Written by Rebecca T Dickson, Leadership Coach
Rebecca T Dickson is recognized as one of the most transformational leaders in the world. She is the founder of The Yes Method, teaching leaders how to feel and process emotions; an intuitive author, a horse medicine practitioner, and a huge fan of nature-based therapies.
Your leadership isn't failing because you lack strategy or vision. It's dying a slow death because you've been taught the most dangerous lie in business: that professionalism means emotional sterility.
Every time you swallow rage, bury grief or mask fear behind that practiced smile, you're not just disconnecting from yourself. You're sabotaging your capacity to lead with true power. The boardrooms and Zoom calls are littered with the hollow shells of leaders who abandoned their emotional truth for the fantasy of control.
This isn't about feeling your feelings so you can be nice. This is about reclaiming the raw, untamed energy that fuels decisive action and magnetic leadership. Your suppressed emotions aren't weaknesses to overcome. They are weapons waiting to be wielded.
Why emotional suppression is killing your leadership (because we fear our own emotional power)
We've been conditioned to believe emotions are irrational disruptions to our logical minds. The unspoken religion of corporate America: leave your feelings at the door. Play the game. Stay professional.
But what if this is the poison killing your leadership from within?
I watch it happen daily: brilliant entrepreneurs and executives who pride themselves on "keeping it together" while their bodies scream in rebellion. Their jaws tight enough to crack teeth. Stress headaches that no amount of Advil can touch. Ulcers burning holes through their stomach linings. Sleep that never quite reaches deep restoration.
This isn't strength. It's slow-motion suicide wrapped in a false narrative about professionalism.
The truth most leadership books won't tell you: emotions are simply energy in motion. They're not good or bad until we slap our judgments on them.
That anger you're suppressing? Pure power.
The grief you won't acknowledge? Deep wisdom. The fear you hide? Razor-sharp intuition.
The biological warfare you're waging against your own brain
When you resist what you feel, you trigger a toxic cascade inside your nervous system that actively destroys your capacity to lead.
The science is brutally clear. Emotional suppression floods your body with stress hormones that hijack your brain's most valuable real estate. Your amygdala – the primitive alarm system designed to keep you alive – seizes control from your prefrontal cortex, the command center responsible for strategic thinking, creativity, and decision-making.
This isn't abstract theory. It's the biological reality happening inside your skull every time you refuse to acknowledge what you feel.
Let's get painfully specific about what this means for your leadership:
That strategic vision you're known for? Gone when your prefrontal cortex goes offline.
Your ability to see multiple perspectives? Collapsed under primitive survival instincts.
The emotional intelligence that built your team's trust? Replaced by reactive impulses you'll later regret.
You can't think clearly or act decisively when your brain is drowning in its own chemical warfare. And everyone around you can feel it, even when they can't name it.
The revolutionary power of emotional surrender
The path forward isn't what the toxic positivity cult would have you believe. You don't need more affirmations, gratitude practices, or mindset shifts.
You need the courage to surrender to what you're actually feeling.
This isn't weakness. It's the most radical form of leadership power available.
When I started working with Marcus, a tech founder whose company was hemorrhaging talent, his first words to me were: "I need to get better at controlling my emotions so my team stops leaving."
The irony was savage. His desperate attempt to control his feelings was precisely what made him unbearable to work with.
His breakthrough came not through mastering his emotions, but by finally allowing himself to feel the rage and inadequacy he'd been burying.
In his words: "I spent years thinking I needed to be less emotional to lead effectively. Turns out I needed to be more honest about what I was already feeling."
Within six months of this work, his retention rates stabilized. Not because he learned to suppress better, but because he stopped pretending.
The five stages of emotional freedom for leaders
The journey from emotional suppression to authentic leadership isn't comfortable, but the path is clear.
1. Name what you feel without judgment
Most leaders can't even accurately identify their emotional states. They've collapsed complex feeling landscapes into simplistic categories: good, bad, stressed. This emotional illiteracy costs them crucial data.
Start by expanding your emotional vocabulary beyond the basics. Are you feeling disappointed or betrayed? Frustrated or enraged? Concerned or terrified?
The specificity matters because each emotion carries different information about what your body knows that your conscious mind hasn't yet recognized.
2. Locate emotions in your physical body
Emotions aren't abstract concepts. They're physical experiences. Where do you feel anxiety in your body? Is it a tight chest, a knotted stomach, or a clenched jaw? That rage you're denying? Does it live in your clenched fists or the heat rising up your neck?
This is neurobiological reality. (Read that again.) Your body processes emotional data before your conscious mind can name it. Learning to read these physical signals gives you crucial seconds to respond rather than react.
