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    the four Ls of emotional intelligence

    Brain Circuits

    The four Ls of emotional resilience

    by Silke Mischke Published December 5, 2023 in Brain Circuits • 6 min read

    Tapping into your emotions can make you more resilient and more efficient in your leadership.

    Our ever-present emotions impact our thoughts and actions in sometimes surprising ways. Emotionally aware leaders who effectively embrace their feelings are more likely to serve as role models and inspire their teams.

    Emotions have an adaptive function for us. Disregarding them means foregoing critical data that is relevant to make sense of a specific context or situation.

    Leaders can build on the information they convey using this step-by-step approach, which I have simplified here and named “the four Ls of emotional resilience.” 

    1. Listen

    Embrace what you are feeling in the present – in other words, practicing mindfulness. Acknowledge that you are experiencing emotions but don’t judge them. Suspending judgment is critical and requires self-empathy.

    2. Label

    Go deeper when it comes to exploring your emotional energy. Are these emotions positive or negative? How intense are they? Do you feel high energy or low energy? What is the exact feeling? Fear? Surprise? Anger? A combination? (It’s rare to feel just one emotion at a time.) Describing your emotions will help you understand where they come from and how to best work with them.

    Ask yourself how you feel right now: 

    Graph Brain Circuit
    On a scale of -5 to +5, rank how positive or negative you feel and how intense you experience this emotion.

    3. Learn

    Reflect on the impact your feelings have. Why are you feeling this way? How does this impact others? How can you effectively work with this emotion? Do you need to process it, or can you benefit from this energy?

    4. Leverage

    As a leader, how can you use what you have learned to suit your big-picture purpose, mission, or goals?

    Consider the case of a VP for a global medical device company who came to us amid the COVID crisis. We’ll call this person Kim. (We disguised all identifiable details of this executive, so don’t bother trying to guess who it was.) Sales had dipped 32% annually and the forecast looked grim, so Kim was tasked with reducing headcount by an estimated 18% to keep the company viable. Kim reported feeling worried and anxious, but not on account of their own situation, as they were quite senior in the company and nearing retirement. By taking stock – listening to and labeling their emotions – Kim realized they felt fear on behalf of their team. So how could they leverage that knowledge? 

    What Kim did next was to create a space for their team to be honest about their fears and for management to address what they might be able to do to help. This space allowed them to explore even what was outside of management’s control. By doing this, Kim moved closer to team members than would have been possible with bottled-up feelings. This helped by building trust, increasing their emotional resilience.  

    Further reading: 

     Watch a video and read more here: Second that emotion – building emotional resilience 

     

    Authors

    Silke Mischke

    Senior Leadership Advisor and Lecturer, IMD and EPFL

    Silke Mischke is a Senior Leadership Advisor and Leadership Lecturer at IMD and EPFL, where she teaches leadership in the E4S Master in Sustainability Management, a joint program by IMD, EPFL, and UNIL. She holds a Doctorate in Business Administration and a Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology. Her work focuses on leadership through the lens of emotional intelligence, exploring its impact on individuals, teams, and organizational performance. She coaches and teaches leaders and teams from a wide range of international organizations, supporting their development through both individual and collective learning. At IMD, she also serves as Co-Director of the Executive Coaching Certificate program.

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    If you’re known as a solid executor and a safe pair of hands but can’t see an exciting  future for yourself in the organization, you may be overly risk-averse. Answer the questions below to see if this applies to you and check out...

    Further reading: 

    Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman 

    Authors

    Silke Mischke

    Senior Leadership Advisor and Lecturer, IMD and EPFL

    Silke Mischke is a Senior Leadership Advisor and Leadership Lecturer at IMD and EPFL, where she teaches leadership in the E4S Master in Sustainability Management, a joint program by IMD, EPFL, and UNIL. She holds a Doctorate in Business Administration and a Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology. Her work focuses on leadership through the lens of emotional intelligence, exploring its impact on individuals, teams, and organizational performance. She coaches and teaches leaders and teams from a wide range of international organizations, supporting their development through both individual and collective learning. At IMD, she also serves as Co-Director of the Executive Coaching Certificate program.

    Related

    Are you stuck in a leadership comfort zone? 

    February 3, 2026 • by Brenda Steinberg in Brain Circuits

    If you’re known as a solid executor and a safe pair of hands but can’t see an exciting  future for yourself in the organization, you may be overly risk-averse. Answer the questions below to see if this applies to you and check out...

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