What do Great Leaders know about Emotions, that you should learn as well....

Up from the Hub archives. Originally published 2007

I have always thought that showing or simply having emotions was a weakness that needed to be controlled, crushed or suppress. But what if I told you that your emotions were not an obstacle to success but a critical ingredient in your success and can help you increase your income beyond your dream?

As an Emotional Intelligence Practitioner, I train, develop, coach individuals to improve their performance by allowing them to understand, integrate and use consciously their "emotions" and "thoughts" as well as the ones of other to create the results they want and influence others (after all, is it not what leadership is about?). Allow me to share some secrets with you:

Great leaders accept their feelings and allow themselves to feel their feelings fully.
That’s right! They allow themselves to feel their fear in all its
intensity, but do it anyway. They don’t try to suppress it or step around it or deny it. They don’t fight it. They accept it and feel it. A great leader doesn’t
believe something is wrong with him when he feels a particular feeling.

Great leaders know the difference between conscious emotional action and impulsive emotional re-action.
Some people might call this emotional maturity emotional awareness. For example when a child feels angry it will hit people or break things. This is an emotional re-action. Some of us don’t know how to stop re-acting impulsively to our emotions and it carries into adulthood. When we feel a particular way, we re-act negatively or we channel one emotion to a different emotion and re-act incongruently. It is impulsive re-action most people think of when they imagine an emotional person.

Great leaders feel their emotion, name their emotions, and act on them. If you're able to recognize which emotions you feel in every part of the day, and associate this emotions to a specific event, you are able to recreate it on demands and generate the state of mind, of thoughts you want and ultimately the actions you want to produce. Imagine being able to do that when signing an important deal, create an emotion of certainty, pleasure and achievement, how will you act?

Great leaders trust their intuition. Intuition is the art of knowing without reasoning. Great leaders know that intuition is the shortcut to making great decisions quickly. We can all access our intuition if we learn to listen to our guts.

Great leaders broadcast positive emotions. Great leaders have learned to use their minds to feel and broadcast Love, Hope, Desire, Sex Appeal, Confidence, Joy, Trust, and Faith to other people. This is the best way to create report, forge relationships, another great secret of success.

Great leaders do the seemingly impossible using imagination combined with positive emotion.
They create a novel, a piece of artwork, a political movement, a military victory, an invention, or a great theory, by first imagining it in detail while feeling positive emotions like passion, love, and faith. Without intense focused emotions, there would be no world
changing creations. Emotions are the fuel for behavior change, they create thoughts, states that transform the way you act.

Trust me, I wasn't always that way, for a long time I use to be arrogant, harsh to others, pushed people away and this has costed me to lose friends, opportunities,potential incomes or deals. Suppressing your emotions won’t solve your problems because emotions will always find a way to
manifest itself.

Your emotions are your strength, not your weakness. It just depends upon how you think about them. Learn how to identify them, use them to create the thinking process you need to support and strengthen your action and have complete certainty.

Get to know your emotions, to understand them and integrate them as part of your decision process. Emotions is the fuel and dynamic for lasting behavior changes, it's one the starting poing for effective changes...

To your success,