44. Emotional Resilience Isn’t About Controlling Emotion - It’s About Commanding It
Women are constantly told to calm down, take a breath, and manage their emotions. But what if this approach is actually limiting your leadership potential? What if the real issue isn't that you're too emotional, but that you've been taught to use only half of your emotional facilities?
This week, I'm exploring the difference between emotional suppression and true emotional resiliency, and why having the full range of emotional expression is critical for ambitious women who want to lead powerfully. Using the Wright Model of Emotional Facilities, I'll show you four distinct ways to work with your emotions and why most women overuse only two of them.
Tune in today to discover why your anger matters, how to express difficult emotions without becoming a bulldozer, and what happens when you finally give yourself permission to use all four emotional directions. I share real examples from my coaching practice, and how to clean up emotional expression when you feel you’ve gone too far. By the end, you'll understand why emotional resiliency isn't about having less emotion, but about having more options for how you channel them.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
The difference between emotional resilience and suppression.
Why self-silencing and emotional suppression lead to resentment, health issues, and being overlooked in leadership.
How to recognize emotional suppression patterns.
The four emotional facilities, and which ones women typically overuse versus avoid.
Practical ways to activate your anger and passion without becoming reactive or unprofessional.
How to clean up emotional expression when you feel you've gone too far.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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The Heart of the Fight by Judith and Bob Wright
Full Episode Transcript:
If you've ever been told you're too emotional or felt like you had to shut down your feelings just to get through the day, this episode is for you. We're taught to regulate emotions by calming down, but real leadership requires more than just composure. It requires emotional capacity. Today, I'm going to show you a powerful model to build that capacity so that you can feel fully, express strategically, and take bold action without apology. This is how we rewrite the rules for women in leadership.
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.
All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode. It is all about emotional resiliency and how you can use your full range to lead powerfully. So, I want to dive in with first understanding the difference between resilience versus suppression. I think there's a lot of things out there where it is confusing with all of the emotional frameworks out there. People don't really know what emotional resiliency means and is because it's not always easy to be taught. It's hard to understand how it shows up, and we have so many messages in the world that are conflicting, confusing, we don't know how to operate and to actually build this resiliency.
But this emotional resiliency, I can tell you a lot of the women that I coach with come to me because they want this. They want to have their emotional range. They want to feel emotionally resilient. They want to feel like they have agency over their emotions and they use it productively. So, this episode is really that first step into understanding what this could look like for you, feel like for you, and I'm going to share with you a tool that can help you understand your emotional capacity better because that will lead to emotional resiliency.
So, what is the difference between resilience and suppression? It's not about bouncing back fast or always staying calm. I think a lot of people know that when you're emotionally dysregulated, it is good to calm down, but also, there are other ways that you can approach your emotions that can help you to express more fully, understand yourself more intimately, and take bolder action. So, let's first talk about true resilience is having emotional range and strategic direction. This is understanding that those two things at play actually create true resiliency.
Let's talk about emotional suppression and how it shows up. Sometimes, it is showing up as being overly nice, apologizing for your feelings, apologizing for yourself, apologizing for interrupting, right? And it could also show up as talking yourself out of the truth, being justifying your emotions in some way that has you not really speak up for what you want and need. It might sound something like, "Well, if I say this, it's going to make him feel uncomfortable, so I really just shouldn't say this. It's not a big deal." So that's how you talk yourself out of your truth, and that's actually emotional suppression, not expression, not resiliency, none of that stuff.
Or it's suppressing your feelings to preserve the peace. Again, it might look like, gosh, I really don't want to go to that family event that I feel obligated to go to. But let's not think about that. Let's just think about how fun it will be when I'm there. So it's almost like redirecting to some positive feeling versus actually feeling what you're feeling in the moment.
And then the next one is around following rules at the cost of authenticity. Again, this is where you suppress your emotions and you abandon yourself. You decide like, "Okay, well, I was asked by my boss to come to an event even though that means me not going to see my best friend who's in town." This is where we abandon ourselves and we follow rules at the cost of our true authenticity. We want to be that good worker, that good soldier, and we decide to suppress our emotions and just follow the rules and just decide that's what you're going to do because you don't want to feel any other emotional upset. So, again, that's emotional suppression, following rules at the cost of authenticity.
But what you can do, and this is part of building your emotional capacity and resiliency, is learning the different ways to deal with your emotions and knowing that you have different emotional facilities within you. So, this comes from the book The Heart of the Fight from Judith and Bob Wright. It's the Wright model of emotional facilities, and it really explains how you could be using your emotions in different ways and the different facilities that you have possible for you. And I'm going to share with you what they are, but also how they typically show up for women and men.
If you imagine that there's four different ways that you can go with your emotional expression and your emotional facilities, there's the down, grounding, calming our nervous system. Think about this as breathwork, body scanning. It's an important tool, but it's only a tool to ground downward because oftentimes if we are having really, really strong emotions, then it's important to slow ourselves down and emotionally regulate downward, down-regulate.
So this down-regulation happens where we want to calm our body, we want to take deep breaths, we want to notice ourselves before reacting quickly. Typically, you know, notice this in women that are feeling lots of emotions sometimes. Women are often encouraged to down-regulate, like, "Oh, you're being too emotional. Why don't you go take a walk? Or why don't you go do something? Or why don't you take a break?" Sometimes you're going to notice people wanting you to down-regulate because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
Here's another piece. There's up-regulation. Oftentimes when people are really bored in their life, this is a good sign that you need to up-regulate. You need to feel more emotions. You need to connect with yourself better. Up-regulating is mobilizing energy. It's activating passion, anger, courage, maybe even fear, noticing what's coming up. A lot of times we in the world are just doing things and ignoring our emotions, and we don't even know how to up-regulate. But if you're bored and if you're feeling not really interested in your life, this is a sign that you need to work on this up-regulation. It's needed when you've been quiet for too long, when you've been, you know, kind of in your shell, when you feel disconnected from yourself, it's important to know how to up-regulate.
And then there's the in. So this is that arrow pointing inward. There's the reflection and introspection. And this is where you want to ask yourself, what am I feeling? What do I need? What is this telling me? So, with that emotion, you want to be able to ask yourself these things. And then there's out. This is the expression. This is communication. This is turning your inner world into language that others can understand and respond to.
So, that is all of the four ways, things that you could be doing with your emotions. And all of them are productive and useful. You just want to notice which ones do you overuse. And I will tell you, with a lot of women, including myself, most of what we are taught to do and what we are taught in society to do and what feels comfortable for us to do is go down, like down-regulating, and in, right?
So, instead of expressing or up-regulating, oftentimes, and I've done this with myself too, right? If I'm feeling uncomfortable, I will calm myself down, I'll take some deep breaths, and then I will ask myself, "What's happening? What's going on for me?" Which is not a bad skill, but you want to know that you need all four. True leadership needs all four facilities, and you want to be playing with all four of them.
And this is what emotional agility looks like, being able to maybe it is going down and in, but it's also about going up and out. A lot of men are much better at going up and out. They're angry. It's like when I see my husband in the car and there's traffic, he's angry, and he goes up, he is like saying all these things, and then it goes out of him, right? He actually speaks it outwardly. He has that sort of entitlement to own his upset and just name it and say it.
And actually, that's a lot of work for women. Women oftentimes self-silence, and they are not actually speaking up, and they are pushing it down and suppressing it and putting it inward and trying to justify their feelings or hold back instead of saying the uncomfortable thing, owning it, you know, being able to up-regulate to really feel why they're angry, to feel why they're passionate about something.
Oftentimes, if you are not super emotionally mature or you didn't grow up with a family that, you know, had a lot of emotions, you might be scared of your emotions. Or maybe you had a parent who was angry and you swore to yourself like, "I'm not going to be angry." Well, the part that I do with a lot of my clients is that we need to reclaim your anger because there's life force and there's power in that. And learning how to up-regulate that and understand what it's there for and to express it outwardly, this is powerful. A lot of times for people, and it was for me too, it feels really scary because it's out of the norm and it's unfamiliar, but it is powerful.
And having all four of these is important because you don't know what's going to happen in your life, in both personal and professional. But I will tell you, if you are an ambitious woman who wants more in their life and expects to, you know, climb up that leadership ladder, you are going to need all four of these facilities. There's going to be sometimes when you are feeling lots of fear and it's important to calm yourself down and go inward. There are other times when things are going to be on the line and you need to activate your anger, your intention, and speak up and say, "Listen, this isn't going to fly. We can't do it this way, and here's why."
