Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

You Can’t Check Emotions at the Door

25 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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A leader thanked the speaker for helping release tears held for 63 years, revealing how emotions we suppress shape our decisions and relationships. Citing Bessel van der Kolk's "the body keeps the score," the speaker argues that unprocessed feelings live in our neurology and drive how we lead, making emotional integration essential to wise choices.

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I had a leader say to me recently at the end of a program, thank you for helping me to cry the tears I walked with for 63 years. I thought to myself, we're trying to make wise decisions functioning on a lake of frozen tears, of uncried tears. It's not actually true that you can set the emotions aside. Bessel van der Kolk says the body keeps the score. They're in neurology, they're in our perceptual fields, they influence our relational habits. And so the important work opening the heart And making room to host emotions, both historic and current,