The Most Dangerous Moment

The most dangerous moment in your leadership is not when things go wrong. It's in the three seconds before you respond and then in the three seconds after you respond that you wish you had not. You already know those 3 seconds. Something happened. The emotions fired and then before you had a chance to think, you were already responding in a way that you didn't want to. Then it was over. You sat there with it in the aftermath, the adrenaline fading, knowing that was not who you wanted to be at that time.

Most leaders live in that aftermath. They apologize, recover, and move on. But the aftermath is not where this gets fixed. It gets fixed in those three seconds before. That moment between what happened and what you actually do. And almost no one has ever shown you what to do with those 3 seconds. And here's a part that no one talks about. Most leaders already know something's wrong at that time. They feel it. They just cannot locate it. They know they reacted when they didn't want to, in a way that they did not want to.

And they know something is happening in those moments that they're not in control over or they think they don't have control over. You just don't have the language for it yet. And without the language for it, it's very hard to change it. There's probably someone in your life right now who got that version of you. The one you didn't choose to give them. They may have not said anything, but you both know that it happened. And that's what this episode is about. Our host believes the greatest leadership principles ever written were never meant to stay on the pages of books.

They were meant to be applied in real decisions, real conversations, and real moments of pressure. Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world. This is the leadership series. Welcome back to the Jeffree Scott Stanton podcast. This is the leadership series. Some of you are already leading, some of you are stepping into a leadership role, and some of you are building towards it. This episode is for all of you.

And I want to be clear about something up front. This episode is not about being emotionless. It's not about performing calm or pretending to be calm when you don't feel calm. It's about what's happening inside of you in the moment before you respond and how to lead from that moment rather than being run by that moment. For those of you who are not yet in a formal leadership role, that emotional habits, the emotional habits that you are building right now, that you're building today are the ones that you will lead from.

This is not the preparation for later on. This is the work. If we haven't met yet, I am Jeffrey Scott Stanton. I am a coach. I'm a consultant and an adviser. I'm the former executive vice president of learning development for Douglas Elellman. My work focuses on behavioral strategy, learn design, performance enablement, leadership development, and building highscaling teams within the real estate environment. This series is built episode by episode. If you're new here, you can go back and listen to episode one, but each episode does stand on its own.

And I absolutely promise you will get something from them, each individually. In episode one, we said leadership is not about being emotionless. It's about being regulated. And this episode is where we actually build that regulation. Episode one named it. Episode 6. This episode does it. Before we go any further, I want to sincerely thank our founding partners, Subi, the CE Shop, and Wise Agent. Their information is in the show notes. Please reach out to them and thank them for their support. This episode is inspired by emotional agility by Susan David.

Susan David is a Harvard psychologist and one of the most respected researchers on human emotion and behavior work. Her central argument is something most leaders have never heard stated this directly. The problem is not that you have difficult emotions. The problem is what you do with them. The goal here is not to be emotionless. The goal is not emotional control in a ways that people usually use that phrase. Your goal as a leader is emotional agility. It's something harder, but it's something that actually works. Susan David uses a term that I want to spend some time on.

Once you understand it, you will see it everywhere. She calls it being hooked. Being hooked means an emotion has taken over your steering wheel. Something happens, emotions fire, and the behavior follows without any real decision being made by you. The leader who is hooked is not choosing their response. They're executing an emotions instructions. A hooked leader is not leading, they're reacting. And there's a real difference between leading and reacting. Here's what it looks like. An agent challenges you on a decision in front of a full team meeting.

The leader feels the spike. They the heat that comes before the mind even has a chance to process what happened. And without the sign to do so, they get dismissive or defensive. They shut down the conversation a way that tells the whole room what happens when you disagree with that leader. None of that was planned. None of that was who they wanted to be at that time. It was the hook running the show. If you're not yet leading, the same thing shows up in highstakes conversations with colleagues, with managers, or even with clients.

