32. Why Emotional Maturity is Your Leadership Superpower
Most women think leadership maturity comes from mastering skills like communication, negotiation, or strategy. But the real differentiator is emotional maturity - the ability to expand your capacity to handle difficult emotions while maintaining leadership presence. True leadership is measured when stakes are high and emotions are uncomfortable.
I see this pattern repeatedly with high-achieving women leaders who want to escape discomfort. They often believe changing jobs or finding a "better" culture will solve their challenges. However, this approach leaves significant growth opportunities on the table and can actually limit career progression.
Listen in this week to learn how expanding your window of tolerance for uncomfortable emotions is the key to unlocking next-level leadership. Discover how sitting with difficult emotions and remaining grounded regardless of external circumstances makes you the kind of leader who thrives in any environment.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How to expand your emotional capacity to handle challenging workplace situations.
The window of tolerance concept and its impact on leadership effectiveness.
How to create internal safety instead of depending on external circumstances.
Why escaping uncomfortable situations limits your leadership potential.
How to transform difficult workplace relationships into opportunities for growth.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Why Emotional Intelligence is Important in Leadership - Harvard Business School
Full Episode Transcript:
Most women think leadership maturity comes from mastering skills like communication, negotiation, or strategy. But the real differentiator? It's your emotional maturity. It's not about avoiding difficult people or creating perfect circumstances. It's about expanding your emotional capacity so no situation or person can shake your leadership confidence.
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. Today we are talking about emotional maturity, the leadership skill that changes everything. So this one is very near and dear to my heart because it has actually changed how I see myself and how I lead and how I coach people. This is the skill set that I would say really set me apart from my peers and really helped me to accelerate my career so quickly. It is emotional maturity, which is really about expanding your window of tolerance for emotions that you historically labeled as bad. So that could look like anger, sadness, frustration, rejection.
And the term window of tolerance, I did want to share, comes from Dr. Dan Siegel. He studied a lot of this. He does a lot of coaching adults as well as children. And when he talks about the window of tolerance, the way that he describes it is that the window of tolerance concept is the optimal zone of arousal for a person to function effectively in everyday life. It represents the range of emotional experience that an individual can comfortably process and integrate.
So, it is really this window, if you see for yourself, that you're like, I can tolerate all of these emotions and still be able to access my prefrontal cortex, which is my higher-level thinking. I am able to be with these emotions without going into a survival brain.
And what I'm talking about today is emotional maturity is really expanding this window of tolerance and expanding our ability to feel emotions, to be able to sit with our emotions, to understand them. And it's not just about how you relate to yourself with these emotions; it's how you relate to other people while feeling these emotions. This is also super important because I think sometimes people are like, I want to become emotionally mature and then I will interact with people. It's kind of like, I want to become this great person and then start dating people because then I will be this perfect person.
The reality is, the way that we learn to expand our emotional maturity, and part of that is expanding our emotional capacity, is by interacting with people. Other people are a great mirror for us because they represent the way that we see the world, and they also represent the way that we feel about the world. And what happens in all of this is as you are a leader growing and expanding your capacities, oftentimes when we are starting out our careers, we're doing a lot of things. We're getting things done and we're doing all of these different things.
But as you grow into a more and more senior leader, you're going to be dealing with more people, more interpersonal problems, more emotions, more responsibility. And when you do this, it will trigger emotions in yourself and the other person. And the way to increase this is to learn how to increase that window of tolerance for yourself over time. Because true leadership is measured when the stakes are high and the emotions are uncomfortable.
So, when people talk about how can I be somebody who can make decisions in a high-stake situation, basically notice my emotions, notice people's emotions, but still have the clarity to speak confidently about what I believe in and stand up for myself? Well, this happens when you build emotional maturity in yourself.
And it's not going to happen overnight; it's something you learn to do over time that you're consciously aware of. If you only feel confident when things are easy, your leadership is conditional. You can't be in those high-stake situations because part of things that are high stakes is you don't have full control over what's going to happen in those moments, but you do have full control over yourself if you are somebody who has built that level of emotional maturity.
