Walking AI Psychological Tightropes: Enhancing Leadership Strategies

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with leadership during technological upheaval. You’re supposed to be the steady presence, the person who helps others navigate uncertainty. But here’s the unspoken truth: you’re navigating the same uncertainty yourself. You don’t know if AI will transform your business or industry beyond recognition. You don’t know if your service or product will exist in five years. And yet, when your team looks to you with questions in their eyes, you’re expected to project confidence you may not feel.

This is the leader’s double bind - guiding others through change and all the anxiety that comes with it, while managing your own. It’s a psychological tightrope that demands a kind of inner mastery rarely discussed in leadership development programmes.

In the first three articles of this series, we explored how AI anxiety spreads through teams via social contagion, and how that anxiety can potentially be reframed as creative fuel. But those interventions depend on something more fundamental: the leader’s own capacity for self-regulation. You cannot help others transform their relationship with uncertainty if you haven’t first done that work yourself. As I say all the time in workshops – your people will do what you do, feel what you feel, not simply do as you tell them.

Beyond the Performance of Calm

Let’s start by naming what doesn’t work: performing calmness you don’t feel.

Arlie Hochschild’s foundational research on emotional labour shows that ‘surface acting’ - displaying emotions you don’t actually experience - comes at a significant psychological cost. Leaders who mask their anxiety while projecting false confidence deplete their cognitive resources, increase their risk of burnout, and, also damaging, often fail to convince anyone anyway. Research published in 2024 in Behavioural Sciences confirms that employees are remarkably attuned to detecting inauthenticity in their leaders’ emotional displays - and that perceived inauthenticity undermines trust more than honest expressions of uncertainty ever could.

The research on authentic leadership supports this. A 2024 diary study published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology found that leaders who maintain consistent authenticity, even when that includes acknowledging difficulty, foster greater employee engagement than those who vacillate between performed confidence and visible strain. Here’s a key insight I keep coming back to: inconsistency in emotional presentation creates more uncertainty for teams than honest acknowledgement of challenges.

This doesn’t mean unburdening yourself emotionally on your team. That would transfer your anxiety to others - the contagion dynamic I have talked about in previous articles. Rather, it means developing genuine equanimity: not the absence of anxiety, but a transformed relationship with it. You can, indeed, establish and practice mental routines that help integrate anxiety as an inevitable human response to uncertainty, rather than fight with, try to avoid or project it unwittingly onto others.

You Are the Architect of Your Emotional Experience

Brain and mind science offers leaders a fundamentally different way of thinking about their inner experience.

The traditional view of emotion - what Lisa Feldman Barrett calls ‘the classical view’ - holds that emotions are hardwired reactions triggered by external events. A threatening email about AI implementation arrives, and your fear circuit activates automatically. Under this model, the best you can do is suppress or manage what’s already been triggered.

But Barrett’s research, synthesised in her landmark book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, reveals something more empowering. Emotions are not triggered, they’re constructed. Your brain doesn’t contain distinct circuits for fear, anger, or anxiety waiting to be activated. Instead, your brain continuously makes predictions about what your bodily sensations mean, drawing on past experience and present context to construct an emotional experience in the moment.

As Barrett writes, “Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.” Your racing heart, shallow breathing, and tightened stomach when reading about AI displacement don’t mean fear - they’re physical sensations that your brain interprets through the lens of your concepts and context. Those same sensations at a rollercoaster might be constructed as excitement. During an important presentation, they might become positive anticipation.

This isn’t positive thinking or wishful reframing. It’s how your brain actually works. And it has profound implications for leaders navigating AI anxiety.

If emotions are constructed rather than triggered, then you have far more agency over your emotional experience than the classical view suggests. You are, in Barrett’s memorable phrase, “the architect of your own experience.” Not because you can think your way out of difficult feelings, but because you can shape the raw materials from which those feelings are built.

The Body as Starting Point: Interoceptive Awareness

The first raw material is your awareness of bodily sensations - what neuroscientists call interoception.