This is why it's so important to work on these facilities and to give yourself permission to practice them because if you're just focusing on out and in, there's no way that you are going to be seen. You'll probably likely be more overlooked. You'll be self-silencing. You're not going to be, you know, connected with your own emotions.
And listen, most of us, we want to follow leaders who have like this emotional capacity. Not always anger because sometimes people feel really scared by anger, but we also know what it feels like to work with someone who is passionate, who you could tell that they are expressing their emotions because you feel connected to them. You feel like you want them to lead you. You feel influenced by them. This is why having this emotional resiliency and having this full range is going to help you accelerate in your leadership, both in your personal and professional life. You need to have these also in relationships. I use this with my husband all the time. It's important that we are able to express. For him, he's working more on the in and, you know, down, right? So, I'm working on more up and out.
But this is important. You want to notice for yourself, of these four, what is my go-to? You know, what do I usually go to? And what does growth and expansiveness look like for me as I build my emotional capacity? Because this will lead to more emotional resiliency, having more facilities to be able to use your emotions in this way.
Let me ground this down into some real-life examples because I think oftentimes, you know, it can feel really abstract. So, let me first share with you a client that I'm working with who is having a really difficult time at work. So, my client has been given an expanded scope. She was given a new team and more deliverables, but there's a lot of open positions, which her boss says we can't fill.
So what did she notice for herself? So again, historically when we started working together, a lot of, you know, down and in, trying to make it work, trying to figure it out. But here's the thing, it's not working out. She's not able to do what she needs to do, what the company needs her to do, because she's lacking resources. So this is her ability to go up and out, which has been the work that we have been working on for a while. So I was super proud of herself, even though she came into our coaching session saying, "I lost it. I was so angry. This isn't good for me."
But then when I asked her, "What happened?" She said, "I was so angry. I sat down and then I wrote out exactly what I needed from my boss. I said exactly why this whole plan doesn't work, exactly why I need resources." And I laid it out there, and I sat on it, and I wasn't going to send it, but then I chose to send it.
This is a great example of her going up and out. She used her anger. She used her anger intentionally to say what was so, not blaming people, not, you know, calling names or whatever. She literally just said, "This is what's happening. These are the deliverables that are needed, but this is the staff and this isn't going to work." So she also, that emotion allowed her to put her foot down, allowed her to put her stake in the ground and say what's so. And what happened, even though she afterwards was like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know if I should have sent it or not." But guess what happened? Her boss actually said, "Give me until the end of the month."
That's everything. That's huge, right? She could have just been placating him or trying to do the job resentful, but she gave him her intentional upset in an email, clearly defining how this isn't going to work, and he met her with an answer. Now, maybe she doesn't love the answer because she's got to go a month without it, but that was an answer. And he didn't go into any drama or anything like that. So that really gave me clarity about how clear her email was because he responded with something that was just as clear.
So this is what you want to notice, right? When you show up with your emotions and you show up with your clarity and you allow yourself to be with those emotions and actually express it in a way, often times, we as women question that responsibility. We think maybe it's irresponsible. We think maybe we've gone too far. But if you don't know what it's like to go too far or to even be able to express it, you're not going to learn. Like part of the learning is to do it.
You know, and I'll share a situation where I felt like I went a little too far. I was really angry about something, and my team member said to me, "Oh, I just did this because I needed to get it done really quickly, and so I did this calculation." And I felt like I lost it, too. I had the same thought about myself as my client did where I was like, "I got really angry. I got really frustrated and said, 'How could you let this happen? This can't happen. This is not right.'" And in the moment, I'm like, "Oh," but it made sense. Actually, I had a lot of fear and I was questioning things and I allowed my emotions to come out.
And guess what? If you overdo it, you can always step it back. You can always say, "Hey, sorry I showed up too hard there." And that's actually what I did with my direct report. About a couple of hours later, I came back and said, "Hey, sorry, I was very tense and I was speaking really loudly. I just felt really scared that this number was wrong, and a lot of our leaders are making decisions on this number." And she said to me, "I get it, you know, I understand where you're coming from."
So, you want to know that you even practicing these facilities, you have room. You have room to make mistakes, but this is where you make mistakes is also where you learn. And I didn't feel like I made like some huge mistake. I, you know, got upset with this person in front of a lot of people, but I also cleaned it up. And that's okay too. This is what leadership is about. It's about expanding your emotional capacity. It's about giving yourself permission to use all of your emotional facilities. Because if we're not able to do this, then we're not able to deal with all of the stuff that comes our way. And it's important to be able to deal with your emotions in a lot of different ways.
