Emotions Are A Competitive Advantage

Shhhhh. There’s a secret that many highly intelligent people have in common, but rarely talk about: analysis paralysis.

…Like the talented job seeker who has 5 great job offers in front of them, but doesn’t know how to choose. The entrepreneur who has a dozen great business ideas, but doesn’t know where to start. Or the CEO who isn’t sure which of 3 directions to take the company.

In situations like this, we’re trained to believe that “If only I could be more rational, then I’d make better decisions.” Mainstream thinking says that true professionals can’t bring their emotions into the workplace. And women in particular often feel that they need to tamp down their emotions to succeed in the workplace. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Effective decision making can’t happen without the context that the emotional brain provides.

Enter neuroscience. Neuroscientists have been holding onto a little known secret for at least the past two decades: that emotions are the key to successful planning and decision making.*

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s work with patients who had lost their ability to feel emotions due to brain tumors are a case in point. When asked to choose between a blue, black or red pen, these patients needed 5 hours to make a decision. Rather than becoming perfect decision making machines, they became paralyzed by indecision. They were missing the subtle, visceral signals that make even the most basic decisions possible.

There's a world of difference between seeing what our emotions have to tell us and being a slave to them. When we are a slave to our emotions, we lose our moorings and get washed out to sea with them. But when we tune into the intelligence of the emotional centers in our limbic brain, we become productive because we no longer have to spend energy fending off emotions, and we can see what wisdom they have to tell us. This is when emotions become a competitive advantage.

So how do we practically build our ability to integrate emotions into our decision making without getting caught up in them? Through meditation.

In any decision, there is a tug of war going on in our brain between pleasure and pain centers. And it’s our higher brain that is responsible for integrating all of these competing emotions in decision making. Meditation systematically builds the brain's frontal lobes, and in so doing, builds our capacity to sit with competing emotions without needing to shut any of these signals down. Having this richer set of signals allows us to make more informed decisions, and ultimately become more effective leaders.

---

Want to learn to meditate?  Sign up for my next meditation course for peak performance starting May 11th.  Build the habit shared by top leaders in just a few minutes a day.  www.seachangecoaching.co/meditate 

----
* Ironically, artificial Intelligence researchers have also found that emotions enhance decision making. In highly complex decision making scenarios where it's hard to “compute” a rational optimal long-run answer (e.g., where there’s no obvious wrong answer, and there’s a lot of uncertainty), they’ve found that when emotions are followed, decision makers are guided to the optimal solution. For more, see the scholarly research from Harvard: https://ijcai.org/papers11/Papers/IJCAI11-016.pdf

—
Follow me on LinkedIn --> click the "follow" button on the top right of this page Follow me on Twitter @m_lau
Contact me at [email protected]
Schedule a free 20 minute executive coaching session: www.SeachangeCoaching.co/schedule