Managing Emotions in Leadership:
Self-Awareness, Composure and Executive Presence
For leaders, deeper composure cultivates executive presence and offers strategic leverage. Beyond protecting reputation, credibility, and relationships, composure and presence enhance your perception—allowing you to recognize risks, opportunities, and unseen relationship dynamics that others miss. Your unique perspective becomes your advantage, sharpening your judgment, earning deeper trust, and making you exceptionally hard to replace.
Managing Emotions Under Pressure:
How Leaders Are Controlled by What They Avoid
Almost everything we experience as “leadership under pressure” is less about what we feel and more about what we can’t tolerate feeling—by what we habitually, unconsciously, refuse to confront. We spend our lives outrunning discomfort—towards whatever we think will eliminate our discomfort or protect us from it—chasing the full/final relief we think is waiting beyond the next milestone/solution.
We tend to seek resilience after a setback. But the setback is destabilizing because of our resistance to the discomfort that the setback produced. Whether we like it or not, our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions determine so much of our lives, but only because we avoid them. Composure isn’t something we create on demand when we experience a setback—it is what remains when we stop needing discomfort to disappear; it is what remains when we no longer organize our life around the hope of never again feeling exposed, ashamed, incompetent, or replaceable.
What disrupts our presence and judgment isn’t the presence of emotion, or even fear or avoidance or desire. What disrupts our presence and judgment is the “absence” of awareness. Awareness is what lets us see—before being consumed—how our thoughts, emotions, and instincts are shaping what we notice, what we miss, and how we respond under pressure.
What makes our emotions destabilizing is the lack of awareness we have for the intolerance we have for our unwanted thoughts and feelings. What passes for resilience in leadership—emotional control, toughness, rebound speed—often reinforces the very fragility it claims to resolve. We don’t fall apart because we feel too much. We fall apart because we keep trying not to—and believe we never should, and never should have to.
Deeper composure doesn’t require the capacity to control our emotions. It requires the capacity to become aware of discomfort before being consumed by it. Managing emotions just requires becoming aware of them before becoming possessed by them. It requires seeing how our attention, our thoughts, our actions may have been preoccupied by the desire to avoid certain states of being and cling to others.
Avoidance isn’t always visible. It hides inside productivity, spirituality, even introspection. In leadership, this avoidance is particularly costly—especially in situations of public scrutiny, succession pressure, high-stakes decision fatigue, stakeholder betrayal, or status loss. It requires seeing how much of our lives may have been organized around the hope that some accomplishment might guarantee that we’re never again made to feel invisible, ashamed, replaceable, unworthy, guilty, defective, exposed, inadequate.
Our habits of avoidance organize our thinking, feeling, behaving, and even our perception. We may stay in roles or relationships that no longer serve us, just to avoid the discomfort of disruption. We may hesitate, over-prepare, delay decisions—not because we don’t know what to do, but because we don’t want to think about or feel what clarity would require that we confront. In other words, our hesitation may not be strategic; it’s protective. We become hyper-attuned to what we fear—we notice it everywhere, we assume it will be where it might not, we project it onto others’ words/actions, and we become experts at how to manage or hide our discomfort.
We become shaped by the impulse to not feel/think some particular thing. This is why deeper composure is not a trait, but is an effect of being able to remain with our discomfort before unthinkingly being compelled by it. When discomfort governs perception, leadership becomes a series of evasions. We confuse decisiveness with control, and impulsivity with courage. We ask decisions to do more than clarify—they must now protect us from shame, exposure, or regret. The urge to rebound or to retreat often comes from the same source: the discomfort we are trying to avoid.
Avoidance also distorts growth. We want progress, but only on the condition that it never again forces us to feel weak, exposed, or uncertain. We remain fixated on what we haven’t yet accomplished, hoping our achievements will silence the background sense of inner lack. But the stronger our craving for completion, the more incomplete we feel. Even the pursuit of peace becomes agitating when driven by the fantasy of invulnerability. The more desperately we want to feel at ease, the more preoccupied we become with whatever disturbs it. This craving for finality—of feeling done, resolved, protected—only intensifies the sense that something is still wrong. The very effort to extinguish discomfort makes us more aware of it—just as a stronger desire for wealth or power makes us feel poorer or powerless.