I also know a lot of people suppress their emotions because they get so angry and they're so resentful and so upset. And they go for that glass of wine after work to cut that edge off, to lessen that intensity because you haven't expressed outward. And I'm going to confess, I was one of those corporate people. I used to feel like I need to get a drink after today. It was a hard day. And I didn't know how to express up and out and I was keeping it in and that's not good for us either. We're holding in a lot of our own emotional expression, which is at the end of the day, also valuable for people. Like it was valuable for my client to share what she thought, why she thought it, and be very clear with her boss because now he knows Sarah needs resources. So now he knows that and he's going to be really clear about making sure that she gets resources at the end of the month.
And then even with my person that I yelled at, my direct report, she understands how important it was, why I was so upset, why I was so scared. And this is good learning for her too, as she continues navigating her own corporate world and how she wants to deal with leaders and why the work that she does matters so much. So you want to notice that.
And so we want to be able to have these facilities because it's important to have this range and not always just go in and down. That's what, again, what a lot of women do. And if you're going to go toe-to-toe with other men, you have to be able to express and you have to be able to say what's so in the moment and interrupt in the moment in a way that is in line with your authentic leadership. And it takes practice. So you got to just try it on and see how it is.
So those were two real-life examples of why it's important to speak up and out and to be able to notice and regulate your emotions at the same time, right? And that these facilities, you know, they're important to be able to have a lot of emotional agility. So, why this builds true power? Spaces weren't built for women to lead emotionally. So we're rewriting that. There is a lot of rules in society that say women need to self-silence and please. And really the research that I've seen around self-silencing that women are doing, it's causing them to have more autoimmune diseases. It's causing them to have a lot of health concerns and mental health pieces.
I'm even reading an article about how much it takes women to cognitively hold back anger and how exhausted people feel because they are not giving themselves permission to be angry, to notice their angry to be angry, to honor their anger, to even speak up. So, when we use all four directions, we are responsive, not reactive. There's a lot of other places. You'll be less emotionally triggered when you're more responsive.
Emotionally triggered happens a lot of times when we have a lot of built-up emotions that we have pushed down and in. And so when something happens, we're so triggered. Like I was just talking to my husband today about being emotionally triggered by my dad. I have a lot of past experience where I pushed myself down and in, and I didn't speak up for what I wanted. And so when things happen and I get triggered, it all kind of comes back. But the more I'm able to speak up, get clear with myself, and emotionally regulate up and give myself permission to feel, I'm able to get back to myself and get true to my authentic leadership and feel more powerful in me versus things are happening to me.
This skill makes you trustworthy, clear, and compelling without being a doormat or a bulldozer. Did you see that example that I gave around my client? She isn't a doormat, but she also didn't give her boss an ultimatum. She just said what's not working. And by being able to say that clearly, he gave her a clear response back. Emotionally resilient leaders don't shut down emotions, they channel them. Again, you've got choices. You can go in, you can go up, you can go out, you can go down, right? You want to notice for you, what are those emotional channels that you haven't utilized enough? Again, like I said, for most of the women that I coach, it's going to be up and out. So oftentimes, we are self-silencing.
So, I want you to go out and practice this. I want you to notice for yourself first, you know, using the four facilities, what do you usually do? Are you usually going up? Are you usually going down? Are you usually going in or you expressing out? Sometimes people have the opposite problem. They go too quickly to up and out and they are seen as like a hothead and they're seen as not really holistic. They're seen as reactive, right? So you just want to notice what it is for you. Like I said, for most of the women that I am coaching, it's really that in and down that they overuse. So, again, ask yourself, what direction do I overuse, which ones do I avoid, and you want to practice those ones. So I'm often times, if I notice anger now, I want to go up and then I want to go out. But sometimes I want to go in to understand myself too.
So this isn't about, you know, you're doing something wrong. This is about expanding your toolkit, expanding your tool belt, having a bigger emotional range, having other ways to express yourself and be with yourself and your emotions. So, before your next tough conversation, ask yourself, do I need to go in first? Like are there things that you need to ask yourself about yourself first? Do I need to activate more fire and go up, you know, up-regulate yourself? Or have I grounded myself? Am I grounded enough to have this conversation where I am not breaking down in tears and I can actually speak up in a way intentionally?
