47. How to Handle an Angry Leader Without Losing Your Power
You're in a high-stakes meeting. A senior leader's voice rises, face turns red, hand slams the table. All eyes swing to you. Your chest tightens, your mind races. Do you freeze? Do you overexplain? Do you apologize? This moment, when someone else's anger hits you, is where many women leaders lose their power.
A podcast listener recently wrote in asking for help with an angry leader who regularly storms into her office, blaming her for things and sharing his anger. She freezes, shuts down, and feels helpless. As a woman who's navigated male-dominated spaces and coached hundreds of women on this exact challenge, I know how threatening it can feel when you suddenly find yourself in leadership roles with other leaders who openly express their anger, especially if you haven't been around angry people in your workplace before.
Tune in this week to learn a powerful reframe for understanding anger in leadership, plus 4 tactical tools to stop absorbing someone else's emotional storm. You'll discover why anger isn't actually the root emotion, how to respond productively without taking on responsibility for others' feelings, and the long-term strategy that transformed my own leadership.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why anger feels so threatening to women leaders.
The two core emotions that always sit underneath anger and how to listen for them.
How to distinguish between absorbing someone's anger versus understanding the actual problem.
4 practical tools to interrupt your nervous system patterns when facing an angry leader.
Why making friends with your own anger is essential for navigating high-stakes leadership rooms.
How grounding yourself changes the entire dynamic when someone comes at you with anger.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Picture this. You're in a high-stakes meeting. A senior leader's voice rises. His face turns red. His hand slams the table. All eyes swing to you. Your chest tightens, your mind races. Do you freeze? Do you overexplain? Do you apologize? This moment, when someone else's anger hits you, is where many women leaders lose their power. And today, I'm going to show you how to keep it.
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's episode is all about how to deal with an angry leader coming straight at you. I recently got a email from one of you podcast listeners. I always love hearing from you. One of them said, "Hey Yann, I am dealing with an angry leader. He is always coming into my office, blaming me for things, sharing his anger, and I freeze. I shut down. I don't know how to respond, and I feel very helpless in the situation. Please help me." So, I am happy to talk to you about this episode because it's something that I have had to overcome myself being a woman in male-dominated spaces and dealing with people's anger and dealing with my own anger and learning how to use anger effectively for myself and with other people.
And I have coached hundreds of women on this very thing because anger is one of the emotions that typically shows up with leaders. And if you've heard me talk about this before, it is really about emotional capacity. A lot of times people think that senior leaders behave badly or they have lots of emotions or they have, it's funny because in my family, I have two young ones and we say big feelings. They're big feelings.
But oftentimes I help people reframe this as the more senior you get, the more responsible you are for a lot of things, the more emotionally triggered you'll be. But also, as a mature executive that is able to use their feelings, express their feelings, and embody their feelings, sometimes it can feel really threatening for somebody who doesn't have the same emotional capacity or the same emotional intelligence or competence. And in a lot of ways, it could feel very threatening or scary for you if you have not been around angry people in your workplace and suddenly you find yourself in a leadership role with other leaders that openly share their anger. It could feel very threatening, scary, like you don't belong and you could feel like you're going to shut down when you want to speak up. So, let's first talk about why anger feels so threatening.
Women are often times conditioned to appease and to smooth things over, to avoid conflict. I have a lot of clients that I talk to who oftentimes in their family, their father was really temperamental, was really angry and grumpy, and the mom's role was kind of to either avoid the anger or to smooth it over or to placate to the dad in some way. So there might be ways that you have learned about anger, what's okay and what's not okay from your family system.
I actually, when I'm in my coaching sessions with my clients, we call this your family of origin blueprint, which is really the programming that you've gotten around feelings, around relationships, around how to relate to people, to connect with people, to survive the family system, if you will. There's going to be ways that you've learned to do that just because you grew up in a system. So, if someone's angry, you might have these internalized thoughts, it's my fault or I must fix this. So, for example, if your dad comes home angry because dinner is not on the table at 5:00 and you see your mom rushing to get everything ready and apologizing, you might have learned that somebody else's anger is your responsibility.
You might have learned that, oh my gosh, somebody is angry, I need to jump into action. It's my fault somehow. I need to take over. Your nervous system might have been programmed to, again, jump into action. Anger equals danger. So we're going to either fight, you know, either defend ourselves against the anger, we're going to flight, we're going to run out of the room because we don't know how to deal with it or shut down or stonewall, or fawn. It's not quite freezing, it's just kind of being small. Like I'm there, but I'm kind of helpless or I'm in the corner of I'm shrunken down. I don't know what to do. I'm numbed. I don't know how to think about this.
