Conscious leadership: Making decisions from fear or love

Bootstrapping vs. venture capital: Growing a business without investors series | Part 5 (Want to start at the beginning? Read Part 1)

This blog is written by Clay Upton, entrepreneur, patent holder, and founder of Bloom Growth. Read his full bio below.

INDEX

• The core question: Who are you for the world
• The ripple effect of leadership decisions
• Fear-based vs. love based decision making
• Daily grounding: The leadership filter
• Reflect on whether fear or love is driving it

The core question: Who are you for the world

Before you lead others, you must lead yourself. The most foundational question of conscious leadership is this:

Who are you for the world?

This is the most important question to answer, but it’s also the hardest one to convey. Without a clear answer, you’ll lead by default rather than by design. And when you don’t choose who you are, fear often chooses for you.

In this five-part series, I’ve given you some practical considerations, but if you start without choosing what you and your company stand for, you’ll end up with disharmony in your organization that ultimately corrupts or kills it from within. Before you dive into the rest of this article, ask yourself:

“What fears are driving your leadership right now?”
“When was the last time you made a decision out of love?”

The ripple effect of leadership decisions

Every decision you make as a leader radiates outward—from your customers and team to their families, your community, and beyond. Your mindset sets the tone. Are you spreading fear or love?

There may be many reasons for your decisions, but when we boil it down, all your actions come from either a place of fear or a place of love.

Fear-based vs. love-based decision making

By default, most decisions come from fear, but with intentionality, your decision-making process can be redesigned and influenced by love. Let’s take a look at where your basis for decisions comes from.

Fear-based decisions stem from:

• Scarcity
• Distrust
• Greed
• Control
• Disempowerment

Love-based decisions emerge from:

• Trust
• Abundance
• Partnership
• Empowerment
• Possibility

Effects of fear-based decision making

Let’s say you need to make payroll. If we were to objectively look inside you, we might find you are afraid of the results of missing payroll. There is nothing wrong with admitting this fear to yourself and others. There is no weakness in it—hard things require strength.

If you were to make your decisions from a place of fear, the way you interact with your team might carry the implicit threat of termination if a goal is not hit. Unintentionally, you transmit that fear to your sales team. You do this because you hope it will ease the fear that is within you, but this relief is only temporary.

Unfortunately, this only results in transplanting that fear into your sales team, which results in them making similar decisions with the people around them. They also do this to assuage this new fear you have transplanted in them.

Their fears are then reflected in the people they interact with. In this way, your fears are replicated a thousand-fold. We are responsible for these ripples we create.

How to lead from love, not fear

By contrast, when you make decisions from a place of love, then this, too, will be transmitted and replicated. Love, in this sense, is based on trust and partnership. Start by sharing your fear along with the cost and impact with your team.

By approaching the problem from a place of partnership, trust, and empowerment, your team is empowered to solve the problem together. Now you are on the same side, rowing in the same direction. There is no manager-employee distinction. You’re building a culture where your team is in partnership with you, where they are empowered and trusted to solve problems—they help you carry your burden instead of adding to it.

Daily grounding: The leadership filter

When you start your day, first ground yourself in the space of love. When you find yourself afraid, your first and only job is to:

1. Transform the fear into love.
2. Resolve not to pass it along.
3. Filter every decision you make through this lens.

You’ll know you understand when you begin to see it everywhere because most of everything we see exists to temper some kind of fear. Most things in our world aren’t built out of love—they’re built to protect us from fear, scarcity, or self-doubt.

People accumulate money and power to try to quiet the fears they have from within, but the underlying fear persists because it is not a hole that can be filled.

“How can our problem be solved with more trust, partnership, empowerment, abundance, and possibilities?”

Reflect on whether fear or love is driving it

We are not independent from the world, the world is a projection of us. Most of us are not choosing who we are, and so we end up with the default fear-based state. If you start your company from a place of fear, all that you will replicate is more fear.

Remember, even when you are successful by every metric, you will not have assuaged your underlying fear. Your company and your success cannot solve the fear you have, only you can transform the fear you have by choosing a new possibility for yourself.

Choose to start from love, and you will be a beacon for that in this world.