Hello Everyone,
I hope you had a good weekend and will be finishing out October strong.
I had always intended “Cultivated Perspective” to be a long-form academic style series of writings; however, with the writing cadence I’ve been able to put out, I’ve realized that the segment will be better suited towards the conversations, such as these, with people who have different backgrounds than my own. So, here is the first-ever “Cultivated Perspective!” I hope you get as much out of it as I did.
Introduction:
As 2025 has shown us, leaders are navigating burnout, polarization, and uncertainty, all while having to care and provide meaning for those who are doing the same. Understanding how awareness and agency flow between individuals and systems is more important than most of us are currently prepared for.
Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to cohost an excellent livestream with
of , on this topic, specifically the relationship between agency and self-awareness, and how leaders can cultivate both.Nicole and I share many thoughts on leadership and organizational culture, but we work from different approaches. As she noted on the live, I tend to work from a holistic perspective on individuals, whereas she works from a holistic perspective on systems, which allowed for a very natural back-and-forth exploration of the topic.
A likely reason for the similarities comes from the fact that neuroscience is the data-driven, modern way of understanding the interconnection between the mind, body, and environment; my approach seeks the same understanding but comes from the myth-making, animistic lens that has been around since before the scientific method and kept alive by indigenous peoples and academics.
I don’t believe that one outlook is better than the other: conversations like these give me hope that such different perspectives can actually support each other in developing better leadership practices. The fact both Nicole and I agree the conversation is far from over is an indication mutual development towards new ways of leading is possible.
In this chat, for example, we used our understanding of neuroscience and myth-making to examine the scaling relationship between agency and awareness through house, ecosystem, and cleaning metaphors. My favorite question that came out of it was: “If Agency were a guest in your house, how would you treat it?”, and I’ll bring that up again later.
A point that stands out from my re-watch of the livestream is that whether you work from a neuroscience perspective or a more theoretical lens, the issues remain the same, but changing the words simply increases understanding. What Nicole would call cognitive dissonance, the Apalech scholar Tyson Yunkaporta would likely call “wrong story,” both are terms that inform when leaders have limited self-awareness and constrained agency.1
Self-Awareness as Shared Stewardship
In most leadership models used today, self-awareness is treated as something internal and contained; held inside and disconnected from the world around you. Like authenticity and agency, it’s often viewed as a personal trait, not a living relationship.
As Nicole noted, many leaders approach self-awareness like a mirror: they polish it, pose for it, and focus on what they see, forgetting to look beyond the reflection of their perspective towards what others might perceive.
From an animistic perspective, awareness is not privately held, but relational. Animism understands that everything people, organizations, even systems, have their own kind of life, energy, and voice that is interconnected. If we attributed sentience to a mirror, then, it wouldn’t reflect, but instead participate in shaping the leaders’ view of themselves. Only using the mirror to see your reflection can blur reality and sever the connection between individual and collective.
There are myths and fables from folklore around the world about reflective entities that might steal our soul, which may serve as a warning that reflection absent relationship and contextual understanding can disconnect us from the life around us.2 We’ve all seen the frightening speed at which AI can produce deepfakes that distort our perception of reality, perhaps these stories are worth listening to with a modern context.3
Particularly in discussions and training on emotional intelligence, leaders are told to ‘actively listen’, and its always framed as the leader focusing on hearing the voice of thoughts of the other and not projecting their perspective onto them. While important, this frame is binary and does not help with understanding the relationship between people.
True self-awareness is more akin to listening to your body and thoughts as it interacts with what you are hearing and seeing from others, to the unseen signals that reveal the interconnected relationship with everything else. Just as breathing exercises help us focus on our body and mind, awareness links individuals to their organizational bodies.
Nicole offered a helpful metaphor to practice this: think of yourself as a house. When that house is messy, you might feel frustration or shame, particularly if you had a guest over, or were gauging a potential roommate. But, if you view the mess relationally, you can move through those feelings by asking “What is this mess trying to tell me?” Somewhere within the web of connections, energy is being extracted faster than it is being restored.