Why it feels so threatening is because of how it was programmed and how our nervous system reacts to that programming. And what I want you to reframe in your mindset and as we dive into this episode is knowing that it's not the anger itself that strips your authority. There's actually potentially nothing wrong with anger itself. It's how conditioning tells you to respond to that anger. If it tells you to respond in a way that is I need to hide or I need to do something or I need to take on more responsibility for somebody else's emotion, this may feel scary because you don't want that responsibility, right? And you may not know how to move forward in a productive way.
So, what I'm going to be talking to you about today is number one, a way to reframe anger, especially in work conversations that will have you listening beneath the anger and have you taking action in a different way, right? And not just diving into your automatic response that comes from your nervous system and your family of origin programming and historical conditioning. The next thing I'm going to give you is tactical tools to break and interrupt that pattern. And those are more short-term in nature, but a lot of my clients need those short-term things to get started to interrupt the pattern. And then there's a longer term solution that I want to share with you and is part of the deeper coaching container that I do with my one-on-one clients in my Undeniable Leadership Program.
But before I tell you the short and long-term goals, I want to talk about leadership reframe because this is something that had totally changed the way I thought about anger when I got to go underneath it and when I understood my anger better. But this leadership reframe is about listening beneath the anger. What I want to share with you is that oftentimes underneath anger, underneath somebody's angry reaction, there are two emotions. Anger is rarely the root. Beneath it lives these two emotions, and it's so important to know that these two emotions exist because then you can understand yourself better and you can understand the other person better.
So, the first emotion is fear. When we feel fear, we may jump into action with anger to protect ourselves, to take care of ourselves. And that fear might come from what's the worst case scenario they're bracing for. If you think somebody is going to about to hit you and you are really scared, but you're angry, right? You're yelling at them because you're like, oh my gosh, you almost hit me. It's like that's the fear coming out and the anger on top of it really explosive because that fear is real, right? That's aliveness.
The next emotion is hurt. What loss or threat are they protecting against, right? There's like a hurt that they might be feeling, some wound that they might be having, right? And so somebody might react super angry if you start touching on that hurt. And that might be something beneath their own story, their own projections, but it's good to know that these two things happen and these two emotions sit underneath anger because it gives you a different lens of looking at things.
The new lens is instead of absorbing their storm and just seeing like, oh my gosh, anger is coming, you start listening for fear or hurt underneath it. This will help you to get clearer on what is actually going on. First of all, as I said, anger is an emotion. Your job is not to absorb other people's anger. Your job is not to be responsible for other people's anger, but in a work environment, your job is to understand the data, understand the context, and be able to respond in a way that productively moves the problem forward or the solution forward in a way that, you know, is better for other people.
So, there's a difference between maybe your sales leader comes to you and is angry and mad at you. There's a difference between apologizing, taking on the anger, absorbing it, and feeling like you're responsible for their emotional well-being versus understanding what the problem is, understanding the emotions that relate to the problem and dealing with the problem. When you deal with the problem and you are not absorbing the emotional storm, you're going to be able to take better care of yourself. And when we take better care of ourselves, we're more in our prefrontal cortex, higher level thinking versus our primitive brain limbic system survival thinking. When we're in survival thinking, we're usually defending, we're usually, you know, freezing or running away from our problem or we are using strategies that might not be the best for a highly complex issue.
This is why leadership and emotional intelligence, emotional capacity, emotional toughness, and resilience all relate because as you get to more and more of these high stake rooms, there is more complexity, there is more emotions, there is more things on the line. I want to just share a story from my own leadership. I had a boss, I've shared about him before in this podcast. He was highly abrasive, very volatile, had a lot of anger, and I used to just shut down. I would have these conversations, I would share my thoughts, and he would just shut me down and freak out. And I would, you know, try to defend myself, but it wasn't really working.
Until I decided to start listening for the fear underneath it. And when I started listening for the fear underneath what he was saying, I got so much better at dealing with the problem at hand and understanding the data that was there to be able to respond in a productive way versus trying to absorb his emotions, trying to take care of myself and take care of him and feel like completely sort of emotionally kind of at capacity because I was doing too many things and I was more fearing his anger than really dealing with what was underneath his anger and what the data was.
So, often times as a finance leader, I would have to share about news like how our finances were going. And a lot of times, as soon as I shared that news, right? And I started understanding that the way that I was sharing it wasn't in a way that helped him feel calm. It more freaked him out. I might say we missed our target by a million dollars. And you know, as I was about to say what our plans was, he would chime in and freak out.