So that's the last one. Am I ready to share out with intention? So, these are the four ways you get to be with yourself. There is no wrong emotion. There's only unpracticed expression. There's only unpracticed skills that we're learning in this episode that will serve you really well in your leadership and in your life.
So, if you've ever felt like you had to mute parts of yourself to be taken seriously, this episode is your invitation to try a different way. Leadership doesn't require less emotion, it requires more capacity. The more you use your full range, the more powerful and sustainable your leadership becomes. The more you become authentically aligned with yourself.
All right, that was the episode for today. I would love to hear your feedback on this. I would love to hear how you're using this. If you are going up and out and starting to build this emotional resiliency for yourself, I want to hear how it's impacting your leadership and your life. So feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or on Instagram. I personally reply back myself, and I'd love to hear from you. All right, have a beautiful week. I will see you next 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.
All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode. It is all about emotional resiliency and how you can use your full range to lead powerfully. So, I want to dive in with first understanding the difference between resilience versus suppression. I think there's a lot of things out there where it is confusing with all of the emotional frameworks out there. People don't really know what emotional resiliency means and is because it's not always easy to be taught. It's hard to understand how it shows up, and we have so many messages in the world that are conflicting, confusing, we don't know how to operate and to actually build this resiliency.
But this emotional resiliency, I can tell you a lot of the women that I coach with come to me because they want this. They want to have their emotional range. They want to feel emotionally resilient. They want to feel like they have agency over their emotions and they use it productively. So, this episode is really that first step into understanding what this could look like for you, feel like for you, and I'm going to share with you a tool that can help you understand your emotional capacity better because that will lead to emotional resiliency.
So, what is the difference between resilience and suppression? It's not about bouncing back fast or always staying calm. I think a lot of people know that when you're emotionally dysregulated, it is good to calm down, but also, there are other ways that you can approach your emotions that can help you to express more fully, understand yourself more intimately, and take bolder action. So, let's first talk about true resilience is having emotional range and strategic direction. This is understanding that those two things at play actually create true resiliency.
Let's talk about emotional suppression and how it shows up. Sometimes, it is showing up as being overly nice, apologizing for your feelings, apologizing for yourself, apologizing for interrupting, right? And it could also show up as talking yourself out of the truth, being justifying your emotions in some way that has you not really speak up for what you want and need. It might sound something like, "Well, if I say this, it's going to make him feel uncomfortable, so I really just shouldn't say this. It's not a big deal." So that's how you talk yourself out of your truth, and that's actually emotional suppression, not expression, not resiliency, none of that stuff.
Or it's suppressing your feelings to preserve the peace. Again, it might look like, gosh, I really don't want to go to that family event that I feel obligated to go to. But let's not think about that. Let's just think about how fun it will be when I'm there. So it's almost like redirecting to some positive feeling versus actually feeling what you're feeling in the moment.
And then the next one is around following rules at the cost of authenticity. Again, this is where you suppress your emotions and you abandon yourself. You decide like, "Okay, well, I was asked by my boss to come to an event even though that means me not going to see my best friend who's in town." This is where we abandon ourselves and we follow rules at the cost of our true authenticity. We want to be that good worker, that good soldier, and we decide to suppress our emotions and just follow the rules and just decide that's what you're going to do because you don't want to feel any other emotional upset. So, again, that's emotional suppression, following rules at the cost of authenticity.
But what you can do, and this is part of building your emotional capacity and resiliency, is learning the different ways to deal with your emotions and knowing that you have different emotional facilities within you. So, this comes from the book The Heart of the Fight from Judith and Bob Wright. It's the Wright model of emotional facilities, and it really explains how you could be using your emotions in different ways and the different facilities that you have possible for you. And I'm going to share with you what they are, but also how they typically show up for women and men.
If you imagine that there's four different ways that you can go with your emotional expression and your emotional facilities, there's the down, grounding, calming our nervous system. Think about this as breathwork, body scanning. It's an important tool, but it's only a tool to ground downward because oftentimes if we are having really, really strong emotions, then it's important to slow ourselves down and emotionally regulate downward, down-regulate.
