Love Isn't a Feeling. It's a State of Being. And It Might Be the Most Generative Force You've Stopped Trusting.

Let’s start with a provocation.

The word love has been so thoroughly domesticated, stuffed into greeting cards, Valentine’s Day campaigns, and inspirational LinkedIn posts, that we’ve almost completely lost contact with what it actually is. We’ve reduced it to a sensation. Something that happens to us, rather than something we do, or more precisely, something we inhabit.

That’s the mistake. And it has a higher than anticipated cost, in your leadership, your creativity, your business, and frankly, your life.

Fromm Saw It Coming

In 1956, Erich Fromm published The Art of Loving, a book that, if the business world had taken seriously, might have saved us seventy years of fear-based management. His central argument was simple and radical: love is not a feeling that arrives unbidden. It is a practice. A discipline. An art form, in the same sense that medicine, carpentry, or music are art forms. It demands both knowledge and consistent effort.

Most people, Fromm wrote, approach love as if the problem is finding the right object to love. They don’t realise the real question is whether they’ve developed the faculty for it.

This distinction is everything.

A leader who is waiting to feel inspired, who is waiting for the right team, the right market, the right conditions, is making the object mistake. They are waiting to fall in love with their work again, rather than understanding that love is something you bring to the work, or you don’t.

Fromm called this the difference between falling in love and standing in love. One is a temporary neurochemical event. The other is a way of being in the world.

What Neuroscience Actually Says

Here’s where it gets interesting for those of you who need the science before you’ll trust the philosophy.

When we experience states of warmth, connection, trust, and genuine care (what the brain’s oxytocinergic system is running on), something quite remarkable happens to our cognitive function. Research published across multiple peer-reviewed studies, including a landmark paper by De Dreu and colleagues, has shown that oxytocin doesn’t just make us feel good. It directly enables creative cognition. It reduces analytical rigidity, increases holistic and divergent thinking, and enhances our capacity for original ideation.

In plain language: love-adjacent states make you significantly better at problem-solving, innovation, and seeing what you haven’t seen before.

There’s a parallel finding in the research on flow states, which Csikszentmihalyi spent his career mapping. What happens in flow? The prefrontal cortex partially deactivates. The inner critic goes offline. The brain slips from the fast-moving beta waves of anxious productivity into the slower, more connective alpha-theta border, where ideas combine freely and time loses its grip. McKinsey’s ten-year study of top executives found performance increases of up to 500% in flow. Harvard’s Teresa Amabile found that not only do people perform more creatively in flow, but they also remain more creative the day after.

Now consider: what reliably blocks flow? Fear. Anxiety. The experience of being unseen, unvalued, or under threat. In organisations built on fear (and most organisations still are, whether they admit it or not), you are chemically and neurologically suppressing the very capacities you’re desperately trying to hire for.

Love, as a state of being and not a sentiment, is the antidote.

The Business and Meaningful Project People Are Starting to Figure This Out

Softway, a Houston-based technology company, was on the edge of collapse in 2015. Toxic culture. Haemorrhaging talent. Leadership that managed through control and fear. In their own words, they were “running on empty.” Their turnaround, documented in Love as a Business Strategy, wasn’t built on a new product or a funding round. It was built on a decision: to create an environment where people could bring genuine care, honesty, and vulnerability to their work.

The results were measurable: retention soared, innovation returned, and the business not only survived but became something its founders were proud of.

Marcus Buckingham, who has spent decades studying the most engaged teams and loyal customers for Harvard Business Review, reached a striking conclusion: when someone says they love what they’re doing, it isn’t hyperbole. His research shows it means they are actively flourishing, at ease, absorbed, productive, and energised. That state doesn’t happen by accident. It is the product of environments and leadership that make love (in the Frommian sense) possible.

Steve Farber, who has spent years translating this into leadership development frameworks, puts it simply: love generates a culture where people are more loyal, more innovative, and more likely to do their best work. And critically, you cannot fake it. People know.

David Whyte’s Contribution: The Quality of Your Conversations

The poet David Whyte, who has spent thirty years working at the frontier of where poetry meets organisational life, offers something that the business researchers can’t quite get to on their own. He says that the quality of your life is, ultimately, the quality of your conversations, including the conversation you have with yourself.

This lands differently when you understand love as a state of being rather than a sentiment. In a fear-based state, you have fear-based conversations: defended, performative, managed, strategic in the small sense of the word. You say what will protect you rather than what is true.

In a love-based state, a state of genuine care, of what Fromm would call active concern for the growth of what you’re engaged with, you have entirely different conversations. You tell the truth. You ask the question you’ve been avoiding. You challenge the person in front of you because you actually want them to grow, not because you want to be right.

