627 | When Emotions Drive Decisions: How to Lead Rationally in High-Stress Situations

Have you ever reacted emotionally as a leader and watched it hurt your team, your credibility, or your outcomes? You're not alone.

Today we're talking about what happens when emotions drive decisions and how to lead with wisdom, not reactivity, in the most high pressure moments of leadership. That is coming up next.

Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today we are diving into one of the most critical leadership skills you can develop, and that is emotional intelligence under pressure.

Now you'll learn why emotions often hijack decision making, how to recognize your personal triggers, and what it looks like to lead with clarity.

Clarity even in high stress situations. We'll walk through how to pause before reacting, how to turn emotion into data instead of a driver, and how your emotional state sets the tone for your entire team.

By the end of this episode, you'll have simple but powerful tools to stay grounded, lead rationally, and build a culture of calm and confident leadership even when the pressure is on. So let's dive in.

Emotional Hijacking Happens—But You Can Stop It (00:01:28)

First key point, emotional hijacking happens, but you can stop it. So in high stress moments, your brain defaults to survival. That's when emotional hijacking kicks in.

Your rational brain shuts down, your emotional brain takes over, and suddenly you're reacting, not leading.

Now, you've heard me talk about this before. When you get into the limbic system of your brain, we get to the amygdala. Amygdala is where we set response.

That's where you're going to see fight or flight or freeze, or as I would say, freak or freeze. This is a place where we need to understand our response is going to come from.

So for me, I believe we even set what that response is going to be, whether it is a small reaction or going postal in a situation, Right?

So understanding this about your emotions helps you to understand the difference between the emotional brain and the rational brain.

If you know that something is bothering you, if you know that something is affecting you, then it can help you to recognize that you're beginning to feel emotional and stop responding that way.

Now, there's plenty of little things you can do. One of the things I tell people all the time is take your tongue and stick it to the roof of your mouth and push as hard as you possibly can.

Sometimes that will get you out of the emotional brain into the logical brain. But the key is you have to be able to recognize that you're in that space when it happens.

So, for example, let's say you're in a team meeting. Somebody questions your strategy. Instead of staying curious, you get defensive and sometimes you may shut them down. Later you realize it wasn't about their question at all.

Instead, it was your fear of looking incompetent. This is something we must recognize. We have to understand that there are many times we can be in a situation and something triggers us.

And yes, that is a massively used word right now. But something causes us to respond with that amygdala. That response of going, you know, maybe fear, maybe it's concern, maybe it's embarrassment.

Whatever it is, it causes us to respond in a way that literally we could shut somebody down.

We can cause people to feel like maybe that they shouldn't be asking questions. We could set a tone that says, don't push back in this situation. So here's what you need to know.

Emotion isn't bad, but when it leads your decision making, it blinds you. Great leaders learn to pause and choose their response instead of reacting.

Know Your Triggers Before They Explode (00:04:03)

Key point number two, know your triggers before they explode, folks. Triggers are emotional landmines.

Certain situations are words that can ignite a strong emotional response based on past experiences or wounds. Just like I talked about in that amygdala, I believe you set how you're going to respond when you experience something.

So maybe let's say that a team member has missed a deadline and you explode, right? The thing is, is that maybe you're exploding because in the past you've been let down by people before.

In the past you've experienced somebody failing something and it's come back on you. There could be fear that you're going to have to take responsibility for this.

There could be fear that this is going to destroy something, that it's going to affect the client, that it's going to.

Whatever that response that you are experiencing now that you've blown up, now that you've exploded has told people something. This is how you respond in these types of situations.

So if you will understand those types of triggers before you ever get to that place and you understand the things that are going to set you off and maybe you will respond emotionally.

Then again, maybe a good tool would be taking your tongue and sticking it to the roof of your mouth and pushing hard. But getting over to that logical brain, here's something that just happened. Here's a situation that is frustrating the daylights out of me.

Don't respond yet. Understand the trigger and start asking yourself some questions in your head, why am I frustrated? What just happened? What can I do about this? How can I respond in this situation?

