"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." - Nicholas Janni, "Leader As Healer"

In our conversation we learn to understand Nicholas' concept of Leader As Healer. He summarises it beautifully, "[Leaders] who has rejected the normalised version of reality, which is dominated by linear thinking. [It is a leader] who understands that we need to bring a unification of embodied experience, emotional connection, intuitive opening and a deeper meditative practice in which thinking becomes our servant not our master.". It is the process of shifting from being stuck in our heads to observing and being aware of our experiences. As a leader, you shift into a perspective where you become more empathetic and compassionate.

Nicholas assured us that even hard shelled lawyers were receptive to this process of becoming vulnerable and to shift their perspective from doing to feeling. There is hope after all. On key tool I took away from our conversation and brought it in to my own practice as well as teaching my own clients is to "drop the narrative". As you may have heard me quote many times before, "pain is inevitable, the suffering is optional"; the narrative is essentially the suffering. It is the story we build up to justify why we are feeling what we are feeling, and the more we justify it the more we prolong the presence of the emotion in our body. Let the emotion stay for as long as it needs to, not for as long as you can hold on to it.

Nicholas' experience and expertise is a window into a new paradigm that many of us are working towards, and the future is bright. Don't forget to pick up his book, it is a must read.

Contact Nicholas Janni: https://www.nicholasjanni.com, www.matrixcoaching.net

About Nicholas

Over the last 20 years Nicholas has gained an international reputation for his transformational coaching and leadership development seminars. The clients he has served include FedEx, Rolls Royce, Swiss Re, Centrica, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Amdocs, Intel, Motorola, Microsoft, eBay and Lafarge, as well as the UK Permanent Secretaries and several cabinet ministers.

He bridges the worlds of creative, personal, spiritual and professional development in a uniquely powerful, relevant and accessible way. In his first career Nicholas was a theatre director. He taught acting at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and directed his own theatre company.

He has spent 30 years researching the theory and the practice of ‘the zone’ of peak performance, and studying multiple mind/body disciplines. In 1998 he became a Visiting Fellow at the Cranfield School of Management, and in 2001 he left the theatre to co-found the arts-based leadership development consultancy Olivier Mythodrama. In 2013 he founded his own consultancy, CORE PRESENCE.

He was an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford Said Business School 2010–15, and currently teaches regularly at the IMD Business School in Lausanne. He is based partly in Israel, where he has worked with numerous corporate clients, The Interdisciplinary Centre, Tel Aviv Recanati Business School and various Israeli and Palestinian NGO’s.