What does it really take to stay solid and grounded when the stakes feel high?
In this solo episode, I’m sharing how I think about performing under pressure – drawing from almost 2 decades in one of the world’s most stressful jobs and 6 years coaching ambitious entrepreneurs.
I explore:
- How calm confidence is actually a competitive edge in leadership
- Why, believe it or not, introverts often thrive in high-pressure environments
- The difference between pressure and stress (and how I avoid tipping over)
- Why owning “enough” is more powerful than doing “everything”
- Why pressure becomes easier with practice
- Why your ability to deal with pressure isn’t fixed – and how rituals, routines and ‘tools in the box’ are what really separates those who perform well from those who don’t
🎧 Tune in now and rethink what it means to perform at your best when it matters most in your business.
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Episode 226: How I Think About… Performing Under Pressure
I spend my days supporting ultra ambitious founders and before that I spent two decades in possibly the world’s most pressure driven job. So when it comes to how I think about performing under pressure, I’ve definitely got a lot to say. Let’s dive in.
Welcome to the Ambitious Introvert, the podcast for founders and entrepreneurs who want to create big results in their business without draining their energy. I’m your host, Emma Louise Parks. Let’s dive in.
Hey, welcome back to the Ambitious Introvert and specifically to this end of year series in how I think about all kinds of things that affect us in our businesses as entrepreneurs and founders. and first off, apologies for my slightly husky voice if I’m a little bit nasal. The cold, the kind of late autumn stroke fall in the UK has finally caught up with me. Two weeks ago it was super warm and gorgeous here and last week the temperature just plummeted, as did my immune system. So coming to you slightly nasally. So thank you for bearing with me.
Okay, so performance and pressure. This is such an interesting one and this is one that I’ve had many conversations with clients and with peers about, but I haven’t really talked about too much on, on the podcast. And again, as with anything, it is so nuanced.
For example, one person’s idea of a pressure driven situation is completely different to another person’s. Someone may feel a lot of pressure in having to public speak and someone else may feel absolutely fine with that. Someone may feel a lot of pressure if they are working to a strict deadline and they’re on a time limit and other people may thrive in that situation and they may love to, you know, reverse engineer when they need to do everything to be on track for the timeline.
So I think that there are many things that get lumped into the bucket of like pressure and, but there’s no doubt if you are running a business, you will feel pressure in an aspect of it at some point and probably at numerous points. And the first thing that I want to share about that is that is okay, that is normal. And especially when we’re doing things that are different outside of our comfort zone.
When we get in innovative, when we’re in maybe a new growth phase, it is totally normal to, to feel that as we take on more responsibility. I think one of the myths that I used to see very early on in my business is people leaving corporate jobs to start service provider or coaching businesses.
That was super popular kind of six years ago, seven years ago because they, they wanted freedom and they didn’t want the Responsibility and then realising very quickly that you still have responsibility as a business owner, you know, leaving a corporate job does not absolve you of responsibility. You’re still responsible for numerous things, whether it’s clients or cash flow or team or marketing or brand awareness or any of the above and more.
So I think that responsibility in and of itself is something that we is part and parcel that we have to accept. But again, the different types of responsibility would, will affect people differently. And then the other nuance that I want to add to this is I’m going to give some, some very high level ideas of ways that we can cope with pressure.
But it is so personal, it is so ultra personalised. And even within my client roster, the kind of rituals or the methods that people have for either dealing with decision making or, you know, switching off to make sure that their brain is fresh for, you know, the next event or whatever it is, they’re all very different because they’re all different humans.
And that’s why I wanted to do a series like how I think about. Again, what I don’t want is to be like, hey, here’s three tips to cope with pressure. Because I don’t think that’s actually super helpful because it’s very generic and those tips may, may work beautifully for you and they may not work for you. So it is a very personalised and and nuanced thing, which is why I’m just gonna spend a little while riffing about it and hopefully you get something that you either resonate with or a way that you hadn’t thought about it or some other kind of value.