Eventually, self-management replaces self-awareness. The desire to fix ourselves eclipses our ability to understand how we’re being shaped—particularly by our preoccupation to silence/outrun our discomfort once and for all. Ironically, the very attempt to “stabilize” ourselves destabilizes our leadership. Because our freedom depends on the elimination of discomfort, we become more fragile and continue to imprison ourselves.
Deeper composure is not a technique for bypassing/deleting difficult emotions—it means becoming aware of how quickly and reflexively we try to bypass them. Our failures aren’t destabilizing because they reveal what’s missing in our abilities. They’re destabilizing because they reveal the feelings we were hoping our success would protect us from. We don’t just react to what happened—we react to what it produced in us: shame, exposure, helplessness, uncertainty. The more we fear those feelings, the more we demand that every decision or achievement shield us from them. And once avoidance shapes our perception, leadership becomes less about vision and more about protection.
We don’t become composed by mastering our fear. We become more composed when we stop organizing our lives around the need to avoid the feelings that we fear. We become more composed as we stop waiting for fearlessness—and as we begin to discover how much of what we call procrastination, perfectionism, or hesitation is just avoidance—avoidance of the very discomfort that our leadership, our relationships, and our integrity now may require us to confront.
Composure isn’t the absence of emotion, it’s the presence of awareness—of being aware of how our attention is pre-occupied before becoming completely pre-occupied. Better managing one’s emotions rarely requires doing more. In fact, better managing one’s emotions is the result of surrender, not pursuit.
And for those who lead, this capacity is not just personal—it becomes the subtle leverage that alters perception, earns trust, and determines whose presence is missed when it’s gone.
Whether we like it or not, our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions determine so much of our lives, but only because we avoid them.
The Yoga of Emotional Composure:
How Leaders Can Deepen Their Composure Under Pressure
(Without Having to Control/Eliminate/Manage Emotions)
What follows are four essential dimensions of a yogic approach to deepening composure—the foundation of clarity, influence, and presence under pressure. These dimensions are not steps to complete but capacities to deepen—refined through experience, awareness, and the challenges of leadership itself. Each dimension is not a step toward control, but a deepening of our capacity to recognize the way(s) our attention is instinctively preoccupied. The more we grow, the more nuanced our awareness and self-awareness become—the more we notice. Every step forward reveals new possibilities; there is no final destination (emotional “mastery” or bulletproof mental health)—only the growing ability to remain present with what is already happening but we didn’t notice. Ultimately, deeper composure is not the reward for some kind of invulnerability or self-mastery, but is what remains when we are no longer imprisoned by our need to be in control—of what we (and others) feel, think, do, see; deeper composure is what remains when we are no longer imprisoned by ourselves.
(1) Experience Your Innate Calmness and Composure
Running From Your Emotions Means that Your Emotions Are in Control
Inner calm is not something that we must “obtain” from some place outside of ourselves, nor is it achieved by eliminating whatever we think is preventing us from experiencing it. And simply wanting to experience inner calm isn’t enough, because the simple exertion of willpower isn’t enough—especially when the source of this willpower is the anxious individual looking to “get rid of” something in/about themselves; forcing composure through willpower only reinforces the tension it seeks to dissolve. In these instances, our anxieties are in control. The habitual self who needs to feel secure is in control. (And this habitual self who is in the habit of reaching for security cannot grow.) When composure is driven by the need for security, it is fragile. And when the need for control takes over, composure is lost.
Avoidance fuels the cycle of restlessness; this basic habit—of avoiding our anxieties—produces and reproduces self-sabotaging behaviour, feelings of isolation, and the relentless craving for whatever ‘next’ thing we feel we need in order to finally feel “at peace” and “complete”: more money, fame, love, attention, status, respect—the car, the house, the job, the promotion, the partner, marriage, the child, retirement, or even spiritual enlightenment. But if composure is always conditional on the next milestone, it remains forever out of reach. When we are no longer running from ourselves, our attention is no longer consumed by a future ideal that we think will fill up our sense of lack (which tends only to exacerbate our lack rather than free us from it): the more we crave composure, the more sensitive we become to our agitation—the more desperately we want to feel at ease, the more preoccupied we are with whatever disturbs it.
Calm is not the absence of anxiety, but the ability to notice anxiety before it possesses your decisions or distorts your perception. In other words, we are not attempting to generate a peaceful state, but to see how much of your attention, judgment, and sense of self have been shaped by precisely the desire to generate a peaceful state.