Let's talk about this because I see this in so many women that I coach, so many people that come to me. They are often many high-achieving women wanting to escape the discomfort instead of learning from it. Oftentimes this sounds like, "I'll just leave and find a better culture." They think that their boss is a problem. Maybe it's a toxic culture, maybe a lot of things are happening that feel like it's an uphill battle for them, and they're having lots of emotions, and they feel drained and exhausted, especially if they're not able to see this as a challenge to overcome, as an experience where they can actually be expanding their window of tolerance, right? They just feel those negative emotions. And oftentimes, if we haven't expanded this window of tolerance or we're at a next level, what will happen is we will regress to different behaviors.
So, I've talked to a lot of women where they're like, I was super confident back then. I was able to speak up. I felt good about what I had to say. I felt really strong about myself. But in the last year, being in this company, something has changed, something has shifted. When people interact with me, I feel like they're dismissing me. I feel shut down, I shrink down, I don't stand up for myself. I have a lot of fear in my body. And so, basically all of these thoughts and feelings in that moment point to something is really wrong here, I need to get out.
So it's like your body wants to have that escape because when we're expanding our window of tolerance, we either have a choice that we're making where we're actively engaging and saying, this is going to feel uncomfortable before it starts feeling comfortable. Kind of like when I go see my personal trainer and he's like, "You can lift that 30-pound weight." And I'm like, "I don't think I can." And he's like, "You can, you know, you can lift it." And so, just that belief in myself and building that muscle capacity for me is really having him guide me in that moment and saying, "Yes, you can do it." And over time, I can do it. But there is that, you know, in myself and having this personal trainer help me see that, hey, this is just part of the learning. This is part of the path. It is going to feel uncomfortable.
But oftentimes, a lot of the women that I coach or come to me, they're feeling like they want to escape difficult relationships, you know, but they are also escaping the learning that they could be having, the learning that they could be engaging with. But sometimes the discomfort feels so big that engaging in the opportunity feels really small or not possible at all.
And that's really where I come in and support them with this. But the thing that I sell them on isn't just like, "Hey, expand your emotional maturity. This is great." What I sell them on is, yes, of course, you can leave. Yes, you can go find another job. Yes, you can find another culture and a new boss that you trust. But here's the thing that's limiting.
Oftentimes, women are coming to me and they're like, “This culture doesn't work for me. This guy is so rude and his values are very different than mine, and I can't get along with him, so I've got to leave.” And I say, "Yes, so you can leave." Of course, that's an option for you. It would not be that easy. You'd have to go find another job, you'd have to decide if you're going to move, all of these things, especially for the senior women that I coach.
They're in these, you know, sort of making $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 jobs, where there's not a ton of these jobs out there. But the other thing that I remind them of is, yes, you can go find another job, another culture, another boss. But what happens if there's a reorganization? What happens if your boss leaves? What happens if you meet another person that reacts just the same way?
In coaching, there was something that I learned that I thought was super helpful about how we always recreate our circumstances wherever we go to overcome the challenge. It's kind of like the same analogy of, you know, you're always going to date that bad boy until you learn something about yourself, and then you're going to date the guy that you're supposed to marry.
But until you are open to learning what it is that attracts you to this bad guy or this bad boy or whatever it is, that your common problem guy, that you won't be able to overcome that and actually meet the person that you're supposed to marry because, you know, there's a challenge that you're supposed to learn. So it's the same thing in the working environment. You can keep chasing for the culture, you can keep chasing for a boss that makes you feel safe and trusted and wanted. But there's also something on the line for you. There's something about learning and becoming the person who creates safety for themselves, a person who creates confidence within themselves, no matter what circumstances are around them.
And if you're bought into that person, that is a person that is resilient, that is a person that is empowering. That is a person that's going to have many more opportunities and lots more leadership runway ahead of them because they are so open to learning and growing and to becoming the person who can overcome whatever challenges, whether they're interpersonal or whether it's a cultural piece, right? If you're able to become that person to learn that.
Oftentimes, I see that women leave that on the table because the discomfort in the moment feels way bigger than the empowerment or the potential empowerment and the potential opportunities. But when they're asked this question, when I say, "Hey, would you rather be somebody who leaves standing tall, excited about the future, and looking for that next opportunity with their head up high, or do you want to leave as somebody who is angry, resentful, feels like they've been wronged, and your confidence is shaken, you know, because you can't work with this person and it feels like all or nothing?"
