Why Being Left Off the Email Bothers You

0:00There's an email sitting in your inbox that you weren't copied on. Someone's forwarded it to you afterwards as an afterthought, and you are pissed. More pissed than an email, really, warrants. Why does something this small get under your skin like this? Why does one missing CC feel, feel like evidence about whether you're respected, whether you're still needed, whether you're actually as secure in that room as you thought? Is your body actually reacting to if it isn't the email itself? And why does being left off the email body you this much? Let's find out shall we? Welcome to Project Joyful, the podcast for Health Centre Leaders. Project Joyful is the space for conversations at the intersection of leadership, health and lived experience. Here we explore what it means to lead and ways to follow your body, protect long-term capacity and support a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks

1:04on the outside. This episode is part of the Biology of Leadership Series. In this series, we explore leadership through your body, not as a performance to optimize or a mindset to fix, but as a biological experience, straight down the side. Leadership doesn't just live in decisions, strategies or roles. It lives in your nervous system and how responsibility is held and how reliability and care have quietly organised your body long before your podcast is done. These conversations are for leaders who are capable, trusted and effective and who are curious about how leadership is experienced internally, not just how it performs externally. There's nothing you need to do as you listen, no insight you need to apply. This looks simply an invitation to understand what's been shaping your experience of leadership and need the students and what's become possible when biology becomes a part of the conversation.

2:09Let's begin shall we? You can get email in your past. Someone's forward you an email, three names on it before yours. A decision that's more or less made, next steps more or less handed out, you weren't on the original scene. You keep reading, your jaw gets tighter, the frown is firmly in place now. You feel hot, that specific kind of hot that starts at the back of your neck and it climbs, and you can feel yourself feeling more and more annoyed with every single word, like each line adds another degree. Your hands still on the mouse, not moving, while your eyes go back over the same sentence a second time, a third time, because you're not actually reading it anymore, you're just letting it heat you up. You think to yourself, what the, you were 40 feet away the entire time this got worked out,

3:11at the desk that you sit at every single day. You glance up, you can see them from here. They're on a call, half laughing at something. No idea any of this just landed on you the way it did. You open a blank reply. First go, you write exactly what you think, no filter, and it says everything about being left out of the loop that you actually wanted to say. You read it back, and it feels good for about four seconds. Then you delete the last line, and you write it again, you're angry at this time. You read that back too. It's too much, and you know it's too much. In some part of you wants to send it exactly like that anyway, right? Okay, third go. You paste the whole thing into Copilot and ask it to make it sound more professional. Copilot gives you back a more sanitized version. Then it has a line underneath it. This response may come across as quite direct. Here's a softer alternative.

4:11You read the softer one. It's warm even. Thanks so much for looping me in, keen to stay across this, going forward. You accept Copilot's suggestion. You read it back once more before you hit send, and somehow the politeness makes it worse, because now you have to sound like someone who's completely fine, 40 feet from someone that you're very much not fine with. You send it, you're still seeing. You open your scent folder before you shut the laptop at the end of the day, not to send anything else, just to check. There's the reply, the one that Copilot smoothed out for you. Thanks so much for looping me in, keen to stay across this, going forward. You read it again, word by word this time. The way you check a document with something riding on it, keen. There's keen too much. Just keen read like you're actually keen, or does it sound like something

5:13else entirely? Was the seam all okay? Is it good enough? Are you about to make a whole scene out of something that you didn't make a scene of? Hmm. You've read it four times now, and the words have stopped meaning anything. They're just shapes on a screen, and you still don't have an answer to any of those questions. You close the laptop, you mean at this time. That night, driving home, you've stopped it all right, and it comes back on its own. Except now it isn't the email itself, it's the question underneath it. Why weren't you in on it? Was it deliberate? Did someone decide, like, actually decide that this one didn't need you? Would it nobody decide anything at all, and somehow that's worse, that you didn't even register as a name someone thought to type? You run through three or four versions of an answer before that light goes green. None of them land, none of them let it go either. You see your body speaks in feeling. Your brain speaks in thought.

6:21A thought is never raw material. It's already been shaped by something that ran ahead of it. That's why you don't believe a thought just because you think it. The meaning came first. So you saw that CC line. You clocked in less than a second that you weren't on it, and that's where the meaning got made. Before you'd read a word about what the email actually said, that meaning triggers a physiological cascade through your body, a chain of signals, and the feeling, the jaw, the heat, up the back of your neck, well, it's the last part of that sequence. So the way the time that you feel it, that decision's already been made. Now roughly 80% of vagal fibers carry signals from your body to your brain. This means that your body's constantly informing your thinking, and it's doing this off a nervous system imprint that's uniquely yours. It's running underneath the identity and the story that you've been operating from,

7:24probably for years. So the rereading, the scanning for who else was on it, the fourth check of your own reply, all of that happened downstream of a meaning that it already been made. The easiest way to catch this is in real time. It's to notice one thing. When you check in with your body in that moment, does it feel constricted or does it feel expanded? Constricted is a sign that your sympathetic nervous systems in charge and that the story or the identity that's currently running the show isn't a helpful one right now. It's most likely narrowed, defensive, already braced. Expanded is a sign that your parasympathetic nervous systems in charge. When this happens, you're more open to things like information, to more than one explanation, to possibility. So those feelings at your desk, they signaled constriction. So what could that meaning of being?