And I realized, you know, when I just took a zoom out, I realized, hey, what is he actually scared of? What might actually be scaring for him in this situation? And as I thought more about this, we were approaching budget season and I remember him saying, wait a minute, how can you guys be a million dollars off of your budget? And we just submitted budget to our leaders like a month ago. And it dawned on me that yeah, he's angry, but really he's scared because his credibility is on the line, because my credibility is on the line, our company's credibility is on the line, and he wants to understand what happened.
Historically, I would shut down or I would not know how to respond in a useful way. But this time, when I could listen for the fear, I could pause and say, hey, this is what happened. When we got our financial results, this is the big deals that were in our pipeline that we were expecting to move forward. The landscape has changed. These are no longer the deals. But what is positive is that we have four other deals that are in pipeline that look very good. And even though this is at risk, we're bringing these in and we will know more and actually one of these we're at a 50% close rate and that one is a really big deal. And that will end up, you know, mitigating a lot of this risk.
I had the words, I just didn't know how to use them. I didn't know how to interrupt his pattern because I was so scared of his anger. But the more I could see that his anger was fear being expressed as anger, the more I was in control of myself and the more grounded I felt to respond to him and to respond to his fears and to share my knowledge and what I could bring to the table. And the more I could do that in a firm and grounded way, the more he calmed down. The less upset he would get, the less he would escalate in his anger, the more calm he was. But it was me holding steady and firm and being really clear and interrupting his pattern so that it wouldn't just, you know, bulldoze our whole conversation.
So, what I want to say is it's not an easy thing, but this is something that you could start practicing today. You know, if you have an angry leader that often comes into your office, instead of dealing with just the anger, ask yourself and listen for what is the fear? What is the hurt underneath it? If you can ask yourself these questions, you will have a better ability to respond in a productive way, not taking on their emotions, but really dealing with the data at hand and understanding the emotional complexity underneath it.
There's another story from my client who realized her boss's blowups were tied to a fear about missing deadlines, especially deadlines with the customer that reflected on his reputation. Once she understood this, once she understood why every time she brought in things that were going to potentially upset that deadline, he would get so upset. Once she saw that, she stopped taking it personally. And she started gaining authority in the room because she would start off the message as in order to not miss this deadline, this is what we will have to do. So she would like start using it for herself and communicating in a way that he could hear it up front instead of hearing any type of fear of missing a deadline, she was saying this is what we need to execute in order to not miss the deadline.
So sometimes people just need to hear something that will help them calm themselves down. But if you're not calm and clear and grounded in yourself, you will be less likely to be able to respond in a way that is grounded, firm, and, you know, really certain in that moment. If you're feeling shaky and your shakiness might have more to do with your nervous system than your actual data, than the actual stuff that you know. Like for me, I knew if we had a hole in our budget, it was our responsibility to fix it.
But when I'm presenting and people don't really see that I'm presenting in a way that takes in all those emotional things in account, they're already jumping the gun and thinking ahead and thinking about what they need to be angry or fearful or hurt about. So this is your opportunity to be the most grounded. If you're grounded and firm within yourself, it's less likely that you're going to be swept up in someone else's storm. You're more witnessing it and you're more responding to it.
So let me share with you, that was a big piece of the leadership reframe listening beneath the anger. But let's dive into some more tactical things that you can do to stop the emotional absorption. I'm going to do a whole episode on absorbing emotions, but really in this context, let's think about it as absorbing someone's anger. Let's get practical. In the moment, when someone comes at you angry, you don't need theory, you need tools that work. So let me walk you through four tools that I have helped my clients use to just experiment and change up the pattern because typically when an angry person comes at you, there it's usually a pattern for them. They do it. You get to take it upon yourself to learn some new patterns to support yourself in different ways.
So, the first one is a state change. When anger hits, most women freeze. So you might have shoulders up, stomach clenched, you breathe shallowly. You know, you might end up maybe your jaw is like really tense and your body kind of collapses, or maybe it tenses up, you know, preparing for a bowl. You want to notice your body movements and be able to relax your body because when you relax your body and you give yourself a body state change, even standing up, even stretching, even taking a, you know, more firm posture, like a more up-seated posture, this will allow your body to know that it's engaged. It tells your nervous system like I have a choice in this moment. Like I'm not trapped. I'm safe. I have my body. I'm connected to my body in this moment.
So that's number one, just some embodied reset. You know, you want to be able to notice your body and not just go into that automatic nervous system pattern that you might have been used to going into. Like if your dad came home and you were used to shrinking in the corner, you want to do the opposite because part of this is breaking that nervous system pattern which will get you thinking differently and feeling differently. So that's number one, a state change.
