100. The Anger Advantage: Why High-Achieving Women Need to Stop Avoiding Anger
What if the emotion you’ve been taught to control, hide, or get rid of could actually become one of your greatest leadership advantages?
In this episode, I’m sharing why anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions in leadership and why so many high-achieving women struggle to stay present with it, whether it’s their own anger or someone else’s. This is crucial to your career because as your leadership grows, your ability to hold difficult emotions without immediately reacting, fixing, or shrinking back becomes a key part of your emotional capacity.
The challenge isn’t that anger exists. It’s that many of us have learned to fear it, avoid it, or make it mean something has gone wrong. Tune in this week to learn why avoiding anger can limit your leadership, how your relationship with other people’s emotions impacts your ability to lead, and how building emotional capacity allows you to stay connected to yourself while navigating high-stakes moments.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why anger is often misunderstood and why avoiding it can limit your leadership.
How to build the emotional capacity to hold your own emotions and other people’s emotions without immediately reacting.
Why anger is information, not something to suppress, fix, or automatically act on.
The Feel, Fuel, Fire framework for understanding what your emotions are revealing and choosing your next step intentionally.
How your fear of other people’s anger can impact the way you communicate, make decisions, and lead.
Why emotional capacity allows you to stay connected to yourself during high-pressure leadership moments.
How to use anger as a source of clarity, boundaries, and intentional action without letting it control you.
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Full Episode Transcript:
What if one of the emotions you've been taught to control, hide, and get rid of could actually make you a more powerful, grounded leader? I'm talking about anger because here's what I've learned coaching hundreds of women at some of the highest levels of leadership. Your anger isn't necessarily the problem. Your inability to stay with anger, yours or someone else's, might be.
And in this episode, I'm going to show you how to turn anger into a leadership advantage. Not by becoming angrier, not by unleashing it on everyone around you. I'm going to show you how to use anger to understand what matters to you and others, make decisions from a clearer place, communicate more powerfully, and build something I believe becomes increasingly important the higher you rise in leadership: emotional capacity.
By the end of this episode, I'm going to give you a simple three-part practice—feel, fuel, fire—that you can use the next time anger shows up, whether it's yours or someone else's. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's podcast episode. This is number 100. That's so exciting that we have reached 100 episodes so far. And I am actually so inspired that this episode is about anger because, again, it is one of the things that I am super passionate about. It is the emotion that I teach the women that I coach the most because it has been so misunderstood. And there is a lot of emotional heaviness around it. And in today's episode, I want to unpack that.
Can they be angry with you? And how the fear of people being angry with you comes up into you, and how it has us sometimes reacting in ways that doesn't have us leading at our highest level. It actually has us shrinking back and in more of a survival mode. It happens personally and professionally, and I want you to understand why. So let's dive into today's episode.
Can you let someone be angry with you? Your employee thinks you're unfair. Your boss doesn't like your answer. Maybe your friend is mad at you. What happens inside of you? Do you start justifying? Do you start defending? Do you start softening or explaining? This is what happens when we are not slowing down to name our emotions. We resort to trying to either justify it, defend it, or soften it. Maybe we've already decided we're wrong and they're right. So we've got to go and do something.
What I'm talking about here today is really an emotional capacity piece. Where at some point in your life and your career, your ability to hold greater authority is going to be limited by your ability to experience the emotions that come with that authority. Because if you're an executive, we are not reacting constantly to other people's emotions. People may have lots of emotions that come to us, especially as authority figures. People constantly come to authority figures with lots of emotions and wanting to be fixed or wanting help in some ways. But as your leadership expands, as you continue climbing that corporate ladder, it's going to require a greater amount of emotional capacity.
And when I say emotional capacity, I mean the ability to hold your emotion, understand other people's emotions, without immediately reacting to it. This is key. It's not that we are suppressing the emotion or hiding it or running away from it or trying to explain it away or make it okay. It is literally the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions, anger, and other things like hurt and disappointment and rejection, and not react in the moment. It's to be able to have the capacity to sit with the emotion, to feel it, to name it, and then to consciously choose what you want to do next.
I know, it sounds pretty simple, but it's not that simple, especially when you're in it, especially when there's stories around it, especially when you feel like you're the bad guy in it. So, let's talk about it because I talk about this as the anger advantage, and it actually is a twofold. And I want to be really clear about what I mean. Anger in itself isn't the advantage, right? Being angrier doesn't make you a better leader. Acting out of your anger doesn't make you powerful. Reacting to other people's anger and fixing everything doesn't make you more powerful.
The advantage is what becomes available when you stop being afraid of anger, your own and other people's anger, and learn how to work with it. Because anger contains a lot of information. And your ability to stay present with that information gives you choice. That's where the advantage begins. And you got to think about this because a lot of people spend their life trying to not make other people angry. And they're scared of other people's emotions. But here's what happens when you are a leader. And this happened to me too.
When I am with other authority figures and other leaders, and the higher I grew in my career, the more I saw their anger. The more behind closed doors, not in the town halls when they're happy and grounded, the more I saw that they were dealing with high stake situations, the more angry they got, the more I had to learn to be with myself. And the less I had to go into reactive mode, which would be like data or trying to fix it or getting upset myself and not understanding why. These things don't go away. The emotions actually get higher and more, I don't know if it's explosive, more expressive at the more senior levels.
And I actually used to see this as a privilege because I would be like, wow, I'm with this senior leader who is really upset and they're just sharing their pure emotion and their pure pain and their pure upset, whether it was anger, embarrassment, disappointment, all of the things, right? They're sharing it in the room with the other leaders in the room because they expect to be heard and to move and to be able to be fully expressed while leading, right? This is not a place where we're polished or positioning ourselves when people are making some hard decisions, right?
And your ability to stay with yourself and understand the dynamics and not hide from the anger or not, maybe get busy with something else because you feel highly uncomfortable, is your ability to actually lead and support and to help things move forward. And so, I explain this to people because I think oftentimes they're like, there's anger and there's so much emotion. And when you feel like you are under attack, you go into that survival mode.
And I did it too. I fixed, I explained, I retreated. I was like, I need to make them understand the process. I need to help them understand that we don't need to be angry. That was really my thought under a lot of this, right? It was like, why do people need to be angry, right? So I was starting to solve for the anger versus actually solve for the problem underneath the anger.
Emotional capacity isn't about feeling less, it's about being able to feel more without losing access to yourself. You want to notice when you're in this dynamic in a room, like, wow, this person's really angry. What's going on here? Versus, oh my gosh, this person's really angry. Let me go head down and try to solve it or just stay in my lane and fix the problems that I'm fixing, right?
