Shabaan Ahmad

When I discuss emotional connection with executives, I’m not suggesting excessive displays of emotion, oversharing of personal information, or getting into therapy sessions with colleagues. Rather, it’s about   connecting   with our teams, our peers, and our bosses as humans with emotions, not task-focused automatons. It’s the emotions that you as a leader evoke within others that enable you to bring out the best in them. Thousands of years ago,  Aristotle identified  p athos  as a critical element in communication and persuasion.  Pathos , in philosophy and rhetoric, is a purposeful appeal to emotion to evoke specific feelings in one’s audience. Aristotle understood way back then that the human connection makes a huge difference in provoking action. As the maxim suggests, logic makes us think, but emotions make us act. Here are three ways I’ve coached executives to harness the power of emotion to motivate the people they work with and drive better results: 1.  Cultivate the energy tha

                Natalie, a two-month-old newborn, alerts herself as a familiar voice — soft, musical, loving — approaches. Her eyebrows lift, her body relaxes, and an oval shape forms on her tiny pink mouth as she speaks: “Goo Goo Gaa Gaa.” When Natalie sees the face connected to this voice, her eyes light up, grow wide, and fix upon the sight of her mother. Saving the best for last, Natalie beams back a baby’s love by igniting her million-megawatt smile. All of Natalie’s behaviors, including baby talk and smiling, occur without the need for a teacher, textbook or a school building. They occur 100% outside of the process called learning. Her motor movement system, which will allow her to crawl, climb and walk, and her sensory systems, which give her the ability to see, hear, touch, taste and smell, are activated by pre-packaged, inborn reflexes which occur automatically. In this sense, all infants start life on an equal footing, determined by genetically hardwired reflexes. So far, so

 

Life isn't about finding yourself.  Life is about creating yourself.