I will tell you. You will find the more that you do this, you will respond so much better. Are people still going to understand that you're frustrated? Absolutely. Are people going to see that you're having to pause?

Absolutely. But it is a thousand times better than responding by ripping somebody's head off or exploding and showing that really, you're not emotionally intelligent enough to handle the situation.

So here's what I want you to do. I want you to identify your top three leadership triggers. Is it being challenged? Is it feeling disrespected? Is it being out of control? When you name them, you can manage them.

Slow Down to Speed Up: The 3-Second Rule (00:06:14)

Key point number three, slow down to speed up the three second rule.

In high pressure moments, time feels compressed, but you gain leadership power when you slow down just enough to reengage your rational brain.

If you can move from the emotional to the rational, then you can start to change. So let's say you're about to fire off an emotional email.

Instead, you stop, you breathe for three seconds and ask, what outcome do I actually want from this? That pause could save a relationship.

It could change the way that people see you. It could change the way that people respond to you. The wrong response, the emotional response could absolutely shut down a team member.

It could shut down a team. It could cause people to back away and stop taking risks, which, as a leader should not be something that you want. You want people to feel good. You want them to feel like everything is okay.

And even if they've done something wrong, then we use accountability. We don't use emotion. So use the three second rule in emotional moments. Pause, breathe, reflect, and then respond. That's where leadership lives.

Use Emotion as Data, Not a Driver (00:07:26)

Key point number four, use emotion as data, not as a driver. Emotion is meant to inform you, not to control you. It's a signal, not a steering wheel.

Emotion tells you something's going on, but not necessarily what to do.

So let's take for example, you feel anxiety when your boss schedules a surprise meeting. Emotion says, danger, Something's wrong. But the truth is you don't actually know what it's about.

That's your chance to challenge the story you're telling yourself. I used to have a team member years ago that we used instant message in our office. And I would just type a message like once or twice a month.

Hey, come see me. And every single time she would come to my door, and it took a while before I recognized that she would come to my doorway. And she was actually nervous, but she was always a very happy person.

So I didn't really catch it at first. And then eventually I started noticing this, and I would say, hey, you seem nervous. Are you okay? And she's like, I never know what this is going to be about.

So I'm always concerned when you send that message. And I was like, to come see me? And she's like, yeah, because I don't know if I'm in trouble.

And so I asked the question, have you ever been in trouble in the past? When I sent that message, she's like, no. Have I ever ripped your head off for anything? Have you ever seen me do that to anybody? No.

Why are you concerned about it? She goes, I don't know. It's just something that fires inside of me. And so I told her, listen, if I. If you were in trouble, I'm going to come and get you.

I'm going to come and talk to you about this. But it helped me to recognize something, that I could just change the way that I'm sending a message and it changes the way that she responds.

In fact, it changed her whole day. If she got set off by emotion because I sent a text, and then she could be worrying about this for a period of time and feel bad for a period of time.

If I just make the adjustment and lean in her direction, that changes everything. So here's what I want you to do. Ask yourself a question. What is the emotion telling me?

And is the story true? Let emotion inform your awareness, but let wisdom lead your response.

So in other words, when you have an emotion that is lying to you, you are hearing lies, you are telling yourself lies in your head. That negative self talk will destroy your day.

That negative self talk will set your attitude, it will set your mood. It will change the way you focus on things.

It will cause you to back away from things. It will cause you to not be your normal self. It'll definitely keep you from taking risks and doing things that you should be doing.

It'll cause you to slow down. It may even cause you to do half the productivity that you normally would because you're being affected by those emotions.

If you will stop and ask yourself a question, is what I'm telling myself truth?

Then that will allow you to change that narrative and start telling yourself what the truth actually is. I don't know what the situation is. I don't know if my leader is upset.

So instead, let me just go on over, find out what's going on, and then I'LL make decisions from there.

Your Emotional State Affects Everyone Else’s (00:10:28)

So key point number five, your emotional state affects everyone else's. So leaders are thermostats. They are not thermometers.

Your emotional presence either regulates the room or escalates it. When you're grounded, others feel safe. So think about a situation like maybe in a crisis, two department heads are panicking.

