Do I Need to Say It, or Do They Need to Hear It? How Leaders Handle Emotional Triggers
- Greg Wiens
- Aug 10
- 5 min read
A while back, I was sitting with a man, and he was a genuine athlete, like the real thing, and he was telling me about it. His accomplishments, his records, the whole resume. And I felt something rise up in me that I know well by now. I felt inferior.
See, I was an athlete too, sixty years ago, and I could feel this urge to jump in, “Hey, I did a few things myself, you know.”
In that half-second I had a choice. I could serve my insecurity, or I could serve the man. I had to say to myself, essentially, “shut it down and let him talk. What are you learning about this person right now?” And that little act of getting out of my own way is what opened the afternoon.
You will be triggered. The question is what you do next.
If you're going to be genuinely, emotionally engaged with a person, you are going to get triggered. It's unavoidable. The failure I watch people fall into is that, to keep from being triggered, they go emotionally distant. They cool off, back up, protect themselves. And now they're safe and useless. Distance keeps you from being triggered. It also keeps you from actually being with the person.
So the goal isn't to never be triggered. The goal is to stay engaged, get triggered, and catch it fast enough that it doesn't take a trajectory which is not healthy.
For me it shows up as a twist in my gut. I know the moment I've been hit. And when I feel it, this whole thing runs through my head in about a second: Okay, Greg what just happened? Where did that come from? And nine times out of ten the honest answer is some old insecurity of mine.
I'm an I-D on the DISC, which means I want people to like me and I want to be significant. So I have to be especially careful, because when I sense that someone doesn't like me, that's my trigger, and if I'm not watching, my stuff starts driving the conversation instead of their good. Or if I am feeling insignificant, that same trigger is pulled and I must be careful not to prove how important I am to the other person. The question is never am I triggered? I'm human; I will be.
The question is; when I'm triggered, how do I respond?
The question that reorders everything
Someone once framed the whole issue for me in a single question, he said before you say the hard thing, ask yourself:
Do I need to say this or does this person need to hear it?
"Do I need to say it" is about me. My need to prove I'm worthwhile. My need to show I was right, that my read of the situation was correct, that I brought something to the table.
"Does this person need to hear it" is about helping them, what I've actually discerned about helping them be healthy.
Sometimes the answer is that I just want to say it for my own sake, and it is not what they need to hear. That question has saved me from a lot of words that would have served me and wounded them.
Non-anxious, not disengaged
There's a phrase I keep coming back to, a non-anxious presence. It's the ability to stay peaceful in the middle of someone else's chaos without getting sucked into it. But people hear "non-anxious" and think it means detached, calm because you don't care. That's not it at all. It is being a peaceful presence.
A non-anxious presence is staying deeply connected while staying differentiated, engaged with the person's pain without letting their pain, or my own insecurity, start controlling me.
Practically, that means a few things. It means the pause, sometimes just few seconds of silence lets my mind catch up to my emotions before I say something I'll regret. It means self-awareness, not just knowing I'm angry or threatened, but knowing why, tracing it back to its source in real time. And for me it means the humility to remember that this isn't ultimately about my performance at all.
That last part is the medicine for the insecure among us, and I count myself in that number. If my worth is riding on how brilliantly I show up in the room, if I have to deliver the goods to feel worthwhile, then every conversation becomes a stage, and I'll be triggered constantly, because the stakes are all wrong. When I remember that my job is to engage in the moment and God's job is to do the work, the pressure comes off. I can stop performing and start paying attention.
The inner work is the work
This is why, when I teach on assessment, I spend a third of my time on the person doing the assessing and only the rest on other factors. Because if you haven't dealt with your own insecurities, your own family-of-origin wounds, your own need to prove, you will read every person through that fog. Your fears will bend how you hear them. You'll mistake your own anxiety for discernment.
I have kept a journal for fifty years. Not because I'm disciplined, I'm not, particularly, but because when I write my reactions down, I can see how much of what I'm feeling comes from my narrative and not from the actual person in front of me. I write the situation from the other person's point of view, and about three-quarters of the time I realize the problem was mine to own. I see my insecurity for what it is. Then I make peace with reality and move on.
That's not a detour from leading people well. That is leading people well. The most useful thing I bring into a hard conversation isn't my expertise. It's a self that's quiet enough and engaged enough to actually be present in my leadership.
Try this
For one week, run every charged moment through this:
Catch the trigger. Learn your tell, the gut twist, the flush of heat, the urge to jump in and prove something. The second you feel it, name it to yourself: I'm triggered. Where's this coming from?
Ask the question. Before you speak: Do I need to say this, or does this person need to hear it? If it's the first, hold it.
Take the pause. A few seconds of silence, on purpose. Let your mind catch up to your emotions.
Journal one of them at the end of the day but write it from the other person's point of view. You'll be surprised how often the thing that triggered you turns out to be mostly about you.
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