I’m proud to say I’ve been accepted, two years in a row now, to speak at the annual conference for the Association of Engineers and Geoscientists BC this fall.
This year’s talk is called “Managing your reactivity before it manages you.”
Here’s what motivated this topic. As an executive coach working with leaders and teams, I see the same thing everywhere. The pressure is immense and causes anxiety and stress even though we try to look calm. Unattended, this leads to burnout.
Managing your reactivity isn’t just a work problem because it spills into your home life.
Most leaders manage their reactivity reasonably well at work, because there are consequences for not doing it. You don’t snap at your boss. You don’t raise your voice at a client. So you hold it in all day.
But holding it in isn’t the same as actually processing what happened. For a lot of leaders, home is the first place all day where it feels safe enough to stop performing as if everything is fine. So it’s easy to snap, even at the slightest hiccup. Not because your partner or your kids did anything wrong, but because they’re the safest people to be real with.
In other words, your family isn’t absorbing your bad mood. They’re absorbing what your job never let you process.
That distinction matters. It’s the difference between “I’m a bad partner when I’m stressed” and “I never gave myself a chance to come down before I walked through the door.” One of those is shame. The other one you can actually address.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, the goal isn’t to stop reacting. That would ask us to stop being human. We all react. The real question is how do we give ourselves the transition time so that we can leave work behind when we go home.
Here’s the fix: build a decompression buffer.
You wouldn’t take a hot pan straight from the stove and dunk it in cold water. (OK I’ve been known to do that, and it wasn’t a great idea – I ended up with a warped pan!). You let it cool first. Same idea here. You need a transition between who you were at work and who you want to be at home. Thinking with intention on how you want to show up with your family is more important than you can imagine. It allows you to be more present with the people that matter most.
You can transition from work to home in a couple of different ways:
- A 90 second reset before you go inside. Sit in the car or on the porch. Name out loud what kind of day it actually was. Take a few slow exhales before you open the door.
- A physical cue that signals “I’m switching roles now.” Changing your clothes, taking a short walk from the car to the door, putting your work phone away before you go in. Your nervous system responds to ritual, even a small one.
- A quick check-in with yourself: “Am I about to bring something home that has nothing to do with the people in front of me right now?” That one question alone catches a lot of misdirected reactivity before it lands on someone who didn’t earn it.
If you’re an introvert, this matters even more.
Introverts recharge by being alone, not by being around people, even people they love. So if you’re an introvert and you walk straight from a day full of meetings and people into more people at home with zero buffer, you’re not just carrying unprocessed stress. You’re also running on an empty battery with no chance to recharge.
That’s a double deficit. Which means the decompression buffer isn’t optional for you, it’s essential. Even ten minutes of actual solitude between work and home, no phone, no conversation, just quiet, can be the difference between showing up present or showing up depleted.
This is whole person leadership, and it’s the secret sauce to my clients’ success.
The same nervous system that shows up in your board meeting shows up at your dinner table. You don’t get a separate one for each room. So the work of managing your reactivity isn’t just a leadership skill for the office. It’s a skill for the people you go home to every night.
That’s exactly what I’ll be digging into this fall at the EGBC conference, not the theory, but the practical work of catching yourself faster and coming down sooner.
What does your transition between work and home actually look like right now? Or does it not exist at all? What is one baby step you could do to create a buffer between leaving work and going home.