Something hits an herb and the response comes before the thinking even does. Different context, same mechanism. Or this version, the managing broker finds out a very strong agent is considering leaving. Their anxiety fires up and before the situation has even been assessed, it is already shaping the decision. phone calls made from panic instead of from strategy. Commitments offered that should not have been offered in the first place. The hook took over before the leader even realized it happened. And that emotional hook led that conversation. Being hooked is not a character flaw.

It's a human response. When something feels like a significant risk, the emotional response system fires faster than your rationality ever could each and every single time. The hook arrives before the thinking does. And most leaders do not realize that they've already reacted until the damage is done. The question is never whether you will feel it. The question is what happens next. Now, some of you are thinking, I don't get emotionally hooked. I stay calm under pressure. And you might be right. But David makes a distinction worth naming because it catches a lot of leaders who assume this episode is about someone else, not about them.

There are actually two different types of hooks. The first one being the difficult emotional hook. Anger, anxiety, fear. The one that most people recognize and most people can recognize that one easily. The second is being hooked by a thought. The certainty that you are right. The conviction that the other person is the problem. The belief that your read on a situation is accurate and complete. That's a hook. David calls this cognitive fusion. When the thought becomes so fused in your reality that it stops feeling like a thought and starts feeling like the truth.

The second hook is the most dangerous one for high performers because it doesn't feel like a reaction. It feels like good judgment at the time. The leader who stays completely calm while being completely certain that they are right and they're completely wrong is hooked just as deeply as the one who raises their voice. They just can't say it. And here's what makes this costly over time. A leader who is regularly hooked is not just having bad moments. They are creating a pattern that people around them are reading and adjusting to.

A team member of yours who has seen the hook enough times starts to manage around it. They stop raising certain issues and certain problems. They learn to read the leader's emotional temperature before they even speak to the leader. And that leader operating from inside the hook has no idea the information they are getting has been prefiltered by people who have learned what sets that leader off. They think they're getting the full picture. They're actually just getting the safe version of it. Leaders almost never realize how much truth has already left the room.

Most leadership content tells you to control your emotions, stay composed, project confidence. And for most leaders, that translates into one thing. Suppression. Push down that feeling. Keep a straight face. Perform steadiness. You don't have to feel this, which all sounds right until you realize what the suppression actually does. Cuz the things most leaders call emotional control is the thing that makes everything worse. And that's emotional suppression. In episode 3, we talked about pressure moments from a communication standpoint. How to stay in a room, how to ask instead of assert, how to slow things down when things speed up.

This episode goes one level deeper. Not what to do in that moment, but what happens inside you before you do anything. Because if you don't understand that internal process, the tools that you're going to use, they're going to disappear when you need them the most. The hook will take the wheel before you even have a chance to react to them or to bring out one of those tools to help you. Now, why suppression makes things worse? Well, what you're about to hear runs directly against what most of us were taught about emotional control.

And once you understand it, you can't go back to the old model. When you suppress an emotion, when you push it down, when you hold it back, when you pretend it is not there, that emotion does not go away. It intensifies. The effort of managing what you are feeling while also trying to function reduces the quality of your thinking, slows your decision process, and narrows your perspective. You are actually less effective under suppression than you would be if you simply named what you're feeling and chose deliberately what to do with it.

And here's the part that matters for most leaders. Suppression is visible even when you believe it's not. When someone is actively suppressing an emotion, the people around them feel it. Not consciously, not in a way they can name a name it, but they absolutely can feel it. Tension goes up in you, tension goes up in the room, trust goes down. People become careful because they sense something is being managed rather than something being real. The leader who thought they were hiding the emotion is actually communicating it more clearly than if they were simply being honest about the emotion that they were having.

There's also a delayed cost. The suppressed emotion does not disappear. It builds and builds stronger and it comes out later in a different situation at a higher intensity than anything originally warranted. The leader who holds it together all week long and then overacts as something tiny on a Friday afternoon. That's the suppression releasing. And we've all dealt with leaders. We've all been there and it's happened to us. that reaction looks disappropriate because it's carrying everything that was pushed down and along the way all week long.

