If you want to understand emotional leadership in your family, here’s the one truth most parents overlook: it starts with you. And not the polished, centred version of you — but the very human, occasionally chaotic version who experiences fear, joy, overwhelm, pride, frustration and disappointment, sometimes before breakfast.
Over the past fortnight, emotional leadership became more than a concept I teach. It became a lived experience – a reminder that our emotions can behave exactly like our teenagers: dramatic, insistent, and deeply inconvenient.
The Fortnight My Emotions Revolted
It began with the final live session of my seven-week course, Parent Like a Leader: Raise the Future. I felt proud, relieved, accomplished. Emotional leadership felt easy in those moments.
Then came a restorative trip to Denmark. Joy, connection, contentment — all the warm, expansive emotions we wish our teenagers felt more often.
But emotional leadership is not tested when life is going well. It’s tested when something wobbles.
In my case, the wobble arrived as a missing cat. Four days gone. A distraught daughter at the airport. Catastrophic thinking rippling through the house. Helplessness. Worry. Fear.
And overlapping this: the week I was meant to buy my first electric vehicle. A brand-new car. Terribly modern. Completely intimidating. My nervous system had thoughts about that too.
And then, the plot twist: ITV Anglia invited me to speak about children using robots to attend school. The interview was filmed. I waited. The programme aired. My clip was shorter than I’d secretly hoped – and I felt unexpectedly deflated.
What Emotional Leadership Really Means
Every one of these feelings – pride, joy, fear, overwhelm, disappointment – arrived like children. Loud. Illogical. Demanding attention.
And this is where emotional leadership begins.
Not with calmness. Not with logic. Not with premature positivity.
With attention.
Appropriate attention.
Emotional leadership means recognising that emotions are not adult creatures. They are toddlers. They do not need shutting down. They need tending.
When I turned towards my own disappointment about the TV segment, my thinking brain clicked back into place. Of course they edited. Of course airtime is limited. And really – I was still on the evening news. A perfectly good outcome, if you ask my daughter who was doing a victory dance behind me.
This is emotional leadership: the ability to feel the feeling, support yourself through it, then return to clarity.
Why This Matters for Your Teenager
If your emotions behave like toddlers, imagine what your teenager’s emotions are doing. They have fewer tools, a developing brain, and a social world that feels existential.
Emotional leadership means modelling the behaviour you want them to learn.
You don’t need to be perfect. You need to be present.
You don’t need to eradicate emotions. You need to guide them.
You don’t need to fix their distress. You need to help them process it.
This is especially true when it comes to school avoidance. Robots may support children with medical illness, but when the root cause is emotional, the work must focus on understanding anxiety, fragility, and fear — not bypassing them. Emotional leadership teaches children that difficult feelings can be faced, processed, and survived.
The Heart of Emotional Leadership
Turn towards the feeling.
Name what’s happening.
Support yourself through the wave.
Let clarity return.
Then lead.
Not from fear.
Not from reactivity.
From grounded truth.
If you want to go deeper into emotional leadership for your family, sign up to Inger’s Insights – my fortnightly guide for parents raising emotionally intelligent, resilient young people.
PS. If you’d prefer to watch me share my ideas about it, you can find the video on YouTube here.
P.P.S Here I am on the news: