Emotional Intelligence for Leaders: Why You Must Own Your Sense of Worth

The Faltering Father: A Story About Outsourcing Your Emotions

I found myself doing something that I feel to be quite shameful recently. I was kneeling down, getting in the face of my eight-year-old son, and raising my voice to him.

I found myself saying these words:

Why do you have to be like this? I really wanted to have a good night tonight. I just wanted to relax and enjoy time together. Why do you have to be like this?

Thinking back on these words, I feel a sense of shame and self-judgment.

But if I let the shame pass for a moment, I can also see the humor in it: a 41-year-old man, handing to his 8-year-old the full responsibility for his emotional state. Asking a child to determine whether Dad has a good evening or not. That is a failure of emotional regulation, and it is one most leaders will recognize in their own lives, even if the setting is a boardroom instead of a living room.

I shared this story with a client recently, pushing through the shame, because I thought the story might be helpful to her.

The client was explaining to me how she felt hamstrung by a constant desire for approval:

• From her leadership team
• From her business partners
• From her romantic partner

She could not make a single decision without first wondering how it would be received. This need for external validation was draining her energy and clouding her judgment. It was, in essence, a failure of boundaries for leaders, one that showed up in every relationship she had.

In the session, we began to explore together what it is to hand our well-being to others.

Why Leaders Struggle to Stop Seeking Approval

I see this in myself first. As a coach, I also see it in the lives of dozens of CEOs and leaders: this handing over of our well-being to another. To another person, to the success of our business, or to some amorphous stranger (“I want to prove them wrong!”)

This desire for approval does not come from a negative place. For most leaders, it is a deeply ingrained pattern, something learned in childhood that once served a real purpose. Understanding where it comes from is the first step in learning how to stop seeking approval and reclaiming your emotional intelligence as a leader.

I have written before about how frequently, as a coach, I witness the dynamic of early life promotions in the life stories of the leaders I meet.

Many of us founder or CEO types come from families where we were asked to step into adulthood, or caretaking roles, quite early in our lives.

We begin, at an early age, to fuse our sense of identity and well-being with the feedback we are getting from those in our lives whom we have been charged with caretaking.

In my life, this took the form of being a friend and emotional ally to my mother as she navigated my father’s alcohol addiction. I don’t share this to shame my mother or my father but rather to illustrate from my own life the dynamic I see often in leaders.

For those of us that received these early life promotions, leadership roles can feel very natural.

We have learned how to put the needs, interests, and emotions of others, ahead of our own. In our families of origin, we were rewarded for it.

The rewards continued in leadership roles.

How Approval-Seeking Shows Up in Leadership

Before we go further, let me name the specific ways this pattern tends to show up. If you recognize yourself in this table, you are not alone:

Each of these is a form of outsourcing your sense of worth. And each of them erodes your effectiveness as a leader over time.

The Trap of the Selfless Leader

Those of us who come into leadership with this background are often praised for our willingness to put the needs, interests, and well-being of our employees or teams ahead of our own.

The dynamic here can have positive results in our early years as leaders.

Many of us have superpowers around our abilities to read the room: to perceive the emotions of others to surmise in advance what a team or company or culture might need.

We have honed these superpowers since childhood.

Our ability to caretake others has become fused with our identity. And for a while, it works. We excel. We get promoted. We raise rounds. But over a period of years, this pattern becomes a setup for fatigue, resentment, and burnout. The very thing that made us effective leaders in the early days becomes the thing that breaks us. Self-care for leaders is not a luxury. It is survival.

I myself woke up in my 30s to find I had never really taken time or space to consider my own happiness and well-being. I had lost touch with what in childhood had been my birthright: a strong sense of self and a strong connection with my own happiness. The ability to access my own emotions at will.

Taking Off the Mask: Emotional Regulation for Leaders Starts with Feeling

My first time in therapy was back in college. I remember my therapist looking at me and saying, “We’ve been talking about some really hard topics today. Yet the expression on your face hasn’t changed. In fact, you’ve shown almost no expression.”

I found that very surprising because I considered myself a fairly emotional and open person.

The therapist shared with me that children who grow up in alcoholic homes, or who have other versions of early promotion experience, often detach themselves from their own emotions. We learn that it’s safer to keep them shielded behind the mask.

I often hear in coaching sessions from CEOs and leaders they feel it is safer to keep their emotions masked and to maintain a serene face for the benefit of others.

In another session recently, a client shared a sense that he was lacking intimacy with his wife, with friends, and with his leadership team.

He went on to explain the lesson he had received early in life that his primary role was to take care of others first and that acknowledging his own emotions first was an act of selfishness. As a result, in his 30s, he finds himself disconnected from his own emotions.

