Leadership and Belonging: Lead Without Projecting Your Unfinished Work

Belonging starts with the leader who stops outsourcing their inner work

The practical answer from Jonny Miller’s conversation with Jerry Colonna is this: humane leadership is not created by better values statements alone. It begins when the person with power becomes willing to ask what they are disowning, how they are benefiting, and where their unprocessed fear is shaping the room.

Jerry’s language is direct. Leaders who create love, safety, and belonging have “done their work”: they have reconnected with their own sense of self, welcomed disowned parts back into awareness, taken responsibility for their feeling state, and stopped externalizing their emotional life onto other people.¹

That is the nervous-system layer of leadership. A leader’s body can teach the room what is safe to say, who is allowed to belong, and which emotions must go underground. If the leader cannot sit with shame, grief, fear, anger, or uncertainty, the team often learns to hide those states too.

So this guide is not a recap of the episode. It is a tactical way to use Jerry Colonna’s questions: practice radical self-inquiry, shift from fixing to holding, trace the stories that shape belonging, build psychological safety through behavior, and ask what kind of ancestor your leadership is becoming.

Ask the complicity question before you redesign the culture

Jerry’s most famous coaching question is: “How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” In this conversation, he expands the leadership version: how have I been complicit in, and benefited from, a world I say I do not want to see?²

That question can feel confronting because it removes the easy refuge of blame. But it is not meant to induce collapse. It is meant to restore agency.

Use it when you notice a repeated pattern:

• people do not tell you the truth until it is too late;
• your team is “aligned” in meetings but fragmented afterward;
• conflict becomes gossip instead of repair;
• urgency keeps overriding care;
• inclusion is named as a value but not felt as a condition;
• you feel chronically misunderstood, unsupported, or betrayed as a leader.

The tactical move is to separate fault from participation.

Ask:

1. What condition do I say I do not want? Be specific: silence, fear, resentment, burnout, avoidance, exclusion, fragility, heroics, dependency, or performative agreement.
2. What do I do that makes this condition more likely? Include what you reward, ignore, rush, joke about, tolerate, punish, or avoid.
3. What benefit do I receive from the pattern? Control, speed, admiration, distance from conflict, not needing to feel grief, not needing to change, or being seen as indispensable.
4. What honest sentence have I not said? Jerry offers an even more fundamental prompt: “What am I not saying that I need to say?”³
5. What is one repair behavior? Not a cultural transformation plan. One visible behavior that changes the incentives in the room.

✻1The point is not to make the leader responsible for everything. The point is to stop pretending the person with power is merely an observer of the system they shape.

Jerry notes that both Reboot and Reunion begin with the inner journey, but Reunion turns from inner work toward outer responsibility. His warning is practical: people with power who do not connect the inner and outer are likely to do damage to those around them.⁴

Create belonging by holding, not fixing

One of the most useful distinctions in the episode is Jerry’s description of himself as “Holder of Stories of the Heart.” He says the work is to open his heart and hold — not fix, not make better, not worry everything into safety.⁵

That is a leadership skill.

Fixing often feels helpful from the inside. It can also be a subtle attempt to regulate the leader’s own discomfort. When another person is grieving, angry, scared, confused, or not yet ready to move, the leader may try to solve too quickly because uncertainty feels intolerable.

Holding is different. It does not mean passivity. It means staying present enough that the other person can remain whole in your presence.

Try this distinction:

• Fixing says: “I need this feeling to stop so we can get back to normal.”
• Holding says: “I can stay connected while this is here.”
• Fixing says: “Your pain is a problem I must remove.”
• Holding says: “Your experience belongs in the room, and we can decide wisely from here.”
• Fixing says: “I will protect you from every hard thing.”
• Holding says: “I will help create enough safety for you to meet reality with support.”

Jerry gives this advice in the context of parenting, but it transfers cleanly to leadership: do not snowplow the path, do not push people into completing your unfinished work, and do not confuse protection with control. The more mature stance is shoulder to shoulder: hold, share wisdom, keep people physically and ethically safe, and let them remain whole human beings unto themselves.⁶

Research on psychological safety supports a cautious organizational version of this. Amy Edmondson defines team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking; in her field study, psychological safety was associated with learning behavior in work teams.⁷ That does not mean safety is softness or conflict avoidance. It means people can tell the truth, make mistakes visible, and learn without unnecessary social threat.

