Why does good leadership require you to learn about healing?

Why do you need to learn the arts of healing to be a good leader? I often get asked this question by professionals and why learning about shamanic healing helps. The answer depends greatly on how you understand both leading and healing. 

From a shamanic and ecocentric perspective – where one walks in the world with a deep understanding of wholeness - the aim of leadership is to nurture relationships and support where a system or organisation energetically wants to go. It stems from the understanding that an organisation is a living system with its own energy. This is very different to traditional forms of leadership where the leader's role is often assumed to be an external force heroically driving an organisation forward and where the organisation is made of cogs, structures and 'performers'.

From an ecocentric steward’s view, they then focus on three important things.

1. They start with themselves. They operate as if they are their organisation, deeply entangled within it rather than standing outside it. How they find balance within themselves directly shapes what happens in the wider living system they lead.

   
   

2. They tend to the relations between people and more than human kin. They support healthy relations within their organisation and around it, helping individual people and other beings and their relationships move towards greater balance themselves.

   
   

3. They steward the system as a whole. They support and nurture what helps an organisation – as a living system – go where it wants to go, find greater alignment within its ever-shifting patterns of its own life cycles and change.

   
   

All three depend on the same underlying ability: to sense imbalance and help something move back towards coherence. That ability at its root is a form of healing.

So why healing?

At its simplest, healing from an ecocentric perspective means helping something — a person, a relationship, a place — move toward balance and wholeness rather than treating a ‘problem’ as something mechanical and isolated that needs to be solved. We clearly sometimes need to pop a pill, but that often treats symptoms rather than getting to the underlying imbalance. Such imbalance – form and ecocentric perspective - is understood as the root of dis-ease irrespective of whether it shows up as illness in a person or dysfunction in a team. Healing is then the practice of restoring right relationship: between a person and themselves, between people, or between an organisation and its wider environment.

Healing as an essential aspect of leading

Learning healing as a leader tends to unfold in three main ways.

1. Healing yourself

You learn to heal by first learning to notice and tend to your own imbalances. When you see yourself as your organisation – and not separate from it – you understand how your own distortions affect what is around you and that your personal work is never separate from the systemic work that you do. Heal yourself, and you shift your family; a client, your wider community or your organisation.

2. Healing with others and their relationships

The second aspects is learning methods for healing beyond yourself. In shamanic and other ecocentric practice this might be clients, ancestral lines, land, even communities carrying collective grief. A practitioner might retrieve a lost part of someone's soul, work with a pattern inherited down a family line, or sense what a place itself needs to return to health. What unites all of this is the same underlying principle: you are not fixing an isolated part, but restoring right relationship within whatever web that being, place, or lineage belongs to. The same applies to working with individuals, relations, and dynamics within organisations, communities or partnerships. It is a process of restoring balance. 

3. Healing systems 

The third aspect is learning the art of healing at the level of systems and organisations themselves. Here, you draw on everything from the previous stages: perceiving an organisation as a field of energy or consciousness, sensing where relationships are out of balance, where old patterns are unconsciously repeated, or where parts of its collective story have been lost. Seen this way, an organisation isn't a structure to redesign but a living system with its own history and direction it wants to move in. Healing at this level applies the same stance learned with individuals, ancestors, and land. The sensing of imbalance, restoring flow, trusting what wants to emerge at the scale of a whole system.

So why does good leadership require learning the arts of healing? Because leadership, understood this way, is not a separate capability from healing. It is the same capability, applied at an ever-widening scale. Learning to restore balance in yourself, in others, and in the living systems around you helps you and your organisation find your way back to coherence and wholeness.