But we cannot turn off these basic desires—to avoid anxiety and to seek security/control—with our will. What’s needed is not another technique, but the capacity to see the pattern of avoidance itself, directly, in real time—we need a practice to bypass (not reason with or explore or deconstruct) the habitual self’s desire to unthinkingly escape discomfort. In yoga, we cultivate awareness so that we may become aware of—before being consumed by—the very thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving that prevent us from seeing, among other things, how our efforts to acquire permanent peace might be reinforcing the very suffering we’re trying to escape. “Yoga” is not the destruction of vulnerability, but is a state of being—it is what remains when we stop striving to destroy our vulnerabilities.
Learning to sit with our anxieties ensures that we won’t waste our time and energy running from them. Acquainting ourselves with our innate inner calm and composure allows us to develop a clearer relationship with anxiety, one where you no longer see composure as the absence of difficulty, but as the ability to become aware of anxieties before becoming consumed by them. Anxiety doesn’t have to be debilitating, and moments of rest/relaxation don’t have to be anxiety-producing (by reminding us about what we’re not doing or what we could or should be doing). And we don’t have to feel compelled to constantly be “busy” just so we can avoid the anxiety of not having something—anything—to occupy our attention, or of not being able to honestly tell others that we are “busy”, to signal our worth through activity.
Anxiety is a non-optional part of growth. Perhaps the simplest way to deal with anxiety is simply to be willing to feel it. Simple, yes, but certainly not easy. (And always made more difficult by craving some state of being that we think is on the other side of our anxiety, on the other side of discomfort.) Running from (or trying to destroy) our anxieties just means that our anxieties are in control.
No longer reflexively avoiding discomfort, you begin to notice what most people miss under pressure—not just your own reactive patterns (that enable and disable us), but the signals offered by others: what’s actually at stake, who is posturing, where the tension is, etc.. This is clarity—not a special state, but an ability to see what is actually happening, before anxiety narrows your options. People trust your steadiness—not because you never feel anxiety, but because you don’t let it possess your judgment or your presence. This is the kind of composure that quietly sets you apart, even when nothing obvious is said.
As we become more capable of viewing our situation more objectively (instead of instinctively running from our unwanted emotions and thoughts), we become more “connected” to our current reality and to ourselves. And it is this connection that reduces the likelihood that we will be consumed in/by the relentless pursuit of “more”—the very “more” that reinforces our lack (just as a stronger desire for recognition leaves us feeling more invisible) and ensures that no success will ever feel like it’s enough.
Composure is not the result of more “control” over your inner life; composure is simply what remains when control no longer feels necessary. It is the result of freeing ourselves from limitations imposed by our habitual self’s desire for recognition/security; composure is the result of surrender, not pursuit.
(2) Experience Your Innate Fearlessness
Your Impact & Legacy Might be Connected to the Things You Avoid
Fearlessness just is no longer running from our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions. Fearlessness just is no longer running from ourselves.
As we learn to sit with our fears and anxieties rather than unthinkingly react to them, we’re less trapped in/by them. And when we’re less trapped in and by our patterns of reactivity, there is more “space” to see our underlying patterns, and to articulate—by directly experiencing—how these patterns are producing and reproducing our destructive habits—including the patterns that shape our decisions, our limitations, and our sense of possibility. In other words, we are able to see the ways in which our attention is habitually and automatically pre-occupied.
Changing our habitual self requires confronting these unconscious habits, especially those that we develop and inherit in order to avoid painful thoughts/emotions/situations. Focusing our efforts on making our implicit habits more explicit will allow us to see how our effectiveness (and impact and legacy) is tied up in the tangled emotions connected to the things we avoid. Unless we become clear about the unconscious patterns that are determining our choices, we’ll often pursue remedial measures that further reinforce our problem (and thus reinforce our self-sabotage)—we’ll often double down on the very strategies that end up deepening the problem.
Confronting what we avoid about ourselves allows us to experience how/when our anxieties are in control. Once we repeatedly see—actually see—that the actual benefits we derive from avoidance are not aligned with our objectives—that avoidance doesn’t help us—new behaviours become available to us. But this doesn’t occur if we don’t directly experience the pattern; a purely intellectual understanding that a particular habit is “destructive” isn’t enough to change our behaviour. Simply studying the depths of our inner life alone is insufficient to produce behavioural and perspectival change.
