You need emotion to negotiate effectively and to make good decisions.  In fact, you need your emotions to make all decisions.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m going to make this decision rationally,” as though they could set aside their feelings and allow only logic to guide their decision making?  Well, they can’t, though they may believe they can, because we place high value on rationality and reasoning in our culture.  For years women in the workplace have been challenged, often overtly and sometimes with ridicule, to rely less on emotions and be more logical and rational.

But our “thinking brain” can’t do its job without our “emotional brain.”  Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist, studied patients with a type of brain damage that prevents emotional memories from reaching the rational part of their brain (if you like jargon: they had damage to their prefrontal-amygdala circuit, cutting off emotional memories residing in the amygdala from the neocortex).  Though this type of brain damage does not result in a loss of IQ or any cognitive ability, these folks make incredibly poor decisions for themselves—if they can make decisions at all.  Simple acts like making appointments become almost insurmountable.  Damasio first wrote about this research in his well-known 1994 book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, and the body of research has continued to build ever since.

It’s not possible to turn off your emotions and if you could, you’d become a pretty ineffective negotiator and decision-maker.  For women, there’s an added message:  Women’s ways of knowing, which are often associated with empathy and feelings are as important for good negotiating and good decision-making as the objective, thinking ways of knowing often associated with men.