Chad Silverstein urges leaders to develop self-awareness and emotional control, arguing that how you respond to anger reveals your leadership strength. He explains that getting angry over others' actions hands them control of your emotions, and contrasts volatile surface reactions (waves) with a steady, calm core (beneath the water). Strong leaders stay consistent—cool, calm, and collected—because consistency builds trust. He recommends measuring yourself by what sets you off, practicing letting go, and making emotional discipline a habit.
Chapters
There are some leaders that have incredible ability to have some self awareness and how they measure their success, their performance, their strength so they can become stronger, their weaknesses so they can close gaps and get better. But when you aren't sure and you don't have people in your life, that will tell you. One of the ways that you can measure how strong you are is by simply looking at how you show up when you're angry and what ticks you off, what sets you off, what starts to make you bubble up inside, whether you show it or not. And it will really be a great indicator of how strong you are as a leader. You know, one of the crazy things about getting angry about situations that involve other people, is that you have no control over what they do, yet you emotionally punish yourself because of something they did. And if you think about that, it's crazy. I'm gonna punish myself by being angry because of something someone else did. You're giving them control over your emotions. That's not something that you want to do. And anytime you've ever seen anyone just get set off and they're angry and they've got a hot temper, think about that. Like, think about the fact that they're literally punishing themselves. It's crazy when you really kind of break it down and think about why you would let someone do that. But most of the time it's because they're not strong, they have a weak core, they don't know what they believe, they're easily influenced by other people, they care too much about what other people think. And great strong leaders know how to stay cool, calm and collected. And it doesn't matter the situation. When they hear bad news, hard news, they're cool, they're calm. I used to use the analogy for myself because I'm a feeler, I'm an emotional person and I ride the waves high. And I can feel people's pain and certainly can feel my own when I have it. But if you think about like the ocean and you think about waves crashing on top of the ocean, and then think about if you go out at 5 o' clock in the morning, you'll see glass on the ocean. And so depending on the type of day and what time of the day, you're going to see different types of waves. But as a leader, you want to be underneath the water where it's cool and calm, no matter what's happening up top. Crashing waves, tsunami, glass, you're the same. You're the same. And that's an incredible skill for a leader to build because you don't want to be the kind of leader that people don't know what they're getting from you. You know, who's showing up today. You know, I don't know if I'm getting the angry guy or the calm one. You know, is he having a good day or a bad day? You want to be consistent, and that helps build trust. That helps build, you know, a certain type of feeling that you want to invoke in the people that you're leading. And, you know, cool, calm and collective. That's the aim. That's what you want. And so just measure yourself by looking at what sets you off, what you've been angry at, and just think about what you've been angry about recently and how you've given your power over to someone else to let you punish yourself by feeling what you felt and let it go. Let it go and make it a discipline.