Fearlessness isn’t bravado; it is the result of no longer resisting our discomfort—no longer turning away from ourselves. Fearlessness is not about feeling no fear, but about not letting fear instinctively the boundaries of what you see, say, or do. Under pressure, most people’s perception contracts; they become hyper-attuned to risk, blame, or loss. When you can stay with discomfort—without being possessed by it—your field of vision remains open (and even wider, relative to others). You notice more nuance, more possibility, and more of the underlying dynamics affecting the situation. This capacity—to remain with our anxieties so that our lives aren’t dictated by the instinct to avoid/eliminate them—gives us choice.
No longer running from ourselves allows us to (finally) bring to light these tensions and hidden (often warring) commitments that have been preventing us from adopting new behaviours. These tensions and commitments remain unintelligible because we do not approach the (difficult) work of remaining with our discomfort, of becoming self-aware; in other words, we don’t face ourselves. And when we don’t face ourselves, resources remain trapped in repressive habitual behaviours (i.e., our self-protective habits and patterns, including desires, fears, thoughts, emotions, sadness, anger, pain, excitement, etc.). Confronting our repressive habitual behaviours allows us to un-cover our own resources that allow us to overcome or transcend our existing ways of being in the world. Self-awareness just is becoming aware of the various factors determining our existing ways of being. Self-awareness is self-transcendence.
As such, we continue to shame ourselves for our failure to course-correct, and we continue to search for more/better “advice”. No amount of good advice will help us if we are bound by (i.e., unaware of) self-sabotaging patterns that prevent us from acting on (what could be) good advice (or even seeking out good counsel). Self-sabotaging habits are often produced in response to the mere expectation of discomfort, the expectation that one will be inadequate to the demands of growth, that we might be overwhelmed or feel too exposed. We will not naturally seek to expand our discomfort; a self who recoils from certain forms of discomfort is unlikely to grow into something they predict will be faced with these very forms of discomfort.
Growth requires opening our (current) self up in ways that we don’t control, which may include abandoning the very strategies that have earned us success thus far. Fear is the primary obstacle. Not just fear of failure, but fear of change—fear of letting go of what once worked, fear of stepping into something untested. Unarticulated fears have the capacity to be most obstructive, but the process of articulating fears is unavailable to those who recoil from fears rather than remain with them.
No longer running from our fears, we are more willing to question our own standards, habits, motivations, assumptions, and needs—and to see beyond our current constraints. In other words, we become less weighed down by discomfort, less reactive to our (interpretations of our) self/past, and less beholden to the instinctive desire to protect or elevate ourselves at any cost.
Fearlessness is not a trait—it is the effect of not being determined by what we can’t tolerate. Under pressure, this is what lets we see further, listen longer, and act before others even realize the opportunity is there. Our steadiness and decision-making become both impressive and—because they are a matter of your unique, individual perspective—irreplaceable.
Fearlessness just is no longer running from our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions.
Fearlessness just is no longer running from ourselves.
(3) Experience Your Innate Ability to Manage Your Emotions:
Managing Emotions Just Requires Becoming Aware of Them Before Being Consumed by Them
All too often, “managing” emotions means “controlling” them. But gaining “control” isn’t actually too challenging; gaining “control” often just requires reducing the number of things that we feel compelled to control, which often just requires reducing the number of things that we compel ourselves to control—including the various sources of discomfort that produce the very emotions that we want to “manage”. But wanting to control our inner life comes at a cost, if only because it limits clarity, connection, and adaptability.
Emotions can’t be switched off at will, as if they were a superficial addition to a more core ‘self’ that doesn’t have emotions (or that only has positive ones). Moods aren’t optional; all of our experience is “moody”, but we only notice our moods/emotions when they are particularly strong. Every experience is shaped by mood—even when we don’t consciously notice it. Our moods attune us to our world in some particular way—they allow us to experience some things and not others. Whereas certain emotions self-defensively narrow our focus (which allow us to put out fires when necessary), other emotions self-forgettingly expand our focus to see the terms of our situation with heightened clarity (so we can see nuance, connection, and possibility).
The “problem” is not the emotion itself. The problem is that we are consumed by them before becoming aware of them. Our perception, thoughts, and actions are consumed by our emotions before we become aware of them—and the emotions that consume us are not conducive to our being fulfilled. When emotions control perception, judgment becomes reactive. Relationships become strained. Reputation becomes fragile. Our habitual self defaults to grasping for control—seeking emotions that shut down awareness rather than open it up.
