The Embodiment of Leadership

A Volume in the International Leadership Series, Building Leadership Bridges

Lois Ruskai Melina, Gloria J. Burgess, Lena Lid-Falkman, Antonio Marturano, Lois Ruskai Melina, Gloria J. Burgess, Lena Lid-Falkman, Antonio Marturano

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781118551615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118615669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

Covering leadership in the arts and humanities, this volume integrates critical theory with authentic leadership development, exploring the notion that leadership is both a discursive practice and a performative identity. Each year the International Leadership Association publishes a book that captures the best contemporary thinking about leadership from a diverse range of scholars, practitioners, and educators working in the field of leadership studies. In keeping with the mission of the ILA, the International Leadership Series Building Leadership Bridges connects ways of researching, imagining, and experiencing leadership across cultures, over time, and around the world.

Praise for The Embodiment of Leadership

"Read this book to experience an artistic and more robust sense of leadership; to rise to the challenge to gain alignment in mind, body, and spirit; and to heed the call to heal the shadows we as leaders sometimes cast over our collective humanity. Read this book to become more whole.
" —Shann Ray Ferch, professor of leadership studies, Gonzaga University

"For once leadership experts consider the mind-body problem from the perspective of the latter—the body. Those with an interest in how the body is brought to bear on the exercise of leadership would do well to explore The Embodiment of Leadership.
" —Barbara Kellerman, James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

"The Embodiment of Leadership goes beyond the banal by using our body experiences as the point of departure in deciphering the leadership conundrum. Anyone interested in the study of leadership would do well to pay attention to this book.
" —Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership and Organiza-tional Change, The Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, INSEAD

"Leadership is a social construction. The Embodiment of Leadership presents a multifaceted approach to understanding how we, as a society, define, create, and contend with leaders and leadership. Serious scholars and students of leadership need to read this."
—Ronald E. Riggio, Kravis Leadership Institute, Claremont McKenna College

Part One

Leadership Thresholds

Gloria J. Burgess

Now more than ever, leaders stand at the threshold of myriad unknown and unknowable frontiers that can be daunting if not downright terrifying. But when we welcome them, thresholds can be places of allure, hospitality, and companionship. As pioneering scholar and soul curator Thomas Moore (2000) reminded us, there, “in these liminal narrows, a kind of life takes place that is out of the ordinary, creative, and once in a while, genuinely magical” (p. 34).

Part One presents innovative practices, ideas, and insights on embodied leadership from several interdisciplinary thresholds or perspectives. The authors explore ways that leaders might befriend and traverse these thresholds, beginning with reflections on the singularity of the leader’s journey as embodied story and concluding with a summons to leaders everywhere to embrace the world body as a singular collective because our very survival depends on it. In between, the authors invite us to sojourn, offering a way station for beleaguered travelers—leaders in the throes of ever-accelerating change, leaders in search of new maps, new coordinates to navigate pervasive ambiguity, disorientation, and dislocation.

We begin with a chapter by Stephanie Guastella Lindsay, who investigates the interconnections of metaphor, embodiment, and personal mythology. Delving into the heart of these intersectionalities, she invites leaders to embark upon a heroic journey, a voyage inward so that they might discover and reflect on their personal metaphors and how they are expressed through the language and behavior of their personal and professional narratives.

Continuing with a chapter by Kate Katafiasz, we are ushered into the domain of dramatic discourse as she examines the work of actor, educator, and transformational leader Dorothy Heathcote, whose legacy to leadership theorists and practitioners is a vast body of work that suggests how drama can assist leaders in generating the creative flow that is necessary to challenge the status quo and become transformational leaders, equipping teachers and others to become transformational leaders themselves.

In his contribution on the nexus of leadership and performative discourse, David Holzmer reminds us that in a radically destabilized world, leaders must shift their mind-sets and habits to continuously adapt and flourish. To equip them in making and mediating these shifts, Holzmer offers fresh perspectives for leaders on navigating the interlocking thresholds of pervasive uncertainty and disruptive upheaval.

This part concludes with Skye Burn’s chapter, which moves beyond leading in the contexts of corporation, organization, institution, system, and community. With the conjoined sensibility and perspective of creative artist and social artist, Burn’s context, canvas, and corpus is the world. She calls for nothing less than our conscious awareness and aligned stewardship of our precious planet as singular body.

As leaders cultivate the capacity to embrace thresholds not as threat but as opportunity, they prepare themselves for their most significant and enduring act of leadership, that is, being conscious stewards of our organizations, institutions, and communities, for the sake of our children, our children’s children, and the many generations to come.