The reason why this becomes ever more important is in these high stake rooms when people, especially men, are expressing anger, maybe pounding their fist on the table and saying, I'm angry about this. We need to figure this out, right? If you retreat in that moment, that is you retreating from the leadership that's available in front of you. Instead of saying, going into data or trying to fix it, you say, I'm angry about this too. I am frustrated and I agree with you. Something's got to change. And then you move into what that thing is, and you say it out loud and you make your move, not by trying to placate somebody, but by meeting them in their own anger. And your ability to hold yourself in that is going to be really important because what happens with a lot of women is that we shrink back.
And I want you to think about your upbringing. What did anger mean in your household growing up? Was anger loud, dangerous? Did people explode? Did people withdraw? What happened? Were you praised for being easygoing, responsible, the achiever? I will tell you for me what happened with anger is I saw my brother get angry a lot of times. And he just seemed out of control and he would just be left to his own devices and sort of ridiculed by the rest of the family like, oh, look at him, he's all angry and upset, having his tantrum. Let's just leave him alone until he calms down.
And so I don't even remember being angry. I don't remember a lot of my terrible twos being, I think I was more quietly resentful versus actually outwardly expressively angry. And it makes sense because when I started being in more of these rooms and having a boss who was very angry and very openly expressive as his anger, I would shrink back, right? If you've seen my TEDx talk, this is all about it.
This is about how I would shrink back and I would be frozen in fear because I could not handle his level of anger. I could totally handle the questions that he was giving me. I could totally understand and handle the problem that was on the table, but what I couldn't handle was the emotional capacity. I just didn't have it at that time. And I had to practice it. I had to learn how to be with my own anger so I could be with someone else's. And it really starts with understanding our relationship with anger. That is part of our story.
In my head, before you ever had a boss, you were learning what happened when someone was angry with you. And now, in your 40s or in your 50s, you're sitting in an executive meeting, but your nervous system still remembers what it's like to be that little child, to be that little girl who is scared of anger and shrinks back instead of stands up and stands strong and uses her anger to ground herself in the moment. So where does your anger go?
I wanted to share this with you because for me, I oftentimes would become super responsible when someone was angry. I would be like, all right, let's just hold their anger and let's figure out how to fix it. And that worked for a while, but it actually also doesn't work when you are constantly trying to fix somebody else's anger and you're not in touch with your own. You keep thinking, did I work hard enough? Become more competent, prove myself, overthink it.
I didn't think of myself as an angry woman. But that didn't mean I wasn't angry. I simply became very good at covering up my anger into many more acceptable things, right? So I want you to go to school on yourself and notice, is this you? What do you turn your anger into? Productivity, achievement, perfectionism, people pleasing, resentment, complaining to somebody who wasn't in the room, silence, self-doubt, overworking.
This is what happens when we don't have the capacity to deal with or hold the anger and just be like, okay, people were angry. Let's just take a deep breath and notice and be curious. It's hard to be curious when we are triggered and our survival senses are coming up. So where does your anger go when you don't allow yourself to have it? Where do you go? Because this is really important. I noticed I used to go to shutdown mode. I would appear, because it wasn't like I would totally just shut down in meetings. I would go to my facts and data. I would reiterate things, but I wouldn't be as convicted as I could have been because half of me was shut down, because half of me was in fear.
So we're going to dive into anger as information. This is the heart of the anger advantage. Anger isn't bad. And anger isn't automatically right. Anger is information. What if anger is saying, that's not okay with me, whether it's you or somebody else, right? Because somebody is having an upset and typically underneath anger is hurt or fear. They are fearful of something, they feel hurt about something, a boundary has been crossed, and this is why it's important to listen for this within yourself and other people. Because if you can listen to what is the information that anger is providing for you versus shutting down or going into maybe a fixer mode, then you are going to have more data to deal with this leadership challenge in the present moment and be open and curious and be more resourceful about it.
So when that anger comes up, what I want you to do is ask it, welcome, what are you here to teach me? You don't have to obey the anger to listen to it. Anger doesn't get to make every decision. Anger doesn't need to drive the car, but it deserves a seat at the table. That is the anger advantage. I can hear the information without being controlled by the emotion. This is so important because imagine this, your CEO comes into the room and says, I'm really frustrated and angry by the sales performance this quarter. Listen to that, right? I mean, sometimes people just hear the anger and they shut down. They don't know what to do with it. But if you are the leader in the room that's like, hey, I agree with you. Can you tell me more about exactly what it is? You know, asking more questions. That creates choice for you and it creates authority in the room. You're speaking into it. You're asking curious questions. You're not just trying to manage his anger or her anger. You are actually meeting her and saying, I hear you. This is really upsetting. And I want to hear more.
If you can be that leader that can be with this person and not make their anger bad or wrong and not make you spin out into fix it mode, you're going to be able to lead more powerfully with much more executive presence in these rooms.
I want to also share this with you because the truth is that leadership gets lonely at the top. And having people understand you, understand your emotions, and not judge you is a huge thing. This is a huge part of what I do in coaching, where people can just literally come to me as a leader and tell me all of the things that are on their minds, all of their emotions that they've packed up so tightly because they're trying to be responsible. And in that responsibility, they're also suppressing a lot of emotions because they haven't had time to sit with them. They haven't had time to be curious about them. So in these coaching sessions or in my command container, this is the space to do that.
I want to tell you about a woman that I am coaching inside command. One week, she gets so much pushback. She's showing up, she's saying what's so. She gets so much pushback. And she's literally asking herself, and I want you to notice this for you too, have you ever had one of those weeks where every room seems to be telling you no?
After enough resistance, you do wonder, right? Is this me? Maybe I'm not pushing hard enough. Maybe I should let this go. Maybe I'm too much. Why am I even doing this? This is what she was thinking. She was feeling lonely, she questioned herself, she was angry. She wanted to walk away. And then she had to terminate an underperforming employee who was very defensive, very irresponsible, yelled at her, said she was awful, told her people hated her behind her back.
I want you to pause and ask yourself, what would that do to you? Would you believe her? Would you mentally poll everyone? Would you wonder, maybe I am a terrible leader? Well, here's what my client did instead. She let herself feel it. She didn't bypass it. She didn't pretend she didn't care. She breathed, she processed, she shared what she was feeling, and this is how she was building emotional capacity.
