You know the meeting.
The numbers are bad, someone’s just said something that landed like a slap, and you can feel your chest go tight and your ears go hot and a small internal voice going ‘do not react, do not react, do not react.’
So you don’t. You keep your face still. You keep your voice level. You say, “Okay, let’s work the problem,” get through it, and afterwards someone tells you that you handled it really well.
And you go home feeling like you’ve been hit by a bus.
Here’s what I want you to understand: what you just did was not regulation. That was suppression. And they are not the same skill.
One of them costs you almost nothing and makes the room safer. The other one costs you enormously and — this is the part that surprises people — makes the room worse. Even though nobody could see a thing.
Let’s get into it.
The lie we’ve all agreed to
Somewhere along the way, leadership development decided that composure was the goal.
Stay calm. Don’t let them see you rattled. Poker face. Be the steady one. Whole careers have been built on a reputation for never showing anything, and we’ve handed those people the word “gravitas” and promoted them.
I understand where it came from. Nobody wants a leader who detonates. A leader whose mood dictates the weather is exhausting and, frankly, a bit dangerous.
But we overcorrected. Hard. We took “don’t dump your emotions on your team” and turned it into “have no visible emotional life at all,” and now we’ve got a generation of senior leaders who genuinely believe that the job is to feel it all and show none of it.
That is not strength. That’s a full-time second job you’re doing on top of the one you’re paid for.
Suppression vs regulation, properly
Let me draw the line clearly, because most people have never had it drawn for them.
Suppression happens after the emotional response has already fired. The feeling arrives, floods the system, and you spend your energy stopping it from reaching your face. The emotion is fully present. You’re just building a wall in front of it in real time.
Regulation happens upstream. It’s what you do to the response itself — noticing it early, understanding what triggered it, reframing what it means, choosing your response before the wave has taken the wheel. The feeling still happens. You’re just not being driven by it.
The distinction sounds academic. It isn’t. It changes everything about what it costs you and what it does to the people around you.
Suppression is expensive. You are running a demanding cognitive task — hold the wall up — simultaneously with the actual work. Which means you’ve got significantly less capacity for the thing you’re supposed to be doing: listening, thinking, deciding. This is why leaders often can’t remember the detail of a meeting they white-knuckled through. They weren’t fully in it. They were busy with the wall.
Regulation is cheap by comparison, because you’re not fighting yourself. You’re steering.
Same calm exterior. Completely different internal economy. And a completely different effect on your team.
The bit that stops executives in their tracks
Here’s where it gets genuinely uncomfortable.
There’s a solid body of research on emotional suppression, and the most striking finding isn’t about the suppressor. It’s about everyone else in the room.
When you suppress, the physiological stress of the people you’re talking to goes up.
Not down. Up.
You are sitting there, holding it together, believing you are protecting your team from your reaction — and their systems are quietly escalating.
Why? Because humans are extraordinarily good at detecting mismatch. We’re built for it. We read micro-expressions, breathing rate, vocal tension, blink rate, the tiny delay before someone answers, the fact that the face says “fine” while everything else says otherwise. That detection happens fast and mostly below conscious awareness.
So your team registers the mismatch. They just can’t name it.
What they get instead is a vague, unpleasant, low-grade feeling that something is off and nobody’s saying what. And because the brain will not tolerate an information vacuum, they’ll fill it. Usually with something worse than the truth.
Is it the restructure? Is it me? Did the board say something? Am I about to be managed out?
You thought you were shielding them. What you actually gave them was ambiguity, which their nervous systems process as a threat. This is the same mechanism I bang on about constantly — uncertainty is metabolically expensive and behaviourally corrosive, and you just manufactured a batch of it by trying to be strong.
Meanwhile the version where you say, plainly, “I’ll be honest, that number has rattled me, give me a minute and let’s work it” costs you nothing and resolves the entire thing.
They already knew. You just made them guess.
Why nobody taught you this
Because we’ve been measuring the wrong thing.
Every leadership assessment I’ve ever seen rates composure. Almost none of them distinguish how the composure is being achieved. A leader who’s regulated and a leader who’s suppressing score identically on the outside, right up until one of them is signed off with shingles.
And there’s a second reason: suppression works brilliantly in the short term. That’s what makes it so seductive. It genuinely gets you through the meeting. The bill arrives later, and it arrives somewhere that doesn’t look connected — the disproportionate reaction to something trivial at 6 pm, the sleep that stopped working, the fact that you’ve become slightly sarcastic in writing, the Sunday dread, the sense of being far away from your own life.
Chronic suppression has a well-documented association with worse physical health, worse relationships and lower wellbeing. Not because feelings are magic. Because you’re running a costly process continuously for years and calling it professionalism.
