The Most Dangerous Leadership Mistake Empaths Make With Narcissistic Leaders

Ever feel like you’re pouring energy into a black hole—rewriting emails, softening your tone, apologizing for their reactions—yet nothing improves? We dig into why empathic, high-achieving leaders lose footing around manipulative or narcissistic personalities and pinpoint the core mistake: trying to earn fairness, respect, and accountability from someone who thrives on confusion and control. Instead of clarity, over-explaining becomes emotional labor that signals power to the other side while draining yours.

We unpack the two-worlds mismatch: you explain to connect; they invite explanations to maintain control. From shifting standards to emotional baiting, we show you how to spot the pattern quickly and stop taking responsibility before it’s even assigned. You’ll learn a practical approach to get grounded—seeing the dynamic clearly, listening to your body’s no, and responding with concise boundaries and calm follow-through. We share the SAFE framework to diagnose chaos, anchor in your body, frame clear limits, and execute decisions without drama.

A client story brings this to life. Her boss kept moving the goalposts: star one week, problem the next. She broke the loop by refusing to chase understanding, documenting criteria, and aligning effort with clear agreements. The spiral lost momentum, and her confidence returned. The takeaway is simple and liberating: you don’t need to be less sensitive; you need to place your empathy wisely. Lead with neutrality, boundaries, and self-trust. Power returns when you stop auditioning for approval and let your limits define the game.

If this resonates, share it with a colleague who over-gives, subscribe for more tools on emotionally intelligent leadership, and leave a quick review—what boundary will you try this week?

Chapters

• 0:16 Why Empaths Lose Their Footing
• 4:12 The Cost Of Over-Explaining
• 9:00 Two Different Worlds At Play
• 13:20 Conditioned To Self-Soothe And Fix
• 17:11 Spotting The Pattern With SAFE
• 22:30 You Can’t Earn Fairness From Chaos
• 26:32 Boundaries, Neutrality, And Sovereignty

