The Power of Positive Leadership And The Link That Makes It True
Joy, gratitude and other positive emotions arise from our sense of connection and can power better health, a better life and what we make real in the world. Credit: yuriyseleznev, Canva
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on December 1st, 2025.
“’Tis the season to be jolly,” we’re reminded by the old carol that suggests it’s time to deck our halls. As we enter this holiday season, fraught with political upheaval and cruelty, and perhaps personal angst around increasing prices and uncertainty, being jolly may seem quaint or out of reach. And yet, it is excellent advice, not only for this season, but all seasons, as positivity is at the heart of our health, the quality of our life and efficacy of our leadership.
What’s the evidence behind these benefits? And how can we authentically access joy, not just “fake it till you make it”? How do we remain clear-eyed and present for difficulty, not bypass it in some blissful “always-look-on-the-bright-side” naivete? It turns out that joy and other positive emotions arise from our sense of connection, while fear-based emotions arise from a sense of separation. The good news is that connection is our original nature—before the ego ever developed and thought itself separate. So, returning to it is completely available to us as we cultivate inner coherence between head, heart and our ground of being in hara (lower abdomen). It is this last part—connection with hara—that is often missed in our focus on the power of positive thinking (head) or feeling (heart). Yet it is from this depth of coherence that clarity and positivity become real and realized, not only within our inner state but also in the outer world.
The Benefits Of Positivity
The power of positive thinking is no stranger in the corridors of business. From Napolean Hill to Norman Vincent Peale, it has been touted and taught, especially in sales, for more than 80 years. Further inquiry into what enables a positive life followed in the work of Martin Seligman and the Positive Psychology movement. What emerged through this research, as well as advances in neuroscience, was an important distinction between thoughts and emotions. While thought is a product of our brain working through synaptic pathways, emotions spread through our entire body through neuropeptides carried in our bloodstream. While thought lasts but seconds, emotion is a whole-body experience that endures for many minutes. Once the body is amped up on an emotion, it sends signals to the brain that give rise to more thoughts matching the emotion. Put another way, emotion is a much more enduring and powerful regulator of thought than the other way around. Hence, research shifted to studying the power of positive emotions.
Positive emotions have been found to have significant power over our health. They’re associated with reduced stress, lower blood pressure, decreased inflammation, and improved immune response. So potent is the connection to health and well-being that some refer to gratitude as “Vitamin G”.
Rollin McCraty and colleagues at the HeartMath Institute further explored the power of positive feelings and the heart. Using a protocol involving heart-centered focus combined with calling up positive feelings of appreciation or care, they found practitioners showed greater coherence (i.e., vibrations adding up, smoothing out) between head and heart and in heart rate variability. Objective measures of coherence also matched practitioners’ subjective experience of feeling more coherent. Moreover, a happy, coherent heart produces a stronger, more coherent electromagnetic field around one’s body, which is likely one of ways positivity radiates to others.
The contagious effect of positive emotions has also been shown to play a key role in leadership. Positive leaders have been found to create more positive teams, inspire greater engagement, and get better results. Positive affect correlates with greater emotional intelligence, charisma and executive presence. While negative emotions can create strong adverse reactions, positive emotions generate attraction. They are also great amplifiers of intent and how leaders conduct a possible future into the present. Joe Dispenza, who has been collecting case studies from his healing and development workshops for years, summarizes the formula for manifesting a desired future: clear intention plus positive emotion.
Making It True
This formula is not Dispenza’s alone; it powers many a personal and professional development program, including our own work in Zen Leadership. It has also been misconstrued in popular culture (e.g., “The Secret”) as a kind of “magical thinking.” Can one simply intend to grow sales 10-fold, for example, put on a happy face or have a rollicking sales meeting and it will come true? Not likely.
But looking through the lens of Zen Leadership and the science of resonance, what is true is that we have the capacity to resonate with possible futures that are on the horizon but not yet present. Those futures can be signaled by many sources from polling data and market trends to subtle sensing of the Zeitgeist, dreams or intuition. Just as sense organs like ears and eyes can vibrate with signals in the field that we translate into named senses like hearing and sight, our whole body in its three primary centers of head, heart and hara is like an antenna that can vibrate with signals that we may not name as a sense but arrive, for example, as a gut-level feeling, a heartfelt opening or a vague vision that gradually comes into focus. Such unnamed senses can warn us of danger—such as somebody sneaking up from behind—or they could ignite a sense of positive possibility, as in a solution to an unmet need in our community.
