By Dr. Joan Flora, PCC
Most leaders try to fix or hide their emotional reactivity.
Effective leaders learn to study it.
After decades of coaching high-capacity professionals, I’ve learned this: burnout rarely stems from incompetence or lack of effort. It often begins with a failure to pause to meet and understand our own emotional reactivity.
The Familiar Pattern of Denying Emotional Reactivity
It usually looks like this: You get a critical email or text. You instantly feel your body tighten. Your hands fly to the keyboard to compose a reply designed to defend yourself before you’ve even taken a breath.
This is reactivity: fast, familiar, seemingly invisible. And it’s costly—not just for you, but for everyone who depends on your emotional clarity.
Through learnable practice, emotional reactivity can become a valuable signal. It’s an internal alert system pointing toward unmet needs and core values. When leaders learn to decode it, they become more grounded, more effective, and—ironically—more trusted.
Reactivity often hides behind sharp judgments. Thoughts like: “There he goes again.” “What an idiot.” “They aren’t worth the effort.”
These aren’t just frustrations; they’re red flags that something deeper is at stake: a need for respect, clarity, inclusion, or even safety.
Once you learn to ask what those judgments are protecting, you unlock a new level of self-awareness and leadership presence.
Where the Work Begins
We all have a default response to stress. For some, it’s powering through. For others, it’s retreat. But what the most effective leaders have in common isn’t that they avoid reactivity; it’s that they’ve learned to pause long enough to ask a better question.
Viktor Frankl once wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
That space may be small. But inside it lives every good decision leaders make.
To accomplish that, leaders must reclaim that space—not just to manage reactivity, but to mine it for insight.
Charles M. Jones calls it Emotional Response-Ability: The capacity to notice and decode a trigger, get curious about it, and respond in ways that are wise. humane, and powerful.
The Science of Reactivity
Your brain is built to react. It’s a survival design: it scans for threats to protect you. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson (2004) defines emotional reactivity as: “The magnitude and duration of a person’s emotional response to a stimulus.” In simpler terms, it’s how strongly, how quickly, and how long your emotions show up when something triggers a response.
But here’s what leaders often miss: emotional reactivity often feels disproportionate to the moment, and we tend to push it down for a variety of reasons—fear of looking unprofessional, a desire to stay in control, or simply because we were never taught how to process strong emotions at work (or at home).
Psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk explains: “Being triggered means that some current experience is reactivating a deep past wound. Even a minor irritation can unleash intense reactions because the body still remembers the original threat—even if the mind does not” (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014).
This is why reactivity can feel so overwhelming. It’s also why logic alone won’t settle it.
When a leader snaps, shuts down, or spirals into self-doubt over a single comment, it’s not about that comment alone. The nervous system may be defending against an old, unresolved threat, not the present situation.
The problem isn’t reactivity; it’s unexamined reactivity. The challenge is to notice it, study it, and trace it back to what needs attention.
The Temptation to Hide or Deny
Reactivity can feel like something to hide or power through. But with practice, it becomes something else entirely: a flare, signaling an unmet need or violated value.
That’s the paradox. When we learn to decode it, we become more present, more grounded—and more trustworthy as leaders. It becomes a gift.
Here’s the caveat most people overlook: Unmet needs almost always drive our most difficult emotions.
–Anger often points to a need for fairness or respect.
–Anxiety may signal a need for clarity or a sense of safety when facing risk.
–Resentment? It usually hides a need for acknowledgment or autonomy.
When leaders can name the need beneath the feeling, everything shifts. What once looked like a liability becomes an asset—a source of insight that sharpens judgment, deepens relationships, and turns emotional reactivity into strategic intelligence.
The 3-Step Pause
Here’s what it looks like in action. A leader feels triggered. Instead of reacting, they run a simple internal script:
- Notice the Reaction: What’s happening in my body? Tight jaw? Racing thoughts? Sudden shutdown?
- Name the Emotion: Is it frustration? Fear? Embarrassment? Naming it precisely slows the nervous system.
- Identify the Need: What value is being threatened? Respect? Belonging? Clarity?
What am I protecting?
This pause is command, not weakness. It creates space for values to lead instead of reflexes. And with practice, it becomes a fast and powerful habit
The Case Study: Mia’s Pivot
In a recent coaching session, Mia, a Curriculum Director, described feeling invisible in leadership meetings. Her strategy? Over-prepare, speak longer, try harder.
It didn’t work. She was exhausted—and still felt unseen and unappreciated.
In coaching, she explored her resentment and shame. Beneath it? Grief, and a deep, unmet need to feel valued and included. Her over-functioning, she realized, was a strategy to meet those needs, but it was pushing people away.
Marshall Rosenberg called these “tragic strategies” because our attempts to meet a need actually prevent us from fulfilling it.
After that session, Mia showed up differently. She spoke more concisely. Asked more questions. Created more space. Her reactivity didn’t disappear (and it won’t), but when it flared, it made sense. And she knew how to listen to it.
The Leadership Implication: Trust Lives in the Pause
Reactivity doesn’t destroy trust. Unexamined reactivity does. When leaders skip the pause, they solve the wrong problem, say the wrong thing, or shut down the very conversation that needed oxygen. But when they pause—even briefly—they communicate something powerful: This space is safe enough for truth.
That’s the birthplace of team resilience and high-quality conflict.
The Takeaway: One Simple Question
Next time you feel triggered, meet it. Pause and ask: “What need is speaking right now?” That one question can convert emotional heat into strategic clarity.
Frankl was right: Freedom begins in the space between stimulus and response.
At Inner Sage Leadership Group, we help leaders slow the moment, decode the signal, and lead from emotional clarity—building cultures rooted in dignity, trust, and courageous communication.
Want to bring this insight to your work or to your leadership team? Let’s talk.