The same is true of organizations. When the collective house (work atmosphere and culture) feels chaotic, tense, or drained, it indicates that something is out of balance and that connections between people and meaning are beginning to fray, rather than a moral failure of any one individual.
Individuals tend to sense these disconnections first, because they form the organizational nervous system. Just like people, organizations don’t think clearly when they don’t feel safe. Under stress, the pre-frontal cortex, which Nicole informed us is the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, empathy, and strategic thinking, goes quiet, putting blinders on us.
Nearly every signal is interpreted as a threat or harm. Take this further, and the same pattern appears at the systemic level: cultures, economies, and political systems contract when they feel unsafe, interpreting uncertainty as danger rather than an invitation to grow. Over time, if this feeling is sustained it can lead to the kind of hyper-vigilance common in military veterans and civilians with PTSD.4
Note the language I’m using. We talk about how a city feels alive, how organizational culture drains or invigorates us, and how economic or political systems treat people a certain way. These words are animistic in their framing, we are attributing sentience to them in order to make sense of how they affect our life.
Leaders who recognize these dynamics and respond with expanded awareness increase their agency and become stewards of organizational meaning and drive. They can bring order to chaos and restore a sense of safety, meaning, and shared purpose so long as they themselves don’t shut down into self-preservation.
Leaders are the prefrontal cortex of communities.
When leaders understand their role as part of the ecosystem rather than separate from it, they act as natural filters (also tying to Nicole’s example of dirty HVAC filters creating a toxic environment) to the noise that sends most people into a panic. They help the “house” remain a psychologically safe place.
Leaders care for their personal house so that the community can breathe again. In animistic terms, tending to yourself is tending to the living system you are a part of, they are one and the same. Over time, leaders learn to interpret what the house is telling them intuitively through the connection felt.
Myths, Translation, and Bridging Meaning
If self-awareness is how we learn to listen, translation is how we understand what we hear, both internally and externally.
Animistic traditions hold that all entities, human and non-human alike, are in constant conversation with each other. The language may not be words, but in signals, rhythms, feelings, intuitions, patterns, and stories.
In this view, everything is always telling a story; people, teams, and organizations are all storytellers who translate experience into meaning. The stories we tell determine how we understand what is happening and inform our choices and decisions.
Whereas neuroscience maps neuron relationships, animism maps entity relationships; both are ways of understanding the living, intelligent reciprocity moving through an interconnected system.
If leaders are the prefrontal cortex of organizational culture, they have to train themselves to stay in tune and not shut down in times of fear and stress. If that part of the brain goes quiet and our awareness of the ecosystem closes off, we lose access to perspective.
Organizations mirror this. When systems feel unsafe or uncertain, decision-making tightens, creativity fades, and communication becomes abrasive as the organ(ism)ization curls inward, reactively protecting rather than connecting and growing. In simpler terms, the system runs out of breath. The pulse of communication, the heartbeat of any collective, becomes to shallow to be effective.
In both approaches, animistic and neurological, awareness is relational. Whether we are speaking of a brain or an ecosystem of relationships, the flow of energy and information between its parts is critical to its functioning.
If the system begins speaking in fragmented or distorted signals, leaders must translate those into understanding and meaning. This involves asking “What story are we telling about this moment? Whose voice is missing? What reciprocity is out of balance?” Through this process they help the organizational ecosystem enter into a dialogue with itself.
In this sense, leaders are both the prefrontal cortex and the nervous system of the collective entity. They are at once a steward and the one being stewarded. Nicole pointed out that our brains (and those of our organizations) constantly fill in gaps. When information is missing or doesn’t align with what we want to believe, we filter through assumptions, and leaders decide what meaning to push to the rest of the body.
This is where myths begin (something I’ve talked about before), with the stories we tell ourselves to feel safe, in control, or validated. We carry them with us, both personally and organizationally, and shape how we interpret stress, failure, and success. They act as the oral history of organizational culture that cloud understanding or let new meaning form.
