Self-Regulation Is Leadership

Pressure doesn’t make great leaders—presence does. We dig into why the best leadership moves often begin inside your nervous system, long before a difficult conversation or high-stakes decision. Drawing on lived experience and insights from a previous conversation with Annie Paraison, we explore how to read the body’s early signals, pause before reacting, and turn tense moments into opportunities for trust and clarity.

First, we unpack somatic awareness: those subtle cues like tightness, dread, or irritability that appear before your brain writes a tidy story. Instead of powering through, we treat those sensations as data that can prevent costly missteps. You’ll hear how ignoring signals leads to reactive leadership and quiet burnout, and how listening to them can redirect your path with honesty and courage.

Next, we move into self-regulation—the real-time skill of creating space between stimulus and response. We break down a practical micro-ritual: three deep belly breaths, naming sensations, and choosing timing, tone, and intention that align with your values. You’ll see why most relationship damage comes from the state we’re in, not the topic at hand, and how a single, well-placed pause can protect both clarity and reputation.

Finally, we introduce relational groundedness: staying rooted in yourself while staying open to others. It’s the difference between caring and rescuing, listening and agreeing. We map the balance between personal boundaries and collective needs, showing how grounded leaders stop keeping score and start expanding what’s possible. To make it stick, we share a 30-second challenge you can use before any hard conversation or meeting.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a leader who needs it today, and leave a quick review to help others find it. Your pause could be the culture shift your team has been waiting for.

Connect with Beki on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/BekiFraser
Learn more about her coaching: TheIntrovertedSkeptic.com

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Short Story Long is produced by Crowned Culture Media LLC

Chapters

• 0:00 Rethinking Leadership Through Self-Regulation
• 1:01 Leadership Starts In The Body
• 3:17 Somatic Signals And What They Mean
• 6:20 When The Body Says Stop
• 9:10 The Pause, Breath, And Better Choices
• 12:02 Repairing Trust And The Matchstick Metaphor
• 15:04 Relational Groundedness In Practice
• 18:05 Balancing Needs Without Keeping Score

