Leading with Emotional Intelligence
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Why changing how you show up feels exactly like driving on the wrong side of the road — and why it's worth the discomfort.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." ~ often attributed to Viktor Frankl; widely cited as a paraphrase of his ideas
What You'll Learn
Why your emotional reactions feel automatic — and what that costs you as a leader
The "wrong side of the road" analogy for changing ingrained emotional habits
What it actually means to be present with someone, beyond hearing their words
A practical way to bring intentionality to your hardest conversations
Why this work is uncomfortable, and why it's worth it anyway
The habits you can't see
When was the last time you reacted to someone before you'd decided to? The sharp tone under pressure, the defensiveness when challenged, the story you tell yourself when someone disappoints you — most of our emotional responses run on autopilot, built over a lifetime. Jonathan Fanning on our team captures why that's so hard to change with a story about renting a car in London. He and his wife drove all over vut what he remembers most isn't the sights. It's how much focus it took just to drive.
Everything was reversed. Which hand to shift with. Which shoulder to check. And over and over, when he went to back up, he'd throw his right arm over the passenger seat the way he always had in the States — except there was no passenger seat there. Just a window. So he'd whack his fingers into the glass. Four, five, six times a day.
That's not a driving problem. That's a habit problem. And it's the perfect picture of what makes emotional intelligence so hard.
Our mental habits, our thought habits, our emotional habits become so ingrained that we stop noticing them entirely. The way you react when someone challenges you in a meeting. The tone that creeps in when you're under pressure. The story you tell yourself when a direct report disappoints you. You're not choosing those responses in the moment — they're running on autopilot, built over a lifetime, as automatic as reaching for a passenger seat that isn't there.
This is what we call unconscious incompetence: you can't adjust what you can't see. Most leaders aren't failing at emotional intelligence because they don't care. They're failing because their reactions feel like simply how things are rather than choices they're making.
Changing sides takes deliberate focus
Here's what driving in London actually required: Jonathan couldn't just intend to drive differently. He had to consciously, deliberately override the automatic move every single time. Take a breath. Pause. Look over the left shoulder, not the right. Turn this way, not that way.
Emotional intelligence works exactly the same. You have a mode you've been running your whole life — a default way of reacting to people, to conflict, to stress. This is what we call your Default Success Strategy doing what it's always done, often driven by your Critic rather than your Executive. Shifting it doesn't happen by deciding to be better. It happens through deliberate, conscious, repeated intentionality — the same focus it takes to back up a car on the wrong side of the road without hitting the window.
And just like driving, you'll revert under pressure. The moment you stop paying attention, the old habit takes the wheel. That's not failure. That's the work. Every time you catch the automatic reaction and choose a different one, you're rewiring the habit a little more.
What presence actually looks like
Here's where it gets practical - before a conversation, to be fully there:
I'm going to be in this whole meeting. I'm going to be present. I'm going to pay attention to every word. And I'm not just going to listen to what they're saying — I'm going to listen for what they're feeling. For what they're not saying. For whether they're comfortable. I'm going to completely be there with them.
That's the move. Most of us listen for the gap where we get to talk. Emotionally intelligent leaders listen for what's underneath the words — the hesitation, the thing left unsaid, the feeling the person may not even have named yet.
But notice what makes that possible: it's a decision made beforehand, not a skill you summon mid-conversation. You can't white-knuckle your way to presence once you're already reacting. You set the intention before you walk in — I'm going to look over the left shoulder this time — and then you hold it.
And here's the part that's easy to miss: presence can't be faked. You can't perform "I'm listening" while you're actually waiting to make your point — people feel the difference instantly. The intentionality has to be real, because what you're truly feeling leaks out through your tone, your face, your attention long before your words do. This is the difference between fear-based and love-based leadership: are you in the conversation to win it, or are you genuinely there with the person? They can tell. They always can.
Is it worth it?
This is hard. It takes more energy than running on autopilot. Some days it'll feel like whacking your fingers against the glass over and over.
So, is it worth it?
Is it worth it to take your relationships to another level? To have deeper influence with the people around you? To stay calm in the situations that have always owned you — instead of you owning them?
We think it is. Because here's what's true: the leaders people follow aren't the ones who never feel reactive. They're the ones who've done the deliberate work to put a space between the trigger and the response — and who use that space to choose presence over autopilot, partnership over defensiveness, love over fear.
That space is learnable. It just takes the same intentionality as learning to drive on the other side of the road. Uncomfortable at first. Automatic eventually. Worth it always.
This is the deep work we do with leaders inside culture transformation — building the self-awareness to see your automatic patterns, and the intentionality to change them: phoenixperformancepartners.com/culture-transformation
This week: Before your next hard conversation, make one decision in advance — I'm going to be fully present for this one. Then, in the conversation, listen for one thing beyond the words: what is this person feeling that they haven't said? Just notice it. That single act of deliberate attention is you looking over the left shoulder instead of the right.
If you want to build this kind of presence and steadiness into how your whole team leads — that's exactly what we're taking on this fall. Join one of our forums where we'll be leading a 5-month series on Emotional Intelligence in our leadership forums: a practical blueprint for teams that stay centered, focused, and authentic no matter what's thrown at them.