Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication. Our habits comfort us much like the Balinese feel reassured by their morning offerings. But, have you ever taken an inventory of your daily rituals and how they’re serving you? And, have you ever imagined what daily rituals could make you a better leader or a happier person?

About a decade ago, I experimented with a daily offering at the worst of times for my company. As CEO, I could see that the dot-com bust was taking a huge toll on the psycho-hygiene of our hotel company. Knowing that creating a culture of recognition was one means of developing a ripple of positivity in an organization, I made it a practice of giving a minimum of two heartfelt expressions of recognition to two different people in the company each weekday. My rule was that it had to be unexpected by the recipient, it had to be specific in terms of what I was thanking them for, it needed to have a level of detail that was more like a paragraph than a sentence, and – if possible – it needed to be done in person. I tried this for a month and found that like a stone falling into a pond, the reverberating effect of people feeling significant by being caught doing something right helped change the mood and morale around the offices. My daily offering was the American workplace equivalent of a Balinese gift to the gods.

The Balinese could teach us a few things about how to create the conditions for a happy culture. One of my favorite Emotional Equations is the one about Happiness which is defined by Wanting What We Have divided by Having What We Want. The numerator of this equation is all about Practicing Gratitude, finding the time to really want we have rather than take it for granted. A daily offering is one means of doing that. The denominator – having what we want – is the act of Pursuing Gratification. When we jump on that never-ending treadmill of aspiring to have what we want in life, it can create a momentary adrenaline high but it also can distract us from all that we already have in our lives. Some dictionaries define “pursuit” as “to chase with hostility.” At work, do we chase happiness with an edge of hostility? I saw some of that at the mall this holiday season.

We can either be conscious or unconscious about our personal daily rituals as well as our organizational rituals. I just finished reading a groundbreaking book by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer called “The Progress Principle.” Based upon giving a large sampling of employees in seven diverse companies a daily journal along with precise instructions about how to review their work experiences of the day, the authors were able to create one of the most authoritative studies of the inner emotional life of American workers. And, they were able to show that the most fruitful means of managing or leading a work group is to give them a meaningful sense that they were making progress and had the resources and encouragement to feel like they were living up to their potential. It’s a very instructive read that I highly recommend. But, one of the most interesting lessons of their study was just how much the employees got out of their daily ritual of reflecting on their work day. Here’s a quote from one manager who was disappointed that the daily journal study was ending: “I am sorry this is coming to an end. It forced me to sit back and reflect on the day’s happenings. This daily ritual was very helpful in making me more aware of how I should be motivating and interacting with the team.”

Starting tomorrow, what offering, ritual, or habit are you going to start practicing that is going to serve you in your personal or work life?

The fact is that almost all anxiety can be distilled down to two basic variables: what we don’t know and what we can’t control. So, the Emotional Equation for Anxiety? ANXIETY = UNCERTAINTY x POWERLESSNESS. You may have heard about the social science experiment in which people were given the choice between an electric shock now that’s twice as painful as one they would receive randomly in the next 24 hours. As you can imagine, the vast majority of people chose more pain now as opposed to less pain at some unpredictable time in the near future. Mystery creates anxiety, especially when we feel we have no influence on the situation.

Once you know the emotional building blocks of Anxiety, you can influence them. Take out a piece of paper and label it “The Anxiety Balance Sheet.” Create four columns with the first one being a list of what you DO know with respect to this issue that is giving you anxiety. Then, in the second column, write down what you DON’T know. In the third column, list what you CAN influence with respect to this issue and, finally, in the fourth column, write down what you CAN’T influence. Most people’s experience of this exercise is enlightening as they have more items in columns one and three (what they do know and what they can influence) than they expected. But, the magic comes from looking at what you don’t know  and what you can’t control. Often, you can move an item from column two to column one by just asking a few knowledgeable people on the subject whether it’s regarding your likelihood of a promotion or your job security. And, I’ve often seen people review column four and realize that they may have a little more influence over some of these items than they’d previously considered.

In sum, the lessons for leaders are simple. Even if you have bad news, it’s better than no news. Transparency is the leadership equivalent of giving people that electric shock early. It may be painful, but the uncertainty creates an even more distracting and debilitating environment. And, as a leader, one of the most effective steps you can take in harrowing times is to help your people steer away from what psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness.” Great leaders help their people see how they can directly impact the company’s objectives and their own personal goals. The more externally chaotic the world becomes, the more we need sound internal logic, especially when it comes to our emotions.