Leverage comes not from “mastering” our emotions, but from recognizing how quickly and automatically they shape—among other things—what we notice, what we overlook, and what we assume is urgent. The more control sought, the more subtle your blind spots become—often where the highest reputational risks or lost opportunities actually live.
Attempting to destroy an emotion only exacerbates the problem: trying not to feel—and being on the lookout for—anger means that anger is controlling our perception and behaviour. We must then deal with the consequences (emotional and otherwise) of avoidance: hating that we can’t “control” our anger just makes us angrier. Being unable to control our undesirable emotions makes us more frustrated (especially when it prevents us from making progress), and this frustration tends to exacerbate our self-criticism, stress, fear, self-doubt, etc. A stronger desire for composure, influence, or success intensifies our awareness of our reactivity, irrelevance, and inadequacy. (As such, we become even more fragile under pressure.)
Managing emotions doesn’t require controlling them; managing emotions just requires becoming aware of them before being consumed by them. Managing emotions, in other words, requires awareness. And awareness requires the capacity to sit with discomfort—rather than having discomfort dictate the terms of our awareness. Direct awareness, if nothing else, gives us choice—a moment to intervene in an instinctive reaction, even if our choice is simply not to intervene.
As we become less avoidant of our own inner life, we become less controlled by it. As we become more fearless, we become more willing and able to recognize the triggers that produce our more destructive behaviours in different areas of our life—including those that shape our behaviors in leadership, decision-making, and relationships. We become more mindful of these triggers without needing to change them—and this is the (paradoxical) key to changing our most destructive behaviours. The paradox can be circumvented by committing to focusing on becoming aware of our triggers (in all of their incarnations and depth), rather than immediately seeking to avoid/change/destroy what is uncomfortable. As we begin to see what motivates our unconscious self to engage in some behaviour (e.g., the feelings, thoughts, situations, people, etc.), the behaviour sometimes changes with seemingly little/no effort.
And as we become less obsessed with ourselves (and with having the world be the way that make us feel most in control), we begin to see/hear others more clearly, because our perception of them is no longer governed by self-protection or self-elevation. And the nature of the relationship is no longer dictated by our need self-protection or self-elevation. They soften around us because we’ve softened around them, all because our rigidity around our own inner life has softened. Our more open and fluid perception allows to see more—more of reality, of others, and of ourselves.
Managing emotions just requires becoming aware of them before being consumed by them. This is simple, but not easy—and always made more difficult by craving total emotional control.
In high-stakes moments, this single skill changes everything—not only for us, but for those around us. As others’ presence contracts as pressure rises—they default to old strategies, familiar reactivity, or the compulsion to reassert control—our perception widens and our options multiply.
Managing emotions doesn’t require controlling them. Managing emotions just requires becoming aware of them before being consumed by them. Managing emotions, in other words, requires awareness.
(4) Experience The Self that Needs Nothing
Composure is the Result of Surrender, not Pursuit
Yoga is not a technique for composure; it’s a method for becoming aware of what disrupts composure. Awareness gives us space: to notice desire without being consumed by it, to notice discomfort without being compelled to extinguish it.
Self-awareness has another, more important role than insight or regulation. The habits we’ve developed and inherited to avoid our discomfort have obscured the self we are when we no longer feel the need to prove, protect, or purify ourselves—the version of our “self” that remains when we don’t need anything, where we can experience the ease of being ourselves and being okay with ourselves—lest our composure belong to those whose recognition we find ourselves compelled to seek.
Experiencing this self doesn’t require sanitizing our inner lives of whatever (we think) causes our sense of inadequacy/shame. It doesn’t require ‘fixing’ our weaknesses so that we are immune to feedback or disappointment. It doesn’t require achieving bulletproof mental health and wellbeing, perfect work-life balance, unwavering positivity. In fact, the quest for any kind of personal perfection only reinforces our inner lack, and this includes the quest for the kind of self-sufficiency that eliminates our vulnerabilities. This quest is pursued by the self that craves permission/recognition, that wants to add weight to its image/existence.