Emotional capacity doesn't mean you're not unaffected. It just means that it doesn't have you spinning into doing things like people-pleasing, like going into victimhood or self-doubt or self-beat up. There may be tinges of it, but you bring yourself back on course because you say, "Hey, I have the emotional capacity to hold this right here, right now. I'm able to understand why this person could be upset with me. I understand why I'm upset with this person and the situation, and actually, in this moment, I don't need to do anything about it."
It's saying this affects me and I don't have to abandon myself because it does. This is so important because this is where you build that emotional capacity to feel, fuel, and fire. Feel is the first step. What am I actually feeling? You can do this for any emotion, but I want you to do it for anger because like I said, this is the emotion that has a lot of women pushing back, shrinking back, softening themselves and feeling like they just can't do it. They feel like they have to carry all this armor because they're like, these emotions are too much.
What I'm here to tell you is that these emotions are not too much. You can handle it. You can feel it. You don't need to let these emotions control you. But it takes your ability to breathe into it and to feel it, not get rid of it, right? You can acknowledge, I'm angry. I'm hurt. I'm embarrassed. I'm scared, without immediately doing anything about it. I know it sounds simple, but this is not a simple skill. And you know it because you're listening to this podcast and I'm sure you've spun out on things before. But I want you to know that you can start with just feeling. What am I actually feeling?
There is research that shows if you name your feelings, it actually slows down your nervous system. You feel calmer, you feel more able to be resourceful. You feel more connected to yourself.
And the next question is fuel. What is this emotion revealing to me? What matters to me? What value does it have? Is there a boundary, desire, standard, truth? You can also do this with someone else. When I am, whether it's my husband or maybe it's other clients and they're having really strong emotions, I really want to understand like, "Hey, what are you making this mean about you? What are you noticing that this emotion is revealing to you?" And you want to ask yourself, what does my anger know that I've been unwilling to acknowledge? That's information.
So for me, when I was noticing this for myself, it would often times be again, some boundary, something I wasn't okay with. And because of a lot of conditioning that we have as women, it's hard for us to really say, I'm not okay with that. I don't like that. And so actually practicing even saying those words is going to be powerful for you. It will have you move and shift. And I know women in my Command container just by saying something like, I don't want to, or I won't, will help them connect to that will inside of them, that ability to create that connection with themselves to know what matters to them. And that's the power of emotions. Emotions allow us to understand what really matters to us.
And then lastly, fire. Now you choose. Fire is actually being fully expressed, being able to express intentionally. What does my anger want to do? Instead of, what does the leader I want to be choose to do with this information? So we're not just saying, "Hey, what does my anger like is just going to go off and be a bull in a china shop?" No, you want to ask, "What does the leader I want to be choose to do with this information intentionally?" This is how you use information from your emotions to lead. Not have just emotional reactions and have those emotions lead you. That is exactly what people say when they say women are too emotional. It means that they are allowing their emotions to drive them instead of taking a pause and intentionally choosing what you want to do with that information.
I will speak. I will ask. I will say no. I will address that behavior. I will change my mind. I will hold the expectation. I will walk away, right? You want to feel it. Find the fuel and choose your fire, your expression. That's the anger advantage. And if you recall from my TEDx talk and if you haven't listened to it, we'll link it in here, but for me, I learned how to connect with my own anger in the moment. And I learned to say, "Hey, I can disrupt, I can interrupt, and I can get everybody back on page because I know the information that I'm sharing is so important to this room. And it's going to lead us in a more productive way forward."
But if I can't speak up with conviction and I just shrink back because I can't handle the anger, then that's the limit of my leadership. And I was super grateful to have a boss that was super angry because you know why? I learned how to be with his anger and I learned how to be with my own. And he was just the very beginning because other leaders I would be with, they would have lots of emotions too. Anger being one of them. I was actually in a room with a divisional CEO who was very angry at me. And instead of just shrinking back and, you know, hiding for the rest of the meeting, I took it. I mean, I was just like, "Yeah, I get why you're angry with me. This number is not right. I'm going to fix it. Let's move on."
And so I held my ground. I was still powerful. I can still make mistakes, have my own back, use my anger for me, notice other people's anger and not need to defend myself. This is the power of being able to build your emotional capacity and hold anger and use anger to intentionally shift what's happening in the room inside yourself. Not just by fixing, by holding space and by asking yourself, what is the best next step forward with an intentional space, not just a triggered survival mode.
So, I want to go back to the woman that I was talking about in my Command group because just one week later, I had actually coached her through the pushback. And we'll link in the episode about how pushback means you're powerful. This is a critical thing because I think a lot of women who start getting higher and higher up and they start feeling more and more pushback and more and more heat, they think there's something wrong with them. And I'm like, there's nothing wrong with you. You're just becoming more and more powerful and this is the game at this level.
People are not always going to just be happy with your leadership, especially if you're holding people accountable, especially if you are in charge of a transformation project that is disrupting the way that they did things in the past. Especially if you are being really direct with them and they've not had a boss that really cared about them in that way or asked them to do things in a really direct manner.
So, I want to share with you this because this client of mine, she has a brand new employee. So it's six weeks in. She's frustrated. He has not communicated with customers. He has not done the things she's asked him to do. And so she says, "Hey, what's going on here?" He gets really defensive. Tells her how hard he's working, tells her questions are unfair. And then something happens inside of herself. She actually shared that I started to feel bad. And I felt myself wanting to soothe him and tell him it was all right. She wanted to rescue him. She wanted to be like, "Don't worry, it's not a big deal. Let's just move forward."
But that would be her not actually listening to her anger. That would be her wanting to be a people-pleaser nice girl versus being a leader that holds people accountable. So I want you to notice for yourself, have you ever felt that way? You know, you walked into a conversation knowing exactly what needs to happen. The other person gets emotional. Maybe they get angry, maybe they get sad, maybe they start crying. And suddenly, you're taking care of them. Whose discomfort are you managing at the expense of your leadership? So I really want you to notice that because that is the game that happens to a lot of women that has them feeling burnt out because they are often times managing other people's discomfort versus leading with their own leadership. Whose discomfort are you managing at the expense of your leadership?
Let that sit. So this is what happened to my client. She started to catch herself. She noticed herself have that thought like, I felt bad for him. I wanted to soothe him. I wanted to tell him it's okay. He was freaking out. But she asked herself, where does soothing him take both of them? And then she holds the expectation again. She realizes that she doesn't need to people-please him. She doesn't need to soothe him. He's a grown man who should be doing his work.