The difference between true sensing of the field and magical thinking of the head alone can be sensed in the coherence between head, heart and hara. The head, functioning from an ego that can feel separate from nature, others, and its own life-body (as in “mind over matter”) thinks in patterns shaped by its history, likes and dislikes, fears and sources of safety. It can be readily fooled and confused and come up with an intent based on the past but not aligned with a possible future that matches life.
If we listen to our heart and emotions relative to an intent, we can begin to sense whether we’re truly all-in or if we have mixed feelings. If our intent generates mixed feelings, we create our own emotional interference patterns, cutting our strength and effectiveness. Gay Hendricks identifies a common example of this as the Upper Limit Problem, that is, habitual, self-limiting beliefs that keep us in familiar territory and hence thwart our growth toward new goals or intents. Such beliefs might be that something’s wrong with me or I’ll end up alone, triggering negative emotions such fear of inadequacy or abandonment. These negative emotions compete in the background, undermining the positive emotions we’d need to manifest our intent.
Even if head and heart agree on an intent and amplify it through feelings, that intent can still be based on the delusive separation of ego with its thoughts and desires. But add the hara into the picture and now we’re tapping into our grounded connection to life, a gut-level intuition that developed even before the ego had a chance to form and think itself separate. Just as we sense the rhythm of music from the lower body, enabling us to dance to the beat, so coherence with hara enables our intents to dance with the rhythms of life. Hence the sage observation of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, psychotherapist and author of Hara, “Only that which is done with hara succeeds completely.”
The more deeply we cultivate connection, the more we experience the positive emotions associated with it, such as gratitude, love, appreciation and care. There are many ways of cultivating connection, generally falling into two categories that take opposite approaches. Some practices start from positive feelings to elicit connection. Examples include calling up feelings of appreciation and care, keeping a gratitude journal or meditating with loving-kindness extended toward ourselves and others. This was the spirit, for example, behind the Big Joy Project, where 17,000 people from around the world engaged in “micro acts of joy” such as 5-10 minutes of feeling grateful or performing an act of kindness. After only one week, more than a quarter of the participants reported more positive mental health and connection with others. Since each positive emotion puts us in relationship with something or someone, methods like these build up a stronger sense of connection one positive experience at a time.
Zen, Zen leadership and other forms of meditation work from the opposite direction. They build a visceral sense of connection, which gives rise to positive emotions. In my line of Zen, for example, we access this sense of connection by using hara to regulate deep, slow breathing that fosters the boundless state of samadhi. While head and heart can feel like a separate self in a contest with life, connection with hara puts our ego in coherent context with life. The more we cultivate coherence in head, heart and hara, the more we entrain what would otherwise be a confused sea of energy and the more our clear intent and positive emotion are made true to ourselves and true to life.
Not A Bypass But A Becoming
Finally, the coherent positivity that lets us co-create with life is not the same as bypassing life’s difficulties or just putting on a happy face and pretending everything will be alright. Rather, coming from hara, resonant with life source and life force, the heart and head can remain relaxed and open, with a bigger perspective on life’s ups and downs. Far from bypassing the present moment, this condition lets us be what’s needed, embracing present-moment difficulties with our grounded presence and care.
As regards the future, this condition lets us become what’s needed to exactly match the person we will be when our intent comes true. Coherence in hara will help us sense the field and what ours to do, helping us literally move toward the future we want to create. Positive emotions will help us persevere through points of difficulty and radiate an attractive signal to those around us. Clear intention will help us cut out distracting signals and listen for resonance or the need for realignment. When we exactly match who we will be when our intent is manifest, that intent arrives in the present—because that’s where we live.
So, yes, ‘tis a great season to be jolly, joyful, grateful and loving. And when such positive affect permeates all the way through our being, it radiates through our health and beyond the season into every moment we make positive through our presence and every positive future we make possible through our becoming. Let’s deck the halls of life with that!
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.