Leadership Under Pressure: What to Do When It Feels Too Much

Even the most seasoned leaders face moments when their work feels overwhelmingly difficult—when self-doubt creeps in, motivation fades, and the usual strategies to "push through" no longer seem to work. In this episode of Second Crack – The Leadership Podcast, we explore what to do when leading starts to feel truly hard.

Join us as we reflect on the emotional, mental, and physical toll that leadership challenges can take—especially in today's volatile and high-pressure corporate environments. We talk about how to recognize when it's time to take a break versus when persistence might carry you through. And we discuss why one-size-fits-all advice often falls short in these moments.

The conversation introduces the Healthy Mind Platter, a concept developed by Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. David Rock. This simple but powerful framework outlines seven essential daily activities that support mental well-being: focus time, play time, connecting time, physical time, time in (for reflection), downtime, and sleep time. We share how leaders can use this model not only to sustain their energy and focus, but also to develop the clarity and resilience required to lead through tough times.

Beyond practical tools, this episode invites you to reflect more deeply on personal values, your "inner compass," and whether your current leadership path aligns with what truly matters to you. Sometimes the answer lies in small adjustments; other times, it may require bigger, more fundamental changes—for instance, changing jobs.

Reflection Questions for Leaders

•  When you feel a lack of motivation or start doubting yourself, ask yourself: What is this telling me? What can I learn from it?
• And when a situation is feeling just too hard: Do I simply need a break and some rest—or is something fundamentally wrong? Are my daily actions still aligned with my inner compass? And do I even know clearly in which direction my compass is pointing?
  
  

About Second Crack
More information about us and our work is available on our website: secondcrackleadership.com. Contact us now to explore how we can support your leadership development in a company-wide initiative or with individual executive coaching: hello@secondcrackleadership.com.
 
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Martin Aldergård
Gerrit Pelzer

Transcript

Second Crack – The Leadership Podcast (Episode 45)

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain typos and errors.

[00:11] Gerrit: Dear listeners, a warm welcome to the latest episode of Second Crack The Leadership Podcast. If you're new to the show, this is where we explore everyday leadership dilemmas and paradoxes, and where we invite you to self-reflect. I am Gerrit Pelzer. I work as an executive coach using a combination of Western science and Asian wisdom.

Joining me today, as always is my dear friend and business partner, Martin Aldergard. Martin specializes in driving change and transformation within organizations and. What we both have in common is that we always put people at the center of our work. Hi Martin, it's great to be recording with you again today.

[01:08] Martin: Hi, Gerrit. Yeah, likewise. And today we will talk about a quite tough subject, when leading feels really hard. As a leader, we might feel really overwhelmed meeting all the challenges, we might feel frustrated that results are not coming as expected, self-doubt might be creeping in, lack of confidence. So how do I deal with this situation as a leader?

[01:39] Gerrit: Yeah, and Martin, I was really looking forward to recording this episode because I think it's such an important topic. And I would actually like to expand on what you said. What is it when, when it goes beyond this feeling of it's hard? I mean, a lot of people do hard work every day. But what is, when it comes to the point where you mentioned self-doubt, when you feel like "I can't handle it anymore. I, I don't know if I can continue working tomorrow. And is it, you know, is it, but, but what do I do?" You know, it, it can, it can lead actually from self-doubt to sheer desperation. And we see now we are in an environment where the world seems to be very volatile, situations changing on all the time. It's easy to get a feeling of losing control and what can you actually do in such a situation?

[02:38] Martin: And I think it's important here. We have different views on this, on the, on the scale of the impact, right? And, and it's highly individual. What might feel very hard to you, might feel a little bit easier to me, or vice versa, right.

[02:55] Gerrit: I'm glad that you brought up how individual it is because also what to do in this situation is particularly individual I could say, because we have seen a number of, again, well-meant advice. Now, if you're not feeling like this, if you're close to a burnout, here are seven tips for you what you need to do. And actually, we saw one of these articles where say, "get enough sleep". My response would probably be right. I'm trying, you know, I just can't fall asleep or I wake up at 2:00 AM and can't go back to sleep. So this is not really helping. So I think what we also wanna be very careful with, or what we want our listeners to take into account, there is no one size fits all approach. It's highly individual and it's actually, a good opportunity to mention the importance of coaching because in coaching I work with people on their individual challenges. And of course coaching is not necessarily the answer to it all, maybe depending on your situation you might want to see a therapist. You may want to consult your general practitioner, or maybe it's just enough to talk to a good friend.