And so she doesn't go in it aggressively. She doesn't attack him, she doesn't rescue him. She just holds the ground and says what she expects and gives him space to do whatever he's going to do, all right? Not needing to fix him. And she did say he is very angry with me, but that's okay. Like she actually said that. This is growth. Like if you're listening to this and you can be okay with somebody being very angry with you, this is growth for you in leadership. This is your ability to expand that emotional capacity.
And what's even greater is the next day, this report of hers, he got to work. He did what she asked him to do over the last six weeks. He did it all within a few days. He set up the meetings, he scheduled his travel to meet clients. And that's not the win. The win isn't that he compiled all this. The win is that she could experience his anger without abandoning her leadership. And that is the rep. That is the practice. This is what we do in Command. This is how you practice this muscle of building your emotional capacity.
It is not about using your emotions to just fix everything. It's about sitting with your emotions and building the capacity to hold them, yours and other people's. Because one week earlier she was processing the emotional aftermath and she was questioning her own leadership. This week, she's catching herself inside the moment. That's the capacity that you are building. This is how you build that capacity to notice other people's anger, connect to your own, stay true to yourself. Don't abandon yourself in those moments.
How much of your leadership is organized around making sure nobody gets upset with you? These are the things, especially as women, we've been really good at, creating trust and rapport with people. But when things get hot, when we have to hold people accountable, when other senior leaders get upset, you've got to watch your response to their emotions. You've got to watch your own response to your own emotion. This is why anger is the advantage point. If you connect with yourself, if you notice what's going on with me, what's going on with them? This is where you are going to show up as a powerful leader. And people are going to be like, "Wow, Sarah is so emotionally mature. She has the emotional and executive maturity to handle what's being thrown in front of her in a way that is grounded and powerful."
This is the power of being in some of these rooms. You don't know it until you're there and then you're like, "Whoa, people are having a lot of emotions in this room. I've got to up my emotional capacity game to not just react to everything, right?" You're learning to calibrate what it's like to be fully expressed. Because the higher you are in that leadership position, the more you're going to notice people's emotions and your own. These are high stakes. If everyone else has to be okay with your leadership before you can be okay with your leadership, you've handed them your authority.
I want you to hear that again. If everyone else has to be okay with your leadership before you can be okay with your leadership, you've handed them your authority. You are trying to please them with your leadership, not get them to do the things that they need to do and lead them, lead them somewhere, right? You're actually being led by them. So you've got to really think about this because often times people are, you know, we're conditioned in a lot of ways and we don't have the emotional capacity and we don't know what this work is like. And so we get lost in it and we feel confused. And listen, if you're lost and confused, you're not going to feel confident. That's just what happens. That happens to so many women.
And that happens to a lot of women when they get, you know, sort of feedback weaponized against them. They start questioning themselves, they don't even know. They've got all this emotional swirl. They don't have the emotional capacity that allows you to be more relational with yourself and other people, so that you can hear, I disagree, or that hurt me. I think you're wrong on this. And instead of immediately defending or collapsing, you become curious. Tell me more. What am I missing? I think I need to repair that. Like there are things that you might slow down and say, I hear you. My decision still stands.
This is about building that emotional capacity and self-trust. Self-trust isn't trusting that you're always right, by the way. It's not like, I'm right, you know, I trust myself. Self-trust is trusting yourself to stay present long enough to discern what is right for you. You know, I've had some moments where I'm like, I trusted myself to make that decision. In hindsight, it wasn't the best decision, but I still stand by myself because I did the best I could in that moment and now I'm going to learn from it.
There is no sort of beating yourself up. There's just the learning and growing from these moments because we've got to give ourselves space to learn and grow. Otherwise, we're not going to learn and grow. We're just going to stay stuck and we're going to maybe take some incremental changes, but we're not giving ourselves the ability to practice, to practice building our capacity.
Okay. So, that is today's episode. It is so much about being able to hold your emotions, notice other people's emotions without automatically reacting. And your brain could react. Your mind might give you a bunch of thoughts and a bunch of things that come up, but you don't have to attach to any of them. You can just be like, "Oh, my brain is telling me all these things that may or may not be true. Let's slow down a little bit."
And this is exactly why I created Command, my six-month leadership accelerator for high-achieving women who want to have more executive presence, who want to be able to stand on their own side and to be able to have their own back, especially when the heat gets really hot. Because you don't need another podcast telling you that you should speak up. That's just so easy. You don't need another list of ways to communicate assertively because that is the script on the top of it, but this internal work, your ability to hold this emotional capacity, this is where things really change for you.
Can you do it when there is something at stake? This is that piece, right? When your heart is pounding, when someone pushes back, when they're really angry with you, when someone powerful disagrees, when you might be misunderstood, when you're afraid they're going to think you're difficult. Can you access yourself? That's what we're practicing inside Command. Emotional capacity, assertive, authentic communication, tension, power, anger, desire, ambition, boundaries, curiosity, letting people have reactions, trusting yourself and having your own back while it's happening. This is the skill.
So, the next level of leadership isn't simply knowing what to do. It's increasing your capacity to stay with yourself while doing it. And as your leadership continues to rise in this rising levels of leadership, you're going to notice and have much more emotions in yourself and experience more fully expressed leaders because they're fully expressed, they're where they are because they are leading with their emotions. They are using the Feel, Fuel, Fire method and they don't even know it, but this is them being able to share their leadership with other people. And your ability to calibrate to that and not shrink back is going to be your ability to accelerate very quickly in that leadership space because people will see you as somebody who can handle the heat.
All right. So, this week, don't get rid of your anger and don't immediately act on it. Please, please don't just immediately act on it and send this crazy emails to people and be reckless. This is not what this episode is about at all. If you've been listening to me, it's all about discernment and trusting yourself and moving, getting curious. When anger enters the room, yours or others, ask, "Welcome. What are you here to teach me?" Really welcome that anger in and embrace it and ask yourself, feel, what am I feeling? Fuel, what is this revealing or protecting? Fire, what do I choose intentionally, right? What is intentionally aligned to the leader I am in this moment and how can I express that?
And finally, can I let this emotion exist without abandoning myself? Your goal isn't to become a woman that nobody gets angry with. Your goal isn't to become a woman who never gets angry. Your goal is to become a woman who can let anger enter the room without abandoning herself. Because the more leadership you hold, the more emotion you'll be asked to hold with it. Anger isn't just the advantage, your capacity to hear it, learn from it and choose who you want to be in its presence. That's the advantage. That's emotional capacity. That's self-trust. That's what we do inside Command.
