Emotions in leadership: notes from a recovering hyper-rational
This article by David Buirs, leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam, is about managing emotions at work. It explains why suppressed emotions keep coming back, and how body awareness helps leaders regulate stress and stay steady under pressure. Readers learn two simple daily habits for noticing and naming what they feel.
For most of my working life I treated emotions as background noise. I was the rational one, the person who solved things with logic and kept feelings politely outside the room. If you had asked me what I felt after a difficult conversation, I would have answered with an analysis of the conversation instead. I genuinely would not have understood the question.
It took me a long time to see what that was costing me. Managing emotions at work sounded, back then, like advice meant for other people. So this is the piece I wish someone had handed me back then, in a way that my then logic-only brain would understand.
You’re tense far more often than you realise
We carry small spikes of tension through an ordinary day, dozens of them. You open your laptop to a full calendar and your shoulders draw up. You see a certain name in your inbox and your breathing goes shallow. None of it is dramatic. Most of it stays under the radar, because nobody taught us to look. And what you don’t detect, you can’t do anything about.
Stress is a physical event. Breath high in the chest, a slightly clenched jaw, a knot in the stomach. Catch it while it’s still small and you have moves that genuinely work. A few slow breaths switch on the calming side of your nervous system. Letting your jaw and shoulders drop tells your brain the threat has passed.
All of it depends on feeling the tension in the first place. Body awareness is the on-switch for every regulation technique you’ve ever read about.
Why this is a genuine edge for leaders
Managing emotions at work is one of those skills that stays invisible until pressure arrives. Your capacity for leadership shows up under pressure. Tight deadlines. Disappointing results. Heated conversations where one sharp reaction costs you weeks of someone’s trust.
Unmanaged stress narrows your thinking when you most need range. It tips you toward reading threat everywhere, so a neutral email looks like an attack. It shortens your patience with the people you need beside you. A leader who can feel that pressure building, and bring it down on purpose, makes cleaner decisions and stays more predictable. That predictability is most of what people mean when they call someone steady.
Your state also spreads. Walk into a room wound up and unaware of it, and the room tightens with you. Walk in relaxed and at ease, and your calm presence spreads out over the room.
Connection runs through the same wiring
You can only meet another person as far as you can meet yourself.
On average, women stay more in contact with their emotions than men do. That gives them a head start on something every leader needs: knowing what’s moving inside them while it’s happening, and using it as information.
Take anger, the one I missed most. You can be genuinely angry at someone and have no idea. The conversation ends, you move on, and the tension sits in your shoulders and your chest, in the places you never check. That tension was a message. Often it means someone stepped over a line that matters to you. Feel it in the moment and you can name it, hold the boundary, deal with it cleanly. Miss it and you carry it around instead, and it leaks out sideways three hours later at someone who had nothing to do with it.
Why the heavy feelings actually fade, and this is the part I resisted longest
I used to assume that letting yourself feel anger or grief just meant more of it. The reverse turned out to be the case.
A difficult emotion is a learned link in your nervous system. This trigger means threat, brace. That link only weakens when your system gathers new evidence, the experience of meeting the trigger, staying with it, and finding that nothing terrible happens. Pushing the feeling away guarantees that evidence never arrives, so the link stays intact and fires again next time, often harder.
Most of the time we suppress without knowing we’re doing it. It runs on its own, under the surface. The way to weaken it is to catch the emotion as it happens, by first noticing the physical sensations all emotions show up with. So when you feel that anger, you stay with it instead of pushing it away. Do that a handful of times and it loses its grip. The charge slowly drains out of it. This is the principle exposure therapy is built on, one of the most reliable findings in psychology. Avoiding a feeling keeps it alive. Meeting it lets it dissolve over time.
The beach ball is the everyday version. Hold one under water and it presses back the whole time, and the moment your attention drifts, up it comes. Holding it down was never free. An extreme example of this is burnout. When stress goes unnoticed or unmanaged for too long, the body can sometimes decide to shut down as a protection mechanism.
Becoming better at feeling your emotions comes with a huge benefit. You feel the positive ones more as well, especially joy. Plus you feel more connected to others, because connection is built on emotion.
How you actually begin
Simpler than it sounds, slower than you’d like. Two small habits.
First, check in with your body a few times a day. Tension, warmth, a knot, a tight throat. No need to fix anything. You’re just learning to feel what’s there.
Second, give it a name. Start with the six basics: anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise. Don’t worry about the exact word. Doing it often is what counts.
Do this enough and the signals arrive earlier. These days I’ll feel a small sting in one spot in my chest and think, ah, there’s anger, before my thoughts have caught up. A tight throat usually means sadness is close. Catching it that early is what lets me choose a response instead of letting it influence me without my noticing.
This is a lot of what we work on together in coaching. We look at what you feel under pressure, where it lives in your body, and how to meet it instead of carrying it around for the rest of the day. For most managers and team leads, management coaching is where this work starts. For leaders at director or board level, coaching for executives goes into the particular weight that comes with that seat.
For organisations that want their managers to build this across a whole team, leadership training brings the same approach in-company.
Interested or curious? Let’s chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.
