WHY HIGH-PERFORMING LEADERS STILL GET DEFENSIVE

You leave the meeting knowing you didn’t show up the way you wanted to.

You over-explained. You defended. You over-apologized.

And now you find yourself ruminating and analyzing how things went. If you could only figure out what happened, then maybe you could fix it.

You practice trying radical ownership and holding high standards for yourself, but it seems like the parts you’re trying to remove become louder, rather than quieter.

Our approach to improving our leadership through this lens is often an unwitting attempt to eliminate the parts of ourselves we wish weren’t there.

You hang on to the conversation you had that went sour, with the hope that if you bounce between justification and self-correction long enough, you’ll find the fix.

We try to adopt a growth mindset to relate to these parts of ourselves, holding our shame as data, and our rumination as an indication that there’s just something for us to fix.

It’s all so noble, because it’s done with great intentions — but it’s an off-ramp for our protective ego.

We try to improve our leadership in such a way that we stop doing the things that evoke shame, upset, or judgment.

Those approaches quietly remove the friction that would expand our leadership. The moments we rush to fix are often the gates to greater depth.

Your reaction to shame creates an internal tension: an experience that you did something that you currently have judgment around.

When that tension arises, we try to collapse it one of two ways:

First, we try to apologize, clean up, and make sure that we never act that way again. If we can just stop ourselves from ever making a mistake, then we won’t have to feel this way again.

Or, down the second avenue, we close off our hearts, so that we don’t have to feel our impact on the other person.

“It’s not my fault they reacted that way. That’s their stuff.”

These inner stances allow us to collapse the tension, and relieve us from having to stay open any further.

Over time, we get better at closing this tension, and so we feel like we’re growing.

But this quietly creates an ongoing experience that certain reactions are errors that need to be removed.

We don’t expand our capacity to stay with those reactions — we just get better at concealing them.

Over time, you build a version of yourself that only includes what you approve of.

And the parts you exclude don’t disappear — they just operate in the background, unmanaged and unseen.

These moments mark the edge of your current capacity.

And until we increase our capacity to stay open to those reactions in ourselves, we can’t hold the space for others to do the same.

People stop bringing you their hard edges. Conflict becomes sanitized, keeping relationships at surface level. Your teams perform, but they don’t risk.

To really lead, we have to develop the capacity to stay open in the moments we’d rather shut down. That means sitting in the tension of our judgment and shame, and letting that wash over us.

As we do so, we can stay open with our impact, without collapsing it into correction or defense.

There may be some clean up to do, or some apologies to make. We might do something different the next time, but this choice becomes available from steadiness, rather than urgency.

When we practice this way, we learn how to repair relationships, and to navigate with the parts of ourselves that aren’t yet artful.

We become leaders that can make mistakes and grow from them in relationship with others, rather than leaders that need to be perfect or pave over our impact.