The entertainment industry has been gravitating north for years as companies like Netflix, Apple, and Pandora in the San Francisco Bay Area have been reshaping the film and music industry. Facebook, which was chronicled in the film The Social Network, has been talking with former My Space co-President (and former MTV exec) Jason Hirschhorn about spearheading the company’s outreach to Valley media companies. And, the entertainment industry’s largest talent representation firm, CAA, has been mulling the opening of an office in Palo Alto.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent four days in a row in downtown Palo Alto right in the midst of the news that Steve Jobs had passed away. As I walked by his home just south of downtown with hundreds of candles and thousands of flowers lovingly placed there, a neighbor remarked that “this is the kind of reception America used to give to its film heroes.” The next day, as I sat in a local café and overheard young entrepreneurs hawk business plans to angel investors like screenwriters might do the same to an agent, I was struck with by the electricity in the air. Young people – many of them college dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg before them – are streaming to Palo Alto hoping to be the next Steve Jobs (another dropout) with the desire to invent something incredible that might change the world. And, yes, they are looking to be “discovered,” or at least, funded.

Palo Alto doesn’t have a Schwab’s or a Top Hat Café (both of which no longer exist), but it does have Palo Alto Creamery, a soda fountain full of aspiring entrepreneurs comparing notes on the Valley’s  powerful players just like struggling actors did in Hollywood years ago. Having spent a few days hanging out in the collegial environment of a few Palo Alto start-ups, it struck me that the optimism, curiosity, and vitality of this tech eco-system is probably not nearly this pure or potent anywhere else in the world. Just eavesdropping on the heady conversations made me giddy! I’m sure a half-century ago, being in Hollywood must have felt quite similar as the entertainment industry gained a global foothold.

And, while Palo Alto is the celebrated place of the moment, there’s a legacy of thinking big and different in this community. Taking a walking tour with a partner of the world-famous IDEO design firm (headquartered in downtown Palo Alto), I saw that the roots of this entrepreneurial gold rush have a storied legacy. There were the first offices of Google and Intuit on University Avenue. And, next door to where my company aspires to create a luxury boutique hotel is where Facebook got started (across the street from the Creamery). But, no tour of Palo Alto could be complete without a visit to mecca, the famous garage (now a historical landmark) where Hewlett and Packard got started just a five-minute walk from where Mark Zuckerberg first started paying office rent for Facebook. There is no star Walk of Fame in Palo Alto (yet), but there’s an unmistakable spirit that the world is counting on this little community to chart a path of hope and renaissance for the world, just like Hollywood did in our darkest days of the past.

Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote a book “Confidence” which could be distilled down to the following: Losing streaks are often created and then perpetuated when people lose confidence in their leaders and systems, while winning streaks are fueled by confident people who are secure in their own abilities and the ability of their leaders. Winning streaks are characterized by continuity and continued investment, while losing streaks are marked by disruption and a lack of investment that typically give way to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Long-term winners often face the same problems as long-term losers, but they just respond differently. They know how to recover quickly and not let failure mess with their head.

We’ve all seen classic human behavior when our confidence is shaken. It could be the coach who throws out the game plan and tries the “Hail Mary” leading to further embarrassment of the team or the business group that starts blaming each other for petty issues. Or, at the high school dance, it could be the shy guy who feels smaller and smaller after two girls turn down his offer for a dance. And, of course, in the bedroom when performance anxiety strikes, one can feel like there are three Olympic judges propped on chairs above the bed ready to reveal their scores.

If “Disappointment equals Expectations minus Reality”, at some point after a few too many disappointments, we start expecting less. This is often the path to personal depression and it could be the same for an economy, which shares that same word – depression – to describe a similar valley. We end up with a “sulking economy.” And, that’s where we are today. For a leader, it’s not an easy thing to rebuild the expectations of one’s people after constant disappointment. The tried and true method of doing this is what I call the “momentum of victory,” creating a feasible goal in the short-term and achieving it. Once that’s accomplished, it means finding another small, concrete win on the horizon. Winning and losing are 90% mental.

