Welcome to the look and sound of leadership, an ongoing series of executive coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to be perceived.

I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking about managing emotions.

Imran and I had been working together many years.

I was honored to be his coach as he ascended into the highest ranks of Silicon Valley corporations.

In addition to experiencing him as ethical and smart with astonishing recall, he was comfortable with being vulnerable.

He came to our conversations with thoughtful questions about how he was showing up in the world.

A recurring topic for the past several years had been his struggle to maintain his composure

with Mitchell, another chief officer in the company whom he experienced as

unreliable and unprincipled. He began our most recent conversation by saying,

The last time you and I met, after I got so angry at Mitchell during that all-hands meeting,

you talked about the phrase, name it to tame it? I thought I understood it, but I clearly didn't.

Can you talk about that again?

Sure, I said. The purpose of the phrase is to stop the emotional hijack. You ask yourself,

what feeling am I having? You ask your brain to make a rational assessment. Name this feeling.

If your brain can stay rational long enough to name the emotion, it'll probably be able

to tame the emotion, too. That's the idea. It's about brain function, he asked, surprised? I nodded.

Well, that's why it works. Emotions start in the brain. We feel them in our bodies, but they start

in our brains. So you're trying to shut off part of your brain, he asked?

Well, not so much shut off your emotions as keep your rational brain online.

You know, those two parts of our brain, the emotional part and the rational part,

they're always in negotiation with each other.

The challenge is that the part of our brains that handles emotion is so much faster than the rational part of our brains.

...