That suppressed emotion. So if suppression is the wrong answer, what's the right one? It's not to feel less because we can't do that. It's to feel what you feel and acknowledge it and then choose your response based upon what you value, not what the emotion is telling you you should do. And this is what emotional agility actually means. Not the absence of emotion, but the presence of choice. The leaders most people describe as emotionally controlled. The ones who seem steady, who never seem to get rattled, they're not suppressing, they're regulating.

And those are not the same things. From outside, both look calm. From inside, they are completely different. Suppression cost effort. It's costly and it's temporary. Regulation is practice. It's sustainable and available when pressure is high. One is a performance. The other one's a skill. They both look calm from the outside. But one of them is exhausting. What you acknowledge you can work with. What you suppress works on you. I want to tell you about a leader. I'll call her Sandra. Sandra was one of the most competent people I have ever worked with.

sharp, organized, decisive. She ran a team at a major brokerage and by every measurable standard she was performing. But Sandra had a specific pattern and the people around her had noticed it long before she even realized she had a pattern. Whenever she was under significant pressure, she would go quiet. Not rude, not dismissive, just quiet. She would move through the office with a kind of controlled precision that her team had learned to read as a warning sign. stay away. Her team called it the zone, but never to her face.

And when Sandra was in the zone, people stopped bringing her problems. People stopped talking to her. People stopped dealing with her. They made decisions without her that they should have brought to her. They solved things imperfectly rather than risk the interaction with Sandra because she was in the zone. Sandra thought she was managing herself well. What she was actually doing was managing people away from her. It took 18 months and a direct conversation with someone she trusted before Sandra even saw it. The pattern she thought was discipline was actually distance.

And the team she thought she was running well was quietly working around her for over a year. That's suppression, not dramatic, not obvious, just as a slow, invisible tax on every relationship around you. And the leader generally never feels it happening because from the inside it looks like strengths. Nobody stopped trusting Sandra. Nobody complained. Nobody quit because of one interaction. They simply learned to work around her and avoid her. Eventually, she became the last person to know what was really happening inside her own organization. And that's the broker's leader's nightmare, not the agent who leaves angry that the organization that quietly reorganizes itself around your

blind spots while you believe everything is fine. Your emotional state is contagious. Think about the most charged leader you have ever worked with. Not the worst, the most charged, the most emotionally charged, the one whose mood you could feel before they said a word. Now, think about what happened to the room when that leader walked in. That's not a personality observation. That's biology. The leader's emotional state is literally neurologically contagious. Human beings are wired what's called mirror neurons. What we do is we unconsciously pick up and mirror the emotional states of the people around us, especially the ones in position of authority.

If a leader walks in anxious, the room becomes anxious. If the leader is reactive, the culture becomes reactive. If the leader is genuinely regulated, the environment around them becomes more stable. Think about what that means practically. Every time you walk into a meeting, every oneonone, every interaction with the people you lead, you are setting the emotional temperature before you even say a word, it's your body language, it's your tone. It's your pace of speech. It's the quality of your attention. All of it being read and mirrored consistently, but not consciously because that's how we as human beings process our environment.

We mirror it. Now, as a leader, you're not just leading the work. You're leading the emotional environment the work happens in. And I don't think enough leaders actually understand this. That environment is being set by you whether you are intentional about it or not. A hooked leader does not just damage their own response. A hook leader pulls the whole room into their hook. The team member who was calm becomes less calm. The meeting that was going well starts to feel charged. the oneonone that need to be productive becomes about managing a leader's emotional state instead of actually solving a problem.

I watch this play out in the brokerage world in ways I have not forgotten. I have a leader I knew very well, genuinely talented, genuinely committed, had a pattern of carrying difficult conversations into the next interaction without even realizing it. They had a difficult phone call, a hard phone call that went straight into a team meeting. Still inside that emotional set, that emotional hook from that original hard phone call. They never said anything about it, never brought it in explicitly. But within 10 minutes, the high energy in that room had totally changed.

