What Regulated Leadership Actually Looks Like

[00:00:01]:
So I worked for a CEO once. It was during a time when that organisation was going through a restructure. I was on his senior leadership team. Uh, I was the finance person. So it was one of those seasons where everything in business was in motion. Roles were changing. People were being let go. Friends they’d worked with for a very long time.

[00:00:23]:
The ones who stayed were being asked to carry more, to do it differently, and to keep showing up. So I was in a meeting with him, just the two of us, no one else in the room. And he’d spent the meeting walking me through everything that needed to happen next. Who needed support, who needed to be told what and when, what had to be handled before the end of the week. He was very thorough, clear, exactly what you’d want from someone holding something like that together. And when he finished, there was a small pause. The kind where the work’s done and the room is just quiet for a second. And I asked him, what about you? How are you doing with all of this? He smiled, but it was a little bit too bright.

[00:01:12]:
And when he answered, his voice just felt a little bit too tight. I’m good, he said. Something in me didn’t sit right with that, but I smiled and I let it go anyway. I was working with a client who was managing a lot of pressure. The latest issue was her team. Their work wasn’t good enough to take further, and she was the one who had to take it further. The business case had to go out tomorrow. In a week’s time, she’d be the one standing in front of the board asking whatever questions that that business case raised.

[00:01:45]:
So she was on a call with her team. She was going through the numbers, through the rationale. And she was asking for the reasoning behind each of the assumptions. And the reasoning simply wasn’t there. Just explanation after explanation from her team that really didn’t hold up. And underneath the words she was actually saying, there was another conversation running, you know, the one that nobody else gets to hear except for you. And she was thinking to herself things like, how am I going to present this? This is shit. Why can’t they just do their job? She kept going.

[00:02:25]:
She kept asking. She kept sounding like herself, steady, capable, across it all, the way she always sounded on these calls. And the whole time, underneath that voice, something else was building. Not thoughts anymore, just that pressure. The kind that doesn’t stay in your head, you know, it moves into your chest, up through your throat, and it doesn’t ask you first, it just moves. She felt it rise and she tried to hold it, tried to tamp it down, but she couldn’t. And then before she’d even registered it happening, there was water coming out of her face. She got off that call real fast.

[00:03:07]:
And the first thing she did before anything else was to beat herself up for crying in front of her team. And it wasn’t even like a big cry. It was just some water coming out of her face, right? Now, in leadership, we’re taught that tears are bad, that crying in front of your team means that you’ve lost the room or you’ve lost authority. You’ve lost the ability to be trusted with the hard things. Here’s what’s actually happening underneath that belief. Her body had been holding pressure that had nowhere left to go. Frustration, probably something bordering on panic. A body being asked to metabolise all of that while still sounding calm on a call about numbers that weren’t good enough.

[00:03:50]:
And when the tears came, that wasn’t her system failing. That was her system finally discharging something it had been carrying the only way it had left to discharge it. Not despite the tears, but through them. Now, that doesn’t mean crying in front of your team is always the answer, or that regulation means letting every wave move through you in real time, regardless of the room or the stakes or who’s in it. Leadership still requires discernment about what you show and when. That’s not the same as suppression, though. Discernment is a choice made from safety. Suppression is a lid clamped down out of fear.

[00:04:32]:
The difference isn’t whether she cried, it’s what was happening in her body in the lead-up to it and what happened in her afterwards. So what happened after the call’s a different story. That’s not physiology anymore. That’s the manual talking, the one that says a leader who feels something has lost control of the room. The one that says composure is the job and feeling is what you do later, alone, somewhere it can’t be seen. I think about my CEO here too. On paper, he did everything right. Even voice, steady face.

[00:05:11]:
I’m good. But underneath all of that, somehow I knew that he wasn’t regulated. Not because his face slipped or his voice cracked. ‘Cause I felt it. That’s co-regulation. It’s the way that one nervous system reads another beneath the words, picking up signal that’s got nothing to do with what’s actually being said. It’s happening between every leader and every team all the time, whether anyone’s naming it or not. And regulated and disassociated can look identical from across a desk.

[00:05:50]:
Even voice, steady face, same words. But they don’t feel identical, not to a nervous system that’s paying attention. And by the way, they always are. One has moved through something, the other has gone somewhere the room can’t reach, and people can feel the difference before they can explain it. Now back to this client. Her team didn’t lose confidence in her because she cried. Something in them settled because for the first time in weeks, what she was showing them matched what was actually happening underneath. That’s co-regulation working the way it’s supposed to.

