I was driving my newly minted teenage son, Ben to the ‘drop off’ location for him to go skydiving. This was not what I’d expected when I asked what he wanted for his 13th birthday, but I supported it. Better than another XBox game, I figured.
But as we drove along, suddenly my imagination raced to the worst-case scenario. It wasn’t pretty.
As I shared during a recent keynote speech (clip below), in that moment, my fear spread.
Fear does that.
The lesson:
Your emotions are never just your own.
Whether you’re a parent, a team manager or a senior executive, the emotions you carry create an emotional climate for others. And given that emotions are what drive behavior instead of logic, it pays to spread the emotions that will embolden people to speak up, think bigger, and take braver action… not the opposite.
I actually learnt this early in my career when I had a boss who was a walking weather system. The moment he walked into the office, you knew. You could read the whole day in the 12 seconds it took him to get from the door to his desk. Head down, no eye contact, shoulders hunched over, jaw tight? Batten down the hatches and say nothing that might inflame him further. No matter how important.
He wasn’t a bad guy. But his inability to manage his inner emotional state had a big cost on the state of our team. And I suspect it cost him too.
As Dan Goleman once observed, negative emotions act like secondhand smoke – they spread, they contaminate. And often without saying a single word.
We Catch Emotions Like We Catch Colds
Unlike our cardiovascular system, which self-regulates, our emotional system is literally wired to be shaped by the people around us. Researchers call it an “open loop” system — meaning our internal emotional state is constantly being co-regulated by those nearby. We don’t choose it. It just happens.
In one study, three strangers sat together in silence for just one minute. The most emotionally expressive person in the group transmitted their mood to the other two…no words spoken!
Now put that person in a leadership role.
Walk into a room anxious, scattered, or bracing for crisis, and your team won’t reason their way to that feeling — they’ll feel their way there. Leaders, by virtue of their position, have an amplified emotional impact.
When you’re the most powerful person in the room, you’re also the most emotionally contagious one.
Thermometer or Thermostat?
Think of it as being the thermostat rather than the thermometer.
A thermometer reads whatever temperature it finds itself in. It’s reactive, erratic, at the mercy of market volatility, board pressure, difficult people, and the ever flowing stream of things beyond its control. It doesn’t mean to create chaos – it just reflects what’s around it.
On the other hand, a thermostat sets the temperature. Regardless of what’s happening outside.
If you’ve ever worked for a thermostat leader, you know what I mean. They don’t pretend everything is fine (thank goodness, since we can smell performative positivity from a mile away). But they’re deeply conscious not to spread their anxiety that enlarges the holes in our psychological net – individual and collective. They acknowledge difficulty without amplifying dread.
Thermometer leaders, by contrast, are buffeted by the prevailing winds. They absorb the market volatility, the board anxiety, the uncertainty and radiate it straight back onto their teams. The result is a climate where even the best ideas get smothered under a fog of self-protective second-guessing and second hand smoke.
Being a thermostat doesn’t require being immune to pressure. It’s about being the steady presence in the room, bringing a deeply grounded energy that conveys we can handle this.
What climate are you setting?
So before you get on your video call or sit down for a sensitive conversation, or take a drive to a ‘drop zone’ pause and ask yourself:
What emotions do I want to transmit?
This isn’t about being immune to pressure. It’s about being intentional about the temperature you’re setting. The choice is never whether you affect the emotional climate around you but rather whether you do it by default or by design.
Where leaders go, others follow.
And as I learned that day driving Ben off to an experience he later described as “Fantasmagorical“, that journey often starts long before you say a single word.
This article was originally published on MargieWarrell.com before launching this substack
Especially when we are the one leading the show!
Identify the stress, then put it in it's place instead of reacting to it. Because, putting out the anxiety signals means you'll also be getting them back. Everything continues to boil out of control because of that lack of emotional control.