Regulated Leadership

She Didn't Try Harder. She Built Capacity.

August 12, 2026 • 6 min • Julia LeFevre
Founder, Brave Restoration
She Didn't Try Harder. She Built Capacity.

I’ve worked with a lot of leaders over the years, but one still stands out to me.

When we started, she was reactive. If her team expressed resistance or struggled with a project, she had almost no room to hold it. She’d jump to conclusions and steamroll people forward, not because she didn’t care, but because she didn’t have the internal space to slow down and stay curious.

At first, she thought the problem was her team. If they pushed back less, communicated better, and got on board faster, the tension would ease.

Instead of blaming her team, she started working on herself. Believe me, it was tempting to return back to strategy or communication techniques. But we kept focusing on her reactivity, the pattern underneath the pattern.

I’ve been asked, “What does it look like to ‘focus on reactivity’? How does that change anything?”

The answer? We notice the reactivity pattern, and then we diagnose the need behind the fight/flight response. Our brains are wired to protect, which signals that our stress responses are due to an unmet relational need.

When you start to meet those needs, the reactions aren’t needed.

Slowly, her responses changed. She started staying emotionally grounded even when a decision didn’t go her way or a conversation turned tense. It wasn’t a perfect transformation, but it was enough that it became noticeable.

I recently talked with her team. Unprompted, they told me how much they’d felt the difference. They said they could move forward in ways they never could before, not because the work got easier, but because they weren’t having to navigate the emotional reactions. When the leader stays grounded, they set the stage for their team to put their energy toward producing instead of protecting.

Here’s what I want you to notice. In the past, this leader tried hard in ways that never produced the desired results. She didn’t have the capacity to make the difference she wanted to make. It wasn’t until she shifted her energy from trying harder to building capacity that so much more became possible.

I see this pattern constantly. Leadership doesn’t become sustainable because leaders try harder. It becomes sustainable because they build greater capacity.

Why Trying Harder Doesn’t Work

Trying harder is a left brain strategy: more effort, more willpower, more information. Read another book. Learn another framework. Push through.

But regulation, the ability to stay steady and connected when a conversation gets hard, doesn’t live in that hemisphere.

Psychiatrist Allan Schore has spent decades researching this. In his 2022 paper “Right Brain-to-Right Brain Psychotherapy: Recent Scientific and Clinical Advances” (annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com), Schore shows that it’s the right brain, not the left, that holds our capacity for emotional regulation and the implicit, procedural knowing that governs how we connect, read a room, and self soothe under stress. That capacity isn’t installed through information. It’s built through experience, specifically relational experience.

This is why a leader can understand emotional intelligence completely and still snap at their team the next time someone pushes back. Insight and regulation are not the same skill, and they don’t live in the same place.

Stephen Porges’ work on the nervous system adds another layer. In “Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety” (frontiersin.org), Porges describes a phenomenon he calls co-regulation. Whatever state your nervous system is in tends to move through the room. If you’re dysregulated, your team feels it, whether or not you say a word. If you’re steady, that steadiness becomes a resource they can borrow. Leaders don’t just model behavior. They set the nervous system tone for everyone around them.

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel’s research on interpersonal neurobiology, laid out across his work including The Developing Mind, backs this up from another angle (drdansiegel.com). Siegel shows that the brain is wired for and by experience and relationship, and that how we focus our attention shapes the structure of our brain over time. We are not just influenced by our relationships. We are built by them.

And this isn’t unique to leadership. Decades of psychotherapy research have found the same pattern. In “How Important Are the Common Factors in Psychotherapy? An Update” (World Psychiatry, 2015), researcher Bruce Wampold shows that the relationship between a therapist and client is consistently one of the most reliable predictors of whether real change happens, often just as important as the specific technique used. Information rarely changes people on its own. Relationship does.

So What Builds Capacity

If trying harder was the answer, most of the leaders I work with would have solved this years ago. They are smart, well read, and full of genuine intentions. What they’re usually missing isn’t knowledge. It’s a practiced, felt experience of staying regulated in a genuine relationship, with real stakes, ideally with someone alongside them while they do it.

That’s what changed for the leader in this story. A new framework was never going to facilitate the change, but practice, repetition, and support rewired how her body responded to resistance and conflict.

If you recognize yourself in this, either in trying harder or in wanting more capacity, I’d love to invite you into two spaces built for exactly this kind of work.

From September 18 to 20, I’m part of the NeuroRelational Summit, where you’ll hear directly from experts in this field on how relationship and regulation change the brain. It’s a low pressure way to go deeper into the research behind what you just read. You can get a discount with the code 250E-REG (register here).

And if you’re ready to build this capacity yourself, inside a genuine relationship, with real practice and real support, my next cohort is where that happens. It’s not a class you sit through. It’s a room where you do the work. Email me for more information.

You don’t build capacity by trying harder alone in your own head. You build it in a relationship, with practice and with people who can hold steady with you while you learn to hold steady yourself.

References

Back to Journal