So the first thing I’ll say about performing under pressure in more of a business situation is it is a competitive advantage, especially if you are any kind of leader. So if you are leading a team or if you’re leading clients, or if you are a thought leader with, you know, community or an audience, the ability to stay calm under pressure will set you apart from so many people that will flap under pressure. And even though a lot of it may be behind the scenes and you may think that’s stupid, my audience don’t know how I feel when I’m pressured or whatever.
We model so much of this and energetically we model so much of this. And when I think about people with big platforms, when we’ve had big events in the world or politically, the way people deal with those really sets a tone for their whole brand. And some people panic, some people panic under the pressure of say, having to speak out against something that’s happening or to, you know, pledge their support to something that’s maybe not that popular and they panic about it and they, they go overboard with it and people feel it and it feels weird and inauthentic and like they, they kind of lose trust in them.
When you can have like a calm confidence in that, when you can be rooted in like, yes, things are shaky as, as hell and things feel uncomfortable and bad things are happening. And this is where I stand on it. And I am, I am the, you know, I am. That is where I am. Like I’m, I’m not shifting, I’m not shaking. You can name something as being bad or, you know, stressful or disappointing or whatever it is, but you, you can say like, you know, and, and this is, this is what I believe and this is how I respond to it. I think it’s the ability to choose your response is huge rather than reacting.
And that’s probably what I’ve just described in a very long winded way. But having that calm confidence in leadership when there is pressure, because there will always be pressure from, you know, multiple angles and being able to respond in a measured way because you know yourself and you know your values and you know how to self regulate and you know what you’re available for and you know what you’re not, it makes it much easier when people don’t know those things, when they don’t self regulate, when they’re running on empty, when they are, operating from a place of external validation, they will react, they will panic and react.
And that is where they, the coping with pressure falls apart. And like I say, people sense it and they know it. This is one of the reasons I believe that introverts often perform better in high stakes situations. And I’ve seen it in air traffic control, I’ve seen it in public speaking. I’ve seen it in various facets of the business world where they don’t panic out loud publicly and make a big scene. So yes, you might panic internally because you’re, you’re a human, but because we do turn inwards, because we reflect so much, we, we quite often know what is going to be pressure driven to us.
And we quite often expect that in advance. It’s the old joke. Whenever I record podcast guest interviews with other introverts, you know, people are like, oh, can I get the questions in advance? Or I like to be prepared. You know, how introverts like to be prepared. Or you know, people going over things like the, the day before, going over conversations, going over situations, visualising them like seeing how they might play out, walking through them mentally. You know, my clients do this a lot so that they can turn up feeling more prepared and more confident. What they’re ultimately doing there is giving themselves calm under pressure because they are less likely to be surprised. They are less likely to be caught out by something.
And that’s not to say something won’t happen that throws them a curveball. But they feel much more regulated when as introverts, quite often I’m the slight exception to this. I think when we feel prepared, that gives us a calm confidence. Already I am a bit more of a, you know, go with the flow, hence these type of unscripted podcasts.
But for many people that, that would make them feel very uncomfortable and that’s, and again that’s great to know. Have the awareness whether it’s in your business, whether it’s in your marketing, whether it’s in your team, whether it’s in your relationships, where do you feel that pressure? And it doesn’t have to be like, oh, this is the most stressful thing ever or it doesn’t have to be, oh, everyone says, you know, this, this thing’s easy and therefore what I’m feeling can’t be pressure. I’m just going to ignore it. You will know yourself where you feel pressure and it would, it might just feel a little bit uncomfortable.
But when you know that that is your edge, it’s much easier to prepare for it and not get, like I say, caught out into this very reactive type of panic and be more like, okay, this is happening. Let me just take a breath and, and let me deal with it and see.
One of the big ways that I see pressure show up for my clients is they actually put it on themselves. So I cannot tell you how many discussions I’ve had where clients are stressed because of the pressure of a deadline that they have self imposed, that actually that has nothing, has no relation to anything else in the real world.
So they might have said, I am going to create this programme and I’m going to launch it by June and then life happens and maybe they get sick or they, you know, get busy or they have a big client or whatever happens and then June comes around and it’s, it’s not quite, it’s not quite ready and you know, it’s probably going to be ready in July.
