We all know we have two choices: react or respond. The reality is it’s a lot harder to respond when every cell in your body wants to react.
Here’s a recent example from my own life.
My teenage son often gets behind on his chores. One day the kitchen was a mess, he’d forgotten to unload the dishwasher (again), and I just couldn’t stand it. So I did his chores for him. I wasn’t exactly seething but when he got home, there was an edge in my voice when I said, “your chores are done.”
He called me on it. Which I’m glad he did. But then I found myself making light of what I’d said, brushing it off, acting like nothing happened. He experienced me in a particular way, and I was telling him everything was fine. Once I caught what I was doing, I stopped and apologized. I didn’t want him to ever question his own experience based on what I was telling him.
It was a short conversation. But something shifted. His response? “Mom, I’m glad you self-reflect.”
Maybe that scenario feels familiar at home. But here’s the question worth sitting with: how often are you doing the same thing at work?
The gap between reacting and responding isn’t about self-control. It’s about self-awareness. Most of us react before we even realize we’ve done it. The sarcastic comment. The dismissive tone. The eye roll in a meeting you thought nobody noticed. These aren’t character flaws, they’re deeply human. But in a leadership role, they carry more weight than you might think.
Here’s what happens when we react and don’t address it. People notice. They file it away. They adjust their behavior around you. Maybe they’re sharing less, taking fewer risks, bringing you a more positive version of the actual truth. They think twice about what they say, wondering about how you’re going to react.
Responding instead of reacting doesn’t mean being passive or swallowing what you feel. It means creating a small gap between what you feel and what you do with it. Even two seconds. A breath. Even just noticing “I’m about to say something I might regret” before you say it. That small gap is leadership in action.
In practice, this looks like taking a breath (or sleeping on it) before you respond to an email that irritates you. It looks like saying “let me come back to that” in a meeting instead of reacting to something that caught you off guard. It looks like noticing the edge in your voice and choosing to name it rather than pretend it isn’t there.
None of this is easy. Especially when you’re under pressure, when the stakes are high, when you’ve had the same conversation for the fourth time and you’re tired. That’s exactly when the reactive response feels most justified. And exactly when the cost of giving into it is highest.
The leaders I’ve worked with who are most trusted by their teams aren’t the ones who never react. They’re the ones who notice when they do, and do something about it.
This is a real leadership skill. It’s not possible to have perfect composure under pressure all the time, but you need to be aware and catch yourself with enough honesty to own it when you don’t. And when you get to that place, it starts with repairing the relationship or minimizing the damage.