Image of a heart on a soft blue and gold background, with the words: Stop Thinking, Start Knowing: Heart Intelligence in Business

Stop Thinking, Start Knowing: The Science of Heart Intelligence in Business

Leadership
November 07, 2025•14 min read

Leading with more heart in business isn’t hippy-ish or a sign of weakness. It's actually very smart.

This is often where mission-driven and passion-led entrepreneurs, businesses, and organisations have an advantage: their focus on who they serve and their impact helps them to cut through the noise and make the right decisions.

But what does it mean to lead with heart? Let's start by looking at what the heart actually does.

Every couple of months or so I deliver a session called “The connected body heart mind” as a volunteer for a small cancer charity called Rainbow Valley. At some point, I always ask: “What does your heart do?”. The two responses I always get are: “It pumps blood” and “It keeps you alive”. Correct, right?

But what about the things we say such as “follow your heart”, “listen to your heart”, “at the heart of”, or “broken heart”? In many languages and cultures around the world, we find similar concepts and sayings. The French (I should know!) use "écoute ton coeur", a direct translation of “listen to your heart”. The Spanish say "me lo dice el corazón" which translates to "my heart tells me", signifying a deep intuitive knowing.

These concepts are not new either. In ancient Egyptian belief, the heart, not the brain, was the source of intellect, character, emotions, and memory. During mummification, the brain was discarded, while the heart was meticulously preserved within the body. The ultimate judgment for the afterlife, as detailed in the Book of the Dead, was the "weighing of the heart". In ancient Greece, Aristotle saw the heart as the "seat of spiritual and mental functions", and in Traditional Chinese Medicine, the heart holds the central role in perception and overall understanding. Humans inherently know that the heart does a lot more than just pump blood.


Fun Facts: Beyond Pumping Blood

Here are some fun facts about the heart besides being at the heart of the cardiovascular system (see what I did there!):

  • It’s a gland producing oxytocin, commonly known as the “love hormone”.

  • It has a mini brain consisting of a cluster of around 40,000 neurons.

  • It communicates at least five times more with the brain than the brain does with the heart.

  • Its electromagnetic activity is 60 times greater than the brain’s and is detectable up to three feet around a person.

Now let’s unpack what all of this means!

The Heart as a Gland

The heart produces the hormone oxytocin, often referred to as the “love hormone”. Why? Because oxytocin helps us connect to others and bond. A few years ago, research was conducted in Sweden where they injected oxytocin into first-year university students. Scandinavians being typically introverted, it was found that the students who received the oxytocin were more talkative and looking for connection. This hormone also plays a critical role in labour and breastfeeding. Its release triggers labour and the release of milk, and, incidentally, helps mother and baby bond.

Oxytocin also has some significant health benefits: it’s a powerful antioxidant that helps protect the whole cardiovascular system, boosts our immune system, and counteracts the negative catabolic effects of cortisol.

Cortisol gets a bad rap as it has been dubbed the “stress hormone”. Yes, it is released when we find ourselves triggered into fight or flight, breaking down the stores of glycogen in the liver into readily available sugar as a source of energy to use to flee or fight back. But it’s also thanks to cortisol that we wake up in the morning. The issue is when cortisol gets released too often, as is the case when we experience chronic stress and anxiety. Constant elevated levels of cortisol lead to Type 2 Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, illness, and premature ageing as our DNA gets damaged (cortisol also attacks the telomeres—the little protective caps at the end of your chromosomes). Oxytocin protects our health.


The Heart Brain and Intelligence

The heart's "little brain" is composed of a network of around 40,000 neurons. While this is a small number compared to the 86 billion in an average adult human brain, its function is remarkable: it can learn, remember, sense, and support decision-making. This is the concept of heart intelligence, a term coined by the HeartMath Institute.

A study as recent as 2024, published in the journal Biology, demonstrated that, just like the “head brain” uses neuroplasticity to learn and adapt, the heart's own nervous system learns and adapts from experience. An academic review led by Dr. Mitchell Liester, and published in Medical Hypotheses in 2020, looked at stories of heart transplant recipients, who seem to have adopted personality traits, preferences, and even memories of their donor. While there are no specific mechanisms identified at this point, it clearly supports the idea that the heart plays a role in memory.

