Emotion isn’t soft; it’s the body’s telemetry. Tune into that chemistry and your execution steadies.
When I was thirteen, I decided the best way to pursue my dream of flying was to join the Air Force.
It wasn’t a romantic decision, more a quiet calculation made from the edges of what felt possible. Flying lessons were expensive, asking my parents to fund them didn’t sit right, so I worked backwards from the outcome I wanted and looked for another way to get there.
Military it would be.
The logic was sound. The strategy worked. And somewhere in that process, without realising it, I began shaping a relationship with myself that would take decades to fully understand.
The odds felt stacked against me. Only a handful of pilot candidates were selected each year and very few of them were women. I became acutely aware that any hint of softness, any visible emotion, might be interpreted as weakness.
So I hardened myself, deliberately and quietly.
I learned to value emotion only when it served a purpose. Passion for flying became fuel for discipline. Fear of failure became a whip that drove preparation. Everything else was folded away, stored somewhere out of sight, out of reach.
Years later, I found myself as the only woman on my pilot’s course.
I was one of the boys.
I was complimented for processing information like “an operator.” Logical. Calm. Emotionless.
At the time, I wore that description as a badge of honour.
Now, I hear something else in it.
Those of us who pride ourselves on logic can easily overlook emotion because it feels intangible, difficult to measure, less trustworthy than facts or analysis. It sits just outside the neat edges of what we can quantify, so we learn to discount it.
That certainly described me.
If that feels familiar, there’s another way of looking at it.
As a junior pilot, I was fortunate to be mentored by a senior instructor, one of those rare people who combined exceptional flying skill with a kind of quiet, grounded wisdom. He had a way of saying things that didn’t feel like instruction so much as an invitation to see differently.
One day, he explained something that has stayed with me ever since.
As logical decision-makers, we naturally focus on what we can see and measure, the instruments, the data, the variables we can track and control. Yet much of our biology operates beneath conscious awareness, shaping our responses long before we notice them.
Ignoring it doesn’t remove its influence. It simply means we’re making decisions without access to some of the most valuable information available to us.
He suggested I think about emotion differently.
Imagine your brain as an extraordinary prediction engine, constantly scanning, comparing, updating. Every experience you’ve ever had, every success, disappointment, conversation, relationship and memory is being processed, consciously and unconsciously, all of it feeding into one quiet, continuous question:
What is likely to happen next?
Long before we consciously evaluate a situation, the brain has already compared it with thousands of previous experiences. It forms a prediction about safety, opportunity, threat, likely outcome, and that prediction begins to shift our chemistry.
We feel that shift as emotion.
“Emotions are the language of our prediction engine. And our body is the microphone”.BB
Modern neuroscience increasingly points in this direction. Research from neuroscientist Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests that emotions are not simply reactions to the world around us, but predictions constructed by the brain, using past experience to prepare the body for what it expects will happen next.
By the time we consciously notice an emotion, our biology has already begun to shift.
That understanding changed something in me.
Emotion began to feel less like interference and more like information, something to be listened to rather than managed away. Curiosity started to replace suppression.
Instead of asking, Why am I feeling this? the question softened into something more useful: What prediction is my brain making right now?
Sometimes that prediction is accurate. Sometimes it’s shaped by an old experience that no longer fits the present moment. Either way, it offers something valuable, a glimpse into the patterns shaping our responses.
Data, not about the world, but about ourselves.
For years, I had been trying to become more like a machine so I could perform at my best. What I eventually discovered was that understanding my humanity made me a better pilot, a better leader, a better decision-maker.
Emotion wasn’t something to push aside. It was something to work with.
The more I learned to recognise the chemistry shaping my decisions, the more deliberately I could choose my response, creating a small but powerful space between what I felt and what I did next.
That is one of the reasons I now spend so much time helping people build Energy before they focus on Execution.
Our biology shapes our psychology far more than most of us realise. When we begin to understand that emotions are the language our body chemistry speaks, we can access valuable insight.
Performance doesn’t begin with behaviour.
It begins with the system beneath the behaviour.
And sometimes, the signal that the system has valuable information for us is simply an emotion we’ve been trying not to feel.
"Our brain continuously solves an incredibly sophisticated algorithm, and our emotions are the output." BB