But the amount of pressure they’ve put on themselves about this and they’re making it a problem when in fact that is complete self imposed pressure because you can change that at any time. Another great one for this is financial goals. I’m all for having financial goals.
I think that is how we create what we want, by knowing what we want and being able to reverse engineer how we’re going to make it happen and taking the right actions to, to get there. I’m not saying have a business and have no idea what you’re going to earn, but ultimately a financial goal is just made up of, for, for most of us as smaller businesses, I’m going to say if we’re not a big corporation with shareholders can make it up. So if you’re applying so much pressure to yourself to hit a certain goal that year that maybe you could hit a month or two later without the pressure, then, you know, take that, realise that you have the autonomy and that when, when we put in the pressure on ourselves and it affects no one else around us, that is actually the biggest gift.
Because that is the gift where we can, we can move it, we can shift it, we can change the goalposts, we can change the end game. But what this often comes down to is feeling like they have to do everything and being unable to find a comfortable middle ground of I’ve done enough for now, so I’m going to pause and go rest or you know, I’ve got this thing to 85% perfect.
Like that is good enough to take it to market. Let’s go. That can be very, very difficult for introverts, especially when we are detail oriented, ambitious and maybe even a little perfectionist because we want it to be everything, we want it to be a hundred percent perfect. We don’t want to stop, we want to get it done. And you know, as I’m obviously I’m changing the intonation of my voice there as I’m talking to highlight pressure.
But we recognise that, right? That’s something that when we hear our own inner dialogue, it’s very different. If it’s going, hey, awesome job, okay, let’s go chill and no, got to get it done right. It needs to be like this is just a different intensity and we’ll hear people like that as well. And because we are so energetically attuned, we know when we’re around people that are under pressure and we feel it and we can really take it on, which is something else to be, to be very, very careful of. But one thing, like I say, I can’t really give you to do’s in this, this is just how I think about it. But for your own inventory I guess maybe just have a look.
Are there places where you are putting pressure on yourself to do something, achieve something, a certain timeline, maybe that actually, if you are really honest, it’s completely arbitrary, it’s completely made up by you and you could change it and remove that pressure. Because, yes, we do want impetus. we do want to be motivated, but we don’t want it to be from self pressure.
We don’t want to be doing something because we’ve told ourselves we should be able to do it or we’ve seen someone else do it and we can do it just as well, or to prove to ourselves we don’t want pressure as a, you know, to cause a proving energy in us. We want our motivation for doing things to be things like fulfilment, like impact, like being true to our values.
And, this is where a lot of the work that I’ve done with clients over the years is to enable them to tap into motivation in those very healthy and aligned ways, rather than comparison items, rather than, you know, pressure, rather than proving energy, rather than, you know, really in their masculine and trying to outdo themselves that the, the outcome’s the same, the results can be the same, the results are generally better if they do it in a more aligned way. But it’s understanding that that type of pressure we get to choose and whether we are being pushed by pressure or whether we’ve been driven by something internal that really lights us up will massively affect how we feel about doing things.
So then the other thing that really has come up a lot in business and really when I was an air traffic controller also, is that pressure reduces with practise. And I remember talking to, I think it was episode two of this podcast, maybe three. Laura o’ Hagan was a guest. And, you know, this was like five years ago because podcast birthday was last week. So Laura o’ Hagan was a guest.
And, at the time, Laura’s coaching business was she was mainly using Facebook as marketing. She was working with online business owners. Her business has grown and evolved now hugely. But back then she said she was terrified to go live because it’s just not something that she’d ever done.
And her coach challenged her to go live for 30 days in a row on her, in her Facebook group, I think it was. So she did. And she said the first day she was terrified, she was sweating, she didn’t know what to say. She felt awful, she felt awkward, she was messing with her hair and just, you know, fidgeting. Uncomfortable.
She said by like Day three or four, she was like, okay, well you know, that didn’t feel so terrible, I guess. And by day 30, it was just the most normal thing ever to hop on and press record. The pressure that she felt. There’s no external pressure there. It may m have felt like there was because she may have thought, what are people gonna think?
