team work and negotiation. Those on the receiving end of your little joke experience a form of shame that quickly turns to rage. People who regularly use sarcasm inflame rather than defuse tense situations. And studies show that when blood pressure rises, intelligence and creativity drop.
Artful wit, on the other hand, packs a constructive contagious punch, disarming fear and anger with feelings of delight as well as amusement, encouraging people to work together more effectively. As Winston Churchill once said, “A joke is a very serious thing.” During the darkest hours of World War II, the British prime minister harnessed the power of laughter to release tension while communicating inspiring, sobering, sometimes even critical, opinions and observations. Here’s a sampling: “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” “[A politician needs] the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year — and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.” “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
And courage he had, in spades, exercised to a large extent on the back of a horse, I might add.
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Throughout his career, Churchill repeatedly demonstrated the ability to lower his own arousal in volatile situations, meeting the affect contagion of fear with the affect contagion of humor, courage, intelligence, and inspiration — centering and focusing large numbers of people who had good reason to panic. Yet nothing in his later years could compare with the intensity of his early cavalry experiences.
In the 1957 book His Kingdom for a Horse, Wyatt Blassingame describes, with hair-raising precision, what twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Churchill faced during a cavalry charge in Egypt by the Twenty-First Lancers regiment. His horse, a gray Arabian he called Arab, was a former polo pony — polo was a game that Churchill himself played “extremely well. From a full run the little horse could whirl to the left or right or come to a sliding stop, keeping his balance like a ballet dancer.” Those skills would come in handy during a Dervish army attack in September of 1898.
Sword drawn, racing toward the enemy with the rest of his troop, Churchill suddenly realized that a recent shoulder injury would prevent him from using the heavy weapon effectively. “At a full gallop,” Blassingame marvels, “he managed to get the sword back into its scabbard and drew his pistol. This took time. When he looked toward the enemy again he was almost on them. The kneeling and crouching Dervishes in their blue robes were firing frantically, the smoke swirling over them.” And just behind the front line, Churchill soon discovered, was a dry wash filled with thousands of fearsomely armed warriors. Dodging bullets he as raced through a cluster of kneeling riflemen, Churchill pulled hard on the reins at the edge of that sunken watercourse. “Arab skidded, then dropped catlike into the depression. If he had stumbled there, if he had fallen, a dozen swords and spears would have struck at the lieutenant. Once unhorsed he would have had no chance. But Arab stayed on his feet; he kept running; he broke through the swordsmen and leaped into the clear on the far side of the dry waterbed.”
As horse and rider careened through the next wave of the khalifa’s brave and fanatical army, Churchill saw a Dervish fling himself on the ground. For an instant the British officer thought the soldier had been shot. Then, even as Arab raced forward, Churchill “realized the man planned to slash at the gray’s legs and bring him down, unhorsing the rider.” With seconds to spare, “Arab turned as if he were on a polo field. The slashing swords missed. Leaning from the saddle Churchill fired two shots into the man. He barely had time to straighten when he saw another Dervish directly ahead, sword raised. But again the gray whirled, so close this time that even as Churchill fired, his pistol touched the face of the Dervish.”
Not all of the Lancers were blessed with the same combination of skill and luck. When the charge ended, minutes after the attack was launched, they had lost almost one quarter of their force. Nearly ten thousand Dervishes had been killed or wounded by the time the rest of their ranks broke and ran. When the dust cleared, twenty thousand British and Egyptian soldiers had won the battle against sixty thousand of the khalifa’s men.
After facing such an extreme form of “natural selection” at such a young age, it’s no wonder that Churchill was able to remain centered and thoughtful in the conflicts to come. As Blassingame emphasized at the end of his breathtaking narrative, “without the leadership of Churchill, World War II might quite possibly have had a different ending.”
From a Darwinian perspective, Lieutenant Churchill not only won the right to breed by surviving that pivotal battle, he demonstrated all the right stuff to lead: during a single cavalry charge, he exhibited poise in the midst of chaos, the capacity to negotiate massive amounts of sensory input, split-second accuracy in reading the nonverbal intentions of others, and — most important when your survival depends on remaining glued to a charging, skidding, twirling, leaping polo-pony-turned-warhorse — an advanced aptitude for coordinating movements with other team members.
The latter ability has a neurological component — namely, oscillators, cells that attune two or more beings physically by regulating how and when their bodies move together. Researchers see oscillators in action when people are about to kiss. These special neurons also help the cello section of the New York Philharmonic play in unison: if you could peek inside the musicians’ heads, as scientists have figured out how to do, you’d see that the performers’ right brain hemispheres are more closely coordinated with each other than are the left and right sides of their individual brains.
Optimal use of mirror neurons, oscillators, and other social circuitry allows leaders to engage what Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee call resonance. Biologically speaking, a manager who worships objectivity, outlaws feeling, and hides in his office while handing down written policies and procedures, expecting followers to mirror his dissociative, stoic presence, is, at the very least, not using his brain properly — and preventing employees from reaching their potential as well. To activate the optimal team-building power of resonance, you have to actually care about others, sensing and coordinating with their feelings and motivations while, at the same time, turning destructive emotional feedback loops around by modulating your own empathic physical responses.
Two thousand years ago, people had no idea how many thousands of specialized neurons were firing during the complex social interactions of gifted leaders, but they recognized true talent when they saw it and even managed on occasion to write about it. The Greek historian Plutarch was particularly impressed with the exploits of a young prince named Alexander. Student of Aristotle, son of Philip of Macedon, the boy obviously had the opportunity to balance his rigorous intellectual studies with extensive equestrian training: at age ten, the future conqueror proved to be the only person in his father’s entourage capable of riding an unruly horse named Bucephalus.
No one could mount the black stallion, and even the grooms were afraid to lead him. In one of the first historical reports of “horse gentling,” Alexander noticed that Bucephalus seemed to be spooking at his own shadow. The young Macedonian prince took hold of the bridle and turned the quivering, snorting stallion into the sun. The boy spoke softly, stroking the horse for a while. Then, at the right moment, Alexander the Great leaped onto the stallion’s sturdy back and took off at a gallop, reveling in the horse’s phenomenal vitality rather than trying to rein it in. The connection between the two deepened over the years. Plutarch wrote that “in Uxia, once, Alexander lost him, and issued an edict that he would kill every man in the country unless he was brought back — as he promptly was.”
Bucephalus died at the age of thirty, a long life for a horse even by today’s standards. “During the final battle in India,” observed Lawrence Scanlan in Wild about Horses, “the horse took spears in his neck and flank but still managed to turn and bring the king to safety before dying. Alexander was overcome with grief, and later named a city after Bucephalus.” The legendary king relied on his mount’s sensitivity, vitality, quick wits, and subtle warnings to help him survive many a battle. And Bucephalus relied on Alexander’s ability to not only understand and respond to the horse’s concerns but also interrupt the debilitating effects of escalating arousal, transforming the energy