51. No One F’s with Me Energy
The tension in the room is palpable. Your CEO's face flushes red, his voice sharp as he demands answers about a failed project. Before you realize it, your chest tightens and you're carrying his anger as if it's your responsibility.
This invisible pattern of emotional absorption is destroying your leadership capacity. When you unconsciously take responsibility for other people's moods, reactions, and bad decisions, you end up managing the room instead of the results. You replay meetings in your head at night, overexplain yourself to calm others down, and shrink your presence when emotions run high. The real cost? You stop thinking like the visionary you are and slip into survival mode.
Join me today to learn how to develop what I call "No One F's with Me Energy" - a powerful approach to maintaining your emotional boundaries while staying empathetic and effective. I share how to protect your mental space without shutting down your empathy, 3 key shifts to stay grounded when tensions are high, and why emotional boundaries actually make you a stronger leader.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why emotional absorption happens more intensely for women in male-dominated environments and how it directly leads to burnout.
3 critical shifts to make to command “No one F’s with me” energy.
How to stay empathetic without becoming an emotional sponge.
Why self-abandonment is the real reason women burn out and leave leadership positions.
How to zoom out and see the bigger picture when tensions are high instead of spinning out.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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49. The Executive Pause: How Leaders Command a Room with Silence
Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick - Time article
Full Episode Transcript:
You're in a meeting. The CEO is flustered. His face is red. You feel the tension in the air. His voice sharpens. "Who's responsible for this mess?" You feel your chest tighten, and before you say a word, you've already started carrying his anger as if it's your responsibility.
This, right here, is what I call emotional absorption. And for so many brilliant women leaders in male-dominated rooms, it's the hidden reason you feel overworked, undervalued, and on the edge of burnout. Today, I'm going to give you the tools to end it, to protect your energy without shutting down your empathy, because leadership isn't about carrying more weight. It's about staying anchored while the storm swirls around you. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right, hey everybody. Welcome to this episode. I had so many thoughts about the different names, and I actually talked to my podcast producers about it because part of me was like, I want to call it, I'm Not Your Punching Bag, because it is really about absorbing emotions, and particularly the emotion of blame, and feeling responsible for other people's emotions. And you've probably heard me say this before, but when you are overly valuing other people's emotions, not attuned to your own emotions, you start becoming irresponsible with your needs and your wants. And this is the very thing that has women feeling burnt out, overloaded, mentally and emotionally strained.
It's like this idea that when we're noticing emotions around us somehow, especially from authority figures, it becomes our responsibility to solve. I also see this with a lot of female leaders that maybe have played the peacekeeper role in their family dynamic, and when their leadership team or even their direct reports start arguing and confronting each other and fighting, they feel like they have to be the one that, you know, smooths it all over. And that is a leadership trait to be able to notice other people's emotions, but you're going to be way more powerful and feel way more energized if you are attuned and connected to your own emotions.
So, what I'm going to talk to you about today, part of it's like, I'm not your punching bag. I also thought about anti-emotional absorption, all these weird names for it. But really the thing that I teach the women leaders that I coach, and I'm going to say it very plainly, it's really about don't f with me energy. So this is the energy that you need to have for yourself to take care of yourself. It is really about creating emotional boundaries for yourself and mental boundaries for yourself when the tension is high, when there's a lot of emotions flying around in the room. This is a skill that is needed for you to stay anchored, connected, attuned to yourself, while still being open to what's happening around you.
Often times, when women or when we are overly, you know, our emotions are really triggered and we feel helpless, we feel like we don't have the ability to connect to ourselves or anchor into ourselves, we end up in a swirl, spinning out, feeling powerless, doing things that maybe are survival patterns from our childhood or from earlier years of our leadership, right? We jump into these different roles, like a fixer, or maybe you jump into, you know, just action and saying, "Let's do all these things and be helpful," right? But if you're not connected to yourself, you're not attuned to yourself, right? You're going to be more in that survival limbic system brain that's going to offer you some solutions, but they're not going to be as high quality, as complex as the prefrontal cortex, which is that executive functioning part of our brain that's able to regulate emotions. It's able to think through really complex things and be super resourceful.
