Sandesh's Sudden Resignation

    Sandesh quit his job on the spot after one tough meeting, with no plan and no backup. Avinash Chate breaks down the emotional hijacking behind it and the Self-Control trait that could have stopped it.

    Sandesh's Sudden Resignation

    Sandesh's Sudden Resignation: What Emotional Hijacking Costs You at Work

    Sandesh had been unhappy at his job for months. He never said a word about it to anyone who could help. Then, after one particularly tough meeting, something in him snapped — and he walked straight into his manager's cabin and quit. No plan. No backup. No notice period discussion. Just pure impulse, in front of witnesses, in a moment he could never take back.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    Self-Control is the fourth trait on the EQ — left — side of your Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). It comes right after Emotional Awareness, Accurate Self-Assessment and Self-Confidence, because you cannot manage a feeling you haven't first learned to notice. Sandesh's story is what happens when that sequence breaks — when frustration builds for months, unnoticed and unmanaged, until it detonates in a single irreversible act.

    The Story: A Resignation That Was Never a Decision

    Sandesh wasn't a difficult employee. He wasn't known for outbursts. By every account, he was ordinary — competent, quiet, the kind of professional nobody worries about. But underneath that ordinary exterior, he had been unhappy at his job for a long time. Months, not days. The kind of slow-burning dissatisfaction that a lot of people carry silently: a role that stopped exciting him, feedback that stung more than it should have, targets that felt increasingly unreasonable, a manager he no longer felt understood by.

    He never raised it formally. He never asked for a transfer, a role change, or even a candid one-on-one about what was bothering him. It just sat there, compounding, week after week.

    Then came a difficult meeting. We don't know every detail of what was said in that room — maybe it was tough feedback, maybe a target was raised again, maybe a decision went against him. What we do know is what happened next: Sandesh felt so overwhelmed that logic simply switched off. He got up, walked out of that meeting, went straight to resign, and left the building. On the spot. No two-weeks notice discussion. No conversation with HR about his options. No call to a mentor or a friend to sanity-check the decision. Just the decision itself, made and executed within minutes.

    It was only later — once the adrenaline wore off — that reality caught up with him. He had bills to pay. He had a family depending on his income. He had, in a matter of minutes, converted months of quiet unhappiness into a financial and career crisis that a calmer version of himself would never have created. The damage to his bank balance, his resume gap, his reference from that employer — all of it was now locked in. There was no undo button.

    What Actually Happened Inside Sandesh's Head

    To understand Sandesh, you need to understand what neuroscientists call emotional hijacking — a term popularised by psychologist Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence, and one I lean on heavily when I train leaders on this exact trait.

    Think of your brain as having two boxers in the ring. The first is your emotional brain, the amygdala — the heavyweight. It's fast, powerful, and reactive. The moment it senses a threat, real or perceived, it floods your body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart races. Your muscles tense. Rational thinking shuts down almost instantly.

    The second is your rational brain, the prefrontal cortex — the featherweight. It's slower, more thoughtful, logical. It's the part of you that weighs consequences, checks whether a decision makes sense, and holds you back from doing something you'll regret in an hour.

    Here's the problem: the heavyweight can knock out the featherweight anytime it wants. Under extreme stress, anger, or humiliation, the emotional brain takes over completely. It's like a hijacker storming the cockpit of a plane — your emotions are now flying the aircraft, and logic has been thrown out. That's exactly what happened to Sandesh in that meeting room. The heavyweight boxer landed the knockout blow, and by the time the featherweight — his rational brain — could even get up off the canvas, he had already resigned.

    Sandesh Isn't Alone — And That's the Point

    I tell Sandesh's story alongside a handful of others in the Self-Control chapter of Stars at India Inc., because it's rarely a one-off. There's Praful, who fired off a rude, defensive email to his boss after weeks of feeling overworked, and regretted it the second he hit send. There's the story of a teenager in a Mercedes in Delhi in 2018 who, enraged after being overtaken on the road, chased down another car and shot the driver dead — the most extreme, tragic version of the same failure. There's Zinedine Zidane, France's captain, head-butting Marco Materazzi in the 110th minute of the 2006 World Cup final and ending a legendary career on a red card instead of a trophy. There's even Gautam Gambhir shoving Ambati Rayudu on an IPL field in 2017 after a verbal exchange about family.

    None of these people were fools. Zidane was, by universal agreement, one of the greatest footballers who ever lived. Gambhir was an India World Cup winner. Sandesh, in his own smaller and more human way, was simply a working professional under pressure — exactly like most of the people reading this. That's what makes his story more useful than Zidane's for most of us: it isn't a stadium moment watched by 69,000 people. It's a Tuesday afternoon meeting room, the kind every one of us sits in regularly.

    Why Self-Control Fails Precisely When You Need It Most

    Self-control is never tested when things are going well. It's tested in five specific situations, and Sandesh's story sits squarely inside the fifth:

    Sandesh's difficult meeting likely combined more than one of these — probably criticism plus months of accumulated frustration plus the temptation to simply be done with it. That combination is exactly when the amygdala is loudest and the prefrontal cortex is weakest. It's also, not coincidentally, exactly when your decisions carry the most permanent consequences.

    Marshall Goldsmith's Fix: Insert the Gap

    Here's the insight from executive coach Marshall Goldsmith that I lean on constantly when I train leaders on this trait: self-control isn't about willpower. It's about managing your triggers.

    Most people live by this default model:

    Trigger → Response.

    A tough meeting happens (trigger), and you quit on the spot (response). No thought in between. It's a reflex, not a decision.

