Your Nervous System Is Affecting Your Leadership Development

Romie Montpeirous: Welcome everyone to another episode of Leadership from the Heart. This week we're talking about the psychology of leadership because some of you think that leadership is mostly strategy I would say it's an equal split between strategy and your nervous system. Hey guys, I'm Romie I'm your host. I the nervous system is a really good part to touch on in leadership.

And I think that it's something that we often just gloss over. And I know when we removed the person or the soul, the human from work and in terms of the ability to have feelings and regulate those feelings and move past those feelings. think that we've gotten to a point where we're expected to just be kind of emotionless. And that's a thing from, I would say, you know, the last couple of generations that you just do the work, right?

You just put your head down, you just do the work, however. And I agree with that, right? There's a time and a place for that. And I that the more and more we talk about regulating emotions and nervous regulation and why it's important in any aspect of your life, better I think will be as leaders because the more we'll realize, maybe I'm not being by a lion right now.

Maybe I am safe right now. ⁓ And I am safe right now, then what is the best decision for me to make? Because you can't think strategically while living in constant survival mode. And again, these are leadership conversations that I think people are starting to have and we'll we'll see it become more of a thing, I think, in the next two years, three years.

Because leadership as a person, right, it is about your nervous system regulation. It is about your identity. It is about emotional awareness and the ability to make decisions while you're under pressure. And I always say that a lot of leaders, they're capable, but there are things in the way.

that's just clear that are things in the way because they have a hard time regulating. They have a hard time seeing past the trigger. And it's they're just operating from reactions. And the neural pathway in their mind always says, when someone triggers me, this is how I react.

When someone triggers me, this is how I react. And it all depends on the type of trigger and the pathway being, that has been designed or has been in. Right, it all depends on that. But if you notice like pattern recognition, and we're gonna talk about pattern recognition a lot in the future, because it is I find to be the most accurate, the closest to reasoning of why we act the way we act, you know?

And so when someone challenges my authority, this is how I act. And if you can notice those little patterns within you, then I think that you can interrupt the pattern. And we'll talk about how to pause later on. But these things are important because I think that like, people become, like the, you want to be the cause, not the effect, right?

So if you're the effect, then you're going to effectively be, you know, riding the wind or, you know, you're gonna go any which way that people set you because you don't know how to stay your power. You don't know how to be the thermostat. And I mean, to truly. be the thermostat, right?

So today we're gonna talk about how stress changes leadership behavior, why micromanagement is usually just anxiety disguised as control, which is a lack of control, how teams absorb leaders energy, why leaders avoid hard decisions or tough decisions or decisions while under pressure, and why executive level leadership actually requires you to be emotionally stable. And the higher you go up in leadership, the less your value comes from doing more and the more it comes from your ability to think clearly, especially while under pressure.

And so, you know, know that most leadership conversations, most learning and development, most seminars about how to communicate, how to set the KPI, how to do accountability, productivity and execution. I know that because I talk about it too. Right? And I think that the things that matter the most, and I'm turning into this now, and I'm no longer pretending that it's not part of success, is again, the emotional regulation, nervous system, the psychological safety that you need and also create, where identity lives and why you operate from that place.

Because once you can understand it, I think that you can begin to peel it back and find your success in there. ⁓ We're going talk about relational intelligence and stress psychology. And so there are a couple of new terms, vagal authority and relational intelligence that I just recently learned, but I love them because it allows us to tap into these things that in the past we would have called woo-woo that I think we're now noticing science-backed that are important. And relational intelligence is your ability to understand the emotional and relational impact that you have on other people.

It's not just can you communicate, but it is also like, do people feel safe around you? Can you regulate under pressure? Can you create trust? Can you navigate your emotional complexity without escalating it?

And I found another definition of it and it's your ability to read, navigate and repair dynamic connections between people in real time. And so while EQ, emotional intelligence, is focused on recognizing personal feelings, cue is focused on the systemic interactions, the boundary setting, and mutual trust required to maintain a healthy, productive relationship. And I thought that that was so good now we're not just talking about being able to recognize the feeling. We're talking about being able to implement in real time.

or being able to take what we see and put it into real time and repair and again, still set the boundary. But it is part of relationship like now, right? Not later, now. Because changes the way you think and stressed leaders unknowingly create stressful teams.

