Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions Under Pressure

Pressure can make even the smartest person sound unclear, act defensive, or rush a decision they would never make on a calm day. I’m Vicky Ross, and I’m digging into the real reason: when stress rises, your nervous system shifts into protection mode, and your world literally narrows. You don’t see more options, you see fewer and that’s when “I wasn’t thinking straight” becomes your default explanation. 

We walk through a simple but powerful model of human behaviour: a thought becomes important, you attach meaning, meaning sparks emotion, emotion creates body chemistry, and that chemistry drives your behaviour. Once you understand that loop, you can stop blaming willpower and start building awareness. I explain why you’re not reacting to situations, you’re reacting to your interpretation, and how a short pause can interrupt the cycle long enough to return to clarity, intention, and choice. 

From there, we bring it into leadership communication: state before strategy, regulating before responding, and why tone and nonverbal cues often land louder than the words you choose. I also share how meetings derail when outcomes are unclear, and why psychological safety is essential if you want honesty instead of polite agreement and silent resentment. If you want to lead under pressure with calm authority, better decision making, and clearer communication, press play, then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, and welcome back to Rise Up Podcast. My name is Vicky Ross, and I'm your host here. So, this episode is for people who know they're capable, but notice that under pressure they don't always show up as that best version of themselves. Because this is the truth. When pressure rises, clarity drops. They can't work together, they're not friends. And even the smartest people can find themselves thinking differently, reacting differently, and making decisions that they wouldn't normally make. And you know, people say it, they'll go, Oh, I was triggered, or I wasn't thinking straight, I wasn't myself. So unconsciously, they they know and they they say it in their language. So in this episode, I'm going to explore why that happens and how to come back to clarity, intention, control, and be the best version of yourself. So we're going to talk about how we can think clearly, how we can communicate with intention and what does it really mean, because we all communicate, and how to lead with alignment. And the question is aligned with what? And it is aligned with who you want to be and what you want your life to be all about. So you can't change what you can't see. So a lot of the time, people are very blindsided with themselves about, you know, who they are, what they want. And sadly, today in our world, we are so bombarded with so many negative things that most people are very focused and very aware about the things they don't want rather than starting to focus about the things that they do want. And part of that would be about who I want to be, how I want to lead, how I want to live, what kind of business I want, what kind of team I want, you know, all of those kind of things. So if you're not being aware of that and if you're not thinking about that, then it's not easy to see where you can change and what you can improve. So awareness is the foundation for all behavioral change because awareness is that place where you just take a step back and take a pause and look at things as they are, not as we think they are, but as they are, then to ask ourselves a deeper question so that we can bring that awareness to ourselves. Pressure that we get, you know, so when we are under stress and pressure distorts perception. Because your brain is geared and fixed and built to protect you at all times. It wants to preserve humanity, so it's there to protect you. So as a result of that, when it feels that it's under threat, it will change the perception and change the way we see and think and feel so that we can be safe. So we've got to become very aware of what's happening to us in a moment of stress. And clarity comes from seeing the actual problem, and that's what I said earlier, where we take a step back and see it for what it is rather than what we think it is, so not the reactive story. So let's talk about how the brain creates behavior again. You have a thought. Now you have lots of thoughts, you have maybe 120 to 160,000 thoughts a day. Some people say more, some people say less. But I think we can all agree that we have lots of thoughts per day. So what becomes interesting is in that moment, in any particular moment, which thought that passes by do we make important? So you will make something important because of where you are, who you are, what's happening in your life right now, what is going on, and then that thought that is passing through is going to become an important thought that you're going to place some attention to. And remember that where you place your attention is where you place your energy. So that thought has a meaning that you have given it through life, and therefore that meaning will then create an emotion. It's almost like when you make it important, there straightaway is hooked on meaning and then a hooked on emotion to how I feel about this thing that I know. That will then in turn create a chemical substance in the brain, John Lavelle from the NLP world always called this brain juice. And that chemical will go through your body. So it gets created in your hypothalamus and goes into your body through your nervous system and then gives information to every cell and every organ in your body as to how to behave. Because if you didn't have the information, if your body didn't have the information on how to behave, how would you know to be angry? How would you know to be sad? How would you know to be anything for that matter? So it is really, really important to understand that that all comes from a cycle of thought, have a meaning, have an emotion, create a chemical, and out of that we have a behavior. And then it goes all over again, it goes round and round. And the whole idea of becoming very aware of ourselves is to be able to stop and come out of the reactive, automated, unconscious cycle and see things as they are for what they are and make bring some logical sense to the nonsense that's going on in our minds. So let's talk about what pressure really does to somebody. So under pressure, you will see you just hold on. I'm sorry, under pressure, you will see less, you won't see more. So what happens under pressure is that your body, your