A 2024 integrative review in Behavioral Sciences establishes that interoceptive ability - the capacity to accurately detect, interpret, and integrate signals from inside your body - is “central to emotion experience and regulation.” Leaders with refined interoceptive awareness can notice the early physiological signs of anxiety before they escalate. The subtle tension in the shoulders, the slight quickening of breath, the barely perceptible warming in the face.

This early detection creates space. Space to pause. Space to choose. Space to construct a different emotional meaning from the same physical signals.

Research from the Frontiers in Psychology confirms that mind-body practices like meditation improve both interoceptive accuracy and emotion regulation through what scientists call ‘top-down processing’ - the brain’s capacity to interpret and modulate bodily signals.

For leaders, this translates to a practical discipline: noticing what’s happening in your body before deciding what it means. When you feel physical activation in response to AI-related news or discussions, the first question isn’t “Why am I anxious?” but rather “What am I actually sensing?” A tight chest. A faster heartbeat. A slight breathlessness. These are physical facts, not yet emotional verdicts.

Emotional Granularity: The Power of Precise Language

The second raw material is the conceptual vocabulary you bring to those sensations.

Research reveals that people differ enormously in their emotional granularity, in other words, the precision with which they distinguish between emotional states. Some people experience a rich spectrum. They differentiate irritation from frustration from resentment from disappointment. Others collapse these distinctions into a single category: “I feel bad.”

This matters because emotional granularity predicts regulatory capacity. People with higher granularity are better at matching appropriate regulatory strategies to specific emotional experiences. They can address the actual texture of what they’re feeling rather than applying blunt-instrument coping mechanisms to vague distress.

Consider the difference between “I’m anxious about AI” and these more granular alternatives:

“I’m apprehensive about my team’s capacity to adapt quickly enough.”

“I’m uncertain whether I understand this technology well enough to guide others.”

“I’m grieving the expertise that used to define my value.”

“I’m curious but overwhelmed by the pace of change.”

Each of these constructions suggests different responses. Apprehension about team capacity calls for skills investment and support structures. Uncertainty about your own knowledge invites learning and mentorship. Grief over shifting expertise deserves acknowledgement and meaning-making. Curiosity mixed with overwhelm might benefit from pacing and prioritisation.

Leaders who develop emotional granularity don’t just feel better - they respond more effectively. They can name what’s actually happening inside them with sufficient precision to address it appropriately.

The Prediction Engine: Shaping What You Experience Next

Your brain doesn’t just interpret current sensations. It actively predicts future ones.

Your brain is constantly running simulations based on past experience, predicting what’s about to happen and preparing your body accordingly. When you anticipate an anxiety-provoking AI discussion, your brain doesn’t wait for the actual conversation. It begins constructing the emotional experience in advance, mobilising physiological resources for a threat that exists only in prediction.

This predictive process is both the problem and the opportunity. The problem is that your brain may be constructing anxious experiences based on outdated predictions formed during earlier, more threatening encounters with technological change. The opportunity here is to update your brain’s prediction database through deliberate new experiences.

A 2024 Nature Neuroscience study using computational modeling to examine brain systems involved in emotion regulation highlighted the role of prefrontal regions associated with higher-order cognition. The researchers found that successful regulation involves particular areas of the anterior prefrontal cortex associated with “abstract thought and long-term representations of the future.” In other words, people who regulate emotions well are those who can construct alternative future scenarios - different predictions - that change their present experience.

For leaders, this means deliberately exposing yourself to positive experiences with AI: successful experiments, productive collaborations, moments of genuine insight enabled by new tools. Each positive experience updates your prediction database, making your brain slightly less likely to construct anxiety as the default response to AI-related situations.

A Practical Framework for Leader Self-Regulation

Drawing on this neuroscience, here’s a four-part framework for leaders navigating AI anxiety:

1. Notice before naming

Develop the practice of observing your bodily sensations without immediately labelling them as anxiety. What’s the actual physical experience? Where is it located? What are its qualities? This pause between sensation and interpretation creates space for construction rather than reaction.