And in my I see that a lot, right? I see if the leader's mind is chaotic, ⁓ then ⁓ undoubtedly the team is working off of chaos. And it's usually because the leader hasn't set goal, the standard, the direction. And so everybody's of doing their own thing, but you can also create chaos in a team.

And I've seen, you know, where people think they had a really good day. And when you peel back and you find out. ⁓ why they think they had a good day, it's because they continue to save the same chaos that they create. it's, once you point it out to them, it is, it's a profound moment, but I don't think most people understand that they're creating their own chaos and then they're being the hero of their own story, not understanding that they're the ones also creating it.

So you're the problem and the solution. And when you're not regulated, you default to these things and dysregulated leaders, they destroy clarity without ever raising their voice. don't need, a dysregulated leader is not completely obvious, right? Some of them are, right?

Some of them, if you lose your cool and you don't know how to talk to people, you're just like, this person, know, they're clearly, would say what I always picture is like their emotions are living like on the outside, right? Because most of us have crash but they're internal. But the people that you can tell that their emotions live on the outside, you're just like, ⁓ it's so easy. to just like touch and an explosion, you know?

And so we're talk about the neuroscience now of reactive leadership, you know, because the stress does increase, right? perspective absolutely narrows. And if you've ever been in a situation where ⁓ you're in or fight, you know that your, what am trying to say? Your perspective, your sight, it does narrow.

It looks like a... Like you have blinders on, right? And that's for you to be able to focus. Like that is the way we were created that if a lion was chasing us, then we would just scan for safety and only focus on safety.

But now we're in this regular world and there is no lion, but you know, an email can set off the same trigger if you don't interrupt this pattern. And so... When you are stressed, emotional reactions, they increase. Your long-term thinking decreases.

Your control behaviors increase, which is the micromanagement piece. And your threat sensitivity rises. And so anything could set you off, right? Anything, anybody could touch anything and you're off to the races, right?

And the brain shifts towards survival patterns. ⁓ you know, your nervous system starts prioritizing certainty over strategy. Certainty means in this case when you're set off, I need to survive and I will take out anybody who is interrupting that even if it's not a real threat. And the vagal authority is your ability to maintain a calm groundedness, a presence under pressure.

And it comes from nervous system regulation, ⁓ leader with strong vagal regulation. slows the room down, stabilizes the chaos, thinks clearly under pressure, responds instead of reacting, right? Where, you know, the dysregulated leader on the opposite side spreads the urgency, escalates tension, creates emotional unpredictability, and makes reactive decisions. you know, I often tell people it's okay to take a step back in most cases when you're in a situation that needs to be looked at through a clear lens, it's okay to take a step back.

It is only your mind that tells you that you need to solve for X right now. if it's not an emergency, if somebody's life is not being threatened, if safety is not on the line, then it is imperative that you take a step back because that is part of regulation. And your body affects your leadership more than your title does because again, these neural pathways, they've been created for years and years and years. And again, when something happens, let's call that the trigger, and you don't interrupt your pattern, you're just going down the same pathway, the same pattern, the same thinking.

I want you guys to identify a pattern that you have and then just call it out, whatever it is, it doesn't matter if it's work-related or not. And then the next time it happens, I want you to just notice. I want you to notice the same emotions, almost the same taste in your mouth. the same, your mind goes to the same place.

And it's just telling you that this is the path that's been carved out when this happens, right? And leadership that's caused by stress is why people overwork, overreact, micromanage, you know, they emotionally withdraw. And it's not because they're bad leaders, you know, this, I ⁓ see this inconsistent leaders as well. It's because they don't actually feel safe.

And when a leader doesn't feel safe, what can they create? It's hard to create a safe container when you yourself don't feel safe. And not to say that you couldn't, right? I don't think you have to have this down pat.

You don't have to master this. I think this is an evolution that you do with your team, if your team is safe, with yourself. And you kind of crack the door open little by little as you discover regulate your own self, then you open that up to your team. Because now, if let's say, know, say something triggers you, trying to think of an example, but let's say something always gets you, somebody questioning your authority always gets you going, right?

Once you peel back the onion of ⁓ why am I set when they're questioning my authority, what does that mean to me? What do I think about myself when people are questioning my authority? And then you go down that rabbit hole, right? Is it because they're questioning who I am?