Number two, I just did an episode on the executive pause, but breathing is going to be your best friend in this situation. When voices rise, your breath softens. Short breaths equal short fuses. You want to take a long inhale, a three second inhale, hold it, and exhale for four seconds. Now imagine looking them in the eye and saying slowly, "That's interesting." And I get, sometimes this is super scary. Somebody's coming at you with lots of anger, but you get to slow yourself down. Feel how it buys you space. Pausing doesn't weaken you. It calms you and signals confidence. That eye contact is also going to signal confidence. And you can say that's interesting. Let me think about that. You want to give yourself some sort of pause and breath and calmness in your body before jumping into whatever historical pattern you might have jumped into.
The third tool, this is one that will help people that are more visual. You want to be able to notice, wow, this person's coming. Picture yourself, and sometimes I will even have people draw a big circle around you, right? I have people think about themselves visualizing that they are in a permenal like, they are in like a force field is around them that is, I don't know, I always like to think about the color purple because somehow it gives me like relaxing energy. But it's like there's this purple bubble around you and nobody can penetrate that. You are still able to have conversations, you're still able to have your feelings, but you are protected in this space.
Their storm can crash against that outside of that purple bubble, but inside you're safe. You're steady, you're untouchable. And often times, you know, if you're again visual, you want to like draw the picture of that massive bubble, that protective layer, and then draw a dot inside and picture yourself as this dot inside and know that like, hey, I'm here. You know, and carry that into your meeting and carry that visualization because that will help ground you too. Like nobody's getting through here, you know? And even that groundedness will help you feel more firm in yourself and have you not absorbing all of the emotions that are coming your way, all of the anger that's coming your way. Again, that's a visual reset.
Now, the fourth tool is a mantra. It's a cognitive reset. And you may want to play around with words that will help you. But say this with me, "I will not absorb this. I am safe." Again, "I will not absorb this anger. I am safe." So, again, it's not about stonewalling, but it's about I'm not absorbing this anger right now. You might want to write it down, put it on a sticky note. This mantra interrupts that absorption of the pattern or that emotional programming pattern before it spirals you into burnout or spirals you into survival mode. So again, this is a cognitive reset.
So you might want to write it down if you know angry person's coming your way. And oftentimes we know, we have the idea when people are triggered when they're angry. I have a client who literally is like, every time in the office, he comes and finds me and he comes into my space and he does XYZ. And so what we're trying to do is interrupt the pattern and have tools for you to interrupt them. Again, these are more short-term strategies. But the more you interrupt the pattern, the less of that emotional absorption you're going to take and the less likely you'll go into your survival mode.
These tools don't erase the storm, but they stop the storm from erasing you and your power and your authority in that moment. And that, right there, is leadership. Alright, so let me tell you about the long-term strategy. And I say long-term because this takes time to develop. And I have lots of different exercises that again, in my one-on-one coaching container, I teach women to embody this. The number one emotion that I teach my clients that are females in male-dominated spaces is to make friends with your anger, to own your anger. This is a longer term strategy, right? Leadership isn't about avoiding anger. It's about building your capacity to hold it.
The more high stakes rooms you're in, the more you're going to notice more anger showing up for both men and women. And the more you accept your own anger and get to know your anger and understand the power of your anger, the more you can be with someone else's anger without judging them, without being superior to them, without feeling inferior to them, the more you're going to be able to be mutual with them and understand their anger and connect with them and to move forward in a way where it actually creates more safety and connectedness between the both of you in your anger. But that requires both people to have their anger integrated.
So what happens to a lot of women that feel like they don't have a relationship with their anger at all is you reject your anger and destabilized by other people's anger because you don't know how to deal with your anger in yourself. So when somebody comes to you super angry, you start feeling the anger towards you, you feel angry in your body and you're like somebody who's not used to anger, you may be like, oh my gosh, this is out of control. This is totally toxic. I don't know how to deal with this. I need to get out. Kind of like fighting.
When I'm talking about context of fighting, it's about learning how to resolve issues in a highly activated way. So when my husband and I fight, it is highly activated. It doesn't mean that we're screaming at each other, but we are very present and we are activated in it and we are both fighting for something that matters to us and we're also fighting for our relationship and our connection with each other at the same time. It is a difficult skill. Again, high stakes. The more senior you are, the more you're going to be in rooms where people own their own departments, they have their own teams underneath them, the more anger will show up because people have more to lose, there's more at the line. And your ability to be with your anger and other people's anger in a productive way is going to allow you to accelerate much more quickly in your leadership game.