Reference

Moore, T. (2000). Neither here nor there. Parabola, 25(1), 34–37.

Chapter One

The Anatomy of Leadership

Stephanie Guastella Lindsay

Therefore, if one administers the empire as he cares for his body, he can be entrusted with the empire.

Lao Tzu

Metaphor, Embodiment, and Personal Mythology

Metaphors are deeply entrenched in our everyday language. We explore untested waters by getting only our feet wet rather than diving right in, enjoy the fruits of our labors, and get all nerved up when things are up in the air. When metaphors ring true, they help us make sense of our lives. Because metaphors are plentiful, a fallacy exists that they are just words, that they are not important. Although they typically operate below conscious awareness (Johnson, 2007, p. 139), the nearly six metaphors per minute (Geary, 2011, para. 3) we use in our everyday language dictate to a large degree how we live our lives.

The words we use to describe our experiences reflect the physical structures and functioning of our bodies. We say we grasp an idea or love slips through our fingers because our hands and fingers are anatomically made to hold and let go. Two metaphors of embodiment that have been used to describe leaders, for example, are having one’s feet on the ground and holding one’s ground. The ability to solidly hold up well on two feet has to do with the “great significance” we give to “standing up, rising, and falling down” (Johnson, 2007, p. 137), which, of course, have to do with the body’s basic ability to maintain verticality and balance. The ability to stand upright and maintain balance, actually and metaphorically, can ensure a leader’s survival. We trust leaders who are upstanding or who take a stand.

Cool-headed, hands-on, tight-fisted, and cutthroat are a few more examples of the nearly infinite number of metaphors of embodiment that can be used to describe a leader’s performance. Self-referential metaphors of embodiment like I’m just a pretty face or I’ve got a good head for numbers hint at and reveal essential aspects of our autobiographical selves, our personal mythologies. Personal mythologies evolve from memory and imagination. Acting as narrative blueprints, personal mythologies are the “vibrant infrastructure[s] that inform” one’s life (Feinstein & Krippner, 1988, p. xi). They are brought about by significant pleasurable and painful events we are certain did happen, events that we may be uncertain about having happened, things that we had hoped would happen but did not, and events that did happen but that we wish had not.

Rather than an accurate historical record, our personal mythologies are experienced as a Gestalt from which not only the meaning of our lives can be made, but upon which we base our actions. Sometimes our personal mythologies are inaccessible to us—our psyche holds them at arm’s length; at other times, they are in our face. Stephen Wolinsky (1991) proposed that people create self-image identities that reflect “core beliefs about [their] performance and worth” (p. 220). Self-image identities manifest as specific behaviors (p. 221) that can be either life affirming or life negating. By early adulthood, we become so identified with these “patterns of behavior” (p. 8) that we actually become them. We perform our lives according to these identities that we ourselves have written and embody. Our “attention becomes reduced to those few inner realities that define the identity” so that we “experience all the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations of that limited state/identity” (p. 221).

As a physical, literal, and concrete living structure that takes up space and moves through time, the entire body takes in and chronicles data from the outside world, then interprets and stores them. Our bodies contain our entire life stories just as surely as “they contain bones, muscles, organs, nerves, and blood” (Halprin, 2003, p. 17). If we purposely attend to and examine our own metaphors of embodiment, we can apprehend them as linguistic indicators, vignettes, of the internally held stories of our lives. The person who reports many experiences of love slipping through his or her fingers may develop a personal mythology based on the core belief that he or she is, indeed, unlovable. The person might then intentionally or unconsciously embody the personal mythology of unlovability in ways that will ensure that romantic love will be elusive. Metaphors of embodiment, then, are simple linguistic indicators of deeper, complex personal mythologies.

A convincing argument has been made that metaphors have real-life consequences like “war and peace, healthcare, environmental issues, and other political and social issues” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 246). It makes sense, then, for people in positions of leadership to attend to the self-referential metaphors of embodiment that spill from their lips. When leaders disregard these metaphors as just words, they are likely to disregard the personal mythologies that accompany them, and the roles both play in their performance of leadership. When we listen closely to the metaphors of embodiment we use and then consciously seek out the stories behind them, we open the way to self-understanding and apprehending our deepest reasons for doing what we do.

The leader who declares that he or she stands firm on his or her decisions, or who is known for holding his or her ground, for example, may have a personal mythology more tied to an aversion to appearing weak in public than to any inborn quality of stubbornness. Standing one’s ground only becomes a negative quality for a leader when it results in an inauthentic performance of self. Self-referential metaphors, then, can manifest in life-affirming or life-negating personal mythologies.