Lyndon Johnson was the first White House occupant to have The Conference Board looking over his Presidential shoulder and rating “consumer confidence” as a monthly measurement of our collective psychological well-being. This strong man from Texas saw confidence plummet late in his time in office. True again four decades later when his fellow Texan George W. Bush saw nearly an 80 point drop in confidence, the worst since LBJ. Our most effective confidence-producers have been Reagan (41 point rise) and Clinton (40 point rise). Barack Obama is a man who inhabits his head. Yet, like any athlete – especially a basketball player – hopefully, he knows that over-thinking rarely enhances performance. It’s time for our shrink-in-chief to step it up and find his natural rhythm as a leader. When in doubt, find the goal that we can all believe in and achieve (maybe, today it’s re-establishing our credit rating of AAA) and start creating a micro-map of small victories that can re-establish our confidence as Americans who have a common goal.

A decade and a half later Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (EI) theory was introduced to business schools around the world. But, this idea –still radioactive to some – that the dominant trait in effective leadership  comes from EI (also called EQ), not IQ or the level of one’s experience or depth of their resume, took a while to become commonplace language amongst mainstream business folks. But, while there’s still no hard metric for EI , conventional wisdom now favors this fluid ability as compared to the fixed capacity of one’s brainpower. When I graduated from biz school, I thought I had to be superhuman if I were ever to be a successful CEO. But after two dozen years of being a CEO, I’ve come to learn that the best leaders aren’t comic strip heroes, they’re just super humans who have developed the four capacities that Goleman outlined for EI: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. As Goleman recently told me, “EI includes a broad spectrum of competencies, and no leader is A+ across the board – even the best have room to improve.”

I’m often asked which business leaders are the ultimate examples of Emotional Intelligence, so I decided to do a little research. Limiting my search to only Fortune 500 CEO’s of American companies (so Oprah doesn’t qualify), I started asking everyone I knew who they most admired as a role model for EI and then I talked with employees in these CEO’s companies and did a deep dive into speeches they’d given and articles that had been written about them. And, of course, I took a look at the performance of their companies while they’ve been the “emotional thermostat” for their organization. So, drum roll please, here’s the first annual Top 10 Chief Emotions Officers in the U.S. (in alphabetical order):

• Jeff Bezos (Amazon): With his quirky laugh and self-deprecating style, Bezos doesn’t sound like a Fortune 500 CEO and that’s probably to his benefit. His obsession with the hearts and minds of his customers and his long-term perspective on relationships (and business strategy) are legendary, as was his YouTube announcement of Amazon’s Zappos acquisition in 2009.
• Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway): “Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ once you’re above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble investing.” Intensely loyal and relationship-driven, he asks his CEO’s to run their companies as if they were to own them 100 years from now.
• Ursula Burns (Xerox): In tandem with Anne Mulcahy who moved up to Chair, Burns transitioned to CEO as the first woman-to-woman CEO leadership transition in a Fortune 500 company in what has become a pivotal case study in organizational development.. Direct, yet respectful, her assertiveness is matched by a sense of mission that inspires her employees.
• Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase): At Harvard Business School, Dimon said: “You all know about IQ and EQ. Your IQ’s are all high enough for you to be very successful, but where people often fall short is on the EQ. It’s something you develop over time. A lot of management skills are EQ, because management is all about how people function.” Read “Last Man Standing” about him.
• John Donahoe (eBay): Donahoe inherited a difficult situation from Meg Whitman with the need to truly alter the company’s business strategy. As a role model for Jim Collins’ Level 5 (humility & ambition) and Bill George’s “True North” leaders, Donahoe’s disciplined self-awareness and his listening ability have created a deeply loyal team and a healthy, evolving culture.
• Larry Fink (BlackRock): Called “psychologically astute” in a Vanity Fair feature article, Fink created the largest money-management firm in the world based upon self-reflection, teamwork & direct communication. His senior leadership team embraces EI seminars to improve their skills.
• Alan Mulally (Ford): Walk around Ford’s corporate campus and you will see office cubes featuring handwritten notes that Mulally has sent to employees…praising their work. Great interpersonal skills and a “Clintonesque” ability to make you feel like you’re the only one in the room when you’re in a conversation with him.
• Indra Nooyi (Pepsi): Nooyi is a conscious capitalist whose “performance with purpose” agenda has helped move employees from having a job to living a calling. She is acutely aware that being a woman of color means she may receive more attention and scrutiny, but she still projects her personality without reservation – whether it’s singing in the hallways or walking barefoot in the office. She wrote the parents of 29 senior Pepsi execs to tell them what great kids they’d raised.
• Howard Schultz (Starbucks): He says that the main reason he came back was “love”: for the company and its people. Very dedicated to generous health care benefits – inspired by his father losing his health insurance when Schultz was a kid.
• Kent Thiry (DaVita): Leaders with high EI/EQ create culture-driven organizations that perform at their peak due to the power of mission and teamwork. Thiry took over a demoralized kidney dialysis center company that was almost out of business and, with a passionate spirit, created nearly 44% annual growth in earnings per share in the past decade, 6^th highest of any Fortune 500 company.