This brain is also producing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that, not only gives us a high, but also boosts creativity and problem-solving activity as it allows neurons that are not directly connected to exchange information with each other.

Another way that this little brain shows us that its size really doesn’t matter is by the amount of information that it passes on to the head brain. The communication heart-brain is at least five times greater than that of the brain-heart. Recently, it was demonstrated that the way the heart beats directly affects how the brain functions, and more specifically, how Heart Rate Variability (HRV) links directly to cognitive performance.

HRV is basically the difference between how fast your heart can beat and equally how much it can slow down. It’s a clear measure of the health of your nervous system, a clear picture of how dynamic and responsive the two sides of your autonomous nervous system are and how they work together. The autonomous nervous system is the autopilot running your body’s functions in the background, without you being aware of making a conscious decision. It has an accelerator, called the sympathetic nervous system, and a brake, the parasympathetic nervous system. When we talk about a high HRV, it means a wide range between your heart's lowest and highest beating speed.

A 2023 comprehensive review published in Frontiers in Neuroscience explicitly connects HRV to higher-order cognition. It was found that high HRV is linked to "greater executive function", "better working memory and attention", and "better negativity avoidance". These are pretty sought-after benefits when running and leading a business, don’t you think?

So how can we achieve a high HRV?


Heart Coherence: The Key to Intuition

A high HRV, as we’ve seen, is an indicator of health. Back in my coaching days, I had a client, a former midwife who had worked in a neonatal unit, looking after premature babies. She told me it was the babies’ HRV they were monitoring as an indication of how the babies were doing. A low HRV was a sign that something wasn’t right and they needed to act right away.

However, HRV is only one side of the story. How your heart goes from fast to slow is equally as important, meaning the heart beat pattern. When the body is physically challenged such as through sport or illness, and equally when we are mentally or emotionally challenged, creating stress, the body engages the sympathetic nervous system—your accelerator. This raises the heart rate. Once we are no longer challenged, the body will engage the brake, to return to homeostasis, the equilibrium it’s constantly striving to achieve. The two sides of the nervous system have got to work together, balancing each other so that your heart rate, blood pressure, etc., are stable. This is the reason why athletes monitor their HRV, since it shows them how quickly their bodies are able to recover after effort.

Your heart rate is constantly shooting up and down. In fact, this happens with every breath you take. As we inhale, the accelerator comes on; as we exhale, it’s the brake. But the way it shoots up and down creates very different outcomes—and this is the basis of decades of research from the HeartMath Institute.

The heart rate can fluctuate in different patterns:

  • It can be very erratic, a sign of stress (physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual), autonomic dysfunction, and various neurological and psychological conditions.

  • Or it can be very harmonious, a sign of an adaptive and resilient system—a coherent one.

Coherence can be defined as a logical, orderly, and harmonious connectedness between systems or parts of a system. And this is exactly what heart coherence is—complete harmony between the two parts of your autopilot, creating a sine-wave like pattern that goes beyond just the heart. It creates perfect synchronisation between the heart, body, and mind.


A smooth and coherent heart rate pattern

A smooth and coherent heart rate pattern

In another study, Di-Domenico et al. (2021), researchers used the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a famous psychological test that measures a person's ability to sense risk and choose long-term advantageous options over short-term disadvantageous ones, while looking at HRV. What they discovered was that "good decision-makers" showed significantly higher HRV, and that intuition is not just a feeling, but a physiological state that allows the prefrontal cortex (the analytical part of the brain) to "inhibit" bad short-term impulses and make better long-term choices.

So, can we “activate” intuition?


Implicit Intuition

What we call intuition is a blend of our knowledge, experience (memories), and beliefs (which include our values). All of these are functions processed in different parts of the brain—and the heart. I’ve already mentioned how the heart brain itself is capable of decision-making and making memories. But its connection to the brain, or I should say its communication flow, plays a crucial role.

Through the vagus nerve, the only nerve leaving the head to wander into the body (vagus meaning wandering in Latin), the heart communicates with the brain. I’ve already mentioned that the heart communicates at least five times more with the head brain than the other way round. The vagus nerve’s activity is itself 80% afferent—meaning 80% of the information flow is body to brain.