And the reason why this episode is called Don't F With Me Energy is really because you're protecting yourself and your mind to focus on that prefrontal cortex so that you are expansive, that you are feeling more in control, that you are feeling grounded in your body. Because when you are there, you're going to come up with much more powerful solutions to things, right? And you're going to be much more attuned to yourself. So feeling like you are more in command versus like things are happening to you and you're just catching up to things. Because emotional absorption, right, it's when you are unconsciously taking responsibility for other people's moods, reactions, even their bad decisions. And you manage the room instead of the results. You're really focusing on calming other people down or trying to get somebody else not to feel some sort of emotion.
The typical signs of this are you replay meetings in your head at night. You explain yourself three extra times just to calm someone down. You shrink your presence when someone else's emotions get big. Or you end up maybe playing a game of blaming, justifying, you're just kind of in a some more of the drama patterns than actually feeling calm, connected to yourself. And like I said, there's a real cost. When you absorb, you feel burnout, when you stop thinking like a visionary that you are, you move into those fixer roles versus really feeling like I am part of this leadership team, I am control.
And I'll share with you, this happens in my personal life as well. I have an amazing husband, but he had a pattern of when he was really stressed out to express his anger very openly. And often times that anger in certain situations, particularly driving on vacation somewhere, would be pointed at me. And I actually had to learn a really powerful lesson that our therapist talked to us about, which really was applying to me of like, hey, he is feeling a lot of emotional distress and he may go into a pattern of blaming you, but you actually don't need to take on his blame. You can just be calm within yourself, notice that he's having emotions, right? It's not the most responsible emotion, but I used to go to silent shutdown or actively judging him for his upset. And then we would just like get into something that was totally unproductive for both sides. And there would just be more disconnection, me feeling disconnected from myself, me feeling disconnected from him.
And I bring up this personal example because it's just a way of noticing like if somebody is blaming you or if there's a lot of upset happening, you can still be in control of yourself. It is a 50/50 game to take on other people's emotions, to make them mean things about yourself. You can actually take a beat. You know, now, I take a beat. Actually, it happens much, much less now, but I take a beat and I say, "Listen, he's really upset. I can say what I want, right, in this moment, but I don't need to engage in this game." And I don't need to make him wrong for having feelings, and I don't need to judge him, and I don't need to disconnect from myself. So how can I be more connected to myself?
It was the same in the corporate world. I had a sales leader who would always come in hot and angry. I kind of expected it. But the more I just was connected to myself, I stayed calm. And again, I had this energy inside of me, right? No one Fs with me energy. And sometimes I talk to my clients about it. It's like, you can almost imagine a purple bubble around you that just protects you. You're solid and calm in your space, right? And a lot of times people don't think that this is possible, but if you actually work on thinking about this as an idea, as a way of giving yourself separation from other people's emotions, it has the ability to really calm you down in those moments.
Because if you get super emotionally triggered and hijacked, you're just going to be playing a different game. This is not the next level of your leadership. It's not about just being tougher, right? It's about being grounded in yourself. Not because you're aggressive, but because you're anchored and you feel your own emotions. You're attuned to your own emotions, which gives you a greater capacity to again, connect to that prefrontal cortex.
You feel your own emotions, you notice, you can stay attuned without letting others rock you, right, or knock you off your center. And you choose to respond instead of react in the moment. Typically, we're reacting really quickly when we are triggered. But if we can slow ourselves down and notice, wow, this person's angry. Wow, this person might be blaming me in the moment, but I don't need to go into my defenses. I can just stay calm within myself. And if I zoom out and look at the substance and the context around us, this is really about zooming out in command, seeing the bigger picture, seeing yourself as separate from this person's emotional reaction and connecting to yourself, then you are less likely to spin out in survival.
Spinning out is getting stuck in the swirl of somebody else's thoughts and feelings, and then your own thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings, and really getting into this spiral where it's like, "Oh my gosh, she's mad at me. What should I do? How should I get him to not be mad at me?" which is not the leadership game you want to be playing. The leadership game you want to be playing is really, what is the best outcome for this situation? What data is this, you know, what can I find out about the here and now?
