The Single Most Valuable Skill in the Modern Workplace
"Be Water"
In the first week of a previous job, I had the type of casual encounter that changes your life accidentally. The then-Head of HR was about to announce her departure and needed a writer to help her craft a farewell message. I had some random ghostwriting experience (feels a lot less random now that I’m an actual ghostwriter) and an eagerness to demonstrate my utility, so I volunteered.
We met over Zoom on a Friday afternoon, and she reflected on her time at the company while I transcribed and offered suggestions about how to bottle the experience in words. It became apparent that I had struck a knowledge gold mine. No one knows the underside of a company culture quite like the Head of HR, and no one can describe it with as much candor as a Head of HR who has just turned in her resignation letter.
As we wrapped up the call, I took the opportunity to ask this woman for her advice about what the business most needed and how to be most valuable as a new employee.
“That’s easy,” she said as if she wasn’t about to alter the course of my career.
“Be water. Everyone here is fire. You are going to be surrounded by passionate and emotional people who will make things out to be more urgent and important than they are. If you want to do one thing to make a difference here, all you need to do is be water.”
The Dysregulated Workplace
More than ever before, people have become emotionally dysregulated at work. That’s not an accusation, it’s just an assessment. We’re collectively grappling with the dissolution of democratic institutions, ever-rising rates of anxiety and depression, and a 24/7 barrage of information about other people and places that somehow feel so close and so distant from our lives at the same time, all while chasing rising costs of living. So yeah, most people are rightfully a little stressed out.
When you spend your days surrounded by people who are sort-of-kind-of-losing-it, it’s easy to feel like this state of constant dysregulation is totally normal. After all, companies are just vessels for tons of nuanced, wounded people to bump up against other people's nuances and wounds in the name of building widgets. Of course, it’s an emotional endeavor. Of course those emotions leak everywhere.
And yet, they simply don’t have to. Even when everyone else is fire, and even when the fires are real, you always have the choice to be water. Emotional regulation–the ability to exert control over one’s emotions and responses to emotional situations– isn’t a trait; it’s a skill. And if I convince you of one thing in my entire life, I hope it's this: it is the single most valuable skill in the modern workplace.
Building Professional Athleticism
Since I wouldn’t dare try to explain something to you without an analogy, here’s what we’re working with today: emotional regulation is to working professionals what athletic conditioning is to athletes.
All jobs, like all sports, require a certain amount of technique and skill. At the beginning of your career, most of your advancement is built on mastering those techniques. You work on your form, build your capability, and grow through nailing the basics of whatever it is you do. The problem is that without great conditioning, technique will eventually fail you. You’ll grow tired and get sloppy. Your losses will start coming from unforced errors. And in the highest echelons of your pursuit, you will lose––ten times out of ten––to the person who is evenly matched in skill but has the endurance to keep their body and head in the game just a little bit longer.
At work, emotional dysfunction is an awful lot like athletic fatigue. It undermines our ability to summon even our best-refined skills in the moments when the pressure is high. This incapacitation can show up in a million ways: refusing to cut your losses because of pride (even though you know better), overpromising because you’re insecure while setting yourself up to fail in the process, making mistakes because you’re overwhelmed and unfocused, saying something you regret because you just can’t hold it in. Outsized emotions undermine our decision-making, collaboration, focus, and precision. Yes, yours too.
If I told you that I think athletes need to go to the gym to be great… you’d tell me that’s obvious (and not a great subject for a newsletter). And yet, the idea that we should treat emotional regulation--the fundamental skill that most of our effectiveness relies on--as a necessary part of professional development is absent from most discourse about how to get ahead. So many of us are out here signing up for SQL classes, racking up project management certifications, and memorizing frameworks while failing to identify that it’s our lack of emotional fitness, not our expired Udemy license, that is holding us back.
Not to be the “especially in a world where AI” person… but especially in a world where knowledge and vast categories of skills have become commoditized by LLMs, superior technique can’t be a sustainable differentiator. The ability to self-regulate and stay emotionally neutral can be.
