More from Alper Utku's Open Heart Leadership blog. He and I have a weekly dialog/ue where I challenge Alper's ideas and the ones that survive being hit with a hammer go through to form Alper's blog posts. Please feel free to comment on them yourself to help Alper sharpen his definition of a form of leadership fit for the 21st century. He's posting on Courage this week and next. Here's an excerpt from his second post:

I was talking with a friend, Stuart Turnbull, who is particularly interested in love in organizations, and we realized that the word ‘courage’ has its root in ‘heart’. ‘Cour’ = ‘coeur’ (’heart’ in French). That explains why Courage seems to sit at the core of Open Heart Leadership, as it is about acting from the heart.

In Turkish, we have the same connection as the Latin root: being courageous almost translates directly to being ‘heartful’. That brings us to the word ‘encouraging’, which also has ‘heart’ at its core, and is about nurturing courage in others to do the right thing - an essential part of leadership.

If we follow this ‘heart’ link, it is a vital topic in different philosophies. In Sufi-ism, the heart is the ‘house of the divine’ and you are promised a state of no fears, no worries if you connect completely with the heart.

Manfred Clynes, the psychologist (see the MindMap jpeg in the post below) has a basic construct of emotional rhythms he calls ‘Sentic States’. He says they are universal, shared across cultures by all humanity. The seven Sentic States have been linked to the seven chakras of the body by Peter Hawkins of the Bath Consultancy Group, who has used the model in training.

The seven Sentic States are:

Post continues here (August 26th)

Labels: 21st century leadership, Alper Utku, Bath Consultancy Group, courage and leadership, Manfred Clynes, Open Heart Leadership, Peter Hawkins, Sentic States, Stuart Turnbull