Who do I think I am? Does it matter if they question my authority? Does it matter if they see me as the leader that I think that I am? What kind of leader am I?

Like if you go down that path and you just feel all the feelings and then you come back and now you're... a little bit more regulated than before. The next time somebody questions your authority, you're going to notice you're gonna be like, ooh, this is where I usually X, Y or Z, but this time you're not, right? Or you do and you catch it earlier, cause that's also a progress.

That's also a win, you know, but these kinds of things are important. And this is the way you can, I would say unpack it. It's just questioning the feeling, you know, why am I set off right now? And then just like the five whys, right?

asking why intelligently until you can uncover and get to this like, this aha moment, you know? And, you know, a lot of micromanagers, they think they're micromanaging because they have no trust. And most of the time it is, but the trust is not necessarily in the other team. ⁓ The trust within themselves, you know, because they're just protecting what they fear.

And it's... And micromanagement looks like standards, right? But it's anxiety disguised as standards. Their micromanagement is fear disguised as leadership.

It's control disguised as responsibility. And a lot of leaders struggle with trust because they think that the mistake means that they're less than, they're unworthy that, you know, they're afraid of what their leader's gonna be. So there's a fear of visibility or people seeing that they're wrong. Guys, I go through this stuff too, right?

I want my work to speak for itself. And so if my work has error, what does that mean about me? And, know, I find this a lot as I answer emails and respond on my phone. I often see that somebody pointed to me years ago that there's a lot of grammatical errors, even, you know, obviously there's there's a ⁓ spell check, but just grammatical errors.

And at first I thought, ⁓ my God, people must think that I'm dumb. you know, because why would I have so many grammatical errors and all these things? And I went down that path and I'm like, okay, well, like what if they think you're dumb? Like the, do you know that you're not dumb?

Because that's the one that matters, you know? matters that you don't think you're dumb because then nobody can make you feel anything. Nobody can sway you. You don't, and I don't think people make you do anything.

I think you allow it and you only allow it when there's a shred of evidence about it. within yourself, not real evidence, just you don't know that you're not dumb. So therefore you care about what people are gonna read that email and think. And while I think it's unprofessional to be grammatically incorrect all the time on purpose, however, if I make a mistake, it's okay, right?

And so this is piece or an example of how I had to regulate myself with grammatical errors, which seems like nothing. on the surface, right? However, when we peel it back and we look under the hood, we can kind of see where this may be a thing from my childhood and not being perfect and getting a bad grade or mom saw that I got something wrong on my homework and now I'm punished and all these things that we don't think impact us later on, but they do. so you can become emotionally attached to outcomes.

really easily if that's like where your childhood came from and that's how you received love or recognition or where you think your value is. know, sometimes you believe that control creates safety and in our minds it does. And that's why we often try to control things. But the truth is that you're in control and you safe without it.

Right. That's the truth. You know, because when you over control team in this micromanagement aspect, what you're doing is, you're creating dependency. And, know, we, I've it before, but micromanagement stops your team from thinking because they start to learn, ⁓ right?

neural pathways you're creating for them is that they be independent, that they have to wait for your approval, that you don't want them to take the risk. You don't want them to own the outcome. And then you wonder why nobody's owning the outcome and nobody's taking the And I can't get my team to think. And it's, it's just this visceral ⁓ cycle that Honestly, as leaders we're creating.

so you want to build ownership, clarity, systems, trust, safety. And you want to understand that you are safe in that, right? If somebody on your team makes a mistake, it means nothing about you. If you make a mistake, it means nothing about you.

It's just a mistake, right? And so if this episode is hitting for you right now, I want you to send it to another leader who carrying pressure quietly. Because honestly, a lot of high performers are burning themselves out, trying to hold everything together internally while still looking composed externally. And I don't know about you guys, but internal burnout is way, way worse than external burnout.

And important for us to see each other and to carry each other across the finish line. And your does absolutely feel your energy and your shift and your nervous system. your team read your energy before they even hear your words because humans, they're wired for emotional contagion, right? The meaning of that is able to see your nervous system, being able to see if you're rattled and how like your nervous system influences somebody else's nervous system if they can't regulate.