[00:06:29]:
When the outside finally matches the inside, something in a room exhales, even if nobody can tell you why. So let’s talk about what we mean by regulation. Because it isn’t calm and it isn’t composed and it may not even be quiet. And it’s becoming quite an overused word, don’t you think? There’s a simpler way to feel for it in yourself, and it’s got nothing to do with how you look from the outside. It’s the difference between constriction and expansion. Constriction is the tightening, that held breath, even for a microsecond. The bracing you didn’t notice you’re doing until someone asks how you are and something in you has to decide how you’re going to answer that. Expansion’s what comes after, when whatever was being held is actually moved.

[00:07:21]:
It doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some of you, it’s warmth, a kind of openness in your chest, a sigh that you didn’t plan to let out. For you, it might be something else entirely. A dropped shoulder, a slower breath. There’s no universal version of it, but your body knows the difference between the 2 states, even when your mind is telling you a storey about what should have happened instead. Tears regulate. That’s simply what they do. On that call, she was already full.

[00:07:55]:
Weeks of frustration and pressure with nowhere to go, and underneath the numbers Underneath the questions she kept asking about the reasoning in that business case that wasn’t actually there, that same voice kept running. How am I going to present these? This is shit. Why can’t they just do their job? That was the pressure building in real time. Not calm, not composed, just frustration with nowhere left to sit. And when there’s no more room to hold it, It has to go somewhere, and it went there, on the call, in front of her team, because that’s where she was standing when her body reached the end of what it could keep carrying. It was only after she hung up that the second voice arrived, a completely different one. You know that one. What’s wrong with you? Pull it together.

[00:08:46]:
You don’t do this. That voice had nothing to do with the numbers or her team or the pressure of the week. It showed up the moment the call ended, and it was entirely about the crying itself, about what it meant that she’d let her team see it. 2 different things happened here, not one. Her body regulated in real time, okay, on the call. And then her mind afterwards, alone, wrote a storey about what that regulation meant about her as a leader. And that storey came from somewhere. Nobody arrives at leaders don’t cry on their own.

[00:09:23]:
It was handed to her the way it’s handed to most of us, somewhere along the way to becoming who we are at work, which means it can be rewritten. You don’t choose the manual you inherited, but you get to choose the one you keep running. Now, there’s no single picture of what regulated leadership looks like. Not one face, one voice, one way of holding a room. What moves through you and lands as expansion will not look like what moves through someone else. For one woman, it’s a pause before she speaks instead of after. For another, it’s simply saying the true thing out loud instead of managing it internally for another hour. None of these are more regulated than the others, They’re just hers.

[00:10:12]:
So the work isn’t becoming someone who doesn’t feel pressure. It’s learning to notice the congestion while it’s building, so there’s somewhere for it to go before it reaches the limit that that call reached. And it’s learning to catch that second voice, the one that arrives after, and recognise it for what it is. Not truth, just an old manual still running. Long after the moment it’s commenting on has already passed. So I’m guessing that somewhere in you right now, maybe there’s a place that’s holding something. It might just be a low, constant tightness you’ve stopped registering as tightness because it’s been there so long it just feels like how you are. The shoulders that don’t quite drop, the breath that doesn’t quite finish, the thing you’re carrying that hasn’t found its way through yet.

[00:11:05]:
You don’t need to know what it is. You don’t need to fix it. You don’t need to name it or resolve it today. Just notice where you are right now on that line between constriction and expansion. Not because one of them’s right and the other’s wrong, just so you know which one you’re actually in instead of assuming that you’re fine because you look fine. And if you notice constriction, you don’t have to wait until it reaches the point that hers did that day. all to the brim with nowhere left to go but out, you can let a little of it out now. A longer exhale, a softer sentence to yourself, a pause before you answer the next email.

[00:11:50]:
Small movements, not a breakthrough. Regulation isn’t necessarily one big release. It’s 100 small ones happening often enough that nothing has to reach capacity before it’s finally allowed to move. Managing that regulation on a daily basis with those small micro-moments is how you get to not have those unscheduled releases when you’re on a call with your team. That’s regulated leadership. It’s not composure, it’s not control, it’s just a body that lets things move before it has no choice left. But to let them. I’m sending you lots of love.

[00:12:34]:
Bye for now.