April 21, 2025

Invite the Monster In: Emotions at the Leader Table

“Cut the drama. Stick to the facts. Check your emotions at the door!”

Sound familiar?

Many leaders have swallowed this myth that emotions are a liability, something to suppress, control or avoid. We stay clear of emotions because they hijack our decisions, cloud our thinking and derail our teams. Emotions muddy the water and steer conversations off course.

Emotions, we’ve been told, are like monsters hiding under the bed—watch out. They’ll leap out and stir up a storm!

The truth is, this outdated mindset has a cost and it would serve us to leave it behind.

You see, when we push emotions aside, we abandon one of our greatest sources of energy. We walk away from powerful fuel that magnetizes our connection with each other, our creativity and our motivation to act.

Quantum Physics—and our own lived experience—tells us that emotions aren’t a threat. They are essential fuel for collaboration, creative thinking, risk-taking and commitment to stay the course when we’re pursuing what matters most to us.

#1  Emotions & High Performance: Our Athletes Point The Way

We already know the power of emotions when it comes to watching great athletes overcome limits and achieve success. They leverage their emotions as a competitive advantage.

Athletes funnel passion into focused, committed decisions. They develop the ability to convert fear into inspiration, disappointment into optimism, anger into determination. They fine-tune their internal energy to enter peak states — their “zone.” They visualize success before it happens, locking into the feeling of the win to prime their minds and bodies for victory.

And when athletes don’t bring emotional intensity to the game, we call them out. We say they showed up “all head, no heart.”

So… what happened to us in business? How did we forget that human beings in the office are similar to human beings on a sports field?

Somewhere along the way, we put our brain in charge – and left the rest behind.

As business leaders, we put our heads together to think…a lot. We craft brilliant strategies and detailed plans. We invite people to meetings packed with deadlines, data, and huge to-do lists. Somehow we hope that this sparks high engagement and great performance.

But instead of clarity and connection, we often create the very opposite. More confusion. Less  motivation. Feelings of disconnection and resentment.

The bottom line is that we’ve worked hard to master the thinking part of our work. But we lost sight of the second half – and necessary part – of the success equation… emotional engagement. The fuel that actually powers our desire to connect, collaborate and stretch towards new futures together.

So if emotional energy is so essential to the sports team, why have we left it out of the boardroom?

#2  Our Love/Hate Relationship with Emotions: It’s Not What We Think

Truth is, if you’re like hundreds of leaders I’ve coached over the years, you never fully bought into the idea of “leaving emotions at the door.” You know human beings are emotionally driven. You’ve seen it. People go further and rise higher when they’re inspired — when their heart’s in it.

The problem? Most of us have a love/hate relationship with emotion.

We love the positive ones — passion, appreciation, joy — because they immediately energize the room and lift up the team. But we hate the negative ones — guilt, frustration, disappointment — because they suck the oxygen right out of us. They drain energy, drag morale, and stall momentum.

But… is that really true? Do we actually hate negative emotions? Or are we just… ineffective with them?

Let’s be honest — sometimes negative emotions serve us. They snap us out of complacency.
They call out what’s not working. They can even offer a healthy wake-up call.

But if we don’t know how to shift them — to convert negative emotions into something more constructive — the energy gets stuck. It weighs down the team. It spreads. It infects the whole system. Ultimately it erodes the bottom line.

So maybe emotions aren’t the problem. Maybe we avoid emotions in business not because they’re dangerous – but because we suck at navigating them.

We’ve avoided them because we don’t trust ourselves to move our teams through the negative ones. We don’t know how to do it efficiently within the fabric of our day to day conversations.

We don’t have simple, reliable tools to convert what we DON’T want into what we DO want.

#3  The Science Behind the Spark: Why Emotions Supercharge Performance

For 25 years now, I’ve witnessed leader teams create leaps in collaboration and results – while using a few simple tools that built elevated emotions and energy during meetings and planning exercises. Although my experience demonstrated something was working – I wasn’t sure why or how it consistently created breakthroughs.

Then, Quantum Physics found me.

I was surprised to learn there was a clear and definitive science behind what was happening in front of my eyes.

Basically, this is what I learned (especially about leadership):

1. Thoughts generate electrical impulses in the brain — measurable patterns, like radio signals being broadcast to the field.
2. Emotions produce frequency waves in the heart — also measurable — and these waves amplify the signals of the mind.
3. Like a generator, when emotions wrap around the thoughts we’re having, they create real magnetic energy — a literal electromagnetic field — that radiates outward.
4. So…when our thoughts and emotions are in sync, we broadcast a strong, aligned signal to those around us. We powerfully influence others from a state of coherence and resonance. The field we’re projecting magnetically pulls others to show up more open, collaborative and trusting. Engagement increases and our brains get creative. When it comes to committing to new plans and actions, our teams tap their natural fuel to follow through.

However…when our thoughts and emotions are out of sync – when we create strategies or plans that we feel doubtful, concerned and overwhelmed about – we broadcast an incoherent signal. We can use all the polished words and inspiring language we want when we talk, but the magnetic field we’re projecting is jumbled. Like static on a radio station, our signal creates doubt, distrust and people disengage.

Wow! The science explained in logical terms what I’d witnessed happening over and over again in my years of working with teams.

Great thinking – great distinctions, great ideas, great plans – are just not enough!

We MUST bring a strong and coherent emotional game to the table if we really want unified, satisfied and effective teams who produce extraordinary outcomes together.

#4  You Don’t Need a Labcoat: You Just Need a Toolkit  

If you’re like me, this science simply confirms what we already know as leaders and teams:

Emotions aren’t the monster we once thought they were—they’re our allies.

Our ability to generate elevated emotional energy—combined with clear, coherent thinking—is a powerful formula for charging our connection. Our minds are more open to possibility and our courage to commit naturally arises when the electromagnetic field within us emanates a strong, clear signal.

And here’s the good news: You don’t need a quantum physics degree like Robert Oppenheimer to apply this formula. All it takes is a basic understanding of this success equation and a commitment to grow as a leader. It also helps a lot if you have a simple toolkit and process for having business conversations that elevate thought and emotion in day to day work situations.

You CAN learn to convert negative emotions into positive momentum—especially when challenges arise and disappointment, overwhelm, anger, or shame roll in like a storm. And you CAN do it sitting right there in the middle of your meeting.

Inviting the monster in to become our ally isn’t abstract theory or something reserved for the science lab. It’s possible for everyone. And it’s powerful.

I hope you’ll join me for the ride~

Whitney Walpole