So when a leader walks into a room, are they rushed? Are they tense? Are emotionally active? Are they frantic?

Are they anxious? And one the things that's wild to me, ⁓ but happens often is when people start to say like, ⁓ what kind of mood is so and so in? ⁓ what kind of mood are they in today? And not knowing what kind of mood your leader's gonna be in automatically puts you in survival.

If you can't regulate, it's automatically gonna put you in survival or on notice, right? They absorb your feelings, even if nothing is said directly. some leaders unintentionally spread panic, pressure, confusion, and emotional instability. through your tone, your urgency, your body language, your inconsistency and your unpredictability.

Think about it. Think about, I don't know, you know, there's always these stories of these, how we grew up, right? If you grew up in a unregulated house, then knew, ⁓ you the feeling of tense is coming, tense is here. How do need to behave to be safe?

And to put adults through that because you can't regulate your own emotions seems unfair to me. As adults now that we know better, I think it is our responsibility to regulate. People leaders who make them feel safer, clearer, and more stable. This goes into why leaders behave the way they do.

You could have a decision that know you're about, that you need to make, that you're delaying making, but you don't do it because you're still negotiating with your reality. You know, you have a big decision to make, you know, you need to make it. You're the only one that can make it. And yet that decision will put you in, I would say just for, ⁓ know, for the podcast, upper authority, right?

It's, and that feeling of being put in upper authority of having made a decision, of having that decision, possibly coming back to ask questions. we delay. We delay decision making because of the fear of visibility, of judgment, of being asked, of the responsibility of being the one that made the decision, the fear of becoming the bad guy. It's all identity protection, guys.

It's all identity protection. Because the truth is, like, let's say you make a decision somebody has a question about it, and you made the decision with the purest intentions, right? Whether the outcome was good or bad, but you made it with the business in mind or the person in mind. then should be confident in your decision-making ability and explaining your why.

Whether it criticized or not is nothing, but again, the whole point is that you know why you made the decision. And the higher you go in leadership, the fewer emotional comfortability decisions exist. You're making tougher decisions. Your leadership going to require you to have an increased level of discomfort tolerance.

no matter what, you you're going to have to find a way to be stable. You're going to have to find a way to be clear, even in uncertain times, because somebody needs to hold the line. Somebody needs to be the anchor. And if you're the leader, that responsibility is yours, right?

Whether you have a leader that does it well or not, you still need to practice. what we're learning is that the title alone does not create the emotional maturity. And many people want the authority, the recognition, the influence, but they don't fully understand the pressure, the visibility and the accountability and how leadership can be lonely. know, leadership is like carrying this clarity when everyone is carrying emotion.

Like as a leader, you know, if it's frantic and I walk into the room, you know, and everybody's in a, in a, in in a mode or in a mood, like it is absolutely my job to say, All right, let's pause let's start from the beginning. And I want to hear from everyone. And I want you to get your thoughts clearly ⁓ out. not going to interrupt.

I just want to listen for understanding. And that brings the quiet, calm, because I'm calm. And I'm telling them that no matter what, guys, we're going to figure this out. So I'm not even worried about ⁓ what you are worried about yet, but we will find the answer.

It's clear that we will find the answer. that's necessary because when you're at a specific level of over time, leadership, then people are going to bring you problems. They are going to bring you uncertainty. They are going to bring you their frustrations.

They are going to bring pressure and emotions and your nervous system becomes part of the organizational culture. And this is why you can't get promoted until you regulate yourself because your tone, your nervous system will dictate how ⁓ the team, the department, the department's function. Your nervous system creates the organizational culture. And so until you can regulate, you're not gonna get promoted because can't trust that you can handle more.

You gotta show that you can handle more right now. And I say all that to say that leadership requires both today. It requires strategy and it requires your... you to be the human that you are with a soul.

Meaning that you need to have your self-awareness, you need to have emotional intelligence, you need to have your nervous system regulated. You also need strategic thinking, identity work, and rational intelligence, relational intelligence, sorry. Because I'm really believing now as I continue to discover myself a lot more in the last couple of years that you don't have to lose yourself to be in corporate. And I know that there was this stance that we took and I still take it from time to time if I'm being honest.