Claiming your anger, that becomes information when you understand and you claim your own anger. You can sit in somebody else's shoe and understand, I understand why you're angry. I would be angry too, right? It's not as threatening when you can understand and empathize with somebody else's anger because you know what it feels like to have anger be your friend. So, the mantra here is when I own my anger, I stop shrinking in the storm. When I own my anger, I actually understand other people's anger better and I'm better able to productively navigate and problem solve, understand my own anger and somebody else's anger much better. So again, that is the long-term strategy.
So, that is today's podcast episode. Like I said, this was going to be a pretty heavy one. But the next time a leader comes at you angry, don't absorb it. Don't shrink. Right? You want to pause, you want to breathe, you want to listen for the fear beneath the fury. And remember, anger isn't the end of your authority. It's the invitation to claim it. Let's reframe your relationship with your own anger. This is the longer term game and you can do it. You're totally capable of doing it.
Alright, that is today's episode. I will see you all next week. If you liked this episode, if you have questions about this episode, email me, find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect. Thanks so much. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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's episode is all about how to deal with an angry leader coming straight at you. I recently got a email from one of you podcast listeners. I always love hearing from you. One of them said, "Hey Yann, I am dealing with an angry leader. He is always coming into my office, blaming me for things, sharing his anger, and I freeze. I shut down. I don't know how to respond, and I feel very helpless in the situation. Please help me." So, I am happy to talk to you about this episode because it's something that I have had to overcome myself being a woman in male-dominated spaces and dealing with people's anger and dealing with my own anger and learning how to use anger effectively for myself and with other people.
And I have coached hundreds of women on this very thing because anger is one of the emotions that typically shows up with leaders. And if you've heard me talk about this before, it is really about emotional capacity. A lot of times people think that senior leaders behave badly or they have lots of emotions or they have, it's funny because in my family, I have two young ones and we say big feelings. They're big feelings.
But oftentimes I help people reframe this as the more senior you get, the more responsible you are for a lot of things, the more emotionally triggered you'll be. But also, as a mature executive that is able to use their feelings, express their feelings, and embody their feelings, sometimes it can feel really threatening for somebody who doesn't have the same emotional capacity or the same emotional intelligence or competence. And in a lot of ways, it could feel very threatening or scary for you if you have not been around angry people in your workplace and suddenly you find yourself in a leadership role with other leaders that openly share their anger. It could feel very threatening, scary, like you don't belong and you could feel like you're going to shut down when you want to speak up. So, let's first talk about why anger feels so threatening.
Women are often times conditioned to appease and to smooth things over, to avoid conflict. I have a lot of clients that I talk to who oftentimes in their family, their father was really temperamental, was really angry and grumpy, and the mom's role was kind of to either avoid the anger or to smooth it over or to placate to the dad in some way. So there might be ways that you have learned about anger, what's okay and what's not okay from your family system.
I actually, when I'm in my coaching sessions with my clients, we call this your family of origin blueprint, which is really the programming that you've gotten around feelings, around relationships, around how to relate to people, to connect with people, to survive the family system, if you will. There's going to be ways that you've learned to do that just because you grew up in a system. So, if someone's angry, you might have these internalized thoughts, it's my fault or I must fix this. So, for example, if your dad comes home angry because dinner is not on the table at 5:00 and you see your mom rushing to get everything ready and apologizing, you might have learned that somebody else's anger is your responsibility.
You might have learned that, oh my gosh, somebody is angry, I need to jump into action. It's my fault somehow. I need to take over. Your nervous system might have been programmed to, again, jump into action. Anger equals danger. So we're going to either fight, you know, either defend ourselves against the anger, we're going to flight, we're going to run out of the room because we don't know how to deal with it or shut down or stonewall, or fawn. It's not quite freezing, it's just kind of being small. Like I'm there, but I'm kind of helpless or I'm in the corner of I'm shrunken down. I don't know what to do. I'm numbed. I don't know how to think about this.
Why it feels so threatening is because of how it was programmed and how our nervous system reacts to that programming. And what I want you to reframe in your mindset and as we dive into this episode is knowing that it's not the anger itself that strips your authority. There's actually potentially nothing wrong with anger itself. It's how conditioning tells you to respond to that anger. If it tells you to respond in a way that is I need to hide or I need to do something or I need to take on more responsibility for somebody else's emotion, this may feel scary because you don't want that responsibility, right? And you may not know how to move forward in a productive way.
So, what I'm going to be talking to you about today is number one, a way to reframe anger, especially in work conversations that will have you listening beneath the anger and have you taking action in a different way, right? And not just diving into your automatic response that comes from your nervous system and your family of origin programming and historical conditioning. The next thing I'm going to give you is tactical tools to break and interrupt that pattern. And those are more short-term in nature, but a lot of my clients need those short-term things to get started to interrupt the pattern. And then there's a longer term solution that I want to share with you and is part of the deeper coaching container that I do with my one-on-one clients in my Undeniable Leadership Program.
