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He arrived at our coaching session barely holding it together. I could see it the moment he sat down: the tight jaw, the shallow breathing, the eyes that couldn’t quite settle. He’d had a difficult week. A challenging board meeting, a team member he felt he’d let down, the creeping sense that he was failing on every front.

“I nearly cancelled, I felt so awful I almost didn’t come,” he told me at the end of that session.

His distress didn’t unnerve me. I confidently knew that by the end of our time together he would leave in a fundamentally different state. Not because I had answers, but because I’ve learned after 35 years of this work that the brain is capable of extraordinary resourcefulness when it feels genuinely understood. So I brought that. The calm, the warmth, the unshakeable belief that he was more capable than he currently felt.

By the end of the session, something had shifted. Not just for him, but for me too. His newly acquired positivity came back to me. It lifted us both.

This isn’t a story about skilful coaching, he is the one who did the work. It’s a story about something far more fundamental – about how human brains are wired to respond to each other at a biological level – something most leaders have never been told about. Psychologists call this co-regulation. And once you understand it, you’ll never think of your internal state as your private business again.

The accidental discovery that changed everything

In the early 1990s Dr. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team were studying motor neurons in macaque monkeys – the cells that fire when an animal performs a specific action – when something unexpected happened. One of the researchers reached for his lunch. And the neurons in the monkey’s brain fired — the same neurons that fired when the monkey itself reached for food. The monkey hadn’t moved. It had simply watched.

Scientists had always assumed neurons either perceived an action or performed one. The idea that perception and performance could occur in the same neuron was entirely new. These became known as mirror neurons — brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you observe someone else doing it.

The same neural behaviour has since been confirmed in humans. When you watch someone pick up a cup of coffee, your brain partially experiences picking up that cup. When you see someone grimace in pain, something in you flinches. When a colleague walks into the room radiating barely-contained panic, your nervous system registers it too, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Neuroscientist Christian Keysers describes watching a tarantula crawl across James Bond’s chest in Dr. No. His heart beating faster, his hands sweating, his skin tingling, even though he’s sitting safely in a cinema. His brain had partially lived the experience alongside Bond.

At a fundamental level, we are wired to feel what others feel.

Two systems, one profound insight

Mirror neurons are only half the story. Humans also evolved something no other species appears to possess to the same degree. Neuroscientist Matt Lieberman calls this mentalising network – it is centred on the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction.

Where mirror neurons answer how someone is doing something, the mentalising network asks why. It is the seat of what psychologists call “theory of mind” — our capacity to model what another person is thinking, feeling, and intending. The two systems work in sequence: mirror neurons give you the raw data, the facial

expression, the body language, the tone, and the mentalising network interprets it by building a picture of the inner world behind the outer behaviour.

They work in sequence, and together they form the neurological foundation of empathy.

Lieberman’s research reveals something else worth pausing on: this mentalising network turns out to be the brain’s default mode network — the resting state your brain returns to when it has nothing specific to focus on. As I explored in a previous article your brain’s autopilot isn’t idle — it defaults to thinking about people. Their thoughts, feelings, motivations, relationships. By the age of ten, we’ve already clocked up 10,000 hours of this automatic social processing. Your brain’s factory setting is social. This should be a wakeup call for leaders.

Your emotional state is not your private business

Neuroscientist Tania Singer’s research showed that when we observe someone in pain, we don’t just understand that they’re suffering — we activate many of the same neural circuits we would if we were experiencing that pain ourselves. Not at the same intensity, but through the same architecture. The regions of the brain that process our own emotional experience are recruited when we witness the emotional experience of others, transmitting distress to ourselves. Observation and experience share the same neuronal circuitry — and this is the biological mechanism underlying empathy.

Now bring that into the workplace.

The leader who walks into Monday morning’s team meeting is not keeping their internal state to themselves. Their team’s mirror neurons are already reading it, and research by Neal, Chartrand, and Hennenlotter shows just how automatic that transmission is.

Subjects were asked to do nothing more than look at photographs of people in different emotional states. Those same emotional states were mirrored back in the subjects’ faces and detected in their brains. Looking at a happy face doesn’t just make you aware that someone is happy. It actually makes you happier.

In an interesting twist, the researchers then ran the same experiment on subjects who’d had Botox. Because Botox paralyses the facial muscles, they couldn’t fully mirror the expressions they were seeing, and without that physical mirroring, their brains didn’t receive the corresponding emotional signal. The irony is almost poetic: people use Botox to feel better about themselves, yet it reduces their capacity for precisely the kind of empathic resonance that generates genuine wellbeing.

The point is that emotional transmission between people is not a quirk of personality or office culture, it’s a biological mechanism. And as a leader, you are at the centre of it whether you choose to be or not.

The mirror you don’t know you’re holding

Back to my coaching client — because the most important part of that story isn’t what happened to him. It’s who I had to be before any of it could happen.

I didn’t try to fix his anxiety. I didn’t manage it, redirect it, or talk him out of it with a well-timed reframe. I simply held a different state, and trusted that his nervous system would find it. That’s mirror neurons.