But I think that that's the old model. I think the new model is that we can have strategic leadership with emotional depth. And the leaders aren't the most emotionally disconnected. They're the most emotionally aware without becoming emotionally controlled.

And that's just through regulation, right? That's just through becoming stoic. That's just through taking a step back and looking at the problem from a different perspective. And I don't want to leave you guys without giving you a few practical leadership regulation tools.

so before reacting, want you to pause. ⁓ And I want you, if you're unable to pause, want you to just notice the between the thing that happened, what we'll call the trigger, and your reaction. Because there's a sliver there. There's a sliver of space.

And if you could just see it, if you could just notice it, then I think that you could take advantage of it. But until you can see it, until you can notice it, until you can see someone say, you know, let's say somebody calls you a name. between their calling you a name and your reaction, there's a space everything is in that space. And so I encourage you, if you don't have that space, if you're unaware of it, I just want you to notice it.

And I want you to, yeah, I wanna say for today, we're just gonna notice it. Before deciding, I want you to zoom out. Before deciding something, I just want you to take a quick zoom out to see who it impacts and how it impacts and is this the right call? Before communicating, I want you to regulate first, right?

So happens or you need to have a conversation, you need to do some deep breathing, you need to make sure that you feel safe inside, you need to make a friend of yourself before you start to go out and communicate. And before controlling, so this is for my micromanagers, ⁓ I want you to just clarify the expectations be okay with reclarifying the expectations. And again, reclarifying the expectations because remember if you're uncomfortable delegating, that means you're likely not going to communicate it effectively at first.

And so what you're going to see is maybe the expectation wasn't clear or maybe the result is not where you want it. And that's just going to reaffirm why you can't delegate instead. ⁓ I want you to see that that's a reason why you need to re-explain yourself clearer this time. We're not gonna go down the pathway of, this is why I need to do it myself.

We're gonna go down the pathway of, huh, this must be because I did not communicate it clearly enough. And that's where we're gonna keep going, right? ⁓ me reiterate the expectation. Let me reiterate the expectation.

Let me get better at saying what I want because you're not good at saying what you want yet, because you're not good at work away. So you have to believe that there is a skill here of delegation that you're just now starting to tap into. And so it's not, is why I need to do it myself. is, this is why I need to practice giving work away so that I can practice setting expectations clearly depending on the person I'm speaking to, right?

And you build systems instead of emotional dependence this way. And so my reflection question for you as we close this episode is, Am I leading from clarity or anxiety? And remember that the higher in leadership you go, less your value comes from how you do. And it comes from how clear you?

How steady do you lead? know, how calm respond and how regulated you stay while pressure still exists because it's not going anywhere. And your leadership is not just execution anymore. It is your identity.

It is your regulation. It's your strategic thinking. It's how learning you lead is just as important ⁓ your and your metrics. And you don't have to lose yourself in the process.

All of this can be inside of one person, one great leader. And so if this episode hit you, you're the exact kind of leader that I built this kind of work for. And the that talking to, the one that wants to be better ⁓ and knows that they better, And maybe just need some guidance, because I know I did. have a lot of mentors.

I have a lot of coaches. Because I'm just constantly refining and sometimes redefining my craft. ⁓ And the of leadership is not just smarter execution. It's regulated leadership.

It's relational intelligence. It's learning how to lead powerfully without abounding yourself the process. leadership is such a responsibility that I don't take lightly. You know, there are people who are counting on me.

There are people who are counting on you and I hope you don't take that lightly. And that's why we do the work that we do. And that's why we work on ourselves because there are people who are counting on us, are expecting us to be better, to create a culture of safety, psychological safety and physical safety, whose whole life outside of work depends on our emotional state and the ability for us to regulate. And so I call you forward leaders of people who know that they have more in them, who know they have things to sharpen, to refine, as we all do.

And I hope we never ever stop. I you forward. And if you need any help with any of this, know, drop the show notes, shoot me an get into the community wait list, let's work one on one, let's just do the damn thing, right? Because there are some amazing people and their families who are counting on us.

And it's our responsibility to be there. And if you don't want the responsibility, that's a whole different type of conversation. But I know who I'm talking to and I know that you do want the responsibility. So let's get in the game and let's get good at it.

All right, until next time, guys, thanks for listening. Please like and subscribe and I'll catch you on the flip side. See ya.