People became careful. The free exchange that had always characterized that team started to disappear. And that leader had no idea why. They were looking everywhere else for the answer. They never looked at themselves walking through that door. That team lost three of its strongest people within 10 months. That leader attributed to the market to better opportunities. It was neither. It was the room. It was the room that they were in that they were setting that emotional charge to and they never even knew it. The question is not whether this is happening in your world.

The question is whether you would know if it had because it happens all the time. Your team may spend more time managing your emotional state than solving the actual problems. And this is the most underestimated cost in leadership. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffrey Scott Stan podcast where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world. I want to take a moment to recognize one of our founding partners, Wise Agent. In any performance-driven business, the systems behind the scenes matter just as much as the person in front of the client.

Wise Agent is an all-in-one CRM platform built specifically for real estate professionals. It helps manage your contacts, automate follow-ups, and grow your business with one platform instead of piecing together dozen different tools from dozens of different companies. If you're serious about building something sustainable, it is absolutely worth your times. Visit wise.com. Link is in the show notes. Tell them J Squared Podcast Production sent you. Stop for a second and think about the people you lead right now. They are not experiencing your strategy. They are experiencing your emotional state.

And is it a state that you want them to experience? You know, Susan Dave describes four moves that help people build emotional agility. I want to walk through each one of them and show you what it actually looks like in a leadership moment so you could use this. The first move is to show up. This means notice that you are being hooked. Not judging it, not fixing it. Just notice you're being hooked. I am feeling something. There is a hook here. That sounds simple and is generally hard to do in the middle of a charged moment because when you're hooked, you usually don't feel like

you're hooked. You feel like you're right. The emotion presents itself as the truth. So the first skill is just pausing long enough to notice that something is happening inside of you separate from what's happening in the room. The second move is to step out. Create a small amount of distance between you and that emotion. Not suppress it, observing it. There is a specific technique from the research that works well. They call it label the emotion instead of being in it. Instead of saying I'm angry, try I am noticing anger.

Instead of saying I'm anxious, I am noticing anxiety. That shift from being noticed linguistically creates enough space for the rational mind to come back in. It sounds like a small thing, but the research shows that it measurably reduces emotional intensity within seconds. Small linguistic shift. The third move is to walk your why. This is the one that guides the response. After you've noticed the hook, after you create a little distance, the question to ask yourself is, what do I actually value here? Not what do I feel like doing?

Not what would feel satisfying right now. What matters to me as a leader in this situation? Is it the relationship? Is it the standard? Is it the trust I'm trying to build to this person? What do I value here? And when you know what you value, the response almost always chooses itself. Valuebased responses and emotion-driven responses almost never look the same. The fourth the fourth step is to move on. Take the action. Say what needs to be said. Have the conversation. Make the decision. But from a place of intention rather than a place of reaction.

from what you value rather than what that emotion, what that hook is demanding of you. It's not about being slow in a way that looks uncertain. It's not about hesitation in a way that looks uncertain. It's about the internal process being guarded by your leadership, not by your nervous system. When you first start practicing this, it's going to feel awkward. I know it did for me. The noticing will happen after the reaction, not before it initially. You will run the sequence in your head on the drive home from that meeting or on the subway from that appointment and you'll wish it had gone differently.

That's fine. That's how it starts. The awareness that comes after the reaction is the same awareness that eventually arrives before it if you keep on practicing it. And it is clumsy before it's going to become fluid. The leaders who have genuine emotional agility, they didn't wake up with it. They built it imperfectly at first, repeatedly, and over time. I want to stay on the walk your why for a moment because I think it's the most underestimated of the four. Most people hear values and think a soft concept.