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:16

Welcome to the show leader. We got lots of feedback that you really enjoyed the last episode on empathic and narcissistic leadership. So we're gonna carry on. We're gonna do another episode on the most dangerous leadership mistake empaths can make with narcissistic leaders. Now, again, we're not diagnosing anyone. I know that word is thrown around so much these days. So we can say a toxic boss or a boss with maladaptive behaviors, with manipulative behaviors, with emotional immaturity, can't take accountability, likes to cause commotion and turmoil, whatever it is. If you are interacting with this type of personality in your business, in your career, in your place of work, it can really throw you for a loop. And it can cause a lot of problems in your own growth and not only in your work environment, but it can seep into your personal life. I've worked with multiple clients who have come to me after working with someone who was supposed to be a leader for them, and they've gone through the emotional ringer, and their confidence has taken a huge hit. And these are clients who have achieved enormous things in their career. Things that a lot of people would look at and say, wow, there's no way that this person is lacking any confidence. But working with these types of toxic personalities when you are highly sensitive or you're an empath, again, we don't want to judge anything, right? We're not going to judge, but a lot of these patterns are not healthy. And we can't change something unless we see it for what it is. So today we're going to explore a question that hits right at the heart of why so many empathic, high-achieving leaders lose their footing around narcissistic personalities. What is the most dangerous mistake empaths can make around these narcissistic personalities, these leaders that are manipulating as opposed to actually leading? And why does it cost them? It feels like it costs them so much power. So if you've ever walked away and you just feel like, what the heck happened there? What was going on in that conversation? Why do I feel off? Why do I feel confused? Maybe they were upset, and you feel responsible for their reactions, even though you're like, what even happened? I don't I don't remember doing anything. I don't think I did anything. Or you feel like you have to defend yourself, or you have to explain one more time, and you're just at that place where you're like, What? I don't understand what is happening here. I feel like I've lost my footing. So one mistake that we can make with these personalities is you're trying to earn fairness from someone who's uh cannot give it to you. They are not going to give you what you one deserve and what you want. So one of the most dangerous leadership mistakes you can make is you're trying to earn the understanding, the mutual respect. And you're trying to earn it through over-explaining, emotional labor, and it's not going to work. You're not going to earn anything. This is where we start over giving. And sometimes, right? A lot of us have to learn this lesson the hard way. We can start overgiving to someone who's just an empty pit, and someone with these personality traits, they're going to just keep taking, and there's no stopping, right? You're just like pouring into the void, pouring into the void. You try to earn accountability. You're not going to earn their accountability. They're not going to be accountable. You're trying to earn emotional stability. You are not going to earn that. You are not going to get that from a personality trait like this. And sometimes you're going to try, you're going to try to explain yourself, over-clarify your intentions. You're going to try softening your tone, maybe writing these huge long emails or text message, explaining yourself, giving all these reasons, taking responsibility thing for things that are not your responsibility in the first place. They're not even yours. You try to make the environment easier for them. You cannot earn what someone doesn't have the capacity to give. Certainly not through kindness. None of that is gonna work on a narcissistic pattern. It's just not going to work. It's gonna it's gonna exhaust you, it's gonna confuse you. But it's not going to give you what you're trying to get if you're trying to get that. So why do the empaths fall into this? Even when the empath is extremely powerful, extremely confident, you we can still fall into this. You may be believing that clarity comes through a mutual understanding, but the narcissistic personality thrives in confusion. So you might be thinking, if I explain myself better, we'll connect. We're gonna get that connection. And the narcissistic personality can be th can be thinking, if they keep explaining, I stay in control. So we're talking about two completely different worlds here. So you're over-explaining because you want to connect, you want, you want to be understood, you want to be seen as the person you are. And the narcissistic personality is saying, Yep, keep going, keep explaining, keep giving me what you got, because I can see by you doing that, I'm in control, I'm in power, and that's giving me exactly what I want. It's two completely different worlds. So another issue is you're are you've already taken responsibility before assigning responsibility. And I'm saying you, and I'm including myself in this because I've definitely been in these patterns, so there's no judgment on my end towards you. If you're like, oh, this sounds like me. Yeah, we all gotta learn this lesson. So you can scan for ways you have contributed, and they're scanning for ways where you can carry the blame. So if you are accountable and they're looking for how they can point the blame. Again, two different worlds. Empaths are often conditioned to be emotionally self-sufficient. We're conditioned to be emotionally self-sufficient, especially a lot of the clientele that I work with, a lot of the leaders that I work with, a lot of them have the same story of I grew up, how to figure it out on my own, how to learn on my own, right? It's