Stop Trying to Outrun Your Shadow: The First Lie We Were Told About Leadership

We’ve all heard it. Maybe it was on the playground after a scraped knee, or at the dinner table after a frustrating day at school:

“Don’t cry.”

“Be a big girl/boy.”

“Don’t get angry. It’s not a big deal.”

From the time we can walk, we are taught that “strength” is synonymous with “silence.” We are coached to treat our emotions like unruly pets that need to be locked in the basement so the “productive” version of us can go to work.

But as Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder of Headspace, famously put it:

“Trying to outrun our emotions is as effective as trying to outrun our shadow in the sun.”

When the sun is high and things are easy, the shadow is small. But as the day goes on and the pressure mounts, that shadow stretches out behind you, looming over every decision you make. If you don’t learn to turn around and look at it, you’ll eventually trip over it.

The Source: Emotional Agility vs. The “Be Strong” Script

Psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, argues that modern culture often promotes a “tyranny of positivity.” We’ve been conditioned to treat difficult emotions as problems to fix rather than experiences to understand.

When we tell a child—or a direct report—not to feel what they are feeling, we aren’t teaching resilience. We are teaching suppression. And suppression is costly. Research shows that when people push emotions down, they don’t disappear. They tend to increase internal stress and often resurface later as disengagement, chronic stress, or emotional outbursts.

The Reframe: Emotions as Bio-Data

We need to stop viewing emotions as “weaknesses” and start viewing them as biological data points.

If you were driving a car and the “Low Oil” light came on, you wouldn’t put a piece of tape over it and say, “I’m a strong driver, I don’t need oil.” Yet, that’s exactly what we do when we tell ourselves to “power through” anxiety or “ignore” resentment.

• The Old Way: “Stop crying/getting angry. Get back to work.” (Repression).
• The New Way: “I feel tension in my chest. My body is noticing a threat. What is the signal?” (Literacy).

Leadership Application: The Stone-Faced Leader

The “Be Strong” narrative creates leaders who are emotionally stunted. If you can’t acknowledge your own fear, you will react with frustration when your team expresses theirs.

Unexamined emotions always “leak”:

• An unacknowledged fear of failure manifests as micromanagement.
• An unexpressed feeling of being undervalued manifests as passive-aggression.
• The “Don’t Cry” kid grows up to be the “Don’t Complain” boss who wonders why their turnover is so high.

True human-centric leadership requires us to stop being “policemen” of our feelings and start being “detectives.”

A Practical Takeaway: The “Data Scan”

Next time you feel a “negative” emotion, don’t try to outrun it. Stand still and name it. Use the “Physical Anchor” tool:

1. Locate it: Where is it in your body? (Tight jaw, heavy chest, knotted stomach?)
2. Label it: Use the Emotion Wheel. Start at the center (e.g., “Sad”) and move outward until you find the specific word (e.g., “Abandoned” or “Empty”).
3. The Mantra:“I don’t have to like this feeling to listen to the data it’s giving me.”

The Coaching Prompt

Try these questions to break the “Be Strong” cycle with yourself or your team:

• The Legacy: What was the “rule” about expressing emotions in my house growing up? How is that rule affecting my leadership today?
• The Signal: If this physical tension in my body had a voice, what is the one sentence it would say right now?
• The Shift: Instead of trying to “get over” this feeling, what would happen if I just sat with it for 90 seconds without judging it?

Header picture by Martino Pietropoli