Jeff Bezos on why "I'm scared" became one of his most effective things to say in a meeting: Bezos says that in the family he grew up in, most negative emotions were quietly off-limits. "The only negative emotion that was kind of tolerated in that unspoken family dynamic, and only occasionally, was anger. Sadness, fear, anxiety. These things were looked down on." He believes that conditioning probably served him well as an entrepreneur: "That's probably, in the scheme of things, kind of probably pretty helpful for founding a company." His reasoning is that founders need to project something: "You need optimism. Without optimism and energy, I don't know how some glum Eeyore type founder could ever lead a company to success. I mean, you got to have some optimism. You've got to have some energy. It's got to be a little contagious. There's going to be a lot of bad days. You got to lift people up." But he found the limits of that approach at home first, with his children, his brother and sister, and his parents: "I realized I'm not really being intimate with them if I'm not sharing when I'm sad or sharing when I'm scared or these kinds of things. And so I started working on that with them and found it very meaningful. It deepened those relationships very significantly." Then came the realization that changed how he operates professionally: "And then I realized those were valid emotions at work, too." @JeffBezos now treats every emotion as useful information: "All of your emotions are sort of an early warning system. If you're stressed, for me, that's a kind of an early radar that is detecting that there's something I'm not taking action on. It's an important indicator." The problem with running everything through anger is that it's a blunt instrument. It tells people something is wrong without telling them what: "If you're channeling all of your negative emotions into occasional frustration or anger or something like that, you're not being very precise." Here's what it looks like in practice for him now: "I'll have a meeting and I listened for a while, and when it's my turn to talk I'll say, 'I'm scared.' And that's more effective. People are like, 'You're what? What are you scared of?' And then you are talking about, okay, what's making you scared." Anger in a meeting puts a room on the defensive. Fear, stated plainly, starts an investigation. The conversation moves from managing the leader's mood to finding the actual risk the leader has picked up on. His conclusion: "You get more in touch. It actually help[s] you, probably not just your family relationships, your close intimate relationships, but I think it helps you at work too."