One of the hardest tasks in my consulting work¹ is the assessment of the emotional landscape in a given room at a given time. It’s always a mixed bag: Firstly, my own emotions, secondly, others’ emotions, thirdly, emotions arising from the interaction, and fourthly, leftover emotions lingering in the space. There’s the pride I experience when a chosen method works like expected, there’s the passion a client brings about growing their business, or their envy of a competitor’s recent marketing success, there’s (almost always) the greed to get more done than can possibly be squeezed into the allotted workshop time, and there’s (quite often) some unused anger littering the workshop room’s ugly carpet. Seeing, sorting, and purposefully including (or excluding) these emotions is heavy lifting, over and over again.

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