This post is part of the series: Jung for Leaders — The Inner Work of Moving People to Action
Also in this series: The 12 Jungian Archetypes | A Deep Dive into Jungian Archetypes | Jung’s 5 Pillars of a Happy Life
I find it easy to engage and connect with people. It drains my energy to have challenging conversations with people who are not living up to our agreed (or my expected) standards.
I love working with committed, engaged people who bring their own internal drive and have developed their disciplines for excellence. I hate reminding people to do what they have agreed to do, or calling them out when they deliver mediocre effort.
An “Animus” leader is brilliant at strategy but struggles to bring other people along with them. An “Anima” leader is warm, connected, excellent at reading a room but struggles with necessary conflict.
Both leaders are suffering from a problem: an imbalance of inner energies that Carl Jung called the Anima and the Animus.
In Vistage we speak often of how we combine the two values of Caring and Challenge and call the integration of the two energies “Carefrontation” – the ability to care while also pushing the other to live up to their full potential.
The Anima and the Animus
Jung observed that every human being carries within them both masculine and feminine psychological qualities. He called the feminine dimension within a man the Anima, and the masculine dimension within a woman the Animus.
- The Anima is associated with Caring: receptivity, emotional intelligence, intuition, creativity, relationship, and the capacity to be moved.
- The Animus is associated with Challenge: direction, decisiveness, logic, structure, will, and the capacity to act.
Every human being has access to both. Most of us have developed one at the expense of the other.
The One-Sided Leader
The leader who has overdeveloped their Animus energy is good at cutting through, deciding, and driving. They are less good at listening, empathising, and sitting with ambiguity.
The leader who has overdeveloped their Anima energy is good at building trust, reading emotions, and creating connection. They are less good at setting hard limits, delivering uncomfortable truths, or making unpopular decisions.
Neither is a complete leader. The uncompleted work is integration.
Professional Environments Make This Harder
Most professional environments reward Animus qualities:
- Confidence,
- Decisiveness
- Aggression and
- displaying Certainty.
This has caused many leaders to bury their Anima. They don’t create space for their intuition. They struggle to be patient… actually listening carefully to others feels like a huge waste of time.
Today organisations promote people who are practiced in the Decision Making parts of leadership and underdeveloped in the parts that actually determine whether people follow you, trust you, and bring their complete self to their work.
Integrating Both Energies
Neither energy is “better”. The question is which one is weaker in you, and how you can develop it consciously.
If you live heavily in Animus energy — your default mode is drive, decide, and move on — the development work looks like this: practise listening without immediately problem-solving. Ask how people feel, not just what they think. Sit with uncertainty before resolving it. Allow yourself to be affected by something.
If you have lived heavily in Anima energy — if your default mode is empathy, harmony, and inclusion — the development work looks like this: practise stating your position clearly when it is unpopular. Make the decision you know is right even when it disappoints someone. Learn to tolerate the discomfort of people being unhappy with you.
The fully integrated leader can have empathy for a person’s feelings and make a hard call in the same conversation. They can drive forward with energy and stop completely to listen.
This is wholeness. Great leadership requires integrated, whole leaders with access to both caring and challenging parts of themselves.
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” — Carl Jung
Reflection question: Which energy is most natural for you: the capacity to act decisively, or the capacity to connect deeply? What would it look like to practice the neglected energies?
This post is part of the series: Jung for Leaders — The Inner Work of Moving People to Action
Also in this series: The 12 Jungian Archetypes | A Deep Dive into Jungian Archetypes | Jung’s 5 Pillars of a Happy Life
Conor’s Jung for Leaders Series of Blog Posts
Carl Jung spent his life exploring what it means to be human. Most leadership development focuses on skills, strategy, and behaviour. Jung explores something more fundamental: the person behind the leader. The single most-read post on this blog is about Jungian archetypes — which tells me that the readers here are not just looking for tactics, they are looking for self-understanding. This series is an attempt to go deeper into that territory.
- The Shadow: The Part of You That Sabotages Your Leadership — projection, blind spots, why your strongest reactions point inward, the gift hidden in the Shadow
- The Persona: Are You Leading as Yourself, or as a Mask? — inflation of the Persona, the cost of living inside the role, the journey back to self
- Individuation: The Journey From Success to Significance — why midlife restlessness is a call not a crisis, what blocks the journey, why it is not selfishness
- The Anima and Animus: The Hidden Energies Every Leader Needs — one-sided leadership, integrating strength and empathy, what your professional conditioning suppressed
- The Hero’s Journey: Every Leader Must Answer a Call — departure, initiation, return; the call you’re refusing; why the ordeal is the point
- The Wise Old Man: Finding and Becoming a Mentor — the archetype in myths, what mentors do that advisors don’t, the shift from receiving to giving
- The Trickster Archetype: Why Every Great Team Needs a Disruptor — Loki, Coyote, the Fool; why organisations suppress this energy; how to channel it
- Synchronicity: Paying Attention to What Life Is Telling You — meaningful coincidence, intuition as intelligence, the discipline of attention
- The Collective Unconscious: “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” — culture as organisational unconscious, how it gets formed, making the invisible visible
- Jung’s Psychological Types: The Original Framework Before Myers-Briggs — introversion/extraversion, the four functions, the inferior function as your blind spot
- Active Imagination: A Conversation With the Part of You That Knows More — the practice step by step, why it works, how to use it for decisions
- Your Personal Myth: Living the Story Worth Living — the closing post; the unlived life; rewriting the myth; the test of a worthy story