All right. Well, I want you to go practice this. Go notice yourself and your anger and see your leaders, notice your leaders being able to express fully and notice what happens to you. Go to school on yourself and then tell me, I want to hear from you. Use the Feel, Fuel, Fire method and tell me how this is shifting your leadership, how you are showing up in rooms, how you are showing up in relation to yourself and to other people. You can find me on LinkedIn or email me directly. I love to hear from The Balanced Leader listeners and I always love to hear what your input is as well. What do you want to hear more of? I know a lot of you loved the assertive communications podcast episode, and I'm going to be sharing a lot more of that as we unpack the nuances of leadership at this higher level.
All right, have a beautiful week. Go feel your emotions. Remember, you don't have to do anything with it right here, right then, right? You can sit with the emotion, whether it's yours or somebody else's, and you can be curious. All right, have a beautiful week. Take care. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
And in this episode, I'm going to show you how to turn anger into a leadership advantage. Not by becoming angrier, not by unleashing it on everyone around you. I'm going to show you how to use anger to understand what matters to you and others, make decisions from a clearer place, communicate more powerfully, and build something I believe becomes increasingly important the higher you rise in leadership: emotional capacity.
By the end of this episode, I'm going to give you a simple three-part practice—feel, fuel, fire—that you can use the next time anger shows up, whether it's yours or someone else's. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's podcast episode. This is number 100. That's so exciting that we have reached 100 episodes so far. And I am actually so inspired that this episode is about anger because, again, it is one of the things that I am super passionate about. It is the emotion that I teach the women that I coach the most because it has been so misunderstood. And there is a lot of emotional heaviness around it. And in today's episode, I want to unpack that.
Can they be angry with you? And how the fear of people being angry with you comes up into you, and how it has us sometimes reacting in ways that doesn't have us leading at our highest level. It actually has us shrinking back and in more of a survival mode. It happens personally and professionally, and I want you to understand why. So let's dive into today's episode.
Can you let someone be angry with you? Your employee thinks you're unfair. Your boss doesn't like your answer. Maybe your friend is mad at you. What happens inside of you? Do you start justifying? Do you start defending? Do you start softening or explaining? This is what happens when we are not slowing down to name our emotions. We resort to trying to either justify it, defend it, or soften it. Maybe we've already decided we're wrong and they're right. So we've got to go and do something.
What I'm talking about here today is really an emotional capacity piece. Where at some point in your life and your career, your ability to hold greater authority is going to be limited by your ability to experience the emotions that come with that authority. Because if you're an executive, we are not reacting constantly to other people's emotions. People may have lots of emotions that come to us, especially as authority figures. People constantly come to authority figures with lots of emotions and wanting to be fixed or wanting help in some ways. But as your leadership expands, as you continue climbing that corporate ladder, it's going to require a greater amount of emotional capacity.
And when I say emotional capacity, I mean the ability to hold your emotion, understand other people's emotions, without immediately reacting to it. This is key. It's not that we are suppressing the emotion or hiding it or running away from it or trying to explain it away or make it okay. It is literally the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions, anger, and other things like hurt and disappointment and rejection, and not react in the moment. It's to be able to have the capacity to sit with the emotion, to feel it, to name it, and then to consciously choose what you want to do next.
I know, it sounds pretty simple, but it's not that simple, especially when you're in it, especially when there's stories around it, especially when you feel like you're the bad guy in it. So, let's talk about it because I talk about this as the anger advantage, and it actually is a twofold. And I want to be really clear about what I mean. Anger in itself isn't the advantage, right? Being angrier doesn't make you a better leader. Acting out of your anger doesn't make you powerful. Reacting to other people's anger and fixing everything doesn't make you more powerful.
The advantage is what becomes available when you stop being afraid of anger, your own and other people's anger, and learn how to work with it. Because anger contains a lot of information. And your ability to stay present with that information gives you choice. That's where the advantage begins. And you got to think about this because a lot of people spend their life trying to not make other people angry. And they're scared of other people's emotions. But here's what happens when you are a leader. And this happened to me too.
When I am with other authority figures and other leaders, and the higher I grew in my career, the more I saw their anger. The more behind closed doors, not in the town halls when they're happy and grounded, the more I saw that they were dealing with high stake situations, the more angry they got, the more I had to learn to be with myself. And the less I had to go into reactive mode, which would be like data or trying to fix it or getting upset myself and not understanding why. These things don't go away. The emotions actually get higher and more, I don't know if it's explosive, more expressive at the more senior levels.
And I actually used to see this as a privilege because I would be like, wow, I'm with this senior leader who is really upset and they're just sharing their pure emotion and their pure pain and their pure upset, whether it was anger, embarrassment, disappointment, all of the things, right? They're sharing it in the room with the other leaders in the room because they expect to be heard and to move and to be able to be fully expressed while leading, right? This is not a place where we're polished or positioning ourselves when people are making some hard decisions, right?
And your ability to stay with yourself and understand the dynamics and not hide from the anger or not, maybe get busy with something else because you feel highly uncomfortable, is your ability to actually lead and support and to help things move forward. And so, I explain this to people because I think oftentimes they're like, there's anger and there's so much emotion. And when you feel like you are under attack, you go into that survival mode.
And I did it too. I fixed, I explained, I retreated. I was like, I need to make them understand the process. I need to help them understand that we don't need to be angry. That was really my thought under a lot of this, right? It was like, why do people need to be angry, right? So I was starting to solve for the anger versus actually solve for the problem underneath the anger.
Emotional capacity isn't about feeling less, it's about being able to feel more without losing access to yourself. You want to notice when you're in this dynamic in a room, like, wow, this person's really angry. What's going on here? Versus, oh my gosh, this person's really angry. Let me go head down and try to solve it or just stay in my lane and fix the problems that I'm fixing, right?
The reason why this becomes ever more important is in these high stake rooms when people, especially men, are expressing anger, maybe pounding their fist on the table and saying, I'm angry about this. We need to figure this out, right? If you retreat in that moment, that is you retreating from the leadership that's available in front of you. Instead of saying, going into data or trying to fix it, you say, I'm angry about this too. I am frustrated and I agree with you. Something's got to change. And then you move into what that thing is, and you say it out loud and you make your move, not by trying to placate somebody, but by meeting them in their own anger. And your ability to hold yourself in that is going to be really important because what happens with a lot of women is that we shrink back.
