Your team reads you before you speak

We’ve all been there. A hard conversation in the car park. A quarterly number that just dropped. A fight with your partner about misplaced keys or washing on the floor (the important stuff). As a leader, you assume that the adult thing to do is push all of that aside and get on with your day.

Then you walk into the office, and it is like the baggage of the morning is attached to your soul by a chain and it begins reeking havoc with your office.

That is not mystery. That is biology. Your stress, doesn’t just turn off purely because you put your work costume on and walked into the office.

"The stress you hold usually leaks"

On 15 January 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger had 208 seconds to save 155 lives after both engines of US Airways Flight 1549 failed on take-off.

His pulse spiked. His blood pressure surged. Tunnel vision set in. And then, as he later described it, he forced a practised calm on himself, using mental discipline to keep his prefrontal cortex functioning while his amygdala screamed emergency.

The result was the first successful commercial aircraft ditching in aviation history. No fatalities.

Sullenberger described it afterwards as 42 years of making small, regular deposits in a bank of experience, so that when the moment came, the balance was sufficient. His ability to regulate his nervous system under extreme duress was not incidental to the outcome. It was the outcome.

**THE IDEA**

Here is something to think about. Your emotional state is contagious, even when your stress has nothing to do with your work.

Before you speak, your team's nervous systems have already started reading yours. Stephen Porges calls it neuroception. Below conscious awareness, they are scanning your face, your voice, your posture, and they are syncing. Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson showed the convergence happens within minutes. Sy, Côté and Saavedra showed that when the person doing the emotional broadcasting is the leader, the effect is asymmetrically stronger. Your mood sets the room. Their performance follows.

The trap most leaders fall into is the pushing-through move. You tell yourself you are hiding it well, but in reality, you are not. The research is brutal on this point. Your emotional state leaks. The only question is whether you know about it or not.

We have all been in a room when someone walks in and you smell them before you see them. Maybe it is a magnificent curry. Maybe they’ve just been to the gym… All of it is natural. None of us wants to bring it in accidentally.

Your emotional state works exactly the same way. And the practice I want to give you is threefold. Read. Shift. Own.

Read, by noticing whether you are heightened, flat or present, and whether that state serves what this moment requires. Shift, by using breath, movement, or reframing to close the gap between where you are and where the moment needs you to be. Own, by deciding whether what remains needs to be named to the room or held privately.

That is what Sullenberger did at altitude. The 42 years of deposits were not flight hours. They were reps at regulation. You do not get 208 seconds to save 155 lives. You get a Monday morning meeting. The practice is the same.

The single thing to try this week

Here is what I would try this week. Before your next three meetings, take sixty seconds in the corridor. Ask yourself one question. What baggage am I carrying right now, and is it useful in this room?

If the answer is no, do not pretend it isn't there. Breathe once, slowly. Drop your shoulders. Name it privately to yourself. Then walk in.

You are not performing calm. You are choosing it.

Your team does not need you to be unaffected. They need you to be aware.

The regulated nervous system in the room becomes the one the others sync to. If you do not make that yours, someone else will make it theirs.

To find out a bit more about how i support leaders have a look at my website. www.drbradhodge.com