But before I tell you the short and long-term goals, I want to talk about leadership reframe because this is something that had totally changed the way I thought about anger when I got to go underneath it and when I understood my anger better. But this leadership reframe is about listening beneath the anger. What I want to share with you is that oftentimes underneath anger, underneath somebody's angry reaction, there are two emotions. Anger is rarely the root. Beneath it lives these two emotions, and it's so important to know that these two emotions exist because then you can understand yourself better and you can understand the other person better.
So, the first emotion is fear. When we feel fear, we may jump into action with anger to protect ourselves, to take care of ourselves. And that fear might come from what's the worst case scenario they're bracing for. If you think somebody is going to about to hit you and you are really scared, but you're angry, right? You're yelling at them because you're like, oh my gosh, you almost hit me. It's like that's the fear coming out and the anger on top of it really explosive because that fear is real, right? That's aliveness.
The next emotion is hurt. What loss or threat are they protecting against, right? There's like a hurt that they might be feeling, some wound that they might be having, right? And so somebody might react super angry if you start touching on that hurt. And that might be something beneath their own story, their own projections, but it's good to know that these two things happen and these two emotions sit underneath anger because it gives you a different lens of looking at things.
The new lens is instead of absorbing their storm and just seeing like, oh my gosh, anger is coming, you start listening for fear or hurt underneath it. This will help you to get clearer on what is actually going on. First of all, as I said, anger is an emotion. Your job is not to absorb other people's anger. Your job is not to be responsible for other people's anger, but in a work environment, your job is to understand the data, understand the context, and be able to respond in a way that productively moves the problem forward or the solution forward in a way that, you know, is better for other people.
So, there's a difference between maybe your sales leader comes to you and is angry and mad at you. There's a difference between apologizing, taking on the anger, absorbing it, and feeling like you're responsible for their emotional well-being versus understanding what the problem is, understanding the emotions that relate to the problem and dealing with the problem. When you deal with the problem and you are not absorbing the emotional storm, you're going to be able to take better care of yourself. And when we take better care of ourselves, we're more in our prefrontal cortex, higher level thinking versus our primitive brain limbic system survival thinking. When we're in survival thinking, we're usually defending, we're usually, you know, freezing or running away from our problem or we are using strategies that might not be the best for a highly complex issue.
This is why leadership and emotional intelligence, emotional capacity, emotional toughness, and resilience all relate because as you get to more and more of these high stake rooms, there is more complexity, there is more emotions, there is more things on the line. I want to just share a story from my own leadership. I had a boss, I've shared about him before in this podcast. He was highly abrasive, very volatile, had a lot of anger, and I used to just shut down. I would have these conversations, I would share my thoughts, and he would just shut me down and freak out. And I would, you know, try to defend myself, but it wasn't really working.
Until I decided to start listening for the fear underneath it. And when I started listening for the fear underneath what he was saying, I got so much better at dealing with the problem at hand and understanding the data that was there to be able to respond in a productive way versus trying to absorb his emotions, trying to take care of myself and take care of him and feel like completely sort of emotionally kind of at capacity because I was doing too many things and I was more fearing his anger than really dealing with what was underneath his anger and what the data was.
So, often times as a finance leader, I would have to share about news like how our finances were going. And a lot of times, as soon as I shared that news, right? And I started understanding that the way that I was sharing it wasn't in a way that helped him feel calm. It more freaked him out. I might say we missed our target by a million dollars. And you know, as I was about to say what our plans was, he would chime in and freak out.
And I realized, you know, when I just took a zoom out, I realized, hey, what is he actually scared of? What might actually be scaring for him in this situation? And as I thought more about this, we were approaching budget season and I remember him saying, wait a minute, how can you guys be a million dollars off of your budget? And we just submitted budget to our leaders like a month ago. And it dawned on me that yeah, he's angry, but really he's scared because his credibility is on the line, because my credibility is on the line, our company's credibility is on the line, and he wants to understand what happened.
Historically, I would shut down or I would not know how to respond in a useful way. But this time, when I could listen for the fear, I could pause and say, hey, this is what happened. When we got our financial results, this is the big deals that were in our pipeline that we were expecting to move forward. The landscape has changed. These are no longer the deals. But what is positive is that we have four other deals that are in pipeline that look very good. And even though this is at risk, we're bringing these in and we will know more and actually one of these we're at a 50% close rate and that one is a really big deal. And that will end up, you know, mitigating a lot of this risk.
