You leave the meeting rattled.

On the walk back to your desk, you reason with yourself. It was not personal. Your work is good. You have handled worse than this.

And you feel exactly the same.

Susan Schmitt Winchester can tell you why, and it is not a discipline problem. The limbic system, where our emotions are stored, has no capacity for language. You have been talking to a part of your brain that does not read.

She is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney. Over a career of more than 36 years, she was Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies. She says she did not learn that fact about the brain until recently, and it changed how she teaches everything else.

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Your Best Thinking Goes Offline Exactly When You Need It

Three parts of the brain matter here, and they explain a lot of regret.

The amygdala runs survival. She uses the image of a lion crossing the savanna after a zebra, and the zebra running instantly. That system does not check with you first.

The limbic system stores the emotions and has no language. And the prefrontal cortex, the problem-solving part, cannot function properly while you are in fight, flight, or freeze.

So the moment you feel most compelled to act is the moment you are least equipped to. As she puts it, we cannot make good decisions from fight, flight, or freeze.

Which is where her rule comes from: you never quit on a bad day.

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Start With One Question About Your Body

Her three-step process is called the Rapid Power Reclaim, and the first step is Create Choice. Nothing else can happen until it does.

You cannot do anything, she says, until you release the energy charge inside you.

So she starts with a question anyone can answer. Where am I feeling this charge in my body right now?

Hers felt like an elephant sitting on her chest, the anxiety radiating through the middle of it. For other people, it is the throat, the gut, the neck.

Try it today. You cannot release something you have not located.

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“We can’t talk our way out of that charge. We have to release it.”

Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer

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Sound, Movement, and Breath Are the Only Three Doors

Those three, she says, are the only channels the limbic system has for letting a charge go, which is exactly why the pep talk in the hallway does nothing.

One technique comes from Pathways to Successful Leadership, where she trained for years. It is called the silent scream, and she credits Sue Page with it. You stand, reach for the sky, grab the emotion and pull it down hard with breath and sound, then throw it out behind you.

She likes it because you can do it in an empty office or a restroom without making a sound.

Her other tool is a five-dollar plastic baseball bat. You hit a padded chair or a couch as hard as you can while yelling. Jumping works. Jumping jacks. Singing at the top of your lungs.

There is no wrong way to do this, and you will know it worked because the heaviness in your chest or gut will have let go.

She points out that zebras shake their bodies after escaping the lion. They are releasing the adrenaline of the near attack.

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What to Do When You Cannot Leave the Room

All of that assumes privacy. Meetings do not offer any.

So she has a shorter list. Excuse yourself, say you need a quick break, get cold water on your face. Box breathing works right there at the table: four counts in, four counts held, four counts out, and nobody notices.

Grounding helps too. Feel your feet on the floor. Sit up with your shoulders back. Look around and notice specific things: a light, someone’s brown shoes.

Then tell yourself you will do the full process later.

She calls these small, simple acts of kindness toward yourself, which is a better description than techniques.

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The Step Almost Everyone Skips

Once the charge is out, you choose a different response. She calls that Elevate Action, and hers was once four lines on a pink sticky note before a presentation she was dreading.

Then comes the part people dismiss. Celebrate and Integrate.

Schmitt Winchester is emphatic that it is not optional. Celebrating what you did differently is what lays the new neural pathway over the old one. Skip it, and you are more likely to repeat the old pattern next time.

She admits she was terrible at this. Her own coach opened every session by asking what they were celebrating, and for a long time her answer was that she did not know how.

It counts smaller than you think. Step outside for sixty seconds and notice one beautiful thing. Put a hand on your heart and say out loud that you did that differently. Text a friend who knew you were walking into something hard.

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What To Take With You

🫀 Locate the charge in your body first.

🗣️ Sound, movement, and breath. Not words.

🚫 Never quit on a bad day.

🧊 Cold water, box breathing, feet on the floor.

🎉 Celebrate it, or the pattern comes back.

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Here is what I keep thinking about. If talking yourself down has never worked, that was never a failure of willpower.

You were using the wrong language for the part of you that needed help.

So take one thing into tomorrow. The next time something knocks you sideways, before the email or the replay in your head, just ask where you feel it in your body.

That question costs nothing, and Susan Schmitt Winchester says it is the door to every other step.

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Listen to the full episode

🎧 Emotional Regulation Is Physical Not a Mindset Problem

📺 Watch on YouTube

🎙️ The full series, Healing at Work: Clock In, Heal Up

The full twelve-week course, free with code HWgift

Susan is giving readers free access to her Healing at Work® Signature Course.

It is a twelve-week program for leaders working through the emotional patterns holding them back, covering the Unconscious Wounded Career Path, the Conscious Healing Career Path, Bumper Car Moments®, and the full Rapid Power Reclaim® process from this episode. You get a workbook, a 90-day planner, and bonus mini-courses.

One thing worth knowing: questions go straight to Susan. If a lesson raises something, or something surfaces in your own work life while you are going through the material, you email her, and she answers you personally.

Use code HWgift at programs.healingatwork.com/course

34 Ways to Make Yourself Feel Better Instantly

Exactly what you want in the thirty seconds this episode is about. Susan and her co-author, Martha I. Finney, built this list for the moment you are upset at work and still have to function.

Get the free list at programs.healingatwork.com/34-ways-to-feel-better

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About Susan Schmitt Winchester

Susan Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. Over a career of more than 36 years, she was Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, which means she spent decades watching people carry what she was carrying herself. She teaches self-acceptance as a path to a more joyful working life, and gives people something practical to do in the moments that used to derail them.

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Healing at Work is co-authored with Martha I. Finney and available wherever books are sold.