The cost of stepping over someone’s emotion
She sat down, and I asked how she was. Before she could find words, the tears came. Quiet ones, and they stayed for a few minutes.
I didn’t rush to fix anything. I didn’t step over what was happening. I simply held the space, letting her let go, process what she was carrying, and find her way back to herself.
She apologised and I told her there was no need. Expressing how she felt, without needing to explain or justify it, was exactly what the moment called for.
She worked in professional services, juggling long hours with everything else life was asking of her, and she was exhausted. Coming to coaching had become a relief, somewhere she could finally be herself and release the tension she had been carrying quietly for months. Once the emotion had moved, her mind cleared. She could think well again. She began to reconnect with her own resourcefulness, the choices she still had about where her time and energy went.
That session has stayed with me. It points to something I keep returning to in my work with leaders: what happens when we let emotion move, and what it costs when we don’t?
What we do when someone becomes emotional
I’ve been reflecting on this since listening to a lecture by Chase Hughes on unprocessed emotion, and how it shows up somewhere in the body when it has nowhere else to go. He described witnessing people carrying undiagnosed pain that had never found a way out. It stayed with me because I recognise it, not just in the adults I coach, I think often of how much more willing children and young people are to say how they feel, whether it’s joy or hurt, without editing it first. Something opens up when they do: their thinking gets freer; more creative; more meaningful.
So what happens when we lose that willingness? When work asks us to keep it together, and we quietly comply?
My coaching sessions show me how often composure gets prized over honesty. A raised voice, tears, a long silence, a flash of frustration; when any of these appear in a meeting, the instinct is usually to manage it away as quickly as possible. Offer a tissue, crack a joke or move quickly to the next agenda item. Every one of those responses is well meant yet none of them let the emotion finish what it came to do.
The price of stepping over it
Emotion that doesn’t get to move doesn’t disappear, it settles.
The CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work report found that UK workers took an average of 9.4 sick days last year, up from 7.8 the year before, the highest figure recorded since 2010. Mental ill health is now the leading cause of long-term absence, and 64 per cent of organisations reported some stress-related absence over the past year, with workload cited as the main driver.
I read that statistic and thought of the client I described above, and of how many people like her are sitting in meetings right now, holding something they’ve had no space to put down. Burnout rarely arrives all at once. Long-term absence follows, and the return to work afterwards is its own quiet struggle, one I’ve watched play out for individuals and their teams more times than I can count. The organisational cost is real. Underneath it is a human cost that was almost always visible earlier, if someone had been able to pause and notice.
"How you feel matters. It matters to your health, to your decision-making, to your relationships, to everything you do." — Marc Brackett
The Three Lens: a framework for self-awareness
Over the years, I’ve noticed that the lens I bring to someone’s distress shapes everything about how I respond to it. I think of it as a choice between three ways of seeing the person in front of me.
The first lens sees a problem to be fixed. Advice arrives quickly. Solutions get offered before anyone has asked for them.
The second lens sees a person with a problem to fix, which sounds gentler, but still centres the problem rather than the person, and often shows up as sympathy that quietly rescues.
The third lens sees a resourceful person, someone fully capable of working through what they’re facing, who simply needs the space and the trust to do it.
My work with leaders shows me that most of us default to the first lens without realising it, because fixing feels like helping. Checking which lens I’m looking through, especially in the moment someone becomes emotional in front of me, has become one of the most useful habits I know. The lens I choose decides whether I help someone find their own way back, or quietly take that chance away from them.
The leader who goes first
Marc Brackett, the psychologist behind the RULER framework and author of Permission to Feel, argues that emotional intelligence has to be modelled before it can be taught. A leader who is willing to name how they feel, honestly and without drama, gives everyone else in the room permission to do the same.
I see this play out often. A team stays guarded until someone more senior says something true about how they’re finding a difficult quarter, or admits a decision left them uneasy. Something in the room shifts. Vulnerability, offered first by the person with the most positional safety to offer it, tends to be the thing that makes it safe for everyone else.
What this asks of us
None of this requires a grand gesture. It asks for a pause, the moment someone in front of you shows what they’re feeling, before you move to fix, rescue, or carry on. Check which lens you’re looking through, and adjust it if you need to. Let the emotion finish moving instead of talking over it or past it. Give it space, dignify the person in front of you, and trust them to find their way back to themselves. Most of the time, they already know how.
That client of mine did. She didn’t need me to solve anything. She needed room to feel what she felt, and the belief that she’d know what to do next once she had.
Where might you be stepping over someone’s emotion this week, without meaning to? What might change if you paused there instead?
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