Last month, we talked about downloading — the invisible pattern-matching that makes smart leaders and coaches blind to what’s right in front of them.
This month, we move to the next stage of the U: Seeing. And what gets in the way of it is not what most people expect.
There’s a leader I encounter regularly.
Technically sharp. Operationally brilliant. The kind of person whose teams lean on them instinctively when something goes wrong — and something always goes wrong. In a crisis, they are the calmest, most decisive presence in the building. Their reputation is built in those rooms. Under that kind of pressure. And every word of it is deserved.
And then the crisis passes.
And quietly, almost invisibly, something shifts.
The agenda softens. The room breathes. There’s space — for reflection, for real conversation, for the kind of stillness where nobody has a task to hide behind. And this brilliant, capable leader can’t find themselves in it. They misread silences as disengagement. They interpret calm as complacency. They fill the space with structure, with the next problem, with forward momentum nobody actually needed yet.
They think they’re leading. What they’re actually doing is escaping.
Here’s what nobody says out loud: for some leaders, crisis is not the discomfort. Crisis is the comfort. The stillness is what they can’t tolerate. And that distinction — between where they perform best and where they actually need to be — is one of the most significant risks to quality leadership I see.
Table of Contents
The Smoothie Nobody Ordered
In Part One, I introduced the idea of downloading — the moment you stop sensing what’s actually in front of you and start running old code. Replaying patterns. Executing frameworks. Performing the version of leadership or coaching that got you here, regardless of whether it’s what the moment actually needs.
The emotional smoothie is what happens inside you when that process kicks in. Everything that’s running underneath — your fears, your unexamined assumptions, your threat responses — gets blended into something unrecognisable. You can’t identify the individual ingredients anymore. You just feel a vague texture and call it instinct. You consume it as neutral. As just you, being present.
It isn’t neutral. It’s active. And it shapes everything you see.
For the crisis-brilliant leader, the smoothie has a very specific recipe. The primary ingredient — the one that flavours everything else — is something most of them have never had to sit with long enough to name. Not inadequacy exactly. More specific than that. A fear of irrelevance when they’re not rescuing something. A sense of self is almost entirely constructed around being the person who holds it together when everything falls apart.
That’s not a flaw. That’s a deeply human adaptation that probably served them exceptionally well for a long time. The problem is not the strength it produced. The problem is what happens when that strength becomes the only move available. When the smoothie is so thoroughly blended, they’ve lost the ability to identify what’s actually in it. And then the room goes quiet. And the smoothie is all they have.
The Fruit Salad They Were Never Handed
The opposite of a smoothie is a fruit salad.
Everything distinct. Identifiable. Sitting alongside everything else without losing its own shape. You can see what’s there. You can name it precisely. The strawberry doesn’t disappear into the banana. The discomfort doesn’t collapse into a general unease that quietly hijacks your behaviour before you’ve examined it.
This is emotional granularity. And it starts with vocabulary.
Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research found that people with richer emotional vocabularies have measurably better self-regulation. Not because naming a feeling makes it disappear. But because you cannot manage what you cannot identify. Most leaders — most coaches, too, if we’re being direct — operate with an emotional vocabulary of roughly a dozen words. Fine. Grand. Stressed. Frustrated. Tired.
That’s a smoothie vocabulary. It cannot give you granularity. And without granularity, you cannot see clearly.
Ask the crisis-brilliant leader how they feel in a quiet room, and they’ll tell you they’re fine. Ask them how they feel when there’s no problem to solve, and they’ll look at you like you’ve asked something mildly offensive. Because “fine” is doing an enormous amount of work for something that is almost certainly far more specific.
Is it restlessness? Purposelessness? The particular anxiety of not knowing how to demonstrate value when nothing needs saving? Is it, underneath all of that, a fear that if they slow down long enough, something they’ve been outrunning might finally catch up?
Those are very different things. They require very different responses. And you cannot coach toward them — or lead from awareness of them — if you can’t name them first.
The Practice
The goal is not to eliminate insecurity. That’s neither realistic nor particularly useful as an aspiration. The goal is to see it arriving before it takes the wheel.
That requires three things.
First, know your emotional weather before you enter the room. Not “am I fine?” Fine is a smoothie answer. What’s actually present for you today, specifically? If you can’t answer that in more than one word, your vocabulary needs stretching. This is not a soft skill. It is the perceptual infrastructure on which everything else depends.
Second, notice your peaks. When you feel a strong surge of certainty, urgency, or discomfort in a conversation or a room, that’s data — but it’s not automatically accurate data. A peak might mean something genuinely important is happening in front of you. Or it might mean something inside you has been triggered that has nothing to do with what’s in front of you. The quality of your response in that moment depends entirely on your ability to tell the difference.
Third, — and this is the one that requires the most courage — sit in the stillness. Don’t fill it. Don’t restructure it. Don’t manufacture urgency to make the room feel familiar. Let it be uncomfortable. Because the discomfort you feel in stillness is not a signal that something is wrong with the room. It’s a signal that something in you is worth examining.
The most effective leaders and coaches are not the ones who’ve conquered their insecurities. They’re the ones who can name what they’re carrying precisely enough to set it down before it shapes what they see.
That’s the fruit salad. That’s the work. And it starts with vocabulary.
Next month, we move deeper into the U: Sensing. What becomes available when you stop seeing through your own story and start sensing into the system around you? We’ll explore what it actually means to feel into a room rather than read it.
Richella Boggan
BA (Hons) Economics, Clinical Nutritional Therapist, EIA Senior Practitioner (EMCC), Advisory Board Member (npnHub), Master Business Coach and Coaching Supervisor (CSA)
Facilitation Lead and CEO at Sandown Business School
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