How should leaders handle their own fear and anger in the moment?

Emilie Choi · Aug 23, 2021

Leaders in crypto should keep an even keel — never get too excited when everyone is exuberant about crypto, and never get too down when people think you're insane for being in the space

Getting caught up in market sentiment distracts from the future and the mission

Scope: much harder to do than to say

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Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

Staying even keel is a precondition for consistent high performance — getting too high invites a punch in the mouth and getting too low suppresses your ability to perform

Learned on the baseball field, where he is always one pitch from escaping a bad situation and one pitch from disaster

Scope: generalized from sport to life and work

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Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025

After a demoralizing setback, a founder should be authentic and process the anger and mistakes with the team first, rather than immediately jumping to 'it's fine, let's solve it'.

He made the mistake of skipping straight to problem-solving; talking through what went wrong is genuinely valuable before moving to action.

41:39 Process the setback with the team before jumping to solutions

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

The most non-obvious but important skill for a CRO — and leaders generally — is the ability to detach emotionally and observe the situation from the sidelines.

Detachment lets you diagnose the deeper issue behind a problem or a success and then fix and improve it.

58:10 Emotional detachment enables clear diagnosis

Matt Mochary · Mar 9, 2020

Asking the people around you to tell you when you appear to be in fear or anger is a more practical self-awareness hack than trying to develop that recognition through years of meditation.

Most people, himself included, never develop the meditative self-awareness to notice their own triggering; outsourcing the detection works immediately.

6:45 Outsource detection to the people around you

Matt Mochary · Mar 9, 2020

When there is no urgency, the right move is to wait for fear and anger to dissipate before trusting your own thoughts, aided by structured questioning exercises.

Exercises like Byron Katie's 'The Work' lead him to see that the opposite of his current view has merit and may be just as true, which dissolves the fear or anger.

8:29 Wait for the emotion to pass before trusting your thoughts

Matt Mochary · Mar 9, 2020

When you feel wronged in a negotiation, the productive move is to shift from the external perspective ('they did this to me') to asking what you did to help create the situation.

10:16 Shift from blame to your own contribution