I had the words, I just didn't know how to use them. I didn't know how to interrupt his pattern because I was so scared of his anger. But the more I could see that his anger was fear being expressed as anger, the more I was in control of myself and the more grounded I felt to respond to him and to respond to his fears and to share my knowledge and what I could bring to the table. And the more I could do that in a firm and grounded way, the more he calmed down. The less upset he would get, the less he would escalate in his anger, the more calm he was. But it was me holding steady and firm and being really clear and interrupting his pattern so that it wouldn't just, you know, bulldoze our whole conversation.
So, what I want to say is it's not an easy thing, but this is something that you could start practicing today. You know, if you have an angry leader that often comes into your office, instead of dealing with just the anger, ask yourself and listen for what is the fear? What is the hurt underneath it? If you can ask yourself these questions, you will have a better ability to respond in a productive way, not taking on their emotions, but really dealing with the data at hand and understanding the emotional complexity underneath it.
There's another story from my client who realized her boss's blowups were tied to a fear about missing deadlines, especially deadlines with the customer that reflected on his reputation. Once she understood this, once she understood why every time she brought in things that were going to potentially upset that deadline, he would get so upset. Once she saw that, she stopped taking it personally. And she started gaining authority in the room because she would start off the message as in order to not miss this deadline, this is what we will have to do. So she would like start using it for herself and communicating in a way that he could hear it up front instead of hearing any type of fear of missing a deadline, she was saying this is what we need to execute in order to not miss the deadline.
So sometimes people just need to hear something that will help them calm themselves down. But if you're not calm and clear and grounded in yourself, you will be less likely to be able to respond in a way that is grounded, firm, and, you know, really certain in that moment. If you're feeling shaky and your shakiness might have more to do with your nervous system than your actual data, than the actual stuff that you know. Like for me, I knew if we had a hole in our budget, it was our responsibility to fix it.
But when I'm presenting and people don't really see that I'm presenting in a way that takes in all those emotional things in account, they're already jumping the gun and thinking ahead and thinking about what they need to be angry or fearful or hurt about. So this is your opportunity to be the most grounded. If you're grounded and firm within yourself, it's less likely that you're going to be swept up in someone else's storm. You're more witnessing it and you're more responding to it.
So let me share with you, that was a big piece of the leadership reframe listening beneath the anger. But let's dive into some more tactical things that you can do to stop the emotional absorption. I'm going to do a whole episode on absorbing emotions, but really in this context, let's think about it as absorbing someone's anger. Let's get practical. In the moment, when someone comes at you angry, you don't need theory, you need tools that work. So let me walk you through four tools that I have helped my clients use to just experiment and change up the pattern because typically when an angry person comes at you, there it's usually a pattern for them. They do it. You get to take it upon yourself to learn some new patterns to support yourself in different ways.
So, the first one is a state change. When anger hits, most women freeze. So you might have shoulders up, stomach clenched, you breathe shallowly. You know, you might end up maybe your jaw is like really tense and your body kind of collapses, or maybe it tenses up, you know, preparing for a bowl. You want to notice your body movements and be able to relax your body because when you relax your body and you give yourself a body state change, even standing up, even stretching, even taking a, you know, more firm posture, like a more up-seated posture, this will allow your body to know that it's engaged. It tells your nervous system like I have a choice in this moment. Like I'm not trapped. I'm safe. I have my body. I'm connected to my body in this moment.
So that's number one, just some embodied reset. You know, you want to be able to notice your body and not just go into that automatic nervous system pattern that you might have been used to going into. Like if your dad came home and you were used to shrinking in the corner, you want to do the opposite because part of this is breaking that nervous system pattern which will get you thinking differently and feeling differently. So that's number one, a state change.
Number two, I just did an episode on the executive pause, but breathing is going to be your best friend in this situation. When voices rise, your breath softens. Short breaths equal short fuses. You want to take a long inhale, a three second inhale, hold it, and exhale for four seconds. Now imagine looking them in the eye and saying slowly, "That's interesting." And I get, sometimes this is super scary. Somebody's coming at you with lots of anger, but you get to slow yourself down. Feel how it buys you space. Pausing doesn't weaken you. It calms you and signals confidence. That eye contact is also going to signal confidence. And you can say that's interesting. Let me think about that. You want to give yourself some sort of pause and breath and calmness in your body before jumping into whatever historical pattern you might have jumped into.
The third tool, this is one that will help people that are more visual. You want to be able to notice, wow, this person's coming. Picture yourself, and sometimes I will even have people draw a big circle around you, right? I have people think about themselves visualizing that they are in a permenal like, they are in like a force field is around them that is, I don't know, I always like to think about the color purple because somehow it gives me like relaxing energy. But it's like there's this purple bubble around you and nobody can penetrate that. You are still able to have conversations, you're still able to have your feelings, but you are protected in this space.