And I want you to think about your upbringing. What did anger mean in your household growing up? Was anger loud, dangerous? Did people explode? Did people withdraw? What happened? Were you praised for being easygoing, responsible, the achiever? I will tell you for me what happened with anger is I saw my brother get angry a lot of times. And he just seemed out of control and he would just be left to his own devices and sort of ridiculed by the rest of the family like, oh, look at him, he's all angry and upset, having his tantrum. Let's just leave him alone until he calms down.
And so I don't even remember being angry. I don't remember a lot of my terrible twos being, I think I was more quietly resentful versus actually outwardly expressively angry. And it makes sense because when I started being in more of these rooms and having a boss who was very angry and very openly expressive as his anger, I would shrink back, right? If you've seen my TEDx talk, this is all about it.
This is about how I would shrink back and I would be frozen in fear because I could not handle his level of anger. I could totally handle the questions that he was giving me. I could totally understand and handle the problem that was on the table, but what I couldn't handle was the emotional capacity. I just didn't have it at that time. And I had to practice it. I had to learn how to be with my own anger so I could be with someone else's. And it really starts with understanding our relationship with anger. That is part of our story.
In my head, before you ever had a boss, you were learning what happened when someone was angry with you. And now, in your 40s or in your 50s, you're sitting in an executive meeting, but your nervous system still remembers what it's like to be that little child, to be that little girl who is scared of anger and shrinks back instead of stands up and stands strong and uses her anger to ground herself in the moment. So where does your anger go?
I wanted to share this with you because for me, I oftentimes would become super responsible when someone was angry. I would be like, all right, let's just hold their anger and let's figure out how to fix it. And that worked for a while, but it actually also doesn't work when you are constantly trying to fix somebody else's anger and you're not in touch with your own. You keep thinking, did I work hard enough? Become more competent, prove myself, overthink it.
I didn't think of myself as an angry woman. But that didn't mean I wasn't angry. I simply became very good at covering up my anger into many more acceptable things, right? So I want you to go to school on yourself and notice, is this you? What do you turn your anger into? Productivity, achievement, perfectionism, people pleasing, resentment, complaining to somebody who wasn't in the room, silence, self-doubt, overworking.
This is what happens when we don't have the capacity to deal with or hold the anger and just be like, okay, people were angry. Let's just take a deep breath and notice and be curious. It's hard to be curious when we are triggered and our survival senses are coming up. So where does your anger go when you don't allow yourself to have it? Where do you go? Because this is really important. I noticed I used to go to shutdown mode. I would appear, because it wasn't like I would totally just shut down in meetings. I would go to my facts and data. I would reiterate things, but I wouldn't be as convicted as I could have been because half of me was shut down, because half of me was in fear.
So we're going to dive into anger as information. This is the heart of the anger advantage. Anger isn't bad. And anger isn't automatically right. Anger is information. What if anger is saying, that's not okay with me, whether it's you or somebody else, right? Because somebody is having an upset and typically underneath anger is hurt or fear. They are fearful of something, they feel hurt about something, a boundary has been crossed, and this is why it's important to listen for this within yourself and other people. Because if you can listen to what is the information that anger is providing for you versus shutting down or going into maybe a fixer mode, then you are going to have more data to deal with this leadership challenge in the present moment and be open and curious and be more resourceful about it.
So when that anger comes up, what I want you to do is ask it, welcome, what are you here to teach me? You don't have to obey the anger to listen to it. Anger doesn't get to make every decision. Anger doesn't need to drive the car, but it deserves a seat at the table. That is the anger advantage. I can hear the information without being controlled by the emotion. This is so important because imagine this, your CEO comes into the room and says, I'm really frustrated and angry by the sales performance this quarter. Listen to that, right? I mean, sometimes people just hear the anger and they shut down. They don't know what to do with it. But if you are the leader in the room that's like, hey, I agree with you. Can you tell me more about exactly what it is? You know, asking more questions. That creates choice for you and it creates authority in the room. You're speaking into it. You're asking curious questions. You're not just trying to manage his anger or her anger. You are actually meeting her and saying, I hear you. This is really upsetting. And I want to hear more.
If you can be that leader that can be with this person and not make their anger bad or wrong and not make you spin out into fix it mode, you're going to be able to lead more powerfully with much more executive presence in these rooms.
I want to also share this with you because the truth is that leadership gets lonely at the top. And having people understand you, understand your emotions, and not judge you is a huge thing. This is a huge part of what I do in coaching, where people can just literally come to me as a leader and tell me all of the things that are on their minds, all of their emotions that they've packed up so tightly because they're trying to be responsible. And in that responsibility, they're also suppressing a lot of emotions because they haven't had time to sit with them. They haven't had time to be curious about them. So in these coaching sessions or in my command container, this is the space to do that.
I want to tell you about a woman that I am coaching inside command. One week, she gets so much pushback. She's showing up, she's saying what's so. She gets so much pushback. And she's literally asking herself, and I want you to notice this for you too, have you ever had one of those weeks where every room seems to be telling you no?
After enough resistance, you do wonder, right? Is this me? Maybe I'm not pushing hard enough. Maybe I should let this go. Maybe I'm too much. Why am I even doing this? This is what she was thinking. She was feeling lonely, she questioned herself, she was angry. She wanted to walk away. And then she had to terminate an underperforming employee who was very defensive, very irresponsible, yelled at her, said she was awful, told her people hated her behind her back.
I want you to pause and ask yourself, what would that do to you? Would you believe her? Would you mentally poll everyone? Would you wonder, maybe I am a terrible leader? Well, here's what my client did instead. She let herself feel it. She didn't bypass it. She didn't pretend she didn't care. She breathed, she processed, she shared what she was feeling, and this is how she was building emotional capacity.
Emotional capacity doesn't mean you're not unaffected. It just means that it doesn't have you spinning into doing things like people-pleasing, like going into victimhood or self-doubt or self-beat up. There may be tinges of it, but you bring yourself back on course because you say, "Hey, I have the emotional capacity to hold this right here, right now. I'm able to understand why this person could be upset with me. I understand why I'm upset with this person and the situation, and actually, in this moment, I don't need to do anything about it."
It's saying this affects me and I don't have to abandon myself because it does. This is so important because this is where you build that emotional capacity to feel, fuel, and fire. Feel is the first step. What am I actually feeling? You can do this for any emotion, but I want you to do it for anger because like I said, this is the emotion that has a lot of women pushing back, shrinking back, softening themselves and feeling like they just can't do it. They feel like they have to carry all this armor because they're like, these emotions are too much.
