The Most Misunderstood Emotion in Leadership

Growing up, not a lot of anger was expressed in my house.

My parents didn't get angry. In my family, anger was what uncivilized people felt, what people who couldn't control themselves did.

Anger was viewed as bad, violent, inappropriate, and out of control. And so I became cool, calm, and collected.

I carried that belief into my leadership. And for a long time, I was proud of it. I didn't raise my voice. I didn't make people uncomfortable. I stayed measured, even when things weren't going the way I wanted.

What I didn't realize was what that composure was costing me.

I encounter this same pattern constantly with founders. People are showing up late to meetings. The team isn't performing the way they want. Someone's underperforming and they're not sure what to do. They've tried being clear. They've tried being patient. They're not sure what's left to try.

But I've come to realize that staying cool and collected, the way I'd been taught, was working against me in ways I couldn't yet see.

All Emotions Are Love Through a Prism

Here's the reframe that changed things for me.

All emotions are love refracted through a prism. Just as light enters a prism and refracts into different colors, each emotion is love expressed as something different. Each one traces you back to presence, back home.

Anger, specifically, is love refracted as a boundary. Pure boundary energy.

And love can be fierce. A lot of people hear the word love and think soft and nurturing, but that's not always what love looks like. When my kid's about to walk into a street and doesn't see a car coming, I'm not like, "Oh, honey, maybe you want to..." I'm like: "Stop." That urgency, that force, is love. Just expressed differently than we're used to thinking about it.

The reason most people don't see anger that way is that almost every example of anger they've witnessed has been reactive: throwing staplers, yelling, shutting people down. And they conclude: this is what anger is. This is what needs to be avoided.

But the reactivity isn't caused by anger. It's caused by the unwillingness to be with anger. This happens in two ways.

1. In the moment, if you're not willing to be aware of and welcome the sensations of anger as they arise, you react to them instead. That reaction is the violence. But if you can be aware of the sensations and welcome them, allow them to be there, the energy moves through you in a healthy way.
2. Over time, if you chronically suppress anger, it accumulates. The store of it grows until even a small trigger produces a disproportionate explosion.

Both come from the same root: the unwillingness to feel the sensation.

Suppression doesn't prevent reactive anger. Suppression is what causes it.

What Your Anger Is Telling You

Once I started welcoming and allowing more anger, I found I could literally sense my boundaries more. Over the last several years, I've really learned to feel anger. And when I'm really practicing it, it's like a more finely tuned sense of when something I want isn't happening, or something I don't want is happening, and I can speak to it. It's a real superpower.

Here's how I think about the spectrum.

1. Light anger shows up when a want or preference isn't being met. Even just when I don't get what I want, I can feel my anger and it shows me: "Oh, there's something I want that's not happening." Something like: "I'd really like this handled differently."
2. Strong anger shows up when something is genuinely not okay, with a signal more like: "This needs to stop."

The question I find most useful when I notice anger arising: "What wants to be stopped?"

Most of the time, when we first ask that question, the mind goes outward. There's something out there that wants to be stopped, a behavior, a pattern, a standard that keeps slipping. But I also find it useful to ask: what in here wants to be stopped? Because often that's an even more useful inquiry. Some judgment I'm hanging on to, some story, some way I'm showing up that isn't actually serving this situation.

So: what wants to be stopped out there? And what wants to be stopped in here?

How to Actually Access It

If you've spent years not feeling your anger, here's the process.

Step 1: Identify it.

Anger is a physical phenomenon. There are sensations moving through you, you just may not have learned to notice them yet. For a lot of people, anger lives in the shoulders and neck. Tightness, heat, tension. That's your signal.

Slow down enough to ask: where am I feeling this in my body?

Step 2: Welcome it.

It's not the emotion that's painful. It's the resistance to the emotion that's painful. So instead of pushing it down, see if you can just let it be there. Notice it. Breathe into it. The goal isn't to get rid of it, just to welcome it, allow it to be present.

Step 3: Express it in a healthy, safe way.

This is the step most people skip entirely. Anger is energy and energy wants to move. If you don't give it somewhere to go, it will find somewhere to go on its own, usually at the wrong moment.

For this reason, I keep a wiffle ball bat in my bedroom. When I feel anger building, I'll grab it and beat my pillow. It's safe, no one gets hurt, and I'm able to move the energy through me. If you don't have a wiffle ball bat, there's a Qigong technique I find useful: chopping wood. Stand up, raise your arms, and bring them down with a "ha." Sound plus movement. Even ten repetitions can shift something. Or go scream in your car. The specific method matters less than the principle: give the energy somewhere healthy to go.

Step 4: Communicate your want or set a boundary.

Once you've moved through the feeling, you can speak from presence rather than reactivity. Something like: "When this happens, I feel angry. This is not okay with me. Here's what I want." That's not aggression. That's clarity.

An amazingly underutilized tool for leaders is simply saying, "I want us to do this." Not justifying it, not convincing people it's the right path, just stating it. A lot of founders come to me frustrated that they can't get their team moving in a certain direction. I ask: have you told them you want them to? Often the answer is no. They assumed the team would figure it out or come around on their own. But if you don't feel your anger, you don't know your wants, and if you don't know your wants, you can't communicate them.

One thing I've noticed from not feeling my anger for most of my life: I struggled to make decisions. Because when you really feel your anger, you get a sense of determination. You know what you want. On the other side of the feeling is clarity.

For most of my adult life, I thought the right move was to stay cool, calm, and collected, taking that to be what emotional intelligence looked like.

What I've found is that learning to feel anger, to actually be with it and hear what it's telling you, turns out to be one of the most valuable things I've done for myself and for the founders I coach.

With love,

Dave Kashen