The Leadership Move That Drains The Room

Season 1, Episode 1

Most leaders walk into a room believing their presence is a positive one. They care about the work. They are committed to the cause. And yet, the people sitting across from them are quietly losing energy, disengaging, or finding reasons not to show up at all.

In a recent episode of Sustaining Social Change, John Rodríguez and Frederick Jefferson III tackled one of the most overlooked dynamics in leadership: the energy you bring into a space does not just affect you. It spreads. And if you are not paying attention to it, you may be the source of the very problem you are trying to solve.

What Is Emotional Contagion, and Why Does It Matter for Leaders?

Emotional contagion is the psychological process by which one person's emotional state, positive or negative, transfers to the people around them, often without anyone realizing it is happening.

It works through mirror neurons, brain structures that cause us to unconsciously reflect the emotional and physical states of the people we are near. When a leader walks in grounded and calm, the group tends to settle. When a leader walks in agitated, scattered, or depleted, the group absorbs that too.

For leaders in movement spaces, nonprofit organizations, and community organizing, this is not a soft concept. It directly affects whether people keep showing up, whether trust is built or broken, and whether the work actually moves forward. As Frederick put it, your energy is either strengthening the group or weakening it, every single time.

The Gap Between What You Intend and What You Actually Bring

One of the harder truths in this conversation is the difference between intention and impact. A leader can genuinely want to show up well and still be having a draining effect on their team.

This gap often shows up in subtle ways: the impatience that creeps in when a meeting runs long, the body language that closes off when someone challenges a decision, the habit of cutting people off without realizing it. None of these things are malicious. But they land on the people in the room, and those people remember.

John and Frederick have both worked with leaders who could not understand why their coalition kept shrinking, why fewer volunteers were doing the heavy lifting, or why the energy in their spaces felt so flat. The answer, more often than not, had something to do with the leader themselves. Not their values, not their commitment, but their unmanaged emotional state.

Why Movement Leaders Feel This More Acutely

The stakes are different in social change work. The people you are organizing alongside are often volunteering their time on top of full lives. They are showing up because they believe in something, and that belief is renewable, but it is not unlimited.

When the environment around the work is chronically draining, when the leader is running on empty and it shows, people stop choosing to be there. Not because they stopped caring about housing access or education reform or healthcare, but because the emotional cost of being in that room became too high.

John and Frederick are particularly mindful of this for Black and Brown leaders, who carry unique stressors in their roles and are often navigating systems that were not built with them in mind. Unchecked energy, in that context, does not just burn out one person. It erodes the collective.

The Body Knows Before the Brain Does

One of the more grounding parts of this conversation is the attention John and Frederick give to physical awareness. Before you can regulate what you bring into a room, you have to notice what is already happening inside you.

Shallow breathing. A tight chest. That low-grade tension you have been carrying since the commute. These are not just inconveniences. They are signals. And ignoring them before stepping into a high-stakes meeting or organizing session means those signals go with you, whether you want them to or not.

The practice they recommend is simple: check in with yourself before you check in with the room. What is mine right now? What am I carrying? What do I need before I can be fully present for other people?

That kind of self-awareness is not instinctive for most leaders. It has to be built.

Building a Daily Practice That Actually Holds

John and Frederick are both clear that showing up well is not something that happens by accident. It is the result of consistent, intentional habits that build a kind of emotional reserve, what they call resilience.

For Frederick, that looks like meditation, journaling, and setting intentions in the morning before anything else takes over the day. For John, it starts with protecting the first hour from news and screens, entering the day aware instead of reactive.

But the piece that often gets left out of leadership development conversations is the schedule. John shared that the single biggest contributor to his ability to stay regulated through difficult meetings has been building actual breathing room into his day. Not back-to-back sessions. Real gaps. Time to absorb, transition, and come back into the next thing as a whole person rather than a frayed one.

If you are perpetually late, perpetually overbooked, perpetually moving from crisis to conversation without a beat in between, you are not giving yourself any capacity to handle the unexpected. And in movement work, the unexpected is not the exception. It is Tuesday.

The Question Most Leaders Are Afraid to Ask

Toward the end of the episode, John and Frederick land on the question that cuts through everything else: what if you are the problem?

Not the volunteers. Not the underfunding. Not the political climate. What if the reason things keep falling apart, the reason people keep leaving, the reason nothing seems to hold, is you?

Frederick has watched leaders face this question with a blank stare. The first instinct is always to look outward. But the leaders who grow, and whose work grows with them, are the ones willing to sit with it honestly.

The practical starting point they recommend is asking for feedback directly. Go to someone you trust who works closely with you. Ask them where you are getting in their way. Ask them how your presence lands. And then actually listen.

If one person shares something difficult, you can weigh it. If three or four people are telling you a version of the same thing, that is information worth acting on.

Where Do You Go From Here

The energy you bring into a room is not separate from your leadership. It is your leadership. And for those working on causes that matter, in communities that are depending on this work to hold together, that is not something you can afford to leave unexamined.

The conversation that John and Frederick are building at SSC is rooted in exactly this: helping leaders show up on purpose, not by default. Because when you get that right, everything else, the trust, the participation, the momentum, has a much better chance of following.

If this is landing for you, subscribe to the SSC newsletter and listen to Sustaining Social Change wherever you get your podcasts. Share this post with a leader in your circle who needs the reminder that how you show up is always part of the work.