I also used to have a boss. He would get, you know, really angry, and I realized like underneath his anger was a lot of fear. And I, instead of getting like feeling like defensive in his anger or shutting down, I would just start asking him questions and I would realize, wow, he's going to come in hot and heavy. My ability and my capacity to deal with his emotions without taking them on, without being responsible to calm him down or getting angry at him because I'm feeling uncomfortable, right, allowed me so much more mental capacity to say, "Hey, I hear you're frustrated. Tell me more about this." "Oh, I understand that. That would be upsetting to me too. Let me tell you what our team is doing about this. It is scary. We might not make our numbers. Here are all the risks. I've also thought about this." But historically, I couldn't respond that way. If I was spinning out too, I would just be scared. I would be defensive. I would say, you're jumping to conclusions. And I wouldn't get enough data to actually have an argument.
So this ability to zoom out, it's not just like that being not being able to speak up for yourself, but it's also exhausting. It's like emotionally exhausting to feel like you are not in control of yourself or that you are holding other people's emotions. And like the reality is if you're holding to the responsibility of other people's thoughts and emotions, that is a very, very tiring game because we cannot, we can say things to influence, but we are not in charge of other people's thoughts and feelings. We are in charge of our own and we have that capacity to take care of our own, but if we are in that other game of trying to calm somebody else down, diffuse somebody else, managing somebody else, and we're not connected to ourselves, it is an exhausting game, and you will burn out and you will feel emotionally drained when you leave work.
But in this way, what I want to talk to you about is there are really three shifts that you can make to call in that no one f's with me energy and to know that it's a thing. Like that thing is really, it's kind of like this conviction you have with yourself where you're like, "Nobody has the ability to literally make me think or feel things that I don't want to feel." It's a line in the ground. It's a commanding, grounded way to take care of yourself, but it doesn't mean shutting off and not being empathetic and not being clear to, clear and open to what's around you, what's happening, because we need to know what's happening around us, right?
We can't just be like things are happening and I'm just going to stay like a rock. We're like things are happening and I'm open to hearing what's happening, but number one, I claim my own inner authority and I don't allow anyone to F with me. I don't allow other people's energy to impact my energy, how I carry myself, how anchored I am with myself. Because the more you have this, right, the more that you'll feel grounded and in control of yourself versus you're just reacting to situations.
So, the first step is claiming your inner authority, anchoring yourself first, and having phrases that will help you, right? Sometimes when I feel like, "Whoa, there's something going on here," I have to remind myself, "I have a choice." And that just slows me down, right? Or "I'm safe. I'm here. I get to choose my response." That again, your nervous system hears you say that and it will calm down. It will help you to take a breath in the moment instead of just swirling in somebody else's energy. And it's really good for you to notice what is that spin out that you do? Because the more you notice your spin out, the more you can interrupt that pattern.
Let me share with you an example from one of my clients who I was just talking to recently, and she's had this issue where her CEO comes in hot and heavy, starts blaming people and starts wanting to restructure things. And she just goes into, "Oh my gosh, how do I make this best for my team? How do I listen to what he says and then how do I, you know, scramble to make sure he's okay, but then also make sure this is the best outcome for the team." And you might say, "Wow, she's a really great leader," but here's the thing. She would lose herself in this. She wouldn't be calm and grounded, connected to herself. And so it would be more survival strategies, more figuring out coping with the monster in the room and how to clear up the mess versus when I talked to her last and we've been working on this, her ability to separate attunement from absorption.
You can still attune to somebody's emotions and notice them, but also stay really grounded and attuned to your own emotions so that empathy is not absorption or listening to somebody's upset is not absorbing it. It's just listening to it. It's like standing in the rain under an umbrella versus becoming that puddle. When you're that puddle, you're just in it. But if you're standing in the rain and you've got that umbrella, you can start thinking clearly, right? You can say, "Okay, how can I move forward? Where can I walk to? Where can I get shelter?"