brain is goes into high beta brain waves. Now, what that says to your nervous system is that you're under attack, you're under danger. So remember, like what I said earlier, is that you will want to have to preserve yourself. So your focus of what you see will start to narrow because you have to become very, very focused at what you're looking for. You're looking out for the danger. You it creates tunnel thinking because it is here. You you're not looking big picture. So you'll find that a lot of people that are under stress can't see the trees, the wood for the trees, because they are so sort of here. They can't see problem how to problem solve, they can't come up with ideas and solutions, they can't be creative because they can't open their minds. In that moment, the only thing that's important to the brain is what do I do to keep myself safe? So it hijacks communication again because we can't think properly. All we can do is survive. And leaders often make the mistake of pressure for urgency. So when you've got pressure, that doesn't mean you have to rush through things. Sometimes pressure is an indication that this is something really important, and if anything, you need to take a step back and just let your nervous system calm down so that you are able to see the right solutions. The real source of your reactions and where they're coming from, you're not reacting to situations, you are reacting to your interpretation. And this is again why we have to bring awareness up and get that pause and see things for what they are rather than the way we interpret them. Because our interpretation again will be there to support safety. So if going ahead to do something is going to feel risky and it's going to feel like there's a threat here that I might be humiliated, I might be rejected, I might lose my position, I might, you know, lose something, your whole nervous system wants to pull back and protect you and hold you back from doing something so that you don't risk actually, you know, getting hurt or humiliated or rejected or whatever it is. So if you think about when you first started life, life had no meaning. If you look at a little baby, it hasn't got experience, it hasn't got references, it doesn't have understanding, it's it's got nothing. So there is no meaning to life. It will see its parents, it will recognize sounds, it will start to recognize smell, but other than that, it doesn't have a this is my mother, this is my father. And a baby is built to naturally want to just be protected, so it will have all the mechanisms built to make itself really, really cute so that we are in love with it to the point that we'll protect it. But a baby will have no meaning for life. So what happens as we grow, we start to program ourselves through experience, through what we get taught, what we observe, what we see, and that all starts to give meaning to life. So that's why that meaning is your interpretation. It's neither right or wrong, good or bad. It just is. But if it's not giving you the outcomes that you want, then you have to step back and ask yourself is what I'm doing and what I'm thinking and what I'm feeling giving me the outcome that I want. So, in other words, we start to question the meaning that we have for a particular situation. So, this is why I use the pause, and the pause is one of the most powerful leadership tools. And again, people think, oh, I don't have time to pause. But like I said, when you're under pressure, urgency does not help you. And a pause does not mean, hey, we're pausing for a month and we're going to do nothing. A pause could be five minutes, a pause could be and just letting your whole body decompress, using breath, using quietness, using stillness, using a meditation, using a walk out in nature, using something to just bring you out. And then with consciousness and intention, you start to see the situation for what it is rather than the interpretation that your brain is giving you. So the way you start to think shapes who you become. Whatever you do, again, there's no right and wrong, there's no good or bad, but your thinking will shape who you become. Because who you become shapes the life that you live. It has to. So every decision that we make in life comes from the way we think about things and the way we feel about these things, and therefore the desires that we have about these things to move towards them and move away from them. So this is how it starts to shape the life that you live. So just a reminder from last week already that thoughts create the feelings that drive the actions that give us the results that we want. Now, what most people will do is they will focus on the results, they'll take a step back and go, what actions do I need to change? And they do their best to change the actions so they can have different results. But the thing is, is that we have to change the thoughts. We have to change the way we see things, the meaning that we have, the ideas, the values, the belief systems that we've got, the paradigms, because that will change the way we feel about them. That will change our actions because of the chemistry changes in our brains, and that will change the results that we've got. So to change, you need air. Of course. What is air? So air is an awareness. With the awareness, we interrupt the pattern that is not giving us the outcomes that we want, and then we rewire ourselves to what we want to do. So I use air on all my sessions, and I use it all the time with my clients because that's what makes the change happen at all times. So, you know, we might go from awareness to interrupt, and then before we can rewire, we go back into awareness, back into interrupt. Then we start rewiring, we might go back into awareness. So it's just something that just fluidly moves through all my sessions and all the work that I do with my clients. So state before strategy. You cannot enter into a strategy if you haven't checked your state and make sure that your state is in the right place at the right time, that you have got the kind of state that you want, and that you are in a place, emotional place that you want so that you can tackle what's going on. And again, the way that you know what state you're in is by having that pause, that step back, and having the awareness to be able to assess yourself. So a high beta, which is a high-brain thing, is a survival state, and most people run their days constantly surviving from one firefighting situation to another. The thing is that most people are so used to this level of living that they don't even think that there's something wrong with it. But