Whyte calls this “courageous conversation.” And he’s clear: courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s what happens when you love something more than you fear the consequences of honesty.

That distinction alone is worth the price of entry.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Monday Morning

Here’s where the philosophy has to pay its rent.

Love as a state of being, practically speaking, means this:

You do your work from interest, not from anxiety. Anxiety narrows. It makes you conservative, reactive, and control-obsessed. Interest, genuine curiosity and care about the problem in front of you, opens. It generates the divergent thinking that neuroscience tells us is the signature of actual creativity. The question to ask yourself is: am I approaching this project because I fear what happens if I don’t, or because I’m genuinely interested in what might happen if I do?

You treat accountability as an act of care. One of the most common misunderstandings about love-based leadership is that it means soft. It doesn’t. Fromm was clear: love without discipline is sentimentality, not love. The companies that have successfully embedded love as an operating principle (Patagonia, Warby Parker, the Softway story) are not places without accountability. They’re places where accountability is held by people who genuinely care about each other’s growth. That’s entirely different from accountability as punishment.

You notice what you’re actually trying to protect. Most of the defensiveness in organisations (the turf wars, the information hoarding, the political manoeuvring) is fear wearing a strategic mask. When you’re operating from a genuine state of care for the work and for the people doing it, you ask a different question: what do we need to be true to actually do this well? Not: how do I stay safe?

You build belonging deliberately. Belonging, the experience of genuinely mattering, is not a soft benefit. It is the precondition for people bringing their actual intelligence to work rather than a managed version of it. When people know they matter, they bring their best ideas, their real concerns, and their creative risk-taking. When they don’t, they bring compliance.

You love your own work enough to do it with full attention. This is Fromm’s self-love point, and it’s the one most likely to make executives uncomfortable. He was direct about it: you cannot genuinely love others if you haven’t developed the capacity for self-love, not narcissism, but the genuine honouring of your own life and what it’s asking of you. A leader who has long since stopped caring about their own work cannot create the conditions for others to care about theirs.

The Harder Question

All of this raises something that the business literature tends to avoid.

If love as a state of being is this productive, this generative, this measurably good for the bottom line, why isn’t every organisation operating from it?

The answer is uncomfortable. Because love requires courage. It requires honesty. It requires being willing to be seen. It requires having actual conversations about what matters, what’s broken, and what needs to change, rather than the managed performance of those conversations.

And it requires that the people at the top of the organisation go first.

Fromm’s observation still holds: most people are more afraid of loving than of not being loved. They would rather remain in the familiar contracted state, defended, strategic and performing, than take the risk of full engagement.

But here’s what sixty-plus years of research since Fromm, and the accumulated wisdom of the practitioners, the neuroscience, and the business case studies all point to:

The contracted state isn’t safe. It just feels familiar.

The companies that will matter in the next decade are the ones where people are actually in their work, curious, connected, accountable, and alive. That state has a name. We’ve just been too embarrassed to use it in a boardroom.

Love is not the opposite of professionalism. It is the precondition for the kind of professionalism that actually gets something done that matters.

After more than half a century on this beautiful earth, I have seen a fair bit of Love come and go. One of the greatest lessons of my life involves the infinite relationship between love and grief… but, as they say in the classics, that is another story.

I have included a poem from my upcoming canyon and dust publication that highlights a few of the lessons I have learnt about love along the way.

Dust Roads and the Beloved

You want to know about love?

Then you must learn the language of dust,

how it rises from the road with each step taken,

how it settles in the folds of your clothes,

in the creases of your palms,

in the lines around your eyes from squinting into distance.

The desert knows what the mountains know:

that joy begins the journey

but cannot promise its ending.

The trail winds down into valleys

where you lose sight of yourself,

where the question isn’t

will love stay or flee, but

whether you can bear not knowing.

Look, there is fruit on the branch,

summer-swollen with promise.

But the tasting requires the tearing,

the revealing of hidden flesh,

the juice running down your chin

like a confession.

Some nights, the stars conspire to make you believe

heaven has descended.

You hold your beloved close,

breathe her in like prayer,

mistake this moment

for the whole story.

But the ocean calls

from beyond the ridge.

You can hear it some mornings when the wind shifts

that azure invitation,

that ancient pull.

And the only way there is the dust road down.

This is what the path teaches;

that love leaves its mark,

that scars are evidence of having dared the distance,

that freedom comes

not from avoiding the dusty road

but from walking it with open hands,

with dust in your mouth,

with love as your companion

and uncertainty as your north star on a cloudy night.

If you found this worth your time, share it with someone who's still running their organisation on fear and calling it rigour. ¡Gracias, Gracias, Gracias!