use their body’s capacity to shape what our mind thinks. We have the power to influence our thoughts and actions to keep us calm, engaged with others, and playful instead of being worried, cautious, and anxious.
This profound change in our leadership perspective can occur not only at the upper levels of our evolved primate and mammalian brains, but also at the earliest level of our reptilian brain. While many of us recognize that we can intentionally move ourselves into social thriving mode in a single situation, the beauty of it is that we can practice this change in our operating mode until it becomes reflexive.
Throughout Boundless Leadership Loizzo and Aslan use clear language and avoid the use of technical jargon. Some of the extensive science is deep, and the book makes the ideas approachable. They also use accessible language when dealing in the more enigmatic areas of contemplative practice. Each of the three disciplines – mind, heart, and body – is associated with a primary competency. For the mind discipline, the competence is clarity; for the heart, it is compassion; and, for the body it is fearlessness.
To support the strengthening of each of these competencies and associated qualities, the authors share formal practices to help grow our leadership skills. While the authors offer a generous number of powerful practices, some may be more easily understood by experienced practitioners. Leaders new to mind training, building their awareness, and sensing into thoughts, feelings, and body might benefit from additional practice material or guidance.
Boundless Leadership develops leaders who have strength in clarity of mind, compassion, and fearlessness. These principles align closely with those of the Center for Compassionate Leadership. We view the competency of compassion as aligned with nurturing compassion that responds to the suffering of the world, and the competency of fearlessness as being aligned with courageous compassion that seeks to remove the causes of suffering by bringing forth systematic change.
Regardless of the labels, leaders will only truly embody their leadership through practice. Boundless Leadership offers an important new resource for compassionate leaders to do just that.