the hierarchy of feeling
Emotional numbness has become a leadership aesthetic. Leadership is staying human even when the room demands you stop feeling.
About five years ago, I was doing a training at a manufacturing company. The training was on ethics, and it was for the C-suite. As I was getting three quarters of the way through, the CRO asked me a question, and I answered it honestly. My answer wasn’t snarky or impolite. It simply named a pattern I had observed at the company. The moment the truth landed, he snapped. His whole emotional landscape changed. He got heated, reactive, offended. And the room shifted with him. Suddenly, everyone’s attention went to managing his response; softening it, soothing it, making it acceptable.
It was crystal clear. This man had permission to exist in his full emotional range.
I’d seen this before. I once worked for a very wealthy woman with a massive network of influential people. She would get angry, incoherent, even cruel, and these same highly intelligent adults would coddle her in ways they’d never allow anyone without her wealth to get away with. She had access to emotional range the way some people have access to private security. She could feel widely, loudly, sloppily, and everyone adjusted around her.
These weren’t isolated incidents. They were different doorways into the same pattern, emotion is a privilege that follows power.
That’s the quiet truth about this culture. The more power you have, the more you’re allowed to feel. Not everyone gets the same emotional range without consequence. Some people get called “passionate.” Others get labeled “aggressive.” Some get described as “assertive.” Others, usually women, usually people of color, get told they’re “emotional.” Same feelings, different consequences. That’s the double-tax at work.
I’ve spent years in rooms where emotion was treated like a flaw to manage, not data to understand. How people are allowed to feel, and how their feelings get interpreted, says everything about who holds power.
In many spaces, emotional numbness gets mistaken for leadership. But the truth is, most people aren’t calm, they’re performing calm because they’ve been punished for anything else. They’ve learned to mute themselves just enough to stay employable. They’ve learned that their safety depends on making their feelings digestible.
And because this performance of neutrality reads as maturity, it gets rewarded. Emotional restraint becomes the standard. But what’s actually being rewarded is disconnection, the ability to silence your own internal truth so the system doesn’t have to confront it.
Meanwhile, people in power get to throw tantrums and call it passion. They get to take up space and call it conviction. They get to be fully human while everyone else gets penalized for having a body.
I’ve sat in too many rooms where a man slams his hand on the table and gets praised for his “drive,” while a woman raises her voice half an octave and the whole room goes cold. I’ve watched women of color get judged for expressing the same emotions white leaders are rewarded for. The only time that dynamic shifts is when money or status bends the rules.
Composure is not the same thing as control. Most people aren’t composed. They’re conditioned. They’re exhausted from translating their emotions into palatable language. They’re constantly filtering themselves: Is it safe to feel this here? Will this be held against me? Will this cost me something? That constant filtering rewires you. You start thinking suppression is emotional intelligence. You start thinking “holding it together” is a virtue. When really, it’s a survival strategy.
We talk about wanting more “emotionally intelligent leaders,” but what we actually need are leaders who can tolerate emotion in other people. Leaders who don’t require calmness as a condition for credibility. Leaders who don’t censor truth just because it’s uncomfortable for them. That's emotional integrity.
When power can’t tolerate emotion, it doesn’t mean we’ve evolved. It just means only some people are allowed to be fully human.
And this is also where the resilience conversation gets distorted, because resilience has been weaponized to justify emotional silence.
We talk a lot about resilience, but most of what people call resilience is just emotional suppression with better branding; the ability to keep functioning while disconnected from yourself. The system rewards people who keep performing while cut off from their own truth, and calls that strength. That's not resilience. That's self-abandonment.
I’ve watched people amputate their emotional range to be taken seriously. People who should never have had to trade authenticity for credibility. But that’s what professionalism has become, obedience.
And when leaders demand composure from the people beneath them, what they’re really saying is, “Don’t make me experience anything I don’t want to feel.”
Leadership that earns the name can handle emotion. It doesn't require politeness to stay grounded. It doesn't panic when someone tells the truth. It uses emotion as information. It knows that emotion is not the opposite of logic, it's part of how humans make meaning.
Every time you give yourself permission to feel without filtering for palatability, you reclaim a piece of your humanity. And every time you hold space for someone else's full emotional truth without making it wrong, you help build a world that is safer for all of us.
The kind of leadership worth building expands humanity, not restricts it. The next era belongs to leaders who can feel deeply without collapsing, who can hear the truth without punishing it, and who can stay fully human in rooms that reward disconnection. Because the point was never to become unfeeling, it was to refuse the demand that we shrink ourselves to make power comfortable. When we stop treating emotion as a liability and start treating it as part of our intelligence, we don't just lead better, we build systems where more of us get to exist as whole people. And that is the kind of leadership the future is asking for.