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

In my last episode, I had a great conversation with Annie Parison. It had me thinking, which I know could be dangerous. But I was thinking that the leaders we need right now aren't the loudest or the most certain. They're the ones who can self-regulate. They can show some compassion, and they can still stay connected even when things feel uncomfortable. That takes work and it takes focus for leaders to develop. Leadership isn't always about reacting faster. Sometimes it's the quiet, internal pause that changes everything. Hi, I'm Becky. Welcome to Short Story Long. In this podcast, we discuss ways you can integrate who you are into how you lead. Today I'm offering strategies for building your skills as a leader. Let's break down what's important as you build your self-regulation skills. One of the themes that kept surfacing in my discussion with Annie was that leadership starts in the body. Let's note for a minute that it doesn't start with the title. Annie talked about noticing when her joy dimmed, when her body resisted walking into work, and when something felt off before her mind could even explain it. She was accessing that information as data to shift. Often we feel like we need to overcome or push through, and mostly that just makes things harder. Another theme that struck me was the connection between self-regulation and compassion. Yes, those are soft skills. And it's also worth noting, they are survival skills. When you can regulate your own nervous system and pair that with compassion for yourself and others, you stop leading from fear and start leading from connection. Connection actually moves us out of scarcity and into like shared outcomes. The shift is from me versus you into together we rise. Some may feel that is idealistic. And I'd say it's an understanding of how systems actually move together. Seeing ourselves as part of a system is a more mature form of leadership. The thing is, being a compassionate leader isn't for the faint of heart. You may naturally sense the emotions and feelings of yourself and of others, but that doesn't mean you know how to lead around and through them. Compassionate leadership requires you to respond to that awareness before you've even reached an understanding of what it is. It requires you to regulate yourself before you communicate, and you don't always get a lot of time for that. One of the first key things that a leader needs to understand when they're really trying to develop themselves as a compassionate leader is learning to listen to what your body is telling you before circumstances make a decision for you. And with this, I'm talking about somatic awareness. Somatic awareness is the ability to notice what your body is telling you before your brain has this neat organized story to explain it. It's collecting information based on how your body is actually responding in a situation. When you're somatically aware, you can sense when something feels off and use the body to try to regulate and move yourself back into a place where you can function and be effective in what you're trying to do. It's not about fixing or controlling the sensations, it's about noticing them. So you might be noticing tightness in your chest before a meeting. You might be noticing that heavy dread when you open up your laptop at first time for the day, or the irritability that shows up just coming out of nowhere, and you're not even certain immediately what happened that caused that. And you might be even thinking, why am I suddenly so tired? I had a decent night's sleep. And again, you don't notice them, so you can roll those sensations into a little ball and shove them down and away. Sadly, when you do that, they often return at the most awkward and uncomfortable times. Somatic awareness is about responding with intention. That response is built on checking in with what is happening in that moment and really recognizing and naming what you noticed. Checking in with the moment is not just internal work, it's also the external environmental check. What just changed around you? What might have contributed to what you were sensing within your body at that point in time? Annie's point was my body was communicating something was going on. And it was loud enough to say, we can no longer be here. What she said there goes beyond listening to your feelings. It was more specific than that. Your body is often the first messenger when something is misaligned. Your nervous system flags threat, overload, and just general moral dissonance faster than your logic can catch up. One of those moments for me was when I realized it was time for me to leave HR. Sadly, the awareness didn't tell me what to do. What it did do was signal me that applying for a different HR role wasn't going to be the answer I was looking for. I'd read job descriptions and had zero interest in doing any of the line items. I didn't dislike or undervalue the function of HR. I just couldn't do it anymore. My body held up a stop sign, and that looked like hardly able to click the mouse in order to move forward unless I was leaving that space. Anytime I thought about performing any of the functions that were frankly familiar to me, my body would almost seize up. In contrast, when I received my acceptance letter from Yale, I had a big green light going off everywhere in my being. I even had a voice in my head that said, I must do this. Neither of those messages were convenient or well-timed for me. They were clear and mighty, though. Leaders who ignore their signals don't become neutral. They become reactive, depleted, and honestly, eventually unreliable. Even if they're performing fine on paper, they're not really performing fine. Many leaders will wait for proof beyond those physical signs or they ignore them entirely. Most of the time, proof is not coming until it's too late, and ignoring it, like most things, when we ignore them, they don't go away. If your body is screaming every time you walk into an environment, odds are you're asking yourself to tolerate something you would never recommend to someone you care about. That gap matters because your team feels it too. You can't lead people into well-being while quietly abandoning your own. And really, why wouldn't you take the advice you would give someone else you care about? So, what do you do with all of these feelings and this awareness that you're creating? You create a path toward self-regulation, specifically self-regulation before you start communicating with other people. And this is really important as you are teaching yourself to pause instead of reacting, especially when emotions are high. Self-regulation is that ability to pause when you're activated, when you're feeling all of the buzzing in your body, so that you don't let your lizard brain communicate with your team. It's the space between whatever the stimulus was and the response that you consciously give. This isn't just the self-talk of be calm, because we all know when we say be calm, calm is not usually the result of that. It's instead know when you're not calm and don't pretend you're making a clean decision or communicating effectively while your body is in fight or flight. Most relationship damage isn't caused by the topic being discussed. It's caused by the state people are in while they discuss the topic. Annie tried to talk about her need to pause and breathe, and then she needed to ask, what's the most loving thing I can do in this moment? You know, that