The Dance of Head and Heart: Recalibrating Your Leadership Vision

🎧 Episode 183: The Dance of Head and Heart: Recalibrating Your Leadership Vision

Leadership is a reflection… but what happens when the image looking back at you is distorted? In this episode, I explore how vision gets skewed, the red flags to watch for, and what it takes to recalibrate when you’ve drifted off course. Through personal stories, psychology insights, and practical recalibration tools, I unpack how great leaders balance both the head and the heart to stay aligned with their vision—and inspire their teams to do the same.

We explore:

• The subtle ways vision gets distorted: tunnel vision, echo chambers, busyness disguised as progress, and external pressures
• A personal story of when I had the vision and the people… but the numbers weren’t there—and the hard leadership calls that followed
• Four red flags that signal your leadership reflection may be warped
• The psychology behind why leaders miss distortion: confirmation bias, Dunning-Kruger, and availability heuristic
• How imposter syndrome skews your personal reflection and bleeds into how you show up as a leader
• Practical ways to recalibrate: stepping back, returning to values, inviting honest mirrors, redefining success, and practicing radical reflection

🔑 Key takeaways:

• Distorted vision doesn’t scream at you—it whispers, until suddenly you’re miles off course.
• Great leadership is a dance between the head and the heart: too much on the business and you lose people, too much on the people and you lose results.
• You are worthy of where you are, and worthy of where you dream to be—but you must unpack the internal doubts or they will resurface in damaging ways.
• Good leaders notice something is off. Great leaders recalibrate quickly, transparently, and courageously.

A rising tide raises all ships, and I invite you along on this journey to Evoke Greatness!

Check out my website: www.evokegreatness.com

Follow me on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonnie-linebarger-899b9a52/

