Most of What You Do as a Leader Is About Managing Your Own Discomfort

Marcus had been struggling for three weeks.

His manager, David, knew it. He had seen the signs. The energy that used to be there was gone, and the quality of his work had slipped in subtle but consistent ways. David had been meaning to have a real conversation with him for days.

Finally, they sat down.

David opened well. He asked how things were going. Marcus started talking slowly at first, then more freely. Something was happening in his personal life. It was affecting his sleep, concentration, and ability to show up the way he wanted to. He was not quite asking for anything. He was just finally saying it out loud to someone.

About ninety seconds in, David felt the familiar pull.

He knew what was wrong. He could see what Marcus needed. He had resources available. He knew exactly how to fix it.

So he did.

“What support do you need? Let us talk about what a realistic plan looks like for the next few weeks. Here is what I can do to help.”

Marcus nodded. Said thank you. Left the meeting.

David felt good about the conversation. He had listened. He had responded with care and practical action. He had done what good leaders do.

What he had actually done was something else entirely.

Every leadership development program teaches some version of what David did.

Listen. Show empathy. Move to solutions. Support your people. Be action-oriented. Follow up.

All those things are good. None of them are wrong.

The problem is not the behaviors. The problem is what was driving them.

Marcus had been talking for ninety seconds when David became uncomfortable. He didn’t know it and probably could not name it. He was anxious.

Another person’s distress triggers anxiety in the nervous system of the person witnessing it. We have all felt a specific discomfort of watching someone struggle, or of sitting with an unresolved problem. Being present with an emotional state that has no immediate fix registers as a low-grade threat.

And the nervous system reaches for the fastest available resolution to calm the anxiety.

Fix the problem. Make a plan. Offer support. Move toward action.

Every one of those responses resolves David’s discomfort.

None of them addresses what Marcus was experiencing.

David’s immediate pivot to solutions is the most common version of this pattern. But it runs through almost everything that gets called good leadership.

The structured feedback process keeping the conversation efficient and forward-looking. The agenda that moves the meeting beyond the uncomfortable silence. The quick acknowledgment before getting to the point. The delegation that solves the immediate problem without examining its root cause. The reassurance delivered before the concern has been fully heard.

Every single one of these behaviors feels like leadership from the inside.

Every single one of them is an anxiety management strategy.

The competence-authority-control operating system that underlies most leadership behavior seeks resolution, order, and the feeling of having done something useful. What is really occurring is self-soothing. Leaders unconsciously soothe their anxiety by appearing to take action when they should be listening and validating.

Stephen Covey named four specific forms the soothing takes. We evaluate. We probe. We advise. We interpret. He called them autobiographical responses and identified them as the primary obstacle to genuine listening.

What he could not tell you was why we do them.

The answer is biological, not dispositional.

When someone brings us their distress, confusion, struggle, or fear, our nervous system activates. The activation is not dramatic. It is the low-grade anxiety of being in the presence of an unresolved problem. The behaviors that feel like leadership are not. They are self-soothing behaviors disguised as leadership.

Marcus left that meeting feeling heard in a way that left him more alone than before the conversation started. David arrived at the plan before Marcus felt that anyone had been present for what he was carrying.

The advice landed before the acknowledgment.

And advice without acknowledgment is not care; it is anxiety management.

The specific cost of this pattern runs through every relationship a leader has. The direct report stops bringing real problems because they know the real problem will be converted into a plan before it is heard. The team aligns in meetings and processes frustration in the hallway. The high performer who leaves without fully explaining why, and whose exit interview does not capture the actual reason.

All of it traces back to the same moment. The moment when the leader’s anxiety was resolved at the expense of the other person’s experience of being met.

A specific intervention is available in the ninety seconds before David pivoted to solutions.

It requires noticing the pull toward resolution to soothe one’s anxiety and doing something different.

Naming what Marcus is carrying before moving toward anything else.

Two words.

“You feel.”

Followed by the most accurate emotion word available. Delivered without hedging. Followed by silence.

“You feel overwhelmed.”

“You feel like you are failing.”

“You feel like you have been holding this alone.”

Then stop talking. Watch the body. The shoulders. The breath. The quality of attention in the eyes.

When the body signals that something landed, the conversation that follows is completely different, because Marcus is now in a regulated enough nervous system state to genuinely engage with a plan rather than simply comply with one.

Matthew Lieberman’s fMRI research at UCLA documented the mechanism in 2007. Directly naming an emotion reduces amygdala activation and restores prefrontal cortex function. The nervous system, running a protective protocol, begins to regulate. The person becomes genuinely available for the conversation that follows.

David’s anxiety does not disappear when he names Marcus’s emotion. But it transforms. From the urgency of an unresolved problem into the quiet of a person who has been met. And from that quiet, everything David wanted to offer, the support, the plan, the practical action, becomes receivable rather than just delivered.

One version of leadership manages people toward outcomes.

Another version that creates the biological conditions under which people can access their capabilities.

They look similar from the outside. They feel completely different from the inside of the person being led.

The first version produces compliance. The second produces genuine engagement.

The first version resolves the leader’s anxiety. The second resolves the other person’s activation first and lets the leader’s anxiety settle as a consequence.

Most of what gets taught as leadership development is about doing the first version better.

The prior step, the one that makes the second version possible, is what nobody teaches.

That prior step is what Empathy Leadership was written to address.

The framework that explains it, the neuroscience behind it, and the field evidence from twenty-five years applying it in the hardest human environments available are in the book that arrives September 8.

Empathy Leadership: How a Powerful Skill Drives Business Success.

Beyond Words and Simon and Schuster.

For bulk orders for your team, board, or portfolio companies, which include various levels of training and coaching with me, reach out at doug@dougnoll.com or visit https://dougnoll.com/empathy-leadership-launch.

Douglas E. Noll is a lawyer, mediator, and peacemaker. A Distinguished Fellow of the International Academy of Mediators, he has spent twenty-five years resolving conflicts that other processes could not reach, in boardrooms, courthouses, and maximum-security prisons.

He is the author of De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less and the forthcoming Empathy Leadership: How a Powerful Skill Drives Business Success, Beyond Words and Simon and Schuster, September 2026.