Dualism and Embodied Metaphor

Rational philosophic thought has conceptualized thinking as coming from a disembodied intellect that we call the mind (Johnson, 2007; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). Dualism traditionally divided human experience into mind and body. On the one hand, the mind became the seat of logical thinking—the place where Absolute Truth could be sorted out. The body, on the other hand, was linked to the “imaginary, unreal, [and] unscientific” (Pert, 1997, p. 18), the “devil’s handiwork, animal instincts, and lower forms of life” (Hanna, 1987, p. 9). Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, elimination, reproduction, and illness are some of the body’s never-ending list of baser functions in which the loftier mind seemingly has no interest or involvement. The mind has been conceived of as rising above the messiness of the body. Emotions—also messy—arise from the physical body, get us all stirred up, and cloud our judgment. Finally, the body ages, dies, and decays.

When we say that someone needs to use his or her head, has lost his or her head, or is out of his or her head, we are really referring to the person’s mind. The notion that the mind is located in the head, where the brain is, and where thinking is thought to occur, is conventional wisdom (although Empedocles once taught that the heart was the seat of intellect and Aristotle thought the brain was the body’s cooling system) (Gross, 1995). According to dualism, abstract concepts like consciousness, morality, and time, and more concrete concepts like language and leadership, arise from a purely reasoning human mind, and are “in no way dependent upon our embodied, phenomenal selves” (Johnson, 2007, p. 7). If we believe that language springs spontaneously from a pure and disembodied mind, it becomes easier to believe that the self-referential metaphors leaders use are merely linguistic symbols—extensions of disembodied thinking—and that the body plays no role in a leader’s deeply personal ways of being, decision making, and acting. The idea that thinking takes place somewhere in a mysterious inner space of the body called the mind is so ingrained in Western thinking that it is almost impossible to “think about mind in any other way” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 266). It makes the notion that the body thinks and has a logic all its own seem absurd.

Embodied Minds, Enminded Bodies, and Many Minds

While dualism has contributed significantly to our understanding of the world, we seem to be embracing more holistic attitudes toward and accounts of mind and body. Contemporary science is engaged in “refuting traditional” ideas of dualism by “validating accounts of consciousness that relate body, self, mind, and emotion” (Fraleigh, 2000, p. 55). Language is now thought to depend on a “core consciousness” that is envisaged as a spiraling “bodymind axis” (p. 61). Psychoneuroimmunology has furthered the nondualistic basis of phenomenological inquiry, which has traditionally rested upon the concept of “the lived body” and the sentiment that dualism has been an error, that the “traditional division of body/mind [is] false” (p. 55). Cogent arguments for the embodiedness of mind (or enmindedness of body) have been provided: “What we call ‘mind’ is really embodied. There is no true separation of mind and body. These are not two independent entities that somehow come together and couple. The word mental picks out those bodily capacities and performances that constitute our awareness and determine our creative and constructive responses to the situations we encounter. . . . Mind is part of the very structure and fabric of our interactions with our world” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 266, italics in original). “There is no disembodied logic at all” (Johnson, 2007, p. 181).

Perhaps we do not have one mind but many. Research suggests that the mind “travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision” (Ackerman, 1991, p. xix), and kinesthesia. Mind, then, might be conceptualized as numerous embodied biological systems that extend into and derive information from the world. Data are stored in the filing drawers of organ, bone, muscle, and nerve. Our organs and musculoskeletal, nervous, cardiovascular, respiratory, and endocrine systems, then, can each be conceptualized as having minds, and stories, of their own.

Metaphors of embodiment are evidence of the enmindedness of the human body. Our hair stands on end, chills run up and down our spines, and our skin crawls when we are fearful. We love people from the bottom of our hearts, we get choked up, and no one makes it through life without feeling as though his or her heart was breaking at least once. Our blood runs cold, we waste our breath, we get cold feet, and we feel things in our bones. We become flushed with love and feel the heat of anger. We change our minds.

That self-referential metaphors of embodiment provide “true statements about our inner lives” suggests that these metaphors “conform in significant ways to the structure of our inner lives as we experience them” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 288). Leaders perform real actions in the world, with good or bad results, and the metaphors they use contextualize and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: Leadership Thresholds
• Part Two: Leaders Are Their Bodies
• Part Three: Leadership By and Through the Body
• Name Index
• Subject Index