How to Stay Calm Under Pressure as a Leader: Why Knowing Better Is Not Enough
Most leaders can describe how they want to behave under pressure.
Stay calm. Ask questions before making assumptions. Address poor performance directly. Hold the standard without making it personal.
The difficulty is not understanding any of that. It is being able to do it when patience is gone, the stakes are rising and another problem lands at the worst possible moment.
Jacqlin Richards, a parenting expert and bestselling author who founded the Resourced Parenting Method, calls this the gap between awareness and capacity. You may recognise your patterns and know what a better response would look like. That does not mean the response is still available when pressure actually hits.
Knowledge gives a leader options. Capacity determines whether those options remain accessible when they are needed.
Why capable leaders still react badly
A poor reaction under pressure does not necessarily mean someone lacks leadership knowledge.
They may understand accountability but avoid the conversation. They may value calm decision-making but become controlling. They may believe in giving people autonomy but take over as soon as something begins to go wrong.
Jacqlin describes five survival responses that can appear when capacity is stretched: fight, flight, freeze, flop and fawn.
Fight looks like aggression, blame or an unnecessarily sharp response. Flight looks like avoiding the conversation or distancing yourself from the people involved. Freeze is the inability to decide or act, even when the situation clearly requires leadership. Flop is going offline mentally. Fawn is keeping people happy at the expense of a boundary or a standard.
Different shapes, same source: the leader has stopped choosing the behaviour. Pressure is choosing it for them.
Capacity is the space before the reaction
Jacqlin offers a useful definition:
The space between you getting triggered and you reacting is your capacity.
When that space is wide enough, a leader can notice what's happening, weigh the consequences and choose a response. When it disappears, the reaction arrives first.
That space doesn't need to be large. A few seconds is often enough to stop an emotional response from becoming a decision.
The same pattern shows up in parenting. A parent may know yelling won't help and still yell when exhausted and late for work. A leader may know that humiliating someone in front of the team will damage trust and still lash out when a deadline is missed.
The knowledge was there. Access to it wasn't.
The need to be liked can weaken boundaries
One survival response deserves particular attention because it can easily pass for empathy.
Fawning is the instinct to keep other people happy so conflict, rejection or discomfort can be avoided. In leadership, it looks like giving someone another chance without addressing the underlying problem, lowering a standard, taking work back from the team, or delaying a hard conversation because the leader doesn't want to be seen as difficult. The tension disappears. The problem grows.
Jacqlin connects this directly to parenting. She had recently become a solo mother, moved her family from London back to New Zealand, and placed her seven-year-old son into a school four times larger than the one he had known. Her son was struggling with the upheaval and began carrying sharp kitchen knives. Jacqlin felt she had lost her authority, and eventually called the police.
What she took from it wasn't that her son was a bad child. His behaviour was telling her he didn't know where the edges were. He needed a parent prepared to set clear and consistent boundaries.
Teams need to know where the edges are too. If a standard moves every time someone pushes against it, people learn fast that it was never really a standard. Clear boundaries show people what's expected, what's unacceptable, and whether the leader will follow through.
Notice what reduces your capacity
Leaders often pay attention to a problem only after the reaction has already happened. A better place to start is with the conditions that made the reaction more likely.
Fatigue, competing priorities, unresolved conflict and sustained workload all shrink the room between a trigger and a response. A minor issue can feel far more serious once that capacity is already spent.
None of this excuses poor behaviour. Leaders remain responsible for how they treat people. But it does give an earlier point of intervention. Short patience, rigid thinking or avoiding people is useful information, and a reason to slow the interaction down before trying to resolve it.
Recognise your default response
Under pressure, most people have a pattern. Some become forceful and controlling. Others withdraw. Some stop making decisions. Others agree with everyone just to reduce tension.
Every leader experiences pressure. The useful question is what you tend to become when your capacity runs low.
Once that pattern is visible, it gets easier to catch early. Someone who knows they get controlling can pause before taking work back from the team. Someone who avoids conflict can put the hard conversation in the calendar before another week slides past.
Decide the boundary before emotion takes over
Standards are easier to hold when they're set before the difficult moment arrives. Leaders shouldn't be inventing expectations mid-conflict. People need to know what good performance looks like, what's unacceptable, and what happens when a commitment is missed.
It also gives the leader something stable to return to. The conversation becomes about the agreed expectation, not how frustrated they feel. Holding a boundary doesn't require aggression. It requires clarity and follow-through.
Repair when you get it wrong
No leader responds perfectly every time.
Jacqlin uses what she calls the rewind tool with her children. When she reacts in a way she regrets, she stops, names it, and tries again:
My God, that wasn't the way that I wanted to do it. Let's just rewind that.
She'll mime pressing rewind on an old tape deck, take the moment back, then run it again. Ownership comes first, before the second attempt:
I really got that wrong. The words that just flew out of my mouth were not what I meant to say.
A proper repair doesn't ask the other person to make the leader feel better. It puts the responsibility where it belongs and does something different next time.
Repair doesn't remove the need for the original conversation. A missed deadline may still need addressing. A boundary may still need holding. But the leader can deal with it without also defending the behaviour that damaged the relationship.
Calm leadership does not require perfect leadership
Calm leadership means noticing what's happening before the reaction takes over, then repairing honestly when it doesn't work. Fatigue, frustration and being triggered stay part of the job regardless.
As Jacqlin puts it:
You do not need to be a perfect parent. In fact it's better when you're not.
Jacqlin Richards is a parenting expert, bestselling author, and founder of the Resourced Parenting Method. She joined Chris Turkington for the full conversation on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.
The full episode goes further into the rewind tool in practice, and what Jacqlin calls the window of resilience: the space that either holds under pressure or disappears entirely.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/A_wVDeM-6_U
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6WGNIMkVvj522fbt4qoOFg
The Fireside Leadership Podcast is brought to you by Aegis Leadership and supported by Dark Horse Coffee Co.
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