Learning to respond

I've made decisions that still keep me up at night.

Not the ones where I lacked information or made a reasonable bet that didn't pay off. Those I can live with. The ones that haunt me are the decisions I made when I was angry, or afraid, or wounded. The times I fired off an email I should have sat on. The conversations I escalated when I should have listened. The relationships I damaged because I was reacting to something inside myself rather than responding to what was actually in front of me.

If you've been there, you know. The slow-motion recognition that you've done something you can't undo. The sinking feeling when you realize your emotional state just cost you something that mattered.

I'm not writing this as someone who's figured it out. I'm writing as someone who's been humbled by his own reactivity more times than I'd like to admit. Someone who's still learning, still failing, still trying to close the gap between the leader I want to be and the one who shows up when things get hard.

The pattern

When I look back at my worst decisions, both personal and professional, there's a pattern. It's not that I didn't know better. It's that I knew better and did it anyway. The information was there. The wiser path was visible. But something in me was hijacked.

A prominent leader publicly questioned my judgment, and instead of getting curious, I got defensive. A key hire didn't work out, and instead of taking responsibility for the miss, I looked for someone to blame. Someone I trusted disappointed me, and instead of having a real conversation, I withdrew into cold professionalism.

The common thread was always the same: I was operating from my emotions rather than through them. The feeling was running the show, and I was just along for the ride.

Maybe you recognize this. Maybe you've watched yourself do something you knew was wrong while a quieter part of your mind observed the wreckage in real time. If so, you're not alone. And you're not broken. You're just human.

The space between

Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps. In that darkness, he noticed something about the people around him. Those who maintained some sense of inner freedom, who could still choose how they responded to horror, were more likely to survive. Not just physically. Their humanity survived.

He wrote that 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 is everything. It's where leadership happens. Not in the boardroom or the all-hands meeting, but in the gap between what happens to you and what you do about it.

The problem is that the space can feel impossibly small. When the emotion is big enough, it shrinks to almost nothing. The stimulus arrives and the response fires before you've had time to think. You're halfway through the angry email before you realize you're writing it.

Expanding that space is the work. Not eliminating the emotions. Not pretending you don't feel what you feel. Just creating enough room to choose.

What the research shows

James Gross at Stanford has spent decades studying how we manage our emotional lives. His work identifies two common strategies: suppression and reappraisal.

Suppression is what most of us default to. Push it down. Don't let it show. Keep it together. The problem is that suppression doesn't actually work. The internal experience doesn't diminish. You just stop expressing it. Meanwhile, your body is still flooded with stress hormones, your memory is impaired, and the people around you can feel that something is off. You're leaking what you're trying to contain.

Reappraisal is different. Instead of trying to push the feeling down, you change how you think about the situation before the emotional response fully develops. You reframe. The board member isn't attacking you; they're stress-testing your thinking. The failed hire isn't a judgment on you; it's information about what you need to look for next time. The difficult conversation isn't a threat; it's an opportunity to deepen the relationship.

This isn't positive thinking or denial. It's recognizing that your first interpretation isn't the only interpretation. And your first interpretation is almost always shaped by fear.

The contagion problem

Daniel Goleman's research on emotional intelligence surfaced something that should trouble every CEO: emotions are contagious, and they spread most readily from the most powerful person in the room.

Your emotional state doesn't stay inside of you. It radiates outward. Your anxiety becomes your team's anxiety. Your frustration becomes their frustration. Your unprocessed fear shows up in a hundred small ways you never intended.

I've experienced this from both sides. I've walked into rooms and unknowingly poisoned them with my mood. I've also been in rooms where the leader's calm centeredness made everything feel possible. The difference isn't personality. It's practice.

Goleman found that self-awareness is the foundation. Most people think they're self-aware; very few actually are. The gap between how we think we're showing up and how we actually are is where the damage happens.

What the stoics understood

Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire during plagues, wars, and rebellions. He had every reason to be consumed by anxiety and anger. Instead, he spent his evenings writing notes to himself about how to be a better person.

"You have power over your mind," he wrote, "not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."

The Stoics weren't about suppressing emotion. That's a common misunderstanding. They were about not being enslaved by it. They understood that our perception of events, not the events themselves, determines our emotional state. The same situation that destroys one person leaves another unshaken. The difference isn't circumstances. It's interpretation.

Marcus believed that angry, aggressive people were actually weak. Real strength was the capacity for restraint. During a civil war, when a general mocked him as a "philosophical old woman" for not retaliating with rage, Marcus didn't take the bait. He understood that the general was trying to provoke him into becoming something smaller than he was.

I think about this when I feel the urge to respond to criticism with force. The temptation is to match energy, to hit back. But matching energy with someone who's operating from a lower place just drags you down to their level. The real power is staying rooted in who you want to be, regardless of what's coming at you.

The ongoing work

I wish I could tell you there's a technique that solves this. Some system that, once implemented, makes emotional regulation automatic. But that hasn't been my experience.

What I've found instead is that it's a daily practice without a finish line. Some days I do it well, and other days I fall back into old patterns. The difference between now and years ago isn't that I've mastered anything, but that I notice more quickly when I'm off. The space between stimulus and response has widened, not because I have eliminated the emotions, but because I've gotten better at recognizing them before they take over.

A few things have helped. Keeping a journal, not for posterity, but to process. Noticing what triggers me and being honest about why. Asking people I trust how I'm actually showing up, then listening to the answer without defending myself. Taking care of the physical basics, because emotional regulation is nearly impossible when you're exhausted or depleted. And giving myself permission to pause before responding to anything that produces a strong reaction.

None of this is glamorous. None of it makes for a good LinkedIn post. But it's the work.

The inner game

I've spent decades building communities of CEOs and founders. The pattern I see is consistent. The leaders who build enduring organizations and inspire genuine loyalty aren't necessarily the smartest or the most driven. They're the ones who have done the inner work. They've learned to respond rather than react. They've expanded the space between stimulus and response.

Your company can only grow as fast as you do. Your team can only be as healthy as you are. Your culture, whether you like it or not, is largely a reflection of your emotional state multiplied across every interaction.

This isn't about becoming someone you're not. It's about becoming more fully who you already are, underneath the reactivity and the fear. The version of you that shows up when you're centered, when you're not threatened, when you have enough space to choose.

That version is in there. It just needs room to emerge.

I'm still learning how to give it that room. If you're on the same journey, I'm glad we're not doing it alone.