Managing Partner + Coach, Conscious Leadership Group
At our Conscious Leadership Group team retreat last month, one of my colleagues said something that woke me up. We were in the middle of a conversation about a technology project I’d been managing for the company. It was a major infrastructure overhaul involving our new client portal, our CRM, and our accounting system. It had been delayed multiple times, and for the better part of six months, I’d been showing up to team meetings with updates about what happened, what we’re doing about it, and the new timeline.
What my colleague said was, “Jim, we want to know how you feel about all of this.”
I paused and then told them I was frustrated. Genuinely frustrated. Underneath that, I had a layer of anger and some fear. I was wrestling with the delays, the ambiguity, and the gap between where the project was and where I believed it would be.
When I said it out loud, something shifted in the room. Several teammates shared that they felt closer to me. More connected. More confident in the project itself. They trusted me more, and I felt more connected to them.
What really struck me was that I’ve been practicing these tools for years. I know this work deeply from the inside out. Yet here I was, showing up with my own team, not attuning to my own emotional experience while keeping them up to speed on the project — definitely a pattern throughout my leadership career.
Simply put, our patterns are powerful.
The Gap Most Leaders Don’t See
Every leader is having two simultaneous experiences: What’s happening on the inside, and what they’re expressing on the outside. A lot of the time, those two things don’t fully match.
I’m not talking about leaders who are consciously choosing to hide how they feel. I’m talking about all the times we as leaders are genuinely not attuned to our feelings in the moment, not because we’re dishonest or intentionally hiding something, but because we’ve developed automatic behaviors to keep our emotions beneath the surface.
It makes sense! Most of us weren’t taught to honor and express our feelings. We were socialized early to compose ourselves, put on a calm exterior, and keep our emotional lives separate from our professional ones. Over time, we developed a way of being that created a gap between our internal experience and our external expression, and the gap is not the same for everyone.
I see this everywhere in my work with leaders and their teams.
- The CEO who lets his team know when he’s frustrated but tightens up when he feels fear about the future.
- The CMO who’s congruent with her sadness but isn’t able to express her frustration when results are not meeting her expectations.
- The enthusiastic founder who relies so much on joy and positivity that their other emotions are bottled up.
The cost of all of this in any given moment isn’t usually dramatic; it accumulates over time. Trust becomes hard-earned or potentially erodes. Teams follow out of obligation and organizational structure rather than genuine connection. Leaders wonder why the people around them feel slightly out of reach, or why difficult conversations feel harder than they should be.
The Science Behind the Sensing
Human beings are social creatures. We evolved in groups, and our survival depended on our ability to read each other accurately. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges calls this neuroception. It’s the nervous system’s continuous, subconscious scan of whether a person or situation is safe to trust. It happens below conscious awareness, before you’ve formed any opinion at all.
We were doing this long before we moved into conference rooms, and it’s still alive in us today. We’re constantly scanning, whether we know it or not, for congruence: The degree to which someone’s external expression matches the emotional experience actually happening inside them.
When there’s a gap, we feel it. We might not be able to name it, or we might describe it as something vague (“There’s something off about them,” or “I can’t quite put my finger on it”), but the sensing is real. When we sense a gap in our leaders, we trust less. Not all at once. Steadily. Quietly. Over time.
The inverse is equally true. When a leader shows up in full alignment, when what they say on the outside reflects what’s actually happening on the inside, something opens up. People lean in. The relationship becomes easier. Trust isn’t just maintained — it deepens.
Practice Emotional Literacy First
Becoming a more congruent leader involves two connected skills: emotional literacy, which is the ability to sense and name what’s happening in your body, and emotional intelligence, which is how you bring that awareness into your leadership. We’ll take them in order.
Emotional literacy begins with a simple premise: At CLG, we define emotions as energy moving in and on the body. Not thoughts or stories, but physical sensations, like the tightening in the jaw or the tension across the shoulders when anger is present, or the lightness and expansion that can come with joy. Most of us were never taught to honor these signals. Instead, we were shown how to bottle them up, keep them undercover, or filter them out. Emotional literacy is the practice of tuning back into what’s been there since we were kids.