8:29Well maybe it's something like they don't know I need to know this. I'm losing visibility on something I'm responsible for. And here's the thing, maybe you are responsible for it, or maybe the very idea that you need to be across it is the same old program deciding what's yours to hold and helping you to hold more than you actually need to. Well how about decisions are getting made without me in the room? I'm not in control of something with my name on it. I'm being cut out. None of that came from the email. It came from a filter, your reticular activating system or now razz's entire job is deciding what you notice and rating it as significant. And it's based on the program that you've already have installed, not on what's actually in front of you. So these are part of you that is the reading emails for facts. It's scanning constantly, the way it scans every silence on the other end of a phone call, for whether you're safe. Now this is different

9:34whether there's a real threat, whether there might be and I isn't reading words to do that, it's reading absence. An MTCC field is just an absence. But to the part of you running this whole show, absence reads exactly like a threat that's already arrived. If that's you, if your sense of mastering has been built for years around being the one who's across everything, the one who knows, the one nobody ever needs to loop back in because you were never out of the loop to begin with. Then that absence lands as a direct hit on the exact thing that's been keeping you feeling secure this whole time. And that feeling of security didn't come from nowhere. So being the one who's across everything, the one who gets looped in, the one whose name is on the list before anybody else has to ask, well, that's probably worked for you, but years. That's probably part of why you've been promoted, why you're trusted with what you're trusted now. Somewhere along the way, being

10:35informed and being safe became the same thing because in a lot of rooms that you've climbed through, they were the same thing. People who got quietly cut out of the loop, were often the people who got quietly moved out of the room altogether. But the career that rewarded all of that isn't the career that you're in anymore. Climbing ran on your own effort, your own knowledge, your own hands on every detail, being the one who caught what everyone else missed. Leading a team runs on a completely different mechanism. It runs through other people, through what they know, what they catch, what they're trusted to handle without you anywhere near that room. Now that doesn't mean that you disappear from the work. It means that where your value sits has moved, into the calls only you have the experience to make, into what you notice that nobody else in the room is positioned to notice yet, into whether your team gets better at their jobs because of how you lead them.

11:41Not until whether you personally caught the thing they were going to catch anyway. It's different work. Most of it doesn't look like effort at all, which is exactly why it doesn't always feel like enough. Your system reading in absence is a threat. Is pattern matching against something real? Years of it. It's just pattern matching against a version of the job that you don't have anymore. That's not oversensitivity. That's an intelligent adaption built off actual evidence. But the evidence is just old and a little outdated. So here's what is actually costing you though. Running that many scenarios takes real energy. Your prediction machine doesn't do that work for free. And every rerun of an email, it's already been sent, already happened. Is energy spent on something that can't be changed. The four rereads of your own reply, checking a single word for

12:42what it might give away. The three drafts before you let co-pilot soften it. The stretch at the red light where you couldn't let it go, even after you'd already sent it. If you're tired in a way that doesn't match how much you've actually got done, there's a decent chance you already know where it went, not into the work, into replaying something that had already finished. Now let's be clear, the strategy worked. It's also got an old. It's built for a version of safety that needed you to be indispensable to feel secure. And it hasn't caught up to the fact that your job now is to build a team that's capable enough that you're not being cc'd on one email. That actually isn't that important. None of this means that the jaw stops tightening, right? It probably won't. Not for a while, maybe not ever completely. That reaction took years to build. What changes is what happens next.

13:43So you feel the constriction. You clock at the way you clocked that cc line in the first place. Except now you know what it actually is. It's an old alarm, doing the job it was trained to do. Running off a rule book that used to keep you safe. It doesn't need to carry quite so much weight anymore. You don't have to talk yourself out of that feeling. You just get to notice it. And choose whether it gets to write that email. That's the shift that's available to you. Feeling your jaw tightened, clocking exactly what it is, instill trusting your team, your judgment, your seat in that room, without needing to have been copied on every single email to feel secure in it. Now that's a quieter kind of safe. It's less exhausting to maintain and it's available to you because you'll stop needing the reaction to mean something about whether you're still enough. That same system turned an empty cc field into evidence that you weren't safe. It's the exact same system that's

14:44still running when you walk into a room having prepared more than anyone else there. There was never actually checking whether you knew enough. On the 15th of October at 9.30am New Zealand time, I'm running a live executive briefing. It's called when preparation isn't on. And it's built for exactly this moment when you've done all the preparation there is to do and you're still bracing any way. Details are in the show notes. Well come and find me on LinkedIn or Instagram where I'll be talking about when preparation isn't the problem. I'm sending you lots of love. Bye for now. Hey Facebook is into today's podcast. Can I ask you a favour? Tell conversations spoke to you today. But you please take a moment to leave the five star review. Your review will help people discover this podcast and together we can create a world where there's even more love and more laughter. And if you want to hear more from the project joyful podcast just click the subscribe button. Bye for now.