But in the middle of a real hook, values are the most practical thing that you have. They are specific to you and they're already there. You already have those values and they are pointing you towards a behavior that the hook would never produce on its own. Here's what it looks like. Imagine brokers in a one-on-one with the top agent who just said they're thinking about leaving. Anxiety fires off immediately. Fear of losing them. Fear of what it means. Fear is what it says about their leadership.

Fear what it says about their organization. The hooked response goes one of two directions. either trying to hold on to that person through promises. If they stop and ask themselves honestly, I value this person's success. I value honesty in this relationship. I value understanding what is actually driving this before I respond to it. Those values point that conversation to a completely different direction. Not a retention pitch, not a withdrawal of yourself. A genuine curious conversation about what the person actually needs and whether your organization can provide it.

That conversation guided by values instead of fear is one that either keeps them for the right reasons or lets them go with the relationship remaining intact. Neither one of those outcomes are available from inside your hook. They're not what this looks like in a room. Picture the last time you were in a conversation that just went sideways. You already know which one. Stay there for a second. An agent challenge you publicly in a team meeting directly, not rudely. They question the decision you made in front of everyone.

The hook arrives immediately. Maybe it's defensiveness. Maybe it's irritation. Maybe it's a flash of feeling disrespected. And it's real and it's fast. The hooked response runs on automatic. You defend the decision. You explain your reasoning. You explain your reasoning in a way that signals the challenge was inappropriate. You move on in a way that closes that conversation. The agent feels dismissed. The room registered that disagreement is not welcome with this person. You leave that meeting feeling a little bit off about it, but you can't name why.

The agile response is completely different. you noticed a spike doing this right now and create enough distance to ask what do I actually value here? Maybe I value the team feeling like they can be honest with me. I value being the kind of leader who can hear hard things without needing to win in the moment. From that place, the response totally changes. You ask a genuine question, tell me more about your concern. You listen. You acknowledge what is legitimate in what they said, even if you hold the direction you wanted to.

The room reads a leader who is secure enough to hear a challenge in public and stay curious instead of getting defensive. That's a trust deposit. And it would not have been possible from inside the hook. Here's a different scenario that happens quite often. You find out midweek that one of your strongest agents has been taking calls from another company. The anxiety fires. The story start. Are they leaving? Did I miss something? Is the whole team unhappy? The hook response acts from anxiety immediately. Conversation driven by what you are afraid of rather than what the situation calls for.

The agile response notices the anxiety first. It labels it. It asks what you actually know versus what the anxiety is adding. Then responds from value which might look like calm, direct, curious conversation about where that agent is. Not from fear, not from control, but a genuine investment in their success. That conversation had from a regulated place produces a completely different outcome than one had from the hook. The difference between those two conversations is not competence, not experience, not market knowledge. It's the internal state the leader brought into the room.

And you have far more control over that than most leaders realize. You are not the mercy of your own emotions. You are the mercy of your habits around them. And habits can change. I want to tell you about something. Not a concept, not a framework. a real person who who had to learn this the hard way. Over four months of trying and failing and trying again because that is actually what this looks like. I worked with a leader I'll call Thomas. Thomas was sharp, experienced, deeply committed to the people he led.

By almost every measure, a very strong leader, but he had a specific pattern that was costing him and he knew it. When he felt disrespected, when someone challenged him in a way that touched his authority or judgment, the hook was immediate and intense. He would shut down, become clipped and formal. The warmth that defined his leadership in normal moments would totally disappear, replaced by something technically professional but unmistakably cold. And the people around him felt it. They didn't know exactly what had happened, but they knew something had changed.

And then they would spend days trying to figure out what went wrong, what they had done wrong. When I started working with Thomas, the first challenge was helping Thomas see the pattern in all of this. Because from inside the hook, the response always felt justified to him. The person had been disrespectful. The challenge had been inappropriate. The coldness was a reasonable reaction to him. He was not wrong that the situations were sometimes genuinely difficult. What he could not see was that his response was doing more damage than the original situation ever could.

