Playing With Conflict

How Integrated Leaders Make Wise Emotional Decisions?

You know the feeling. You've got a big decision to make. A change. A tough conversation. A move that’s either going to stretch your team or burn them out. And inside you, five different voices are all saying different things. If that sounds familiar, congratulations: you’re not broken. You’re complex. This is what emotional leadership looks at: how to chair the boardroom that arises inside you when there are difficult choices.

“Every leader is a meeting room of moving parts. The wisest ones don’t silence the voices — they listen until something deeper aligns.” from The Book of Inner Arts, Vol. V

The Five Forces of Leadership: Your Inner Board

When leaders speak about “gut instinct” or “conflicted emotions,” what they’re really describing is this: an inner team of competing needs, energies, and emotional modes.

Ignore some, and you risk reactivity or blind spots. Listen to all, and you build coherence — the emotional clarity that wise leadership demands.

In this article we are calling this your Inner Board — the committee that forms when something important arises. Many times the board may be formed of the following members:

🌍 The Grounded One: Your Inner Voice Seeking Stability

This voice brings structure, caution, and reliability. It’s the voice of systems, policies, sustainability. But when it dominates, it can resist change or ignore emotional signals.

✔️ When to listen: When you're emotionally charged and need grounding.

⚠️ When to question: When “status quo” is being used as a shield for fear.

“Before we do anything rash, let’s ask: What are the risks? What have we already built that’s working?”

🌊The People Oriented: Your Inner Feelings Seeking To Be Seen

This is the voice of emotion, connection, and team culture. It’s your EQ in action.But when it dominates, decisions may get stuck in people-pleasing or emotional overload.

✔️ When to listen: When you’re too focused on outcomes to notice morale.

⚠️ When to question: When emotional avoidance is dressed up as compassion.

“Let’s be honest — this will land hard for some people. Have we made space to acknowledge the impact?”

🔥The Relentless Driver: The Inner Motivation Seeking To Move Forward

This is vision, ambition, clarity. It brings urgency and transformation. But without balance, it can burn people out or override nuance.

✔️ When to listen: When you’ve analysed too long and need momentum.

⚠️ When to question: When fear of stagnation is pushing impulsive action.

“This is our chance. We’ve hesitated too long. Let’s make the call.”

🌬️The Innovative Thinker: The Idealist Seeking To Make It Better

This voice is air, curiosity, and perspective. It zooms out. Sees the pattern. But too much air creates overthinking and indecision.

✔️ When to listen: When things feel binary or emotionally reactive.

⚠️ When to question: When you’re using strategy-speak to avoid emotional truth.

“What if we paused and asked a better question? There might be a third option we’re missing.”

🌌 The Wise One: Your Inner Intuition & Knowing

This is the voice of intuition and integrated wisdom. It’s not reactive — it’s spacious. When it speaks, it doesn’t shout. But it often knows.

✔️ When to listen: When none of the other voices feel quite right.

⚠️ When to question: When “intuitive clarity” is masking unexamined bias or emotional residue.

“Let’s be still for a moment. Something’s speaking through this tension. Can you hear it?”

How to Use This in Real Leadership?

Most leadership breakdowns aren’t due to poor logic — they come from emotional misalignment. When you chair your inner board with presence, you start leading from integration, not fragmentation. And when leaders do this — so do their teams. This helps to reduce the following:

• Acting from urgency without sensing impact.

• Being so compassionate you avoid hard truth.

• Overthinking while ignoring intuition.

• Prioritising structure at the cost of momentum.

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats offer a structured way to separate different modes of thinking — logic, emotion, caution, optimism, creativity, and process. But their true power lies not in wearing one hat at a time, but in learning how to facilitate a dialogue between them.

When you allow your different voices to speak to each other you move from rigid decision-making to dynamic integration. This internal conversation helps leaders reduce blind spots, access deeper insight, and respond with greater clarity and balance — especially in emotionally charged or high-stakes environments.

Letting Go Of Seriousness: Playing With Conflict

The forces of the world are all the time impacting us. Work and conflict becomes heavy not because they are there. I enjoy work. I enjoy playing with conflict. Work and conflict become a problem when we take things seriously. A conflict becomes a fight when we take all that is said personally. When this happens everything dies.

When I have a very important decision where I have multiple parts conflicting, I take a piece of paper or a word document and I play. This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a practical emotional check-in process I use with senior leaders — especially when they're split, overwhelmed, or emotionally loaded. I ask them to do the following:

1. Pause the rush – Emotion always wants urgency. Interrupt the cycle.

2. Name the voices – Ask: Which forces are speaking inside me right now?

3. Let each speak – Even for 30 seconds. Feel each perspective.

4. Check for imbalance – Is one voice dominating? Who’s being ignored?

5. Dialogue Voices - let the most conflicting ones speak to each other.

6. Decide – What decision includes the wisdom of each voice?

Integration doesn’t always mean compromise. Sometimes it means: listen fully, then act cleanly.

From Inner Integration To Outer Conflict Resolution

Before we can resolve conflict with others, we need to recognise the conflict within ourselves. Most external clashes — with colleagues, teams, or stakeholders — are magnified by unresolved tensions inside us: competing priorities, unacknowledged fears, or inner parts pulling in opposite directions.

When a leader takes time to pause, listen to their own internal “boardroom,” and integrate those emotional voices, they show up clearer, calmer, and less reactive. From that integrated place, it becomes easier to guide others — not by imposing control, but by modelling containment, curiosity, and clarity. Inner resolution becomes the foundation for external transformation. The work always starts within — but it doesn’t end there:

1. Clarify Your Intention: begin with a clear purpose for what you are addressing in this conflict. This sets the tone for constructive resolution.

2. Create Safe Conditions: choose the right time, space, and tone. Psychological safety is the container — without it, conflict deepens instead of dissolves.

3. Acknowledge Emotion (Yours and Theirs): Start by owning your emotional presence: “Here’s what’s been alive for me.” Then make space for their experience. This humanises the conflict.

4. Separate Story from Impact: clarify what happened vs. how it felt. “When X happened, I experienced it as Y.” This prevents blame while surfacing the real emotional residue.

5. Co-Create Understanding: invite their perspective. Stay curious. Ask, “What was your experience of this?” This step builds shared truth, not just resolution.

6. Design the Path Forward: Name what’s needed for repair, clarity, or future boundaries. Collaboratively define next steps so the tension turns into a generative turning point — not just a bandage.

Refernces

1. Baron, R. A. (1988). Negative effects of destructive criticism: Impact on conflict, self-efficacy, and task performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73(2), 199–207. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.73.2.199

2. Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead: Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts. New York: Random House.

3. De Bono, E. (1985). Six thinking hats. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

4. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam Books.

5. Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692–724. https://doi.org/10.5465/256287

6. OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (July 18 version) [Large language model]. Available from https://chat.openai.com

7. Safran, J. D., & Muran, J. C. (2000). Negotiating the therapeutic alliance: A relational treatment guide. New York: Guilford Press.

8. Siegel, D. J. (2010). The mindful therapist: A clinician’s guide to mindsight and neural integration. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

9. Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (2010). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books.