A steady emotional center has a zillion benefits, professional and otherwise. But in case you’re unconvinced… I’ll give you five:
1. You’ll make clearer, better decisions.
When your emotions are level and managed, you'll make better decisions. You just will. This isn't to say that emotions have no role in decision-making—feelings can be valuable inputs into many choices. But dysregulated emotions will corrupt even the best-intentioned deciders by turning every choice into a misshaped tool for emotional expression and management. "Should we ship this?" becomes a question about "am I good enough?" and "should I say this in the meeting?" becomes "will they like me?" When your emotions are in the driver's seat, you end up using business decisions to resolve personal insecurities. Accordingly, choices that might make you feel more validated in the moment can end up worsening the actual problem you set out to solve or cause you to act in the face of explicit evidence to do something else. Regulated people, meanwhile, can separate their ego from the outcome and consistently choose what's best for the work while using other tools to handle the emotions certain choices can evoke.
2. You will hear the truth more often.
IMO, the number one reason people withhold feedback isn't kindness… It's fear of other people’s reactions. People aren’t actually afraid of hurting you. They’re afraid that your unmanaged hurt will cause them pain. So when someone thinks you can't handle criticism without melting down, deflecting, or retaliating, they'll smile, nod, and talk about your blind spots with everyone except you. But if you consistently prove you're regulated in the face of hard feedback, you'll get exponentially more of it, multiplying your opportunities to learn.
3. You will build more resilient relationships.
Beyond just getting honest feedback, regulated people also build relationships that can withstand higher pressure. When your colleagues know that working with you won't require them to manage your emotions on top of their own jobs, they'll invest differently in the relationship and will show up more authentically, building a stronger foundation for your relationship. You become someone who energizes rather than exhausts, someone who adds capacity to the team rather than consumes it, someone with whom they can be more whole with. That doesn't mean you can't have bad days. You can and you will. But it means you know how to contain your bad days so they don't metastasize into everyone else's problem. And when you do have a moment of genuine distress…people will take it seriously and rally.
4. You will get invited into more rooms.
In almost every situation, there’s value in being a level and calm contributor to the vibe. But when the stakes are highest and problems are most complex, that value multiplies tenfold. Some of the most career-shaping opportunities happen in rooms that feel like they're on fire, and to get invited in, you have to prove you can be water, not kindling. Leaders don't need more people around who will amplify the chaos or who need their own emotions managed in the middle of a crisis. They invite people who can absorb the heat and help others think clearly. Being someone who stays calm when everything is falling apart will get you access to the conversations where real decisions get made, the type that can teach you career-shaping lessons.
5. You will outlast others.
Most of work, at its core, is a game of endurance disguised as a game of talent. So many people quit early, not because they lack skill, but because they can't handle the emotional discomfort of sticking with something difficult. Pride, fear of judgment, or even just basic fatigue, causes people to walk away from opportunities that could change their careers. If you can regulate yourself through these inevitable feelings rather than being controlled by them, you'll keep working when others step away. You'll stay in the room during the difficult conversations. You'll iterate when others declare defeat. And since most people are regularly operating at their emotional limits, simply outlasting the chaos is often enough to win.
The irony of living in an optimization-obsessed culture of people who life-long-learn, fine-tune their task management systems, chase down umpteenth certifications, and even A/B test their stupid LinkedIn headlines is that so many of us are investing in the things that might matter at the margins without ever attending to the competency that sits at the core of most success. You can learn all of the best prioritization frameworks in the world and nail your LinkedIn bio… but if you’re giving into overwhelm or apathy when things are truly challenging… what was the point?
My experience is that the people who are most likely to achieve their loftiest goals or to successfully lead others aren't necessarily the smartest or the most skilled. They're the ones who can keep their heads when everyone else is losing theirs. They're the ones who show up consistently, think clearly under pressure, and don't make everyone else's job harder by bringing their emotional weather into every room.
So by all means… take the SQL course. But if you really want to transform your career, it’s easy. Learn to be water.