Emotional Systems & Trust Workshop - Beirut, Lebanon

This five half-days leadership workshop held in Beirut Lebanon was conducted for a group of 14 leaders from 8 different nationalities. The workshop focused on understanding emotional systems and include trust, honor and shame. Purpose was to help the leaders increase their emotional capacity and skills in doing crisis work within the region. Interested to bring Victor to facilitate a leadership workshop? Connect with Victor

Summary of session:

This was a five half-days leadership workshop held in Beirut, Lebanon, delivered in the first week of October, 2026. There were 14 participants from 8 nationalities working for an NGO. Participants come from the US, Italy, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, Lebanon, Egypt and UK.
The workshop focused on understanding emotional systems. I integrated systems thinking with moods (emotional habits) and demonstrated how individuals showed up in communities and families because of the effect of moods inhabited in communities. The workshop was designed to be very interactive and hands-on with the use of different activities to illustrate systems thinking, case studies and role plays to demonstrate the effect of emotional systems. The design of the workshop used key ontological frameworks to break down effects of culture.

What is an emotional system?

Most of us think of emotions as personal. I feel anxious. You feel frustrated. But walk into any team and you’ll notice something else. There is a mood in the room before anyone says a word. We not only listen to different emotions and moods in the room, we also listen through our moods. So teams have different effectiveness because of the moods the team is in. (Have a read about this article on listening through our moods if this might be new).

And here’s what matters for leaders. Moods don’t only live in individuals. They live in groups. A team can inhabit resentment, distrust or resignation the same way a family can. Once a mood settles into a group, it starts shaping how each person behaves. People who are open and generous elsewhere become guarded. Someone who usually speaks up goes quiet. Nobody decided this. They’re adjusting to the climate.

Think of the central air-con in an office. Nobody chose the temperature, and after a while nobody notices it. But everyone is adjusting to it, reaching for a jacket or sitting nearer the window. That is an emotional system. People adapt to a climate they didn’t choose and can’t see.

So the workshop was built to make that climate visible. [I designed an activity using the clothes hanger and clothes pegs to illustrate individuals, their impact of their moods on others and how one person’s movement and mood affects the whole system.] We also used case studies and role plays to see how moods passed through teams, communities and families.

Honour and shame across eight nationalities

Shame is universal. How a culture handles it is not. (Read Article on Shame and Honour Culture)

In more individualist cultures, wrongdoing is often experienced as guilt. I did something wrong, and I deal with it. Shame becomes a private matter, something to work through on your own. In honour-shame cultures, a person’s standing is held by the group. Shame isn’t only something I feel. It touches my family, my community and my name. Restoring honour is a public act, not a private one. Every person in the room carried a mix, shaped by where they grew up, where they’ve lived and the communities they belong to. But in a group of eight nationalities, the differences show up in ordinary moments.

[We had different activities to highlight how honour and shame might look differently in different culture. Different ones realised how they react as a result of shame they had inhabited and it was very different for each person. We build enough psychological safety to talk about how shame behaviours could look like. I shared my own personal story on shame to illustrate hidden patterns.]

Trust Work & Listening

Trust building and restoration work starts with small little behaviours repeated consistently over time. We used cases and real life examples to explore the behaviours. We also distinguish between honor and trust. We explored different distinctions of trust, different trust myths, how trust is deeply personal and works differently for each individual. We practice how to build psychological safety through listening practices and explored embodied listening.

What changed?

Beside, the 5 half-day sessions, I managed to have 1 on 1 coaching for different individuals. Participants gave great feedback on taking away valuable insights and embodied practices to regulate and manage different emotions. What I took away was how much more these leaders could hold for each other once the system was visible. The mood didn’t vanish. But they could name it, and naming it is where choice begins.

If your team works across cultures, or carries a weight that never seems to get talked about, I’d be glad to explore what that might look like for you.

Victor’s other work in Lebanon, Middle East
- Working in Teams - Leadership Retreat in Lebanon
- CliftonStrengths Team Workshop and Leadership Coaching for NGO
- CliftonStrengths and Difficult Conversations - Leadership Retreat in Lebanon