Welcome back 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

unmasking stand-ins.

Over a two-year span, Scott had four hostile explosive outbursts.

After the most recent one, which had happened during his own staff meeting, he was asked to get coaching.

At our first meeting he was understandably defensive.

He admitted that yes, the incidents had happened, but he was full of justifications about why. Then he became sheepish, acknowledging

that there really was no excuse for his red-faced vitriolic outbursts. I asked him to describe where in his body he experienced

his rage. He was quite articulate about that, and about how the four experiences were similar

to each other. But when I asked how the four situations

leading up to the incidents were similar, in essence what had triggered his rage,

he was stumped. To him, the situations felt distinct and unrelated.

Over several sessions we explored what had set him off in the different incidents.

I began to feel that in each case the inciting incident had felt to him as though he might

look bad to his boss. When I suggested this idea he looked me in the eyes, but was clearly turning inward. After a long silence, he said,

I think that's right. He then began to connect different dots in his life.

In college and grad school, he'd had similar explosions when he felt he might look bad to his

professors.

He traced his rage back to his youth saying,

I once beat up one of my brothers because he told on me to our

dad I went sort of crazy he told me how his dad had been a scary punishing man nothing

...