Great leadership factors emotion. Employee engagement depends on emotion. Great branding is about hooking the emotions. Choices of partnership, marriage, parenting, buying a car or a house, our work—ultimately decided by emotion. Yes, facts and logic are a significant part of making a choice, but most often, the reason we take one direction over another is an emotional one.
In fact, we can say that every decision we make is an emotional one and most often made as a way to get to a better result from making that choice. It follows, then, that there is no such thing as a purely logical decision.
We make all "rational" decisions according to
preference for one set of data points over another, or just as often, based on a desire to get something else that the chosen logic will help bring to us.
We may think that we are using logic when we decide,
but to make a particular choice, we must like the outcome of that pick—at least a bit better than the alternatives. If we are expressing a preference for an outcome (at any level), we are making an emotional choice.
We explore this idea further in our introduction to the "
Desire Engine" on this site, but for now, let's agree that misunderstanding and mismanaging our emotional nature is bound to have a deleterious effect on our decision-making and life.
It doesn't have to go that way.