a survival strategy. You've also learned to understand people because it makes you feel safe. So this can look like you trying to understand the leader because you think you'll be respected. If I can understand, let's say, your romantic partner, I can get things to calm down. If I can understand their reaction, I'm going to fix this dynamic. But that just keeps you in a loop with a narcissistic personality. Because the narcissistic personality does not want to be understood. They want to be validated, they want to be emotionally fed. A lot of times they just want to be obeyed. They don't want to be understood, and they're going to have a aura of confusion around them. So what does this actually look like? So we can spot the pattern, so we can see the pattern. If you remember, if you listen to the previous episode, we talked about the safe method. And the first part of the safe method is seeing the pattern. So I want you to look for these aspects. Are you preparing for every conversation? Are you writing emails three, four, five, six times, rewriting them, spending hours on one email? Apologizing for things you didn't even do. Taking on their emotional reactions as your responsibility. Trying to explain your intentions so it's understood. Trying to make them feel comfortable. Trying to fix the misunderstanding. Trying to soothe their ego. Remember that a narcissistic personality wants to exploit. And when you are an empathic leader, you're highly sensitive, you're giving, you're an overgiver, you're gonna be trying all these things, you're gonna be giving, you're gonna be pouring. And the narcissistic personality is designed to exploit that. So you end up exhausted, doubting yourself, overfunctioning, blaming yourself for their behavior, feeling confused, and like you've been put in a ringer. Right? The dynamic is engineered to make you feel at fault. So you keep giving. Hands up, if you've maybe you haven't had a relationship at work like this. Maybe this has been a personal relationship. I think most of the people that I've worked with, they've also had a personal relationship with a narcissistic personality. It's almost like the paying our dues to learn from these relationships to really understand what boundaries are, what our self-worth is, self-trust, self-respect. So you can't earn fairness from chaos. And that is what these personalities are bringing, right? The personality is bringing chaos. So you gotta get out of, I'm gonna fix this, I'm going to do something to help this and make it better, make it more fair, because you're just gonna keep giving over giving. Right? So narcissistic dynamics are gonna break the rules of healthy communication, which means you have to break your old rules, your old patterns, I should say, of emotional labor. So stop trying to make them understand, make them calm, make them reasonable, make the relationship work, make the conversation smoother, stop trying. And instead you start leading with clarity, boundaries, neutrality, that's really big. Neutrality is is a big part of the lesson here. Self-trust and emotional sovereignty. And your power is gonna start to return. So when you get into these dynamics, what can happen is you start to feel like you're being misunderstood. Maybe like you're failing, you're too much. Maybe that you start feeling you're the problem. You are you you are not the problem. You are simply using emotional intelligence in a place where emotional intelligence is not going to be reciprocated. Your empathy isn't the issue, it's the placement of where your empathy is. And this is a tough one. This is a real tough one, especially if you have a soul growth lesson around contribution, because you're gonna want to always have that empathy, right? Front and center. But in these specific dynamics, it is it completely turns it on its head. So once you stop trying to earn fairness from someone who uses confusion as a weapon, you're gonna stop feeling like you're losing yourself in the dynamic. And you're gonna feel clear, grounded. You're gonna get to a place where you feel like you are leading from that power, from your true, innate, divine, clear power, and not from the emotional wounding. And there's a lot of reasons why we can get into these dynamics. There's a lot of soul growth. There's there again, we're not judging. These are powerful dynamics, these are powerful relationships that hopefully we don't have to be in for a huge amount of time, even though sometimes they are lifelong dynamics, especially if someone's in your family and it just is that challenging dynamic. Hopefully, in a work environment, this doesn't have to be an extended dynamic that you are finding yourself in because it can get quite toxic and unhealthy, but they are powerful learning experiences. So I had a client who her superior would always move the goalpost. Right? So one week she was a star, then she was a problem. Every time something fell off, she would want to fix it, she would want to push harder, she would want to prove herself. I often talk about the high achiever wound, right? Of proving, of tying your self-worth with achievement. So she would over-explain, she would over-deliver, she would over-apologize. She was trying to be understood. And again, you can't earn your way into being understood. You can't earn your way into a fair dynamic in a system that is built on chaos. So part of the work with this client was really getting clear on the pattern, seeing things for what they are, right? You know, what can be helpful is if you separate yourself from it. And this is really important work that it is helpful to have someone, whether it's a coach, whether it's a therapist, whether it's a mentor, someone that you trust, someone that can work with you through this, because it can be very hard to make sense of things, especially when you're in it, right? But taking an eagle-eye view, so separating yourself, really bringing yourself up and seeing it from an eagle eye view, as if you're just observing what is happening, right? That's when your clarity can return. You want to all the time be trusting