Moods are contagious, and leaders are super-spreaders. Check yours before you walk in.

Whatever you walk in carrying spreads through a room within minutes, and it spreads faster from whoever the group is watching. Tension, impatience, low-grade irritation, none of it needs to be announced to be caught. People take their reading of how bad things are from your face rather than from the facts. That is an unfair amount of power and you have it whether or not you want it.

Take thirty seconds outside the door before you go in. Decide what the room needs from you. You do not have to fake cheerful, just stop leaking the rest.