3. Ask what this emotion needs to teach you
Every emotion carries intelligence if you stop fighting long enough to listen. Your frustration with that team member isn't just annoying interference. It's information about violated expectations or unmet needs. Your anxiety before the investor meeting isn't weakness. It's your system preparing for high-stakes performance.
The question isn’t, "How do I get rid of this feeling?" It is, "What is this feeling trying to show me?"
4. Express without acting out
This is where most leadership advice fails catastrophically. We're told to either suppress our emotions or risk unprofessional "emotional outbursts." It’s a false dichotomy that keeps leaders trapped.
The liberating truth: you can fully feel your emotions without dumping them onto others.
You can acknowledge rage without screaming. You can feel fear without hiding. You can experience disappointment without shaming your team.
5. Leverage emotional energy for decisive action
Once felt and acknowledged, emotions become fuel instead of obstacles. That anger you've been suppressing? Channel it into boundary-setting and decisive action. The fear you've been hiding? Transform it into thorough preparation and contingency planning.
Your emotions aren't distractions from leadership. They're the raw material of honest influence.
Creating cultures of emotional integrity
When you stop suppressing your own emotions, something revolutionary happens to your entire organization. You give others permission to exist as full humans rather than productivity machines.
This isn't about creating some kumbaya circle of feelings (though there’s nothing wrong with that either). This is about building teams that don't waste energy on emotional theater. No one is pretending to be fine when they're struggling, hiding concerns until they become crises, or sugar-coating feedback until it loses all meaning.
Leaders who model emotional honesty create cultures where:
Issues are addressed before they become catastrophes
Creative dissent can flourish without fear
People bring their full intelligence (emotional and analytical) to challenges
Recovery from setbacks happens faster with less drama
Trust forms the foundation of all interactions
The leadership advantage of emotional intelligence
The research is clear: leaders with high emotional intelligence outperform their peers across every meaningful metric. They build stronger teams, make better decisions under pressure, and adapt more quickly to changing conditions.
This isn't soft skills nonsense. It's competitive advantage in its most potent form. (Check out Harvard Business School's research on emotional intelligence in leadership, research from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or the meta-analysis by researchers from University of Queensland, to mention a few.)
When you develop the capacity to process your emotions rather than suppress them, you gain access to:
1. Faster ground recovery
Everyone gets knocked down. What separates exceptional leaders is how quickly they recover their center. Processing emotions in real-time rather than bottling them allows you to move through disruption without getting stuck in it.
2. Enhanced body wisdom
Your body processes millions of data points below your conscious awareness. When you're connected to your emotional landscape, you can access intuitive knowing that logic alone can't provide. That gut feeling about the hire that looks perfect on paper? That's your system processing patterns your conscious mind hasn't yet recognized.
3. Expanded self-awareness
You can't lead others effectively when you're a stranger to yourself. Emotional processing forces you to confront your triggers, biases and blindspots – the very things that sabotage leadership despite your best intentions.
The cost of continuing the charade
Let's be brutally honest about what happens when you cling to emotional suppression as your strategy:
Your health will continue deteriorating under the weight of stress hormones your body was never designed to sustain long-term.
Your decision-making will remain compromised by unprocessed emotional data.
Your relationships – both professional and personal – will bear the scars of your disconnection.
And worst of all, you'll continue modeling a form of leadership that perpetuates the very suffering you're experiencing. The next generation of leaders watching you will learn the same damaging patterns, continuing the cycle.
The most selfish thing you can do is continue pretending you don't feel what you feel.
The most courageous act of leadership is facing your emotional reality without flinching.
Take action: Transform your leadership through trauma-informed practices
If you're ready to stop the slow suicide of emotional suppression and develop leadership capacity that's both true to you and effective, the path forward requires more than reading articles or adding mindfulness to your morning routine.
It demands a fundamental rewiring of how you relate to your emotional experience, a process that requires skilled guidance and proven methodology.
My Trauma-Informed Coaching Certification program, beginning April 17th, provides the roadmap and tools to transform your relationship with emotions from liability to leadership superpower. This isn't about becoming more emotionally expressive. It's about developing the capacity to use your full emotional intelligence as the leadership asset it was meant to be.
Stop wasting your potential on the altar of emotional suppression. You and your team deserve leadership fueled by your true power, not something crippled by denial. And you deserve to lead without the exhausting charade of pretending not to feel. Check it out here.
Rebecca T Dickson, Leadership Coach
Rebecca T Dickson is recognized as one of the most transformational leaders in the world. She is the founder of The Yes Method, teaching leaders how to feel and process emotions – and rise. During her 16 years in the coaching industry, she has served tens of thousands of clients globally. The mission: Be yourself.