[04:13] Martin: So what do I do? What if I'm in the situation where I'm feeling it's getting really hard, hard, I doubt myself, perhaps my self-motivation is declining. Do I take a step back, start to think about what's going on, or should I just push through and push harder, keep it going.

[04:35] Gerrit: I think stepping back is a good thing to do. Like you say, so often stop and pause. And I would stop and pause to first of all, assess the situation. What is my individual perception and can I get a sense for what is really going on? What is objectively going on? Because many times I, I don't want to downplay how bad people may feel, and I want to clearly state that I take a clinical depression very, very seriously. But for the most part, when you also see what's going on in the in the world, many times we are basically okay right now. In fact, people who meditate may be used to this, when we are in turmoil and we start meditating, focusing our breath, one aspect of it can be to just realize "I'm basically, okay, I'm still breathing. I'm still alive." There may be pain, there may be serious challenges. Maybe I, I don't know where I get, you know, where, where the next money is coming from. But right now, in this moment, I am basically okay. 

And when I can get into such a state, I'm in a good state to analyze my situation. Is it just my perception or is something seriously wrong? And I think this can give us a sense for, is that something where we need to push through, or Is it time to take a break? And I have maybe an example from, from exercising and people who exercise regularly they may occasionally encounter pain of some sort. And I think there are different sorts of pain. There is the pain that indicates a serious in injury that is a signal to your body or to your brain to rest, for instance, if you have a broken bone. But there are also other pains where gentle movement helps getting the juices flowing and accelerates the healing process.

So this may be an analogy to work related examples: is this feeling that I'm having right now, self-doubt, frustration, overwhelm, is that an indication to really stop, or is it that I, you know, I just need to push through and maybe I'm in the tunnel and around the next corner I will see the light at the end of the tunnel.

[07:23] Martin: Hmm. Hmm. There's so many things here inside this, but when I am in this feeling of self-doubt or frustration, it's not going to be a quick fix necessarily, right. It's probably because I haven't had the right habits before, or I haven't, clarified my purpose, my direction enough, or I haven't reflected on my assumptions. Or I haven't maintained a healthy mind, for instance, I haven't maintained my physical health or my sleep or my, my nutrition, and now the symptoms are catching up, so to say.

[08:06] Gerrit: Yeah. Yeah. And I get a sense from the people I work with, I've said it many times, one thing all my coaching clients have in common is that they are extremely busy. 24 hours a day, 7 days awake, are never enough to get things completely done. And I think from what I see in the corporate world, there is this tendency to push through. There is this tendency to not wanting to appear weak. There is this ridiculous, I mean it's not only ridiculous, I hate it when people say you can sleep when you're dead. Yeah. So not acknowledging the physiological need for a rest or a break. So I'm inclined to think that maybe in many cases people really need to take a rest, take a break.

 I've experienced this myself. I learned very early on when I started with my self employment, nobody does the work when I'm not working. And there was a tendency to push through to work seven days a week. But I also realized then when I continue working, when I'm actually tired, pushing through most of the time leads then to two things: Low quality of work. And being even more tired the next day. So you, you easily end up in a vicious circle. And I have now as a golden rule to take Sundays completely off from work, not to check my emails, do nothing work related, and, that really helps a lot.

[09:52] Martin: The matter of having healthy habits, how I spending my time also helps to be proactive about this. Andwe have been talking about this Healthy Mind Platter. And I'm thinking this might be one way to assess and think about what about my habits and how do I spend my time? Should we look at this and see what we can learn from this and see if this can be used as a tool.

[10:25] Gerrit: Yes. So for me, this is kind of the basis for wellbeing. A healthy mind is in balance. A healthy mind is a resilient mind, a calm mind. It provides clarity for our thinking. And it was Dan Siegel together with David Rock, who came up with this Healthy Mind Platter. They talk about seven daily essential mental activities to optimize brain matter and wellbeing. And we can put a link to it in our show notes.