So for her, calming down and noticing like her leader's emotions, then connecting to herself. And instead of just going into that, you know, survival mode spin out, she zoomed out, she saw the bigger picture. She stayed really calm within herself to notice her own emotions, and then she spoke up for what she thought was best. She led with her vision versus just answering his questions to answer his questions. She said, "This is actually the way most companies do this type of thing. This is how most companies deal with it." And because she was so calm and in control and being really connected to herself, her CEO started calming down as well. He was starting to take on her energy versus she taking on his energy and taking on all of his emotions, right?
She started asking her really curious questions about like, "Tell me more about this. How does this work?" And there she just switched the whole conversation to like this like creative visionary conversation to actually productively deal with the conflict at hand, not just to defend around it, not just to cope with it. And he loved her idea and she was really clear about like how it would need to get implemented and that it was outside of her, you know, her functional area, but this is the things. And then he ran off with it. He went to go talk to other senior leaders about it. And she influenced and impacted him in such a big way. But she couldn't have done that if she didn't stay grounded with herself, right, with that nobody F's with me energy, right? If you don't have that, it's going to be really hard and it's going to be really tough to influence and to feel connected to yourself and lead really from an impactful way.
So this the second, right, the first step was claim your inner authority, really like noticing that there's a line in the sand that people can't actually put thoughts and feelings in your mind, right? So that you have this way of protecting yourself and not getting swapped up in the storm. The two is again, attuning to your own emotions, asking yourself, how do you feel? And obviously noticing the emotion around you. Wow, he's angry, but that doesn't mean that I need to take on responsibility for his anger.
And then third, it's choosing presence over performance. Instead of just trying to answer the question, right, you want to connect to yourself. In high stake moments, it's rewarded to be present and grounded in yourself. Your solidity can diffuse other people's really strong emotions. You're not overexplaining, you are having well-timed pauses. Hopefully you just listened to my episode on the executive pause and how truly powerful it is, especially in these high tense moments. Even if I was, you know, with my husband and I could stay quiet and calm, it would almost allow him to just like be calm too, instead of me jumping into fight with him. He would be calm and a lot of times he would just take responsibility for his emotional outburst or his upset. But the biggest thing for me is right, how do I take care of myself in those moments so I don't get swept into the storm or spin out?
So, this is really for you to take away. It's really this idea that you have the capacity to carry this energy with you wherever you are. And again, it is not about not being empathetic. It's not about shielding yourself from the world. It's literally about attuning to yourself and having this energy where it's like, "No one F's with me." And even claiming that, right? Like that's a big word to claim. But if you can hold that for yourself, then you'll take greater responsibility for your mental and emotional space and it will allow you, right, instead of being an emotional sponge, it will allow you to show up in a different way, right? And it's not that you have to show up perfectly calm or grounded, right? We just want you attuned to yourself, connected to yourself. Because the more you're doing that, the less likely you'll burn out.
Most women burn out because they are self-abandoning. They are leaving themselves. There's actually an amazing Time article about how women that are self-abandoning, which is really like not listening to their own emotions, they're not talking about their own needs and wants, how much that impacts their health. And the diseases that show up for women over time when they are not speaking up for themselves and how record numbers of female leaders are leaving companies because they are done abandoning themselves. So I'm giving you a way to take care of yourself. No one F's with me energy ever in your personal and professional life and how to take care of yourself so that you can stay grounded and not spin out.
So start this week by noticing moments when you might spin out when you're noticing you're taking on other people's emotions and really like, I don't know, even for you visualizing putting a stake in the ground to say, no, that's their emotion, that's not mine. I can be aware of it. I can empathize with it, but I don't need to take it on. So you want to pause and breathe and remind yourself like, this is not mine. This is not my emotion at this moment. What's really needed here? Not how do I make them feel better? You want to zoom out and notice this for yourself. And you want to attune to your own emotions. How are you feeling in the moment? When you do this, you stop being the emotional sponge and you start being the person in the room who sets the tone. That's leadership.
So what I want you to take away from this episode and what I want you to remember for yourself is boundaries aren't walls. They're the structure that lets your vision and energy go further. Women who rise without burning out master this early, right? No one F's with me energy. They protect their mental and emotional energy as fiercely as they protect their time. If you're ready to stop spinning out and start leading with unshakable presence that we've been talking about, this is the work that is needed to be done.
