Who's Leading: You or Your Nervous System? – with Carolyn Hart

**“Your nervous system walks through the door before you do.”** We like to think that how we show up as leaders is largely a conscious choice. We prepare, set our intentions, choose our words, and try to behave in ways that reflect the kind of leader we want to be. But what if something else is already happening before we say a word? And what if some of the challenges we experience as leaders are not about lacking skills, mindset, or experience, but about what is happening in our nervous system? In this episode, we speak with Carolyn Hart, leadership consultant, workplace culture architect, author of Evolve: The Path to Trauma-Informed Leadership, and co-founder of Resilient Voices. We explore how our nervous system affects our capacity to lead under pressure – and how the state we bring into the room can affect not only ourselves, but everyone around us. **Highlights** - **You can't outthink your nervous system.** We may know rationally that a situation is safe and still experience it as threatening. Our nervous system is constantly taking in signals from the environment and influencing how we respond. Often before we are consciously aware of it. Under pressure, this can affect our ability to listen, connect, think creatively, or handle disagreement. - **Leadership is not only about skills, it’s also about capacity.** Carolyn reflects on her own executive career and the feeling that she wasn't able to lead the way she wanted to. She later came to see this not simply as a personal failing, but as her nervous system struggling to hold the level of stress and pressure she was experiencing. Sometimes the question may therefore not be “What skill am I missing?” but “What capacity do I have available right now?” - **Your state affects the people around you.** Before we even speak, people are picking up signals from us – through our tone, facial expressions, pace, and energy. We may intend to create psychological safety, but intention alone is not enough. As Carolyn puts it: you can't have psychological safety without physiological safety. - **Resilience is not the same as toughness.** Organizations often respond to increasing pressure by asking people to become more resilient. But if resilience means becoming tougher and continuing to push through, we may actually reinforce the problem. Carolyn describes resilience instead as fluidity: the ability to move through different nervous-system states without becoming stuck in one of them. - **Awareness gives us more choice.** We cannot simply think our way out of our nervous system's response. But we can learn to notice what is happening and work with it. A pause, a breath, naming an emotion, or simply putting our feet on the floor can create enough space to respond differently. Sometimes slowing down may actually increase our capacity to perform. We may not fully control how our nervous system responds, but the more aware we become of it, the more responsibility we can take for how we show up. **Reflection questions** - What do you notice, in your heart, your head, and your body? - Before you walk into a meeting, what is your intention, and what can you do to help others in the room feel psychologically and physiologically safe? - As a leader, how does your state impact your team? And how aware are you of that impact? **Connect with Carolyn Hart** Please reach out to Carolyn via LinkedIn, or Instagram @becomingcarolynhart, or her webpage www.resilientvoices.ca  **About Second Crack** More information about us and our work is available on our website: secondcrackleadership.com. **Contact us now** to explore how we can support your **leadership development** in a **company-wide initiative** or with individual executive coaching**:** hello@secondcrackleadership.com. **Connect with us on LinkedIn** Martin Aldergård Gerrit Pelzer