And it typically starts with "focus time". So we closely focus on a task in a goal oriented way. We take on challenges and that makes deep connections in the brain. By the way, Dan Segal talks a lot about integration. So for instance, in the brain, that means a high degree of specialization of the different parts of the brain, but then also strong linkage. So a lot of what we're talking about in the healthy mind platter leads to integration in the brain and in the mind. And I think when we also prepared for this podcast, we talked about the focus time that we think, on the one hand, that is what people are already good at. But I think we really must distinguish here: focus time does not mean just being busy and getting things done quickly. Focus means single tasking, and that is what I think people are getting increasingly worse at. We have, for instance, now a lot of online meetings, and then it's so easy to get distracted. You're looking at your laptop and I think, oh, I don't need to pay attention at this moment. Let me quickly check my emails. But then you're not doing anything well, you're not focused on the conference, and you're not really a hundred percent focused on the email. And there is this great misunderstanding, the misperception that multitasking is efficient. Because there are now many studies clearly indicating that it's much more effective and efficient when you do one thing after the other in a focused way.

[12:51] Martin: And I think this is a huge step to work on because the lack of time to focus and finish something that you need quality time to think, it might be a problem, a challenge, and the growing frustration to never have the time to really think something through. That's, that adds on a lot. So as a leader, I really need to fight to protect in my schedule focused time.

[13:25] Gerrit: Yeah.

[13:25] Martin: And, and, and this is already a big first stepping stone, I think, to reduce frustration.

[13:33] Gerrit: Yes. And perhaps from there I can jump to something that is in a way similar because you talked about blocking the calendar and that is what they call "time in" and that is about quiet reflection. It's about focusing on what's going on in your body and in your mind. And I think it relates so well to our podcast because we focus a lot on reflection questions. So besides this focus time where you want to get something done the time in. You also wanna get something done, but it's less about the time pressure, it's more about the reflection time where you allow things to come rather than pushing them or forcing them.

[14:25] Martin: And we always talk about self-reflection as a tool to increase self-awareness, to understand what's happening, to understand, um, what am I feeling. To start to deal with, for instance, the growing self-doubt or all of these issues that we talked about in, in the introduction. But of course, it's also the time to look at your longer term targets. Where am I heading? Do I feel alignment between what's happening in my company, where we're heading with my own personal priorities? All these questions, they are the ones that we are reflecting on during time in. So this is extremely important to also block in your calendar. And it is productive time, it's not unproductive time.

[15:14] Gerrit: Absolutely. And this is also extremely important because on the outside it doesn't look like something is is happening. And we may be labeled lazy when we are seen not doing something actively, something that is visible to the outside. But this then also links me to the third item "downtime", which is also important because that is really where you just relax, you're not focused. That also helps the brain recharge. But in our busy time today this just looks like lazy, right? But when when we label people as lazy, we are actually not acknowledging how our body physically operates. We need this downtime for a healthy brain and mind.

And so from there, downtime almost naturally leads me to "sleep time". I think over the past decade or so, people have, also understood that sleep is really, important for recovery. And, it's, it's definitely important to get enough sleep. We see this also all the time on the internet where people proudly brag about getting up at 5:00 AM in the morning and getting things done. And I think that's completely ridiculous. And in this context, I think we also need to acknowledge that people have a different circadian rhythm. So I am, for instance, naturally early bird. I wake up early also on a weekend, it's just my habit. Whereas my wife, for instance, she's more of a night owl. She likes to sleep longer and is more productive or longer productive in the evening. So that is also extremely important.

[17:08] Martin: I think this, this is an easy example to see the individual differences, right? Where, where, of course, everybody has their own individual needs, the importance is then to at least reflect on that, and thinking about how does sleep contribute to my ability to, to be productive, feel motivated long term. Right? Do I get too little sleep? But also as you mentioned, like what is the quality of sleep? 

[17:37] Gerrit: And maybe from there we can go to, should I say the opposite, the "physical time". Um, of course when we move our bodies, then we strengthen the brain and body in, in many ways. I think that is a given, I think we don't need to spend too much time on this. But I think also here is important to notice there is this healthy balance of this physical exercise. These corporate people who are very focused on success, there is a tendency to overdo it with the physical time, to exercise too hard. But when you look at professional athletes they also know that. Top performance in their sports is not only about exercising as hard and as long as possible, but also many other aspects. For instance, getting healthy nutrition and rest. Yeah. They know that sleep is as important as the exercise.

[18:41] Martin: Mm-hmm. And another part here that I personally really like is "playtime". And I think this is something that in corporations we focus too little on. This is where, where we really practice the other side of the brain, the creativity, the spontaneous, this being spontaneous, um, where we exercise new ideas, thinking in different patterns. But of course also playing it creates wellbeing, it's fun.

[19:18] Gerrit: Yeah. And, and I think that is important to highlight, right? So we don't talk here about plays in a goal oriented way, or in a competitive way, and probably not computer games. But maybe like playing with children and, and, and doing something just for the fun of it. Because it also helps, again, making this new connections in, in the brain. What's your pre preferred playtime?