This runs directly counter to how most leaders are trained to think about their role. We are trained to do — to act, decide, direct, solve. The entire architecture of most leadership development programmes is built around behaviours: the right frameworks, the right conversations, the right techniques. But who we are in any given moment, the internal state we’re inhabiting, is being continuously broadcast to everyone around us, below conscious awareness.

Leadership, in this light, is not just a set of behaviours. It is a state of being that others mirror.

Consider what happened when the FBI overhauled its approach to hostage negotiation. For years, the bureau’s success rate in securing the release of hostages was poor. The prevailing approach was transactional: applying pressure, making demands, trying to out-manoeuvre the other side. Then Chris Voss, who became the FBI’s lead hostage negotiator, recognised something that changed everything: the key to liberating hostages wasn’t tactical superiority. It was empathy. Not agreement. That distinction matters enormously. Empathy doesn’t mean conceding to demands or validating someone’s actions. It means genuinely acknowledging that their perspective is as real and valid to them as yours is to you. The moment hostage-takers felt truly understood rather than simply opposed, the dynamic shifted. The FBI’s success rate improved dramatically.

If empathy can transform the most adversarial human encounter imaginable, think what it does for a team that genuinely wants to perform well together; helping them navigate friction, stay connected under pressure, and bring out the best in each other.

Most leaders, even those who genuinely “lead by example”, are still translating it into visible behaviour. What they do, how they act and what they say. The neuroscience suggests the transmission goes deeper than that. It’s not just your behaviour that’s being mirrored, it’s the emotional state underneath the behaviour. And your team’s mentalising network is often better at reading the gap than you might be comfortable with.

You can say the right things while being in entirely the wrong state. And your people will spot the inauthenticity.

The unexpected reward of generosity

I want to share a small moment that has stayed with me, because it captures something the research confirms but rarely makes it into leadership conversations.

I was in a restaurant and I made a deliberate decision, almost a private experiment with myself. I’m going to be genuinely warm to the person serving me. Not just pleasant, but genuinely warm. I smiled with real intent. I asked a question I was actually curious about. I paid attention to the answer.

What surprised me was what happened inside me. I felt a quiet, unexpected uplift that stayed with me well beyond the meal. I’d gone in thinking I was doing something for them. It turned out I was doing something for myself too.

Here’s what’s actually happening in those moments. Lieberman’s research identifies a structure called the septal area as the convergence point for all the inputs that produce empathy, drawing together the signals from the mirror system, the mentalising network, and our own emotional response, and converting them into the urge to help. Critically, this area is also deeply linked to the brain’s reward system and contains the highest density of oxytocin receptors in the brain. Being genuinely warm to another person activates your own reward circuitry. The neuroscience of generosity is quietly self-serving.

Lieberman’s research goes further: positive affect, genuinely feeling good, increases working memory, improves decision-making, and enhances cognitive performance, likely through the release of dopamine into the prefrontal cortex. Feeling good isn’t an add-on to performance. It is performance.

The reverse is equally true, and probably more consequential. A leader in a chronic state of stress or suppressed frustration is radiating that state continuously. Their team’s mirror neurons pick it up. Their

mentalising networks amplify it into narrative. And the cost of that ambient social pain quietly erodes the very performance the leader is under pressure to deliver.

The familiar advice to ‘be positive‘ on its own tends to produce very little of lasting value. We all have examples of the leader who smiles while their jaw is clenched, who delivers the upbeat message while their body tells a different story. As this research suggests, it is genuine mirroring that produces the neurological effect. At a biological level, you cannot convincingly fake it.

Which brings us to the most important capacity in human-centric leadership, and arguably the most neglected one. Self-awareness.

Self-awareness

You cannot choose your state if you cannot see it. You cannot manage what you’re transmitting if you have no awareness of what you’re actually feeling. And most leaders, pressed by the relentless demands of organisational life, have developed a remarkable capacity to override their own internal signals in the service of getting things done.

The leader’s state is the most contagious one in the room. It is amplified by the attention their people pay them, with the mentalising networks constantly constructing meaning from every signal they emit. Which means the most consequential leadership development work isn’t the next workshop on communication or strategic thinking. It’s the capacity to know, in any given moment, who you’re actually being, and to close the gap between that and what you intend.

Experiment

For the next week, try this. Before every significant interaction, pause and notice your actual internal state. Not what you’re about to say or do. Are you present or preoccupied? Genuinely curious about this person, or already half-thinking about your next meeting? Calm, or carrying something you haven’t put down yet?

Then ask yourself one question: if my team’s mirror neurons are accurately reading this state (and they are) is this what I want them picking up?

Have you ever been in a meeting when someone walked in and immediately changed its atmosphere, positively or negatively, without even saying a word? What did you notice? Drop a comment or message me directly, I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’re working with a leadership team that’s ready to explore what human-centric leadership looks like in practice, let’s talk.

Tom Flatau is CEO of Teamworking International and has been applying neuroscience to leadership development for over 35 years. His upcoming book on human-centric leadership explores how understanding our social brains can transform organisational performance. Connect with him at team-working.com.