Have you ever noticed that your best thinking has impeccable timing… just not always the timing you’d choose?
A conversation finishes, you walk back to your desk and suddenly the words arrive. The clear explanation, or the thoughtful challenge or the question you wish you’d asked. By the time you’re making a cup of tea, driving home or standing in the shower, everything feels obvious.
I find those moments strangely encouraging because they tell me something important.
Your capability was there all along.
The conversation simply finished before you could access all of it.
That one observation has quietly changed the way I think about leadership presence under pressure, confidence and what really happens when the pressure is on. In fact, I wrote more about why confidence changes under pressure in an earlier article because it’s a pattern I see time and again.
For years we’ve been encouraged to think about leadership presence as something we create. Stand a little taller, make stronger eye contact, lower your voice and learn how to command a room. Some of that advice is useful. At the same time, I wonder whether we’ve accidentally made leadership much harder than it needs to be by suggesting we have to become someone different before people will see us as leaders.
When I think about the leaders I’ve trusted most, I don’t remember how they stood or whether they had a particularly commanding voice. I remember how I felt after spending time with them. I left those conversations thinking more clearly, feeling calmer and believing I had something valuable to contribute. Somehow they brought out the best in the people around them, and I’ve realised that’s what leadership presence feels like to me.
Perhaps leadership presence under pressure is about helping other people experience more of who you already are, rather than becoming more impressive.
That’s certainly the pattern I’ve noticed in my coaching.
I work with ambitious women in science and technology, and capability is almost never the issue. My clients are bright, thoughtful and exceptionally well prepared. They’re the people others turn to when something complicated needs solving. They’re often the quiet expert in the room who’s already thought three steps ahead.
What I hear instead is something much more interesting.
“There are meetings where I know I’m capable of more than people saw.”
That sentence always makes me stop because it contains its own answer. Most often they know they are capable and they are questioning or recognising that other people didn’t experience the full extent of what they were capable of in that particular moment.
Those are two very different things.
I’ve become fascinated by what creates that gap because understanding it changes the conversation completely. Your body is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
Whenever something feels important, your nervous system starts preparing you to keep yourself safe. That’s an extraordinary piece of engineering and one we’re usually very grateful for. The challenge is that your brain doesn’t always distinguish between physical danger and psychological pressure.
- Presenting to senior leaders.
- Receiving difficult feedback.
- Speaking up when everyone else seems more certain.
- Challenging a decision you don’t agree with.
If you’ve ever left a meeting wishing you’d said something different, you’re certainly not alone. I explored that experience in more depth in my article about speaking up at work because it’s one of the most common frustrations clients bring to coaching.
Your brain recognises uncertainty and quietly starts shifting its resources towards protection.
That helps explain why your thinking can become narrower, why your working memory doesn’t feel quite as available and why you might notice yourself editing your thoughts, over-explaining or waiting for the perfect moment before contributing.
Those behaviours tell me your nervous system is trying to help, not that you’re not leadership material.
That’s the bit I find really hopeful.
Instead of asking ourselves, “Why wasn’t I confident enough?”, we can ask a much more useful question.
“What would help me access more of my capability when the pressure is on?”
There’s also a growing body of research showing how psychological safety influences our willingness to contribute ideas, ask questions and speak up, something that Amy Edmondson has pioneered over many years. Understanding leadership presence under pressure starts with understanding what the brain is trying to do and the brain changes the way it allocates attention and cognitive resources. Your expertise doesn’t disappear. The American Psychological Association has published extensively on the way stress affects attention, memory and decision-making, helping explain why pressure changes our access to thinking rather than our intelligence itself. Some of it simply becomes harder to reach in the moment, which explains why your best answer often appears ten minutes after the meeting has finished.
Your capability is still there. Leadership presence under pressure is about creating the conditions that allow you to access more of it when the moments matter most.
How Leadership Presence Under Pressure Really Works
Here’s the part I find most encouraging.
Once you understand what’s happening, you stop trying to become more confident and start creating the conditions where more of your capability can come forward.
That feels like a much kinder way to approach leadership.
One of the things I love most about the women I work with is how much they care. They prepare thoroughly, think carefully and genuinely want to make a positive contribution. They don’t need to become a different person in order to lead well. I’d much rather help them access more of the capability they already have when the pressure is on.
That’s why I encourage clients to prepare themselves as carefully as they prepare their presentations.
Before your next important meeting, spend a few minutes thinking about the state you’d like to bring into the room as well as the information you’d like to share. Calm. Curious. Clear. You don’t have to feel those things perfectly. Simply choosing them gives your brain a different place to focus.
There are a few simple experiments that are worth trying.
- Decide on the one message you want people to leave remembering.
- Give yourself permission to pause before answering a difficult question.
- Notice when your inner critic starts becoming louder than your own judgement.
- Spend a couple of minutes helping your nervous system settle before you walk into the room.
One of the approaches I often use with clients is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Tapping. It’s a simple technique that helps calm the nervous system, making it easier to think clearly and access your existing capability. Peta Stapleton is one of the world’s leading researchers on EFT as an approach for reducing stress and anxiety, although like many coaching tools it’s best understood as one part of a broader toolkit rather than a magic wand. I don’t use it because nerves are a problem. Caring about your work is a strength. I use it because I’ve seen how powerful it can be when knowledge, experience and good judgement are no longer competing with a nervous system that’s trying to keep you safe.
There’s one final experiment I’d love you to try.
The next time you leave an important meeting, resist the temptation to start with everything you wish you’d said. Your brain will happily do that without any encouragement.
Instead, ask yourself:
- What am I pleased I contributed?
- When did I feel most like myself?
- What would help me bring even more of that version of myself into the next conversation?
Starting there doesn’t ignore the things you’d like to improve. It simply reminds your brain that learning begins much more effectively when we recognise what’s already working.
Leadership Presence Under Pressure Starts Here
If you’ve been reading this and quietly thinking, “That sounds exactly like me,” I’d love you to know you’re not the only one. It’s also exactly the kind of conversation I have every week with ambitious women in science and technology through my leadership coaching, and capability is almost never the issue. Together, we explore what’s making that capability harder to access under pressure and help more of it become available when it matters most.
For some people that starts with a single Steady Under Pressure session. In seventy-five minutes we’ll focus on one real challenge, understand what’s happening beneath the surface and develop practical strategies you can use straight away.
Others choose a longer coaching journey because they want to change not only how they lead, but how leadership feels.
Both start with the same conversation.
Your capability is already there.
The opportunity is helping the world experience more of it.
If that sounds like the conversation you’ve been waiting to have, I’d love to hear from you.
Further reading
- Why You Lose Confidence Under Pressure at Work
- You Had Something To Say… And Didn’t Say It