“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” This principle, attributed to Navy Seals and mountain climbers, holds wisdom for leaders of all types. It’s most needed in the very times when it’s easiest to forget, which is when we get spun up into the flurry of things. Even on the surface this is good advice as haste makes mistakes. Look a little deeper and it’s even more important for leaders, as everything leadership relies on—from sensing an emerging future to bringing others along—gets compromised when we move too quickly. As we enter a year that promises to be wildly unpredictable, with swift-moving currents of ecological, social and political change, it’s worth remembering what slowing down does for us as leaders and a surefire way to access it.
Slow is smooth, smooth is coherent
We would not choose to be or follow an incoherent leader. Yet, sped-up times can make us incoherent as not all of our parts can change at the same rate. Some thoughts change quickly, while others are held in place by long-term beliefs or self-limiting habits. A thought stream can change more quickly than the emotions it gives rise to. Negative emotions, associated with stress, grievance, or fear bring tension into the body that disrupts smooth heart functioning and the flow of energy. These are just a few of the measurable ways that incoherence arises in our body-mind system. Conversely, objective measures of coherence as seen in heart rate variability or electroencephalograms (EEGs) pretty-well match the subjective experience of “smoothness” or feeling whole.
The Heart Math Institute puts coherence at the center of their research and wellness guidance, complete with a mobile app to measure when one is in a state of heart-brain coherence. According to their research, at a frequency of .1 Hz (i.e., every 10 seconds) heart and brain vibrations can sync up (rather than interfere) and they’ve developed a widely-practiced protocol for the process.
Slow is smooth, smooth is resonant
As social beings whose survival depends on relationships, our nervous system is rife with ways to sense other people’s states. When we’re around someone who is nervous and twitchy, if we’re reasonably sensitive, we can feel their high frequency agitation. When someone is “all over the place,” it’s hard to get on the same wavelength with them because there are just too many wavelengths, all interfering with each other. Conversely, when we sense a person is calm and centered, we’re more likely to resonate with them and may even feel ourselves calming down in their presence. Mirror neurons that resonate with another’s movement give us a way to replicate their subjective state.
Another mechanism underlying the attraction of a smooth, coherent state is the fact that the heart is the primary generator of the electromagnetic field around our body. When that heart is happily coherent, the field it generates is stronger. Most of us don’t “see” these fields around people, but we certainly feel them, as we’re generating our own field and our fields interact, that is, resonate with one another to greater and lesser degrees. Terms like charisma, positivity or leadership presence speak to this energetic attractiveness.
Joel Barker once described a leader as someone you’d choose to follow to a place you wouldn’t go by yourself. That’s a way of describing resonant relationships, where we truly get on the same wavelength with others and can journey coherently, together.
Slow is smooth, smooth is attuned
Slowing down is good not only for our happily coherent heart and head and the resonant relationships we participate in, but also for attuning to subtle signals. When our system is noisy and rushed, it is like choppy water reflecting a shoreline. One can make out the most obvious features reflected in choppy water, but subtle or high frequency features like a butterfly winging its way between flowers are missed. But if the waves settle down and the water becomes smooth, more features and frequencies of movement become evident. In a leadership sense, some of those signals are important clues as to the emerging future—what’s ready to happen next, what’s calling. Slow and smooth, we listen better and we hear more.
We also see how speed changes our attunement by looking at the large-scale energy patterns in our nervous system that coordinate thought and movement. At the physiological extremes are the Visionary pattern, which is peripherally open and expansive and the Driver, which is singularly focused and pushing. When we start pushing against the clock, we tend to enter the Driver pattern, which trades away peripheral vision and lateral thinking for the hellbent hitting of a target. You can experience this trade-off in attunement if you press your hands together in front of you and site down your index fingers as if your life depended on it (Driver), and then release your hands, letting them drift to the sides of your head as wide as your peripheral vision can possibly see (Visionary). Going back and forth between these two states, you’ll see that they yield different information and feel quite different. Leaders need Driver energy to hit targets, but they also need to slow down into the broader attunement of Visionary to sense which targets are worth hitting.
Slow is smooth, smooth is connected
Slow and smooth leadership attunes us to more information and enriches our connection with life itself so that we can respond to what’s calling with ease and effectiveness, as if we are dancing with life. We feel a part of what is going on, not apart from it.
Conversely, when the energetic formation that is ego distances itself from the material body and gets lost in thoughts, it can get lost, indeed. Conditioned by the past, including lived trauma, intergenerational trauma, social conditioning, needs for survival, fears that those needs won’t be met, its sense of its own power and inadequacies, its effort to control and exploit to feel more powerful and less inadequate, the ego can loop around in its thought patterns, heavily filtering and distorting what the senses present. Far from being an anomaly, it is this sense of separation that gives rise to unhappiness and the ills of our world.
Slowing down, as one does in meditation, for example, we drop into a frequency range that can see through the ego’s chattering sideshow. That doesn’t make it instantly stop, but over time it becomes more transparent, more connected and less distorting. By opening the senses, feeling gravity through one’s entire body, something deep and true of the earth itself, of life and the universe, infuses the ego’s thoughts until it can no longer pretend to be separate. This is at the heart of Zen Leadership, where we come to trust the wisdom that arises from such connection more than the cleverness of a self-preserving self.
Slow is smooth, smooth is timeless
In the depth of meditation, slowing down becomes stopping, where time stands still—or better put, the maker of time goes silent. This all-expansive samadhi is indescribably blissful and, just the same, is a state that comes and goes. But it shows us something of the false efficiency of time-based hurrying and efficacy of slowing down to catch the wave of life.
Slow your exhale, smooth now
So how do we do it. I harken back to a timeless moment at Chozen-ji where I did a good deal of my Zen training. One day, as I was sitting in meditation, Tanouye Roshi unexpectedly entered the dojo, presumably to inspect us. When he walked by me, he said, under his breath, just barely loud enough for me to hear, “Slow down your breathing even more and you’ll see all the way through.” That was good enough advice and sufficient encouragement to guide me for years. In this line of Zen, we slow down the breath by lengthening the exhale, as it is the relaxing part of the breath cycle and slows down one’s entire system.
How slow is slow enough? According to the Cleveland Clinic, most adults breathe around 15 times a minute. Slowing that to 6 times a minute brings breath into the .1 Hz range that supports heart and head coherence. Slowing it to 2-3 times a minute maintains coherence while making, in effect, a smoother mirror for discerning perceptions, thoughts and feelings. Lengthen your exhale, and it’s as if now itself smooths out.
Slow is smooth, and smooth means we’re more coherent, resonant with others, attuned to the bigger picture, connected with life, and able to see the flurry from relative stillness. Let out a long, slow exhale and ask yourself: why would you want to lead any other way?