You know that moment. The forehead-slap. The internal cringe. “Why did I let that get to me?” “I’m so stupid.” “How do I come back from this?”
That shame is almost universal. And yet most of us carry it alone, convinced it’s a personal flaw. Something wrong with us specifically. Something the people around us have somehow figured out and we haven’t.
We haven’t. None of us have. And the science explains why.
Recently, in one of our Lead Always Forum sessions, Leigh and I asked people to speak into their triggers and reactions. The room shifted almost immediately. Not in a good way at first – just discomfort. Even writing privately on their own paper felt exposing. And then came the exhale. The quiet realisation settling across faces on screen.
It’s not just me.
It never was.
Here’s what the neuroscience tells us.
Somewhere deep in your brain sits a tiny structure the size and shape of an almond. The amygdala. It came with the original package, long before language and logic were available to you. Its job was to keep you alive – to protect you from predators, to sound the alarm before your conscious mind had time to think.
The problem is, there are no longer sabre tooth tigers. What we have instead are WhatsApp messages, irrational bosses, a glance across a room, someone’s carefully curated success story on social.
The moment your amygdala detects anything that even resembles a threat, it fires. Your heart rate climbs. Your breathing becomes shallow. Your thinking narrows. You are now in full survival mode – perfectly equipped to outrun a predator, completely ill-equipped to think clearly about anything that actually matters.
Daniel Goleman called this the amygdala hijack: an emotional response disproportionate to the actual threat. Once your nervous system sounds the alarm, the part of your brain designed for rational thinking, creativity and sound judgement gets switched off. Which is why the pause matters so much. Sometimes it’s a second. Other times it’s a day or two.
Most of us are being run by two tiny almonds in our heads. This is not a character flaw. It’s biology.
But here’s what else the neuroscience tells us: awareness changes everything.
Viktor Frankl said it best:
Between stimulus and response is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
That space is small, and it doesn’t come naturally at first. I’ve seen it taught and practised over months in leadership programmes, and still, once people leave the safety of that container, if the practice isn’t kept alive, old biological patterning returns. Not because anyone is stupid, undisciplined or over-emotional. But because this is how we’re wired.
The work isn’t about becoming someone who never gets triggered. It’s about building enough familiarity with your own patterns that when the amygdala fires – and it will – you have just enough pause to ask: “do I respond from this state, or do I come back to myself first?”
That question is where growth lives.
There’s one more thing worth saying, because it doesn’t get said enough.
We cannot claim helplessness. But we can claim self-compassion. And as we grow wiser, something else tends to happen: we grow compassion for the person who triggered us too. They also have a story running on repeat in their heads. They are also, in all likelihood, being run by their own two almonds.
Leading is not easy. But if we want to make a positive impact – whether with our loved ones, colleagues, our organisation or our planet – the greatest work will always begin closest to home. With ourselves. When we do that inner work, something shifts. We feel less shame, less stupid, less irrational and more human. Kinder to ourselves and to others.
The ancient Sanskrit principle of Ahimsa points to exactly this – non-harming. It applies to all living beings, and yet we most often forget to apply it to ourselves.
It’s not just me. It’s not just you either.
If this resonates and you’d like to keep exploring these conversations, the Lead Always Forum is a live, Monday gatherings for people who want to keep growing. People bring what’s actually going on – a decision they can’t make, a relationship wearing them down, something that needs to shift but they can’t quite name yet. It moves faster when you’re working it out with people who are genuinely paying attention.
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