Why is Passion so Important for Creating Deep Learning as a Leader?

The brain has a very special system, which needs to be activated to let it grow—the so-called "emotional system" (Hüther, 2006). Without activation of this emotional system, there can be no growth, and the emotion that activates the system is enthusiasm, or passion. Interest alone is not enough, what is needed is emotional participation. Your emotional sensors in the midbrain need to be activated, and once they are, the respective cell clusters release so-called neuroplastic transmitters. These transmitters are never released when you try to learn what is written in a telephone book, for example. They are only released if something happens that is really important to you, that excites you, that goes under your skin; otherwise the emotional center is not activated.

When this emotional center is activated and the transmitters are released, they act like a fertilizer for the brain. Then they can activate cascades in the cell and its nucleus and stimulate the expression of new gene sequences. New proteins are produced, which are needed for neurons to grow new processes and connections that are even more complicated, sophisticated and stable than before. So it is actually true that only under conditions of deep involvement and emotional excitement, the fertilizer in the brain is released (Hüther, 2008).

In general a society or culture is eager to have everything work smoothly, perfectly even, but this causes a big problem because the better something works, the less excited we are. All excitement disappears. Then the young are our only hope, and we should more readily learn from them. Especially the very young, 3-year-olds can learn so much. They can learn everything because their emotional system, their excitement system, is switched on and the fertilizer is released in the brain about 50-100 times a day. And then we send them to school, where they make less exciting experiences with learning.

Problem-Orientation Does Not Lead Into the Future Change

The problem with excitement and passion is that they cannot be ordered or commanded. Even worse, in our culture, we often discourage each other, we steal the excitement from each other by telling each other what to do, how difficult something is and how it is not going to work. It is not possible to excite somebody we have thus turned into an object. It is that simple. We need to rediscover the other person as a partner (Schein, 2009) with whom we can enter into contact at the same level.

We all have experienced everyday feedback from superiors (in various contexts) such as:

• You are wrong,

• This is too late,

• This is your fault,

• This is your mistake,

• You are not good enough.

This old-fashioned way of authoritarian communication turns the other person into an object and at the same time signifies an intervention, which causes fear and pressure rather than success. Negative feedback is useless because learning does not occur in such situations: nothing good happens in the brain because this type of intervention leads to nothing new; fear makes it impossible to develop new synaptic connections (Huther, 1996). The harder an authoritarian leader tries, the less learning happens, which often leads to anger and aggression—a hopeless situation.

Recognizing and appreciating the differences between supportive and authoritarian leadership strategies as contrasted in the following table would be a first step to invite for deep learning.