Leadership Horizons

Regulating Your Nervous System

• Lois Burton • Episode 36

Share episode

Strategy doesn’t fail because the ideas are weak; it fails because our nervous systems spin up at the worst moment and pull us into reflex over reason. We pull back the curtain on the leadership advantage most people overlook: the ability to regulate your internal state so your best thinking is available when stakes are high.

We start with a candid client story: a brilliant director who alternated between force and frantic pivots under pressure. His board lost confidence, his team felt whiplash, and he was burning out. The shift began with awareness—reading somatic signals like tight shoulders, chest breathing, and racing thoughts—and installing the pause between stimulus and response. From there, simple tools did heavy lifting: breath work before big meetings, physical grounding in the chair, and short mindfulness “bookends” to steady the system before and after intense moments. No personality transplant, just consistent regulation that turned reactivity into response and won back trust.

We name the four survival patterns that hijack modern leadership—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—and show how each one quietly derails outcomes. You’ll learn why the amygdala can’t tell a board challenge from a threat, how cortisol narrows your options, and what practices reopen the window of tolerance. We also bust meditation myths: you don’t empty your mind; you remember and return. 

Expect practical guidance on building a noticing week, choosing one lever to start with, and designing daily rituals that protect focus, clarity, and stamina. Along the way, we share real results: calmer rooms, clearer decisions, and a meaningful reduction in hours without sacrificing impact.

Ready to make your best strategy stick by showing up regulated, present, and decisive? Press play, run a noticing week, and tell us which pattern shows up for you. 

If the conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review so more leaders can find it.