How does my hair look? You know, are, these people judging me? Is anyone gonna turn up? Am I just gonna sit here talking to myself? Do I sound like an idiot? But really, that’s internal pressure, right? But the more she did it just became the most normal thing. And I think for many years she ended up doing weekly, weekly lives.
So it’s the same with air, traffic control because when you first start a job like that, there is so much to learn. There are so many neural pathways that you need to build before you can be confident in your ability to actually carry out the job.
And then when you’re confident in your ability to actually carry out the job, there is still pressure. Like there is no doubt that that job is one of the most pressure driven in the world. There is a massive safety implication if you make a mistake.
That is a lot of pressure right there. And then it’s, there are pressure of confines. So airspace is finite. You know, people look up in the sky and they go, oh, talking about the skies, loads of sky. But actually airspace is very rigidly boundaried and within those boundaries there are many rules, things that you, you know, can and must do and things that you cannot and must not do. And you’re working within the confines of that. So there is a pressure, there is a logistical pressure, there is a time pressure, there is a pressure that, you know, when an aeroplane’s coming, it’s coming, and it’s coming pretty fast because, you know, they don’t hang around.
So if a, controller were to sit there and think about all of those things, they would probably never make a decision because the pressure is I need to make faster decisions and they need to be safe. And I did a very crude calculation with ChatGPT and what we got to was that, in 17 years in that job, I probably made 7 million safety critical decisions, which is kind of crazy. All under pressure, right? Under pressure to do it quickly, to get the right decision the first time where possible, to communicate it effectively to the pilot, to ensure that the pilots comply with that decision.
And all the while knowing that the next decision is like five seconds away or less and that is going to keep going for the hour. 90 minutes, however long I’m sat there, controlling aircraft, right? And then I’m going to go and have a break and come back and I’m going to have to make those decisions under pressure again.
And a big part of that was the practise. Like, how it feels as a new controller is completely different to how it feels when you’ve been qualified for a year or five years or 15 years. Of course, because there’s a familiarity. There is also a set of best practise decisions. It’s like having this big toolbox, but you know which ones work best in different situations.
So you’re not making a decision from scratch every single time. You are using a set of tools that you’re very well versed and very well practised in, and the decision becomes, which one should I use? So that takes a lot less brain power and it feels like a lot less pressure because you’re not making something up from scratch. And I see this in business. Business owners so often think they need to throw everything out and start again. And that is a lot of pressure. I’m like, oh, my God. Like, I, build everything and da, da, da, da, ah, da. Or when it comes to the making decisions about something in their business, whether it’s a team member or a client or a programme, that they feel very uncomfortable and they feel pressure around that because they’re not familiar with it. People that have been in business for, you know, half a decade or more, that have been through this numerous times. I spoke with a client last week who had an issue with a client that would have derailed her, a few years ago.
But, you know, when you’ve had literally hundreds of people go through your programmes, you are going to get some issues. That’s just the way it is. And this issue came up and she was very, almost blase about it because, oh, yeah, you know, you know, she complained about this, this thing, this is what I’m going to do, blah, blah, blah, because the emotional charge was taken. She didn’t feel that pressure because she dealt with it before and seen the patterns and started to realise this is something that happens. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about me.
You know, I just need to look whether I’ve done something wrong. But generally this, this is just, you know, the 0.1% of people that are going to be unhappy or something like that. So when we are feeling like everything’s got to be from scratch and when something difficult happens, when we feel like we don’t know how to deal with it, that is pressure. But the chances are you do know how to deal with it. Or if you’re working with a, coach or mentor or advisor.
The way I work with clients is that you can map something out that feels good and true and authentic to you to deal with a problem, to remove the pressure. And then when you have that confidence in dealing with it that way, in maybe having that difficult discussion with a team member or trust in yourself to cut a revenue stream that actually brings in a lot of money, but you realise it drinking the life out of you. When you have your own ways and methods of your own toolkit.
