If you want to change what people do, you need to change what they think. If you want to change their thinking, you have to change how they feel... and underlying feelings is emotions...
– Dr. Alan Watkins
 

As a leader – of a corporation, a department, a team, a start-up – you carry a lot of responsibility. Many leaders feel that, to be effective, they have to be tough and unemotional, steely-eyed, and constantly performing, over long periods of time (50-, 60-, 70-hour weeks with few or no vacations), at peak levels. Sound familiar?

Many leaders try to, or want to, forget that they are human, vulnerable, and that they have emotions and feelings which will be informing their decisions, their choices, their actions.

And why not? Why would you want to do deal with emotions in a business environment? Aren't they just inconvenient at best, divisive and time-wasting at worst?


Why Deal with Emotions?

Because emotions drive us. They drive our thinking, and our actions, whether we are conscious of them or not. In fact, even more so when we are not conscious of them. I have seen this for a long time, in my own life and in the lives of my clients.

Emotions have important information for us, if we are willing to listen to them. But in the busy, high-pressure world of senior levels of business, many don't know how to, or are simply unwilling to, take the time to decipher that information. We neglect this area of who we are as human beings at the risk of our emotional, psychic, and physical health, the last being the one most of us notice first, in terms of burnout or chronic illness.

And because decisions at senior levels impact so many others around us, we therefore imperil others as well.

In a talk given by international expert on leadership and performance, Dr. Alan Watkins,  he shares a bit of his expertise around emotions.  (I shared his talk with you in this month's  Resource Corner.)  The relevant   <more>