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome back to Leadership Horizons. I'm Lois Burton and today we're going to be looking into something that might surprise you. A leadership skill that's rarely talked about in the boardroom, but one that can make or break your effectiveness as a leader. We're talking about regulating your nervous system and emotions. This has been quite a theme this last couple of weeks that I've noticed with many of my coaches. There's a lot of pressure out there, and people are really feeling it in this way. So some people might be thinking, um, Lois, I'm here to learn about strategy, influence, and results, and you're right to want those things. But here's what I do know: the most brilliant strategy in the world falls apart when a leader can't regulate their internal state. And as I said, it's one of the things that I'm working on right now with many of my coaches. So let me share a story first of all. I've been working with a brilliant director, let's call him Naheem. He's got an MBA from a top university, a track record of turning around struggling departments, and a mind that can dissect complex problems in minutes. On paper, he's the perfect leader. But Naheem's got a problem. In high-stakes meetings, particularly when challenged by his board, he would do one of two things. He'd either become increasingly forceful, pushing harder and harder until people just gave in to stop the confrontation, or he'd pivot so quickly from one strategy to another that his team felt like they were chasing a moving target. And they never knew which Naheem was going to show up. His team described feeling exhausted and his board was losing confidence. He had a 360 feedback exercise that reflected these things. And he was burning out. He was working 80-hour weeks and trying to force results through sheer willpower. What Naheem didn't know and what we started to discuss, and any of you who were on my masterclass in September might remember we talked about it there as well. 93% of people experience symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system. And that can lead to classic self-sabotage patterns. And this was what was going on for Naheem, and it was undermining everything he was trying to achieve. Think about that statistic for a moment. 93% of people experience symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system at some point. And that can lead to self-sabotage. That means if you're listening to this right now, chances are you've experienced this too. I certainly have at different points in my career. So what does a dysregulated nervous system actually look like? There are four primary patterns, and I bet you'll recognise yourself or leaders you know in at least one of these. First is fight. This shows up as pushing harder, forcing results that that just do it energy, that bulldozes through resistance. Leaders in fight mode often mistake intensity for effectiveness. They're the ones sending emails at midnight, demanding immediate responses and wondering why their teams seem stressed and disengaged. Secondly, there's flight. This is when leaders chase the next tactic, pivot endlessly, always looking for the silver bullet solution. I've seen brilliant executives abandon solid strategies halfway through implementation because they're in flight mode, always moving, never landing long enough to see results. We talked about this in one of the podcasts a few weeks ago when I talked about this urge to pivot if one thing's not working. This is not saying you should never change your mind. That's important to do. But this is when your mind is just whirling and you're not thinking things through and you're just moving for the sake of moving. Thirdly, we have freeze. This manifests as procrastination, shutting down, feeling stuck and isolated. Leaders in freeze mode miss deadlines, avoid difficult conversations, and let problems fester because they literally cannot access their executive functioning brain properly. They're paralysed, even though they desperately want to move forward. And finally, there's fawn. This is the overgiver, the leader who takes on too much responsibility, tries to solve everyone's problems and cannot set boundaries. These leaders burn out the fastest because they're carrying not just their own load, but everyone else's too. What I want you to realize is that any of these responses doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you or that you're a poor leader. It's simply that you're not regulating your nervous system. And this is what fascinated me about Naheem's case. This is not a character flaw, they're not a sign of weak leadership. It's your nervous system's ancient survival responses showing up in a modern boardroom. The amygdala, which is the part of our brain which activates fight, flight, freeze, form, is still very primitive. And it doesn't distinguish between a genuine physical threat and the stress of a challenging board meeting. And the problem is what saved you from a predator makes you a less effective leader. Because your nervous system gets flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and it paralyzes your thinking function. So these just instant responses show up, and that makes you a less effective leader. So what did Naheem and I do? We started with awareness. I taught him to recognise his early warning signs, the tension in his shoulders, the tendency to breathe high in his chest, the acceleration of his thoughts, that urge to push or pivot. We worked on what we call the pause, which those of you who've been listening a while know that I talk about a lot. That critical moment between stimulus and response where choice lives. And we introduced simple but powerful regulation techniques. Breath work. It's always good to breathe. I was speaking to a coachie this morning and she contacted me a couple of weeks ago when she was in total overwhelm. And the first thing I asked her to do was get outside and breathe, get some oxygen into your system. So breath work, if you can do that before important meetings, that always helps. A practice of physically grounding himself in his chair, being present as he sat and being conscious of himself in a physical way as well as in an emotional way. And most importantly, creating what Naheem and I called his emotional bookends. These were short mindfulness practices before and after high-sex situations to help his nervous system stay, stay in or return to a regulated state. Many of my coaches will recognise this conversation. I have it a lot with a lot of people, and it's about mindfulness and meditation. Now, before you say meditation's not for me, I am gonna bust a few of the myths around it. But I just want to tell you the story of how I came to meditation. It was 2009. Um I was still, I've been in business for nine years, but I was still in building mode. I was taking on an awful lot that year. And I was doing a lot of traveling, a lot of dashing around, was really quite conscious of stress, which I hadn't been previously, but I was doing the push-through. I can