Their storm can crash against that outside of that purple bubble, but inside you're safe. You're steady, you're untouchable. And often times, you know, if you're again visual, you want to like draw the picture of that massive bubble, that protective layer, and then draw a dot inside and picture yourself as this dot inside and know that like, hey, I'm here. You know, and carry that into your meeting and carry that visualization because that will help ground you too. Like nobody's getting through here, you know? And even that groundedness will help you feel more firm in yourself and have you not absorbing all of the emotions that are coming your way, all of the anger that's coming your way. Again, that's a visual reset.
Now, the fourth tool is a mantra. It's a cognitive reset. And you may want to play around with words that will help you. But say this with me, "I will not absorb this. I am safe." Again, "I will not absorb this anger. I am safe." So, again, it's not about stonewalling, but it's about I'm not absorbing this anger right now. You might want to write it down, put it on a sticky note. This mantra interrupts that absorption of the pattern or that emotional programming pattern before it spirals you into burnout or spirals you into survival mode. So again, this is a cognitive reset.
So you might want to write it down if you know angry person's coming your way. And oftentimes we know, we have the idea when people are triggered when they're angry. I have a client who literally is like, every time in the office, he comes and finds me and he comes into my space and he does XYZ. And so what we're trying to do is interrupt the pattern and have tools for you to interrupt them. Again, these are more short-term strategies. But the more you interrupt the pattern, the less of that emotional absorption you're going to take and the less likely you'll go into your survival mode.
These tools don't erase the storm, but they stop the storm from erasing you and your power and your authority in that moment. And that, right there, is leadership. Alright, so let me tell you about the long-term strategy. And I say long-term because this takes time to develop. And I have lots of different exercises that again, in my one-on-one coaching container, I teach women to embody this. The number one emotion that I teach my clients that are females in male-dominated spaces is to make friends with your anger, to own your anger. This is a longer term strategy, right? Leadership isn't about avoiding anger. It's about building your capacity to hold it.
The more high stakes rooms you're in, the more you're going to notice more anger showing up for both men and women. And the more you accept your own anger and get to know your anger and understand the power of your anger, the more you can be with someone else's anger without judging them, without being superior to them, without feeling inferior to them, the more you're going to be able to be mutual with them and understand their anger and connect with them and to move forward in a way where it actually creates more safety and connectedness between the both of you in your anger. But that requires both people to have their anger integrated.
So what happens to a lot of women that feel like they don't have a relationship with their anger at all is you reject your anger and destabilized by other people's anger because you don't know how to deal with your anger in yourself. So when somebody comes to you super angry, you start feeling the anger towards you, you feel angry in your body and you're like somebody who's not used to anger, you may be like, oh my gosh, this is out of control. This is totally toxic. I don't know how to deal with this. I need to get out. Kind of like fighting.
When I'm talking about context of fighting, it's about learning how to resolve issues in a highly activated way. So when my husband and I fight, it is highly activated. It doesn't mean that we're screaming at each other, but we are very present and we are activated in it and we are both fighting for something that matters to us and we're also fighting for our relationship and our connection with each other at the same time. It is a difficult skill. Again, high stakes. The more senior you are, the more you're going to be in rooms where people own their own departments, they have their own teams underneath them, the more anger will show up because people have more to lose, there's more at the line. And your ability to be with your anger and other people's anger in a productive way is going to allow you to accelerate much more quickly in your leadership game.
Claiming your anger, that becomes information when you understand and you claim your own anger. You can sit in somebody else's shoe and understand, I understand why you're angry. I would be angry too, right? It's not as threatening when you can understand and empathize with somebody else's anger because you know what it feels like to have anger be your friend. So, the mantra here is when I own my anger, I stop shrinking in the storm. When I own my anger, I actually understand other people's anger better and I'm better able to productively navigate and problem solve, understand my own anger and somebody else's anger much better. So again, that is the long-term strategy.
So, that is today's podcast episode. Like I said, this was going to be a pretty heavy one. But the next time a leader comes at you angry, don't absorb it. Don't shrink. Right? You want to pause, you want to breathe, you want to listen for the fear beneath the fury. And remember, anger isn't the end of your authority. It's the invitation to claim it. Let's reframe your relationship with your own anger. This is the longer term game and you can do it. You're totally capable of doing it.
Alright, that is today's episode. I will see you all next week. If you liked this episode, if you have questions about this episode, email me, find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect. Thanks so much. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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