And oftentimes they tell me, I want to be the person who knows how to learn and grow and expand and work with anybody because the reality is, you don't know who you're going to work with, and you can't keep finding another job over and over. I mean, you could do that, but it's probably going to be detrimental to your career and also exhausting for you. And not a lot of fun to feel like you can't handle things. A lot of times people want to escape a situation because they don't feel emotionally safe in it.
But here is the way: it's actually getting into that challenge to create that emotional safety, that emotional maturity as you expand your window of tolerance. So this is what's really on the line, right? Escaping or engaging. And that engagement has you sitting with the discomfort rather than reacting to it, choosing your response instead of just being triggered emotionally, separating someone else's behavior from your own self-worth.
Oftentimes, a lot of the women that I coach, they take on other people's emotions, or they project a senior leader who doesn't give them eye contact or who doesn't return their emails as something to do with their self-worth, rather than, you know, feeling the emotions. Maybe they feel rejected, maybe they feel sad, maybe they feel angry, and they're not comfortable with those emotions, nor do they know what to do with them next. And so they feel stuck.
But this is the path to learn how to sit with those emotions and not just react in the moment, but to take responsibility for those emotions and use them as a way to move forward and to expand your emotional maturity.
And doing this work is really about speaking up respectfully when it's hard, not needing the environment to change to feel grounded. And so the more and more you can sit with these uncomfortable feelings, name them, validate them, and ground yourself in them, the more you're going to be able to respond in a way that creates more possibilities for yourself and creates more learning for yourself in that moment.
Research from Harvard Business Review actually talks about emotionally intelligent leaders foster positive work climates and enhance team effectiveness. So it's not just about you showing up with your own emotional maturity, but it's you fostering an environment that helps other people understand that emotions are okay, that sitting with intense emotions is part of the game. And learning about yourself while you're sitting with these emotions is going to set you up for the next level game.
I oftentimes talk about how emotional maturity and learning how to embrace emotions that you didn't typically feel a lot of before is part of table stakes at this next level. Really learning how to affirm yourself in situations where people might not affirm you. You might get yelled at, you might make a mistake, and it might be a high-stakes mistake, but you get to create that emotional maturity for yourself to learn how to react to the situation.
So, I just wanted to share for myself because I've had a lot of really amazing bosses, really supportive bosses in my time, and I've learned so much from them. And there is something about having a boss that you trust and that you care about. But there is also something about having a boss that you never thought you could create a strong relationship with, where you never thought you could see eye to eye, where you never thought you could stand up for yourself because he's so abrasive and so loud and so angry.
This was me. I had a boss like that where I was like, I don't know if I could work with this person. And I think there were part of me that was like, I not sure if this is the work environment for me. I kind of entertained it for probably like 20% of the time because I was like, this doesn't feel good. I don't like going to meetings. I don't like getting shut down. I don't like getting yelled at in front of my peers. I don't like feeling like I am being under attack.
But I was also super lucky because I had my own coaching at the time that really helped me see the bigger game of this. And for me, I had decided, this isn't going to be the only sort of arrogant, bully, abrasive man that I was going to work with. I knew that my runway for my career was going to be much more expansive, and I knew learning the skill of actually working with this person and understanding them and forging a relationship with them. And it didn't mean kissing his ass. That's not really what I was playing into, and I actually don't even think that would work for him or with him, right?
It wasn't about manipulating the situation. It was really about me learning how to be with his strong emotions while I was sitting with my own. And instead of allowing those uncomfortable emotions to shut me down, shrink me down, have me not speak up, I actually had to learn this over time. It was, you know, every month end we'd have these meetings, so I'd always have an opportunity to work on it. And I got better and better. I actually learned how to understand that his anger, his emotions were more a lot more about fear.
And I spent way more time focused on the content of what he was saying, the substance of what he was saying versus how he was saying it. And my emotional reaction to how he was saying it over time kind of didn't faze me. You know, I'm like, "Okay, he's angry." Like, what's the big deal? I've heard him be angry for the last six months. So it kind of no longer had that emotional reaction in me that would shut me down because my window of tolerance was expanding and had expanded at that point.
And so I could be much more quick with him. And no matter how he was presenting the information, what tone, I could really just engage with the topic that he was talking about versus all of the emotions that I historically felt because I was so uncomfortable with the way that he would present things. And this is a really powerful skill.