There are many honorable mentions from Jim Sinegal at Costco to Gary Kelly at Southwest Airlines to Andrea Jung at Avon or John Mackey at Whole Foods Markets. As for the Top 10, there are some obvious choices as well as some more obscure CEO’s. But, before you start throwing stones at these business leaders, don’t forget Daniel Goleman’s premise that we’re all works-in-progress. What tends to set these people apart is a level of disciplined self-awareness that helps them develop as leaders faster than the average CEO, as well as knowing how to attract a complimentary team around them.

Conventional wisdom suggests the primary motivator for entrepreneurs is money or wealth creation and, in fact, much of the political debate tends to center around what kind of tax or regulatory policy changes will turn corporate suits into small business adventurers overnight. But, what drives someone to be an entrepreneur is a much more complex question and one that I’ve grappled with in the quarter century since I launched my company.

When I started my hotel company, Joie de Vivre, at the age of 26, I saw this venture as my ticket to freedom. I’d done my time in corporate America from McDonald’s making shakes to Morgan Stanley making deals and, yet, I felt awfully constrained by the uniform – not just my clothes, but how I felt I needed to conform – that a traditional job required me to wear. So, the freedom to be myself and develop a business based upon my own rules was my first driver. Right behind that was a need to be creative. I joined a maverick commercial real estate development company right out of business school thinking that it was going to unleash my creative juices, but instead, found that I was just a transaction jockey constantly toggling between negotiating high-stress development deals and having my eyes glued to a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. This was not fertile ground to explore my creative side. Launching a boutique hotel company dedicated to creating original, stylized small properties satisfied my need to be inventive.

As  my company grew, I became aware of another motivating force that led me to entrepreneurial pursuits beyond just freedom and creativity. I became more and more curious about human nature and, as we grew to nearly 40 hotels and thousands of employees, I saw our company as a laboratory for trying things in one hotel – whether it was a new incentive plan for employees or a new unique service for guests – so that we could roll it out elsewhere if we saw that we struck a chord with this innovation. And, ultimately, this curiosity led me to writing books on the crossroads of business and psychology.

But, what’s most fascinating about what drives an entrepreneur isn’t necessarily what’s most conscious to the entrepreneur. For many entrepreneurs, the fuel that keeps them going could be power, fame, a trophy wife or husband, or – possibly – as is true with many workaholics, their business is a means of running away from other elements of their life that either scare them or make them feel small. More than a few entrepreneurs use their business and their success as a means to build their fragile self-esteem. As the business goes, so goes the entrepreneur’s sense of them self. So, for many of us, our ego is a major driver for why we throw ourselves with reckless abandon into a new venture.

Carl Jung said that we are powerless over what we’re unconscious of in our lives. For me, while it was enlightening to know that freedom, creativity, and curiosity – more than money or power – were the key qualities that made my work life a calling, it was when I came face-to-face with how much of my identity and ego was wrapped up in my work that I found real freedom. Becoming conscious that my sense of self didn’t have to be strapped to that inevitable rollercoaster that defines the ups and downs of a business gave me a “joie de vivre” that I never found by just chasing the next success.