I guess in essence, as to what I was saying about air traffic control, when you have your own decision making toolkit and when you’ve built yourself trust and when you can do that, then those situations feel much less pressured. They might not be great, it’s not saying they’re fun, but the pressure is very, very different than when they’re unfamiliar or when we don’t have a way of dealing with them. And that brings me to, I think where some people get confused is that pressure and stress are not the same thing. And this is a question I’ve probably been asked 100 times when I was a controller.
Oh, is it really stressful? I bet that’s really stressful. And I always replied, no, it is pressure driven. It is a pressure driven environment. But if you can’t deal with the pressure and adapt to it, then you will get stressed and you probably won’t be able to do the job for any significant amount of time. And that is the same in many professions.
You know, attract control is not special in that it requires a very specific way of thinking and operating. But many jobs do, right? So stress is a product of pressure that is not handled well. And what I want to make clear about that is I am not saying, oh, this person’s a snowflake, they can’t deal with pressure. It’s not about that. If we are running a business or in a role that is innately against how we operate, how we think, how we work, against our energy, it could be what could be conceived as the easiest job in the world.
And you will still feel pressure and you will not cope with that unless you either remove yourself from the things that are causing you to feel pressure because they are so wrong for you that you shouldn’t be there in the first place. This is why we see people in corporate burnout, right?
Or refer to my earlier of enough doing enough versus doing everything.
But also pressure requires Management outside of the pressure. And my two decades in aviation were a literal experiment for this. I am not kidding, I must have tried every supplement that I could that was legal while I was medically licenced to help me with sleep, to help me feel more awake, I tried to, I tried every different type of diet, I did yoga, I did every different type of yoga, I did pilates, I had meditation, I had acupuncture, I use Lumi lamps when it’s low light to make sure I was feeling more awake. I, you know, I was managing the pressure not only of a job that was very cognitively demanding, but also the pressure of the physical shift work that came around. That, and I don’t believe I could have done that for so long if I hadn’t because I’m a sensitive soul, right? And my, my body’s physically quite sensitive to, to different stimulus.
So does that mean, is that a weakness? No. And what I see now, you know, some of my, my peers in the space and some of the amazing people that I’ve interviewed on this podcast that I’ve gotten to know as friends, these are people running businesses and performing at a really high level. You know, seven multi, seven figure businesses that they’re at the helm of with their brand name front and centre, you know, extremely visible.
Do they go, I’m just going to get by?
No, they want to perform, they want to perform at their best. And so they all have, you know, if you’ve listened to any of my guest interviews, all have ways of decompressing. They all make sure that they switch off in different ways. They, they have hobbies, they have life outside of business because if they were in that, 24, 7, the pressure would get to them and we all need to be able to extract ourselves. I still to this day do my weekend tech detoxes sometimes two days, more often one just because, you know, the Internet of things.
Need my phone to, you know, get on a train or, you know, charge my car or whatever else we need, we need phones for like everything turn the heated up. So that’s, that’s a practise I’ve done for such a long time and also knowing what kind of nourishes me, knowing that, you know, screen free time is huge for me and it was huge when I was a controller because I was under the glare of screens for a lot of my day. So that is to say, you know, it’s not so simple as, oh, this job has a lot of pressure and you can either do it or you can’t.
And that’s it. There’s much more nuance than that. Maybe the job has a lot of pressure and if, if you manage yourself and you self regulate and you master your energy and you are intentional about your rest and your physicality outside of it, then maybe you will just love doing that job.
The pressure won’t get to you in the same way as if you are eating junk food and sitting on screens the whole time and not really prioritising your sleep and never getting back into a good schedule after night shifts and things like that. So all of that to say, whatever your role, whatever your business, you know, and I’m also any, any kind of CEO, anyone, C suite in a big company director level I believe will deal with pressure a thousand times better if they are looking into themselves and how they can regulate and manage themselves.
Because it is a fine line between responsive and reactive. As I said earlier, it’s, it’s a pause, it’s a beat, it’s a second. It’s being able to catch yourself and go, how do I want to act here, right now versus reacting and either, you know, losing a team’s respect or losing confidence in yourself because you feel like you couldn’t cope with the pressure.
