Ep #99 - Lead With Love (Even When You’re Pissed Off)

Love isn’t fluffy. It’s a powerful leadership strategy - especially when you’re fuming. 

In this short, straight-talking episode, I break down the difference between emotional childhood and emotional adulthood, why your primitive brain loves to jump into defence mode, and how to regulate first so your message actually lands. 

Expect practical, compassionate tools you can use with your team and at home - because leading humans starts with leading yourself. 

What we cover:

• The undercurrent that derails tough conversations (ego, self-doubt, frustration) and how to interrupt it. 
• Emotional adulthood 101: taking responsibility for your feelings so you can respond, not react. 
• “Love sometimes sounds like no”: why boundaries from love are more effective than control. 
• A calm-first approach to emails, performance chats and parenting moments. 

If this resonates, come to my February Lunch & Learn: Lead With Love—a deeper dive into emotional management for real-world leadership. 

👉 If you found this helpful, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a friend who’s having “that” conversation this week. 

And if you want tailored support for you or your team, enquire about 1:1 coaching, workshops or leadership away-days.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube with Captions - https://www.youtube.com/@TheWorkingWomensLifeCoach

If you'd like to have a chat about how I can help you further, please don't hesitate to click here & book a time with me, I'd love to meet you.

You can also follow me on IG @NickyBevan_LifeCoach

Transcript

Welcome, welcome, welcome to this week’s podcast episode. It’s going to be short, it’s going to be very to the point. And I’m saying it with so much love — if you’re listening to this, if you are a leader, whether you’re leading a team or you’re leading a family or you’re leading a business, it doesn’t matter. If you are leading humans, whether you see yourself as a leader or not, this podcast is for you.

I am going to tell you what I consider to be the most fundamental requirements for you, and also the people that you are leading. Now, I’m talking fully functioning adults here. It’s going to be slightly different if you’re leading a family and those family members are children, but from your perspective exactly the same applies. It just won’t be as relevant for them to learn the skills that I’m about to teach you, but it will be incredibly relevant for your staff or your people to learn these skills.

And it is the mind and emotional management.

Because here’s what I see happening a lot with leaders. They are generally — sometimes actually not all the time at all — they’re probably good at the job, they’ve just never learned the skill of actually managing people. And most of us are acting out of a place of insecurity.

And when we are acting out of a slight insecurity, that primitive part of our brain that sees everything as a threat is heightened and tends to take over. And so then what happens is even if we think we’re talking calmly, there’s an undercurrent of self-doubt, or there’s an undercurrent of frustration. And it does not matter how you speak to someone, or what you say — if you haven’t dealt with that undercurrent of frustration or self-doubt, the message is not going to land effectively when you’re talking to another human. And vice versa.

And a lot of people go into a leadership role because of their ego. This is not a penis or vagina issue. This is not masculine or feminine. If you are trying to lead and your ego and your primitive brain is in charge, you will not be the best version of yourself. Because you will be defensive. You will be trying to prove. You will want to be right. So you won’t be able to have an effective conversation.

You won’t be able to listen to what other people are saying or be willing to be wrong, and listen to the value that some of your people have. Children, by the way, included.

And most of us are trying to avoid conflict, so we’re either avoiding the conversation completely, or when we have to have it — because we’re frightened — we do it defensively. Which then makes the other person receiving the message get defensive. And everyone gets heightened. Everyone’s in their frightened survival state. Not effective.

And you, if you’re listening to this, will have experienced this. Maybe it’s with your husband, your partner. You both get defensive, emotions escalate, and you end up in this argument — totally ineffective.

Especially in the workplace. People come away feeling defeated or like they’ve been attacked. Or it just either shuts people down or sends them off the rails. Not effective.

The best way to have a very productive, calm, efficient workplace is for everybody to learn that their emotions are created by their thoughts. So this is the difference between emotional child and emotional adult.

