Sadness, when allowed to speak, often carries the clearest signal in the room.

Anxiety-driven leadership can look like excellence, until it becomes the only frequency a leader operates on.

The best leaders hold the full emotional range and don't let any single emotion run the room.

On a recent flight, I did what I often do: I put on a children's movie.

I'm not subtle about it. I laugh out loud. I've been known to tear up. On this particular flight, I was watching Inside Out 2, and somewhere over the middle of the country, I was laughing hard enough that the man beside me finally looked over.

"Whatever you're watching," he said, "it must be good."

"It's Inside Out," I told him.

He smiled, genuinely glad to see someone laughing that hard, and went back to his iPad.

There wasn't time to explain. I wasn't laughing because the film was silly. I was laughing because I recognized everyone in it. Including myself.

Joy is my favorite, as you can see by the photo, and I cried when Imagination Land was destroyed.

In the first Inside Out, Joy is the one running Riley's emotional control panel. She's optimistic, fast-moving, fiercely protective, and utterly convinced that if she can just keep things positive enough, everything will be okay. She's not wrong to care. But she makes one costly mistake: she keeps Sadness out of the room.

Sadness carries........

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