    Goldsmith's breakthrough is to insert two steps between the trigger and the response:

    Trigger → Impulse → Awareness → Choice → Response.

    That tiny gap — the moment where you notice the impulse rising and consciously choose what to do with it — is where self-control actually lives. If Sandesh had inserted even sixty seconds of awareness between "I want to quit right now" and actually walking to resign, an entirely different story would have unfolded. He might still have decided to leave the job. But it would have been a decision, made with his rational brain in the room, not a reflex fired entirely by his emotional brain.

    A 3-Step Exercise to Build This for Yourself

    Step 1 — Pick your behavioural goals. For instance: stay calm during critical feedback, don't make big decisions when angry, listen fully before reacting in meetings.

    Step 2 — List your triggers. Which situations derail you (end-of-day meetings, rushed reviews, high-pressure deadlines)? Which people trigger you? And, just as important, in which situations do you stay composed — when you're rested, prepared, in a good mood?

    Step 3 — Forecast your environment. Look at tomorrow's calendar. Mark the high-risk slots. If you have a tense review at 5 PM, when you're already tired, you now know in advance that your self-control will be tested — and you can prepare for it instead of being ambushed by it.

    You can't always control your triggers. But you can absolutely control your response to them, provided you've built the habit of pausing first.

    What Sandesh Should Have Done in That Room

    None of this is about telling Sandesh to bottle up months of genuine unhappiness — that unhappiness was real and deserved to be addressed. The failure wasn't that he felt frustrated. The failure was in the gap between the trigger and the response. A few small moves would have changed everything:

    These aren't complicated techniques. They're small, learnable habits — the same building blocks I train inside Signature Corporate Training Programs when leaders and teams work through the EQ side of the Winning Kite together.

    Employee A vs Employee B: The Self-Control Gap

    Low Self-Control (Employee A)High Self-Control (Employee B)
    Loses temper easily when things don't go as plannedStays calm even when frustrated or stressed
    Quits projects or jobs impulsively, like Sandesh didPersists through challenges without giving up on impulse
    Sends angry messages in the heat of the momentPauses before responding to difficult emails or situations
    Gets defensive when receiving feedbackReceives feedback professionally, without becoming defensive
    Lets personal stress spill into professional behaviourSeparates personal emotions from professional responsibilities

    Both employees can have identical skills and qualifications on paper. But Employee B is the one who gets trusted with bigger responsibilities, promoted faster, and respected more — precisely because of this one trait.

    The Discipline of the Ones Who Stayed

    It helps to hold Sandesh's story next to its opposite. Rahul Dravid earned the nickname "The Wall" not only for his batting technique but for his emotional control — facing the fastest, most hostile bowling attacks in the world without ever losing his composure. MS Dhoni, in the 2011 World Cup final, promoted himself up the batting order under the most intense pressure Indian cricket has ever seen and played one of the calmest innings in the sport's history. And Cheteshwar Pujara, during India's historic 2020–21 series win in Australia, absorbed blow after blow from Australian fast bowlers and refused even painkillers — fearing they would dull his focus — because staying present mattered more than escaping the pain.

    None of them were free of frustration. They simply didn't let the trigger dictate the response. That's the entire difference between them and Sandesh in that meeting room — not the intensity of the feeling, but what happened in the gap right after it.

    Psychologist Carol Dweck's research on mindset offers a useful frame here too: people who see setbacks as information to learn from, rather than verdicts on their worth, recover their composure faster. Sandesh's meeting wasn't a verdict on him as a professional — but in the moment, his amygdala convinced him it was.

    Building This at Your Workplace

    If you're a manager reading this and recognising a "Sandesh" on your own team — someone who's gone quiet, whose frustration has been building for months without a formal channel to surface it — the intervention point is long before the resignation meeting. Regular, honest one-on-ones. Actually asking "how are you finding this role, really?" and creating enough safety that the honest answer comes out in week three of unhappiness, not month six.

    And if you're the one carrying the unspoken frustration yourself right now, the lesson from Sandesh isn't "never quit." Sometimes leaving is exactly the right call. The lesson is: never let the decision get made by your amygdala. Let it get made by you, with your rational brain fully in the room, after the pause.

    This is precisely the muscle we build inside my corporate training programs on emotional intelligence — not abstract theory, but the specific habit of inserting that gap between trigger and response, rehearsed until it becomes reflexive.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is emotional hijacking, and is it what happened to Sandesh?

    Emotional hijacking is when your amygdala (the fast, reactive emotional brain) overpowers your prefrontal cortex (the slower, rational brain) under stress, anger or humiliation. Sandesh's resignation is a textbook case: one difficult meeting flooded him with frustration, his rational brain got shut out, and he quit on the spot with no plan and no backup.

    Why do smart, capable professionals like Sandesh make impulsive decisions?

    Because self-control isn't about intelligence or talent, it's about managing triggers. Months of unaddressed unhappiness built pressure. Without emotional awareness or a pause-and-respond habit, one tough meeting was enough to trigger a reflex reaction instead of a considered choice.

    How could Sandesh have handled the situation differently?

    By inserting a pause between the trigger and the response. Marshall Goldsmith's model is Trigger to Impulse to Awareness to Choice to Response. Sandesh could have asked for a day, spoken to a mentor, or simply left the room to cool down before making any decision about his job.

    Where does self-control fit in Avinash Chate's Winning Kite framework?

    Self-control is Trait #4 on the EQ (left) side of the Winning Kite, right after Emotional Awareness, Accurate Self-Assessment and Self-Confidence. It acts as the stabiliser: without it your EQ, RQ and PQ all wobble under pressure, and the kite that is your career struggles to stay airborne.

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