An Interview With Edward Sylvan
Leader as Healer is a book about the highest levels of presence and peak performance leadership, and the cultures that ensue from them, in which wellbeing, results and contribution to the world are naturally interwoven.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicholas Janni.
Nicholas Janni is an author and leadership consultant with a focus on deep presence. He bridges the worlds of professional, personal and spiritual development in a uniquely powerful, relevant and accessible way.
He is one of the growing number of global thought leaders bringing a rewriting, a new paradigm of leadership, to meet the urgency of our times. A paradigm in which we recognise how dangerously disconnected we have become, rewire the balance between doing and being, and bring all of ourselves to the table.
He mentors CEOs and senior leadership teams worldwide on reaching advanced levels of consciousness and effectiveness and also teaches at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and the IMD Business School in Switzerland.
His latest book, Leader as Healer (March 2022, Lid Publishing), is a guide to reaching the highest levels of presence and performance. He argues that modern leaders need to break from the normalised and chronically imbalanced ways of thinking and functioning, in which rational thinking dominates, leaving no room for feeling, sensing and intuiting.
He has delivered programmes for CEOs across the world. Recent clients include Eugene Woods of Atrium Health and Michelle McMurry-Heath of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. Previous clients have included Anglo American, Fedex, Microsoft, Rolls Royce, Lafarge, the NHS and UK permanent secretaries.
Before becoming a leadership consultant 20 years ago, he directed his own theatre company and taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1997, he was also part of the company which opened the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London.
He has also studied drumming with masters in west Africa and Japan, made two percussion albums, and performed throughout the UK and Europe.
Nicholas, 67, is married with two grown-up children and lives in Oxfordshire and Puglia, south Italy.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I was born in London in 1954, the only child of an affluent show business family.
My father, an Italian Jew, was brought up in Milan and fled to England in 1938 with his mother. While studying engineering at Milan University, he had entered a film in the Venice Film Festival amateur competition in 1938. He won, but when they realised he was Jewish they refused to give him the prize. His response: “One day I will come back and win the main prize.”
After the war, he became one of the world’s top film producers. With his close friend, the director John Schlesinger, he made Billy Liar, A Kind of Loving, Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Yanks. And he won first prize at Venice.
My mother was of Welsh origin, brought up in an upper-middle-class family in Brighton, and was one of the first women to earn a scholarship to study at Oxford University. A brilliant, vivacious and exceptionally beautiful woman, she met my father while working as an assistant on one of his early films.
My parents lived a “celebrity” lifestyle in Chelsea. Film stars of the day were our regular house guests. It was the Swinging Sixties and we lived near the famous King’s Road. Ours was high energy, always exciting, but also deeply volatile home, and only later did I understand how thick the air had been with my parents’ unspoken, unhealed trauma.
During the war, my mother’s only sibling had died in his Supermarine Spitfire, a single-seat fighter plane, his loss made worse by the fact that neither his aircraft nor his body was ever found. Though it was never openly discussed, she was eventually diagnosed with manic depression, or what is now termed bipolar illness. My father, a Holocaust survivor, ploughed onwards by burying not just the trauma, but his entire identity as a Jew, including any relic of religiosity or spirituality.
While my mother’s emotional instability grew, matched in intensity by the disabling lows of chronic fatigue, my father regularly erupted with a volcanic rage. At nine years old, I was sent away to boarding school. Initially, I was overwhelmed by the pain of separation, a trauma in its own right and the basis for the UK therapy group Boarding School Survivors. Later, however, I began to love being at school. It was there that I made my first 16mm film and where I had my first powerful theatre experience, playing the role of Lady Macbeth. I still remember our excellent drama teacher and the intensity with which we performed.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
At 16, my life radically changed direction. At school in London, I was fully immersed in the teenage counterculture of the times — sex, drugs and rock and roll — to which academic study became a tedious interference. It was the norm to listen to Pink Floyd, Yes, The Nice and others play live at all-night concerts. But as one school holiday approached, I was invited to accompany a friend on a visit to his grandmother in Scotland. She lived as a nun at Samye Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Lockerbie.
One day, someone lent me a classic Buddhist text, which I sat down one afternoon to read. It suggested that we each live inside a small, tightly conditioned experience of self and the world, one that conceals something much deeper and vastly more real. Suddenly — I cannot know how or why — it was as if an enormous curtain had been torn open, exposing this truer, vaster reality to me.
I had never thought about such things, yet immediately understood in my bones the truth of what I was reading. It irrevocably altered the course of my life. Ever since the drive to explore the deeper self and the more expanded sense of reality that ancient text pointed towards has been the central focus of my life.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?
Not a mistake, but certainly funny and more…
I have practised meditation most of my adult life. I remember a time when I opened my eyes to find my two children, aged two and five at the time, sitting there staring at me. And how they then started being there most days, quietly.