Rituals that keep you steady when pressure is high should just, just be part of, part of life as an entrepreneur. And it’s not about, oh, I’ve just had, I feel stressed because I’ve just been under a lot of pressure. So I’m going to go and relax now. The rest and the relaxation really needs to be part of the journey because the difference it will make to your stress levels is immense. I’m going to share a very quick story actually that I did on a client call like 12 hours ago.
So it’s, it’s very timely. But his clients in a very high responsibility role and ah, energy management and making sure that she gets things done. She has a lot to get done but it also has to be done well. It’s detail oriented. There is pressure to do things correctly.
The consequences in her role if she does not do these things correctly are high. So how do we balance that? Right, there’s pressure so you feel like you want to act fast and go and rush and get everything done. Yet she also knows that if she tries to do too much or she multitasks and gets distracted that the quality of the work is going to be subpar.
And one of the things that she shared with me yesterday is that she has found that having a block of Time to do something and then stepping away even for two or three minutes and then coming back to do the next thing has had a massive impact.
Before, she wasn’t giving herself any space in between. She was going from task to task to task and she wasn’t flitting around necessarily, you know, between everything, multitasking. But there was no end to one thing and start to another. And then cognitively we carry that through. So first off, you might do three things back to back and you feel like, oh my God, I’ve been working all morning, I haven’t stopped. What she found is stepping away, like I say, two to three minutes to step into the garden and take a few deep breaths to make a cup of tea, because she’s British, like, go and drink a cup of tea and just to let her mind almost wander and settle a little bit and let whatever she’s been working on just let it, let it go.
Like there’s no big action here. But, you know, go and come play with the dog or the cat or get outside or take some deep breaths or, you know, drink a drink or do, do whatever you need to do as a signal to your brain that, like, oh, that the pressure of that task has finished, it’s ended. And when, when you go back, you’re going back fresh and you’re starting something.
She said that, you know, she told herself for a long time she didn’t have the time to do that because she’s got a lot to do, she’s busy, she needs to get straight on with things. So it’s very uncomfortable to bring in. But she now feels so much less pressure on doing numerous things because she’s only thinking about one at a time. Yeah, she knows there’s more to do.
Like, you know, she’s not kidding herself that, oh, I’m done for the day, but she’s got a little break in between. Her brain gets revitalised and she said she, she is amazed at how much better she performs on, like the second task and how much more quickly she’s getting things done because she’s not, like I say, bringing this cognitive kind of like garbage with her from, from the last thing that isn’t relevant.
So I just thought that was a very timely story to share, that there are very, there are small ways that we can almost like release the valve on the pressure and take that pressure off ourselves to be able to perform at our best. And quite often we have a lot more say over what is pressure than we give ourselves credit for.
And a lot of it can be internal, but in those spaces where it’s not, where there is very real restraints, constraints, pressure, like, you know, the airspace thing, having the toolbox of knowing what to pull out and how we make decisions and how we deal with certain situations, and having the confidence to know that if something, trips me up, if something goes wrong, if the worst thing happens, it’s okay because I know how to respond.
Stop you being reactive, gives you so much confidence as an entrepreneur. So that one was pretty long.
Like I said, I have a lot to say about performing under pressure because it’s something that I’ve done my entire life and it’s something that I think has a massive, massive impact in, in how entrepreneurs work. If it is something that you think you could improve on, if you think that performing under pressure is maybe holding you back or you want that calm confidence, you want to operate in that way that you have that toolkit and you know to pull from it, because you can see how much that is going to help not only your mental health and your resilience, but your business as you go forwards.
Then I would love to talk to you about partnering together in my six month container. Please feel free to pop to the show notes and have a look at the application with absolutely no pressure to perform under. But if you would like to chat, then I would love to hear about ways that we could work on this for you to help your 2026 be the least pressured and maybe even the most profitable ever.
Thank you and again for tuning in. And I will be back in the next episode talking about how I think about every introvert’s favourite thing, visibility. Until then, have a good few weeks. I’ll talk to you soon.
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