What Dr. Alicia Grandey Knows About Emotion Regulation That Most Leaders Don't

Written By chris danilo

A conversation about the recovery paradox, the beach ball you've been holding underwater, and why "calm, cool, and collected" turns out to be bad leadership science

If You Only Read This Far

The lines worth underlining before you read the rest:

Should I just fake care?

"It [faking emotions or acting] is like holding a beach ball underwater. You can do it. It's not hard. But it takes a little bit of attention, takes a little bit of energy away from other things. And if you keep doing that, eventually it's going to fly up and hit you in the face."

Why is recovering so hard?

"The more stressed out we are, the less likely we are to do the thing we need to do, which is recover."

Are emotions bad or unprofessional?

"Emotions are information. And if your employees don't have emotions, their work must not matter to them very much. Is that what you want?"

You sound like you have it all figured out.

"Research is me-search. I've always struggled with emotion regulation. I don't have it all figured out."

Jump to a question


A Note from Chris

I took Dr. Alicia Grandey's class at Penn State as an undergrad. The course was called Emotional Intelligence: Real or Pop Psychology?, a deliberately spiky question for a 400-level seminar, and the kind of question that has shaped the rest of my working life.

Two decades later she has more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, 30,000+ citations, and a new book called Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work, co-authored with executive coach Dina Denham Smith. This book is SO useful.

"Research is me-search," she told me. She studies this because she's lived it.

If you run an early learning center, lead a team, or stand in front of a classroom every day acting like you have it together, this one is for you.

— Chris


Why does being more stressed make you less likely to take a break?

There's a name for it. The recovery paradox.

The more stressed you are, the more you convince yourself you can't afford to stop. Which is exactly the moment stopping would do the most.

Sabine Sonnentag and her collaborators have spent two decades building the empirical record on workplace recovery. The framework Alicia uses, D.A.R.E., comes from that research.

DARE to recover:

  • Detach (cognitively and physically; stop checking email)

  • Autonomy (you choose what you do next, and the choosing is part of the mechanism)

  • Rest (return your nervous system to homeostasis, whatever that looks like for you)

  • Empower or Engage (do the thing that reminds you you're a whole person)


"Choose it," Alicia said. "If someone makes you do it, that's not gonna help."

These are experiences. The specific activity you choose for each is the vehicle. The same activity gives one person recovery and drains another. This means that if you're a leader of a team, you probably can't prescribe a single specific recovery protocol for the whole staff. That removes the autonomy step that helps make it work.

Using myself as an example, I have to be honest that I just cannot sit still. I've got a lot of energy. Like, a lot. So, one thing I've learned about myself is that I need to burn a lot of energy if I'm going to sit at my desk and focus all day.

So, I run trails, ride my bike, or climb mountains instead. What's also great about this for me is that it means that I also get to spend that time alone. Just pedaling along to the crunch of gravel under my tires and my own breathing.

That's the only stretch of the day I'm both paying full attention and not working.

Most ECE professional development still treats recovery as a wellness add-on or a luxury, but the recovery paradox stops for no one.

The good news: the dosage can be small and still be effective.

Allie Gabriel and colleagues have shown that micro-breaks of as little as five minutes produce measurable recovery. Even one minute of focused breathing, specifically breathing out longer than you breathe in, flips your nervous system out of fight-or-flight mode.

Stick with me because I know this might sound fluffy, but of every system in your stress response, breathing is one of the only ones you can directly control. The vagus nerve connects the lungs, heart, and brain. The effect is that if you breathe out for longer than you breathe in, you can literally slow down your heart rate. Still don't believe me? Navy SEALs use a technique called "box breathing" to achieve exactly this.

What does suppressing your emotions at work actually cost you?

Here's the metaphor I'll be stealing from this conversation forever.

Suppressing emotion at work (the technical term is "surface acting") is like holding a beach ball underwater. You can do it. It's easy in the moment.

But it takes a small amount of attention you could be spending on something else.

Decades of research, much of it Alicia's own, document what happens when you keep that ball under for forty hours a week. Burnout. Reduced impulse control after work. And yes, heavier drinking.

One of her studies on hotel managers found something I haven't been able to get out of my head: managers who surface-acted more brought home such negative energy that their spouses were more likely to want them to quit their jobs.

That's not a metaphor. Those are people's lives.

The opposite of surface acting is what the field calls "deep acting." This means engaging with the actual emotion rather than slapping a mask on top of it. Deep acting is a skill that takes practice.

This is what Self-Management looks like in the body. The leader who knows when to mask and when to drop it, and who has built the internal emotional radar to tell which is which.

I'm a leader. Aren't I supposed to be "calm, cool, and collected"?

Alicia and Dina interviewed working leaders for the book. They asked each one what they thought they were supposed to show emotionally at work. The answer came back almost verbatim, every time.

