This article builds on an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Recalibrate, where I explore how leaders can stay grounded, clear and intentional in the midst of ongoing change. This book will align your inner clarity with your outer influence. If you’re keen to know when it’ll be launched, please sign up here for the pre-orders.
“When one person settles, the other can see clearly.”
– Leigh Morrison
Right now, leadership is happening against a demanding backdrop. An era of constant movement.
You’re leading in a tighter job market, where expectations are high and capacity is lean. Inflation and sustained high interest rates are putting pressure on organisations and households alike, and many people are carrying quiet financial stress into work each day.
At the same time, technology adoption is accelerating. AI has moved from concept to reality almost overnight. It brings opportunity, fear and uncertainty all at once. You may be asked to implement new systems, rethink roles, reassure your team, and make decisions without clear precedents.
Layer this with restructures, hybrid work, ongoing transformation programs and geopolitical uncertainty, and it’s no wonder leadership can feel overwhelming. This is the ever-changing landscape of work many leaders are navigating. And it’s the space my coaching work sits in. Supporting you to lead through complexity with clarity, steadiness and confidence, rather than being consumed by it.
The challenge isn’t just keeping up. It’s holding perspective, making sound decisions, and taking your team with you through continual change. Without burning out yourself or them.
In this environment, calm is not optional. It’s foundational.
Calm is a practice, not a personality trait
Calm is often misunderstood. You might think it belongs to people who are naturally unflappable. But calm is rarely accidental.
It’s learned. Sometimes early in life. Sometimes through experience. Often through repetition. What matters is this: calm isn’t who you are. It’s something you practice.
When you’re calm, you create space. Space to think clearly. Space to listen properly. Space to choose your response rather than default to reaction. Without that space, leadership becomes reactive, defensive and exhausting. In environments like the ones many leaders are facing now, calm can be mistaken for disengagement. In reality, being calm is what allows you to lead through complexity rather than be consumed by it.
Without calm, everything feels urgent. Every decision feels loaded. Every change feels destabilising. With calm, you can distinguish between noise and signal. You can pace change instead of piling it on. You can communicate steadily, even when you don’t yet have all the answers.
I see this often in my coaching work. Rochelle, a senior leader navigating constant project changes, realised that her reactions weren’t driven by her thoughts but by unregulated feelings in her body. Once she learned to recognise those signals and bring herself back to a useful state, everything shifted. “It only takes a few minutes to get back in control,” she said. “I don’t crumble anymore.”
The foundations of calm leadership
Your ability to stay calm is closely linked to how resourced you are. When your system is depleted, your nervous system is more likely to tip into fight, flight or freeze. From there, even small challenges can feel overwhelming.
In times of economic pressure, rapid change and uncertainty, many leaders try to compensate by pushing harder. Longer hours. Faster decisions. Less rest. But this is when your nervous system needs more support, not less.
This is why I work with what I call your five energy bases:
- Sleep – restores clarity, patience and emotional balance
- Hydration – supports focus and steady energy
- Movement – shifts stuck energy and widens perspective
- Meals – stabilise mood and blood sugar
- Breath – the fastest way to regulate your nervous system
These aren’t productivity hacks. They’re leadership infrastructure.
When these bases are tended to, you’re far more likely to respond thoughtfully rather than react defensively. You can hold space for others because you’re not running on fumes yourself.
Daniel, who was leading in a culture moving “a hundred million miles an hour,” learned this first-hand. He believed speed was the answer. Instead and from our conversations, composure became his edge. He rebuilt the basics with improved sleep, healthier choices and getting back to exercise. Daniel learned to step back and choose how he wanted to lead, “I learned to recalibrate” he told me, “To respond, not just react.”
The gift of the pause
Leadership lives in the moment between what happens and how you respond. That pause might only last a breath. But it changes everything. When you pause, your nervous system has a chance to settle. Your body moves out of threat mode. From there, curiosity becomes available again. Instead of reacting, you can ask:
- What’s really going on here?
- What’s mine to own?
- What response would be useful to me (and others) right now?
When your body is wired for survival, reflection isn’t possible. Calm doesn’t mean ignoring emotion. It means creating enough distance to feel without being flooded by it. Over time, those small pauses add up. They become the difference between being driven by emotion and guided by intention.
Focusing on where your power is
One of the most practical ways to protect your calm is to know where to place your energy. Stephen Covey’s Circle of Control, Influence and Concern offers a simple but powerful lens.
- Your Circle of Control – includes your choices, words, habits, effort, self-care and boundaries.
- Your Circle of Influence – is where you can shape outcomes indirectly, through conversations, relationships, expectations and culture.
- Your Circle of Concern – contains everything outside your reach, like other people’s reactions, organisational politics, global events.
In volatile environments, it’s easy to get pulled into the outer circle. That’s where anxiety grows and perspective narrows. When you bring your attention back to what you can control, and specifically – how you are being, how you communicate change, how you pace your team, how you care for your own energy – then calm returns. It doesn’t remove the complexity. But it does reduce the internal chaos.
For the next week, notice the first physical signal that tells you you’re leaving calm. It might be a clenched jaw, a racing mind, or a shallow breath.
When you notice it:
- Stop for three seconds.
- Breathe out longer than you breathe in.
- Ask yourself, Is this in my control, my influence, or my concern?
- Choose the smallest useful response available to you.
Even one breath can buy you back clarity.
Calm doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means you care enough to stay conscious. When you stay calm, people around you borrow your nervous system. Teams feel it. Conversations soften. Decisions improve. This is why calm isn’t just self-management. It’s collective leadership.
In times of ongoing economic pressure, rapid technological change and uncertainty, teams don’t just need strategy. They need steadiness. And that steadiness starts with you. This is the kind of inner capacity I help leaders build through one-on-one coaching. We work beneath the surface. Strengthening your foundations, taking guidance from your values to expand your choices, and helping you lead with clarity and confidence in complexity.
So you don’t absorb chaos. You transform it.
Comments +