We’ve all been there: a team member misses their deadline again, an unpleasant email catches us off guard, the market shifts, or something goes wrong at home. Suddenly, you feel like you’ve lost all control of your life, so you lose control of your emotions. You want to lash out, shut down, or do something else out of character.
But if you give in to your feelings and take action, you won’t be able to take them back. Your bad news won’t serve as a valid justification. You’ll be judged only by your actions — and as a leader, if you get triggered and lose control, it will send the rest of your team a signal that you’re not in control.
Hal Elrod — best-selling author of The Miracle Morning and a multiple-time guest of the Crisp organization and The Game Changing Attorney Podcast — shared a story I always think about when emotions overwhelm me.
At several points in time, Hal’s reality looked like a checklist of everything that could go wrong in a person’s life: a near-fatal car accident, a cancer diagnosis, a financial crisis, and more. He’d gone through unimaginable stress and hardship. But his mindset was game changing.
He used what he referred to as “the five-minute rule.” When life punches you in the face, you’ve got five minutes to scream, complain, and feel the full force of whatever just hit you. But once those five minutes are up, you get moving, plotting your response and taking back the reins of what you can steer.
Staying stuck in an emotional spiral of what you can’t control will poison what you can change and slowly but surely ruin your life.
There’s a reason elite performers focus on response over reaction. When your leadership is reactive, you’re not leading; you’re being led. Your fear, ego, stress, and other people’s energy are in the driver’s seat, and you become just a passenger of your own life.
In the last few months alone, I’ve had several friends receive negative health diagnoses, experience family emergencies, and other life curveballs you wouldn’t wish on anybody. The common thread of how they all moved forward wasn’t being unaffected. It was choosing to respond with intention. They focused on things within their control and let go of the rest.
Your power is in what you can control.
You can’t control the market.
You can’t control the weather.
You can’t control the news cycle.
You can’t control your competitors’ next move.
You can’t control the wind. But you can adjust your sails.
You can control how you pause, show up, and lead yourself and your team through the storm.
There’s a space between stimulus and response — and that space is where growth happens.
Whether it’s meditation, taking a walk, journaling, or doing breathing exercises, find and use the tool that will help you expand that space and build self-awareness in hard moments.
Learn how to see it all — the spike in your heart rate, the irrational voice in your head starting to take the wheel, surge to fire back — and steer yourself away from it. Instead of reacting, lead.
Being triggered is not a strength or a personality trait. It’s a weakness. But one you can close with discipline, perspective, and practice.
Bad things will happen. That’s not a matter of if but when. What separates real leaders from the rest is now how smooth the path is, but how solid they stay when the path gets bumpy.
So the next time you feel that rising, stop and ask: Who is in control here? And if the answer isn’t you, it’s time to get to work.
