Manage Your State

The earlier you learn to manage your reactions, the less they cost you.

I’m in a performance calibration meeting. A VP and several directors around the table. We’re discussing one of my direct reports. I’d rated them highly. The room disagrees. Questions come from multiple directions, and then the VP says he’s downgrading them.

My chest tightens. I go into protection mode. I say I disagree but will commit to the decision. I think I’m exercising backbone. But I’m not thinking about the org. I’m not calibrating across teams or engaging with my peers as a leader. I’m defending my person. I walk out of that room having missed the entire point of being in it.

I didn’t think of my emotional state as something I could manage. It was just something that happened to me. Someone challenged my idea, I got tight. Someone threatened something I cared about, I got defensive. I thought that was honesty. Authenticity. Backbone. I didn’t understand that my reaction was getting in my way.

That meeting cost me trust with my leadership. It probably impacted my growth at the company. And it wasn’t the first time. Years earlier, I’d lost my composure in front of a CEO. Another time, in front of a manager whose opinion mattered. Each time the pattern was the same: I got triggered, I reacted, and my reputation took a hit I didn’t fully see until later. These moments compound, just in the wrong direction.

I was 29, at a Tony Robbins program, when I first heard someone talk about managing your internal state as a skill. Not suppressing emotions, but managing them. That was the first time it clicked that the tightness in my chest was a signal, not a command. Something I care about feels threatened, and my instinct is to defend. Now when I feel it, I ask for a break, take a walk, or just breathe. The signal hasn’t changed. What I do with it has.

Your state is your responsibility. Nobody else is going to manage it for you. When you’re sleep-deprived, hungry, angry, or tired, you don’t regulate well. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a design constraint. The skill is noticing when you’re off-center and intervening before you react from your worst self. Every year I catch the signal a little earlier, and the cost of missing it gets a little smaller.

I wish I’d started learning this at 22 instead of 29. I would have been more curious and less righteous. I would have connected more instead of contracting into defense. This is the kind of thing that compounds in trust, in reputation, in the quality of every conversation I walk into.