When Emotions Are High, Intelligence Is Low
The strongest designer superpower might actually be holding you back.
For years, I invested lots of emotions into every single project I was leading. I thought I was being “empathetic” to the users. Empathy, I told myself, was the secret sauce of great work.
As I advanced into higher positions, with more responsibilities and a broader view, I've learned overly invested emotions were doing more harm than good.
I became hyper focused, "emotions" blurred my view to look at the bigger picture.
The key is: Balance with logic and macro view.
Few things I do now to consciously remove access emotions:
Acknowledge my own bias - ask "What if the opposite is true"
Put extra efforts to research and understand the opposite
Look at every project through the lens of a good journalist.
Read time: 4mins
The emotional bias cost
Let me introduce you to Liam (name changed).
Liam is the kind of designer who would drop everything to pick up lunch for a colleague, the most considerate soul you'd ever meet.
With over 15 years of design experience, he carried a heart so big it sometimes overwhelmed his professional perspective.
We were working on a critical project - restructuring a website navigation system that impacts millions. Liam's passion ran deep, especially around sensitive topics like domestic violence and aged care.
His intentions were pure gold - he wanted to ensure support resources prioritised front and centre.
But here's where emotions began to cloud logical judgment:
The website's metrics were screaming for help:
a 55% churn rate affecting 2.5 million visitors - daily! 😱 That’s 1.3 million users turned away due to unintuitive navigation system.
We were sitting at a 15% conversion rate, that’s 195,000 daily users that could have could have turned into leads!
While Liam was fixated on surfacing needs for a selective user segment, he was missing the larger operational context. His emotional bias is creating tunnel vision for his work.
Business leaders operate with a macro view - they're balancing outcomes, trade-offs, roadmap actions, and financial impacts. We ended up spending more efforts to show Liam the “blind spots” and the trade offs he wasn’t able to see, just so we can get the project through to next steps with urgency.
This isn't about diminishing empathy for a group of users.
It's about expanding designer’s perspectives.
Balancing emotion and intelligence
I've learned to consciously check my emotional temperature. Here are my personal strategies:
Acknowledge Your Bias: Ask yourself, "What if the opposite is true?"
Curiosity: Put extra effort into understanding perspectives different from your own
Adopt a Journalist's Lens: Observe without immediate emotional attachment. Catch yourself doing the “over empathy” thing, and actively seek broader perspectives. This part, requires high level of self-awareness. Did I mention that’s a super skill for high performers?
What Liam could have done
Strategic Repositioning
Approaching the project with a macro lens, Imagine Liam understands that solving a design challenge isn’t just for certain users, but it could unlock multiple opportunities for discovery and the business.
There’s opportunity for Liam to help business partners broaden considerations with multiple potentials to broaden his influence.
Example action points could be:
Soft launch of targeted support navigation: Less risk, high impact for millions of site visitors
Phased approach: Reducing implementation risk without loosing growth opportunities
Suggest measurable incremental improvements: Identify targeted data points to set milestones to move the project forward
Layout risk, trade offs, quick wins and long term impact across the lead generation pipeline: Sales, Marketing, Customer metrics, Conversion rates..etc (And he works closely with multiple teams to get their perspectives)
Impact at scale:
As Liam escapes his own “empathy tunnel”, he's doing something revolutionary:
Demonstrating multiple business considerations as a strategic partner
Showing risk management skills
Proving he thinks beyond his design silo
This is the opportunity for Liam to up-level his influence from a "nice-to-have" designer to a critical strategic partner.
Now Liam isn’t operating at a designer level.
He’s now impacting organisational influence.
Influence: the day to day “personal brand”
What Liam is achieving with the above actions is building his “personal brand” as a strategic thinker. Yes, the personal brand thing applies to work environment too: He’s selling his expertise as the “go-to system-thinking” designer.
He's showing that:
Empathy can coexist with strategic thinking
Passion becomes powerful when channeled selectively
Design is a business solution, it’s empathy problem solving with the bigger picture in sight
Leap to leadership
Expanding your horizon is the leap you need to master towards leadership (and it isn’t an optional skill)
This is the zone to demonstrate a Senior IC’s ability to lead, the ability to identify opportunities beyond your immediate emotional response and understanding the intricate dance of business, user needs, and strategic movements at a macro scale.
Being intelligence means creating space between your emotional reaction and your professional response.
So next time you feel that surge of emotion threatening to hijack your professional judgment, take a breath.
Step back. Look wider.
Your most intelligent design might just be the scale perspective you create.
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