So this down-regulation happens where we want to calm our body, we want to take deep breaths, we want to notice ourselves before reacting quickly. Typically, you know, notice this in women that are feeling lots of emotions sometimes. Women are often encouraged to down-regulate, like, "Oh, you're being too emotional. Why don't you go take a walk? Or why don't you go do something? Or why don't you take a break?" Sometimes you're going to notice people wanting you to down-regulate because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
Here's another piece. There's up-regulation. Oftentimes when people are really bored in their life, this is a good sign that you need to up-regulate. You need to feel more emotions. You need to connect with yourself better. Up-regulating is mobilizing energy. It's activating passion, anger, courage, maybe even fear, noticing what's coming up. A lot of times we in the world are just doing things and ignoring our emotions, and we don't even know how to up-regulate. But if you're bored and if you're feeling not really interested in your life, this is a sign that you need to work on this up-regulation. It's needed when you've been quiet for too long, when you've been, you know, kind of in your shell, when you feel disconnected from yourself, it's important to know how to up-regulate.
And then there's the in. So this is that arrow pointing inward. There's the reflection and introspection. And this is where you want to ask yourself, what am I feeling? What do I need? What is this telling me? So, with that emotion, you want to be able to ask yourself these things. And then there's out. This is the expression. This is communication. This is turning your inner world into language that others can understand and respond to.
So, that is all of the four ways, things that you could be doing with your emotions. And all of them are productive and useful. You just want to notice which ones do you overuse. And I will tell you, with a lot of women, including myself, most of what we are taught to do and what we are taught in society to do and what feels comfortable for us to do is go down, like down-regulating, and in, right?
So, instead of expressing or up-regulating, oftentimes, and I've done this with myself too, right? If I'm feeling uncomfortable, I will calm myself down, I'll take some deep breaths, and then I will ask myself, "What's happening? What's going on for me?" Which is not a bad skill, but you want to know that you need all four. True leadership needs all four facilities, and you want to be playing with all four of them.
And this is what emotional agility looks like, being able to maybe it is going down and in, but it's also about going up and out. A lot of men are much better at going up and out. They're angry. It's like when I see my husband in the car and there's traffic, he's angry, and he goes up, he is like saying all these things, and then it goes out of him, right? He actually speaks it outwardly. He has that sort of entitlement to own his upset and just name it and say it.
And actually, that's a lot of work for women. Women oftentimes self-silence, and they are not actually speaking up, and they are pushing it down and suppressing it and putting it inward and trying to justify their feelings or hold back instead of saying the uncomfortable thing, owning it, you know, being able to up-regulate to really feel why they're angry, to feel why they're passionate about something.
Oftentimes, if you are not super emotionally mature or you didn't grow up with a family that, you know, had a lot of emotions, you might be scared of your emotions. Or maybe you had a parent who was angry and you swore to yourself like, "I'm not going to be angry." Well, the part that I do with a lot of my clients is that we need to reclaim your anger because there's life force and there's power in that. And learning how to up-regulate that and understand what it's there for and to express it outwardly, this is powerful. A lot of times for people, and it was for me too, it feels really scary because it's out of the norm and it's unfamiliar, but it is powerful.
And having all four of these is important because you don't know what's going to happen in your life, in both personal and professional. But I will tell you, if you are an ambitious woman who wants more in their life and expects to, you know, climb up that leadership ladder, you are going to need all four of these facilities. There's going to be sometimes when you are feeling lots of fear and it's important to calm yourself down and go inward. There are other times when things are going to be on the line and you need to activate your anger, your intention, and speak up and say, "Listen, this isn't going to fly. We can't do it this way, and here's why."
This is why it's so important to work on these facilities and to give yourself permission to practice them because if you're just focusing on out and in, there's no way that you are going to be seen. You'll probably likely be more overlooked. You'll be self-silencing. You're not going to be, you know, connected with your own emotions.
And listen, most of us, we want to follow leaders who have like this emotional capacity. Not always anger because sometimes people feel really scared by anger, but we also know what it feels like to work with someone who is passionate, who you could tell that they are expressing their emotions because you feel connected to them. You feel like you want them to lead you. You feel influenced by them. This is why having this emotional resiliency and having this full range is going to help you accelerate in your leadership, both in your personal and professional life. You need to have these also in relationships. I use this with my husband all the time. It's important that we are able to express. For him, he's working more on the in and, you know, down, right? So, I'm working on more up and out.
But this is important. You want to notice for yourself, of these four, what is my go-to? You know, what do I usually go to? And what does growth and expansiveness look like for me as I build my emotional capacity? Because this will lead to more emotional resiliency, having more facilities to be able to use your emotions in this way.
