Emotional Courage: Leadership Through Vulnerability

Alex Budak, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Changemaker program, reveals how emotional intelligence can create deeper, more meaningful organizational connections. Emotional courage involves developing the capacity to feel deeply, name complex emotions, and leverage them as strategic signals for values-aligned action.

Video Transcript

Alex Budak: Emotional courage shines a light on our inner bravery. It's a willingness to feel, name, and act on our own discomfort. There's a myth that says that leaders always have to have answers. They always have to be composed. But the reality is that teams follow leaders who are more honest about their difficulty. So when you're feeling emotions, don't run away from them. Don't let them control you, but do use them as a signal. A signal that allows you to lead with values-aligned action. 

The first way to lead with emotional courage is to notice, name, and ground your emotions. This means avoiding defensive statements. Things like oh, these things happen. And instead, before a tense meeting, taking a moment, identifying 1, 2, or 3 emotions that you're feeling and then coming in fully equipped to share those feelings, to say things like this didn't go the way that I had hoped, and I'm disappointed too. 

Secondly, own the feelings, not the room. Especially when we're in positions of power. It can feel especially risky to show any type of emotional openness. Brené Brown calls this floodlighting. It doesn't mean you have to share every single emotion you're feeling all the time, but rather it's reading a room and leading with just enough emotion so that people know that you're bringing your full self and that you care.