When Personal Feelings Come to Work
Case Illustration
All names and identifying details in these case illustrations are fictional. They are composite sketches drawn from clinical and coaching experience, not accounts of real individuals.
Clearing the cache of emotional reactions.
Colleen was surprised and concerned to hear that Adam, a valued member of her leadership team, was thinking about leaving the company. She was immediately worried about the impact to several critical initiatives. She also worried about how it would affect Zeke, another critical member of her team — Adam and Zeke had come together from a previous firm and clearly functioned best as a pair. Losing Adam would be terrible. Losing both Adam and Zeke would be catastrophic.
She decided to give Adam some time without mentioning it to anyone. But to her own coach, Colleen unloaded all her concerns and feelings, including a bevy of unproductive speculations about why Adam was doing this. What mattered most was that she could show her coach the personal, unfiltered side to herself that would have served no purpose outside of that context. Among other things, Colleen felt no small degree of anger at Adam and could not help taking his potential departure personally. She recognized her feelings were to some extent irrational — but being able to air them without fear of consequences allowed her to return to a more balanced position quite quickly.
It isn’t necessary to know exactly why Colleen felt so strongly. Most likely the situation had triggered some memory or personal association not directly related to Adam at all. What mattered was that being able to clear the cache of the emotional side of her reactions meant she could bring a fuller capacity to the actual complexity of the situation. When she later met with Zeke, she was able to be present for him — rather than managing herself in his presence.
People in senior roles are not insulated from the emotional textures of their own histories simply by having reached seniority. A situation at work will sometimes land on an old bruise — the feeling of being left, of something depended upon turning out to be moveable. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or even fully conscious. It just has to be unexamined.
The value of a protected relationship — a coach, a trusted advisor, someone genuinely outside the system — isn’t about becoming more psychologically minded as a leader. It’s simpler and more functional than that. Those parts of a reaction that don’t get aired find another exit –into decisions made from slightly the wrong place. Into an edge in a conversation that the other person feels but can’t understand why. Into a guardedness that ends up feeling, to the people around a leader, as distance or withdrawal.
Colleen didn’t need to resolve her feelings about Adam to work effectively with Zeke. She needed somewhere to put those feelings first. Not because the coaching session produced a strategy, but because having somewhere to put the full weight of her reaction — including the parts she wasn’t proud of — meant those parts didn’t have to find another exit.
On Finding a Good Room for Our Feelings
There is a version of this story that can be told purely in functional terms: Colleen managed her reaction, kept her team intact, and returned to effective leadership. All of that is true and worth saying. But it undersells what actually happened.
What Colleen needed was not emotional management. She needed somewhere to be unmanaged — somewhere the anger at Adam, the fear about Zeke, the irrational sense of personal betrayal — could exist without cost. Not end up on the balance sheet, but simply be held by someone outside the system, who had no stake in the outcome and no need for her to be anything other than what she was in that moment.
This is what space for our feelings, be it in a protected relationship or any other equivalent, makes possible. Not the performance of equanimity – but the actual conditions under which equanimity can return on its own.
See also: Loneliness at the Top — the cluster article that frames this territory.