Let me ground this down into some real-life examples because I think oftentimes, you know, it can feel really abstract. So, let me first share with you a client that I'm working with who is having a really difficult time at work. So, my client has been given an expanded scope. She was given a new team and more deliverables, but there's a lot of open positions, which her boss says we can't fill.
So what did she notice for herself? So again, historically when we started working together, a lot of, you know, down and in, trying to make it work, trying to figure it out. But here's the thing, it's not working out. She's not able to do what she needs to do, what the company needs her to do, because she's lacking resources. So this is her ability to go up and out, which has been the work that we have been working on for a while. So I was super proud of herself, even though she came into our coaching session saying, "I lost it. I was so angry. This isn't good for me."
But then when I asked her, "What happened?" She said, "I was so angry. I sat down and then I wrote out exactly what I needed from my boss. I said exactly why this whole plan doesn't work, exactly why I need resources." And I laid it out there, and I sat on it, and I wasn't going to send it, but then I chose to send it.
This is a great example of her going up and out. She used her anger. She used her anger intentionally to say what was so, not blaming people, not, you know, calling names or whatever. She literally just said, "This is what's happening. These are the deliverables that are needed, but this is the staff and this isn't going to work." So she also, that emotion allowed her to put her foot down, allowed her to put her stake in the ground and say what's so. And what happened, even though she afterwards was like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know if I should have sent it or not." But guess what happened? Her boss actually said, "Give me until the end of the month."
That's everything. That's huge, right? She could have just been placating him or trying to do the job resentful, but she gave him her intentional upset in an email, clearly defining how this isn't going to work, and he met her with an answer. Now, maybe she doesn't love the answer because she's got to go a month without it, but that was an answer. And he didn't go into any drama or anything like that. So that really gave me clarity about how clear her email was because he responded with something that was just as clear.
So this is what you want to notice, right? When you show up with your emotions and you show up with your clarity and you allow yourself to be with those emotions and actually express it in a way, often times, we as women question that responsibility. We think maybe it's irresponsible. We think maybe we've gone too far. But if you don't know what it's like to go too far or to even be able to express it, you're not going to learn. Like part of the learning is to do it.
You know, and I'll share a situation where I felt like I went a little too far. I was really angry about something, and my team member said to me, "Oh, I just did this because I needed to get it done really quickly, and so I did this calculation." And I felt like I lost it, too. I had the same thought about myself as my client did where I was like, "I got really angry. I got really frustrated and said, 'How could you let this happen? This can't happen. This is not right.'" And in the moment, I'm like, "Oh," but it made sense. Actually, I had a lot of fear and I was questioning things and I allowed my emotions to come out.
And guess what? If you overdo it, you can always step it back. You can always say, "Hey, sorry I showed up too hard there." And that's actually what I did with my direct report. About a couple of hours later, I came back and said, "Hey, sorry, I was very tense and I was speaking really loudly. I just felt really scared that this number was wrong, and a lot of our leaders are making decisions on this number." And she said to me, "I get it, you know, I understand where you're coming from."
So, you want to know that you even practicing these facilities, you have room. You have room to make mistakes, but this is where you make mistakes is also where you learn. And I didn't feel like I made like some huge mistake. I, you know, got upset with this person in front of a lot of people, but I also cleaned it up. And that's okay too. This is what leadership is about. It's about expanding your emotional capacity. It's about giving yourself permission to use all of your emotional facilities. Because if we're not able to do this, then we're not able to deal with all of the stuff that comes our way. And it's important to be able to deal with your emotions in a lot of different ways.
I also know a lot of people suppress their emotions because they get so angry and they're so resentful and so upset. And they go for that glass of wine after work to cut that edge off, to lessen that intensity because you haven't expressed outward. And I'm going to confess, I was one of those corporate people. I used to feel like I need to get a drink after today. It was a hard day. And I didn't know how to express up and out and I was keeping it in and that's not good for us either. We're holding in a lot of our own emotional expression, which is at the end of the day, also valuable for people. Like it was valuable for my client to share what she thought, why she thought it, and be very clear with her boss because now he knows Sarah needs resources. So now he knows that and he's going to be really clear about making sure that she gets resources at the end of the month.
