I was in a meeting with about twenty senior leaders when two of them started screaming at each other.
A sales leader had closed a big deal, huge revenue, but the margin was negative, and it had put a real dent in the quarter. The CEO called it unacceptable. The sales leader shot back that he’d been told to do it. The CEO said he’d said no such thing. And it went from there. No I didn’t, yes you did, louder each time, until there were f-bombs flying across the table. Twenty of us sat there, a few of us women, watching two grown executives forget that anyone else was in the room.
It was disrespectful and deeply uncomfortable. Nobody said anything. We just absorbed it.
Then, in the middle of it, the CEO looked at me. I didn’t say a word. I held his eyes and let my face ask the question the whole room was thinking. Really? Is this what we’re doing? He caught it. Something shifted. He took a breath, brought his voice down, and reset the entire conversation.
I’ve thought about that moment for years, because I never opened my mouth. I didn’t make a speech about professionalism. I didn’t scold anyone. All I did was let what I was feeling show honestly on my face, and it was enough to change the temperature of the room.
That’s the part we underestimate about how we come across at work. People read you before you say a single word. Your face, your posture, whether you lean in or check out, the energy you walk in carrying. It is all talking, all the time, whether you mean it to or not. In that meeting, my values did the work without my voice. What showed up on my face was candor, the same thing I try to lead with out loud, just delivered in silence.
But energy isn’t only the charged, dramatic moment. Most of the time it is quieter than that. It is the tone you choose to set, over and over, in ordinary rooms.
I saw the same thing years later, in my doctorate program. My cohort was a group of people holding down full-time jobs and families while earning a doctorate at the same time. Everyone was stretched thin. So from our very first weekend, on instinct, I made myself a kind of class mom. That first day I switched everyone’s name tags so we couldn’t settle into the same seats and the same little cliques. From there it kept going. I made up team jersey day. I brought something silly for the holidays. I put up a countdown clock to graduation so we could all see the finish line. None of it was on the syllabus. I just wanted us to have some joy while we did something hard, and they loved it.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I was setting the energy for that group, and it turned out to last far longer than I expected. Just recently, someone from that cohort I hadn’t spoken to in years reached out, and out of everything we went through, the thing he wanted to tell me he had never forgotten was the name tags. What they did for the class. How they made the whole thing feel a little special.
I didn’t remember it as a big deal. To him, it was one of the things that stuck.
That is what energy really is. It is what people feel in your presence, and it is what they carry long after they have forgotten the exact words. Sometimes it is a single look that keeps a room from coming apart. Sometimes it is a stack of name tags a person remembers a decade later. Either way, you are setting the tone in every room you walk into, whether you decide to or not.
So decide to. Walk in as the person you actually want to be in that room. Everyone there is already reading you, and your energy is speaking first.