Does leading with your heart make better decisions, even on a stressful Tuesday afternoon? According to Arnaud Saint-Paul, founder of the Leadership Coherence Research Institute TAPUAT, most leadership development never answers that question because it targets behavior instead of the belief system underneath it. In this episode of the Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast, Nicole Greer sits down with Arnaud to discuss his book, Heart Leadership: Fostering Coherence to Amplify Impact, and why leading with your heart leads to better decisions and leadership.
What Leading With Your Heart Means
Arnaud coined the term heart leadership to describe a shift most of us never make on purpose: moving from a life led by the mind (the brain’s linear, thinking, projecting intelligence) to a life led by the heart (a wider, feeling intelligence that reads the world directly). He carefully draws a line here.
Leading with your heart is not the soft, emotional, accountability-free version some leaders picture when they first hear the phrase. Arnaud calls it “the most practical and pragmatic discipline” he knows, because it demands constant simplicity and presence, and it produces measurable results within weeks, not years. At its center is purpose, which Arnaud describes as one of the seven dimensions of heart leadership and the one that gives a life or a career its sense of direction.
The Heart Leadership Index: Measuring What Usually Goes Unmeasured
Arnaud built the Heart Leadership Index (HLI) to answer a question most leadership development skips entirely: Where is a leader in terms of coherence with their heart, right now? The HLI is a 35-question, seven-minute assessment that reads a leader’s coherence across seven pillars, originally named purpose, presence, inner peace, inner joy, non-attachment, selflessness, and unity. Leaders and teams can rescore every 90 days, which makes movement visible instead of theoretical.
What makes the tool unusual, Arnaud says, is that it measures coherence at the identity level rather than the behavior level, and a change at the identity level reshapes everything downstream.
Why Your Team’s Dysfunction Might Be Yours
One of the most striking claims in this conversation is a pattern Arnaud has observed again and again in the HLI data. A team’s seven dimensions tend to mirror its leader’s. If a leader scores low on unity, the whole team will show the same gap, whether or not anyone has ever measured it.
Arnaud illustrates this with a story about a highly regarded doctor who scored low on unity, selflessness, and inner peace. In about fifteen minutes of conversation, they traced it back to being told she was “stupid” by a teacher at age seven, a moment that pushed her to become the A student who read 500 books but never felt truly connected to the people she was trying to teach.
She had carried that fragmentation for 40 years. For HR leaders and executives, the takeaway is direct: fragmentation in a company usually starts at the top, and it stays invisible until someone actually measures it.
Does Your Head or Your Heart Make Better Decisions?
Midway through the conversation, Nicole asks Arnaud directly, “When a leader’s head says one thing, and their heart says another, which one should lead?” Arnaud said that the heart, or intuition, makes better decisions than the noisy mind. He connects this to a word most people have never heard: Pronoia, the lesser-known antonym of paranoia.
Where paranoia assumes the world is working against you, pronoia is the belief that the world, and every event in it, including the difficult ones, is actually working to support and nudge you forward. Leaders who operate from pronoia, Arnaud argues, are less likely to get hijacked by reactive, fear-driven decisions and more likely to build a genuinely vibrant culture, because that culture starts inside the leader before it ever reaches a team.
Two Practices For Leading With Your Heart
Leading with your heart is a discipline you have to embody on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Arnaud offers two concrete habits that can help you do that. The first is what he calls the pause button. Whenever something triggers you, physically press an index finger to your heart for one second and ask whether this is really how you want to respond. The second is an hourly check-in, an alarm that prompts the question “Who am I right now?”, meaning which role or identity is currently driving your behavior.
Nicole ties both practices to her own bookend routine for leaders. She calls it “priming the pump” with stillness at the start of the day, and closing the day with a version of the centuries-old Examen, reflecting on what brought joy and what stole it.
Connect With Arnaud Saint-Paul
Website: https://tapuat.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnaudsaintpaul/
Book: Heart Leadership: Fostering Coherence to Amplify Impact (available at tapuat.com and on Amazon)
Build Your Vibrant Culture With Nicole Greer
Learn more about Vibrant Culture and how Nicole Greer can help your team build the kind of coherence that holds up under pressure, not just the kind that looks good on paper.
Download the Speaker Packet: https://vibrantculture.com/speaker-kit-request/
Explore the Employee Training Catalog: https://vibrantculture.com/catalog-request/
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