In addition to reinforcing our inner lack, our craving to be invulnerable also reinforces our sense of separateness/isolation, which then motivates more protective behaviour, more compulsive striving, more self-monitoring—ways that keep us ‘stuck’ in identities, situations, and habits that produce and re-produce our reactivity and discomfort. Our self isn’t a problem to be solved; trying to perfect or “fix” the self only deepens the sense that something is missing or not quite right. Our desire to find permanent emotional/material security (to finally be “at peace”) actually reinforces the basic sense of lack/anxiety that we’re trying to eliminate. In other words, the quest for permanent freedom from our personal suffering might be the very thing keeping us from our deepest fulfillment.
Excessive focus on our image can cause us to remain firmly in the grip of our compulsions, anxieties, and rumination—in cycles of doubt, comparison, and compulsive striving. It’s as if we can be okay with ourselves using others’ approval—as if we need them to tell us that we can be okay with ourselves. The very vision that excites us can become the standard that shames us—reminding us of what we haven’t accomplished and of all the time we’ve been “wasting”. In fact, we can waste our entire lives chasing a version of ourselves that would finally deserve approval.
Composure is not about self-satisfaction or positive self-image. It is about no longer being driven by the need to escape, perfect, or justify yourself—either to others, or to your own standards. This is what makes someone feel solid and trustworthy under scrutiny: their attention isn’t split between the actual demands of the moment and a secret project of self-defense.
Apart from healthier emotional management, self-awareness allows us to filter and focus our attention: we don’t waste our time putting out fires and/or shoring up personal weaknesses for the sake of image. We’re not preoccupied with ‘fixing’ ourselves, trying to ‘collect’ strengths with the hope that we’ll finally eliminate our feelings of personal inadequacy; we stop treating self-development like self-redemption.
In our lived experience, we often see our past as a repository of failures/incompetence, and we often see our future as containing impossible ideals, and even wonder if achieving these ideals will actually (finally) make us feel “okay” with ourselves and our lives. Conversely, becoming aware of our habitual narratives (including their triggers) before becoming consumed by them, we are no longer subject to them. Instead of seeing our situation through the lens of what needs to be “fixed,” we start seeing what’s actually present, what is actually possible, and what genuinely matters now. This clarity is what others experience as poise, stability, and presence, especially when things do not go as planned.
From here, confidence feels less manufactured. This allows for different expectations about our future possibilities, which then affect how we use our time and attention right now. From this place—where we do not feel compelled to fill up our sense of lack in/with the world—we are less likely to engage in self-obsession through craving and comparison (which often leave us feeling disorganized and stuck, isolated and resentful, and unhappy with ourselves, our abilities, our progress, and our lives). Composure becomes effortless because it is no longer something we have to do, but is rather a result of becoming aware of our inner life—i.e., of the way(s) our attention is habitually pre-occupied—before becoming consumed by it. In other words, emotional composure (or emotional regulation) becomes a byproduct of awareness, not effort.
This state—where composure arises from awareness rather than force—naturally enables improvisation and spontaneity. When you are no longer compelled by the need to control your experience, your responses become less scripted, more attuned, and more creative. To be sure, awareness is not a technique for “being in the moment”, but the result of no longer being preoccupied by what you’re trying to escape or prove.
To this self—the self that needs nothing, the self that realizes itself in and with the world—emotions are not obstacles to be overcome, but rather a rich source of awareness—and the myriad resources that awareness begets, including, among other things, the clarity and spontaneity produced by being okay with yourself—by being able to sit with, rather than avoid, discomfort—and by being able to notice our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving before becoming consumed by them.
Composure is not the result of more “control” over your inner life; composure is simply what remains when control no longer feels necessary. It is the result of freeing ourselves from limitations imposed by our habitual self’s desire for recognition/security; composure is the result of surrender, not pursuit. And it is precisely this non-striving, this refusal to be ruled by the need for advantage, that creates the most uncopyable leverage in leadership.
What disrupts our presence and judgment isn’t the presence of emotion, or even fear or avoidance or desire.
What disrupts our presence and judgment is the “absence” of awareness.
The Pursuit of Emotional Composure in Leadership: What Can Go Wrong
Our anxieties show us what we care about but perhaps didn’t realize we cared about. Our emotional life gives us the opportunity to think seriously about how we’re spending our limited time and attention.
