Issue No. 13 | May 5, 2026 | Dr. Jacqueline Ashley, PCC
The Space to Choose
What you feel is information. What you do with it is leadership.
The inner work of emotional self-control
FEEL DEEPLY
Your jaw locks, breathing becomes shallow, fists tighten, and your neck feels hot.
Frustration and anger just hit the center of your chest—like a bullseye.
What happened? Well, you were abruptly cut off by a colleague who’s always doing this to you. Three words away and you would’ve finished what you had been building toward in that meeting.
He rolled right over your words like you weren’t even there.
No one’s making eye contact with you as you look around. Everyone’s now looking at the colleague who interrupted you mid-sentence…and waiting.
What now? Your shallow breathing (anxiety) makes you want to shrink and let it pass. But your tightened jaw (anger) feels compelled to break open and speak words that will certainly cut deep. These feel like the only options.
There’s a price for either.
So if you hold back, you’ll bring it all the way home. That means while you’re driving, into the night, and still at ten o’clock when you’re thinking about what you should’ve said and done.
Now, if you were to push back, the biased script that’s been written about you will confirm you as being “difficult” or “too much.”
It feels like there are only two options: Either you are the emotion, or you suppress the emotion. Nothing in between.
There is another option. For the last two months you’ve been learning to recognize what you feel and how you land. The data is there and what’s missing now is what you do with emotions when they’re hot.
THINK CRITICALLY
Are emotions directives? Anxiety may tell you to hold back while anger wants you to attack. If they’re telling you what to do, then emotion regulation must mean overriding the directives.
No.
Award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist Dr. Susan David teaches the importance of “recognizing your emotions as data, not directives.”
Frustration is information about being blocked in what you’re trying to do, anxiety alerts you to potential threats, and anger indicates the violation of a value. It’s all real information to help you choose your response.
Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl identified there’s a space between what you feel and what you choose. This is the centerpiece of Dr. David’s work on emotional agility.
Emotional self-control—where you regulate yourself and choose how to respond—lives in this space.
It’s important to note that it’s different from suppression. That’s pushing down emotions, like submerging a beach ball and holding it underwater.
Dr. David’s Emotional Agility framework is a practice of four steps:
Start with “Showing Up.” Be willing to face your thoughts, emotions, and behavior with self-compassion. Approach your feelings with curiosity and nonjudgment, and identify them with granularity. The more precisely you can name them, the more useful the information they provide.
“Stepping Out” is where you actually create the space for yourself. Psychologically distance yourself from your thoughts and emotions by becoming an observer of them instead. You aren’t your emotions. Untangle them from yourself. Instead of believing you’re the storm (weather), recognize that you’re the sky it’s in.
“Walking Your Why” is recognizing who you really want to be, based on your core values and the goals that matter most to you. That informs your response.
Last is “Moving On.” Translate your choices into small and deliberate actions that can be tweaked little by little over time.
If you’re a leader who’s a member of a marginalized group, you know there’s a pre-written script for what the room thinks will happen the moment you walk in. Meet the bias here. Falling back into reacting or suppressing makes the cost higher, so take advantage of the opportunity to self-regulate. Write your own script and break the preconceived expectations of the room.
The space between feeling and acting on your values is the opportunity to write the leadership story you want.
LEAD POWERFULLY
Your strengths can help you improve your emotional self-control to navigate the space as an opportunity as well as to lead with the emotion that demonstrates what really matters.
Deliberative is one of my strengths. If it’s one of yours, too, then you’re a natural at weighing the consequences before taking action. For us, the pause is built in and serves as a refusal to follow the script in a room that already has it written for us.
If you lead with Empathy, you can sense how others feel and have the vocabulary to help them with their emotions. Apply that emotional granularity to pinpoint what you need, especially when the room asks you to feel much less.
If Intellection is your strength, the inner space of introspection is something you cherish. The room is expecting you to react, so don’t let the pressure get to you. Let the space be a place for thinking, even if it’s in milliseconds. Give yourself enough time to respond thoughtfully.
The Integration
When you feel the heat coming on after an interruption, dismissive comment, or any moment that would trigger a reaction, feel it in your body first.
It could be anywhere—your chest, hands, neck (you get the idea). Then get clear about what you’re feeling. So not just “stressed” or “frustrated,” but what it really is. Maybe what you’re feeling is dismissed, disrespected, scrutinized, doubted, or erased. Be granular with every emotion.
Finding the right words for how you feel helps you to choose how you respond (rather than reacting) and lessens the power of the room’s script about you. Write your own narrative with clarity, so any room that carries bias no longer holds enough power over the story of who you are.
This Week's Momentum
📌 Where in your week will you write your own script in the space between feeling and acting on your values?
Simply hit reply to share your response with me. I'd really love to hear from you!