So, I want to hear how this works for you, how this lands with you. Because if you want to be a female leader commanding spaces in male-dominated workplaces, then this is the skill that you need to be learning and mastering for yourself. So it really starts with you. So feel free to share with me on LinkedIn. Feel free to leave a review for me. I'd love to hear from you. This is powerful work if you take it seriously, if you take yourself seriously, and you move forward, right? Not being somebody's punching bag, no longer absorbing the emotions around you, really connecting with yourself, attuning to yourself, and leading with no one F's with me energy, which is going to be expansive because this is where your genius and your brilliant rises when you are able to anchor and take care of yourself. Command yourself first, then you go command the room.
All right, have a beautiful week ahead. I will see you next week. Take really good care.
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.
This, right here, is what I call emotional absorption. And for so many brilliant women leaders in male-dominated rooms, it's the hidden reason you feel overworked, undervalued, and on the edge of burnout. Today, I'm going to give you the tools to end it, to protect your energy without shutting down your empathy, because leadership isn't about carrying more weight. It's about staying anchored while the storm swirls around you. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right, hey everybody. Welcome to this episode. I had so many thoughts about the different names, and I actually talked to my podcast producers about it because part of me was like, I want to call it, I'm Not Your Punching Bag, because it is really about absorbing emotions, and particularly the emotion of blame, and feeling responsible for other people's emotions. And you've probably heard me say this before, but when you are overly valuing other people's emotions, not attuned to your own emotions, you start becoming irresponsible with your needs and your wants. And this is the very thing that has women feeling burnt out, overloaded, mentally and emotionally strained.
It's like this idea that when we're noticing emotions around us somehow, especially from authority figures, it becomes our responsibility to solve. I also see this with a lot of female leaders that maybe have played the peacekeeper role in their family dynamic, and when their leadership team or even their direct reports start arguing and confronting each other and fighting, they feel like they have to be the one that, you know, smooths it all over. And that is a leadership trait to be able to notice other people's emotions, but you're going to be way more powerful and feel way more energized if you are attuned and connected to your own emotions.
So, what I'm going to talk to you about today, part of it's like, I'm not your punching bag. I also thought about anti-emotional absorption, all these weird names for it. But really the thing that I teach the women leaders that I coach, and I'm going to say it very plainly, it's really about don't f with me energy. So this is the energy that you need to have for yourself to take care of yourself. It is really about creating emotional boundaries for yourself and mental boundaries for yourself when the tension is high, when there's a lot of emotions flying around in the room. This is a skill that is needed for you to stay anchored, connected, attuned to yourself, while still being open to what's happening around you.
Often times, when women or when we are overly, you know, our emotions are really triggered and we feel helpless, we feel like we don't have the ability to connect to ourselves or anchor into ourselves, we end up in a swirl, spinning out, feeling powerless, doing things that maybe are survival patterns from our childhood or from earlier years of our leadership, right? We jump into these different roles, like a fixer, or maybe you jump into, you know, just action and saying, "Let's do all these things and be helpful," right? But if you're not connected to yourself, you're not attuned to yourself, right? You're going to be more in that survival limbic system brain that's going to offer you some solutions, but they're not going to be as high quality, as complex as the prefrontal cortex, which is that executive functioning part of our brain that's able to regulate emotions. It's able to think through really complex things and be super resourceful.
And the reason why this episode is called Don't F With Me Energy is really because you're protecting yourself and your mind to focus on that prefrontal cortex so that you are expansive, that you are feeling more in control, that you are feeling grounded in your body. Because when you are there, you're going to come up with much more powerful solutions to things, right? And you're going to be much more attuned to yourself. So feeling like you are more in command versus like things are happening to you and you're just catching up to things. Because emotional absorption, right, it's when you are unconsciously taking responsibility for other people's moods, reactions, even their bad decisions. And you manage the room instead of the results. You're really focusing on calming other people down or trying to get somebody else not to feel some sort of emotion.