In our session, he found it very difficult to access or identify his emotions. The noting and sharing of his own emotions was not a practice he was accustomed to. To meet him in person, you would never know!

This is one of the hidden costs of poor emotional intelligence for leaders: the inability to feel your own feelings makes it impossible to truly connect with the people around you.

Having spent hours with him in sessions, I found him deeply personable likable, enjoyable; the kind of person that could be the life of a party or whom you might seek out to spend time with at a dinner party.

In the session, we explored defining intimacy as ‘providing another human unfiltered access to the real emotions we are experiencing in real-time’. It is, after all, what we do with our closest romantic partners and friends.

As happened with this client, those of us who grew up with the message that our identity or safety is fused with our ability to read and interpret the emotions of others often have a difficult time accessing our own emotions in real-time.

Without easy access to our own emotions, it is impossible to let others in on our emotional state.

When Leaders Outsource Their Happiness

With these dynamics simmering for so many leaders, it is no surprise many of us find ourselves placing our happiness and sense of well-being in the hands of others.

Where do leaders tend to place their sense of worth? In my experience:

• In romantic partners ("If they are happy with me, I am okay")
• In children ("If my kids are thriving, I am doing something right")
• In leadership teams ("If the team respects me, I have value")
• In company metrics ("If revenue is up, I am worthy")
• In investors ("If the board is pleased, I am safe")

For those of us who prone to outsource our sense of well-being, any of these places are easier resting places for our sense of well-being than where it most belongs: with ourselves.

It feels more familiar to place it outside.

We have been rewarded for placing it outside.

This approach has kept us safe.

But, eventually, the difficulties come.

Hitting the Wall: When Approval-Seeking Leads to Burnout

Place our well-being in the hands of anything external, and we will eventually wake up to find ourselves in some degree of burnout and resentment.

Sometimes it shows up at work. The most widely-shared article I have ever written was about my own journey through burnout. Every week, CEOs reach out to me wanting to talk about burnout. The pattern is almost always the same.

Most share how in their early days of working and leading, having their sense of well-being tied to their work felt energizing. It drove long days and weeks. It helped them to push through the difficulty of starting something from nothing.

But, as those weeks turned into months, and months into years, fatigue and exhaustion arose. At some point, we each grow fed up with having our own emotions and needs put on hold.

Whether needs are put on hold for family members, for the financial growth of a business, for the hopes of investors, or for the needs of customers, the results are the same.

We wake up to find something within us shouting for change. Something within us demands attention.

Warning Signs That You Have Outsourced Your Worth

Here is what it looks like when a leader's sense of worth has been fully outsourced. These are the signals I see most often in coaching:

• Fits of rage: Meetings or conversations that would have left you mildly frustrated now trigger deep anger.
• Anxiety or depression: Anger turned inward, a persistent low-grade numbness or sadness.
• Substance use: Alcohol, drugs, or other numbing behaviors to escape the weight of unprocessed emotions.
• Sleep disruption: Lying awake at 3 AM replaying conversations or decisions.
• Loss of intimacy: Feeling disconnected from your partner, friends, or team despite spending time together.
• Decision paralysis: Inability to make choices without first gauging how others will react.

Just last week, one very successful CEO spoke about finding himself in increasingly more frequent fits of rage. Meetings or conversations that previously would have left him only a bit frustrated were now leading to feelings of deep anger and resentment.

We explored in the conversation how a part of him may be the taskmaster and may be ensuring that he reads the room for the needs of others before attending to his own needs. That there may be another younger part of him who has been ignored and now desires to make his needs quite clear.

The way that that was showing up for him was in anger and depression.

Research shows that entrepreneurs are 30% more likely to experience depression than non-entrepreneurs. For leaders who have spent years outsourcing their emotional well-being, that number is not surprising. It is the predictable result of ignoring your own needs for too long.

Where Emotional Intelligence for Leaders Begins: Examining Your Stories

With all of these shared experiences, where does change actually begin? It starts with a single moment of awareness: recognizing that the story running in your head is not the whole truth.

In coaching, we often explore the experiences leaders have “in the moment”. Examining the split-second where the anger or depression comes, we will explore the stories that come immediately following the experience: the meeting, the conversation, the stimuli. In the story, we often find an indication of what it is the client has been carrying.

A few common stories include:

• “Whatever I do, I am always alone.”
• “If I share what’s really going on for me, no one will want to work with me, or be with me, or help me.”

These stories are imprinted upon us in childhood. Many of us carry them for years living by them even as we fail to examine their truthfulness.

If we strip them down, they are always simple stories; they are the stories that we constructed about ourselves before our brains had developed to tell more complicated or nuanced stories.

