Are you an Open-Hearted Leader, too?
An Open-Hearted Leader is someone who has chosen Love as their leadership philosophy.
Not the soft, surface kind of love - but the fierce, grounded, truth-telling kind. The kind that holds accountability and compassion in the same breath.
As an Open-Hearted Leader, you view leadership not as a performance, but as a sacred practice - a creative expression of Love that ripples outward through everything you touch.
Every decision, every conversation, every boundary is an act of Love… a chance to align more deeply with what is truly present, what is truly real, and what is truly ethical .
Does This Sound Like You?
You have an intrinsic need to know yourself more deeply.
You naturally support others, but sometimes feel the weight of the world.
You’ve experienced profound grief or loss in your life, and sense there is meaning within it.
You carry deep empathy for others’ pain -- family, clients, community, the collective.
You’ve struggled to find support that truly meets you where you are.
You ask big questions about purpose, power, and belonging.
You value integrity, learning, creativity, and authentic expression.
You dream of a kinder, more connected, more enchanted world.
You feel ready to lead in a way that is both mystical and practical, soft and strong, human and divine.
If your heart whispered yes more than once… welcome home. You are one of us.
The Way of the Open-Hearted Leader
The Way of the Open-Hearted Leader is not a method or a model.
It’s a philosophy of remembering - a way of living that begins with the simple, radical belief that everything you seek is already within you.
There is no expert outside of you.
There is no authority higher than your own inner wisdom.
You are the experiment and the evidence of Love itself, learning to move through a human body.
The Open-Hearted Way invites you to return home.
Home to the wisdom of your emotions,
Home to the safety of your body,
Home to the voice within that knows what is true for you.
Through the work of Open-Hearted Psychology, we practise the art of feeling deeply and acting courageously.
We stop abandoning ourselves for external validation, and we start listening to the intelligence that lives in our sensations, our grief, our joy, and our longing.
Because emotions are not the enemy.
They are the language of Love -
each one a frequency of life trying to know itself through you.
Fear is love searching for safety.
Anger is love demanding integrity.
Grief is love learning to let go.
Joy is love remembering its freedom.
When we suppress emotion, we suppress Love.
When we feel and honour emotion, we free Love to move as us.
This is what it means to live The Way of The Open-Hearted Leader:
to feel, to listen, to trust, to act.
To live not as a performance, but as a courageous expression of the soul.
Key Values & Struggles of The Open-Hearted Leader
Integrity & Honesty
You care about truth. You always have.
You’ve been the honest one in rooms that preferred comfort. You’ve said what others wouldn’t, and seen what others refused to see.
And when you’re not fully in integrity - when you say yes out of guilt, silence your knowing, or abandon your boundaries - you feel it in your bones.
You might spiral into shame or self-judgment, feeling as though you’ve betrayed yourself.
But integrity isn’t about perfection - it’s about listening closer.
There are always deeper layers of self-honesty waiting to be met with tenderness, not punishment. Each time you tell yourself the truth, you come home to your power and your peace.
Wound: Feeling unseen, punished, or ashamed when not fully aligned with your truth.
Gift: Becoming a compassionate truth-teller who models radical honesty and liberates others by being real.
Growth & Learning
You’re wired for evolution.
You devour books, trainings, conversations - anything that deepens your understanding of life, emotion, and meaning.
But sometimes your love of growth becomes a quiet pressure - the belief that there’s always more to fix, more to heal, more to learn before you can finally rest.
You might secretly wonder if you’re “there yet,” or if you’ve done “enough work.”
The truth is, you already are.
Growth isn’t about striving; it’s about unfolding - letting each season of your life teach you what it came to teach.
You’re allowed to learn gently. You’re allowed to arrive.
Wound: Feeling like growth means never being finished.
Gift: Remembering that growth is not improvement - it’s remembrance of your wholeness.
Self-Expression
You’ve always known there’s something inside you that wants to be expressed - a voice, a vision, a creative force that’s uniquely yours.
You long to show up fully as you.
But somewhere along the way, self-expression became complicated.
You learned to tone yourself down - to be professional, palatable, or safe.
You learned that being yourself could cost you belonging.
Still, that creative pulse inside you refuses to die.
It’s the part of you that writes, dances, speaks truth, and holds space for others to do the same.
Every time you show up as yourself, you open the door for others to do the same.
Wound: Losing your voice in systems that rewarded conformity.
Gift: Leading others back to authenticity through your unapologetic expression.
What The Open-Hearted Leader Isn’t
The Open-Hearted Leader is not the one who has it all figured out.
They are not endlessly patient, perpetually calm, or immune to the chaos of being human.
They are not the leader who bypasses discomfort in the name of “positivity.”
