December 18, 2025

December: Leading with a bleeding heart

This newsletter was written before the events at Bondi Beach, Sydney on 14th December. Given the subject, it feels even more poignant.

I dedicate and further commit my bleeding heart with reverence for my grandmother. She was a Holocaust survivor who nurtured the spirit of love and compassion for all in the way she conducted herself and in the spirit that permeated her being. I feel her especially close today.

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Welcome. The theme for this month is Leading with a bleeding heart.

When I was young, I was disparagingly called a bleeding heart, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as someone who is too sympathetic to people in need.

The positive intention of the older white men who advised me of this (all the voices belonged to this cohort; no woman ever used this term with me) was likely to educate me in the ways of the world and help me to choose a financially beneficial career path.

If I apply a different lens, this was in defence of an economic rationalist worldview and, subsequently, of the place in the world it had secured for them. Their defence mechanism against youthful idealism was also a way to maintain a worldview that justified their life choices and kept self-interest alive, at the expense of the idealism of their inner child, which had been squashed many moons before.

As time has moved on, and around 30 years have passed since these initial insults to my heart, my bleeding heart has become more “on trend”.

Whole movements in the business world have taken shape around the triple bottom line. Reporting on ESG targets is now a regulatory requirement in many countries, and even Inner Development Goals have become a thing, focused on the inner work required for us to live more sustainably. Diversity and Inclusion is a strategic objective or at least an established HR metric, and psychological safety has become the new buzz to enable high performance. Leaders in most large organisations have needed to learn to talk the talk of these concepts for career survival.

The recent right-wing swings in several countries have likely given breathing space to many who felt cornered in a new world they needed to conform to but were sceptical about or scared of.

You might think that with my bleeding heart safely intact, I would have rejoiced at these dramatic shifts towards a worldview seemingly closer to my own.

Unfortunately, no such luck. In my late adolescence and 20s, at the height of youthful zeal and to channel my relentless heart-bleeding, I immersed myself in movements for positive change. I attended international conferences hosted by the UN and other global bodies as a young leader. I spoke on the radio and television about the positive changes that could occur in our world and the role of my generation. I mixed with global political, social, business and spiritual leaders. This all (perhaps coupled with excessive reading of philosophy and Dostoyevsky in adolescence) ultimately led to further disillusionment.

Noting the hypocrisy of people travelling across the world, drinking from plastic bottles, and staying at five-star hotels to find solutions to economic inequality and pending environmental calamities, while not generating any genuine collaborative solutions and instead producing papers or many presenting their own stories as ego wrapped in inspiration to echo chambers, I realised that even at the highest level of leadership and world-peace-making, the human ego, its divisions, and its certainty of one right way -was alive and thriving.

A very grainy image of me and other emerging leaders with His Holiness at a Conference in the late 90’s.

This was not the way to make change, I reflected.

So, when I began, years later, to see that fringe ideas were moving to the centre of our corporate landscape, I did not celebrate too much. I kept at arm’s length from these movements, not because I did not feel an attraction to, or appreciation for them, but because I had seen it before – I recognised the patterns – I could see the way the spirit that could lead us differently was being co-opted, misinterpreted, sliced and diced and used by the very system it sought to transform.

In my work as a transformation strategist in organisations, I attempted, in my own way, to break through the marketed and sanitised version of concepts like psychological safety – pointing out that it was not a panacea for all ills and that it required psychological courage and a culture of genuine development to bring benefits. I noted the shallowness of hiring women to meet quotas without an environment conducive to appreciating their strengths, and of hiring women trained to think like men to survive in a patriarchal system without helping them recover the women they were before this brutal training ground. I wrote papers and developed frameworks and worked with people leading organisations to understand that transforming culture required an evolution and sometimes a revolution of worldviews to be sustainable.

What happened to my bleeding heart?

My youthful idealism might have been tempered and matured; however, my bleeding heart beats strong.

As the world has changed, my point of view that we need to take care of each other and the earth – that we are all interconnected has become easier to digest in a variety of circles, more palatable and obvious. And yet this has not yet led to a mass awakening of people choosing to think, live and work differently.

The people who have paid me to bring a whole-systems perspective into rooms to challenge their status quo often step back from the water when it involves examining their worldview at a fundamental level.

However, while some attempts at fundamental transformation have fallen flat, there have been awakenings.

I have worked with leaders willing to make a real investment in beyond-the-surface transformation that has borne fruit. With a willingness to put more of themselves on the line for teams, customers, community, the planet, and society, their teams and companies have weathered storms remarkably, often grown their profitability, innovated their offerings and become talent attractors and role models for others.

Some of the organisations I partnered with continue to deepen their evolution.

Where new boards or appointed CEOs have not understood or further supported the worldviews previously fostered, quiet rebellions are keeping the spirit alive. Individuals often contact me to tell me how they are applying what they learnt in a more conducive environment in a new organisation.

In other companies and communities where the work did not have the time or investment to be deeply integrated, the spirit has diminished or been sent underground.