The start worked with awareness, not changing the response yet, just noticing it. And after the charge reaction, Thomas would ask himself, "Was I hooked just then? What did I feel? And what triggered it?" Over weeks of him doing this, a specific pattern emerged. It was not disrespectful in general that hooked him. It was being challenged in front of others. the public nature of it was the hook and that specifically mattered because now he could prepare for it. He knew where the hook was most likely to be set and then then came the practice of the four moves starting in lower stakes situation and gradually moving

towards the ones that carried more charge. It wasn't linear. Some weeks he handled things that he would previously struggle with and felt generally different afterwards. Other weeks the hook caught him completely and he ended up right back in the same familiar pattern. And that's how this works. It's not a switch. It's practice. Slow repetition, honest practice. In about 4 months, something shift. Not because Thomas stopped feeling hooked. He still felt it, but he started to have a different relationship with it. Instead of the hook triggering automatic response, an automatic sequence, it became a signal, a flavor that told him, "Pay attention right now.

Something important is happening here." And that half second of attention was enough to stop the run of the sequence to notice to step out walk the Y and respond from a different place. The people around Thomas noticed the change before he fully did. Not dramatically. It's the quality of what it felt like to be in a difficult conversation with him. He became a kinder type of leader. One that could say hard things without bracing for the coldness that used to follow. The hook did not go away.

He just stopped letting it drive him. And that's the shift built through months of unglamorous repetition. It changed the culture of the team, changed the culture of the organization more than anything else Thomas had done. What the Thomas story makes clear is that none of what he built was possible until he could first see the pattern. The notice has to come first. The notice requires a level of self-awareness that high performing environments actively work against. The leader who cannot see their own patterns are being managed by those patterns.

That is not a judgment. It's just truth. The pace of a real estate environment, the constant demand, the immediate response leaves almost no room for the kind of reflection that makes noticing possible. There's no structure built into it for the day. And most leaders move from situation to situation without ever examining the internal patterns shaping their behavior. They react, they move on, they react again. and the patterns that are costing them the most stay invisible because there is never a moment to look. There's also something worth understanding here about why is this so hard.

Research on self assessment constantly shows that people are the weakest at evaluating themselves in exactly the areas where they need to improve. It's not a lack of self-awareness in general. It is the same pattern that produces the problematic behavior also shapes how you perceive it afterwards. The leader who gets defensive when challenged tends to remember the challenge as unreasonable and their own response is justified. The leader who goes cold under pressure tends to experience their coldness as professionalism. The pattern defends itself, which means the information you need to change is exactly the information your mind is most likely distorting.

I know this from my own experience. There was a period in my career when I was leading at a level that demanded a pace I was not always able to sustain emotionally and I had a specific hook that I was generally not aware of for longer than I would like to admit. When I felt that people I was responsible for were not taking the work seriously enough, the hook was immediate. I would not raise my voice. I would not get visibly frustrated. What I would do then was become very precise and very professional.

I would shift into a mode that probably looked from the outside that I was just focused. What I know now is that it was just distance. I was creating distance and the people closest to me in that work were not getting the version of me that was actually invested in them. They were getting the version of me that was managing its own frustration. Some of them told me later when enough time had passed that honesty felt safe that they were long stretches where they were not sure whether I was actually engaged in what I was doing or just going through the professional motions.

that landed hard because from the inside I was completely engaged. I cared enormously. But what I was showing them was not that. And that gap between what I felt and what they were experienced was significant enough that it shaped how they worked with me. I didn't even know that pattern existed until someone trusted me enough to name it for me. That conversation changed more about how I led than almost anything else did. Which is why the most important thing I can tell you in this segment is not framer is this.

Find the person who will tell you the truth no matter what. Whatever course in vulnerability, it costs less than continuing to lead from a pattern that you cannot see. Most leaders think they are leading their team. What they're actually leading first is themselves. And when they lose that battle, everyone feels it. This is why one simple practice matters more than it sounds. And if there any charged interaction, ask yourself these three questions. What was I feeling in that moment? What did I do with it? And what did I produce in the room?

