Regulated Leadership

Why Smart Leaders Repeat Behaviors They Want to Change

September 16, 2026 • 5 min • Julia LeFevre
Founder, Brave Restoration
Why Smart Leaders Repeat Behaviors They Want to Change

I worked with a leader who had resolved to be more patient and a better listener to his team.

He’d leave our sessions clear-eyed and committed. He knew exactly what patience looked like in practice: pause before responding, ask a question instead of issuing a verdict, let someone finish a thought even when he’d already guessed the ending. He could describe it in detail. He believed it, every time.

Then someone would push back, disagree, or even bring him a problem for the third time that day, and the impatience would show up anyway. Right on schedule. A clipped tone. A question that was really a correction. A meeting where he answered before the sentence was finished.

Afterward came the part that worried me more than the behavior itself: the shame. He’d sit across from me and say some version of, “I know better than this. What is wrong with me?”

Nothing was wrong with him. He was smart, self-aware, and trying hard. That was exactly the problem. He kept treating a capacity problem like a discipline problem, and no amount of trying harder was going to fix it, because trying harder was never the thing that was missing.

What’s Actually Happening in the Body

Here’s what’s actually happening in the body when this pattern shows up. Amy Arnsten’s research on stress and the brain found that even mild, uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid loss of prefrontal function, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, perspective taking, and impulse control.

As arousal climbs, the brain shifts control away from that thoughtful, deliberate system and hands it to faster, more primitive circuitry built for threat, not nuance. It isn’t that the patient version of someone disappears. It’s that the part of his brain holding it goes offline exactly when he needs it most.

Knowing how to stay calm is different than having the capacity to stay calm. This leader had the knowledge. But somewhere between the disagreement and the third interruption of the day, he’d run out of the capacity, and no one had ever taught him that this could run out.

Building the Capacity, Not the Behavior

So we stopped working on his behavior in the moment and started working on the state underneath it. Instead of asking him to change what he did when he was already flooded, we built his ability to notice when his tank was getting empty. Tight chest. Faster speech. The urge to end a conversation before it was finished. Small, early signals, the kind that show up long before the clipped tone does.

Once he could feel those signals, the practice wasn’t “be more patient.” It was “slow the pace before you try to solve anything.” A breath before the first sentence. A pause long enough to ask himself one honest question: am I actually available for this conversation right now, or am I past capacity and reacting to survive it?

In addition, we worked on proactively filling his tank. We attended to his relational needs to be seen, known, and valued separate from work.

There’s a second piece of research that mattered here, and it’s one you can use today. Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA found that simply naming what you’re feeling, out loud or even just to yourself, measurably calms the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system. You don’t have to fix the feeling or talk yourself out of it. Naming it is often enough to lower its intensity and buy back a little of what stress just took from you.

I call it commentating your inner world. So that became his other tool. Before he responded to the content of what someone was telling him, he named the state he was in. Not to the room, necessarily, just to himself. “I’m running hot right now.” “I’m at the edge of my patience.” Once, to his team, out loud: “Give me one second, I want to actually hear this instead of reacting to it.” Naming the state before the content instead of trying to muscle through it modeled to the team the value of listening. And he didn’t have to muscle through.

Nothing about this required him to become a different person. It required him to stop treating “I know better” as the finish line and start treating capacity as something real, something that gets spent and needs to be rebuilt, the same way attention or energy does.

Months later, he reported that his work relationships have improved, not because he’d become endlessly patient. But because he’d stopped pretending he always would be, and started telling them the truth about where he actually was in the moment.

What to Practice This Week

Pick the behavior you’ve resolved to change more times than you’d like to admit. The short temper, the interrupting, the going quiet when you should speak up. Whatever it is, you already know it.

This week, stop trying to catch it in the act. Instead, notice the state it shows up in. What does your body feel like right before it happens? Tight jaw, faster breath, a flash of heat, a wall going up. Find the earliest signal you can. Share this with a trusted connection.

The next time you feel it, don’t try to fix your behavior yet. Just name the state, silently or out loud. “I’m past capacity right now.” “I’m running hot.” That’s the whole practice. Naming it before you respond to whatever’s in front of you.

You’re not failing at discipline. You’re finding out where your actual capacity ends, which is the first honest step toward building more of it.

This is the kind of work I walk leaders through in my six week cohorts. We don’t hand you another technique so you can try harder. We build the actual capacity underneath the behavior you keep resolving to change, so the version of you that shows up under pressure is closer to the version you already believe you are.

If this is the pattern you keep circling back to, I’d love to talk with you about whether a cohort is the right next step. You can reach me at julia@braverestoration.org or visit braverestoration.org to learn more.

Sources

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