https://www.instagram.com/evoke.greatness/

https://www.tiktok.com/@evoke.greatness

http://www.youtube.com/@evokegreatness

Chapters

• 0:00 Execute, Then Evaluate
• 1:20 Welcome to Evoke Greatness
• 1:54 The Chicago Bean Metaphor
• 2:32 How Vision Gets Distorted
• 4:00 Hard Calls and Alignment
• 6:00 Red Flags of Distortion
• 7:03 Cognitive Biases at Work
• 8:00 Imposter Syndrome and Inner Work
• 9:40 Five Paths to Recalibration
• 11:22 Good vs. Great Leadership
• 12:10 Three Questions for the Week
• 13:10 Closing Challenge and CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Leadership requires courage. You have to execute and then step back to monitor the outcomes. Resist the urge to keep fiddling. Execute, then evaluate. Now that balance is delicate. You can go so hard on the business that you forget the human son. Or you can lean so heavily into the people that you lose sight of the business. Leadership is a dance between those two things. And it takes clear communication, consistent expectations, and intentional coaching to hold that balance in place. Welcome to Evoke Greatness, the podcast for bold leaders and big dreamers who refuse to settle. I'm your host, Sonny. I started in Scrubs over 20 years ago doing the gritty, unseen work and climbed my way to CEO. Every rung of that ladder taught me something worth passing on. Lessons in leadership, resilience, and what it really takes to rise. You'll hear raw conversations, unfiltered truths, and the kind of wisdom that ignites something deeper in you. Your courage, your conviction, your calling. This show will help you think bigger, lead better, and show up bolder in every part of your life. This is your place to grow. Let's rise together. If you've ever wondered whether you're still fully connected to your vision or felt a disconnect along the way, this episode is your recalibration guide. We'll explore how to spot the drift, unpack what causes it, and give you the tools to realign with clarity and purpose. Okay, let's hop into it. Welcome back to another episode of Evoke Greatness. Have you ever stood in front of Chicago's iconic beam? It's that massive mirrored sculpture in Millennium Park that stretches the skyline and bends her own reflection until it hardly looks like you. It's beautiful, but it's also disorienting. You see yourself not as you truly are. You see the city, but not quite in its real shape. Leadership can feel the same. No matter how clear your vision once was, there comes a point when you're not seeing it from reality anymore. It can become a distorted version of it. And if you don't recognize that skew, you risk leading from a false reflection. Today, I want to talk about how to recognize when your vision has become disoriented, the flags to pay attention to, how psychology plays into this, and what separates good leaders from great ones when it comes to recalibrating. I'll also share a season from my own leadership where the reflection didn't match the reality and what I learned about balancing both the business and the people. Great leaders don't lose their vision overnight. It doesn't just vanish, it slowly bends, like that beans warped reflection. And here's how it often happens: we get tunnel vision. We get so fixated on one metric, be it growth or profit or market share, that we forget the bigger mission. And then we step into an echo chamber. We surround ourselves with voices that only nod along. And pretty soon you mistake agreement for alignment. And then busyness becomes disguised as progress when we pack our days full of meetings and emails and fire drills that feel productive but don't move the needle. And we've got those external pressures. We've got investors, we've got competitors, or that cultural noise that starts steering your direction instead of your values. The danger is subtle. When your vision distorts, you don't just drift. You can actually end up pulling your entire team with you. There was a season in my leadership where I had the vision, I had the people, what I didn't have were the numbers. And when growth lags behind vision, it forces you to ask some hard questions. Do I truly have the right people in the right roles doing the right things at the right time? When the answer is no, difficult decisions have to be made. Because the truth is, the people who start the journey with you aren't always the same people who will carry that vision across the finish line. Executing on those decisions are tough. It pulls both at your head and at your heart. But here's the risk: if your actions are not aligned with your vision, even a two-degree shift off course can actually take you miles away from your destination. That's where leaders get trapped into endless tinkering and adjusting and reworking, micromanaging, trying to avoid making the hard call. But leadership requires courage. You have to execute and then step back to monitor the outcomes. Resist the urge to keep fiddling. Execute, then evaluate. Now that balance is delicate. You can go so hard on the business that you forget the human son. Or you can lean so heavily into the people that you lose sight of the business. Leadership is a dance between those two things. And it takes clear communication, consistent expectations, and intentional coaching to hold that balance in place. And when you get it right, when you hold both head and heart intention, you not only protect the vision, but you inspire people to carry it forward with you. And that's where the Chicago Bean metaphor comes back in. Leadership is a reflection. And sometimes what you're seeing isn't accurate. You have to step back far enough to recalibrate so that the picture lines up with your true vision. So how do you know if your reflection is skewed? Here are four red flags to really evaluate in your own day-to-day. So the first is words that don't match up with the actions. Your team may hear one thing, but they actually experience another. That's distortion. When you're constantly firefighting, if every day feels like survival mode, you've replaced vision with reaction. And team disengagement, that's huge, right? Low morale, turnover, or cynicism, those are usually reflections of your clarity, not theirs. And then a loss of perspective. If you can't remember the last time you unplugged, thought deeply, or asked fresh questions, you're leading from a warped mirror. So ask yourself, which of these red flags is showing up in your leadership right now? Here's the kicker. Your brain is actually working against you. You may recall that I've talked before about confirmation bias, but your brain looks for proof that you're right and it ignores evidence that says you're not. So be careful for confirmation bias. And then there's the Dunning-Kruger effect. And sometimes that's overconfidence that masks blind spots. You think you're clear, but you're really not. And then there's availability heuristic. That's the loudest or most recent problem, weighs more heavily than the big picture. This is why leaders are often the last to notice distortion. Good leaders recognize the pull of bias. Great leaders, they actively fight against it by seeking feedback, inviting challenge, and overall staying curious. There's another kind of distortion that we don't talk about enough. And that's when your personal reflection gets skewed. For me, this showed up as imposter syndrome. I battled it for a large part of my career, questioning my own worth, asking myself if I really belong in the room, if I really deserve the seat at the table. And whether we like it or not, that internal dialogue bleeds out into how we show up as leaders. Then we pack those negative thoughts deep inside of our bags as we grow and we don't deal with them. And I promise you that if you don't do the work to deal with them, they will eventually bubble back up to the top. And they don't return quietly. They show up in our relationships or our leadership style. They show up in the way we treat others. You've probably encountered someone like this in your journey, the leader who micromanages because they don't trust themselves, the leader who criticizes unnecessarily because they don't feel good about who they are. Or the leader who blocks your growth, not because you're not capable, but because they're afraid of the light shining on anyone but them. This is what happens when someone doesn't do the work. But here's the truth: you are worthy of being where you are. And you are worthy of getting to where you dream to be. As leaders, we have to be honest enough with each other to call this out when we see it. We have to be open enough to feedback and vulnerable enough to share where we've misstepped so that others can grow vicariously through us without having to make all of the same mistakes we made. That is a large portion of why I started this podcast in the first place. This is the part of leadership that requires courage in the mirror, not just courage in the workplace. When you realize the reflection is skewed, recalibration is not optional. It is essential. Here are five ways to think about recalibration. First one is step back from the bean, right? Distance creates clarity. Whether that's a weekend away or strategy only time, you need space to see straight. The second is returning to core values. Ask yourself, why did we start? Who do we serve? What do we stand for? Your values are the compass. Invite honest mirrors. Number three is so crucial. Surround yourself with truth tellers, not yes men. When people surround themselves with minions, they do not stay true to themselves. They're just filled with a room, that echo chamber of people who nod their head to what you say. You don't want that. You want to be challenged. Number four is redefine success. Check your scoreboard. Are you measuring what truly matters? Or just what's easy to count? And number five is practicing radical reflection. Journal, pray, meditate, or just sit in silence. Clarity doesn't come in noise, it comes in stillness. Here's the difference when you think about what makes a good leader good and what makes a great leader better than a good leader. Good leaders sense when something is off. Great leaders, they act quickly and transparently. Good leaders talk about vision while great leaders embody it. Good leaders, they tolerate distortion because it's comfortable. And great leaders demand clarity because they know their reflection sets the tone for everyone else. So as you think about today's conversation, there are a couple questions that I want you to sit with this week. I want you to take the time to resonate over these questions and say, where are these applying in my life or in my career? The first question is: where have I noticed distortion in my leadership or my business or my people or even my personal worth? Number two is am I leaning too hard into the business side? Or am I leaning too hard into the people side? Remember, that dance, that dance and that sense of balance and healthy tension is where you want to be. And then the last one is what's one recalibration step I can take this week to realign my vision? Take some time to really ask yourself these questions and sit deeply and quietly with them. The bean does not change what's real, right? The skyline, it's still there. You, you're still there. The distortion just makes it harder to see clearly. Leadership is the same. The vision, the purpose, the worth, they are all still there. Sometimes they just get warped by pressure or distraction or doubt. Because in the end, your job as a leader is not to avoid distortion. Friend, it is to notice it. And it is to step back and recalibrate. Because in the end, your leadership will either be the mirror that distorts your team's view of themselves, or it'll be the mirror that reflects back the clearest, truest version of what's possible. Which one will yours be? If today's episode challenged you, moved you, or lit a fire in your soul, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with somebody who's ready to rise. Can I ask you to take 30 seconds to leave a review? It's the best way to say thank you and help this show reach more bold leaders like you. Because this isn't just a podcast, it's a movement. We're not here to play small. We're here to lead loud, one bold and unapologetic step at a time. Until next time, stay bold, stay grounded, and make moves that make mediocre uncomfortable.