I actually had another client who was able to notice this for herself. I want to share this with you because it is an example of what emotional maturity looks like in action. And what you could see for yourself as you start embracing this skill set for yourself. This is actually, I turned it into an email for my mailing list because it was so compelling and I wanted other people to hear the process that my client went through. So you can just imagine this is you.
You hear from your direct reports that your boss, the CEO, has asked them to fly across the country to meet with him next week. You react. You feel angry. You think, he should have come directly to me, not to my direct reports. He is trying to undermine my leadership. He doesn't respect me. He is a terrible boss and leader. You notice how you feel like a victim. You take a deep breath. You decide to interrupt your internal talk track. You ask yourself, how would a responsible leader show up?
A leader would be decisive, clear, and confident. You tap into your resourcefulness. You get an idea. You act swiftly. You tell your team to book their flights. You decide to meet them at the office. You show up with no drama, ready to work. You feel confident, empowered, and purposeful. You channel your leadership presence. Your meeting is not only productive, but there are clear next steps. You are a force to be reckoned with. You don't allow external circumstances to influence your leadership. You take radical responsibility.
Channeling your emotional maturity and leadership presence is not just a nice-to-have skill; it's a must-have skill, especially for women in male-dominated spaces. This example, again, comes from one of my clients who has really embraced emotional maturity, building out her window of tolerance. She was still having emotional reactions.
The difference was she wasn't allowing those reactions to stop her, shrink her down, push her into some spiral that got her to feel like she has no control, that she's disempowered, that this is just her, you know, circumstances, she's a victim of this. She actually used the emotions, was able to notice herself and take a breath and then choose consciously how she wants to show up. This is really emotional maturity in action.
And this is such an important skill because as a woman leader, especially in a male-dominated space, you're going to have this more and more. And the cost of staying emotionally immature is that you will feel that you have to stay tied to safe environments. You will only look for bosses that you feel like you can work with. You limit your leadership potential. You give your power away to difficult people.
I also just recently talked to somebody who was like, there was a difficult woman who was on her team and she literally left her job because she couldn't deal with this difficult person. And they weren't even an authority figure. They were just somebody on their team. But again, this is where emotional maturity really either makes or breaks you. It either expands your opportunities, empowers you, and has you opening up new doors and new levels of learning and leadership, or it keeps you stuck.
It keeps you capping your growth, your promotion opportunities, your ability to only work with certain types of people. And the consequences is continually seeking environments free of conflict, which can really hinder your personal and professional development. Versus the empowerment, cultivating emotional maturity allows you to thrive regardless of the external circumstances.
So if your sense of safety depends on the behaviors of others, you will always be at their mercy. Versus you becoming that person who creates safety within themselves. You becoming that person that expands your emotional maturity. And when you are feeling uncomfortable, you remind yourself that your body can handle this feeling and that you sit with the emotion. You allow it to come in versus running away from it.
And I get it. In those moments, and I've had them too, whether it's personal or professional, where you're like, something has gone terribly wrong and you just want to jump out of a window or something. But the reality is, nothing has gone terribly wrong. You are having an emotion in your body, and you can't have an emotion that actually is dangerous for your body. So you might feel really strong emotions in your body, but you can, right, be that parent to yourself and say, "This is okay. You are okay. You are just feeling uncomfortable emotions. You are expanding your emotional capacity."
I will have to say this last week or two, I've been up against some things personally and professionally, and it's really helped me when I sit with myself and say, this is all good. You are expanding your emotional capacity. You have a big life. You've got lots of things on your mind. You've got lots of responsibilities. And this is part of just expanding that window of tolerance.
And even saying that to myself helps me to be with the emotion, notice my reactions, but then also be able to relate to myself in a different, more expansive way and relate to other people in that way as well. Have more grace for other people, have more openness, be more curious about how they're feeling when I am able to ground my emotions down and to show up with that emotional maturity in my relationships with myself and other people.
So that was today's episode. I know we covered a lot of ground, but I want to have you, especially if you're somebody who's like, I want to leave my job, I want to leave my environment. I want you to notice what power are you giving away? This is actually, as an exercise, you want to ask yourself, who or what am I giving my power to right now? What are you making the circumstance in your life cause you to do that doesn't feel empowering?
The second question I want you to ask yourself is, how can I use this challenge to grow my window of emotional tolerance? And thirdly, what would it look like to stand firm, grounded, and mature without needing them to change? So this isn't about other people around you changing. This is about you changing, and this is about the growth that's on the line and on the table for you in this moment and for the rest of your career and the rest of your life.
