A Window into My Engine Room

Have you heard of the Resting Disgruntled Face? Many people with strong, dominant personalities have it. I have had it.

It has nothing to do with how I feel in the moment. It is simply what my face does when my brain is moving. When I am thinking, planning, and already working out what comes next, my expression does not look peaceful. It looks stern.

I have been told this many times, by partners and colleagues who did not yet know what was actually happening behind that expression. And for a long time, I could not understand why it mattered, because from the inside, I felt completely engaged. Energized and alive.

That gap between what I was experiencing internally and what everyone around me was receiving is something I wrote about in my book. And it turns out it is not just me.

There is something inside a dominant, driven, intense person that never fully powers down. I call it the internal turbine. It is always running. When we are in motion, solving, building, we feel most like ourselves. The stillness that other people find restorative, we find unsettling. We process the world by moving through it. We feel alive when we are in action, and vaguely restless when we are not.

That turbine is not a flaw. It is the source of everything we build.

The problem is not the turbine. The problem is when it runs at the same speed in every room. When the intensity of a high-stakes decision follows someone home to dinner. When the focus that drives results reads as indifference in a conversation that needs presence. When the urgency that gets things done creates a distance the dominant leader does not intend and does not see.

What I hear most often from the partners, colleagues, and teams of dominant leaders is not that the person is unkind. It is that the leader feels intimidating to them.

A Letter to My Exes is a window into the engine room. For the person with that internal turbine, and for everyone who has spent years trying to reach someone through it.

If you have ever been told you look unapproachable when you are simply thinking, that you seem checked out when you are the most invested person at the table, that your silence reads as disapproval when it is just your face doing what your face does, this book was written for people like us.

And if you live or work alongside someone like that, it offers something rare: an honest explanation of the drive underneath the behavior. Because understanding is where everything starts.

A Letter to My Exes: How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant, publishing June 25th, 2026.

Pre-order on Amazon

More soon.

Roberto

P.S. Dana R. Carney, a UC Berkeley researcher, has documented what she calls “resting cranky face,” the neutral expression that reads as angry or contemptuous to everyone else, and has confirmed that it creates real distance in leadership relationships. Some of us have been navigating this our whole careers without knowing it had a name. The book has a name for a lot of things like this.

#TyrantNoMore

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