So, as politicians harp on about the importance of various tax or regulatory policies that will lead countless entrepreneurs out of their corporate closets, let’s realize that fiscal policy alone won’t fertilize an abundant economic garden. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson – these folks didn’t launch their employment vehicles because they calculated how the government had made it more financially lucrative for them to launch their businesses. For every entrepreneur who is doing it to get rich, I’ll bet you there are three others who are doing it to either make a difference in the world or their community, make a name for themselves, or just make something that makes them feel good. The best way we can encourage people to create companies that create jobs is to celebrate the diverse entrepreneurial stories and the variety of drivers that led these entrepreneurs to sticking their necks out.  Telling powerful entrepreneurs’ stories and aggressively educating people on how to start a business may have more of an impact on reducing our unemployment rate than some subtle or complicated change in tax policy.  Silicon Valley didn’t become the entrepreneurial capital of the world because it has some uniquely attractive tax rate (in fact, quite the opposite, it’s in the high-tax state of California).

To B or not to B? Hamlet is not the only one asking that question as I’ve been queried many times by readers of my book PEAK about whether the self-actualizing business principles I espouse are just as relevant to B2B (business to business) as they are to B2C companies (business to consumer). The thought behind this is that PEAK speaks to the idea that great companies address the higher, transformative needs of their key stakeholders, like their employees, customers, and investors. So, companies like Apple, Whole Foods Markets, Southwest Airlines, Netflix, and the like are B2C companies effectively focusing on understanding the “unrecognized needs” of their core customers and delivering on those needs. If you do that well, you create customer evangelists who are feeling a little more self-actualized.

Somehow, when we imagine B2B organizations – IBM, Deloitte, Boeing – we assume that a business doesn’t have higher needs that you can address. Of course, this is a little more complicated because understanding the higher needs of an individual requires a little less mind reading than understanding the meta-needs of a whole organization. But, at the end of the day, most decisions in companies are made by humans. So, it’s fine to imagine how your company can meet a higher need of the organization you’re trying to sell to, but I highly recommend that you look at the key decision-maker, the human, and ask yourself three key questions about this person: (1) What’s the survival need of this decision-maker such that they will not look like a fool a year from now within their organization for having chosen to buy from us? (2) What would make this decision-maker look successful – giving them greater esteem within the organization – if they buy from us? (3) Is this decision-maker looking for a transformative product or service that will help elevate their company far above their competition and how are we communicating those “higher needs” benefits to this decision-maker and their colleagues?

Amidst the spreadsheets, org charts, and policy manuals, there is a heartbeat in our organizations and it comes from humans. Even in the silos of America’s biggest corporations, there is a man or woman, full of emotions and aspirations, wants and needs, who is making the buying decisions that can fuel your B2B company.  The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human.  Don’t forget this fact when strategizing about how you can make a sale to that B2B company you’ve had your eye on.

John Scott emailed me out of the blue not long ago and asked if I would be his mentor as he wanted to tell me his story of loss and redemption (a particularly good tale around Easter time).  John came to my office and gave me the honor of allowing me to read his story below which touched me deeply.  Because I thought it might be meaningful to those you know and care about, John is permitting me to share it with you.  Hope you enjoy it.  Maybe you can be Mr. Syracuse in someone’s life.

A Year and a Day

On February 22, 2010, I lost my job.

My 34-year career was evaporated in a mere 18 seconds. His words were so few, devoid of even a shred of sympathy or compassion, that they are impossible to forget.

“We’re making a change. It is what it is.”

It was so stunningly to-the-point that even the HR director was a bit taken aback. At least in Up In The Air, George Clooney told the departed a quick story.

“Anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are now. And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it. There’s a packet in front of you. I want you to take some time and review it. All the answers you’re looking for are inside those pages. The sooner you trust the process, the sooner the next step of your life will unveil itself.”

On February 23, 2011, I was offered a new job, and this week, I accepted that offer.

Over the past 366 days I had to make a decision; try to remain in the industry I had devoted literally my entire life to, or take the road less traveled. I thought about my former employer and the industry as a whole. It was a bleak economic time, and many decent people were finding themselves unemployed. The future for this industry is uncertain at best, as it continues a contraction that is precedent-setting. The decision was made: Reinvent.

This is not a heroic tale of a man gallantly facing the world, taking it on full steam ahead, and achieving victory. It was nothing like that at all. Over the preceding 366 days:

I lost a job.

I lost my healthcare.

I lost my home to the real estate bust.

I was denied unemployment by the Republic of California because of a glitch on one piece of paper. I never received a penny.

I applied for 411 jobs online. Not one response.

My former employer withheld my severance for weeks, for no reason other than “they forgot”.

