Dr. Jacqueline Campbell is a conscious leadership strategist, author, and speaker. With 15 years of experience in the mental health field, combined with her years traveling the world as a U.S. Marine, working security with federal agencies for diplomatic officials, she is a trailblazer in emotional intelligence and human potential. Her diverse background bridges neuroscience, trauma recovery, and optimal performance strategies for effective leadership. She brings a unique voice to stages around the world. One that blends scientific insight with deep, soul-stirring truth. Audiences are not only inspired by her presence but transformed by her message. Whether addressing private and corporate events on human potential or law enforcement, school and healthcare conferences on leadership, Dr. Campbell delivers with originality, authenticity, and a call for evolutionary change.
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Blue Talks.
[00:00:03] Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here on the stage at Cambridge University. Thank you for spending your time with me.
[00:00:33] What we're going to be talking about today is how your leadership potential is so vital that just by being here in this room, you are impacting the people around you. I hear a lot of people, they always say, I'm not a leader. I don't own a business. I'm not in charge of this big corporation. You don't have to be. You are a leader right here, right now. If it's not in your home, it's with your spouse,
[00:00:57] person at the checkout aisle. Just by being here, being you, you are affecting the people around you. Before we continue, though, I'd like to start by doing an exercise with you. So if you all feel comfortable, go ahead and close your eyes. Take a few slow, deep breaths in through your heart space. Allow your breath to calm and your body to calm.
[00:01:28] And take another really long, slow, deep breath in through your heart space. And when you're ready, you can open up your eyes. The heart's magnetic field is 100 times that of the human brain. We can feel it, not only in our body, but outside our body. It expands to the people and things around you, and it subtly shifts their state too.
[00:01:58] Heart-focused breathing increases heart rate variability. So it helps your body all get into sync, all your organs. It helps you be healthier. Helps your sleep. Helps you communicate better with the people around you because it increases heart-brain coherence. It increases your intuition just naturally. Increases your internal strength and your peace and your confidence.
[00:02:26] Also because it subtly shifts the people around you, it helps with communication and connection naturally. So you are heart-centered. I once had a coach. She asked me, who speaks love to you? I couldn't tell her though. I had no name. Everybody was around me. They were just rough, aggressive, dominant. I was too. I didn't know anybody who's heart-centered. So that's why they didn't speak love to me.
[00:02:58] We tend to think that the brain is the smartest part of us. It's not. The heart does. It is. But the reason why we follow our brain is because it has all this information in it, right? Like a computer. But it ingests all your history. That's what it's programmed to do. It's running off of old, outdated information. And if you don't update it, it's running off of wounds, traumas, mistakes, regrets.
[00:03:29] And not that it was their fault, but all of our parents' mistakes too. They had no idea. But we can do better. We can change that because we can upgrade it. Generational trauma was passed down in my family, just like most of us. From my grandparents to my parents to me and my siblings. And me and my siblings, we were very aggressive, very violent with each other.
[00:03:58] But we didn't know better. Programming, trauma, it's like this nasty, disgusting goop that you have inside. You want to throw it at somebody. Anybody ever heard that word projection? Like when somebody's projecting onto you? It's because subconsciously, we know it's inside us. We want to get rid of it. It's inside your nervous system. Your nervous system is made up of your brain and your spinal cord.
[00:04:27] And it has nerve endings going all throughout your body. It's amazing and very powerful because it controls your reality. It controls your senses and your identity. This is your experience in life. And it's coding it in old programming. When I was 17, I joined the Marine Corps.
[00:04:55] Every branch of the military has their jokes, okay? All right, I get it. However, one of the jokes that the Marine Corps has is that people crazy enough to join the Marine Corps, they are either running away from something or they are desperately looking for something else. I was both.
[00:05:12] While I was there, they taught us to discipline ourselves, to adjust our mindset, to be strong, capable, and confident. But I was already violent and aggressive. It made me harder. I was just trying to figure out what I needed. I started taking college courses in psychology.
[00:05:39] I learned everything I could about healing myself and other people from the inside, biologically. I wanted to solve the problem. I wanted it to end with me, not the next generation, me. So as I was working on myself over the years, I didn't realize just how much balance the nervous system wants.
[00:06:06] It goes from the left hemisphere of our brain, which is logical, problem-solution focused, and it's detail-oriented, but it's also aggressive. It's wanting to attack the target, get the job done, meet your goals. So it's emotionless. That's why it's logical. And then our right hemisphere, which is very creative, it's very expansive and free, it's very emotionally connected, and it's present because it's just open.
[00:06:37] What our nervous system is doing is trying to balance both sides. So as I was healing, I didn't know that it was trying to do this. I went from complete one side, very aggressive and dominant, to the complete opposite. I was very passive and submissive. My identity changed so many times, it was so hard to keep up. But even though I wanted to quit, I didn't. I pushed through. I call this the pendulum swing.
[00:07:07] I was like, oh, my God. The nervous system, when it's wanting balance, and if you don't know, it will control you, and it will move you to extreme opposites. Its goal is to find the middle right there. And when it does, this is the coolest thing because you have this inside you right now. Our biology knows when the system is balanced, the heart takes the lead. We naturally become heart-centered.
[00:07:33] When was the last time you looked deep into somebody's eyes and just saw how beautiful their heart was? That makes a lot of people uncomfortable because they can't let you in. That vulnerability, if they're heart-centered, they don't do that. And if you're heart-centered, you trigger healing in them immediately just by seeing them. I'd like to welcome you to my vision of the world.
[00:08:01] I've adopted a concept called peak performance emotional intelligence, PPEI. And this is when you get to stand in your strength and be emotionally present at the same time. And every one of us needs it because our biology already wants it. It knows how to do this. We just have to let it. So why, if it's so important, why do so many people suppress it? Well, because it's easy.
[00:08:31] That stuff's in the past. It was 20 years ago. It doesn't bother me. I got over it. I did talk therapy for it. I've read a self-help book. It's embedded in your nervous system and that's self-sabotage, keeping you from growing into your potential. It's holding you back. The other hard part is that some people aren't going to like it. It's going to make them uncomfortable because your healing is going to trigger them to heal too.
[00:09:03] It also takes radical accountability, which means I can't blame. I can't project. What is in my system is my responsibility and I have to work on that. And if somebody else projects, if somebody else blames, that's okay. That's fine. It takes strength to not engage in negativity, not engage in conflict, and still send them love and kindness, forgiveness, and grace.
[00:09:30] Because it is hard to balance your own nervous system and to heal your stuff. When I was going to boot camp, there was like 30 of us kids, right? All leaving home for the first time. Absolute chaos. On a bus. In the middle of the night, drill instructors were screaming. I don't even know what they were saying. But we had to put our head between our legs because they didn't want us to see outside the window driving up to the base. I was horrified, y'all. I thought they were going to take us out back and kill us.
[00:10:00] They didn't. Thank God, right? They made us stronger. However, that's what it's like working on your wounds. It is absolutely terrifying. You will be in a dark place. You will want to quit. You will feel helpless. But it's not going to kill you. It is going to make you so strong. You have no idea how big your potential is until you walk that path and you embody it.
[00:10:31] So our unresolved wounds are coding our potential, right? Our job is to move through it. From this point on, when you think of leadership, I'd really like to challenge you to put the word self in front of it. Because there is no leadership that does not have effective self-leadership. Thank you.
[00:11:57] This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suiteradio.com.