[19:41] Martin: Yeah, my preferred playtime is, of course music. That that gives me a lot of fulfilling. And it helps with creativity. It helps me to meet different friends and build different connections. But what I also wanted to say here, I work a lot with Celemi, with the business simulations and there's a saying there: it's serious fun. And I think the two words serious fun, it also emphasis that having fun is a way to talk and think about, so to say serious matters, in a different way. And this opens up new perspectives. It helps us to learn in a different way when we are not trying to force our ourself through a problem, the, the pure, logical way. And, it builds connections in the brain that we need for new ideas. And of course, playing is typically a social activity, so it also links to connecting time.

[20:44] Gerrit: That's right. That's, I think, the last item on the Healthy Mind platter, "connecting time". And we are social beings and when we connect with other people, ideally in person and not over the screen, then, again, we make, also connections in the brain. Not only connecting with people, we can also connect with our environment with nature. So, for instance, I currently enjoy the change of the seasons, the spring, and we are lucky to have a garden. And every day I look at the changes and I feel this deep connection with nature, and just experiencing this. Ah, it gives me so much joy and makes me more calm. And also coming back to the social aspect, there's this famous Harvard study where they accompanied people for a total of, I think, 80 years. And they realized that people who have good social connections, they live longer, they are healthier, and they are happier. So this is also extremely important.

[21:54] Martin: It links back to being resilient, being able to overcome tough times, as a leader. Of course you come back to your relations because they can help you to, even if you have made mistakes, if results are not coming, they can help you to affirm you as a person. They can help you to affirm your strength. They can help to remind you who you are, what you bring to the world, help you to keep your chin up, right? But they, of course, they can also help you with some feedback. If you need, they can help you, challenge your assumptions if that is needed. So having good connections, of course, is also your lifeline.

[22:39] Gerrit: Yeah. Yeah. So I think we've covered these seven daily essential mental activities. Just to recap quickly one more time: it's Focus time, Play time, Connecting time, Physical time, time in, Downtime and Sleep time. And what I think is extremely important is to add mindfulness as the overarching idea here. Mindfulness meaning for me, very simple: being fully present in the present moment, not being overly worried about the future or being attached to the past. The past has already happened. We can't change it anymore. The future is not there yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare for the future, but it's so often that we are just busy getting things done and we are overlooking what is happening in the present moment. Thich Nhat Hanh said so nicely, well, "the present movement is the only movement in which life is available to you." And I think, again, coming back, I all the time I have these busy people in front of me, this image in front of me, and just about getting things done. And then another day is gone and suddenly I realize they're very old, and they may not have that much time to live, and they realize, oh, I haven't spent much time on what really matters to me, with the people that matter to me. So I think coming back here, these seven aspects they're all very important. And for me, the mindfulness, being in the present movement, aware what is going on inside of me, feelings, thoughts, sensation, aware of what's going on around me. That is for me, the foundation of it all.

[24:40] Martin: Hmm. Hmm. And I'm, I'm thinking of now taking a little bit of a step back, what we talked about, maintaining our healthy mind through mindfulness, but also th e healthy mind platter. I've also spoken about making sure I have the right habits, the right processes, so that I'm able to trust my process when work is getting tough, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, can I trust my process to eventually deliver results and bring me out of this? But something that we haven't spoken so much about is, is the clarity of the purpose, the direction.

[25:24] Gerrit: Yeah.

[25:25] Martin: If I'm working very hard and I'm trying to push through, or I start to :doubt am I going the right way? And of course this might be individually very fundamental question about what am I doing in my life? Or it can be more on a corporate level. You know, do, are we working on the right vision, are we working on the right targets, or should we be trying to focus on something else at the moment? The question about do I believe in the direction that I'm taking?

[25:55] Gerrit: Yeah. if I look back at where we started, so somebody is in this situation where it feels like, oh, I can't do it anymore. Right. And we started with this decision making: do I just need to push through or do I need to take a rest, do I need to take a break? And what we discussed before, mindfulness, the healthy mind platter may help already to reduce the probability that I get in such a state. So if, if I exercise regularly, get enough sleep, all the things we discussed, maybe you need to take rests during the day less often, or you don't get into the situation where you feel ,tired so easily. But then what we didn't look at as you said, is there can be another answer to it. So maybe you take a break, you restart, and soon it's not going well again. And that can be the indication that there's something fundamentally wrong, that maybe you need to change the job. And we spoke in the Inner Development Goals, it starts with Being, and I think one of the first elements there is the Inner Compass. When you set the purpose, what really matters in your life. And then we also spoke in one episode about the Gaps Grid, where we asked the question: are your daily actions aligned with what truly matters to you?

