When Pressure Arrives, What Shows up?

LPX: When Pressure Arrives, What Shows Up?

Most of us probably have some sense of what happens to us when the pressure goes up.

For some people, that might mean speeding up. For others, taking control, going quiet, overthinking, fixing, smoothing things over, or just getting a bit less available to everyone else.

These responses don’t come from nowhere. They’re connected to how we’ve learned to handle pressure, what we tend to protect, and what our bodies are picking up before we’ve necessarily made sense of it.

For the next Leadership Performance Exchange, I’ll be joined by Erin Hutchins, ACT co-founder and leadership coach. A lot of Erin’s work focuses on embodiment and the nervous system — what happens in us physically and emotionally when the stakes rise, and how that shapes the way we show up.

That’s the bit I’m interested in.

We often talk about leadership as if it starts with a decision. But usually something is already happening before that. Our breathing changes. We tense. We lean in. We pull back. We feel an urge to act, fix, defend, withdraw or move faster.

And then leadership follows.

So the question for this LPX is really:

What shows up in us under pressure — and what does that do to leadership performance?

By leadership performance, I mean what our leadership creates in relationships and results.

For some leaders, pressure goes up and performance goes up with it. They get clearer, calmer, more focused. What are they doing differently? What are they noticing, telling themselves, or doing in the moment?

And then: what happens to you?

When the stakes rise, does your performance improve, narrow, speed up, tighten, or become less useful to the people around you?

Erin will bring what she sees in her work with leaders, and we’ll bring some examples and experiences into the conversation.

The X in LPX is the exchange, so we’ll also hear what others are noticing about performance under pressure — in themselves, their teams and the leaders they work with.

That’s really what this one is about: what happens to performance when the pressure is real, and whether noticing what is happening a little earlier changes what comes next.