Leading When Nothing Settles, Part 1: Coming Back to Yourself

A quick question: when, in the past week, were you fully in the room you were sitting in? Not running the meeting while composing the answer to the message that just landed. Just there — feet on the floor, in the actual conversation.

If you have to think hard about it, here's why. Crisis used to have a shape: a beginning, a peak, an end. You braced, pushed through, and normal returned. Your instincts for leading under pressure were built for that world. But normal isn't returning — one disruption now hands off to the next, and AI compresses the cycles further while unsettling what "expertise" even means. So the instinct that once served you — hold your breath until it's over — now works against you. There is no "over."

And pressure that never lets up does something quieter than exhaust you. It pulls you out of yourself. Attention migrates up and out — into the inbox, the forecast, the next thing that might break. A full day of meetings, and not one minute of actually being where you are.

You know both positions from your own weeks. There are days you're on the dance floor: in the rhythm, reactive, pressed by the crowd, one move at a time. And there are the rarer moments on the balcony: you see the whole room, who's moving where, what's really going on, what matters next. Leading well takes both — and under permanent pressure, the balcony quietly disappears. Because you cannot get perspective on a situation you have disappeared into.

So the capacity that decides things now isn't intelligence or experience. It's whether you can come back — into your own body, to where you actually are — while everything keeps moving.

Many leaders already have something that helps here: a breathing practice, a meditation routine, a way of pausing. If you do, keep it — these are real supports, and often a great first step. What I want to offer sits alongside them, on a different path: an energetic lens. Not managing your state from the outside, but placing attention directly in the body — and discovering that there are specific places it can return to. Five of them, in fact. In my work I call them the Basics:

Your own spine. Attention on your skeleton — not as metaphor, but as a felt, physical fact. Someone who can feel their own substance is far less easily swept up by every impulse in the room.

The ground under your feet. The most unglamorous instruction there is, and the one that changes a room fastest. A leader who is actually standing on the floor — not hovering three inches above it in thought — is steadier, and people sense it before a word is spoken.

Your own edge. Knowing where you end and the room begins. Without that, every emotion in the meeting becomes yours to carry — home, after a day of "only" sitting in meetings.

What's mine and what isn't. My judgment, my mandate, my responsibility — versus someone else's fear, expectation, or urgency I've quietly taken on. In any conflict or crisis meeting, this one distinction is worth its weight in gold.

How open you are, on purpose. When am I receptive, and when do I close the aperture a little, so I'm not absorbing every mood in the room unfiltered? Learnable — and entirely different from shutting down. It's choice.

None of these needs a cushion, an app, or anyone noticing. They take seconds, mid-board-meeting. What they restore isn't calm as a feeling. It's presence as a position: you, fully in your body, in the actual room.

The balcony, it turns out, isn't upstairs. It's what becomes available the moment you're fully back inside yourself.

This is what I keep seeing in my work with leaders and their teams: this kind of embodied presence is rarely named, and yet it's often the quiet variable that decides whether a room stays generative under pressure or tips into reactivity. Strategy, judgment, conflict, innovation — all of it runs on the quality of attention available in the room. Presence isn't separate from performance. It's the ground it stands on.

Someone who can't come back eventually leads only reactively. Someone who has their five attentions can stay in the dance and keep the whole floor in view.

Part 2 follows soon: the specific shape each of us contracts into when the pressure holds — and why knowing your own, and recognizing it in others, changes how a leadership team works.