Are You Leading Your Emotions, Or Are They Leading You?

You’re the decision-maker. The one people trust. The one who sees through the fog. But what happens when the fog is inside you?

You still lead. You still ‘perform’. But something subtle starts to shift. You’re showing up on paper, yet somewhere inside, you’re no longer at the helm.

And the hardest part?

At no cost can you show it. Not to your board. Not to your team. Not even to those closest to you.

So you hold it in. You manage the spiral in silence. You tell yourself it will pass.

But suppression isn’t strength. It’s a quiet form of surrender, one that looks like control from the outside.

A founder I worked with once described it like this:

"Last quarter, everything looked sharp on paper; Revenue up, team motivated, clients happy. I was giving keynotes, closing contracts, ticking boxes like clockwork. But underneath, I wasn’t steering anymore. One tough conversation would sit in my chest for days. A small piece of feedback would echo for hours. Even in moments of calm, I felt wired, like something was off. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do. It was that my emotions had taken the wheel, and I was stuck in the passenger seat, watching myself perform."

He hadn’t lost control of his business. He’d been hijacked by the part of himself he was trained to suppress.

Not because he was weak. Not because he failed. But because he was taught to perform strength, while suppressing signals that felt inconvenient.

Paradoxically:

It’s not the loud emotions that hijack you, it’s the ones you suppress.

Science names what wisdom already knew.

Where attention goes, energy flows, and neural connections grows.

This is not a metaphor. It’s how your brain physically rewires itself, moment by moment, through experience and focus.

As Lisa Feldman Barrett reminds us in How Emotions Are Made;

Emotions are interpretative, shaped by your personal history, your mental models, and the context in which the experience enters your system. So every time you focus on the fear of ‘what if’, on the overwhelming pressure, or self-doubt, you activate these specific neural circuits that become faster, stickier, more automatic. Eventually, they don’t need your permission to fire.

They run you.

“What fires together, wires together.” This is neuroplasticity in action, your brain’s capacity to rewire itself.

So when you repeatedly suppress what you feel or avoid certain inconvenient signals from your system, you’re not avoiding discomfort by numbing emotions, you’re actually training your (nervous) system to ignore reality as it is, and only see what is more comfortable to see.

Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion and rational decision-making aren’t opposites—they’re partners.

Suppressing emotion doesn't make you more rational. It makes you blind to half the data. - A. Damasio

Emotional suppression isn’t innocent. It’s a quiet repetition of self-abandonment. And what you repeat, you become.

Norman Farb’s research at the University of Toronto shows this too:

The more we avoid emotional states, the more reactive and the less respons-able we become.

So each time you push discomfort away, the less self-aware you become. Because you’re teaching your system that emotions are threats, not signals. And in doing so, you lose something far more vital than productivity or calm.

You lose access to clarity.

Clarity not as a concept, but as a lived state: the capacity to observe your internal landscape with presence, to lead from the full signal, not the filtered one.

There’s a parable I often share to offer perspective on the above.

Said the grandmother, "Inside you, two wolves are fighting. One is fear, resentment, anger. The other is peace, courage, truth."

Asked the boy, “Which one wins?”

Said the grandmother, “The one you feed.”

Every thought, every focus, every moment of attention, feeds a pattern.

Your attention is nourishment.

Your thoughts are practice.

Your choices are training.

Which wolf are you feeding?

In another conversation, I offered this to a client who felt crushed under constant emotional tension:

“You’re not broken,” I said. “You’re just in conflict with yourself.”

He looked confused until I shared this:

A man once took great pride in his lawn, but it was plagued by dandelions. He tried every method he could to get rid of them. Nothing worked.

Eventually, he wrote to the Department of Agriculture asking, “What else can I try?”

Their reply was simple: “We suggest you learn to love them.”

Like dandelions, your emotions will keep showing up.

The more you fight them, the more they spread.

Stop fighting them, start understanding them.

And still, many leaders I work with suppress what they feel.

not because they lack courage, but because somewhere along the way they learned it was dangerous to fully express themselves.

As Gabor Maté puts it:

The people who get sick are not weak. They are the ones who chronically suppress their signals, their truth.

No child is born suppressing themselves. No infant hesitates to cry, laugh, or rage.

Self-suppression is not innate. It is trained.

But what is trained… can be untrained.

So what now?

Not more resistance. Not more control. But a shift—from expectation to wonder, from ‘reactivity’ to curiosity, from performing strength to practicing integrity.

Because the only way out of hijack isn’t to wrestle back the wheel, but to understand how you handed it over in the first place.

The Practice

If you're leading others, but no longer feel in command of yourself—start here.

• Track what you suppress.

Throughout your day, note when you feel tension but push it aside. Especially in moments of conflict, feedback, or fatigue. That’s the emotional data you're ignoring.

• Name the emotion, not the story.

Don’t intellectualize. Just label what’s alive: frustration, shame, fear, resentment. Naming helps interrupt the autopilot loop your brain wants to run.

• Trace it to the trigger.

Ask yourself: What just happened that brought this feeling up? Then ask: What past experience might this be echoing?This creates space between past programming and present response.

• Feed the right signal.

Shift attention from controlling the feeling to listening to it. Ask: What’s the signal here? What matters to me that this emotion is pointing to?

• Practice self-leadership under pressure.

In your next challenging moment - pause, breathe, feel. Then respond from clarity, not conditioning.

This isn’t soft work. It’s the deepest leadership work there is. Because clarity doesn’t come from suppressing emotion.

It comes from learning to read it, and lead through it.