pause and breathe, that sounds simple, but it's a real leadership move. Because there are a few steps to this. I mean, you need to catch yourself to pause in the first place. You need to notice that this is even happening. And then you need to remember that breathing isn't just in your throat, but in your diaphragm. And you need to fill your whole belly in order to take that deep breath. And then you're consciously choosing timing, tone, and intention instead of letting urgency drive you to say something that you don't even maybe mean. And that question, what's the most loving thing I can do right now, is really a shortcut for what response aligns with who I truly want to be. And that really is about who you truly want to be as a human and as a leader. When you don't do it, you can say something technically correct and still break trust if you say it with heat, sarcasm, or some sort of contempt. Self-regulation may protect clarity, but it also watches over your reputation. There's a quote from Maya Angelo talking about how people remember how you made them feel long after they forget the actual words. She had many words of wisdom, and these are among my favorites. This lesson was a really tough one for me because my early life was full of anger and frustration. It wasn't necessarily anger with the person in front of me. It was my feelings about me, my circumstances, or my path or lack of one going forward. Because I hadn't paused to deal with me, that frustration would get directed at other people. I have felt a lot of shame about the things that I've said in some of those situations. Small infractions would get mega-sized and hurtful responses to people who really didn't deserve it. Maybe you've heard me talk about the bonfire of matchsticks philosophy that I have. Before I learned to do the pause and breathe, I might have said the right words, but decidedly in the wrong way. It damaged some relationships and trust, some that couldn't recover and others that did. And it was really tied to that bonfire of matchsticks philosophy. The philosophy that I have about that is each hurt, you take an unlit matchstick and you throw it into a pile. And that pile is calm and quiet and not reactive each time you throw a matchstick that's not lit on it. And it might be a small thing. One of those matchsticks suddenly gets lit and it gets thrown on this big pile and whoosh, all of a sudden, your reaction in that moment is out of scope with what the situation requires. And when you do that, that's when there's that opportunity, probably likelihood, that there's a breach in a relationship somewhere. And now you have to do some heavy lifting that may or may not be successful to get you back to where you were. I've talked about the somatic awareness and I've talked a little bit about the self-regulation, but I don't think it's a surprise to you. You aren't in this leadership game alone. Hopefully it's not a surprise. That other people are also having their own experience with these things. And then we're supposed to come together and navigate it, all becoming some sort of Venn diagram in real time where my emotional state is overlapping with your emotional state, and we have to figure this out. I call that relational groundedness. And that's about holding your experience while also exploring someone else's. Relational groundedness is the ability to stay rooted in yourself while staying genuinely open to others. It's a triad, if you will, of compassion for others, perspective taking, and a whole heavy dose of self-respect. Success in this realm is really finding a balance along the spectrum of harmony versus anchoring yourself so hard that no one else fits in the room. This skill actually allows you as a leader to say, This is my experience, without turning it into, this is the truth, and maybe even this is the only truth. It allows you to say, I see you without abandoning your own limits, your own values, and your own needs. Annie talked about balancing her needs with the needs of the collective and being able to put herself on a shelf for a minute. She was describing relational groundedness. It's a regulated, centered stance where you are not over-functioning or withdrawing. You're present, you have boundaries, and you're still connected and relational to some degree at the same time. When you feel like your needs aren't met or they're not seen, you may be leaning more heavily toward the needs of others and not advocating for your own. Conversely, sometimes you might be so focused on getting what you want that you aren't benefiting from others' experiences and knowledge. In those moments, it's important to recognize that they likely aren't feeling seen or heard. And most leaders don't really want other people to feel that way. The reality is you can care deeply without rescuing someone. You can actually listen fully without agreeing with someone. It's the tension between detachment and connectedness that allows you to see more of the situation you are in. As Annie shared, it's important to balance your needs and the needs of the collective. They're both equally important. Leaders who are relationally grounded don't keep score. They don't need to. When you can stay grounded in yourself while staying open to others, leadership stops being so exhausting. These three things coming together can be very challenging. So here's your skill builder challenge if you choose to accept it. Consider one interaction that means a lot to you. Maybe it's a meeting, a hard conversation, or something that you're avoiding for some reason. Think about it as a moment where you usually over-explain, overgive, or go quiet because some sense of discomfort around it. Before you engage in that activity, take 30 seconds and ground yourself. And by this, I mean take three deep breaths where you focus on how the air feels as it goes in and out of your nose while you're breathing. Once you're grounded, silently identify what am I feeling right now? Like just go through the senses and recognize what's going on in your body at that point in time. And then reflect on what do I need to in order to stay regulated in this conversation or in this situation I'm going into? It's not about fixing, it's not about judging, it's just about noticing. And then you widen the lens and do what I call noticing that other people are in the room. And think about what might be true for the person that you're going to be interacting with. What might you be assuming that you don't actually know? Let that exercise gain additional insights about yourself and create an expanded view of the other person or people. Your thoughts may or may not be true. So consider them to be like little balloons that you can hold until it seems right to release them so that they can float away. Today I'm not talking about becoming calmer, nicer, or more patient as some kind of personality upgrade. Your feelings are simply what they are. It's what you do while you are feeling them that matters. It's about doing that pause and breath so you can be more effective. Combining somatic awareness, self-regulation, and relational groundedness creates leaders who can think beyond themselves and act with the system in mind. That's how cultures change. That's how relationships get built and grow. It's also how leadership stops being performative and starts feeling real. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from it. Until next time, I'm Becky Fraser, reminding you to integrate who you are with how you lead. Okay, bye!