Dear Ella: Why Do I Panic After I Own the Room?
Dear Ella,
Last week, I led a tough meeting with senior executives about our marketing strategy.
I made the case. I answered the hard questions. I held the room.
Afterward, people told me, “You owned that room.”
Then I walked down four flights of stairs to the farthest ladies’ room I could find and threw up.
Apparently, I can look completely in command while my body is filing a very different report.
Why does leadership still feel like danger when, by every external measure, I handled it?
Sincerely,
Barfing in Boston
Dear Barfing,
Well. Your executive presence is apparently excellent. Your gastrointestinal presence has notes.
Here is the strange part: the room believed you before your body did.
You were clear. You held your ground. You answered the questions. The people in the room experienced authority.
Meanwhile, your nervous system was backstage pulling the fire alarm.
That does not mean the confidence was fake. It means visibility is still expensive for you.
And here is where I want you to be careful.
You are confusing the cost of authority with evidence that you did authority badly.
You felt awful afterward, so some part of you assumes something must have gone wrong.
But look at the evidence.
You made the case. You answered the hard questions. You held the room. People told you that you did.
Your body had a different experience. That matters. But it does not get to rewrite what happened.
For many women, visibility has never been entirely neutral. Being clear, ambitious, direct, or powerful can carry social consequences. Your body may have learned to brace for those consequences long before you arrived in a room where your authority was actually welcome.
So stop waiting to feel calm before you believe you were credible.
Credibility is not the absence of adrenaline.
And discomfort is not evidence.
After your next high-stakes meeting, do not retreat to your office and conduct a private trial of every sentence you said.
Ask yourself three questions:
What landed?
Where did I hold?
What would I change?
Then stop.
No replaying the facial expressions. No reopening the case because someone paused before answering you. No deciding that nausea gets more votes than evidence.
You do not need to feel serene to have led well.
You need to get better at distinguishing adrenaline from evidence.
The work now is repetition. Keep entering the rooms. Keep using your judgment. Keep noticing what actually happens.
Eventually, your body may catch up with what everyone else in that meeting already knows.
You belonged in that room before your body believed it.
Ella’s note: The room saw authority. Your body saw danger. Stop letting the second one grade the first.