Here’s how it works.
- When you notice an emotional response arising (in a meeting, in a difficult moment, when that surprise email arrives), pause for just a moment.
- Turn your attention inward and ask which emotion is present. We like to simplify this to choosing from five core emotions: Fear, Sadness, Anger, Joy, or Creative / Sexual.
- Locate it in your body. Where do you notice that energy right now?
- Find the word that most accurately describes what you’re sensing — words like swirling, tingling, pulsing, tightening, clenching. These present-tense, active descriptors point directly to the aliveness of the sensation.
- Now you’re in the practice: Notice, locate it, name it, get specific.
Then breathe into the sensation. Don’t try to change it or push it away. You want to allow it and just be with it. What most people discover is that emotions, when we stop feeding them with thoughts and stories and orient to them in this way, move through the body quickly. We find that when met this way, emotional flow is complete within 10-90 seconds. The emotion wasn’t arising to cause an issue — it was arising to be acknowledged.
This is emotional literacy, and it can be so easy to develop. Practice is key! The more accurately you can identify what you’re feeling, the more quickly you can access that information in real time. We offer this handout to support our clients in this practice.
Emotional literacy is not a license to unload your reactions on others. Reactive emotional expression, such as blame or criticism, doesn’t build trust; it damages it. The practice above is precisely what prevents that. When you breathe into the sensation without feeding it with story or thought, you metabolize the reactive charge. What remains is something cleaner: An emotion you can own rather than aim. “I notice I’m feeling frustrated about these delays” lands very differently than “I’m angry at you for this.” The feeling is the same, but your relationship to it is completely different.
Move to Emotional Intelligence Next
Emotional intelligence is how literacy becomes leadership. If literacy is knowing your own emotional landscape, intelligence is using that knowledge in the service of your relationship and leadership presence. It’s the capacity to recognize: this feeling is relevant, it’s mine to own, and naming it right now will deepen this conversation rather than derail it. It starts happening in the moment when you choose to name, in conversation, what’s actually happening inside you. Not as dramatic disclosures. Something much simpler.
In a team conversation facing a key decision about a project that has fallen behind schedule, a leader might say:
- “When I put my attention on these results, I notice I feel frustration.”
- “I want to reveal that I'm carrying some fear about this decision.”
- “When I bring to mind all the things we’ve done together in the past year, I feel so much joy. We have much to celebrate together as we consider our options today.”
The point isn’t which is the “right” response; it’s about the person having awareness of what is really happening for them in that moment and their willingness to own and share it.
These may seem like small moves. They take a couple of sentences at most, but they do something that nothing else in your communication can do: They close the gap. They help your external expression match your internal experience, and your teams — and their collective nervous systems — register it. This builds trust, increases collective intelligence, and, when everyone is practicing, helps a group see reality more clearly.
One Small Shift for a Different Culture
I’ve watched leaders make these moves and seen the team’s culture change. Not because any information shared was new, but because the person in front of them was becoming more real to them in a way they hadn’t been before, and with that shift came an increase in trust.
Could it really be that easy? Don’t take my word for it. Start collecting your own data. Pick one conversation in the next seven days — a team meeting, a check-in with a direct report, or a moment where you’re delivering information about something that actually has an emotional charge for you.
Before you go in, take 60 seconds and ask yourself, “What am I actually feeling about this?” Find it in your body. Name it with one of the -ing words. Breathe into it. Then, in the conversation, find one moment to name it out loud. Keep it simple. One sentence. See what happens.
Your leadership is a direct expression of your consciousness, which can be your self-awareness, your presence, or your willingness to be known. When leaders close the gap between who they are on the inside and how they show up on the outside, they don’t just become better communicators; they become the kind of people others choose to follow. The world doesn’t need more polished leaders. It needs more real ones.
