Why Timing is the New Longevity
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
Written by Dr. Nina Jatuparisuthiseen, Acupuncturist
Dr. Kanokwan “Nina” Jatuparisuthiseen is a board-certified and licensed acupuncturist, a Certified Sports Medicine Acupuncture® practitioner, and the founder of Nina Acupuncture. Her work is known for its clinical precision, individualized care, and effective results for pain, stress-related conditions, and well-being.
There is something quite remarkable about the way nature works when you stop and really think about it. A tree doesn’t grow purely for itself. It provides shelter; its roots help stabilise the earth, its leaves eventually return nutrients to the soil and, beneath the surface, it is connected to a much wider ecosystem that helps life around it to flourish. I think there is something in that for leadership.
In my recent articles, I’ve been using nature as a way of exploring authentic and future-ready leadership. We’ve created the clearing, found our flow, looked at the importance of strong roots and, most recently, explored The Intelligence of Intent, my belief that before leadership becomes visible in our behaviour, it first has to be established in our minds. But that raises another question for me. Once we have decided who we want to be as a leader, what are we going to do with that choice?
For me, part of the answer lies in a word we still seem reluctant to use seriously enough in leadership. Love.
What does love have to do with leadership?
Probably more than we think. We’re comfortable talking about strategy, performance, transformation, productivity and growth. More recently, we have become comfortable talking about empathy, wellbeing, psychological safety and belonging.
But mention love in a leadership conversation and it can still feel a little uncomfortable. Perhaps too personal, emotional or even soft for the world of business. I think that misses the point.
When I talk about love in leadership, I’m not talking about sentimentality. I’m certainly not suggesting leaders should avoid difficult conversations, lower their expectations or spend their time trying to make everyone happy. Sometimes love requires exactly the opposite.
It means having the conversation somebody needs rather than the one they want. It means challenging poor behaviour while still respecting the person. It means making difficult decisions and thinking about their human consequences. Sometimes it means putting the longer-term interests of your people, organisation or community ahead of what might be easiest for you personally.
That requires something more than simply feeling that we care. It requires the will to care.
The psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm wrote about this many years ago in The Art of Loving. His argument was that love isn’t simply something that happens to us; it involves practice, discipline, patience and commitment. That idea has always resonated with me because it changes love from something passive into something we choose to do.
We can’t always choose whether we like someone. We can choose whether we respect them. We can choose to listen. We can choose to be fair. We can choose to show compassion. We can choose to recognise the humanity in another person, even when we fundamentally disagree with them.
For me, that is where The Will to Love becomes a leadership philosophy rather than simply a nice idea.
Leadership starts within, but it cannot end there
This also connects strongly with the idea of Psychological Intelligence, or PsyQ, that I explored in my previous article. PsyQ is what I describe as the intelligence of intentional self-leadership. It is our ability to intentionally shape our mindset, identity and beliefs towards the future we want to create.
But there is little point in mastering ourselves if that mastery never positively affects anyone else. Our intention shapes who we become. Who we become influences how we behave. Our behaviour affects our relationships and, collectively, those relationships become culture.
So the inner world of a leader eventually becomes part of the everyday experience of everyone around them. We’ve all experienced this.
An insecure leader creates a certain atmosphere. An ego-driven leader creates another. A fearful leader can create a culture where people stop speaking, experimenting or taking risks because they are constantly trying to protect themselves. So what happens when the leader starts from a position of genuine care?
Perhaps leadership is closer to stewardship
This takes me back to nature. Healthy ecosystems can’t survive indefinitely through extraction. There has to be renewal, replenishment and some form of balance.
Yet we have sometimes built organisations around a predominantly extractive view of leadership. How much more can we get from people? How much faster can we grow? How much more productive can we become? What else can we deliver this quarter?
These questions matter. Organisations have to perform. But perhaps future-ready leadership requires us to ask another question alongside them: What are we putting back?
What are we giving back to the people who contribute their time and energy to our organisations? What are we putting back into communities? What responsibility do we have towards the environment and towards generations who will inherit the consequences of decisions we make today?
This is where love begins to connect with stewardship and sustainability. If you genuinely care about something, you become concerned about what happens to it after you have gone. That moves leadership beyond success towards legacy.
It is also central to my thinking around Leadership 5.0. The future-ready leader cannot simply be technologically capable, strategically clever or comfortable with artificial intelligence (AI). Those things will increasingly become expected.
As technology becomes more capable, I believe our distinctly human leadership qualities become more, not less, important: judgement, empathy, ethics, imagination, courage, compassion and care. Perhaps the more intelligent our machines become, the more intentional we need to become about our humanity.
Love does not mean lowering the bar
This is an important distinction. Caring about people doesn’t mean accepting everything they do.
