Coaching Yourself to Leadership: Five Key Strategies for Becoming an Integrated Leader

Vacillating Between Extremes

I’ve noticed that once people’s buttons get pushed, they often respond by vacillating between two extremes. They either retreat, completely walling themselves off in the hope that the situation will somehow correct itself, or they act out aggressively. Either behavior is a set-up for failure.

If you shut down and retreat, you open up space for the other person (who is probably not displaying much emotional intelligence either) to do damage to you. When you retreat and close other people out, it’s as if you have pinned a sign on yourself that can be interpreted a variety of ways, all of them negative: “I’m better than you, and I don’t like you,” or “I’m busy, and you’re not important enough for me to deal with.”