What I'm here to tell you is that these emotions are not too much. You can handle it. You can feel it. You don't need to let these emotions control you. But it takes your ability to breathe into it and to feel it, not get rid of it, right? You can acknowledge, I'm angry. I'm hurt. I'm embarrassed. I'm scared, without immediately doing anything about it. I know it sounds simple, but this is not a simple skill. And you know it because you're listening to this podcast and I'm sure you've spun out on things before. But I want you to know that you can start with just feeling. What am I actually feeling?
There is research that shows if you name your feelings, it actually slows down your nervous system. You feel calmer, you feel more able to be resourceful. You feel more connected to yourself.
And the next question is fuel. What is this emotion revealing to me? What matters to me? What value does it have? Is there a boundary, desire, standard, truth? You can also do this with someone else. When I am, whether it's my husband or maybe it's other clients and they're having really strong emotions, I really want to understand like, "Hey, what are you making this mean about you? What are you noticing that this emotion is revealing to you?" And you want to ask yourself, what does my anger know that I've been unwilling to acknowledge? That's information.
So for me, when I was noticing this for myself, it would often times be again, some boundary, something I wasn't okay with. And because of a lot of conditioning that we have as women, it's hard for us to really say, I'm not okay with that. I don't like that. And so actually practicing even saying those words is going to be powerful for you. It will have you move and shift. And I know women in my Command container just by saying something like, I don't want to, or I won't, will help them connect to that will inside of them, that ability to create that connection with themselves to know what matters to them. And that's the power of emotions. Emotions allow us to understand what really matters to us.
And then lastly, fire. Now you choose. Fire is actually being fully expressed, being able to express intentionally. What does my anger want to do? Instead of, what does the leader I want to be choose to do with this information? So we're not just saying, "Hey, what does my anger like is just going to go off and be a bull in a china shop?" No, you want to ask, "What does the leader I want to be choose to do with this information intentionally?" This is how you use information from your emotions to lead. Not have just emotional reactions and have those emotions lead you. That is exactly what people say when they say women are too emotional. It means that they are allowing their emotions to drive them instead of taking a pause and intentionally choosing what you want to do with that information.
I will speak. I will ask. I will say no. I will address that behavior. I will change my mind. I will hold the expectation. I will walk away, right? You want to feel it. Find the fuel and choose your fire, your expression. That's the anger advantage. And if you recall from my TEDx talk and if you haven't listened to it, we'll link it in here, but for me, I learned how to connect with my own anger in the moment. And I learned to say, "Hey, I can disrupt, I can interrupt, and I can get everybody back on page because I know the information that I'm sharing is so important to this room. And it's going to lead us in a more productive way forward."
But if I can't speak up with conviction and I just shrink back because I can't handle the anger, then that's the limit of my leadership. And I was super grateful to have a boss that was super angry because you know why? I learned how to be with his anger and I learned how to be with my own. And he was just the very beginning because other leaders I would be with, they would have lots of emotions too. Anger being one of them. I was actually in a room with a divisional CEO who was very angry at me. And instead of just shrinking back and, you know, hiding for the rest of the meeting, I took it. I mean, I was just like, "Yeah, I get why you're angry with me. This number is not right. I'm going to fix it. Let's move on."
And so I held my ground. I was still powerful. I can still make mistakes, have my own back, use my anger for me, notice other people's anger and not need to defend myself. This is the power of being able to build your emotional capacity and hold anger and use anger to intentionally shift what's happening in the room inside yourself. Not just by fixing, by holding space and by asking yourself, what is the best next step forward with an intentional space, not just a triggered survival mode.
So, I want to go back to the woman that I was talking about in my Command group because just one week later, I had actually coached her through the pushback. And we'll link in the episode about how pushback means you're powerful. This is a critical thing because I think a lot of women who start getting higher and higher up and they start feeling more and more pushback and more and more heat, they think there's something wrong with them. And I'm like, there's nothing wrong with you. You're just becoming more and more powerful and this is the game at this level.
People are not always going to just be happy with your leadership, especially if you're holding people accountable, especially if you are in charge of a transformation project that is disrupting the way that they did things in the past. Especially if you are being really direct with them and they've not had a boss that really cared about them in that way or asked them to do things in a really direct manner.
So, I want to share with you this because this client of mine, she has a brand new employee. So it's six weeks in. She's frustrated. He has not communicated with customers. He has not done the things she's asked him to do. And so she says, "Hey, what's going on here?" He gets really defensive. Tells her how hard he's working, tells her questions are unfair. And then something happens inside of herself. She actually shared that I started to feel bad. And I felt myself wanting to soothe him and tell him it was all right. She wanted to rescue him. She wanted to be like, "Don't worry, it's not a big deal. Let's just move forward."
But that would be her not actually listening to her anger. That would be her wanting to be a people-pleaser nice girl versus being a leader that holds people accountable. So I want you to notice for yourself, have you ever felt that way? You know, you walked into a conversation knowing exactly what needs to happen. The other person gets emotional. Maybe they get angry, maybe they get sad, maybe they start crying. And suddenly, you're taking care of them. Whose discomfort are you managing at the expense of your leadership? So I really want you to notice that because that is the game that happens to a lot of women that has them feeling burnt out because they are often times managing other people's discomfort versus leading with their own leadership. Whose discomfort are you managing at the expense of your leadership?
Let that sit. So this is what happened to my client. She started to catch herself. She noticed herself have that thought like, I felt bad for him. I wanted to soothe him. I wanted to tell him it's okay. He was freaking out. But she asked herself, where does soothing him take both of them? And then she holds the expectation again. She realizes that she doesn't need to people-please him. She doesn't need to soothe him. He's a grown man who should be doing his work.
And so she doesn't go in it aggressively. She doesn't attack him, she doesn't rescue him. She just holds the ground and says what she expects and gives him space to do whatever he's going to do, all right? Not needing to fix him. And she did say he is very angry with me, but that's okay. Like she actually said that. This is growth. Like if you're listening to this and you can be okay with somebody being very angry with you, this is growth for you in leadership. This is your ability to expand that emotional capacity.
And what's even greater is the next day, this report of hers, he got to work. He did what she asked him to do over the last six weeks. He did it all within a few days. He set up the meetings, he scheduled his travel to meet clients. And that's not the win. The win isn't that he compiled all this. The win is that she could experience his anger without abandoning her leadership. And that is the rep. That is the practice. This is what we do in Command. This is how you practice this muscle of building your emotional capacity.