Calm, cool, and collected. No matter what.

That ideal is the design specification for surface acting at scale.

If your leadership culture rewards performed equanimity, you've installed a beach ball under every desk. Your people will hold it underwater. They'll do it for years. Eventually they'll quit, or burn out, or start a YouTube channel about it.

The middle ground between those two is what Brené Brown and Adam Grant publicly debated on Grant's Work Life podcast: vulnerability as leadership currency vs. emotional disclosure as its own kind of self-promotion. They're both right.

The synthesis is that acknowledging the reality of the emotion in the room is leadership. Making the emotion "the show" is not.

Alicia's example of how that looks in practice is the most useful one I've heard. She has cried in front of a class.

What she means is this. Her voice got tight. She could feel it. She took a breath. She named it: "clearly this matters to me." Then she kept going with what she had planned to say.

The students read it as real — but she wasn't breaking down and sobbing.

This is Skilled Communication doing its actual job. The leader who can read the room's emotional state, name it accurately, and bring it forward without becoming the center of it.


What do you do when an employee shares more than you can handle?

This is the question that brings the work back to ECE. Alicia's framework is R.A.P. Three steps for the leader who is also the first responder.

Recognize. There's a checklist of signs of struggle in the book, the SOS list. The signal is pattern change. The educator whose work is slipping in ways unlike them. The student who is suddenly absent. Recognize what's happening before you reach for the policy lever.

Acknowledge. I've noticed some things have been different. I'm checking in because that's my job. The acknowledgment opens a door. The door just has to be open. Where it leads is the next conversation.

Act. Within the boundaries of what you can professionally manage. You can know what your EAP offers. You can have the mental-health resource list pinned to your wall. You can sit with a struggling student while they make the call to get help, and stay until you know they have someone to walk them through what comes next.

The skill underneath R.A.P. is what doctors are trained for and most managers aren't. Compassionate Detachment.

Compassion is concern that acts. Detachment is what lets you go home at the end of the day without carrying every patient's diagnosis on your shoulders.

You need both.

The leader who avoids this conversation, out of the entirely understandable fear of saying the wrong thing, has just guaranteed two outcomes. The employee never raises it again. And every decision you make about your team for the next quarter is based on a picture of your culture that's missing the parts that matter most.

What does this mean for your practice on Monday morning?

Alicia's through-line is one sentence:

Emotion is information, and the leaders who build the radar to read it accurately are the ones who last.

Every framework she handed me in this conversation (DARE, BRAVE, RAP) maps cleanly onto what Human Skills Training teaches as Be / Do / Feel.

Who to be. What to do. How to know what it feels like when it's working.

The science is on your side.

Try one of these this week:

  • The next time you catch yourself thinking I can't afford to take a break right now, set a one-minute timer and breathe out longer than you breathe in. Just one minute! Notice what changes.

  • Pick a recovery activity that already works for you. Put it on this week's calendar in writing. Not as a wellness goal. As a meeting with yourself. Defend it the way you'd defend a parent meeting.

  • The next time something at work makes you feel something you'd normally suppress, name it to yourself in one sentence before you decide what to do. I'm angry about this and that's reasonable. Then act.

  • If a member of your team has been off lately, schedule a 15-minute check-in this week. Open with I've noticed some things have been different. Any ideas about why? Lead with curiosity instead of an agenda.

  • The next time you're tempted to email a new policy in response to one person's behavior, ask yourself whether a single conversation would do the work the policy is trying to do.

The leaders who hold up over decades are the ones who built the radar for when to drop the beach ball.


🎙️Listen to the full conversation:

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Alicia Grandey on the Human Skills Training podcast. Her voice, her specificity, and the way she thinks out loud are worth your time in a way this post can't fully replicate.

Full Episode On YouTube
Full Episode On YouTube


📩 Get Human Skills delivered to your inbox:

The best professional development doesn't happen in a hotel conference room. It happens in small, consistent doses. A reframe here, a tool there, something you can actually use before the week is out. That's what the HST newsletter is built for. Sign up now and you'll immediately get a free 7-Email Crash Course on Human Skills, plus be entered to win giveaways of my favorite books (like Grandey's!) each month.

Get The Newsletter
Get The Newsletter

Chris who?

Written by Chris Danilo.

Edited and refined with Claude (Anthropic, Opus 4.7).

I'm Chris. I help early childhood education leaders build the human skills that hold up under pressure: emotion regulation, facilitation, adaptive thinking, and the kind of communication that changes how a team works together.

Unlike other trainers and speakers, I use high-engagement, experiential learning workshops and keynotes, in-person and virtually, to make it all happen.

Want me to work with your team?

Start The Conversation.



🤓 Sources & Nerdy Reading

chris danilo

chrisdanilo.com