The typical signs of this are you replay meetings in your head at night. You explain yourself three extra times just to calm someone down. You shrink your presence when someone else's emotions get big. Or you end up maybe playing a game of blaming, justifying, you're just kind of in a some more of the drama patterns than actually feeling calm, connected to yourself. And like I said, there's a real cost. When you absorb, you feel burnout, when you stop thinking like a visionary that you are, you move into those fixer roles versus really feeling like I am part of this leadership team, I am control.
And I'll share with you, this happens in my personal life as well. I have an amazing husband, but he had a pattern of when he was really stressed out to express his anger very openly. And often times that anger in certain situations, particularly driving on vacation somewhere, would be pointed at me. And I actually had to learn a really powerful lesson that our therapist talked to us about, which really was applying to me of like, hey, he is feeling a lot of emotional distress and he may go into a pattern of blaming you, but you actually don't need to take on his blame. You can just be calm within yourself, notice that he's having emotions, right? It's not the most responsible emotion, but I used to go to silent shutdown or actively judging him for his upset. And then we would just like get into something that was totally unproductive for both sides. And there would just be more disconnection, me feeling disconnected from myself, me feeling disconnected from him.
And I bring up this personal example because it's just a way of noticing like if somebody is blaming you or if there's a lot of upset happening, you can still be in control of yourself. It is a 50/50 game to take on other people's emotions, to make them mean things about yourself. You can actually take a beat. You know, now, I take a beat. Actually, it happens much, much less now, but I take a beat and I say, "Listen, he's really upset. I can say what I want, right, in this moment, but I don't need to engage in this game." And I don't need to make him wrong for having feelings, and I don't need to judge him, and I don't need to disconnect from myself. So how can I be more connected to myself?
It was the same in the corporate world. I had a sales leader who would always come in hot and angry. I kind of expected it. But the more I just was connected to myself, I stayed calm. And again, I had this energy inside of me, right? No one Fs with me energy. And sometimes I talk to my clients about it. It's like, you can almost imagine a purple bubble around you that just protects you. You're solid and calm in your space, right? And a lot of times people don't think that this is possible, but if you actually work on thinking about this as an idea, as a way of giving yourself separation from other people's emotions, it has the ability to really calm you down in those moments.
Because if you get super emotionally triggered and hijacked, you're just going to be playing a different game. This is not the next level of your leadership. It's not about just being tougher, right? It's about being grounded in yourself. Not because you're aggressive, but because you're anchored and you feel your own emotions. You're attuned to your own emotions, which gives you a greater capacity to again, connect to that prefrontal cortex.
You feel your own emotions, you notice, you can stay attuned without letting others rock you, right, or knock you off your center. And you choose to respond instead of react in the moment. Typically, we're reacting really quickly when we are triggered. But if we can slow ourselves down and notice, wow, this person's angry. Wow, this person might be blaming me in the moment, but I don't need to go into my defenses. I can just stay calm within myself. And if I zoom out and look at the substance and the context around us, this is really about zooming out in command, seeing the bigger picture, seeing yourself as separate from this person's emotional reaction and connecting to yourself, then you are less likely to spin out in survival.
Spinning out is getting stuck in the swirl of somebody else's thoughts and feelings, and then your own thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings, and really getting into this spiral where it's like, "Oh my gosh, she's mad at me. What should I do? How should I get him to not be mad at me?" which is not the leadership game you want to be playing. The leadership game you want to be playing is really, what is the best outcome for this situation? What data is this, you know, what can I find out about the here and now?
I also used to have a boss. He would get, you know, really angry, and I realized like underneath his anger was a lot of fear. And I, instead of getting like feeling like defensive in his anger or shutting down, I would just start asking him questions and I would realize, wow, he's going to come in hot and heavy. My ability and my capacity to deal with his emotions without taking them on, without being responsible to calm him down or getting angry at him because I'm feeling uncomfortable, right, allowed me so much more mental capacity to say, "Hey, I hear you're frustrated. Tell me more about this." "Oh, I understand that. That would be upsetting to me too. Let me tell you what our team is doing about this. It is scary. We might not make our numbers. Here are all the risks. I've also thought about this." But historically, I couldn't respond that way. If I was spinning out too, I would just be scared. I would be defensive. I would say, you're jumping to conclusions. And I wouldn't get enough data to actually have an argument.