So what does the heart say? It tells the brain, through its pattern, if everything is well, or not.

  • When the heart beats in an erratic pattern, the brain will engage the stress response. The amygdala (the threat centre) is engaged, draining energy from the prefrontal cortex, because it’s now in “combat” or survival mode.

  • When the heart is coherent, so is the brain. All the parts are working in harmony, giving us full access to our prefrontal cortex, and our implicit intuition.

When I did my HeartMath Coach training, we did an exercise called Mind map/Heart map. It’s so powerful that I still use it in my business today and with all my clients. It consists of taking a challenge you’re facing in your business, or an aspect of your life where you feel confused or stuck in decision-paralysis. You start by drawing a mind map. Then you practice a deep heart coherence technique for a few minutes, then repeat the same exercise, building the “heart map”. It’s always incredibly fascinating to see the difference between the two. Clarity, simplicity, and groundedness are words that come to mind. And this is very nicely summarised by a Hindi saying: "Dil se socho, dimag se nahi," which translates to "think with your heart, not with your brain".


Heart Qualities: Elevating Coherence

So how do we get the heart in this state of coherence so that we can listen to it? Remember when I said that coherence is a harmonious balance between the two sides of your nervous system, and that with every breath you take, you’re effectively stimulating both sides? It may not come as a surprise then that to achieve a state of coherence, it starts with the breath. It starts with creating a harmonious balance between your inhale and your exhale. Early research by HeartMath established that the ultimate rhythm to achieve heart coherence was to breathe five seconds in, five seconds out, or thereabout. But recent research has now demonstrated that as long as you can find a slower, comfortable pace that works for you, keeping that balance between inhale and exhale, you will get coherent.

But that’s not all. What the HeartMath Institute discovered was that the heart can get even more coherent when on top of this breathing pattern, we add “heart qualities”. What do they mean by that? Heartfelt (here’s another word we use) emotions such as love, gratitude, care, compassion. When we activate these feelings by using our imagination or memories of someone, somewhere or something for whom or which we can feel those emotions for, our coherence level rises. This is where being human can make all the difference between analytics and even AI-based decision-making. Your spreadsheets or AI companion do not have heart qualities. They cannot get coherent and access your life-based implicit intuition to make decisions!


The Heart’s Electromagnetic Field

All this leaves me with the last “fun fact” about the heart: the strong electro-magnetic activity it produces. It is 60 times greater than the brain’s, detectable up to three feet around a person with sensitive magnetometers. Why is this electromagnetic field so important? Because it is the broadcast of your physical, mental, and emotional state.

Research by the HeartMath Institute shows that a person’s heart’s electromagnetic activity can entrain another person’s heart: meaning the two hearts’ patterns will synchronise with each other. When my daughter was young and would have a tantrum, you know, the ones when kids just go beyond the “point of no return”, when you can’t talk, or “hug them calm” anymore... I used to sit close to her and practise heart coherence. Within a few minutes, she would start to calm down, then eventually be calm enough to have a cuddle and dissolve that tantrum.

Imagine using this in a team’s setting? In a business meeting with a client? Imagine having everyone not only coherent but in sync with each other, in complete harmony in body, heart, and mind? How powerful would this be?


Conclusion

As Rasheed Ogunlaru reminds us in Soul Trader: Putting the Heart Back into Your Business (2012), “The head thinks. The heart knows”.

The scientific evidence is clear: the heart is far more than a pump. It is a powerful centre of intelligence, health, and intuition that directly influences your decision-making, cognitive performance, and ability to lead.

For mission-driven entrepreneurs, embracing this heart intelligence isn't just a feel-good notion; it's a strategic competitive advantage. It’s the key to making decisions aligned with your deepest purpose, cutting through the noise, and fostering a truly connected and resilient business.

So, whether you are a solo entrepreneur or lead a team, leading with more heart means a clearer mind, better decision-making, and a connected and aligned team. All it takes is five minutes to breathe in balance, activate a feeling of gratitude or care, and start listening to the wisdom of your heart.

References:

Heart Intelligenceleading with heartbusiness intuitionHeart Rate VariabilityHRV for businessheart coherence techniqueentrepreneur stress reductionpurpose-driven leadershipheart-brain connection
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