your body. What is your body saying? I don't care if your brain is saying, oh, this is seems okay. This seems fine, and your body's screaming no, then you trust your body. Okay, your body is your immediate connection to truth. Your brain is gonna tell you a lot of stories. So when we started going through the safe method, she started to feel clear again, right? She started working on the patterns. A lot of us have these patterns that are sometimes decades old of overexplaining, of not feeling comfortable setting boundaries. She started setting boundaries, she removed herself from the emotional hooks, right? That emotional baiting. She unhooked, it was a process, it didn't happen overnight. But she was able to come back to herself. She was able to calm, ground, be decisive again, know her worth. And eventually that dynamic, the spiral, it disintegrated. Because again, a you're you're just a part of that narcissistic game. It's not a personal attack. It is literally just a game. And when you she removed herself, it's the game stopped. So the shift is you seeing that you're not losing your power. We never actually lose our power, but it can feel like that. But you're not losing it because you're weak or fragile or anything that constitutes a negative connotation, right? We're losing our power, or it feels like we're losing our power because we are overgiving in the wrong places. We are trying to fix something that's never going to be fixed. We're trying to make sense of something that's never going to make sense. And again, right, you don't need to become less sensitive. You don't need to shut down. You certainly don't need to harden yourself. But you need to stop trying to earn what someone does not have the capacity to ever give you. And it's about coming back to yourself, coming back to your body, coming back to your safety, which is a divine right. We all have a divine right to feel safe in our body, in where we are working, and who we are. You are safe, you are strong, you are not alone in this. There are so many people that have gone, are going through, will go through a dynamic of this sort. So if you are like, ugh, felt like I was all alone, like nobody would understand. There is a massive community of people who get it. If this landed with you, if it resonated with you, if you're like, yes, this feels like something I have experienced. I'm still trying to move through it, understand it. If you're realizing that, you know, you're overgiving to people that don't deserve your overgiving, that it's like an empty pit. Again, we don't want to judge. We're not trying to judge. It's not about judgment, but it's just about recognizing and seeing it for what it is. Sometimes it's hard for the empath or the high-integrity, heart-centered leader to really see these other dynamics. I know for me it was challenging to really understand these dynamics. In my earlier years in junior high, I remember some girls who would call me to go out and I would go and meet them, and they wouldn't show up. And this happened a couple of times. And I remember finally them, them laughing and saying, Why do you keep going when we don't come? And in my mind, I was thinking, why wouldn't I come? If we made plans, of course I'm going to show up. I follow through with what I say I'm going to do. And for me, it was a wake-up call to say, oh, not everybody is like that. And for a bit, I tried to understand why they would even think that was fun or enjoyable to tell someone to go meet them and not show up. I really couldn't understand. Still to this day, I'm like, what enjoyment do you get out of that other than a power and control? But I had to just leave, leave it, stop trying to understand it and just have the awareness that there are people out there that are not going to operate in integrity. There are people out there that have an emotional immaturity. And there are people out there that are just feeding off manipulation, control, power. They want to take, they don't want to give. And that is a part of the human experience. And having boundaries, honoring yourself, making sure your self-esteem, your self-worth are on point. And if they're not, that's okay. But getting the help you need to get them to a place where you don't find yourself in these dynamics as often. You still might, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. But what I found is once someone starts going through the system, they really start understanding it, they start putting in place the boundaries, they start to feel safe within themselves, they start trusting themselves that when these dynamics show their face or they come in, that leader can tell a lot faster. And they don't get entangled with it anymore. It's more of a quick awareness of, oh, okay, I see this dynamic. I see what's happening here. I'm going to separate myself or I know exactly how to handle this. I know how to deal with this now. I'm not going to fall into overexplaining, trying to control it, trying to make it better. I see it for what it is, and I'm going to use my tools. If this is a topic that you want more on, please drop me a text message. You can head on over to the show notes and you can send me a text message, or you can always send me an email. Just make sure you put podcast question in the subject line because we get a ton of emails all the time, and we want these ones to stand out. And you can send it to infotlisajefs.com. If you would like to speak with me about private coaching for 2026, I'm going to have limited spots for private coaching in 2026, but I will have a few openings for very deep long-term coaching and then some VIP days and some intensives and some shorter term coaching. So you can always book a test drive consult at Lisa Jeffs.com. We'll have a conversation and see if it's a fit. Leader, I love you. I appreciate you. Take care of yourself. Remember, you are worth it. You are deserving. And as always, let's stay connected.

SPEAKER_00: 28:53

Big dreams, believing it. Wisdom, we speaking and making everything that you're looking for. Brought to you by Lisa Jessica, the magnetic leader.