I’ve coached a lot of executives who arrived at that bill. Not one of them saw the connection until someone drew it for them.
How to tell which one you’re doing
Honest self-audit. Nobody’s watching.
You’re probably suppressing if:
- You’re exhausted after meetings where nothing physically happened
- You can’t recall the detail of high-stakes conversations you were definitely present for
- You’re composed all day and then disproportionate over something small at home
- Your “I’m fine” is a full sentence with a door closing behind it
- You’ve got a physical tell you’re managing — jaw, shoulders, the thing you do with your hands
- You feel like you’re performing leadership rather than doing it
- You would describe holding it together as an achievement
You’re probably regulated if:
- You noticed the reaction early, while it was still small
- You could name it — that’s frustration, that’s fear, that’s my ego, actually
- The meeting cost you roughly what it should have cost you
- You can remember what was said
- You occasionally said the honest thing out loud, and the world continued
- You’re not carrying it at 11 pm
The tell is rarely how you looked. It’s what it cost.
Four things that actually work
This is the practical bit, and none of it requires an app.
1. Name it, at least to yourself. Putting a specific word to an emotional state measurably reduces its intensity — the more precise the label, the better it works. Not “I’m stressed,” which is useless. “I’m embarrassed because I should have caught this earlier and now I’m about to get defensive to cover it.” Precision does the work. Vagueness does nothing.
2. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. The single fastest physiological intervention available to you, and it’s free. A long exhale engages the parasympathetic system and directly slows the heart. Four in, six or eight out, three or four rounds. Do it before the meeting, not during, and don’t make a performance of it. This is the most practical tool I put on stage, and the one people message me about months later.
3. Reframe before it fires, not after. This is the actual skill. Ninety seconds before the hard conversation, decide what it means. “This is someone protecting their team, not attacking me.” “This is a data problem, not a loyalty problem.” You are choosing the interpretation before your amygdala chooses one for you — and it will, and its taste is terrible.
4. Say the true thing more often than feels safe. Not the full emotional download. The one-line version. “I’ve got a strong reaction to this, and I want to think before I respond.” “I’ll be honest, that landed badly. Give me a second.” It takes four seconds, it costs you no authority whatsoever, and it does something no amount of stoicism can do: it resolves the mismatch your team was already reading.
Every single time I’ve watched a leader do this, the room got safer, not shakier. Every time.
Regulated is not the same as nice
Let me head off the obvious objection, because someone always raises it and it’s a fair one.
None of this means being soft. Regulation is not the absence of intensity. Some of the most regulated leaders I know are demanding as hell — they hold a high bar, they give feedback that stings, they’ll tell you plainly when it isn’t good enough.
The difference is that their intensity is chosen. It’s aimed at the problem, it’s proportionate, and it’s the same on Thursday as it was on Monday.
Unregulated intensity is weather. It arrives, people brace, and the whole organisation learns to manage the leader instead of doing the work.
Regulated intensity is climate. You know what you’re getting. You can plan for it. You can disagree with it without risking your Tuesday.
Your team doesn’t need you to be gentle. They need you to be predictable. That’s the whole thing.
What this is really about
I’ll finish where I always finish on this one.
Your nervous system sets the temperature of every room you walk into. That’s not a metaphor — it’s contagion, it’s fast, and it’s mostly involuntary. Walk in tense and rushed, and your team makes anxious, defensive, short-term decisions. Walk in genuinely steady, and they think more clearly. Not because you said anything inspiring, but because their brains had enough safety to reach the good bits.
Which makes regulation the highest-leverage skill you own. Not a wellness perk. Not something to do when things settle down, because they won’t.
And the reason I’m so insistent on the difference between this and suppression is that suppression looks like the answer. It scores well. It gets praised. It’ll get you promoted.
It just quietly bills you for the whole thing later, and charges your team a service fee along the way.
You’re allowed to be a person at work. Turns out you’re a considerably better leader when you are.
Sonia x
Where to from here?
🎤 Bring Regulate to Lead to your stage. The leaders who win under pressure aren’t fearless — they’re regulated. This keynote brings the neuroscience of emotional regulation into the room: how to stay clear, calm and courageous when the stakes are highest, and how to build a team that does the same. Built around your audience, your pressures, your language. Book Sonia to speak →
🎯 Book a Strategy Session. If your leadership team is composed on the outside and running hot underneath, that’s a solvable problem — and usually a faster one than people expect. Book a Strategy Session →
🧠 Leadership Brain Program: Our human leadership program for leaders and teams — practical tools, grounded in neuroscience, that people can use in the room that day. Find out more →
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Sonia McDonald is the CEO and Founder of LeadershipHQ, a three-time published author, keynote speaker and executive coach. She has spent 35+ years teaching leaders the difference between holding it together and actually being okay.
