By: Janyne Peek Emsick
By: Dr. Janyne Peek Emsick, founder of Your Executive Coach
The most expensive real estate in your leadership isn’t your calendar. It’s the mental space occupied by frustrations you cannot change.
A senior leader I coach had never been told his directness was a problem. From his first leadership role, it had been his edge – the willingness to name what others wouldn’t, the get-it-done presence that cleared the room. It earned him promotions, trust, and a seat at a table most spend decades trying to reach.
Then he was promoted again. And something shifted.
In peer meetings, he was being read as a complainer. His C-Suite manager was spending real time managing the friction he created – friction he experienced as advocacy for his department. Quietly, behind the scenes, he was no longer being considered for the next promotion.
The pattern was simple. A genuine strength, deployed without a pause, had become a liability.
He introduced one change. Lincoln’s 24-hour rule. Don’t send the email yet. Sit on it for a day.
Within weeks, peers experienced him as more measured. Senior leadership noticed. And the frustration that had been crowding out his best thinking – and not paying rent for the space – had begun to lift.
If you are carrying a frustration you cannot change – whether it lives in the past or in the person sitting across the conference table – the mental energy you are spending on it is costing you more than you know. Here are three shifts that will help you take it back.
Shift #1: See the pattern
Most leaders under sustained pressure do not recognize they are stuck in a loop. They know they are frustrated. They can justify the frustration – often with very good reason. What they have not seen is the loop itself.
A situation triggers a thought. The thought produces an emotion. The emotion drives an action. The result confirms what you already believed. The loop runs automatically. Awareness is how you interrupt it.
Start by naming the situation exactly. Not the frustration – the situation. Who, what, where, when. The more specific you are, the more useful everything that follows.
Shift #2: Claim the choice
Viktor Frankl, writing from inside a Nazi concentration camp, observed: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”¹
He was not writing inspiration. He was documenting survival.
Once you can see your reactive loop clearly, you can choose a different response to the same situation. Same trigger. Different decision. That is not the absence of emotion. It is a decision about what to do with it.
Shift #3: Prepare before the trigger hits
Here is what separates lasting change from a good insight: preparation.
Most leaders reach the insight – and then walk straight into the next trigger without a plan. The reactive loop reasserts itself. Not because they lack resolve. The old neural pathway is simply faster than the new one.
Plan the response before you need it. Think through the next likely situation. Map the thoughts, emotions, and actions you would choose if you were leading at your best. Then practice – not in the moment of activation, but before it arrives.
One executive I coach changed a single variable: she began sitting beside the peer who triggered her rather than across from him. Direct eye contact – and the power dynamic it carried – was gone. The reactive loop had no runway.
Small. Specific. Practiced in advance. That is how new neural pathways form.
The frustration you are carrying is real. So is the cost – to your sleep, your relationships, and your capacity to lead at the level you are called to. You are not managing too little. You are spending too much on what you cannot change.
The work is not to stop caring. It is to decide where your energy goes next.
What is one reactive pattern in your leadership right now that deserves a different response?
Three steps. Take one this week.
- Map the loop. Choose one frustration you keep returning to. Write down the situation, your thoughts, your emotions, your actions, and the results. Be specific. The pattern cannot change until it is seen clearly.
- Choose the response. Using the same situation, rewrite the thoughts, emotions, and actions you would choose if you were leading at your best. This is not wishful thinking. This is pre-loading a new neural pathway.
- Practice one practical change before the next trigger arrives. A 24-hour pause. A different seat. A different time of day for the conversation. Small and specific beats ambitious and vague every time.
Three questions for your team.
- Where in our work right now is someone – or our whole team – spending energy on something we cannot change?
- What would moving from a reactive response to an intentional one look like on that issue?
- What is one pattern in how we communicate under stress that we would change if we could?
Bring one of these to your next team meeting.
¹ Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 66.
Janyne Peek Emsick is the founder of Your Executive Coach and the author of the 5R Edge™ leadership framework.
Learn more on her website: yourexecutivecoach.com
Listen to her podcast: https://yourexecutivecoach.com/podcast