When we’re in our emotional child state, we’re blaming people, we’re reliant on people for giving us external validation, we’re going to the wine to feel better. We are the victim when we’re in emotional child state — very powerless.

When we’re in our emotional adult state, we take full responsibility for our emotions, even the really uncomfortable ones. We don’t rely on anything external. We’ve got ourselves. And we’ve got nothing to prove.

That’s when we’re powerful. That’s when we are able to have really productive, effective conversations.

And you can do this with children and teenagers. I promise. I practice it all the time. They’re going to be teenagers and children — doesn’t mean to say you have to. Same with our staff.

Someone said it beautifully once when they said, as parents, we have to be the adult we want our child to become. Exactly the same applies in the workplace. As a leader, you have to be the qualities that you want your member of staff to become.

It starts with us. It starts with you. And you doing your work in having your back, feeling secure in yourself, so that you can go into those conversations with compassionate curiosity.

Even the most challenging conversations can be very effective when done from love.

When I’m dealing with my children, I literally start the sentence, “It’s because I love you that…” It’s because I love you that you need to get off your Xbox and go outside. You’re not going to carry on eating all the pizza. It’s because I love you that I’m not going to let you carry on eating all that chocolate.

Now, I know it’s not necessarily appropriate to say to a member of staff — especially if you’re in a male environment — “It’s because I love you that we now need to sit down and have a conversation about your performance.” I get that you wouldn’t put that at the beginning of the sentence. I get it.

But you can still say it in your head.

Because when you sit down, especially with a challenging conversation, and you approach that conversation with love for yourself and for the human that you’re about to talk to, and you come at it with compassionate curiosity — things get done so much better.

No one is acting out of their ego. No one’s acting out of their primitive state. Our central nervous system is calm. We are able to be effective. It is a game changer.

It starts with you, but it’s also giving your people the skills to step into emotional adult state. And that’s where I come in.

This is what I teach people to do. I teach them the difference between thoughts and facts. And when you know it’s a thought, you can take responsibility for it — and how that thought makes you feel — and then how to process that emotion effectively so that we’re not behaving in a childlike way. So that we’re not behaving out of our ego, so that we’re not being defensive or abrupt or belittling.

Which, if you’re listening to this, I know you don’t actually want to be that person. You want to lead from love.

And love is a very powerful force. It’s not soft. It’s not soppy. It’s powerful. And it sometimes sounds like no.

I’m actually going to be going into this so much deeper in my February Lunch and Learn called Lead With Love. February — Valentine’s — I couldn’t resist.

The way that we step from childhood to emotional adult is by becoming aware. It’s having that courage to start exploring what’s happening in your mind, and how your thoughts make you feel. And then interrupting yourself at that point so your emotions don’t drive your behaviour.

This will not stop you feeling angry. It will not stop you feeling frustrated. It will not stop all the negative emotions. You’re human — you’re going to have them. But what it will do is stop you reacting from those emotions.

Getting to a good place before you choose to respond to the email, before you choose to have the conversation, before you choose to make a decision. And that is when you are in control of you.

You don’t get to control other people. But you do get to control you.

And when your team members learn this, you will have so much more productivity, so much more efficiency, and such a calmer workplace. And my gosh, don’t most of us want that?

So if this resonates for you, and you want to know more, there are options. One-on-one coaching. Workshops on emotional resilience. Presentations on wellbeing days, leadership away days — those sorts of things.

But as a minimum, please come along and learn more about this in a bit more depth, and have the opportunity to ask questions at the end.

If this resonates, make sure you’re subscribed. Make sure you like. I love hearing people’s feedback, so please give me a comment. And if you have a friend that you think needs to hear this, very lovingly please send this on to them.

Because this is a message from love. It will trigger parts of you. It will. You may get really pissed off at me — I’m here for that. None of that is a problem. It just indicates that there’s a truth in what I’m saying.

Compassionate curiosity.

I love you so much. Have an amazing week. I hope this helps. Bye bye!