I’m Not Angry

When I was an investment banker, I learned to pay close attention to the language my clients used when they discussed a deal. Most of the deals I worked on involved advising founders on an exit. During every first conversation, I always asked one important question: “Why do you want to sell?" The very next sentence was the most important. If the client responded with "well, it's not to get the highest price," I knew exactly what I was dealing with. The important data in that response is “highest price”—not the “not.”

I learned this attentiveness to language from my mentor, and I’ve carried it into my most important conversations ever since—including the ones I have today in my mentorship practice. The negation turns out to be as important as the thing being negated. The price is the first thing that emerged from the founder’s mind. The “not” is an attempt to distance himself from it. In my work with clients today—all high performers—I often ask in session: "What are you feeling right now?" When I get a response like "I'm not angry," I know exactly what I’m dealing with.

The “not” is an even more important data point here. Because most of us are socialized—by our childhood family or our corporate one—to suppress anger rather than express it. There are personalities in sports and the C-suite who became known for their rage. But that model is not only dated—it is demonstrably ineffective. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's decades of research on what actually motivates people points consistently toward psychological safety—defined as the shared belief that candor is welcome and that speaking up carries no penalty. Leading through fear, as Edmondson puts it, is no longer an option in any environment where performance actually matters. So the anger goes underground. And underground is where it becomes dangerous.

A founder who develops anger toward her leadership team finds herself in a difficult position. She’s the boss, but she depends on this team to manage her company. If she’s furious at her COO, what are her options? Yell? Go silent? I often have the conversation with founders that no one else can—and even then, in the privacy of our work, the anger is heavily distanced. Managed out of existence before it’s ever examined.

"I'm not angry" are powerful words because they signal not just anger, but something more intense buried beneath it. That’s a dangerous state for a leader, a spouse, a parent, or anyone who holds authority over others. Anger is energy. And energy doesn’t disappear—it redirects. It shows up in one of two ways: sideways leakage, the passive aggressive comment, the cutting remark that lands nowhere near the actual wound. Or it turns inward—and that’s where the real cost accumulates.

People in leadership positions carry an added responsibility: creating a safe space for those they lead. That includes the leadership role a parent plays at home. When I’m disappointed that my son failed a test but want to appear supportive, and instead make a cutting remark about something unrelated—that's "I'm not angry." The feeling found a way out. Just not an honest one.

It’s easy to underestimate how pervasive this is. Harder not to notice it. Have you ever walked into a room where two people just finished arguing? You may not have witnessed a single moment of it, but the weight of the energy is still there. When a parent tells me she carefully hides her arguments with her spouse from her kids, I push back gently: "Does that sound accurate to you? Or is it possible you're holding yourself in a generous light because you're afraid of what the truth might be?" We consistently underestimate how much anger moves through the walls.

The question isn’t whether the anger is there. It almost always is—often to the surprise of the person carrying it. The question is whether you trust yourself, and the people around you, enough to let it be what it actually is.

High performers are particularly prone to this dynamic. If you play the corporate game long enough, you accumulate enough injustice that suppression becomes a survival skill—and one that gets rewarded. Early in my career I had bosses who screamed, threw presentations across the room, and delivered insults with the confidence of people who had never been held accountable. The analyst who stayed calm when the boss erupted was generally still around when bonuses were handed out. The senior banker who remained ice cold in a brutal negotiation was considered exceptional. The founder who didn’t flinch when a deal collapsed. The parent who held it together at the school meeting. The same emotional regulation that makes high performers effective in professional contexts is what makes them dangerous at home—and to themselves. The skill becomes the liability.

The cost of sideways leakage is often harder to trace than the original emotion—which is what makes it more damaging. The person on the receiving end is confused rather than informed. And the outlets are rarely obvious. The affair. The drinking that quietly crosses a line. The obsessive focus on work that looks like ambition but is actually avoidance. None of these announce themselves as anger. That’s precisely why they persist. And the cost of turning anger inward over time is equally significant—not always dramatic, more often the slow withdrawal from relationships, the emotional distance that looks like stoicism and gets rewarded in the office, but is actually unexpressed anger that has calcified into indifference. That’s the version that quietly ends marriages and estranges children. That’s the version nobody names until it's too late.

Acknowledging anger doesn’t mean expressing it. Those are two separate things—and conflating them is part of what keeps it buried. High performers live in their heads. They’re skilled at real-time cognitive processing—evaluating risk, reading a room, managing a negotiation. But that cognitive dominance comes at a price: disconnection from what’s actually happening inside them. Anger is usually the first thing to go. The person equates naming it with having to act on it.

Or they connect the anger to the parent who raged—and they’ve spent a lifetime proving they’re not that person. The suppression isn’t weakness. It’s loyalty to a story about who they decided to become. But naming a feeling is not the same as becoming it. That’s where the growth is.

Feeling anger doesn’t require yelling or confronting. It requires naming it—to yourself first, and when appropriate, to the right person in the right context. "I noticed I was angry when that happened" is not an explosion. It’s information. And information that stays underground doesn’t disappear. It just becomes harder to trace when it finally surfaces.

In my work, the moment a client stops telling me what they’re not feeling and starts telling me what they are is usually the moment the real work begins.

Everything before that is prologue.