So this ability to zoom out, it's not just like that being not being able to speak up for yourself, but it's also exhausting. It's like emotionally exhausting to feel like you are not in control of yourself or that you are holding other people's emotions. And like the reality is if you're holding to the responsibility of other people's thoughts and emotions, that is a very, very tiring game because we cannot, we can say things to influence, but we are not in charge of other people's thoughts and feelings. We are in charge of our own and we have that capacity to take care of our own, but if we are in that other game of trying to calm somebody else down, diffuse somebody else, managing somebody else, and we're not connected to ourselves, it is an exhausting game, and you will burn out and you will feel emotionally drained when you leave work.
But in this way, what I want to talk to you about is there are really three shifts that you can make to call in that no one f's with me energy and to know that it's a thing. Like that thing is really, it's kind of like this conviction you have with yourself where you're like, "Nobody has the ability to literally make me think or feel things that I don't want to feel." It's a line in the ground. It's a commanding, grounded way to take care of yourself, but it doesn't mean shutting off and not being empathetic and not being clear to, clear and open to what's around you, what's happening, because we need to know what's happening around us, right?
We can't just be like things are happening and I'm just going to stay like a rock. We're like things are happening and I'm open to hearing what's happening, but number one, I claim my own inner authority and I don't allow anyone to F with me. I don't allow other people's energy to impact my energy, how I carry myself, how anchored I am with myself. Because the more you have this, right, the more that you'll feel grounded and in control of yourself versus you're just reacting to situations.
So, the first step is claiming your inner authority, anchoring yourself first, and having phrases that will help you, right? Sometimes when I feel like, "Whoa, there's something going on here," I have to remind myself, "I have a choice." And that just slows me down, right? Or "I'm safe. I'm here. I get to choose my response." That again, your nervous system hears you say that and it will calm down. It will help you to take a breath in the moment instead of just swirling in somebody else's energy. And it's really good for you to notice what is that spin out that you do? Because the more you notice your spin out, the more you can interrupt that pattern.
Let me share with you an example from one of my clients who I was just talking to recently, and she's had this issue where her CEO comes in hot and heavy, starts blaming people and starts wanting to restructure things. And she just goes into, "Oh my gosh, how do I make this best for my team? How do I listen to what he says and then how do I, you know, scramble to make sure he's okay, but then also make sure this is the best outcome for the team." And you might say, "Wow, she's a really great leader," but here's the thing. She would lose herself in this. She wouldn't be calm and grounded, connected to herself. And so it would be more survival strategies, more figuring out coping with the monster in the room and how to clear up the mess versus when I talked to her last and we've been working on this, her ability to separate attunement from absorption.
You can still attune to somebody's emotions and notice them, but also stay really grounded and attuned to your own emotions so that empathy is not absorption or listening to somebody's upset is not absorbing it. It's just listening to it. It's like standing in the rain under an umbrella versus becoming that puddle. When you're that puddle, you're just in it. But if you're standing in the rain and you've got that umbrella, you can start thinking clearly, right? You can say, "Okay, how can I move forward? Where can I walk to? Where can I get shelter?"
So for her, calming down and noticing like her leader's emotions, then connecting to herself. And instead of just going into that, you know, survival mode spin out, she zoomed out, she saw the bigger picture. She stayed really calm within herself to notice her own emotions, and then she spoke up for what she thought was best. She led with her vision versus just answering his questions to answer his questions. She said, "This is actually the way most companies do this type of thing. This is how most companies deal with it." And because she was so calm and in control and being really connected to herself, her CEO started calming down as well. He was starting to take on her energy versus she taking on his energy and taking on all of his emotions, right?
She started asking her really curious questions about like, "Tell me more about this. How does this work?" And there she just switched the whole conversation to like this like creative visionary conversation to actually productively deal with the conflict at hand, not just to defend around it, not just to cope with it. And he loved her idea and she was really clear about like how it would need to get implemented and that it was outside of her, you know, her functional area, but this is the things. And then he ran off with it. He went to go talk to other senior leaders about it. And she influenced and impacted him in such a big way. But she couldn't have done that if she didn't stay grounded with herself, right, with that nobody F's with me energy, right? If you don't have that, it's going to be really hard and it's going to be really tough to influence and to feel connected to yourself and lead really from an impactful way.