a high level of survival, high beta, is actually a very toxic state because this is where you also get lots of cortisol, lots of adrenaline that eventually attacks your whole system. And the place that we should be aiming to get is an alpha state, which is one that is between the unconscious and the conscious, is where we have creativity, where we have problem solving. And therefore, this is where we have clarity as to who we are, what we are, where we want to be. So communication starts with your internal world. People don't respond to your words, they respond to the meaning behind them. So I do a lot of communication training because I think communication is so wonderful. Nothing is random when it comes out of our mouths. It's all very, very intentional. And one of the games that I play is I ask people to describe their favorite room. But what I've done before is I've given everybody a little piece of paper, and on each piece of paper there's an emotion. So they'll open that little piece of paper and they'll look. And for instance, it could be anger, it could be sadness, it could be curiosity, it could be excitement, it could be bored. And they have to describe their favorite room using the emotion that's on the piece of paper. What is always so interesting in this exercise, and it still makes me giggle and laugh when I see it, never mind what it does to my students, is that people listen and hear the emotion more than what they hear about the bedroom or whatever the room was that they described. When we ask about what room did they describe, they went, Oh, I don't know. Um I know there were curtains, but gosh, you were angry. Oh my goodness, you were so sad, because the emotion is what actually takes over. So the emotion comes out of the state, and this is why people don't respond to words. There's also been a lot of communication experiments done, and it's now clear that 60 to 80 percent of communication is your tone of your voice, which comes from your emotion, and your nonverbal expressions of your face. So only 20%, at most 40%, is the words that you use. And for most people, and again, something that I teach is that we don't speak very clearly or very cohesively and all that. So if you start saying that here's an abstract sentence, and then the tone is wrong and the emotion is is is you know pushing some influence, it's no wonder people walk away from very important meetings, having misunderstood what the message was. So leaders will influence presence, clarity, and intention, but not pressure. So they regulate before responding. So any good leader will regulate themselves before responding. Because if you don't regulate, you're unreacting. You're just, you know, it's a game of tennis. You know, there goes the ball, it comes back again. So you will have to regulate if you want to have a very productive, good communication, meeting conversation. They communicate with intention. So again, they have to think about what outcome they want. So they cannot go to a meeting, to a board meeting, or one-to-one meeting, whatever the meeting is, without being very, very clear about what in they what the intention of the meeting is and what outcome they want. I have facilitated so many times in in meetings where people get lost in the meeting and they start talking about other things and other things and other things and forget what the real thing was that they came to communicate with and the outcomes that they want. And I have to bring them back and go, can we just park that for now and can we just carry on with this? And they're going, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a very easy thing to lose thread. But when we are very, very clear about what the intention of our meeting is, then it's easier to stay on track rather than to get lost. And they create psychological safety. If people don't feel safe to be honest and to be truthful with you, you're gonna hear maybe what you want, but you're not gonna get the honest intentions of what's really going on. And again, this is something that when I work with the teams of directors and business owners or CEOs, that I have to teach them about honesty. I have to teach the CEO and the director to accept honesty and be open to having honest conversations because sometimes the truth is so different to what is being said or what they're agreeing to. It's not what they really want or what they are happy with, and therefore they walk away from meetings feeling unheard, they're feeling unsupported, and therefore there's no loyalty, and there's no sort of it does things just don't move. It just becomes a mess. So awareness is how you rise beyond reactivity and you lead from clarity. I think I've I'm making this quite, quite clear about the importance about awareness. And the most important decision you make is what you decide is important. So you've got to ask yourself, what is the important thing here? What do I want to try and communicate? What do I try to achieve? What's the outcome that I want? Because that is really, really important. But unless you know and you're clear about that, then the communication will be as muffled as your brain inside. So, what would you do next? Vicki, come on, you've given me all this stuff. So, what do I do next? Well, mindfulness. A lot of people think it's we would it is gold. It is gold if you've got a brain and if you've got a business and if you've got a life, you have to use your mindfulness to bring awareness. And if you're not being mindful, you're being absent-minded. And I think you all understand how that goes. From awareness, you can now bring understanding because once you become aware, you can see things with clarity, then you can bring some understanding to what's going on and what's going wrong. And from understanding, you can now choose how to go forward, what to change, what to adjust, what to look more into. And with repetition, you can rewire things and make and make changes. So if there's one thing to take away from today's episode, it's this you cannot change what you can't see. So the moment that you can pause, you can step out of your reactive mode and back into clarity and choice. Because that is where clarity lives, and that's where the better decisions live, and that's also where better decisions are made. If you want to go deeper into this work, you'll always find a way to work with me. Whether you connect with me through my website, send me an email, join my beautiful membership, or just start using some of my meditations. Find your way. So thank you for listening. Hears to your success, and I'll see you in the next episode.