There’s a particular kind of composure that a lot of senior leaders have learned to perform. It looks like steadiness from the outside. It feels like holding your breath on the inside.
I spent years coaching leaders who were doing exactly that, and I could usually tell. Not by what they said, but by what happened in the room when something hard landed. The careful flatness. The quick pivot back to problem-solving. The sense that something had just been managed rather than met.
What I’ve come to believe, and what a body of research now supports, is that suppression and steadiness aren’t the same thing. They just look alike for a while.
It’s why I sought out a certification in Emotional Agility, the framework developed by psychologist Susan David, Ph.D. of Harvard Medical School. David introduced the term in the Harvard Business Review in 2013 and built it out in her 2016 book, and at the center of it is an idea I’ve been watching hold true in coaching rooms for nearly two decades: emotions are data, not directives. Information to read, rather than instructions to obey.
I can’t think of a season when that matters more.
The difference between steadiness and suppression
There’s a version of composure that a lot of leaders practice without realizing it isn’t quite the real thing.
David’s research describes three traps that can look like composure and cost the same. Bottling is pushing the emotion down and powering through. Brooding is turning it over and over until it runs the show from inside. And forced positivity is skipping past the emotion entirely, chasing the good mood as though feeling fine were the point. Senior leaders tend to be skilled bottlers, with forced positivity as the backup move when bottling gets too heavy to hold quietly. It reads as composure, it gets rewarded, and it has a shelf life, because what gets bottled, or bypassed, doesn’t disappear. It leaks. Into tone, into decisions, into the 2 a.m. ceiling stare.
Real steadiness is built on awareness of what you’re feeling. Suppression is built on ignoring it. From the outside, the two can look identical for a while. From the inside, one gives you your full intelligence, and the other slowly narrows it.
What naming an emotion actually changes
The research here is striking. A UCLA study led by psychologist Matthew Lieberman, published in 2007, found that simply putting feelings into words, what researchers call affect labeling, reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain’s threat center. Naming an emotion isn’t soft. It’s a regulation strategy with a neural signature.
Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on emotional granularity points the same direction: people who can distinguish their emotions finely manage them more effectively than people working with a coarse vocabulary.
Stressed might actually be unheard. Angry might actually be worried about something you care about.
Precision creates choice. That’s the whole mechanism.
The four practices
David’s framework moves through four practices, and here’s how I see them land with senior leaders.
- Show up. Let the emotion exist without arguing with it, and meet it with compassion rather than judgment. Most leaders skip this step by reflex. Something lands in a meeting, you register a flicker, and you’re already three moves ahead, managing the room. The flicker was information, and you drove past it.
- Step out. Watch the emotion instead of being it. Language helps here. There’s a real difference between “I am furious” and “I notice I’m feeling furious.” The first is fused. The second has a few inches of space in it, and those inches are where your judgment lives.
- Walk your why. Let values make the call. Once you’ve named what you feel, the question shifts from what does this emotion want to what matters most here. The emotion gets a voice. Your values get the vote.
- Move on. Make a small adjustment and act. Not a personality overhaul. One different sentence in the meeting. One pause before the reply. One conversation you stop postponing.
Awareness precedes skill. It always has.
What this makes possible for a team
Emotional agility scales, and this is the part I find most compelling as a coach who works with teams.
A leader who names what she’s feeling with precision gives her team permission to do the same. And teams that can say what’s actually happening spend far less energy performing alignment and far more energy building it. You can feel that difference on a team, and you can measure it. In our work we use the Trust Within Assessments to put data around the human dynamics leaders sense but struggle to name, because trust is a Key Behavioral Indicator, and the gap between what people expect and what they’re living shows up clearly once you look.
The data starts the conversation. The leader’s steadiness makes the conversation safe to have.
A place to begin
Start smaller than you think. Once a day, when something stirs, pause and ask what it’s actually made of. Then name it precisely. Watch what the precision changes.
If this felt true, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at Jenna@JennaStoliker.com, or if you’re ready to explore what steadiness built on awareness looks like in your own context, I’d be honored to sit with you in a discovery conversation. You can schedule one here.
Frequently asked questions
Is emotional agility the same as emotional intelligence?
They’re related but not identical. Emotional intelligence is the broad capacity to perceive and work with emotions, your own and others’. Emotional agility is Susan David’s specific, research-based framework for how you relate to your own inner experience: showing up to it, stepping out of it, and letting values guide action. Think of emotional intelligence as the terrain and emotional agility as a trained path through it.
Isn’t showing emotion risky for leaders, especially women?
The risk is real and worth naming. Research by Catalyst on the double bind, published in 2007, documented that women leaders are often perceived as competent or likable but rarely both, and emotional expression gets judged through that lens. Emotional agility isn’t venting, though. It’s precision and choice, and it tends to read as groundedness. Naming the double bind itself is part of the work: you can’t make conscious choices inside a constraint you haven’t seen.
How long does it take to build emotional agility?
Treat it like building strength rather than learning a fact. The practices are simple enough to start today, and they compound with repetition. Most leaders I work with notice the pause getting easier within weeks. The deeper shift, values choosing instead of emotions reacting, builds over months of practice in real situations.
Can something like emotional agility actually be measured?
The inner practice is personal, but its effects on a team are visible in data. Trust, alignment, and passion are Key Behavioral Indicators, and instruments like the Team Alignment Survey measure the gap between what people expect and what they experience. When a leader’s steadiness grows, that gap tends to close, and the numbers show it.