Three years later I was with my son at a friend’s house, and he, aged five, asked if she would like him to teach her how to meditate. She said she would, so he sat down cross-legged and closed his eyes…
Now, aged 25, he meditates every day, and is in the leadership team of a group of men dedicated to providing young men from all walks of life a platform to speak openly and vulnerably with each other about their emotions.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
Leader as Healer is a book about the highest levels of presence and peak performance leadership, and the cultures that ensue from them, in which wellbeing, results and contribution to the world are naturally interwoven.
It is, above all, a call to break from the chronically imbalanced ways of thinking and functioning that have become the norm in so many corporate cultures, where “doing” eclipses “being”, and hyper-rational, analytical thinking relegates feeling, sensing, intuiting and the transpersonal to the outer fringes of life.
I believe that the failure to correct this imbalance is severely detrimental not only to individual and organisational performance, but to our capacity for creating healthy, thriving futures.
In the book, I outline a theoretical and practical path to a new paradigm of leadership. It is a path of restoration through which we reintegrate previously exiled aspects of our nature: physical, emotional and transpersonal. On this pathway, the brilliance and sophistication of the thinking self take its rightful place alongside the sensing and feeling selves, together creating a much larger, more holistic intelligence.
To face the scope and threats of 21st-century challenges, today’s leaders must possess potent powers for logic, reason, discernment and strategic forecasting. Yet, they must also be empathic and, therefore, embodied; grounded and, therefore, intuitive. They must be skilled in mindfulness and deep listening; present and receptive to higher levels of insight and innovation; able to inspire authentic engagement and collaboration; and possess a clear and wholehearted sense of service, mission and purpose.
I call this leader the Leader as Healer.
The message has been extremely well-received. Could there be a time when healing is needed more?
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
The famous Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski became my first great mentor. Straight after university, I secured a British Council grant to go study with him in Poland.
At the height of his international acclaim, he had stopped his theatre work in order to more directly explore the further reaches of human consciousness.
A small group of us were taken out to a forest, to a rundown stable block, which became our home for the next week.
We would be conducting an experiment, we were told: we were to cease all speaking, go together into the forest and surrounding countryside, and walk or run for hours on end.
Although it was sub-zero February, we weren’t allowed to wear coats or gloves. After returning, we would eat and then sleep, fully clothed in sleeping bags, for only two hours, after which we were awoken and directed back outside to start again.
This routine went on for five days. It was challenging, to say the least, but despite the intense cold and discomfort, we all experienced moments of extraordinary oneness — of total connection — to each other and to the surrounding landscapes. And the body became warm inside.
The experience has been etched in me ever since. To this day I see and feel it.
And, it was my first big awakening regarding how essential the experience of embodiment is.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
The growing understanding of how much we live in, and have normalised, what I call a culture of “absence”.
This culture is both dangerously disconnected, and not fit for purpose. We are trying to navigate the ever-growing challenges and instability of our time as if with one hand tied beyond our back. We seem to have forgotten that thinking does not feel, and if we navigate the world without feeling we are truly lost.
One of my US CEO clients came for a coaching session a few months into our work, having just attended a CEO conference, and experienced a revelation.
She said: “Nicholas, for the very first time I saw how no one was really listening to anyone. I saw how someone spoke, and how it did not truly land in the person they were speaking to.”
She had woken up from the coma of “absence”.
Humanity is at a very dangerous juncture. We are heading towards cliff-edges, of which climate change is but one, and one we are completely failing to address adequately.
Our political leaders are for the most part desperately lacking in inner moral, emotional and spiritual intelligence, and there are far too many people in senior leadership positions, responsible for tens to thousands of people, who are disgracefully lacking in personal development.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
The CEO of a US health care organisation, has 70,000 employees. African American. He came to me, by recommendation, for coaching. In our 18 months of work he dived deep into the personal and intergenerational trauma he was carrying, as well as opening to quite new levels of his sense of purpose. His achievements since we finished the coaching are simply breathtaking. He was recently named in the top five most important figures in US healthcare.
He wrote me just last week:
“The board of directors did my performance evaluation yesterday. When they took inventory of all the things that my team has done over this past year… built the first new hospital the organization has in 30 years; acquired a new health system; launched the creation of new medical school, and innovation district; landed major company from France to headquarter with us; launched $1 billion +construction; managed through the hell of the biggest wave in the pandemic, while still meeting budget financially; and perhaps on the cusp of creating the most consequential and capable not-for-profit health system in the nation… and then most importantly, putting together a team of leaders that are engaged, connected, and really driving a healthy culture.
“That said, I’m still really taken back by the universal confidence and support in my leadership, and comments like ‘you’re the best thing to ever happen to this organization’… ‘thank you for being the person you are’… ‘we thank you for listening and leading us into this exciting future you have charted out’ etc etc.
“The point being, you have played such a significant role in my journey — leveraging your wisdom and experience and tremendous insights to help guide me through some of the most intense professional and personal times in my life (especially when I couldn’t see the daylight) — and you have helped me come through a better leader and a person.”
