In the meeting about timelines—and there are always meetings about timelines—something about the engineering lead's agreement. Too fast, or maybe just wrong. Sales quiet in that particular way—you know the way.

You see it. Underneath, anxiety about committing to a plan that won't work. Stay quiet, and three weeks later you're managing exactly what you saw but didn't name. Push back sharply—"This timeline is unrealistic"—and you create defensiveness that makes the problem worse

There's a third option. You feel what's actually happening inside you. You don't run from it. And you speak—not from the reaction, but from something more grounded: "Before we close this—what are we not saying about the testing window?"

That's emotional assertiveness. Not a technique. A way of being in the room

What It Is

Here's what actually happens in most meetings. You feel anxious about a decision—but what comes out is frustration with the process. You're disappointed in someone—but it shows up as anger at their missed deadline. You're genuinely excited—but you downplay it to "cautious optimism" because that feels safer.

These are cover-up emotions. They protect you. They also prevent anything real from happening.

John Parr, a UK psychologist who's worked with leaders at HP, Motorola, and Coca-Cola, calls it the gap between what we experience and what we express. We learn early to substitute. Anger for fear. Frustration for sadness. Cynicism for hope. The substitution becomes so automatic we forget we're doing it.

Emotional assertiveness is unlearning that. It's not about announcing "I feel anxious" in a board meeting. It's about knowing what you're actually feeling—so you can respond from that place instead of reacting from the cover-up.

The difference between emotional intelligence and emotional assertiveness? Intelligence is knowing what you feel. Assertiveness is being able to do something useful with it.

Where This Drives Results

Performance confrontations. You have someone on your team who's underperforming. You've been putting off the conversation because every time you think about it, you feel irritated. But irritation is the cover-up. Underneath is disappointment—you believed in this person, and it's not working.

When you know that, the conversation changes. You're not attacking. You're not avoiding. You're saying: "I'm concerned about the gap between your capability and what I'm seeing. What's happening?" That's a conversation that can actually go somewhere.

Organizational transformation. You've seen it. Most change initiatives fail. The usual explanation is strategy or execution. But often it's simpler: leaders don't address the emotional resistance—including their own. They either minimize concerns or get defensive when people push back.

When you can process your own anxiety about the change, you stop needing everyone to be okay with it immediately. You can hear the real concerns. Real issues surface early instead of derailing everything six months later.

Cross-functional conflicts. Engineering and sales at odds over timelines. You're sitting in the room feeling frustrated that talented people are wasting energy fighting each other.

That frustration is real. But if you act from it, you'll either take sides or impose a solution that doesn't stick. When you process it first, something different becomes possible: "What I hear are legitimate concerns on both sides—engineering about execution risk, sales about customer commitments. What we're missing is the actual constraint we need to solve for."

You're not managing the conflict. You're dissolving what created it.

The Mechanism

You feel something off in the engineering lead's agreement—too quick, or the tone, or the eyes moving away. Before you've even thought about it, your body has already reacted. That's not weakness. That's biology. Your nervous system assesses threat faster than your conscious mind can process.

The first thing you register is frustration. Or irritation. Or the urge to push back. That's the cover-up arriving. Underneath it—if you slow down enough to notice—is usually something else. Anxiety about committing to a plan you don't believe in. Fear about what happens if you speak up and you're wrong.

Most leaders never get underneath. They either express the anger—"This timeline is unrealistic"—or they suppress everything and stay quiet. Both are reactions to the cover-up emotion, not responses from what's actually true.

This is why knowing about this doesn't change much. The reaction is faster than thought. Without the capacity to slow down and feel what's actually happening, the pattern wins every time.

How You Actually Develop This

This isn't something you learn from an article. Or a workshop. Or a book.

Information doesn't change patterns. Knowing about cover-up emotions doesn't stop them from running. You need something deeper—a way to see the patterns you've been living inside, and the space to build something different.

That's where values come in. When you know what actually matters to you—not what should matter, but what does—you have ground to stand on. You can respond from alignment instead of reaction.

You can't change a pattern you don't see. So the work starts there—seeing what's actually driving your reactions. The cover-ups. The automatic responses. The assumption that how you feel is caused by what's happening around you, not inside you.

But seeing isn't enough. You need someone who can work with you in the uncomfortable space between the old pattern and what's possible. That's what deep coaching does—not giving you answers, but helping you build new internal strategies from a different place in you.

Underneath the patterns—you meet yourself. Not the reactive version. The one who can read the room, know what's true, and say it.

How long does it take? Depends on you. The patterns you're carrying. How deep they run. How ready you are to actually see them. Some leaders notice shifts quickly. For others, the deeper work takes longer to surface.

Either way, it won't be easy. This is thought-provoking, uncomfortable, real work. But it's the kind of work that changes how you show up—not just in meetings, but everywhere.

What It Changes in Real Life

What changes? The obvious things first. Decisions happen faster because you're not waiting for the unspoken to become a crisis. Performance conversations stop being something you dread. Conflicts get resolved instead of managed.

But the deeper shift is harder to measure. You stop being at war with yourself in meetings. You stop rehearsing what you should have said. You start trusting that you can handle what's actually happening—not because you have the right words, but because you're responding from what's true.

One caveat. You can develop this capacity individually, but whether you can use it depends on where you work. In cultures with psychological safety—where speaking up isn't punished—authentic response lands as valuable. In cultures without it, even the most grounded observation can be seen as a threat. The skill is yours. The environment determines what you can do with it.

When capable leaders get passed over despite technical competence. When teams have talent but no traction. When hard conversations keep getting postponed until they become crises. Emotional assertiveness is often the missing piece.

Because leaders who know what they're actually feeling—and can respond from that place—make better decisions, build real relationships, and create environments where people stop performing and start aligning.

Article by Elena Baryshevskaya