Paradoxes often trigger strong, sometimes negative emotions, but these emotional tensions can unlock strategic thinking and leadership growth. This video explores how to navigate discomfort, embrace ambivalence, and turn emotional challenges into opportunities for insight and better decision making.

Understanding paradoxes and emotions
Paradoxes create tension by presenting dilemmas, uncertainty, and conflicting demands. While they often trigger negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, and defensiveness, they can also spark positive feelings of possibility and opportunity. Recognizing these emotional responses is key to leveraging paradoxes for growth and effective decision making.

Strategies to engage with discomfort
Implementing practices such as pausing, accepting emotions, and broadening perspective allows leaders to navigate paradoxes more effectively. Pausing provides space between trigger and response, radical acceptance helps acknowledge negative emotions, and broadening the perspective encourages positive emotions to fuel creative solutions.

Turning emotions into strategic advantage
By leaning into emotional ambivalence, leaders can use both positive and negative emotions to inform rational thinking. This approach, supported by research and expert insights, enables more thoughtful decisions, stronger collaboration, and innovative problem solving, ultimately transforming discomfort into strategic advantage.