For a leader, “holding” becomes behavioral:

• slow down before responding to hard news;
• thank people for surfacing reality early;
• ask what you are missing before defending your intent;
• distinguish impact from intention;
• repair publicly when your reaction teaches people to hide;
• make dissent part of the work, not a loyalty test.

Trace the stories that decide who gets to belong

Jerry frames part of our collective suffering as disconnection: from ourselves, from our ancestors, from true origin stories, and from the parts of ourselves or our communities we do not want to remember.⁸

That matters because disowned material does not disappear. It often gets projected. Jonny names this in the conversation as the way dehumanization can arise when we project rejected parts of ourselves onto other people. Jerry extends the point from individual psychology to communities: groups can collectively disown unacceptable histories and project them onto another group, making “us dehumanizing them” feel socially acceptable.⁹

In practical leadership terms, every team has belonging stories:

• “People like us are direct.”
• “People like us never need help.”
• “People like us are rational, not emotional.”
• “People like us move fast and do not complain.”
• “People like us are the good ones.”
• “People who struggle here are not a culture fit.”

Some stories create coherence. Others create exile.

The belonging audit is simple:

1. Name the official story. What do we say makes someone belong here?
2. Name the felt story. What do people actually do to stay safe, included, promoted, or protected?
3. Name the exile. Which emotions, histories, identities, needs, mistakes, or truths are treated as inconvenient?
4. Name the projection. Who gets blamed for carrying what the group does not want to see in itself?
5. Name the repair. What story needs to be remembered, complicated, or made more honest?

Jerry’s ancestral language can be used carefully here. He describes the work as turning “ghosts” into ancestors: remembering what has been dismembered so that people can take their seat as adults.¹⁰ He also warns about “hungry ghost leadership,” where emptiness and disconnection are filled by power in ways that damage the world.¹¹

A cautious research note is important. There is serious scholarship on intergenerational trauma, including possible biological pathways, but human evidence does not justify simplistic claims that trauma is literally encoded in descendants’ DNA in a deterministic way. Yehuda and Lehrner argue that intergenerational trauma effects are shaped by multiple biological, developmental, familial, cultural, and social pathways, and that epigenetic mechanisms in humans remain an active area of study rather than a settled explanation.¹²

For NSM readers, that caution is useful. The practical point is not “your ancestors determine your nervous system.” It is: unexamined histories can shape threat, belonging, identity, and leadership behavior. Remembering gives the system more choice.

Practice

Run the leadership belonging audit

Use this when you notice fear, silence, othering, resentment, or performative harmony in a team, family, or organization. Move slowly enough that the questions can be felt, not merely answered.

1. Choose one repeated condition. Pick a concrete pattern you say you do not want: avoidance, overwork, gossip, exclusion, shutdown, brittle agreement, or conflict without repair.
2. Ask the complicity question. “How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I do not want?” Write behaviors, incentives, omissions, and emotional reactions.
3. Find the benefit. Ask: “What do I get to avoid, preserve, control, or not feel as long as this pattern continues?”
4. Locate it in the body. When you imagine telling the truth about this pattern, what happens in your jaw, throat, chest, stomach, breath, hands, or posture?
5. Name the belonging rule. Finish the sentence: “Around here, people belong if they…” Then finish: “Around here, people risk exile if they…”
6. Practice holding before fixing. In the next hard conversation, reflect what you heard, ask one clarifying question, and pause before giving advice or defending yourself.
7. Make one repair visible. Say the sentence that has been missing, change one incentive, invite one truth, or acknowledge one impact publicly enough that the room learns something new.

The aim is not to become a perfect leader. The aim is to make belonging less dependent on everyone managing your unresolved fear.

Work with the body, not just the insight

Jonny asks whether generational separation can be “dislodged” from the nervous system, noting that words may only open the doorway. Jerry agrees that cognitive awareness is necessary, but not sufficient, for transformation. The somatic experience is also part of how integration happens.¹³

This is a key NSM point. A leader can understand the right language and still transmit threat through tone, timing, facial expression, pace, and defensiveness.

Use a body-level check before consequential leadership moments:

• Before a difficult conversation: What am I trying not to feel?
• Before giving feedback: Am I oriented toward learning, punishment, rescue, or self-protection?
• Before asking for honesty: Can my body tolerate an answer I do not like?
• Before making a values statement: What will this cost me if I actually mean it?
• Before responding to criticism: Can I let impact land before explaining intent?

Jerry says that a necessary condition for creating love, safety, and belonging begins with being able to sit still and be with ourselves.¹⁴ That is not a productivity hack. It is the first rehearsal for not making other people carry what you refuse to feel.

