I can still do it on command. Thirty years as a principal and a superintendent, then ten more running an auto repair shop, will teach you a very specific facial expression — call it the Steady Face. Eyebrows level. Mouth neutral. Eyes present but unreadable. You wear it when a parent is screaming at you in a hallway, when a mechanic just told you the transmission you already replaced once is gone again, when a school board member is asking a question designed to make you look incompetent in front of forty people. The Steady Face says I have this handled. Most days, underneath it, I did not have it handled at all.
I got very good at that face. Good enough that I started using it at home. Good enough that I used it in my own head, on myself, before I ever got to a meeting — deciding what I was allowed to feel before I'd even let myself feel it.
What the Face Was Actually Doing
Here's the thing nobody tells you about learning to look calm under pressure: eventually you stop being able to tell the difference between looking calm and being calm. The performance gets so smooth it starts performing itself, running in the background whether you meant to switch it on or not. I'd walk out of a meeting where I'd just delivered bad news to a staff of eighty people, get in my truck, and realize I had no idea what I actually felt about what had just happened. Not because I'd processed it. Because I'd skipped it.
Marc Brackett, who runs the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, has a phrase for this that stopped me cold when I read it — he calls unregulated, unacknowledged emotion "the elephant in the room that everyone is too polite to name," and his research is blunt about the cost: people who suppress emotion instead of naming it show worse memory, worse decision-making, and worse relationships, even when the suppression looks like strength from the outside. It doesn't disappear. It just moves somewhere you're not managing it on purpose anymore — your sleep, your blood pressure, the sharp thing you say to your spouse for no reason that tracks back, if you're honest, to a meeting six hours earlier.
"Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts." — Psalm 139:23
The Desert Fathers Called This Something Else
Long before anyone had a word like "emotional regulation," the Desert Fathers of the fourth century were doing something close to it, though they'd have described it in the language of the soul rather than the nervous system. They talked about apatheia — not apathy in our modern sense of not caring, but a settled inner freedom from being yanked around by every passing feeling. The crucial difference between their practice and my Steady Face is that theirs started with radical honesty about what they actually felt. You cannot get free of an emotion you have refused to name. Abba Poemen, one of the more quoted of the desert elders, put it plainly: teach your mouth to say what is in your heart. He wasn't talking about oversharing. He was talking about not lying to yourself first.
That's the piece I'd missed for three decades. I thought the goal was to not feel the anger, the fear, the grief in the moment. The actual goal — the one both the psychologists and the desert monks agree on, from two completely different centuries — is to feel it accurately and then choose what to do with it. Suppression and regulation look identical from across the room. They are not the same thing at all.
Let's Be Honest About Why We Do This
I didn't build the Steady Face because I'm disciplined. I built it because showing the real face felt dangerous — like it would confirm I wasn't up to the job, or worse, that I needed something from the room instead of having something to offer it. That's the quiet lie underneath most professional composure: we've decided that being affected by something is the same as being unfit to lead through it. It isn't. Some of the best decisions I ever made as a superintendent came within an hour of the worst news I'd received that year. Feeling it didn't disqualify me from leading. Pretending I didn't feel it is what nearly did.
What I'm Doing Differently Now
I name it before I walk in the door, not after I walk out. One sentence, silently or out loud in the truck: "I'm angry about this" or "I'm scared this won't go well." Thirty seconds of honesty before the meeting changes what the Steady Face is covering — from a lie to a choice.
I stopped treating "I'm not sure how I feel about that yet" as an unacceptable answer. In three decades of leadership meetings, I can't remember hearing anyone say that sentence out loud. I've started saying it. Nobody has ever thought less of me for it. If anything, it's the moment people trust the rest of what I say a little more.
I ask my wife what she actually saw on my face that day, once a week. Forty-two years in, she reads the Steady Face better than I do. That's a humbling accountability system, and an effective one.
I still have the Steady Face. I don't think it's going anywhere, and honestly, there are rooms where it's still the right tool — you don't want your surgeon narrating his anxiety mid-procedure. But I've stopped letting it be the only face I have, and I've stopped believing that wearing it well means I've handled what's underneath it. Those are two different jobs, and for most of my career I was only doing one of them.
What's the face you've learned to make? And what would it cost you to name, just to yourself, what's actually underneath it before the next meeting?