Nicole’s “dirty filter” metaphor captured this sentiment quite well. If bias, fatigue, or fear clog our individual and organizational “air filtration systems,” then empathy can’t flow. A tired or fearful team will create narratives that make sense of the stress, but invisibly extract from long-term trust and cohesion. The air grows thick with misunderstanding, communication becomes stale, and the cultural atmosphere oppressive. Cleaning the filter, whether through self-care, replacing a toxic leader with a healthy one, or collective reflection and dialogue restores fresh air flow.
Meta-awareness, as Nicole calls it, is the capacity to notice how we make meaning. It allows leaders to clean the filter. From an animistic view, this same process is one of tending the field, leaving an offering out for a local spirit, or not cutting down the biggest tree by the riverbank and instead removing the poison ivy from it.
Both describe the same act of stewardship: bringing awareness to what has become blocked and toxic, reestablishing connection through restorative ritual, and empowering individuals and collective identities to thrive.
Leaders who tend to their filters and help others do the same cultivate psychological safety and clarity so that everyone in the house can support each other and fulfill their roles and obligations.
Leadership as regenerative stewardship of shared agency.
Agency is not an “asset” to own. The ability to act with intention, is not something we can isolate from our relationships to other entities, though many try. It is an energy that moves through us, passed down by our predecessors, shaped by our relationships, and enabled through a combination of environment and choice. It renews us, if we let it.5
As with guests in our home, Agency asks to be treated with care and respect. If leaders treat the Agency as private and individual, they can only extract from it, draining their energy and that of others, passing the bill down the line. This will be done until there is very little left to mobilize people towards a goal beyond the discipline of having no other choice. But, when Agency is engaged with as a communal relationship, it flows, renews, and sustains life within the system.
This is what is missing from modern leadership discourse. Leaders who approach culture via regenerative stewardship understand that people and organizations aren’t mirrors that reflect each other, but living components of an ecosystem that affect each other. Energy, emotion, and meaning all connect our people, processes, and structures together in all directions. When a leader is exhausted, disconnected, or fearful, the organization feels that tension, because it is alive; when the organization feels unsafe or depleted, its leaders carry that same strain.
Stewardship is the act of being self-aware of this reciprocity and using agency to tend to it, nurturing self and system as one entity.
All of this brings Nicole and mine’s approaches to converge with the question:
if Agency was a guest in your house, how would you treat it?
Would you ignore it until it left? Would you demand it serve you? Or would you be hospitable, offer it food, drink and shelter, learn its preferences and create space for it, building a relationship so that it could in turn take care of you down the road?
Agency isn’t something you have or don’t have. It isn’t a resource to hoard, a skill to master. It is a current of life that when engaged with relationally can empower individuals, teams, and systems. It’s held in the Commons I referenced earlier this summer, and while many people in leadership positions extract from it in a way that will have to be repaid by someone else, or try to limit who gets to exercise it, Agency simply is.
Exercising agency as a leader, has nothing to do with control.
Awareness, meaning, and agency form the living aspects of leadership. When leaders listen to the signals of their house, filter the stories of their collective, and treat Agency as a member of that community, as a guest, their organizational ecosystem is regenerated and sustainable.
Just as an ecosystem thrives through balance and exchange, so too does an organization. Team culture grows from how the group manages its house and tends to its garden, the stories, emotions, and energies circulating throughout it. The aim isn’t perfection as much as ongoing, purposeful care.
Whether we refer to Agency as the prefrontal cortex of the organization or as the guardian spirit of the organization, both serve as lenses to understand that leadership itself becomes a shared responsibility wherein everyone contributes to the agency and awareness that sustains us all.
Thank you for watching and reading this segment of Cultivar, consider adding your thoughts in the comments, sharing with someone this might resonate with, or subscribing for similar content.
If you would like to connect with me or Nicole on LinkedIn you are more than welcome to, and if anything you read or listened to today sparked curiosity, my inbox and calendar are open for conversation.
Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell. Text Publishing. Austrailia, 2023.
https://thefundamentalsofphotography.medium.com/the-camera-and-soul-capturing-336f38850c32
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/deepfakes-and-crisis-knowing
https://www.health.com/hypervigilance-7095960
It also could be related in a roundabout way to the old Norse concept of hamingja, I’ll let you explore that and decide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamingja
