Calm Under Fire Series E1- Why Pressure Feels Like Normal (And Why That's the Problem)

I remember it clearly when a colleague said to me, you seem so calm, how do you do it? And I said something like, I just really work well under pressure. And I believed that. I said it with so much confidence. I had no idea I was describing an actual problem. Welcome to the NeuroLeadership Edge. I'm Claire Hayek, NeuroLeadership expert, TEDx speaker, and the founder of Mind Soul Purpose team building. I spent more than 20 years leading high-stakes projects, teams, real pressure, high pressure. This podcast exists for leaders who want to understand what pressure does inside a leadership system and what to do About it. Before I get into today's episode, I want to tell you what's coming. In case you didn't know, I mentioned this in a previous episode. I will be launching a book called Calm Under Fire. It will be available and the launch will be the first week of September. I will be confirming the date soon. And this is basically the first episode in a 7-part series called Calm Under Fire. It's going to run through December, one solo episode per month at the beginning of each month. And I will be reading little passages from the book. I will be talking through the ideas, the research that I've done, and the stories that actually shaped the book. And I will be also featuring some of the global leaders I interviewed as part of that research, executives and senior leaders from across industries and continents 7 episodes of a much bigger conversation. So, if this is the kind of depth that you want from the show, please do subscribe so you do not miss any of it. Most importantly, the show is all about adding value to you and really sharing information that would be relevant to your leadership. Make sure to hit the subscribe button, or you can go on clairehayek.com/podcast. To learn a bit more. All right. So let's get right into it. I mentioned today is the first in a 7-part series running all the way through December. This series is called Calm Under Fire. And it's basically a talk about sustained pressure and what it does to leadership and how it affects our decision-making. 3 things in this episode. This is the first episode in the series. And this is the 3 things you're going to be learning. Why pressure becomes invisible over time. Yes, it does. It does, believe it or not. And what that invisibility costs you before you even recognize it or feel it. And why recognizing this is the beginning of something very important. So, let me start with a question, a quick question. When was the last time a full workday felt genuinely low in pressure? You felt like, oh, that was such an easy day, a full day. Think about it. So, this is a day where the pace was reasonable, the decisions were clear, and you left without that background noise, the hum of things that are unfinished, loops that were not closed, things were unresolved, or kind of Going through your head and ruminating over and over again, maybe a conversation or an email you forgot to you forgot to reply to or something that happened that that is really bothering you. When did that happen? When was the first day or what full day where none of this happened? You and you felt very wow! Everything is perfect. Everything is resolved. There's no noise. Everything's reasonable. Everything is aligned and focused. So, take a moment and think about it. So, for most of us and most of the leaders I work with, it takes a while to answer this question. So, I don't want to be hard on you. It's a question, kind of a reflective question more than anything else. And some of them, usually when I ask that question, some of them laugh. Some of them actually look a little startled. You know, some of them going, okay, I didn't see that one coming. And it's as if like, The question helped them realize something they had never stopped and asked themselves. And then, and maybe also it surfaced some kind of feeling. So if this is happening right now, as you're listening to this episode, this is the point. Okay. Not to make you feel uncomfortable, but to make you stop and reflect. Yeah. Pressure has become such a constant that it just sounds like another Tuesday or another Wednesday. But here's what the research shows. And and also, like I mentioned, what I have seen confirmed in executive and leadership teams across industries across the globe: when the nervous system is exposed to sustained ongoing. Stress and pressure, it adapts. Something that felt before like a bit too much to take or too much to manage, well, eventually, it becomes a standard week. The signal that used to say, oh my God, slow down. This is really too much stress, too much pressure. This is too much for me to take. Well, that's that signal just goes away, and now it becomes okay. Well, that's the new norm. Now the pressure is still there. Don't get me wrong, but your nervous system just got accustomed to it and learned to live with it, right? So that feeling that I guess if we want to call it adaptation, is called habituation. And a lot of leaders describe it as resilience. This is not the same. These are 2 different things. Resilience means you have the capacity to handle pressure and return to a clear, aligned, focused, and grounded state. That is resilience. Habituation means you stop noticing that the pressure was even there to start with. Now, most high-performing leaders I meet, quite honestly, that I speak to and I meet, they are habituated unfortunately. They are smart. They are capable. They are talented. They're experienced. But they've been just absorbing a level of pressure that would Generally should stop somebody up cold. Like it should stop you and startle you, but they just been so used to it that it feels like the norm. It's habituation, and the worst part is that they have been rewarded for it. And people call them steady. They call themselves resilient, and and and. When you do that and you feel that, you know, that you know recognition, now the brain is saying, "Wow, okay." So this state of pressure, this state of survival, is a good thing. So I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna stay there, and it becomes addictive. But here's what really is happening underneath that habituation and that that look of being steady, right? So when the nervous system actually runs at at high pressure for a long time. It starts making quiet adjustments, little adjustments. So these decisions come faster now, but it comes from a narrower focus, a narrow range of options because the brain will narrow down when it's under survival. It doesn't look at the full picture. It just needs to contain its energy and focus on one thing. surviving. Okay? Now, conversations become more like a transaction. Listening skills shrink. The creative thinking that used to feel natural, it starts to take a bit more effort. And leaders start operating from, let's call it, a compressed version of themselves. And they do not notice it because the compression happened so Gradually that every stage felt like a normal day. So, we're just adjusting to this pressure little bits at a time that it just became another normal thing to do. And of course, they make the decisions. They meet the deadlines. The team is performing. Everybody's moving on. But the quality of the thinking, the creativity, the range of it, the depth of it, The ability to see what is coming before it arrives, seeing your blind spot, being really aligned. This is where the cost quietly builds up. And that is the risk because it is invisible and you are measuring nothing. You don't even know that there's a cost. You have no idea there's a gap. Right. So I want to tell you something about where this idea comes from for me, because this is personal. This is not only research, it's also very personal. I grew up in Beirut during the civil war. I was a child, actually. I grew up, I was raised in Beirut up to my teenage years before we moved to Canada. And when I was a child, the adults around me, my family, the people in our building, the neighbors that were in the shelter, When the bombs basically got close, we all functioned. The kids, you know, we weren't really fully aware of what was going on. We knew there was bombs, but, you know, we'd observe the adults and they look like they're functioning. They kept their voices steady, they played music, they made decisions, they kept us fed. And together we played cards, we played games, board games. And I watched all of that and I learned something early on. The way to handle a situation that is objectively terrifying is to keep it from registering as terrifying. That's what I learned. That's the pattern that I took on as a child. Keep your face calm, keep your hands busy, stay in motion, make the next decision and the next one and the one after that. Now, that was survival. That was intelligent. And that was exactly the right thing to do based on the conditions we were living in. I mean, what was the alternative? Panic and freak out and yell and stress everybody out? It was just part of life. So, you had to adapt. And then I, of course, I carried this into my career. 20 years of leading high-stakes engineering projects, demanding deadlines, demanding clients, teams that needed Alignment, communication, collaboration, and I was really good at it, and I'm proud of that. And the pattern that began in a shelter in Beirut kept me running automatically, right? Because pressure had had been kind of embedded in my pattern, and it was not registering in my brain as pressure; it was just registering as. That's what you do, right? It became kind of the air I breathed. It took years to understand what was actually costing me and what it was actually costing the people I was leading. Now, I'm writing a book about this. As I mentioned, it's called Calm Under Fire and it's coming out in September 2026, first week. I spent 2 years on it interviewing executives and senior leaders across industries and continents, going deep into my own history, mapping the mechanism carefully, diving deep into their realities, their pressure patterns, what they've observed, what they've seen, what they've seen fail under pressure, what they've seen worked under pressure, what they think it is. And well, this episode, as I mentioned, is the entry point to that work. Because what I really found in leader after leader was the same pattern. Now, I don't want to give it all away. But the ones that had been really performing well under pressure for a long time were often the ones carrying the most invisible load. Capable people who had become so skilled at absorbing pressure that they had bypassed the signal. Completely, entirely. And here's what happens when you absorb pressure over time rather than process it. Now, I want to be clear on this. Not all of the leaders that I interviewed processed the pressure automatically and got used to it. Some of them did that but also got to a point where they realized this wasn't serving them anymore. And of course, they they changed the process. They became more self-aware and did the work, the personal work. Now again, I don't want to go into too much detail. You'll read it in the book. And what really happens, what I saw when you absorb pressure over time rather than process it, is that it shows up in the quality of your thinking. It shows up in your relationships, in your parenting, in your friendships. It shows up at 4 in the afternoon, 3 hours into a difficult conversation when everyone on the team is waiting for you to land on something, a decision. It shows up in the version of yourself that your team is actually getting. And the version is unfortunately a narrowed version of what you are capable of. So, you're shrinking and you're not playing at the level. That you're supposed to play at that high level because we all have that ability to play at full best version of ourselves. Now, the reality is decisions are still happening. You still make the decisions. You'll get things done. But something is missing. Remember it because it builds slowly. You adapted to the missing piece as well. That missing piece is no longer missing because there's just another day. So, here is what I want you to sit with as we move through the series. Let's start right here. Do you actually know what pressure is doing inside your system right now? Because you can only address what you can see clearly. And most leaders I work with have learned to function so well under pressure that the pressure itself has become Literally invisible. And that is what this series is built to change. Again, over the next several months, we will walk through the full picture, how the patterns you built to survive pressure became the patterns running your leadership. Some of you, maybe not all of you. And what that costs at the organizational level specifically. What a different way forward looks like and what it feels like from the actual inside. And how to make that change hold when you do realize and you put your finger on it. How you can make it stop and how you can grow out of it and rewire the new pattern. What it looks like for the whole team as well. And what it means to lead from a trained, grounded system day to day. Because it's possible. Your brain is neuroplastic and you can rewire it and transform to whatever version of yourself you want to have moving forward. And this episode, I just wanted to start with the recognition. If something in what you just heard felt familiar, and I mean familiar the way something feels when it describes your week, your decisions, your team, and that is really worth staying with. I want you to really sit down and think about it. I think it's great to start reflecting. Maybe put down the ideas if you have anything that comes to mind when you start reflecting about this. 2 things before we go. Calm Under Fire comes out in September 2026. Now, I am building a group of leaders who will get access to a couple of chapters ahead of the launch. They will also get a free copy of the book. And an early access to the full pre-launch. If you want to be part of that, you can sign up and go to clairehayek.com/book. Actually, now I got you curious and you want to map what pressure is actually doing in your leadership and your organization right now. Do reach out to me at clairehayek.com and I will reach out personally and we'll book something, a quick free diagnostic that I could do with you just so you can see what the hidden cost is. In your organization. Because you can only just recognize in order— you need to put your finger on it. You need to understand the gap and find the gap before any change can happen. And finally, subscribe to the NeuroLeadership Edge. Every subscriber helps this show grow and bring the caliber of guests and conversations that actually make a difference and will make an impact. As always, lead boldly, stay human, and turn every challenge into a