So this the second, right, the first step was claim your inner authority, really like noticing that there's a line in the sand that people can't actually put thoughts and feelings in your mind, right? So that you have this way of protecting yourself and not getting swapped up in the storm. The two is again, attuning to your own emotions, asking yourself, how do you feel? And obviously noticing the emotion around you. Wow, he's angry, but that doesn't mean that I need to take on responsibility for his anger.
And then third, it's choosing presence over performance. Instead of just trying to answer the question, right, you want to connect to yourself. In high stake moments, it's rewarded to be present and grounded in yourself. Your solidity can diffuse other people's really strong emotions. You're not overexplaining, you are having well-timed pauses. Hopefully you just listened to my episode on the executive pause and how truly powerful it is, especially in these high tense moments. Even if I was, you know, with my husband and I could stay quiet and calm, it would almost allow him to just like be calm too, instead of me jumping into fight with him. He would be calm and a lot of times he would just take responsibility for his emotional outburst or his upset. But the biggest thing for me is right, how do I take care of myself in those moments so I don't get swept into the storm or spin out?
So, this is really for you to take away. It's really this idea that you have the capacity to carry this energy with you wherever you are. And again, it is not about not being empathetic. It's not about shielding yourself from the world. It's literally about attuning to yourself and having this energy where it's like, "No one F's with me." And even claiming that, right? Like that's a big word to claim. But if you can hold that for yourself, then you'll take greater responsibility for your mental and emotional space and it will allow you, right, instead of being an emotional sponge, it will allow you to show up in a different way, right? And it's not that you have to show up perfectly calm or grounded, right? We just want you attuned to yourself, connected to yourself. Because the more you're doing that, the less likely you'll burn out.
Most women burn out because they are self-abandoning. They are leaving themselves. There's actually an amazing Time article about how women that are self-abandoning, which is really like not listening to their own emotions, they're not talking about their own needs and wants, how much that impacts their health. And the diseases that show up for women over time when they are not speaking up for themselves and how record numbers of female leaders are leaving companies because they are done abandoning themselves. So I'm giving you a way to take care of yourself. No one F's with me energy ever in your personal and professional life and how to take care of yourself so that you can stay grounded and not spin out.
So start this week by noticing moments when you might spin out when you're noticing you're taking on other people's emotions and really like, I don't know, even for you visualizing putting a stake in the ground to say, no, that's their emotion, that's not mine. I can be aware of it. I can empathize with it, but I don't need to take it on. So you want to pause and breathe and remind yourself like, this is not mine. This is not my emotion at this moment. What's really needed here? Not how do I make them feel better? You want to zoom out and notice this for yourself. And you want to attune to your own emotions. How are you feeling in the moment? When you do this, you stop being the emotional sponge and you start being the person in the room who sets the tone. That's leadership.
So what I want you to take away from this episode and what I want you to remember for yourself is boundaries aren't walls. They're the structure that lets your vision and energy go further. Women who rise without burning out master this early, right? No one F's with me energy. They protect their mental and emotional energy as fiercely as they protect their time. If you're ready to stop spinning out and start leading with unshakable presence that we've been talking about, this is the work that is needed to be done.
So, I want to hear how this works for you, how this lands with you. Because if you want to be a female leader commanding spaces in male-dominated workplaces, then this is the skill that you need to be learning and mastering for yourself. So it really starts with you. So feel free to share with me on LinkedIn. Feel free to leave a review for me. I'd love to hear from you. This is powerful work if you take it seriously, if you take yourself seriously, and you move forward, right? Not being somebody's punching bag, no longer absorbing the emotions around you, really connecting with yourself, attuning to yourself, and leading with no one F's with me energy, which is going to be expansive because this is where your genius and your brilliant rises when you are able to anchor and take care of yourself. Command yourself first, then you go command the room.
All right, have a beautiful week ahead. I will see you next week. Take really good care.
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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