The Power of Calm

Pressure has a way of shrinking our thinking and speeding up our worst instincts. We unpack a practical way to lead through chaos without losing your head or your team’s trust. 

Drawing on coaching work with senior leaders across sectors, Lois breaks down three core skills that keep you steady when the stakes rise: regulating your nervous system, separating facts from fear stories, and choosing a values led response over a fast reaction.

We start with the body, not the boardroom. Slow, longer exhales, grounded posture, and a short, spoken pause help switch off the stress response and bring your prefrontal cortex back online. 

You’ll hear how nonverbal cues like pace, tone, and gaze can send a room into panic or anchor it in focus. From there, we move into cognitive clarity: how to strip a crisis down to what is actually known, challenge catastrophic narratives, and make decisions from evidence instead of adrenaline.

Then we explore the power of the micro pause the brief window to ask what is the most helpful response right now. That moment protects judgment, aligns action with values, and signals resilient leadership to your team and stakeholders. 

Lois shares examples from corporate, healthcare, and education, plus a real time look at how measured responses outperform knee jerk statements when events are volatile.

We close by turning immediate calm into long-term capability. Rather than a blame heavy post mortem, use a learning led review to find missed signals, refine systems, and strengthen team habits. 

You’ll leave with simple scripts, science backed tools, and reflective questions you can use this week. If the message lands, subscribe, share with a leader who needs it, and leave a quick review to help others find Leadership Horizon.

You can check out further details on my websites:

https://www.loisburtononline.com/

https://www.loisburton.co.uk/

email:  lois@loisburtononline.com

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries 

Transcript

Why Calm Leadership Matters

Tip 1: Regulate Your Nervous System

Nonverbal Signals And Team Contagion

Grounding Scripts And Science-Backed Tools

Tip 2: Separate Facts From Story

Tip 3: Respond, Don’t React

After The Crisis: Learn, Don’t Blame

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello and welcome back to Leadership Horizon. I'm Lois Burton, Executive Coach, Leadership Development Specialist, and your host for today's episode. First of all, um, thank you again for last week. Thank you for everybody who sent in questions for the Ask Me Anything. We had a great response to that episode. So big thank you again. I'm still very stoked by it because it was so good to get those questions and to have that debate. So today we're looking at another vital topic for leaders. When things get hard, when the pressure spikes, when a crisis hits, how do you stay calm? And I really mean calm, not frozen, not absent, not pretending everything's fine, but genuinely grounded, clear-headed, and in control of yourself, even when everything around you feels chaotic. Because here's what I know from sitting across from hundreds of leaders in high pressure moments. The leaders who truly stand out aren't the ones who never feel the heat. They're the ones who've learned how to be steady inside it. So today we're diving into the power of staying calm, and I'm going to share three practical tips that can genuinely transform how you lead through crisis. Let's start with something that might sound almost too simple, but it is rooted in neuroscience. And that is before you do anything else in a crisis, you need to regulate your own nervous system first. When a crisis hits, your brain fires off a threat response. Your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol. Your thinking narrows, your decision making becomes reactive rather than considered. And if you're leading a team, they are reading you. Your nervous system is contagious. If you're dysregulated, they'll become dysregulated too. And the dysregulation leads to the fight or flight or fawn response, which I'm sure most people are familiar with. So you want to avoid that if you possibly can. I worked with a senior director a few years back. Great person and someone his team really valued and were loyal to. But whenever a major problem landed, his team would watch his face and within minutes the whole room was in panic. Not because of the problem itself, but because of his reaction to it. His breathing would shorten, his eyes widen, his voice tone would go up, and he would speak very quickly. All nonverbal signals that he was in panic mode. So from there, no matter what he said, the nonverbal cues had already sent the team spiraling spiraling, sorry. So what does regulation actually look like in practice? It can be as simple as pausing before you speak. Taking three slow, deliberate breaths, and I mean really slow, breathing out for longer than you breathe in, which actually activates your parasympathetic nervous system, your calm response. Another technique is making sure you're grounding yourself physically, both feet flat on the floor, noticing where you are in the room, feeling the chair that you're sitting in if you're sitting. And if you're someone that needs time to ground, it's better to name that. So ensure you say something like, Okay, everyone, let's just take a moment, let's just breathe before we respond. You encourage your team to do the same thing. And if you say this aloud, not only the team, but your brain also hears this and starts to respond with calm. I know that might sound, you know, a bit crazy, but saying something out loud does allow our brain to hear it in a different way than thinking it. And the team will recognize that you're processing and you're processing calmly. They're not soft techniques, these are science-backed tools that give you your brain back access to its higher order thinking. And that's exactly what you need when the pressure is on. My client started to practice these techniques, and he noticed very quickly that both he and the team responded differently, and gradually calm was restored and they were able to think rather than spiral. Okay, tip number two. In a crisis, most leaders are not just dealing with what's actually happening, they're also dealing with the story they're telling themselves about what's happening. This is going to derail everything, they'll lose faith in me, we're never going to recover from this. Sound familiar? These narratives feel real and urgent, but they're often catastrophizing and they amplify the stress enormously. And these again are fueled by that adrenaline and cortisol flooding your system. So ground yourself first and then learn to separate the facts, what we actually know right now, from the interpretations and assumptions they're layering on top. It's a cognitive reframe and it changes everything. Try asking yourself, what do I know for certain right now? What is actually true in this moment? And then ask, what am I adding to that? What's the story I'm running, and is it helping me? I had another client, a CEO in financial services, who came to a session mid-crisis. She was convinced that her board had lost confidence in her. But when we stripped it right back to the facts, the reality was that two board members had asked a difficult question in a meeting. That's it. That was the fact. Everything else was interpretation. Once she could see that, her calm returned, and so did her clarity. Facts give you solid ground. Stories, especially fear-based ones, keep you spiraling. Staying close to the facts is one of the most powerful acts of self-leadership you can practice. And tip three, and this is the one that often separates truly great leaders from the rest, is learning to respond rather than react. In a crisis, there's enormous pressure, internal and external, to do something immediately, to be seen to act. And sometimes, yes, urgent action is needed. But more often, what's needed is a pause long enough to ask, what's the most helpful response I can give right now? And this actually doesn't take very long. This is this is around, you know, maybe giving yourself 10-15 minutes to ask yourself that question. And that micro pause, that moment of conscious choice, is the difference between reactive leadership and resilient leadership. It's also where your values live. What do you stand for as a leader? How do you want to show up? That pause gives you the chance to access those answers before you speak or act. We've seen it, we've seen it this week in the UAE government's response to the attacks that they're under. And if you notice that leadership did not come out and speak absolutely immediately, although it was quickly, but they clearly gave themselves the chance to think about how they responded rather than reacted. And here's something I've seen consistently across sectors, whether it's the NHS, financial services, manufacturing, or higher education, leaders who stay calm in a crisis give their teams permission to stay calm too. You become the anchor. And that's one of the most valuable things you can offer when everything feels uncertain. Now I want to add something that often gets missed, and it's about what happens after the immediate crisis has passed. Because staying calm in the moment is one thing, but the real goal for leaders is in what you do with that experience afterwards. Every crisis, every single one, contains learning about your systems, your team, your processes, and honestly, about yourself. The leaders I most admire are the ones who build a genuine learning culture around challenge. Not blame, not a post-mortem designed to find out who was at fault, but a genuine curious inquiry into what happened and what it's telling us. Some questions I'd invite you to sit with after a crisis moment are excuse me, tickle. Um, first question. What triggered this and were there early warning signs that we missed or dismissed? How did I show up and how do I want to show up differently next time? What does this tell us about what we need to build, strengthen, or change? This kind of reflective leadership, what I'd call learning-led leadership, is genuinely preventative. It reduces the likelihood of the same crisis repeating. It builds team resilience and it deepens your self-awareness as a leader in a way that nothing else quite does. So, to bring it all together, staying calm in a crisis isn't about suppressing how you feel or pretending the pressure isn't real. It's about developing the inner resources to stay grounded, clear, and purposeful, even when things are hard. And the three tips I've shared today regulate your nervous system first, separate facts from story, and choose response over reaction. These are skills. They can be learned, practiced, and deepened over time. My challenge for you this week: the next time you feel the pressure spike, even in a small moment, try the pause. Just that one beat before you speak or act. Notice what's available to you in that space. If today's episode has resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. You can connect with me over at LoisBurtononline.com. And if you found it useful, please do share with a leader in your world who might benefit. Until next time, this is Leadership Horizon helping you lead beyond boundaries. Take care of yourself and I'll see you next week.