Are You a Thermostat or a Thermometer?

Last week, I was on a coaching call with a pharmaceutical executive who was recently promoted into a senior leadership role.

She’s sharp, driven, and deeply committed to becoming the leader she knows she can be.

But she shared something with me that I have previously found myself doing.

“I think I often mirror whatever emotion the other person is portraying. If they’re negative, I go down with them. If they’re super excited, I get swept up in that too.”

She paused. “And I don’t always like where that takes me.”

This is one of the most common things I see in high-achieving leaders stepping into greater leadership. They’ve got the skills and they’ve got the vision. But their energy is at the mercy of the room when it needs to be the other way around.

So I shared a distinction with her that I want to share with you today.

The difference between a thermostat and a thermometer. I learned this from motivational speaker Les Brown.

A thermometer does what thermometers do: it reads the temperature of the room and matches it.

You walk into a room that’s cold, tense, and low energy. If you be a thermometer, you go down to meet that energy and you stay there.

Most of us do this unconsciously. Someone in the meeting is frustrated, and suddenly we’re frustrated too. Someone panics, and we pick up the pace. We absorb the room without realising it.

A thermostat works differently.

A thermostat sets the temperature. It doesn’t matter what the room feels like when you walk in. You’ve already decided what level you’re operating at. And over time, the room adjusts to you, not the other way around.

Now here’s the nuance that most people miss. Being a thermostat doesn’t mean ignoring the room or bulldozing through it with false positivity. It means you meet people where they are first. You acknowledge the energy, you make people feel heard and seen, and then you don’t stay there. Slowly and deliberately, you begin to bring the temperature up. That’s the real skill that requires self-awareness and emotional resilience.

A leader that is not detached, not robotic, but intentional and aware.

This is what I call Leading From Within. Before you can lead a room, you have to be able to lead yourself. Conscious, powerful self-leadership first, so that you have something grounded to offer when everything around you isn’t.

Most people walk into rooms completely unaware of their own internal state. They’re already caught up in their thoughts, replaying what happened in the last meeting or anxious about what comes next. They’re not even present to the room they’re in. And then they wonder why they get pulled around by other people’s energy.

So how do you actually become a thermostat?

It starts before you even walk through the door.

1. Calibrate before you enter.

Your energy level isn’t set when the meeting starts, the level is set before. Give yourself even two minutes beforehand to breathe, get grounded, and be intentional about the energy you want to bring. This is you setting your own internal temperature before anyone else can set it for you. When you regulate your own nervous system first, you stop being reactive before you’ve even said a word.

2. Meet the room, then raise it.

When the room is tense or negative, the instinct is to match the pace and fix it immediately. Try the opposite. Slow down and get curious. Acknowledge how people are feeling so they feel heard and seen, because people who don’t feel heard don’t open up. Then ask questions. Get underneath what’s actually going on. You can’t bring a room up if you’ve already gone down with it, and you can’t bring a room up if you’ve skipped past people’s reality entirely.

3. Offer the perspective they can’t see.

Once you understand what’s really going on, your job as a thermostat isn’t just to solve the problem. It’s to help people see a bigger picture than the one they’re stuck in. Most of the time, people are lost in their own thinking and they need someone to gently open a door to a different way of seeing things. What if we looked at it this way? What if we tried this instead? That’s how you shift the temperature. Not by telling, but by expanding what’s possible.

Most leaders focus on what they’re going to say when they walk into the room. The thermostat leader focuses on who they’re going to be before they even enter it.

That’s Leading From Within.

If this resonates and you’re stepping into a bigger role or feeling pulled down by the energy around you, reply and let me know where you’re at. I’d love to hear.

J

P.s. here are a few ways I can support your journey:

1) WE ARE AT CAPACITY for our Elite Leadership Experience Circle on Wednesday 4th March 5pm GMT – Be in a powerful space to uncover your blind spots with other growth minded professionals. Join the waiting list for the next one . ​
​2) 📓 Journal with Jaineel 7 Day Experience for Free – 7 days, 10 minutes a day. One prompt. ​

3) 🧘 Download my free guided meditation – 20 minutes to calibrate your energy and shift your state. Remember: you don’t attract what you want, you attract who you are. ​

4) 📞 Let’s talk – If you’re ready to do this work 1:1 or in a group setting, book a call with me ​