One afternoon, I was sitting in the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco with Emily, watching A Single Man. A regrettable choice of film, as this powerful, amazing and completely depressing movie was not the spirit-lifter I probably should have watched. There was no one else but us in the theater. We kept our phones on. About halfway through the film, mine rang. It was a hiring manager for a winery. We set up a time to talk later. I knew I wasn’t going to get the position. I had no experience in the wine industry, and a zillion winery marketing people were unemployed. It was over before it started.

The movie ended, the credits rolled, and I leaned into Emily and unleashed a waterfall of agony. She held me and rocked me like a baby, this inconsolable, broken, lost man.

There was one day I had 6 cents in my checking account.

An insurance company denied my application because I had a hernia in 1974.  I wish I was kidding.

I had the most vivid nightmare I could possibly imagine. I dreamed I had died in a plane crash.

It seemed that everything that could go wrong, did.

Here’s what else happened over this year and a day: I reinvented myself, top to bottom. I reinvented my career, I tackled personal issues. I shed people in my life that were not good for me. I patched up by shattered heart, and spackled my facade to not just look , but to be… more authentic. I questioned everything.

I decided to do it all at once.

I traveled, spent time with family and friends, kept on the move, doing my work. I wrote about it all.

There is a man who is a key player in this tale. I’ll call him Mr. Syracuse.

One day, sitting with him and another good friend at a bar, I moaned about my lot in life, telling him about the 411 jobs, zero callbacks. He said, “Be in my office Monday morning.”

Mr. Syracuse allowed me to do some work for him for a while, in a business that I had never worked in before. Something happened after that experience – good things started happening. This simple act of kindness this man had extended to me made some of the inertia disappear. After I left his company, I got a consulting job. I did some freelance work. I was doing things to learn that ultimately, that I should not do them. I experimented, ad-libbed, and performed extemporaneous jobs and tasks. Some were not glamorous or thrilling, but they were necessary to keep afloat and build the empire I thought I could. Mr.Syracuse had started the ball rolling, and I will never forget it.

I told him the other night, “You know, I blame you for all the good things that are happening!”

He said, “I might have started it. You finished it.”

In these past 366 days I started a company. I secured a monthly retainer for 2011 with a media group to vlog for them. My voice is now heard on one of the top radio stations in America.

And this week, I signed the contract to a full-time position with a local university. I get to learn, read, play with websites, write syllabi, interface with instructors on course outlines. I get to learn and get paid for it.

I took a hike up Mt. Diablo this morning to watch the sun rise. A cinematic moment, yes- I like to mark moments with something memorable. I watched the sun rise, and I sipped a coffee, and looked down on my beloved Bay Area- this hotbed of the creative class, this place so beautiful and yet so tough; you have to want to be here, “they” don’t make it easy.

You have to be relentless. You have to play the odds. 411 no’s, each moving you closer to the YES.  You have to stay the course you’ve charted, with all of the potholes and roadblocks and you have to understand that it’s going to be a freaking mess.

You have to clean up your messes. Because it is difficult, that’s the reason you should do it. Because it scares you, that’s why you need to try.

On this day, nothing is as it was. Everything has changed.

I’ll be moving soon, to a new home. I’ll have room to breathe, a place to call mine again. I have a new career path, education. I have fun little projects and little jobs to keep me completely, totally, busy.

This day, I got my life back, but it’s a whole new version of it. It took a year and a day, and it was pure hell, but I made it to The Other Side.

This is the end of this particular story, but it’s really just the beginning. I made it to the starting line, with a little help from people who I will always be grateful to.

You can do this in your life. Believe that you can. Ask people to help you, for you cannot go it alone. Question everything. Look ahead, not in your rear view mirror. Trust your gut.

Reinvent yourself. I’m cheering you on.