So next time you feel triggered or frustrated by someone at work, pause and say, internally, this is my classroom. I'm here to learn, not react. You want to be embracing this. Emotional maturity isn't about enduring abuse or staying stuck. It's about building your resilience, expanding your leadership capacity, and creating safety from the inside out. Because when you master this, no boss, no co-worker, no culture, no circumstance can define your future but you.
I am excited to hear how you take this in for yourself, what you learn about yourself, and I'm happy to hear from any of you. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can DM me directly. I personally reply to any of those messages.
All right, I will see you all next week. Have a lovely week.
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.
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. Today we are talking about emotional maturity, the leadership skill that changes everything. So this one is very near and dear to my heart because it has actually changed how I see myself and how I lead and how I coach people. This is the skill set that I would say really set me apart from my peers and really helped me to accelerate my career so quickly. It is emotional maturity, which is really about expanding your window of tolerance for emotions that you historically labeled as bad. So that could look like anger, sadness, frustration, rejection.
And the term window of tolerance, I did want to share, comes from Dr. Dan Siegel. He studied a lot of this. He does a lot of coaching adults as well as children. And when he talks about the window of tolerance, the way that he describes it is that the window of tolerance concept is the optimal zone of arousal for a person to function effectively in everyday life. It represents the range of emotional experience that an individual can comfortably process and integrate.
So, it is really this window, if you see for yourself, that you're like, I can tolerate all of these emotions and still be able to access my prefrontal cortex, which is my higher-level thinking. I am able to be with these emotions without going into a survival brain.
And what I'm talking about today is emotional maturity is really expanding this window of tolerance and expanding our ability to feel emotions, to be able to sit with our emotions, to understand them. And it's not just about how you relate to yourself with these emotions; it's how you relate to other people while feeling these emotions. This is also super important because I think sometimes people are like, I want to become emotionally mature and then I will interact with people. It's kind of like, I want to become this great person and then start dating people because then I will be this perfect person.
The reality is, the way that we learn to expand our emotional maturity, and part of that is expanding our emotional capacity, is by interacting with people. Other people are a great mirror for us because they represent the way that we see the world, and they also represent the way that we feel about the world. And what happens in all of this is as you are a leader growing and expanding your capacities, oftentimes when we are starting out our careers, we're doing a lot of things. We're getting things done and we're doing all of these different things.
But as you grow into a more and more senior leader, you're going to be dealing with more people, more interpersonal problems, more emotions, more responsibility. And when you do this, it will trigger emotions in yourself and the other person. And the way to increase this is to learn how to increase that window of tolerance for yourself over time. Because true leadership is measured when the stakes are high and the emotions are uncomfortable.
So, when people talk about how can I be somebody who can make decisions in a high-stake situation, basically notice my emotions, notice people's emotions, but still have the clarity to speak confidently about what I believe in and stand up for myself? Well, this happens when you build emotional maturity in yourself.
And it's not going to happen overnight; it's something you learn to do over time that you're consciously aware of. If you only feel confident when things are easy, your leadership is conditional. You can't be in those high-stake situations because part of things that are high stakes is you don't have full control over what's going to happen in those moments, but you do have full control over yourself if you are somebody who has built that level of emotional maturity.
Let's talk about this because I see this in so many women that I coach, so many people that come to me. They are often many high-achieving women wanting to escape the discomfort instead of learning from it. Oftentimes this sounds like, "I'll just leave and find a better culture." They think that their boss is a problem. Maybe it's a toxic culture, maybe a lot of things are happening that feel like it's an uphill battle for them, and they're having lots of emotions, and they feel drained and exhausted, especially if they're not able to see this as a challenge to overcome, as an experience where they can actually be expanding their window of tolerance, right? They just feel those negative emotions. And oftentimes, if we haven't expanded this window of tolerance or we're at a next level, what will happen is we will regress to different behaviors.
So, I've talked to a lot of women where they're like, I was super confident back then. I was able to speak up. I felt good about what I had to say. I felt really strong about myself. But in the last year, being in this company, something has changed, something has shifted. When people interact with me, I feel like they're dismissing me. I feel shut down, I shrink down, I don't stand up for myself. I have a lot of fear in my body. And so, basically all of these thoughts and feelings in that moment point to something is really wrong here, I need to get out.
