Are You Triggered or Tenacious? Turning Everyday Reactions into Leadership Growth
In moments of stress or disruption, our nervous system reacts before our reasoning mind can catch up. The amygdala — the brain’s emotional alarm system — activates milliseconds before the prefrontal cortex, which governs decision-making and self-control. This is why leaders often find themselves reacting in ways that feel misaligned with their values: interrupting, withdrawing, or micromanaging when things feel out of control.
Over time, these reactive patterns can quietly sabotage credibility. Teams begin to anticipate volatility, avoid transparency, or mirror that reactivity under pressure. Studies from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business have shown that leaders who regulate their emotional responses foster higher team trust, psychological safety, and resilience — key predictors of sustained performance through disruption. In contrast, reactive leaders unintentionally transmit stress, narrowing creativity and problem-solving capacity across the group.
But triggers can also serve as a diagnostic tool for growth. Each one reveals something specific: an unmet need, an internal narrative, or a belief about how things “should” be.
When you pause long enough to notice your trigger and ask, “What is this reaction trying to tell me?”, you begin to transform emotion into insight.
Leaders who develop this awareness use their triggers as a compass — pointing toward areas for deeper reflection and expanded range. Instead of defaulting to frustration, they learn to engage curiosity.
Instead of rushing to fix, they practice presence. Over time, this builds the neural circuitry of composure — the foundation of tenacious, trust-building leadership.
At TLI, we help leaders cultivate this shift. Through neuroscience-based reflection tools and real-time coaching, executives learn to interrupt reactivity patterns and respond with clarity, calm, and impact.
Leadership Action
To begin shifting your own reaction patterns, try this simple experiment in the week ahead: choose one trusted colleague or team member and ask them to gently flag a moment when you seem stressed, defensive, or tense in conversation.
Use their cue as your signal to pause, take one breath, and notice what emotion is rising. This brief awareness—shared and practiced with another person—helps train your nervous system to respond rather than react, and it builds mutual trust through transparency.
Because when you can stay steady under stress, you model what modern leadership truly requires: the ability to lead through disruption without being driven by it.
Leadership Practice
The Trigger Debrief
This week, choose one moment when you feel emotionally charged — frustrated, impatient, or defensive — and use it as data. After the situation passes, reflect on these three questions:
What was I protecting or defending in that moment? (Reputation, certainty, autonomy, etc.)
What belief or story was activated? (e.g., “They don’t respect my time” or “I always have to fix things.”)
What would leadership look like if I responded from calm authority rather than reactivity?
Writing down your reflections helps rewire your response patterns. Over time, you’ll notice your triggers becoming less about threat — and more about growth.
Author
Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations.
Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.
