Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

There’s a call I received on a Tuesday afternoon that I keep coming back to. A client, I’ll call him David, is the head of a large department at a major hospital. Smart, steady, the kind of leader people trust with their lives, literally. And when he called, he was shaken. His boss had summoned him to a meeting that morning, and what followed wasn’t a conversation, but an ambush. Accusations built on assumptions, a story that had been assembled in the absence of facts, and a man with authority who had quietly panicked and taken it out on the wrong person.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of something like that, you know how disorienting it can feel.  You know the pull to defend yourself, to correct the record, to match the energy of what just came at you. And you also know, somewhere underneath all of that, that reacting in that moment is the one thing that will make it worse.

Why Reactive Leaders Behave the Way They Do

Understanding how to deal with a reactive boss starts with understanding what’s driving the behavior. What looks like anger or aggression is almost always fear. David’s boss had watched a surge of people leave his department five years earlier. It had cost him, professionally and personally. So when he heard even a whisper of history repeating itself, he didn’t pause and get curious. He panicked. And panic, when it has a title, looks like being called into a meeting and being ambushed.

This is what emotionally immature leadership looks like up close. It is not power. It is a wounded person who happens to have authority, running on fear and unexamined history. And the hard truth is that you cannot logic your way through it. The more you try to correct the record while someone is still in that state, the more entrenched they become, and the worse you make it for yourself.

The Three Steps That Change Everything

The first step, and the one most people want to skip, is to get your own stuff out first. Before you respond, request a follow-up meeting, or do anything, you have to process what happened privately. Because if you walk back into that conversation carrying your hurt and your justified sense of indignation, you are not responding. You are reacting. And a reaction is just matching fear with fear.

Their behavior reflects them, not you. When someone leads from their own fear or unexamined wounds, what they do and say in those moments tells you everything about where they are emotionally and very little about you. You don’t have to own what isn’t yours. What is yours is how you show up next.

Reassuring the Scared Squirrel

Step two is where emotionally evolved leaders begin to separate themselves from everyone else in the room. Once you’ve done your own internal work, you shift your focus away from what they did to you and toward what they fear. You become the safest person available. Not a pushover, not someone absorbing blame that doesn’t belong to them, but a steady and grounded presence that lowers the temperature enough for the other person to come back to themselves.

In practice, this might sound like acknowledging their concerns directly, walking them through what you’ve verified and double-checked, and making a clear commitment to transparency going forward. You are not capitulating. You are creating the conditions for something productive to happen because honest communication and effective influence are neurologically impossible when someone operates from fear, stress and threat.

Setting a New Agreement

The third step is where you stop managing the moment and begin building something better. If you don’t create a new structure after a rupture like this, you will find yourself back in the same conversation, different day, different trigger, same scared squirrel. Once the temperature has come down and the other person feels safe enough to be reasonable, you can propose a new agreement. Something direct and clear, offered without ultimatum.

 

It might sound like: “I’d like for us to agree that when either of us hears something, a rumor, a concern, anything that creates doubt, we come directly to each other within hours, before we’ve built a case, or before we’re operating from a story we made up in the absence of facts.” That last piece matters. When there is a gap in information, the brain will fill it in, and it will rarely do so with the most generous interpretation. The goal is not to let the gap grow.

What David Did, and What It Cost Him

A few days after the ambush, David went back in. He wasn’t armed with a rebuttal. He didn’t carry the weight of everything that had been unfair about the conversation back into the room with him. He went in steadily. He acknowledged his boss’s concerns, walked him through what he had verified, made a direct commitment to transparency, and offered a new agreement. His boss didn’t apologize. Emotionally immature leaders rarely have the self-awareness to recognize what they’ve done, let alone the humility to own it. But something shifted anyway. The defensiveness softened, and a new understanding began to take root.

David didn’t win that conversation by being right. He won it by being the most evolved and emotionally mature person in the room.

Your Challenge This Week

The next time someone above you, beside you, or across the table from you loses their emotional footing and takes it out on you, resist the pull to match them. Do your own work first. Lower the temperature, and then, when the moment is right, offer a new way forward. You cannot change another person. But you can be so consistently grounded and emotionally available that over time, your presence becomes the standard they rise to meet. That is the long game of conscious leadership, and it is the most powerful move available to you.

In this episode, I share:

• How to process your own emotional response before re-entering a difficult conversation
• The neuroscience of why you cannot reason with someone who is operating from threat or fear
• What it looks and sounds like to lower the temperature with a reactive boss or colleague
• How to set a new agreement that breaks the cycle so you are not back in the same conversation again
• Why becoming the most emotionally evolved presence in the room is your greatest leadership advantage

Resources and related episodes:

• Tune in to the previous episode, Your Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open (Here’s How to Close Them)
• Listen to Leadin From A Heart at Peace
• Get on the Inner Game Advantage Waitlist
• Book a time with Rita
• If you’d like to be notified of when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
• Learn more about the Inside Out Method
• Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Inside Out Method, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.