So it's like your body wants to have that escape because when we're expanding our window of tolerance, we either have a choice that we're making where we're actively engaging and saying, this is going to feel uncomfortable before it starts feeling comfortable. Kind of like when I go see my personal trainer and he's like, "You can lift that 30-pound weight." And I'm like, "I don't think I can." And he's like, "You can, you know, you can lift it." And so, just that belief in myself and building that muscle capacity for me is really having him guide me in that moment and saying, "Yes, you can do it." And over time, I can do it. But there is that, you know, in myself and having this personal trainer help me see that, hey, this is just part of the learning. This is part of the path. It is going to feel uncomfortable.
But oftentimes, a lot of the women that I coach or come to me, they're feeling like they want to escape difficult relationships, you know, but they are also escaping the learning that they could be having, the learning that they could be engaging with. But sometimes the discomfort feels so big that engaging in the opportunity feels really small or not possible at all.
And that's really where I come in and support them with this. But the thing that I sell them on isn't just like, "Hey, expand your emotional maturity. This is great." What I sell them on is, yes, of course, you can leave. Yes, you can go find another job. Yes, you can find another culture and a new boss that you trust. But here's the thing that's limiting.
Oftentimes, women are coming to me and they're like, “This culture doesn't work for me. This guy is so rude and his values are very different than mine, and I can't get along with him, so I've got to leave.” And I say, "Yes, so you can leave." Of course, that's an option for you. It would not be that easy. You'd have to go find another job, you'd have to decide if you're going to move, all of these things, especially for the senior women that I coach.
They're in these, you know, sort of making $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 jobs, where there's not a ton of these jobs out there. But the other thing that I remind them of is, yes, you can go find another job, another culture, another boss. But what happens if there's a reorganization? What happens if your boss leaves? What happens if you meet another person that reacts just the same way?
In coaching, there was something that I learned that I thought was super helpful about how we always recreate our circumstances wherever we go to overcome the challenge. It's kind of like the same analogy of, you know, you're always going to date that bad boy until you learn something about yourself, and then you're going to date the guy that you're supposed to marry.
But until you are open to learning what it is that attracts you to this bad guy or this bad boy or whatever it is, that your common problem guy, that you won't be able to overcome that and actually meet the person that you're supposed to marry because, you know, there's a challenge that you're supposed to learn. So it's the same thing in the working environment. You can keep chasing for the culture, you can keep chasing for a boss that makes you feel safe and trusted and wanted. But there's also something on the line for you. There's something about learning and becoming the person who creates safety for themselves, a person who creates confidence within themselves, no matter what circumstances are around them.
And if you're bought into that person, that is a person that is resilient, that is a person that is empowering. That is a person that's going to have many more opportunities and lots more leadership runway ahead of them because they are so open to learning and growing and to becoming the person who can overcome whatever challenges, whether they're interpersonal or whether it's a cultural piece, right? If you're able to become that person to learn that.
Oftentimes, I see that women leave that on the table because the discomfort in the moment feels way bigger than the empowerment or the potential empowerment and the potential opportunities. But when they're asked this question, when I say, "Hey, would you rather be somebody who leaves standing tall, excited about the future, and looking for that next opportunity with their head up high, or do you want to leave as somebody who is angry, resentful, feels like they've been wronged, and your confidence is shaken, you know, because you can't work with this person and it feels like all or nothing?"
And oftentimes they tell me, I want to be the person who knows how to learn and grow and expand and work with anybody because the reality is, you don't know who you're going to work with, and you can't keep finding another job over and over. I mean, you could do that, but it's probably going to be detrimental to your career and also exhausting for you. And not a lot of fun to feel like you can't handle things. A lot of times people want to escape a situation because they don't feel emotionally safe in it.
But here is the way: it's actually getting into that challenge to create that emotional safety, that emotional maturity as you expand your window of tolerance. So this is what's really on the line, right? Escaping or engaging. And that engagement has you sitting with the discomfort rather than reacting to it, choosing your response instead of just being triggered emotionally, separating someone else's behavior from your own self-worth.