And then even with my person that I yelled at, my direct report, she understands how important it was, why I was so upset, why I was so scared. And this is good learning for her too, as she continues navigating her own corporate world and how she wants to deal with leaders and why the work that she does matters so much. So you want to notice that.
And so we want to be able to have these facilities because it's important to have this range and not always just go in and down. That's what, again, what a lot of women do. And if you're going to go toe-to-toe with other men, you have to be able to express and you have to be able to say what's so in the moment and interrupt in the moment in a way that is in line with your authentic leadership. And it takes practice. So you got to just try it on and see how it is.
So those were two real-life examples of why it's important to speak up and out and to be able to notice and regulate your emotions at the same time, right? And that these facilities, you know, they're important to be able to have a lot of emotional agility. So, why this builds true power? Spaces weren't built for women to lead emotionally. So we're rewriting that. There is a lot of rules in society that say women need to self-silence and please. And really the research that I've seen around self-silencing that women are doing, it's causing them to have more autoimmune diseases. It's causing them to have a lot of health concerns and mental health pieces.
I'm even reading an article about how much it takes women to cognitively hold back anger and how exhausted people feel because they are not giving themselves permission to be angry, to notice their angry to be angry, to honor their anger, to even speak up. So, when we use all four directions, we are responsive, not reactive. There's a lot of other places. You'll be less emotionally triggered when you're more responsive.
Emotionally triggered happens a lot of times when we have a lot of built-up emotions that we have pushed down and in. And so when something happens, we're so triggered. Like I was just talking to my husband today about being emotionally triggered by my dad. I have a lot of past experience where I pushed myself down and in, and I didn't speak up for what I wanted. And so when things happen and I get triggered, it all kind of comes back. But the more I'm able to speak up, get clear with myself, and emotionally regulate up and give myself permission to feel, I'm able to get back to myself and get true to my authentic leadership and feel more powerful in me versus things are happening to me.
This skill makes you trustworthy, clear, and compelling without being a doormat or a bulldozer. Did you see that example that I gave around my client? She isn't a doormat, but she also didn't give her boss an ultimatum. She just said what's not working. And by being able to say that clearly, he gave her a clear response back. Emotionally resilient leaders don't shut down emotions, they channel them. Again, you've got choices. You can go in, you can go up, you can go out, you can go down, right? You want to notice for you, what are those emotional channels that you haven't utilized enough? Again, like I said, for most of the women that I coach, it's going to be up and out. So oftentimes, we are self-silencing.
So, I want you to go out and practice this. I want you to notice for yourself first, you know, using the four facilities, what do you usually do? Are you usually going up? Are you usually going down? Are you usually going in or you expressing out? Sometimes people have the opposite problem. They go too quickly to up and out and they are seen as like a hothead and they're seen as not really holistic. They're seen as reactive, right? So you just want to notice what it is for you. Like I said, for most of the women that I am coaching, it's really that in and down that they overuse. So, again, ask yourself, what direction do I overuse, which ones do I avoid, and you want to practice those ones. So I'm often times, if I notice anger now, I want to go up and then I want to go out. But sometimes I want to go in to understand myself too.
So this isn't about, you know, you're doing something wrong. This is about expanding your toolkit, expanding your tool belt, having a bigger emotional range, having other ways to express yourself and be with yourself and your emotions. So, before your next tough conversation, ask yourself, do I need to go in first? Like are there things that you need to ask yourself about yourself first? Do I need to activate more fire and go up, you know, up-regulate yourself? Or have I grounded myself? Am I grounded enough to have this conversation where I am not breaking down in tears and I can actually speak up in a way intentionally?
So that's the last one. Am I ready to share out with intention? So, these are the four ways you get to be with yourself. There is no wrong emotion. There's only unpracticed expression. There's only unpracticed skills that we're learning in this episode that will serve you really well in your leadership and in your life.
So, if you've ever felt like you had to mute parts of yourself to be taken seriously, this episode is your invitation to try a different way. Leadership doesn't require less emotion, it requires more capacity. The more you use your full range, the more powerful and sustainable your leadership becomes. The more you become authentically aligned with yourself.
All right, that was the episode for today. I would love to hear your feedback on this. I would love to hear how you're using this. If you are going up and out and starting to build this emotional resiliency for yourself, I want to hear how it's impacting your leadership and your life. So feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or on Instagram. I personally reply back myself, and I'd love to hear from you. All right, have a beautiful week. I will see you next 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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