Resilience Under Pressure
About a year ago, I ran a three-hour resilience workshop for a leadership team at Kaiser Permanente. They were producing strong work under exceptional pressure. High expectations, political complexity, and critical feedback from outside. Performance was holding. The people were wearing down.
I built the workshop around one distinction. Wellness and resilience are different capacities, and leaders need both. Wellness steadies the body. Resilience keeps the mind effective when the system is strained. You can sleep well and eat well and still fall apart in a hard meeting if you have no way to recover your clarity in the moment.
Stress, in this frame, is the sensation of losing control. The requests exceed the capacity you have in the moment, and your nervous system reads that mismatch as threat. When the brain senses threat, it narrows. Perspective shrinks. Patience goes. Creativity goes. The ability to say no goes. What is left is urgency, reactivity, over-accommodating, or shutting down. That is how the system responds when agency feels compromised.
Resilience is the reversal of that narrowing. It is built from small, deliberate behaviors. Here are the ones I teach. You can use them yourself, run them with your team, or bring me in to go deeper.
1. Anchor in what is working
Before we talked about pressure, I asked the room to name what they were proud of despite it. That sounds soft, and it is strategic. Under strain, the nervous system forgets evidence of capability, and without that evidence, everything feels impossible. Grounding in what is working restores the internal anchor first.
Try this. Write down one or two things you or your team are proud of despite the pressure. Notice where you feel it in your body. Breath, posture, warmth. That felt sense is a resource. Return to it before a hard conversation.
2. Map what you control
Pressure escalates when leaders spend energy on factors they cannot influence and underinvest where control is possible. So we mapped three zones. Within our control. Influence. Outside our control.
Within our control sits how we prioritize, how we communicate boundaries, how we pace work, how we frame trade-offs. Influence covers stakeholder alignment, clarifying urgency, negotiating timelines, asking for support. Outside our control holds structural reorgs, political dynamics, last-minute top-down requests, and organizational ambiguity.
Try this. List what is on your plate into the three zones. Then ask one question. Where am I spending energy on something I cannot move? Whatever you find there belongs in the release category. The energy you free up is the energy you get back.
3. Say the limit out loud
Most teams are under-communicating constraints, because the environment makes honesty feel risky. So we practiced the language of limits. Communicate limits early, before the crisis point. Name trade-offs instead of silently absorbing extra work.
Try this. Pick one request this week and answer it with a trade-off. "We can do A or B. Which matters more from your perspective?" Or "To take this on, I need clarity on what should move down the list." Or "Here is what becomes possible if we shift X to next week." Say it out loud before you send it. The tone matters as much as the words.
4. Reset in the moment
When pressure spikes, you lose access to nuance, strategy, diplomacy, and creativity. That is neurobiological, and the way back is through the body first, then the mind.
Try this. A four-count breath in, a six-count breath out. Feet flat on the floor, press down, feel your weight. Roll your shoulders back, drop them, unclench your jaw. Broaden your visual field, the way you would look at a horizon instead of a screen. Thirty seconds of that restores enough clarity to choose your next move.
Then clarify. Ask, "What is the actual urgency, and who defined it?" Or "What happens if this is done tomorrow instead of today?" Or "What part of this is mine, and what part belongs to someone else?" Most of the pressure we feel comes from assumptions that sound true in the moment and fall apart under one honest question.
And borrow a peer. When your nervous system is activated, you cannot reliably reframe your own thinking. The part of the brain that reframes goes partly offline. So ask someone next to you for a reframe. A five percent widening of perspective can change the trajectory of a whole day.
5. Hold it, don't carry it
Compartmentalization gets a bad reputation. In this workshop it means selective focus. You decide what to engage with now and what to set down for later. Empathic leaders absorb other people's emotions, urgency, and anxiety. That absorption is what depletes them.
Try this. When something destabilizing hits, name it quietly to yourself. "This hit me." Then decide. "Does this need my attention right now?" Most of the time, the answer is no. So set it down with a time. "I will come back to this at 4:30." Then ask, "What matters in this moment? Who needs me now?" You are sequencing the emotion. It still gets processed, at a time you choose.
6. Make it a team practice
Resilience is relational. Humans do not self-regulate well in isolation, and the strongest senior leaders rely on others to stabilize, widen perspective, or help metabolize pressure. Healthy teams operate on a simple principle. One down, all in. If one person is hit, someone else steps forward to steady the system.
Try this with your team. Pick one ritual and live it for a month. A ten-minute triage huddle when someone is overloaded, to name what is on their plate and decide what can be reassigned, paused, or escalated. A short debrief after a hard meeting, so no one carries it alone. A weekly moment to name how the work tied back to purpose. A shared boundary, like no emails after 6 PM. You do not need ten agreements. You need one or two you can actually live.
The workshop ended with a commitment card. One micro-practice I will apply this week. One shift we will apply as a team. That is the whole method. Small, deliberate actions restore control. Clear language protects energy. Shared rituals build a culture that can hold pressure without breaking people.
The workshop includes three worksheets, one for control mapping, one for boundary language, and one for sorting what belongs to you and what belongs to someone else. If you want them, email me at andrea@andreawedellcoaching.com. And if you want the full three-hour workshop for your team, or coaching that goes deeper into this work, book a free discovery call.
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