Adulting is hard. Parenting is sometimes harder. And being certified in emotional intelligence might qualify me to teach it, but it doesn’t stop me from occasionally losing my mind. We’re all human.
A while back, my car broke down at the end of a day at the fair: ninety minutes from home, two young daughters with me, and zero backup plan. We did our best to manage it. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how well we’d done until later, when I scrolled through the photos I’d taken that night and something caught me off guard: the looks on my daughters’ faces. Genuine smiles. Calm, cool, even collected, with a hint of adventure.
Inside, I had been collapsing, juggling logistics, cost, stress, and exhaustion. Outwardly, they saw something entirely different.
When I thanked them for handling it so well and asked how they did it, their answer surprised me. “We saw you were calm.” (I was?) “You didn’t get frustrated.” (I didn’t?) “We knew it would be okay. You always take care of everything, especially us.” Hollywood, here I come. They even said it was fun. I beg to differ.
That night is the clearest lesson I know about a part of leadership that never makes it onto an org chart: your tone sets theirs. The people around you take their cues from you, not from the problem. If you stay composed, they’re far more likely to stay composed too. What they see becomes what they believe, and what they believe shapes how they respond, in that moment and in the next one.
Teams work exactly the same way. When a launch slips, a key client walks, or a reorganization lands without warning, your team isn’t only reading the situation. They’re reading you. A few things help, in the room and in the field:
Narrate the next step, not the whole problem. When people are anxious, a five-point recovery plan is noise. “Here’s what we’re doing right now” is calm.
Slow your pace on purpose. Teams read tempo as much as words. A leader who visibly speeds up under stress hands that stress straight to the room.
Separate the facts from the story you’re telling yourself. Most panic comes less from the problem itself than from the worst-case narrative running underneath it.
Fake it, for good reason. Composure doesn’t require feeling calm. It means not handing your internal scramble to people who can’t do anything with it. That isn’t hiding. It’s leading. You don’t need to be perfect, just present and aware.
Composure isn’t just about getting through the day. It’s a model. It teaches others what calm looks like in the face of chaos, and for kids especially, it becomes a memory they’ll draw from someday, when they’re the ones adulting.
Because one day, when life breaks down ninety minutes from someone’s comfort zone, you’ll want them to remember the look in your eyes.