Uncertainty, discomfort, and incomplete information are not leadership flaws—they are the conditions under which real leadership must operate. We will never have all the “answers” to our most pressing dilemmas, and we never know how things will turn out. And we cannot pause time or retreat to some place that is ‘outside’ of experience to “get everything right” before we continue to lead. Regardless of our comfort level or sense of direction, a leader is required to decide anyway, even when the path forward isn’t clear, even when they don’t feel ready, and even though they are unequipped with the perfect “justification” for moving forward in some particular way. These are non-optional dimensions of leadership—and of life. And as anxiety-producing as this often can be, no one else (but you) is responsible for making decisions without having perfect information.
To become aware of your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving before becoming consumed by them, you need a practice to expose them. You need a practice experience your inner calm and fearlessness but also your anxieties and fear—and this practice should enable you to interrogate your frustrations and standards, explore your habits and motivations, desires and avoidances. You don’t need “permission” from anyone or anything to have greater impact; you need to notice the hold that needing permission has on you and your composure. You need an effective strategy for liberating the resources from the emotions that you habitually and unthinkingly avoid—as a result of desires you may have never acknowledged.
But the most important part of cultivating composure is ensuring that the ego isn’t in charge of the process. If we cannot monitor the machinations of the ego (and its deep self-preserving habits that turns even growth/contribution into self-protection), we remain stuck (and/or success feels empty)—and will only have reinforced the very problem we were attempting to subvert. The key is not to use “awareness” as another tool for self-correction or self-perfection. If every step toward self-awareness is measured by whether it produces immediate relief or certainty, it quickly becomes another form of avoidance—a subtler, more respectable disguise for the same habit of self-protection.
Not all fear is pathology. There are times when fear is necessary, even life-preserving—when it signals real danger, injustice, or conditions that must be confronted or changed. Likewise, not all avoidance is a problem: sometimes avoidance is discernment, strategy, or basic wisdom. The point is not to eradicate fear or avoidance, but to see when they have become reflexive—especially when “fearlessness” or “growth” becomes just another attempt to secure invulnerability, to escape vulnerability, or to avoid ever feeling exposed again.
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The key to sitting with our anxieties is to ensure that we’re not ‘sitting with anxiety’ for the sake of accomplishing some goal (including “eliminating anxiety” or “achieving growth”).
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The key to confronting what we’ve been avoiding about ourselves is to ensure that we’ve put aside the need to become more substantial and secure.
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The key to becoming more self-aware is to ensure that we’re not immediately consumed by the need to fix/change what we see.
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The key to “surrender” is to ensure that it is not selective; the willingness to give up only what you don’t like is not surrender but is rather just another manifestation of clinging/aversion.
Composure isn’t a state to possess, or a strategic edge that we can manufacture; it is the result of not organizing your life around the quest to feel invulnerable. This is what makes leaders trusted and difficult to replace: their judgment, presence, and reputation are no longer fragile, because they are not perpetually at war with their own experience. In the end, the leverage you carry is not found in the illusion of “having it all together”—but in the capacity to remain with experience.
This shift in composure is a shift in perception: you see more than threat or relief, more than blame or praise. You detect the undercurrents, sense timing, and spot the subtleties others miss. And this field of perception is utterly unique—shaped by everything you notice and everything you refuse to overlook. That’s why your presence can’t be replicated or replaced: it isn’t a “skill” or a trait, but the living sum of your awareness. It is this presence—unclouded by compulsion to control or hunger for approval—that makes your judgment both trustworthy and difficult to substitute. In this sense, awareness is your rarest leverage: it frees perception, reveals nuance, and unlocks a style of leadership that cannot be commoditized or copied.
Our desire to find permanent emotional/material security (to finally be “at peace”) actually reinforces the basic sense of lack/anxiety that we’re trying to eliminate. In other words, the quest for permanent freedom from our personal suffering might be the very thing keeping us from our deepest fulfillment.
Managing Emotions in Leadership:
Self-Awareness and Leadership Composure
Balraj Persaud draws from contemplative traditions of the Indian subcontinent to help those in high-stakes leadership roles deepen composure under pressure. Beyond merely protecting their reputation, credibility, and relationships, deeper composure gives leaders leverage. The more composed they are, the more clearly they see what others can’t: risk, opportunity, and hidden dynamics in relationships. Their decisions are clearer and intuition is sharper; others trust them faster and defer to their clarity. Leaders who cultivate deeper composure don’t just avoid mistakes—they become uniquely trusted, consistently valuable, and increasingly difficult to replace.
For a private discussion about your situation, check Balraj’s availability. You’ll know within one conversation whether or not this work will result in progress—not just insight.