Category: Top Tips

Listen to your emotions. Even the bad ones.

When we feel negative emotions, like anger or fear, it’s tempting to shut them down. But Ethan Kross says all emotions offer important information for us, if we know how to understand them.

“All negative emotions, when they are experienced in the right proportions, are really good for us,” he says. “For example, I experience regret—and that alerts me to something that could have gone better in the past, and prepares me to not repeat that circumstance in the future.”

Ethan is an award-winning psychologist at the University of Michigan, as well as the bestselling author of Chatter and Shift. He argues that we can lead, perform, and live better when we know how to use our complex emotions.

Fall in love with your stress.

Take a moment right now to think about something that’s stressing you out. Our dominant response is to try and deny, reduce, or counteract the stress. But Modupe Akinola says some stress is good for us—if we know how to use it.

“Playing for the long term requires shifting our perspective on stress,” says this celebrated Columbia Business School professor. “For example, simply reminding someone that stress has enhancing properties can make them more creative and enable them to think more flexibly.”

Now go back to that thing that’s stressing you out. “Don’t try to deny the stress. Instead, use it,” Modupe says. “Inherent in that stress are opportunities that can take your performance and your company to an even better place.”

Use anxiety to prepare for the future.

“Anxiety is an emotion,” says Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. “It’s not a disorder. It’s not a red flag. It’s not a danger signal. First and foremost, it’s an emotion. It feels really bad. But it’s actually good for you.”

A clinical psychologist and the bestselling author of Future Tense, Tracy reveals how anxiety turns us into “mental time travelers,” helping us prepare for an uncertain but hopeful future.

Tracy argues that we can turn anxiety into an ally by learning to channel it to create the future we want. “Anxiety lives in that space between where we are now and where we want to be, and it energizes us to bridge that gap.”

Remember: There’s hope on the other side.

Are you part of Generation Dread? Sometimes it feels like we’re anxious about everything, from the day-to-day to the looming climate crisis. But Britt Wray says that when we work through these anxieties, we’ll find hope and purpose on the other side.

Britt is the author of Generation Dread and director of Stanford’s CIRCLE: a research and action initiative focused on emotional resilience and climate leadership. She shows that acknowledging and dealing with our climate anxiety can help us find purpose and avoid burnout.

Britt says that to succeed in the long game, we need to take action, manage our emotions, and take breaks in equal measure. “It’s a very hopeful moment to be in, as we do this difficult yet fulfilling, meaningful, and purposeful work.”

To learn more from these leading speakers…

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1. Ask more questions. No, more than that.

How many questions is too many? It’s way more than you think.

In research on sales calls, Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks found that the most successful agents were the ones who asked the most questions. But more than that, she found that the line between “lots of questions” and “too many questions” is much further out that most of us think. In order to reach that tipping point, you’d have to ask 4 questions a minute—that’s 1 question every 15 seconds!

When you learn to ask more and better questions, you’ll be able to listen so people talk—and get the best out of your relationships at work, Alison says.

2. Get to know your stress—and then use it.

Stress is the #1 killer of high performance. But if we learn how to leverage it, it can help us outperform our competitors and reach new heights.

“You need to get to know your stress like you would get to know somebody on a first date—so that you get to a point where you learn to fall in love with it,” says Modupe Akinola, one of the most highly rated professors at Columbia Journalism School. Modupe suggests that leaders use stress to bring the best out of their teams: for example, you could try introducing a time limit to get the most creative ideas without judgment, or creating overwhelming conditions so your teams are forced to rely on one another and use their unique strengths.

3. Fortune favors the curious.

Don’t just look at what your competitors are doing. Look at what everyone else is doing: from developments outside your sector to innovations that are quite literally out of this world.

Greg Hoffman, former CMO of Nike, explains that the air cushioning technology behind some of Nike’s most beloved shoes was actually invented for space suits by a NASA engineer. If Nike hadn’t been curious about the technology and willing to take a risk, they would have missed out on a massive opportunity. Greg suggests that leaders exercise curiosity like a muscle: “What starts out as homework becomes habit over time.”

Want to learn more about any of these leading thinkers, or invite them to speak at your event? Get in touch with us—we’d love to help.