An emotional style is the personal way someone responds to inner and outer stimuli. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson describes it through six dimensions, including Resilience and Social Intuition. For leaders, one insight matters most: You can change your own style through practice, if slowly.
If you work a lot with people as a leader, you need to read emotions in yourself and in others. In 2012, Davidson and science journalist Sharon Begley made his research accessible to a wide audience in the book The Emotional Life of Your Brain. I like working with the model because it describes people without handing out labels.
Davidson is professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds. For him, emotional style is a consistent pattern in how we respond to experiences, and he locates it in the way the brain works.
The comparison with a fingerprint fits well. Everyone carries their own combination of the six dimensions, and because that combination is anchored in the brain, it stays relatively stable over the years.
Useful for practice: Every profile has advantages in certain situations. Things get difficult at the extremes and wherever the style fits the situation badly.
Resilience: How quickly do you recover from stressful experiences, such as a lost contract or a tough board meeting?
Outlook: How long do positive feelings last for you? Some people carry good news around with them for days, while for others the joy fades after an hour.
Social Intuition: How well do you pick up the non-verbal signals of the people around you, meaning glances, tone of voice and posture?
Self-Awareness: How precisely do you sense the bodily sensations through which your feelings show up, for example a faster pulse before a difficult conversation?
Sensitivity to Context: How well do you adjust your emotional reactions to the context you’re in?
Attention: How well do you stay with one thing when there’s a lot going on emotionally around you?
A leader who recovers slowly carries the anger from the budget round into the next one-to-one with an employee. With little Social Intuition, you may notice too late that a team member has long since withdrawn inwardly.
Sensitivity to Context often decides your standing. Strike the same tone in the boardroom as in the project team, and you’ll come across as either stiff or disrespectful.
Conversely, high Self-Awareness can become an early-warning system. If you notice your own anger in your body before it lands in a sentence, you have the choice to react differently.
So your style affects others, whether you want it to or not. The people around you experience it every day and at some point take it for your character.
Davidson says yes and relies on neuroplasticity: The brain can change its structure and function into old age. Besides outside experiences, what we regularly occupy our minds with also plays a part.
Meditation and mindfulness training play a big role in his research. In the book, he suggests exercises for the individual dimensions that let you shift your own style in a direction you choose.
For everyday leadership, I translate it like this: Pick the single dimension that’s costing you most right now, and practise it daily for three months. If you want to train your Self-Awareness, pause for a minute before tricky conversations and register your breathing and tension.
Change comes in small steps, and the people around you often notice it before you do.
The most important sentence from my original article still holds: Lead Yourself. You can only change yourself, and that work can’t be delegated to anyone else.
I consider Davidson’s model one of the most useful in conversations with leaders. It explains why two equally competent executives come across completely differently in the same crisis, and it gives both of them a direction to practise in.
My limit: A self-test from a book remains a self-image. A structured 360-degree feedback tells you more precisely how your style affects others. And anyone under severe emotional strain is in better hands with a psychology or psychiatry professional than in leadership coaching.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, based on decades of research on emotion and the brain. He summarised it in 2012 with Sharon Begley in the book The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
It comes from disposition and experience. Davidson describes it as relatively stable, and as changeable through targeted mental training. Expect this to take months.
Davidson’s book contains questionnaires on the six dimensions that let you make a first self-assessment. Add feedback from people who’ve seen you in difficult situations.
Davidson describes the dimensions as spectrums with advantages and drawbacks at both ends. For leadership, what counts is whether your style fits the role and the situation: A CFO in a turnaround needs different response patterns from a head of product in a growth phase. High Sensitivity to Context helps in almost every leadership role.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Resilience at work: How to get back on course after a setback · Impathy: The power of self-acceptance in leadership · Brain-based leadership: 4 lessons for how you lead every day · Leadership mindset: Staying effective when the pressure rises
Note: This article was first published on 04.02.2019 and was revised and expanded in October 2026.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more
