and the next one. Kierkegaard once famously said, the thinker without paradox is like a lover without feeling, a paltry mediocrity. But sometimes I wonder what kind of lover Kierkegaard was talking about, because when I talk to people about their experience of paradox, what they feel is that the thinker with paradox is like a jealous, angry, frustrated lover. Because indeed, paradoxes trigger some really strong emotions, often negative emotions. And I want to explore how we navigate those emotions in order to value underlying paradoxes. As we do, I want to just start by acknowledging the strategic role of our emotions. You know, it used to be that we thought of our emotions as these problems that got in the way of our clear, rational, strategic thinking. But that, in fact, what we know from research is that our emotions are actually a critical role into and enabling our cognition, our rational thinking, our strategy. That research that has been done on people who have had brain damage, who have problems experiencing emotions, they actually have problems making some of the most basic decisions, like, what am I going to have for breakfast? And that great leaders, who we think of as clear, rational, analytical thinkers, often are the ones that can actually tap into their gut feeling, their emotion, to inform that rational thinking. And so there's something really important about how we engage with and navigate our emotions. It turns out that paradoxes often trigger, as we said, negative emotions. In the 1990s, Russ Vince and Michael Broussin did a study where they brought together people in the National Health Service in the UK amid a massive organizational change. They brought together healthcare providers, doctors, nurses, and invited them to draw pictures of how they were experiencing this change, this tension that they were experiencing between what they had been doing and where they were going in the future. Three people drew pictures of the opportunity of that change, the image of moving from the ugly duckling to the beautiful swan. In contrast, 83 people drew pictures of the problems that that change was going to create. Pictures of the sick patient in bed or the dark clouds overhead. And as they analyzed this, they noticed that our emotional reactions tend to focus on rejection, repression, denial, anger, in response to these kinds of paradoxical tensions. Those are the kind of emotions that tend to be triggered by paradox. And they get triggered for two main reasons. The first is that paradoxes show up when we are confronting a dilemma, a tradeoff, a challenge, an open question. And these questions offer up or create uncertainty for us. The paradoxes themselves feel complex, confusing, even absurd. And we want a sense of control. And so instead of enabling us to lean into them, we feel that sense of fear, that sense of anxiety that emerges as we're confronting these competing demands. And paradoxes might show up in our interpersonal relationships. When we take a side and somebody else takes another side and then we feel defensive. We might feel angry. We might feel frustrated in those conflicts and conversations. At the same time, paradoxes can also trigger a whole lot of positive emotions of possibility of opportunity. Famously, Einstein wrote in his diaries that when he was thinking about the theory of relativity, navigating this tension between how an object can be both in motion and at rest at the same time, he almost felt like the ground beneath him was shaking, it was unstable, leading him to feel both uncomfortable but also enabling him to feel energized by what possibilities could emerge. My colleagues call that emotional ambivalence. And my colleague Naomi Rothman at Lehigh University has done studies where she shows that that emotional ambivalence, that positivity and negativity together is actually strategically quite beneficial. It leads people in a negotiation to be much more effective in negotiating because the negative emotions make us look for more information while the positive emotions open us up to the possibilities that that information entails. So, if that's the case, how can we lean into these emotions so that the negative emotions don't usurp us and we can engage with both those negative and positive emotions? My colleague Mary Ann Lewis and I talk about this as finding comfort in the discomfort. Knowing that that discomfort exists and being able to find ways to navigate amid that discomfort. And we point to several practices that allow us to find comfort in the discomfort. The first is just pausing. Allowing that space between the trigger and the response. Viktor Frankl, who was both a psychoanalyst and a Holocaust survivor, famously noted that it is in that space between trigger and response, between action and reaction, that we have growth and learning. And pausing allows us to lean into, create value that space. A pause can look like being in a conversation and saying, hey, this conversation is really important, but I feel my emotions rising and I need to step away for a moment. A pause can look like being in a conversation. A pause can look like a leader noticing that in a meeting emotions are rising and we just need to stop. Or maybe even in a difficult conversation, that difficult decision or a difficult conversation saying, hey, this might be an important decision we have to make, but we have to sleep on it overnight. Just pausing. The second practice is that once we've paused, learning to accept the emotions that we feel, to say yes, particularly to our negative emotions. Yes, I'm feeling anxiety. Yes, I'm feeling fear. Yes, I'm feeling that uncertainty of where this is, what the outcome might look like. Tara Brock is an acclaimed psychologist and Buddhist, and she talks about the importance of radical acceptance. That we say yes to our negative emotions, because if we don't, those emotions will just come back and have a much stronger rebound effect on how we engage. And so as a leader, that might look like naming the underlying fears, naming, identifying the vulnerability that we feel as leaders or that we might know that everybody around us feels. And the last is what we think of as expanding, broadening. Barbara Fredrickson has a theory of emotions that she talks about as broaden and build. And what she notices is that there is this virtuous cycle between broadening our perspective, seeing a broader set of ideas that triggers our positive emotions, and that our positive emotions trigger us to look for that broader set of ideas. What that means is opening up the aperture to what we are thinking about and learning about so that we can broaden and bring in more of those positive emotions. What that might look like as a leader is articulating the collective hope, the broader set of ideas, making us see the bigger picture so that we can lean into that more expansive space. Navigating paradoxes is not easy. And one of the reasons it's not easy is because paradoxes trigger difficult emotions. But if we can lean into those emotions, if we can notice the discomfort and then find comfort in the discomfort, we can open up to the possibilities that paradoxes provide. How's that? How's that?