In preparation for writing Emotional Equations, I dove into the deep end of the academic pool reading hundreds of psychological studies and books on everything from anxiety to the difference between happiness and joy to Charles Darwin’s theory on the origin of emotions.  Here’s a list of my top twenty book recommendations for anyone who wants to go “swimming” with me (I have put an asterisk * next to my favorite in each category and I haven’t included Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning since it’s not primarily about emotions):

HAPPINESS/CONTENTMENT

• Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (Dacher Keltner)
• Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener)
• Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strengths of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity and Thrive (Barbara Fredrickson)
• Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert)
• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Jonathan Haidt)
• The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Sonja Lyubomirsky) * 

NEUROSCIENCE/EMOTION THEORY

• Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom (Rick Hanson with Richard Mendius)
• Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Antonio Damasio)
• Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution (Robert Plutchik)
• The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (Joseph LeDoux) *
• What is Emotion? (Jerome Kagan)

 UNCONVENTIONAL BRAIN/EMOTION SCIENCE

• Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine (Candace Pert) *
• The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles (Bruce Lipton)
• The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense (Michael Jawer and Marc Micozzi)
• The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (Gregg Braden)

 PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF EMOTION THEORY

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely)
• The Art of Choosing (Sheena Iyengar)
• The Emotional Hostage: Rescuing Your Emotional Life (Leslie Cameron-Bandler and Michael Lebeau)
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (Barry Schwartz)
• The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (David Brooks) *

Executives execute. We don’t execute people as in life and death matters (although, sadly, we do “terminate” people when they’re no longer needed), but we have traditionally thought of business leaders as being emotionless technicians who just keep the trains running on time. But, timely trains didn’t make Southern Pacific or Santa Fe railroads into 21^st century mega-corporations. In fact, the train industry missed its chance to expand into automobiles and airplane travel by thinking of their business a little too myopically. Maybe these train executives were a little too focused on the simple execution of being on time.

While execution is still a fundamental skill of the best executives, we no longer are purely executing mechanistic, industrial organizations. In this knowledge era, execution is all about people: how to harness and inspire the potential of those we work with. And, at the heart of people are our emotions, the mysterious internal weather that either propels or penalizes us. After 24 years of being a CEO, I’ve come to realize that the best amongst us are truly Chief Emotions Officers as we are the “emotional thermostats” for our organizations with studies showing that a typical leader has 50-70% influence over the work climate of their team.

There are three great pieces of empirical evidence that amplify this reality about 21^st century leadership. First, Daniel Goleman has shown for 15 years now that emotional intelligence (EQ) represents two-thirds of the success of business leaders as compared to only one-third coming from either IQ or the leader’s transferable experience. And, yet, in 2010, less than 10% of the training and development dollars spent by America’s corporations went toward emotional intelligence or literacy training (often called “soft skills”). We know it’s important and, yet, we seem to be reluctant in investing in the skills to help our executives become Chief Emotions Officers.

Secondly, Dr Matthew Lieberman at UCLA has proven that labeling our emotions reduces the intensity of these emotions in such a way that it maximizes our cognitive abilities just at the time when we most need to use the prefrontal cortex of our brain for better reasoning and judgment. By being emotionally literate about what we’re experiencing, executives can sidestep the 10-15 point drop in IQ that often occurs for those who are barraged by having to make decisions during times of emotional distress. So, maybe being a CEO is less about being able to predict the times of trains and more about being an internal weather forecaster.

Finally, Harvard’s Nicholas Christakis, as well as a few other academics, has shown that our emotions are contagious. When we have the flu, our colleagues feel comforted that we stay at home in order not to spread the misery. Yet, when so many of us have caught the “fear” at work – especially in economically turbulent times – there’s no sane corporate voice warning us of the risks of how our emotions can spread and threaten the well-being of those in our organizational petri dish. The ultimate inoculation for fear is a great corporate culture and companies with great cultures have healthy psycho-hygiene. In other words, their leaders are emotionally attuned to what’s going on around them and they cleanse the company through transparent communication or other tactical means to help employees feel recognized and engaged.

Any executive worth their weight understands the principle of accrued interest. If you have a loan and don’t pay the interest currently, it accrues and can compound and over period of time. The cost of the interest can become staggering. This is an apt metaphor for organizational emotions that are not properly addressed in the workplace. Most companies – led by CEO’s who aren’t nearly literate about their own emotions – are actively disengaged in addressing the individual and collective emotions that are invisible predators of passion and engagement. From my own experience, I have learned the hard way. When I most have bottled up my emotions for extended periods of time, they have leaked out in other subversive ways that didn’t serve my purposes as CEO. And, yet, when I was most vulnerable and authentic in my emotional communication with fellow co-workers, ironically, I was told by these colleagues that I was more admired and they felt most comfortable to be all they could be at work.