The CEO walks in and calmly outlines the facts and says, listen, we've got this. Let's just solve the problem. The grounded presence of that CEO de escalates everyone.

Folks, think about this for a second. You have been in those situations.

I am positive at some point in your life, you've worked for a leader or a boss, if you will, that when they walked in the room, everybody panicked or everybody was shut down.

Everybody stopped processing and just waited to see what that leader was going to do. And unfortunately, that definitely set a bad tone for the entire team.

But if you've been leading long enough and you've done a good job at this, you've also recognized the times when you walked in a room and your confidence set the tone.

I can't tell you how many times I've walked into what seems like a bad situation for the team. And instead of panicking, instead of freaking out, instead of any of that, I walk and I'm like, okay, what happened?

What are we going to do about this? We have a five step process. You guys have heard me say this before. What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen?

How do we fix it? How do we make sure it never happens again? Walking in with that calmness going, guys, let's solve the problem instead of ripping people's heads off.

Well, who did this? And you shouldn't have done that. And acting like a crazy person. When you walk in with calmness and it's okay for you to also have a resolve to you that you're going to solve the problem as well.

When you walk in with that attitude, with that type of mood, then it sets the tone for your team. Your team is no longer thinking, I'm going to get my head ripped off here.

Instead, they're focusing on the positive. This is okay. Our job is to solve now. Don't worry about, you know, being in trouble at this moment. How do we solve things? How do we move forward?

One of the things I've had to do with my team over and over and over again, when they have freaked out, you know, a lot of times a new hire will join the team and then you find out after a few months they mess something up.

But they're not really telling anybody because we have a phenomenal culture of accountability. We're going to find out that something's going on.

And when we address that team member, they'll usually say, you know, you say, hey, why didn't you say something? They will usually say, well, I didn't want to disappoint you.

And then we'll ask the question, you've seen us handle situations like this before. How have we done it? Have we ripped anybody's head off? Well, no. Have we ripped your head off? Well, no. Have we treated anybody badly?

Well, no. Okay, then what's making you think we're going to do this? And the answer is almost always, well, it's because somebody I used to work for would do it this way.

That's when we say, hey, challenge our character. If you have not seen us do that in the past, then don't put that on us.

Instead, keep doing what you see until we change that, until you have some reason to believe we're going to do something different, then keep rocking with the way that we run this culture.

So if you understand that you set the tone, then when you walk in a room, you will choose calmness, you will choose clarity, you will choose confidence.

When you do that, you will literally help your team to experience the same thing. So the key is that it has to start with you.

Action Items (00:14:04)

All right, action items. Number one, journal. The last time you got emotionally hijacked, what was that situation like?

What emotion took over? What belief was behind it? Write that down and start to meditate on that.

Number two, identify your top three emotional triggers. Write those down. Watch for them every single week. Watch for them this week.

Number three, practice the three second rule daily in any emotional situation and anything that's charged, pause for three seconds, breathe, and choose your response.

Number four, use this question in high stress situations. What's the truth here? Not just what I'm feeling.

And number five, model grounded leadership this week. When others are stressed, choose to be calm. When others react, choose wisdom. Be the thermostat, not the thermometer.

Additional Resources (00:14:56)

All right, lastly, we have an additional resource for you, and that is Episode 607, Emotional Intelligence in Leadership. In this episode, we discuss how emotional intelligence is the foundation for leading your team and your business to success.

Conclusion (00:15:12)

So, folks, here's the deal. When emotions drive decisions, leadership often goes off course. But when leaders learn to pause, reflect, and respond with emotional intelligence, everything changes.

You show up differently. Your team trusts you more, your decisions improve, and for the love, your culture becomes stronger. So today, ask yourself, am I being led by what I feel or by what I value? Because the best leaders don't ignore emotion.

They acknowledge it. They learn from it. And they choose the path of wisdom. Transformation doesn't happen when you feel better. It happens when you lead better, no matter what you feel.

So let's go lead with wisdom. Well, folks, that's all the time that we have for today. Hopefully this has helped you. As always, take this information.

Change your leadership. Change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.