do this, I can do this. Anyway, I was actually attending um a training programme in London. I wasn't running it, I was attending it. It was run by the late Sir John Whitmore's company, um coaching for performance, and it was run by a woman called Gita Belly, who was an amazing woman, um fascinating, I've never forgotten her. Um, and she was doing some work with us on transformational coaching, but she also was um somebody who was passionate and had done lots and lots of work about medi around meditation and its impact on developing a high performance mind. And she gave us a meditation practice on the first day. Now, I'd always thought meditation wasn't for me, but I was in a group and so obviously, you know, went along with this. But let me tell you how I arrived in London that even the evening before the program. Um, I'd been running a workshop, I dashed to the train and fell on the train, and I remember that Richard, my husband, he'd also been in London, he was coming back to Manchester, and literally our trains passed at Piccadilly Station, we were waving to each other. Um, so I've been dashing around all day. Um, sort of sat down on the train, relaxed a bit, got to London, got to my hotel, unpacked, looked down, realised I'd done the whole day and the workshop in odd shoes. Now, some of you have heard me tell this story before. Um I was thinking, oh, odd shoes. This really isn't good. Um I'd also been suffering really quite a lot from um from really tense shoulders, and that was giving me a bad neck. So physically and mentally, I didn't feel in the best shape. So we did the meditation practice and was quite surprised. We did it in the group, was quite surprised, and I thought, oh, actually, this this feels a little bit different. Feels good. Um, and Gita asked us to um try it again that evening and try it again the following morning. So I did because I'm quite compliant like that. Um the first thing I noticed was that the um the pain in my shoulders and my neck it just disappeared. And clearly it was the result of tension, and I'd probably been holding myself in a really tense way, and that was creating pain. And the second thing I noticed was that I really did sleep very, very well that evening. And I'd I'm a good sleeper, but I can be a restless sleeper. I slept very well um that evening. And the following morning, when I tried it again, I was starting to get really creative. I did the meditation and some ideas popped into my head about things that I wanted to do, and I just jotted them down, but I didn't get into um a kind of overthinking state. So I thought there is something in this, I'm feeling really different. And we we we continued through the three days of that course, and I noticed that I was feeling better and better. So that's when I continued. Now, hand on heart, I um I'm not saying that I do this every single day because I don't and I lapse. However, I do notice that I've missed if I've missed a considerable amount of time, I start to get more easily anxious, more easily stressed, and I start overthinking and getting triggered. And that is my signal to get back to my meditation. I speak to so many people about this, and I'm gonna talk about my favourite app as well in a minute, because I know there are many. But one, but before I do that, I want to set bust the myth that many people think I can't do meditation because I can't empty my mind. Nobody empties their mind, okay? What you do is you focus on something quite often, it's the breath, and then you get distracted, and a thought will come through, and that's okay. You just begin again. And one of the reasons that my favorite app is my favorite app, is that it really stresses this. And I have recommended it to lots and lots of people, and I know it's worked for a lot of people. It's called Happier. Um, it like many of them, it's free at source, um, and then you can choose if you want to get the paid version if you want, you if you want the full range of what they offer, but you can try it free first. The founder is a guy called Dan Aykroyd, and he wrote a New York Times bestseller called 10% happier, and then founded this book following the success of the book, founded this app, sorry, following the success of the book. So I just encourage you to give it a try. Happier is the app I like. You might like some of the others. Um, you might just like a practice that you download from the internet. But please just give it a go because it is massively powerful in helping you to regulate your net your nervous system. Getting back to Naheem, the transformation was remarkable. Within three months, his team reported that meetings felt different, more collaborative, less chaotic. His board noticed he was responding rather than reacting, and he himself managed to cut his work hours by 15, which was a lot. He was still working long hours, but he cut them by 15 and he felt much more effective. And here's the real insight: he didn't become a different person. He didn't get a personality transplant, he simply learned to regulate his nervous system. And that changed everything about how he showed up as a leader. So, what does this mean for you? Whether you're leading a team of five or a company of 5,000, your ability to regulate your nervous system directly impacts your effectiveness. When you're regulated, you have access to your full cognitive capacity. You can think strategically, listen deeply, respond rather than react, and make decisions from clarity rather than survival mode. When you're dysregulated, even if you have the best strategy in the world, you'll undermine it through one of those four patterns, fight, flight, freeze, or fall. The good news, this is a learnable skill, and I've seen leaders at every level develop this capacity. And it starts with awareness, noticing when you're moving into one of those survival patterns. Then it's about having the tools to bring yourself back to regulation. And finally, it's about creating systems and practices that support your nervous system rather than constantly triggering it. So here's my invitation to you. This week, just notice. Notice what happens to your body in stressful moments. Notice whether you have a tendency towards fight, flight, freeze, or fall. Don't judge it, just observe it with curiosity. Because awareness is always the first step towards transformation. And regulating your nervous system might just be the leadership skill that changes everything else. Following your noticing week, you can then start to think about the practices that are going to help you. And please give mindfulness and meditation a try. And feel free to contact me on LinkedIn if you want any more information or you just want to discuss this. So thank you for joining me today on Leadership Horizons. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. And remember, the future of leadership isn't just about what you know or what you do, it's about who you are and how you show up. Until next week, lead well and lead from a place of regulation. I'm Lois Burton and this is Leadership Horizon. Thank you.