The importance of "emotional baggage" for leaders

A leader recently emailed me about the importance of leaders dealing with "emotional baggage" - emotional leftovers that can arise as anger, frustration, etc. years after an event. This leader wanted to know how emotional baggage from the past might hurt him in his leadership role today.

His question got me thinking.

Whenever leaders ask me this question, I use the metaphor of physical wounds. If I'm cooking in the kitchen, and I cut myself with a knife, I may have to get several stitches. If the wound heals properly, two years down the road there will be a scar. If the cut is still festering and oozing disgusting fluids two years later, I am going to get the cut treated, because left untreated, that festering wound can make me very physically sick.

This analogy holds for leaders' psychology. If I go through an event that leaves emotional scars, what is called "emotional baggage" is what happens when our emotional wounds are festing and oozing emotional pus. The feelings of anger, frustration (or whatever feeling you experience in relation to this past events) ARE the emotional pus.

The best response when this "emotional pus" occurs is to manage the emotional wound with a coach. Working with a coach can help drastically descrease (or even remove) this emotional baggage.

So what happens when leaders ignore when their emotional wounds are oozing? They infect others around them, decreasing emotional engagement and employee performance.

Bottom Line: Effective leaders take care of emotional baggage from the past because they know doing so will make them even better leaders.