2. Cultivate granularity

Expand your emotional vocabulary beyond ‘anxious’ or ‘stressed.’ When you notice activation, ask: What precisely am I experiencing? Is this apprehension, uncertainty, overwhelm, grief, curiosity, or something else entirely? The more granular your naming, the more targeted your response can be.

3. Update your predictions

Deliberately seek out positive experiences with AI that can update your brain’s prediction database. Small experiments, playful exploration, and genuine moments of utility all contribute to a more balanced set of predictions about what AI-related situations mean for you.

4. Invest in your body budget

Barrett uses the term ‘body budget’ to describe your brain’s management of physiological resources. When your body budget is depleted through poor sleep, inadequate nutrition, or chronic stress, your brain is more likely to construct negative emotional experiences from ambiguous sensations. The basics - sleep, movement, nutrition, social connection - aren’t peripheral to emotional regulation; they’re foundational to it.

The Authentic Middle Ground

None of this means pretending you’re fine when you’re not. Research on authentic leadership shows that what employees need isn’t a leader without anxiety - it’s a leader whose relationship with anxiety is honest and workable.

There’s an authentic middle ground between performing false confidence and dumping your unprocessed emotions on your team. It sounds like this:

“This is genuinely uncertain territory for all of us, including me. And I’m finding that uncertainty can coexist with real curiosity about what becomes possible.”

“I don’t have all the answers about how AI will change our work. What I do know is how to navigate change together, and that’s what we’ll do.”

This kind of communication models what good self-regulation looks like. Honest acknowledgement of difficulty, paired with genuine agency and forward orientation. It normalises the experience of anxiety without amplifying it, and it demonstrates that uncertainty and effectiveness can coexist.

The Gift of Going First

There’s a final dimension to leader self-regulation that often goes unspoken. By doing this inner work yourself, you give permission for others to do the same.

When a leader demonstrates that it’s possible to feel uncertain and still move forward, to experience activation without being overwhelmed by it, to name difficult emotions with precision and address them with wisdom - they create a template for their entire organisation. The emotional contagion we discussed in previous articles works both directions. Just as anxiety spreads, so does the capacity to hold anxiety with equanimity.

This is the leader’s inner game: not the elimination of anxiety, but its transformation. Not the performance of calm, but the genuine development of it. Not confidence in outcomes you cannot control, but confidence in your capacity to navigate whatever emerges.

In Part Five of this series, we’ll zoom out to the systems level and cover how organisations can create structures, governance, and cultures that contain anxiety rather than amplify it. But those systems are only as effective as the leaders who implement them - and those leaders are only as effective as their capacity to regulate themselves.

The inner game comes first.

References
Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Bo, K., Kraynak, T.E., Kwon, M., Sun, M., Gianaros, P.J., & Wager, T.D. (2024). A systems identification approach using Bayes factors to deconstruct the brain bases of emotion regulation. Nature Neuroscience, 27, 975–987. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01605-7
Macamo, A.I. & Klasmeier, K.N. (2024). Authentic leadership – for better and for worse? Leader well-being and inconsistency as moderating factors in the relation between daily authentic leadership and follower well-being. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 33(6), 632–642. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2024.2361511
Lazzarelli, A., Scafuto, F., Crescentini, C., Matiz, A., Orrù, G., Ciacchini, R., Alfì, G., Gemignani, A., & Conversano, C. (2024). Interoceptive ability and emotion regulation in mind–body interventions: An integrative review. Behavioral Sciences, 14(11), 1107. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14111107
Price, C.J. & Hooven, C. (2018). Interoceptive awareness skills for emotion regulation: Theory and approach of mindful awareness in body-oriented therapy (MABT). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 798. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00798
Tang, X. & Gu, Y. (2024). Influence of leaders’ emotional labor and its perceived appropriateness on employees’ emotional labor. Behavioral Sciences, 14(5), 413. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14050413