Leading from the heart: caring, love, peace, and values guiding leadership.

Contemporary transformational leadership focuses on authentic leadership styles, relational caring, meaningful recognition, creativity, building trust, relationships, participative decision making, dialogue with time for reflection, and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how concepts from the unitary transformative paradigm and caring science can be integrated within nursing leadership practice, to invite nurse leaders to make these concepts explicit in their own transformational leadership journey, and to offer ways of reframing traditional organizational language. Practice exemplars are presented to highlight how tenets from caring theory are guiding the practice of nursing leadership.