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
- Break the spell of disconnection and over-reliance on left-brain thinking, and bring feeling, sensing and intuiting fully back to the table
- Get beyond the ego needs for power, status and recognition and step into highest potential for the benefit of all
- Attend to emotional wounding in order to navigate the world with compassion and an open heart
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
I see two models of leadership at play: the Leader as Executor and the Leader as Healer.
In recent decades, as the world has driven for growth and efficiency above all else, the Leader as Executor became the dominant global business model, the prevailing standard that sees “great” leaders as drivers of action and agents of discipline. Their relationships are transactional, and their goals are primarily instrumental: maximise profit and shareholder returns. The power of Executors rests in a metaphorical sword to be wielded on the perpetual battlefield of business competition. And it is a war of attrition.
Executors operate from a narrow bandwidth, characterised by the primacy of the rational, strategic mind. They are generally disconnected from their emotional and physical selves, which creates an absence of deep listening and receptivity. Executors function almost constantly in a ‘doing’ modality with little or no access to “being”.
Healers, on the other hand, are leaders who have highly developed rational minds and have likewise invested in their emotional and psychological development. They are leaders who transmit embodied presence. They have explored and sufficiently reintegrated wounded parts of themselves and developed higher levels of consciousness and innovative capacity, abilities described by all cultures for thousands of years. As a result, these leaders bring to the table their cognitive, emotional and embodied physical selves; no part of the whole is excluded.
The Leader as Healer sees the world, its problems and potential solutions in very different ways than the Leader as Executor. The Healer can analyse and strategize every bit as well as the Executor, but knows what it means to connect with themself and others, to integrate being and doing, proactivity and receptivity, rationality and intuition.
This fresh and necessarily radical vision offers an entirely new perspective on leadership. As we face ‘the new abnormal,’ the prior model is no longer enough. Simply put, execution-style leadership doesn’t cut it. As Albert Einstein advised, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them. It is time for a new toolbox.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- Meditation will not heal your emotional trauma
I spent many years believing it would until I discovered there was no avoiding personal emotional therapy.
2. Intergenerational trauma is handed down through the generations
I fully understood this when I trained with Thomas Hubl between 2013 and 2018 and then ran ongoing groups in the UK, US and Israel to address the topic.
3. We cannot face the pain of the world alone
I learned that when a group decides to be conscious together, it is possible, and necessary, to turn towards the “darkness”. I participated in four five-day groups of 200 Germans and 50 Jewish people addressing the Holocaust. Not as a topic to discuss, but rather to feel together all its residue. It was intense and extraordinary work.
4. Community is essential
Having friends and colleagues with whom one can share both the joys and inspiration of life, as well as the pain and fears, is one of the most precious things of all.
5. We need to discard a lot of the trappings of traditional religion, but not throw out the baby without the bathwater
On a hot day in Egypt in 1982, I made the long climb upward to the main chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Inside, there were only the stark, stone walls and a solitary open stone sarcophagus. As soon as I arrived in the chamber, I was transfixed by the atmosphere. After a few minutes, I found myself immersed in an altered state, similar to those I had experienced during meditative and creative practices, except for its unusual intensity. I closed my eyes and soon lost all sense of time. I felt as if I were standing in the epicentre of a great energy vortex. Eventually, a small group of other tourists arrived, and it was clear that they were irritated by the climb. Within seconds of arriving, a woman angrily proclaimed “there’s nothing here!” and stormed out, followed quickly by her companions.
In contemporary culture, the transpersonal is rarely transparent. As a result, we are truly lost.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
The great 13th-century Persian mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī invited us to: “Live in the Nowhere that you come from, even though you have an address here.”
How often do we hear versions of: “I know meditation is helpful, but it’s so difficult to find the time for it.”
In the face of our ever more unstable and troubled times, and the tragedy of the current war, I believe we need to stop treating meditation as a kind of palliative add-on to help us feel a bit less stressed, and realise that it has a much deeper purpose.
Meditation opens our access to dimensions of reality far beyond the five senses, dimensions that have been described by every culture for several thousand years. In our self-obsessed culture, it is easy to forget its deeper purpose: to dissolve the experience of separation; to broaden and transform one’s sense of I/me; and to open oneself to the mystery of a deeper unified field.
“Nowhere” is timeless, completely outside of 2022. It always was, always is, and always will be. Nothing can ever change that.
To be rooted in it is NOT a way to disassociate from “here”, although it can be used in that way. On the contrary, it permits us to feel the world even more vulnerably and nakedly, with our deepest humanity; and yet to relate to, respond to and navigate “here” from an inner ground that does not depend on anything exterior in the world for illusions of stability and certainty.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Vladimir Putin. Simply to be in direct contact with the forces inside him that drive his behaviour.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Follow me on LinkedIn, on which I publish a biweekly newsletter about the key features of a new paradigm for 21st-century leadership.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Nicholas Janni Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.