Oftentimes, a lot of the women that I coach, they take on other people's emotions, or they project a senior leader who doesn't give them eye contact or who doesn't return their emails as something to do with their self-worth, rather than, you know, feeling the emotions. Maybe they feel rejected, maybe they feel sad, maybe they feel angry, and they're not comfortable with those emotions, nor do they know what to do with them next. And so they feel stuck.
But this is the path to learn how to sit with those emotions and not just react in the moment, but to take responsibility for those emotions and use them as a way to move forward and to expand your emotional maturity.
And doing this work is really about speaking up respectfully when it's hard, not needing the environment to change to feel grounded. And so the more and more you can sit with these uncomfortable feelings, name them, validate them, and ground yourself in them, the more you're going to be able to respond in a way that creates more possibilities for yourself and creates more learning for yourself in that moment.
Research from Harvard Business Review actually talks about emotionally intelligent leaders foster positive work climates and enhance team effectiveness. So it's not just about you showing up with your own emotional maturity, but it's you fostering an environment that helps other people understand that emotions are okay, that sitting with intense emotions is part of the game. And learning about yourself while you're sitting with these emotions is going to set you up for the next level game.
I oftentimes talk about how emotional maturity and learning how to embrace emotions that you didn't typically feel a lot of before is part of table stakes at this next level. Really learning how to affirm yourself in situations where people might not affirm you. You might get yelled at, you might make a mistake, and it might be a high-stakes mistake, but you get to create that emotional maturity for yourself to learn how to react to the situation.
So, I just wanted to share for myself because I've had a lot of really amazing bosses, really supportive bosses in my time, and I've learned so much from them. And there is something about having a boss that you trust and that you care about. But there is also something about having a boss that you never thought you could create a strong relationship with, where you never thought you could see eye to eye, where you never thought you could stand up for yourself because he's so abrasive and so loud and so angry.
This was me. I had a boss like that where I was like, I don't know if I could work with this person. And I think there were part of me that was like, I not sure if this is the work environment for me. I kind of entertained it for probably like 20% of the time because I was like, this doesn't feel good. I don't like going to meetings. I don't like getting shut down. I don't like getting yelled at in front of my peers. I don't like feeling like I am being under attack.
But I was also super lucky because I had my own coaching at the time that really helped me see the bigger game of this. And for me, I had decided, this isn't going to be the only sort of arrogant, bully, abrasive man that I was going to work with. I knew that my runway for my career was going to be much more expansive, and I knew learning the skill of actually working with this person and understanding them and forging a relationship with them. And it didn't mean kissing his ass. That's not really what I was playing into, and I actually don't even think that would work for him or with him, right?
It wasn't about manipulating the situation. It was really about me learning how to be with his strong emotions while I was sitting with my own. And instead of allowing those uncomfortable emotions to shut me down, shrink me down, have me not speak up, I actually had to learn this over time. It was, you know, every month end we'd have these meetings, so I'd always have an opportunity to work on it. And I got better and better. I actually learned how to understand that his anger, his emotions were more a lot more about fear.
And I spent way more time focused on the content of what he was saying, the substance of what he was saying versus how he was saying it. And my emotional reaction to how he was saying it over time kind of didn't faze me. You know, I'm like, "Okay, he's angry." Like, what's the big deal? I've heard him be angry for the last six months. So it kind of no longer had that emotional reaction in me that would shut me down because my window of tolerance was expanding and had expanded at that point.
And so I could be much more quick with him. And no matter how he was presenting the information, what tone, I could really just engage with the topic that he was talking about versus all of the emotions that I historically felt because I was so uncomfortable with the way that he would present things. And this is a really powerful skill.
I actually had another client who was able to notice this for herself. I want to share this with you because it is an example of what emotional maturity looks like in action. And what you could see for yourself as you start embracing this skill set for yourself. This is actually, I turned it into an email for my mailing list because it was so compelling and I wanted other people to hear the process that my client went through. So you can just imagine this is you.
You hear from your direct reports that your boss, the CEO, has asked them to fly across the country to meet with him next week. You react. You feel angry. You think, he should have come directly to me, not to my direct reports. He is trying to undermine my leadership. He doesn't respect me. He is a terrible boss and leader. You notice how you feel like a victim. You take a deep breath. You decide to interrupt your internal talk track. You ask yourself, how would a responsible leader show up?
