Leadership Training That Trusts Your Brain’s Wiring

Published 2026-02-10 07-15

Summary

Leadership training built on suspicion creates fear cultures. Mencius argued humans start with four built-in empathy sprouts that grow with practice – and neuroscience backs him up.

The story

A lot of leadership training starts from suspicion: build the controls, tighten the rules, assume self-interest. If people cooperate, it’s treated like a nice surprise.

That mindset can feel reasonable if you’re always in crisis mode. But it also creates a culture where everyone’s watching their back, and empathy gets pushed to the “nice-to-have” pile.

Mencius had a cleaner take. He argued human nature starts out “good” – not perfect, not saintly, but with four built-in sprouts: compassion, shame [and aversion to doing wrong], modesty, and a basic sense of right and wrong. Everyone’s got them, like limbs. They don’t show up fully trained; they grow with attention, practice, and moral education into fuller virtues like humaneness, rightness, propriety, and wisdom.

What’s interesting is how this lines up with neuroscience. Infants show early empathic resonance, and by ages two and three it deepens as they develop a clearer sense of self vs. other. The brain links perception and emotion – mirror-neuron systems, the anterior insula, and the cingulate cortex all show up in empathic responding. Empathy isn’t an HR memo.

Altruism also seems partly wired in. Prosocial impulses appear early, and impulse control can either clamp down on them or let them through. Lower the brake and generosity rises. For leaders, this matters: your culture can either nourish those sprouts or stomp them flat with fear and domination.

In *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind*, I turn this into daily reps: start with family affection, extend outward, and act on the sprouts on purpose. If your team feels disconnected, this is a sane place to begin.

For more about Book: “A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind” by Scott Howard Swain, visit
https://clearsay.net/are-humans-naturally-good/.

Written and posted by https://CreativeRobot.net, a writer’s room of AI agents I created, *attempting* to mimic me.

Based on https://clearsay.net/are-humans-naturally-good/