They are not the ones who hide behind professionalism to avoid feeling, or who lead from ego instead of empathy.
They are not saviours.
They don’t carry the world on their shoulders or believe that other people’s healing is theirs to control.
They know that true leadership is collaborative, not codependent.
They are not martyrs.
They no longer sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of being “good,” “helpful,” or “strong.”
They are not perfectionists performing care.
They are not trying to prove their worth through over-giving. They are learning to lead from overflow, not depletion.
They are not blind to the systems that harm - but they refuse to replicate them through domination, shame, or control.
They lead with vision and accountability, not hierarchy and fear.
And perhaps most importantly… they are not numb.
They choose to feel, even when it’s inconvenient.
Because feeling keeps them connected to their humanity, their intuition, and their heart.
When We Fall Out of Alignment
There are times when even the most open-hearted among us lose our way.
When we stop listening.
When the noise of the world drowns out the voice within.
When fear, exhaustion, or cynicism takes the wheel.
It might look like:
Saying yes when our body screams no.
Preaching compassion while neglecting ourselves.
Overworking in the name of purpose.
Shrinking to keep the peace.
Holding everyone else with tenderness while judging ourselves relentlessly.
When we’re out of alignment with our Open-Hearted Leadership, it feels like living half a step away from our soul.
Our energy dulls.
Our intuition goes quiet.
We might look “fine” on the outside - but inside, we feel brittle, disconnected, or restless.
We start to wonder where our magic went.
We might doubt whether we’re still meant for this work.
But even in that disconnection, something sacred is happening: our heart is whispering, “Come back.”
Because Open-Hearted Leadership isn’t a special oasis you miraculously arrive at - it’s a relationship you keep intentionally returning to.
Every pause, every honest check-in, every tear shed in the name of truth is part of the path.
A Love Letter From Tessa: The Journey of Trust and Destiny
Hey Courageous Human!
Please know, wherever you are right now is perfect.
Truly.
Every step, every fall, every heartbreak, every pause - it all belongs.
The way of the Open-Hearted Leader is not linear; it spirals.
It brings us back again and again to the place we began, only each time with softer eyes and a deeper knowing.
I know what it’s like to do the work of remembering who you are in this lifetime.
To reshape your relationships, your patterns, your very identity - so that you can become a living expression of Love.
It is not easy work.
It asks everything of you: your truth, your tenderness, your courage to keep coming home.
Often, the path involves falling off it - just so you can learn how to return.
It’s in the falling that you learn the sound of your own inner guidance,
and it’s in the return that you build the trust to follow it.
Because everything you need to become who you truly are is already encoded within you.
Just as the acorn already knows it will become an oak tree,
your soul already knows its destiny.
Your only task is to listen - and to trust.
The journey of trust works on many levels.
On the human level, it’s about healing the ruptures that once taught you to doubt yourself.
When we were young, our trust was shaped in relationship - and when those relationships carried pain, it taught us to question not only others, but our own inner compass.
That’s how we learned to withhold love, to distrust our needs, to silence our intuition.
As adults, this turns into mistrust in three directions:
Trusting ourselves - our decisions, instincts, desires.
Trusting others - to meet us with genuine care, to hold our truth without control.
Trusting life - that there is a larger intelligence guiding us.
When trust is broken in one, it ripples through them all.
And this is the sacred work of Open-Hearted Leadership: to repair trust in all three - to become the safe place where Love can land.
Because the leadership we are here to bring has never existed before.
It won’t look like what that qualification told you, or what your family imagined for you, or what your workplace expects of you.
It’s the kind of leadership that requires a wild trust - trusting your voice when no one else agrees, trusting your timing when others rush ahead, trusting your heart when your mind doubts.
To trust is to be willing to appear foolish in the name of truth.
It’s to dare to tell a courageous story with your life - one that says, I remembered who I am, and I lived it out loud.
Destiny is not a destination.
It’s a living experience.
It’s the moment you align with your true nature and act from it.
Every time you listen to your intuition and move with integrity, you are touching destiny.
Every time you choose love over fear, you are touching destiny.
Every time you trust yourself enough to create something new, you are touching destiny.
This is how we reshape the world:
one act of self-trust at a time.
Because when you trust yourself, you free others to trust themselves.
When you lead with your heart, you invite others to do the same.
When you live as Love, you make the world safe for Love to exist.
This is the journey we walk together.
To feel everything.
To trust the unfolding.
To embody the divine intelligence already within us.
To keep coming home to the kind of Love that transforms you - and everything you touch.
That’s the art of open-hearted leadership.
That’s the journey of trust and destiny.
That’s the revolution of Love.
“Everything is temporary but love. Love outlives us all.” - R Queen
Love always,
Tessa xx