A leader would be decisive, clear, and confident. You tap into your resourcefulness. You get an idea. You act swiftly. You tell your team to book their flights. You decide to meet them at the office. You show up with no drama, ready to work. You feel confident, empowered, and purposeful. You channel your leadership presence. Your meeting is not only productive, but there are clear next steps. You are a force to be reckoned with. You don't allow external circumstances to influence your leadership. You take radical responsibility.
Channeling your emotional maturity and leadership presence is not just a nice-to-have skill; it's a must-have skill, especially for women in male-dominated spaces. This example, again, comes from one of my clients who has really embraced emotional maturity, building out her window of tolerance. She was still having emotional reactions.
The difference was she wasn't allowing those reactions to stop her, shrink her down, push her into some spiral that got her to feel like she has no control, that she's disempowered, that this is just her, you know, circumstances, she's a victim of this. She actually used the emotions, was able to notice herself and take a breath and then choose consciously how she wants to show up. This is really emotional maturity in action.
And this is such an important skill because as a woman leader, especially in a male-dominated space, you're going to have this more and more. And the cost of staying emotionally immature is that you will feel that you have to stay tied to safe environments. You will only look for bosses that you feel like you can work with. You limit your leadership potential. You give your power away to difficult people.
I also just recently talked to somebody who was like, there was a difficult woman who was on her team and she literally left her job because she couldn't deal with this difficult person. And they weren't even an authority figure. They were just somebody on their team. But again, this is where emotional maturity really either makes or breaks you. It either expands your opportunities, empowers you, and has you opening up new doors and new levels of learning and leadership, or it keeps you stuck.
It keeps you capping your growth, your promotion opportunities, your ability to only work with certain types of people. And the consequences is continually seeking environments free of conflict, which can really hinder your personal and professional development. Versus the empowerment, cultivating emotional maturity allows you to thrive regardless of the external circumstances.
So if your sense of safety depends on the behaviors of others, you will always be at their mercy. Versus you becoming that person who creates safety within themselves. You becoming that person that expands your emotional maturity. And when you are feeling uncomfortable, you remind yourself that your body can handle this feeling and that you sit with the emotion. You allow it to come in versus running away from it.
And I get it. In those moments, and I've had them too, whether it's personal or professional, where you're like, something has gone terribly wrong and you just want to jump out of a window or something. But the reality is, nothing has gone terribly wrong. You are having an emotion in your body, and you can't have an emotion that actually is dangerous for your body. So you might feel really strong emotions in your body, but you can, right, be that parent to yourself and say, "This is okay. You are okay. You are just feeling uncomfortable emotions. You are expanding your emotional capacity."
I will have to say this last week or two, I've been up against some things personally and professionally, and it's really helped me when I sit with myself and say, this is all good. You are expanding your emotional capacity. You have a big life. You've got lots of things on your mind. You've got lots of responsibilities. And this is part of just expanding that window of tolerance.
And even saying that to myself helps me to be with the emotion, notice my reactions, but then also be able to relate to myself in a different, more expansive way and relate to other people in that way as well. Have more grace for other people, have more openness, be more curious about how they're feeling when I am able to ground my emotions down and to show up with that emotional maturity in my relationships with myself and other people.
So that was today's episode. I know we covered a lot of ground, but I want to have you, especially if you're somebody who's like, I want to leave my job, I want to leave my environment. I want you to notice what power are you giving away? This is actually, as an exercise, you want to ask yourself, who or what am I giving my power to right now? What are you making the circumstance in your life cause you to do that doesn't feel empowering?
The second question I want you to ask yourself is, how can I use this challenge to grow my window of emotional tolerance? And thirdly, what would it look like to stand firm, grounded, and mature without needing them to change? So this isn't about other people around you changing. This is about you changing, and this is about the growth that's on the line and on the table for you in this moment and for the rest of your career and the rest of your life.
So next time you feel triggered or frustrated by someone at work, pause and say, internally, this is my classroom. I'm here to learn, not react. You want to be embracing this. Emotional maturity isn't about enduring abuse or staying stuck. It's about building your resilience, expanding your leadership capacity, and creating safety from the inside out. Because when you master this, no boss, no co-worker, no culture, no circumstance can define your future but you.
I am excited to hear how you take this in for yourself, what you learn about yourself, and I'm happy to hear from any of you. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can DM me directly. I personally reply to any of those messages.
All right, I will see you all next week. Have a lovely week.
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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