Practical Tools for Building Emotional Intelligence as a Leader

Awareness is the first step. But awareness without practice changes nothing. Here are the tools I have seen work, both in my own life and in the lives of the CEOs I coach:

For me, the combination of journaling and meditation has been transformative. They slow down my response to events and create space for me to choose how I want to show up, rather than reacting from old patterns. That slowing down is the foundation of emotional regulation for leaders. Without it, we are running on childhood software in an adult world.

What Happens When Leaders Reclaim Their Sense of Worth

Working on our own stories, exploring ways to take back our own sense of well-being, can pay tremendous dividends. Both for us as humans and also for us as leaders.

Leaders who have done this work, who have built genuine emotional intelligence, show up differently. They are grounded. They are creative under pressure. They do not need a good board meeting to feel okay about themselves. That groundedness is utterly foreign to leaders who lack a strong sense of their own value. And it is visible to everyone around them.

A leader who is grounded in her own well-being knows that whether the business succeeds or fails, she will be okay. Her value will be intact.

Therefore, when the business faces a crisis. She is able to show up with creativity and curiosity.

She is able to lead the way.

She can model for her team, what it is to bring that curiosity and creativity to bear on the problem the company is facing.

She does not need to incite panic.

Rather, she invites partnership.

She models for her team, a sense that we are going to be okay.

Less experienced leaders worry that telling the team "we are going to be okay regardless" will make people complacent. The opposite is true. When people feel safe, their prefrontal cortex comes online. They think more creatively. They solve harder problems. They stop operating from fight-or-flight and start operating from clarity. That is what great leadership teams are built on.

Key Takeaways: Emotional Intelligence for Leaders

If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: your worth is not determined by your company's performance, your team's approval, or your investor's satisfaction. Here is a summary of what we covered:

• Approval-seeking is learned, not innate. Most leaders learned it in childhood as a survival strategy.
• It works until it doesn't. The same pattern that makes you effective early in leadership becomes the source of burnout later.
• The mask has a cost. Masking your emotions disconnects you from yourself and from the people you lead.
• Emotional intelligence for leaders starts with feeling your own feelings. You cannot regulate what you cannot access.
• Self-care for leaders is not selfish. It is the foundation of sustainable, effective leadership.
• Boundaries for leaders create space. Saying no to what drains you creates room for what matters.
• This work is not optional. It is the difference between a leader who burns out and one who scales.

Now Is the Time to Take Back Your Sense of Worth

To evolve and scale as leaders, we must take back our sense of well-being, our identities.

We must invite them home to where they belong: with us.

We must learn to deconstruct the stories we have long carried.

We must learn practices of self-care.

This is not easy work.

It takes years, if not a lifetime.

This is work that is impossible to do alone.

If you find yourself caught up in your own stories, if you find yourself riding the ride of your wellbeing tied to the business, to your romantic partner, or to your own performance, you are not alone.

If you find yourself facing fatigue, burnout, anxiety, depression, drug addiction, as a result of this outsourcing of your well being, you are not alone.

You are in the company of some of the greatest leaders I have met or coached.

If you would like support, or to connect with others who are facing the same questions, please reach out.

In the meantime, sending love and hugs from Los Angeles.

-Matt

Frequently Asked Questions

What is emotional intelligence for leaders, and why does it matter?

Emotional intelligence for leaders is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions, and to perceive and respond to the emotions of others. It matters because leaders who lack self-awareness make reactive decisions, burn out faster, and struggle to build trust with their teams. Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It is the foundation of effective, sustainable leadership.

How do I set better boundaries as a leader without seeming cold or disconnected?

Boundaries for leaders are not about shutting people out. They are about being clear on what you need to function at your best, and communicating that with honesty. Start small: say no to one unnecessary meeting this week. Delegate one task you have been holding. Notice the discomfort, and stay with it. Over time, your team will respect the boundaries because they will see you showing up more grounded and present as a result.

Can leaders really stop seeking approval, or is it just part of the job?

Seeking feedback is part of the job. Needing external validation to feel okay about yourself is not. The difference is subtle but critical. A leader with strong emotional intelligence can receive negative feedback without spiraling into self-doubt. Learning how to stop seeking approval is a practice, not a switch. It starts with recognizing the childhood story driving the pattern and building new habits around self-worth.

What is the connection between self-care for leaders and company performance?

Leaders who invest in their own emotional health make better decisions, build more trust, and create cultures where people do their best work. When a leader is burned out and reactive, the entire organization feels it. Self-care for leaders, including therapy, coaching, rest, and boundaries, is not a distraction from the work. It is what makes the work sustainable. I have written more about this in why CEOs should work 40-hour weeks.