Think about a garden. If you care about it, you don’t simply leave everything untouched. You prune things. You remove what is unhealthy. You sometimes move something because it isn’t flourishing where it is. You intervene precisely because you care about what happens next.
Leadership is much the same. I have seen leaders avoid difficult conversations and convince themselves they are being kind. Usually they aren’t. They are avoiding their own discomfort, and the person who needs the feedback loses the opportunity to grow.
Sometimes one of the most caring things a leader can say is: “This isn’t good enough, and I know you are capable of better.”
For me, the important question is what sits behind the challenge. Am I challenging someone because I want to demonstrate my authority or because I genuinely want them to succeed? Am I listening because I’m waiting for my opportunity to speak or because I actually want to understand? Am I developing someone because the succession plan says I should or because I can see something in that person that perhaps they cannot yet see in themselves?
People are remarkably good at sensing the difference.
Think about the leaders you remember
When I think about leadership in this way, I often come back to a simple exercise. Think about the best leader you have ever worked for. What do you remember?
Years later, you probably don’t remember their strategy presentation. You are unlikely to remember their key performance indicators (KPIs). Most of the meetings you attended together will have disappeared completely from memory. But you probably remember how that person made you feel.
Maybe they believed in you at a point when you didn’t quite believe in yourself. Perhaps they gave you an opportunity, listened when something was wrong or challenged you when you needed challenging. Maybe during a difficult moment in your life, they simply treated you as a human being rather than an employee.
Those moments stay with us. More importantly, they often influence the way we subsequently lead other people.
Leadership has a way of passing from one person to another that no organisational chart will ever capture. Rather like the forest, much of its real influence happens through an invisible network.
One question to change your leadership
For all the philosophy around this, the practical application can be incredibly simple. Before your next important conversation, pause for a few seconds and ask yourself: How can I show care here?
I don’t mean: How can I be nice? And I certainly don’t mean: How can I avoid conflict? Ask instead: What does care require from me in this moment?
The answer might be listening. It might be encouragement. It could be patience, honesty or a difficult truth. Sometimes it will require courage.
It is a small question, but it changes the intention we take into an interaction. When our intention changes, our behaviour often changes with it. That is how philosophy becomes leadership.
What is your leadership philosophy?
This is something I’m exploring increasingly through my Leadership Philosophies work because I believe every leader has a philosophy, whether they have consciously articulated it or not. We all have beliefs about people, power, success, responsibility and what leadership is for.
The danger is allowing those beliefs to remain unexamined. Techniques can tell us what we can do as leaders. Philosophy helps us decide what we should do.
It gives us something to return to when the answer isn’t obvious and when circumstances put our values under pressure. Ultimately, that is where integrity comes from: the alignment between what we say we believe and how we actually behave.
One of my own leadership philosophies is very simple: To lead is to love.
Without some kind of love, it becomes difficult to truly care, to serve or to lead with authenticity, respect and integrity.
The best leaders are not simply skilled at strategy, execution or influence. They bring humanity into the room. They create trust. They listen. They challenge with care and lead in a way that allows people to feel seen, valued and respected.
This isn’t weakness. It isn’t softness. It is leadership at its most grounded and most real.
What grew because you were here?
Eventually, every leader leaves. The job changes. Someone else takes the office. The organisation moves forward and the title that once seemed incredibly important eventually belongs to somebody else. So what remains?
The people you encouraged. The confidence you helped create. The standards you set. The opportunities you gave. The values you refused to compromise and, perhaps most importantly, the people who became more because your leadership gave them the space to grow.
Nature seems to understand this better than we do. Eventually, even the oldest tree falls. But the story doesn’t end there. What remains returns to the forest and contributes to whatever grows next.
Maybe that gives us a better question for leadership than How high did I climb? Perhaps we should ask: What grew because I was here?
As we move into a future shaped by AI, uncertainty and extraordinary technological change, I think that question will matter more, not less.
The future of leadership will undoubtedly require intelligence, adaptability, courage and vision. But if we want that future to remain genuinely human, it will require something else as well.
The will to care, the willingness to serve and, ultimately, the will to love.
Read more from Dr. Nina Jatuparisuthiseen
Dr. Nina Jatuparisuthiseen, Acupuncturist
Dr. Nina Jatuparisuthiseen, DAc, L.Ac., LMT, C.SMA, LE, is a board-certified licensed acupuncturist and founder of Nina Acupuncture. She holds advanced training in sports medicine acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, and lifestyle and wellness coaching through Harvard Medical School Executive Education and specializes in evidence-based pain management, sports injury recovery, mental and women’s health, preventive care, and systems-based approaches to long-term health and resilience. Her work emphasizes mindful, ethical, and patient-centered care.