Not to judge yourself. Is to see the pattern. Ask consistently. Those three questions build something more accurate than your immediate perception in any single event. When the same answer keeps showing up after 15 different interactions, you can't call it a one-off. The pattern becomes visible. And that pattern you see is a pattern you can work with. A pattern you cannot see is running you. There's also a version of this that requires other people because the leader is almost always the last person to accurately assess their own emotional impact.

What feels composed from the inside may look very different from the outside. As we said, find the one person that will tell you the truth about how you show up when pressures are high. Not to embarrass you, to give you information you cannot generate on your own. Most leaders don't have this. The ones who do develop faster than anyone around them or faster than any other leader. Because of this, they can see what otherwise they couldn't. No, as a leader, the people who need you to be regulated are not going to tell you when you're not.

They're just going to get quieter and you're and you are going to think things are fine. Before I give you the practical part, and I'm going to I need to just say one more thing about this. Start with this question. What are your specific hooks? not emotional reactions in general. The specific situations that most often pull you out of your best leadership, which are they? Is it being challenged in front of others? Is it someone that you perceive as being disrespectful? What are they? Feeling your judgment is being questioned by someone you have invested in?

Uncertainty you can't control? Name it. Because a hook you have named is a hook you can prepare for. And a hook you have never named catches you every time. Once you name it, take it one step further. Think about a specific situation in the next 30 days where the hook is most likely to show up. The meeting where someone tells where meeting where someone tends to challenge you. The conversation that always carries the possibility of going sideways. The type of news you get that always sends anxiety up.

Before you walk to any of those, ask yourself this one question. What do I value most in this interaction? Not what do you want to happen, what do you value? Write it down if it helps. Because when the hook arrives, and it will, having already answered that question means the walk your why move is already done. You're not searching for values in the heat of the moment. You know where they are before you walk in. That preparation is what closes the gap between a leader you intend to be and the one who actually shows up.

Start practicing this. Notice how it shows up in low stakes situations. Notice how it shows up in the high pressure ones, the ordinary ones. After that conversation that felt even slightly charged, ask yourself, was I hooked here? What did it feel like? What did I do with it? That question asked consistently is how the muscle gets built. Is how your leadership agility and emotional agility gets built. Remember how we started. The most dangerous moment in your leadership is not when things go wrong. It's the 3 seconds before you respond.

Those 3 seconds are trainable. Those 3 seconds are changeable. That is what this episode has been about. Not controlling your emotions, not performing composure, building the practice that makes those 3 seconds beforehand workable. So you don't need to worry about the 3 seconds after you said something. That leadership is real leadership. And that's where leadership lives. Emotional agility is not about being a different kind of person. It's about having a different relationship with the emotions you already have, feeling them without being governed by them, using them as information rather than instructions.

The leaders who develop this are not the ones who feel less. They are the ones who have the ability to be present with what they feel and still choose what to do. That choice, that half second between the hook and the response, that's where your leadership lives. Not in your strategy, not in your vision. It lives in that moment. Thank you for spending this time with me. If you'd like to stay in contact and stay connected, please follow me on social media for updates, future episodes, and additional leadership insights.

If this episode was of value to you, I would appreciate it if you left a review or shared it with someone who is leaning under pressure and trying to figure out why they keep ending up in the same moments they don't want to be in because the answer is almost always in the moment before they react. And that moment is workable. Thank you to our founding partners, Subi the CE Shop and Wise Agent. They are all leaders in their own respective fields. Their information is in the show notes.

I'm Jeffrey Scott Stanton. I am your coach. I'm a consultant. I am your adviser and alone with you on this journey of leadership. Lead with intention. I'll see you on the next one. Leadership isn't learned in pages. It's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard and what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been the leadership series hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by Jqued Podcast Productions.