Belonging research points in the same general direction without turning it into a corporate slogan. Baumeister and Leary’s influential review argued that the need to form and maintain stable interpersonal bonds is a fundamental human motivation.¹⁵ If belonging is that basic, then leadership cues that signal exile, contempt, or conditional worth are not minor. They shape attention, learning, honesty, and physiology.

The tactical reframe: do not ask only, “What should I say as a leader?” Ask, “What state am I leading from?”

Become the ancestor your leadership leaves behind

Near the end of the conversation, Jerry names the question alive for him: “What kind of world do I want to leave?” He then offers a question for listeners: “What kind of ancestor do you want to be to your descendants?”¹⁶

You do not need children for that question to matter. Every leader leaves descendants: people who learned from your nervous system, inherited your incentives, repeated your repair habits, copied your avoidance, or discovered through you that power can be humane.

Use the ancestor lens when a decision feels urgent:

• If this behavior became normal after me, would I be proud?
• What will people learn is safe to say because of how I respond today?
• What pain am I tempted to pass down because I have not metabolized it?
• What do I need to give up that I love in order to create the world I say I want?
• What would service look like if I stopped performing goodness and started taking responsibility?

Jerry describes his broader aspiration simply: to be of service. The world is hurting, and he feels responsible for using his gifts to respond.¹⁷

That is the leadership belonging practice in one sentence: lean in, be kind, and stop making your unexamined fear the architecture other people must live inside.

Key takeaways

• Belonging starts with the leader’s willingness to do inner work and stop externalizing their emotional life onto the room.
• Jerry Colonna’s complicity question turns blame into agency: how have I helped create the conditions I say I do not want?
• Holding is different from fixing. Mature leadership creates enough safety for truth, grief, conflict, repair, and growth without controlling every outcome.
• Teams carry belonging stories. Audit the official story, the felt story, the exile, the projection, and the repair.
• Cognitive awareness is necessary but not sufficient. Your body, tone, pace, and threat response also teach people what is safe.
• Ancestral and intergenerational language should be used carefully: histories shape us, but they do not remove choice or justify deterministic claims.
• Leadership leaves descendants. The question is what kind of nervous-system inheritance your power is creating.

Free assessment

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Continue exploring

• Read Embodied Leadership: Regulate Before You Lead for a complementary guide to leadership presence, body awareness, and relational impact.
• Read The Best Decision-Making Is Emotional for more on emotion, interoception, and choosing from the body rather than from reactivity.
• Read Functional Breathwork: Use Interoception to Regulate Your Nervous System for practical ways to notice internal signals before they shape behavior automatically.
• Read How to Increase Your Nervous System Capacity for a broader look at stress dosing, resilience, and expanding what your system can meet.

References

1. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 36:30–37:30. ↩
2. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 14:10–19:59. Guest-bio details were cross-checked against Jerry’s Reboot profile, https://www.reboot.io/team/jerry-colonna/. ↩
3. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 52:30–53:17. ↩
4. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 20:21–20:59. ↩
5. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 11:28–13:28. ↩
6. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 40:10–42:48. ↩
7. For research context, Amy Edmondson introduced team psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking; in a field study of 51 work teams, psychological safety was associated with learning behavior. See Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly (1999), https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999. This supports the importance of interpersonal risk conditions; it does not mean every workplace conflict is harmful or that leaders should avoid standards. ↩
8. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 21:31–25:43. ↩
9. Jonny Miller and Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 25:43–28:47. ↩
10. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 29:41–35:13. ↩
11. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 35:35–36:30. ↩
12. For a careful review, Yehuda and Lehrner argue that trauma effects may be transmitted through multiple developmental, familial, cultural, social, and possible biological pathways, while noting that human studies have not conclusively demonstrated epigenetic transmission of trauma effects. See “Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms,” World Psychiatry (2018), https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20568. ↩
13. Jerry Colonna and Jonny Miller, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 43:54–46:04. ↩
14. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 51:10–51:35. ↩
15. Baumeister and Leary’s review argues that the need to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships is a fundamental human motivation. See “The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation,” Psychological Bulletin (1995), https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497. This supports taking belonging seriously; it does not imply that every moment of discomfort or exclusion has the same cause or remedy. ↩
16. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 55:04–55:51. ↩
17. Jerry Colonna, Leadership and the Longing to Belong with Jerry Colonna, 53:17–54:40. ↩