It is not about using your emotions to just fix everything. It's about sitting with your emotions and building the capacity to hold them, yours and other people's. Because one week earlier she was processing the emotional aftermath and she was questioning her own leadership. This week, she's catching herself inside the moment. That's the capacity that you are building. This is how you build that capacity to notice other people's anger, connect to your own, stay true to yourself. Don't abandon yourself in those moments.
How much of your leadership is organized around making sure nobody gets upset with you? These are the things, especially as women, we've been really good at, creating trust and rapport with people. But when things get hot, when we have to hold people accountable, when other senior leaders get upset, you've got to watch your response to their emotions. You've got to watch your own response to your own emotion. This is why anger is the advantage point. If you connect with yourself, if you notice what's going on with me, what's going on with them? This is where you are going to show up as a powerful leader. And people are going to be like, "Wow, Sarah is so emotionally mature. She has the emotional and executive maturity to handle what's being thrown in front of her in a way that is grounded and powerful."
This is the power of being in some of these rooms. You don't know it until you're there and then you're like, "Whoa, people are having a lot of emotions in this room. I've got to up my emotional capacity game to not just react to everything, right?" You're learning to calibrate what it's like to be fully expressed. Because the higher you are in that leadership position, the more you're going to notice people's emotions and your own. These are high stakes. If everyone else has to be okay with your leadership before you can be okay with your leadership, you've handed them your authority.
I want you to hear that again. If everyone else has to be okay with your leadership before you can be okay with your leadership, you've handed them your authority. You are trying to please them with your leadership, not get them to do the things that they need to do and lead them, lead them somewhere, right? You're actually being led by them. So you've got to really think about this because often times people are, you know, we're conditioned in a lot of ways and we don't have the emotional capacity and we don't know what this work is like. And so we get lost in it and we feel confused. And listen, if you're lost and confused, you're not going to feel confident. That's just what happens. That happens to so many women.
And that happens to a lot of women when they get, you know, sort of feedback weaponized against them. They start questioning themselves, they don't even know. They've got all this emotional swirl. They don't have the emotional capacity that allows you to be more relational with yourself and other people, so that you can hear, I disagree, or that hurt me. I think you're wrong on this. And instead of immediately defending or collapsing, you become curious. Tell me more. What am I missing? I think I need to repair that. Like there are things that you might slow down and say, I hear you. My decision still stands.
This is about building that emotional capacity and self-trust. Self-trust isn't trusting that you're always right, by the way. It's not like, I'm right, you know, I trust myself. Self-trust is trusting yourself to stay present long enough to discern what is right for you. You know, I've had some moments where I'm like, I trusted myself to make that decision. In hindsight, it wasn't the best decision, but I still stand by myself because I did the best I could in that moment and now I'm going to learn from it.
There is no sort of beating yourself up. There's just the learning and growing from these moments because we've got to give ourselves space to learn and grow. Otherwise, we're not going to learn and grow. We're just going to stay stuck and we're going to maybe take some incremental changes, but we're not giving ourselves the ability to practice, to practice building our capacity.
Okay. So, that is today's episode. It is so much about being able to hold your emotions, notice other people's emotions without automatically reacting. And your brain could react. Your mind might give you a bunch of thoughts and a bunch of things that come up, but you don't have to attach to any of them. You can just be like, "Oh, my brain is telling me all these things that may or may not be true. Let's slow down a little bit."
And this is exactly why I created Command, my six-month leadership accelerator for high-achieving women who want to have more executive presence, who want to be able to stand on their own side and to be able to have their own back, especially when the heat gets really hot. Because you don't need another podcast telling you that you should speak up. That's just so easy. You don't need another list of ways to communicate assertively because that is the script on the top of it, but this internal work, your ability to hold this emotional capacity, this is where things really change for you.
Can you do it when there is something at stake? This is that piece, right? When your heart is pounding, when someone pushes back, when they're really angry with you, when someone powerful disagrees, when you might be misunderstood, when you're afraid they're going to think you're difficult. Can you access yourself? That's what we're practicing inside Command. Emotional capacity, assertive, authentic communication, tension, power, anger, desire, ambition, boundaries, curiosity, letting people have reactions, trusting yourself and having your own back while it's happening. This is the skill.
So, the next level of leadership isn't simply knowing what to do. It's increasing your capacity to stay with yourself while doing it. And as your leadership continues to rise in this rising levels of leadership, you're going to notice and have much more emotions in yourself and experience more fully expressed leaders because they're fully expressed, they're where they are because they are leading with their emotions. They are using the Feel, Fuel, Fire method and they don't even know it, but this is them being able to share their leadership with other people. And your ability to calibrate to that and not shrink back is going to be your ability to accelerate very quickly in that leadership space because people will see you as somebody who can handle the heat.
All right. So, this week, don't get rid of your anger and don't immediately act on it. Please, please don't just immediately act on it and send this crazy emails to people and be reckless. This is not what this episode is about at all. If you've been listening to me, it's all about discernment and trusting yourself and moving, getting curious. When anger enters the room, yours or others, ask, "Welcome. What are you here to teach me?" Really welcome that anger in and embrace it and ask yourself, feel, what am I feeling? Fuel, what is this revealing or protecting? Fire, what do I choose intentionally, right? What is intentionally aligned to the leader I am in this moment and how can I express that?
And finally, can I let this emotion exist without abandoning myself? Your goal isn't to become a woman that nobody gets angry with. Your goal isn't to become a woman who never gets angry. Your goal is to become a woman who can let anger enter the room without abandoning herself. Because the more leadership you hold, the more emotion you'll be asked to hold with it. Anger isn't just the advantage, your capacity to hear it, learn from it and choose who you want to be in its presence. That's the advantage. That's emotional capacity. That's self-trust. That's what we do inside Command.
All right. Well, I want you to go practice this. Go notice yourself and your anger and see your leaders, notice your leaders being able to express fully and notice what happens to you. Go to school on yourself and then tell me, I want to hear from you. Use the Feel, Fuel, Fire method and tell me how this is shifting your leadership, how you are showing up in rooms, how you are showing up in relation to yourself and to other people. You can find me on LinkedIn or email me directly. I love to hear from The Balanced Leader listeners and I always love to hear what your input is as well. What do you want to hear more of? I know a lot of you loved the assertive communications podcast episode, and I'm going to be sharing a lot more of that as we unpack the nuances of leadership at this higher level.
All right, have a beautiful week. Go feel your emotions. Remember, you don't have to do anything with it right here, right then, right? You can sit with the emotion, whether it's yours or somebody else's, and you can be curious. All right, have a beautiful week. Take care. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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