[27:30] Martin: Hmm, for me, it also doesn't need to be so drastic as thinking about, do I need to change my job? It can also be on, let's say, on a corporate goal, or it can be even as a team leader, am I focusing on the right priorities? I think you use this analogy: are we climbing the ladder, but do we lean the ladder against the right wall? And of course if you're, if you're climbing the ladder higher and higher, but it's against the wrong wall, it's, it's not going to end up well. 

[28:01] Gerrit: So we come back to this "time in" to the reflection questions. So it starts with, when we talk about the inner compass, do I actually really know where this compass is pointing

[28:13] Martin: hmm, hmm.

[28:14] Gerrit: Do I have enough clarity about my own values, what is really important? Because we need to distinguish here also what is really important for me and what are the expectations from others. And, and these expectations are everywhere, it may start with the family, in the company, bosses, colleagues, society overall, and I don't mean clarity about your own values in an egoistic fashion, but really determining what is it that matters to me and what has been imposed on me by others, because it's what everybody else does.

[28:52] Martin: Hmm. Hmm.

[28:53] Gerrit: Yeah. And then I remember we worked once with a team where we also spoke about the personal values of individuals and what's done in the corporation, and then we can always ask, well, how can I bring these values into my daily work? How can I live them, But I'm coming back to the example from earlier because it's my personal example: when I did this exercise, I realized that what was important to me didn't really match my corporate job, and I took the decision to leave the corporate world and and do something else, and that was the healthy decision for me. I think for me, this either pushing through or just looking at, okay, how can I bring this this into my daily work wasn't enough. Yeah. And this is again, where it becomes so individual. You can't say do this or do that. Everybody needs to, to listen to themselves and then make their individual decision. 

[29:55] Martin: This is a very nice wrap up. We are coming back to it's really based on your individual decision. And that decision is of course, then based on your own individual introspection, understanding yourself. And then then the Healthy Mind platter could be one tool or model to use to look through how am I using my time or talking to a coach like yourself.

And this might give you a gap analysis to really start to understand more what are my individual root symptoms? There might be more shorter term solutions that you might find, and there might be more long term solutions that you might deal with.

[30:38] Gerrit: Also since you used the gap analysis, I think what we didn't touch on with the Healthy Mind platter is that is a nice way of structuring your approach to wellbeing. You can see what are you doing already i. Well, and where is your biggest lack? Yeah. And it could be that you then see, okay, maybe, maybe I need to start getting into a regular exercise, or I really need to take care of getting enough, enough and good quality sleep.

[31:08] Martin: Hmm, Gerrit, I'm having a reflection question now. Is it time to go to reflection questions?

[31:15] Gerrit: Of course.

[31:16] Martin: We started with what do I do when leading feels hard. And of course hard had different grades of hardness, so to say. When I, for instance, when I doubt myself, when I lacking in motivation perhaps to drive: how can I just look at this feeling and trying to see what does it tell me, what can I learn from this? See it as something more positive and learning opportunity, because then I might be able to start to find a solution forward.

[31:52] Gerrit: I think that is extremely powerful, this, what is this telling me, what can I learn from it. I would say though, if we come back to where we started, something is going wrong, starting with this reality check, what is really going on? It's actually, in a way related to your question, what is really going on here? And then coming to this conclusion, what do I need to do about it? Is it that I need just a break, a rest, or is it that something is fundamentally wrong here and this then is of course related to, do I have enough clarity? Do I know where my inner compass is pointing to? That would be it from my side.

[32:43] Martin: Thank you Gerrit, we have touched on a very important topic, and I think it's part of every leader's life. We have ups and we have downs in our life as leaders.

[32:54] Gerrit: Yeah, so enjoy the ups while they last, and then use our episode today to deal with the lows. And this concludes today's episode. If you would like our support in dealing with difficult situation or in your leadership development in general, be that in a company-wide initiative or through individual executive coaching, please do not hesitate to contact us via hello@secondcrackleadership.com. And if you enjoy the podcast, please remember to subscribe and tell a friend about it. We would also appreciate it if you could leave a positive comment or rating.

Bye for now.