Other well-known spirits have been happy to reclaim the space created. The spirit of the zero-sum, the spirit of self-interest, the spirit of the short-term win and finally, the weapon of the word pragmatism, which can be used to disguise all manner of sins.

I heard someone recently describe evil not as a presence but as an absence. When we fail to allow good spirits to occupy a space, nurturing them, celebrating them, and finding ways for them to influence our world, where there is an absence of soul and good spirit, and a lack of the boundaries that reinforce them, a vacuum arises that needs to be filled.

When worldviews become safety nets

When decisions are made from a mindset or feeling of fear and lack, we often default to worldviews that are less inclusive, expansive, and creative.

Over the last few years, I have seen default settings activate in both teams and individuals. I have seen past worldviews returned to as safety nets, with the illusion that they will prevent us from drowning in a sea of complexity. I see people return to them not because they are helpful, but because we have not developed the muscles to navigate in other ways.

For people and companies who have not prioritised adaptive work, rising complexity can signal a return to past control mechanisms and entrenched worldviews that might provide an illusion of security, safety or control, but ultimately prevent the organisation from becoming adaptive to the new world and more system-aware values and frameworks.

As complexity and even chaos rise, it takes brave leaders to insist on and hold the boundaries for evolution– it is the rare individual who will come to it themselves in a system primed to defend itself.

Sometimes this means a bold commitment to finding a new way through the mists rather than battling with old, worn-down weapons of control.

Over to you

If you see a default to economic rationalisation, shareholder value justifications, self-interest, short-termism or cutting down on values for the illusion of necessary survival, how can you guide yourself and your community and teams to move out of default and into greater adaptivity and consciousness?

Three key areas of focus are essential building blocks:

1. Focus on developing and reinforcing, thinking and acting from a different level of consciousness

Consciousness has created all the systems, structures and ways of working and being together that we currently occupy. Therefore, it is consciousness that can give rise to new systems. The inner work required to enable proactive sustainable systemic change includes consciousness of:

Where our choices emerge from. What worldviews are inhabiting us? Are they based on fear and security needs, or on purpose, potential and possibility?

How we are relating to ourselves and others, with an awareness of our own childhood conditioning (including trauma). What are our inner vacuums, and how might these be used as conduits for fear-nourished spirits? How can we fill any inner vacuum with a positive spirit?

The opportunity for greater coherence and courage in each moment, and the consciousness to take action to enable this.

2. Self-awareness and regulation

The need for self-awareness and self-regulation is essential to navigating our social relationships more effectively and guiding them toward greater health. This looks like greater responsiveness, less reactivity and greater fullness of being. Do not interpret personal pain as a failure. Much of our suffering is due to systemic disease, and it is up to all of us to find ways to protect our souls as best we can while we work with others to co-create systems that enable greater wellbeing and wholeness.

Developing, leading and positively energising the field

Seeing, knowing, and appreciating the interrelationships between our personal and collective fields is empowering and fortifying. Understanding how we bring our unique gifts to be an evolutionary catalyst within these fields is the work of leadership.

Download this complimentary excerpt on seeing and working with systems for more insights on this.

Generative Questions to expand and explore

What is your perspective on a bleeding heart? What experiences, conditioning and worldviews have led to this perspective?
What are the guardtrails that help people to evolve rather than default in times of challenge?
When you experience or observe defaults to old behaviours, what can be learnt from this? How can we move forward with this learning?
What principles or qualities help you to stay coherent with your higher intentions?
How might you move into 2026, stronger in the values and principles you hold dear?

Quotes on our theme: Leading with a bleeding heart

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done, does away with fear.” – Rosa Parks

“There is a difficulty with only one person changing. People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, ‘Well, he’s different from me – I could never do it.’ What’s wrong with most people is that they have this block – they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.” – David Bohm

“I assure you: The one who believes in Me will also do the works that I do. And he will do even greater works than these” – John 14:12

“You can love people without leading them, but you cannot lead people without loving them” – John Maxwell

For more inspiration, you can find previous newsletters here.

For soulful reflection you can download my very popular annual New Year Reflection Journal along with inspiration for 12 days of reflection in the lead up.

Opportunities to engage further

You can register your interest here to join the New Millennium Leader Academy. We are currently upgrading our experience of Self-Authoring for a 2026 intake.

To be further supported and enlivened in this mission read Leadership for the New Millennium available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

I would love to hear your thoughts or reflections on this newsletter at alison@alisoncameron.com.

As I move towards a new year

I do not give up hope. My bleeding heart has been kept alive over the years with the medicine of ongoing self-reflection, prayer, meditation and communion with nature. Accompanying this, my spirit has been nurtured by social circles (both personal and professional) comprising different cultures, backgrounds and political persuasions – this has helped me continue to reflect on my privilege, be challenged and enriched by other perspectives and stay grounded.

My bleeding heart is a wonderful friend. It allows me to love and forgive freely, to see the good and the beautiful and to embrace life in all its dimensions.

With my heart still bleeding, I look to those who are willing to bleed with me – in service of something we all need to grow – Love.