Your stress is contagious. Really.
Today’s edition of the Better Leadership Blueprint is inspired by my former semi/ big rig truck driving instructors… why staying calm under pressure is a learnable neurological skill, not a personality type, as well as the specific habits that build it.
Read time: 4 minutes
You’ve probably worked with someone who had it… the leader who, when everything was falling apart, slowed down instead of sped up.
Who asked a question instead of issuing a decree.
Who didn’t raise their voice once, even when the situation probably warranted it.
And you’ve probably worked with someone who absolutely DID NOT.
The one whose stress was basically airborne, where you’d brace yourself walking past their office because you could feel the energy before you even got to the door.
Neither of those people was born that way.
There’s a phenomenon in neuroscience called co-regulation (you may have heard of this term, and in my opinion, it’s one of the most critical pieces of good leadership practice).
Human nervous systems are not fully self-contained; they pick up cues from the nervous systems around them, especially from people in positions of authority. Your team’s brains are, quite literally, scanning you for signals about whether the situation is safe or dangerous.
When you’re visibly anxious, scattered, or running hot, the people around you don’t just notice it. Their stress response activates in response to yours… cortisol rises… threat-detection goes up… thinking gets narrower and faster, which is the exact opposite of what you need when a situation requires good judgment.
A leader who panics in a crisis doesn’t just have a personal problem. They have a team problem.
Every person in that room is now spending cognitive resources managing their own activated nervous system instead of thinking clearly about the actual issue in front of them.
In small organizations, that contagion effect is immediate. When the CEO of a fifteen-person organization walks in visibly stressed about the board meeting, fifteen people feel it within about ninety seconds.
That’s the organizational cost of an unregulated leader: slower thinking, worse decisions, and a team quietly spending energy managing their emotional response to you instead of doing the work.
If you’ve realized your stress is showing more than you’d like, the usual first move is some version of “stay calm.” You tell yourself to breathe. You try to look neutral. You practice keeping your voice level.
And that works for about twenty minutes, until something actually hard happens and the mask slips.
Trying to appear regulated and actually being regulated are two completely different neurological states.
One is suppression, which is exhausting and eventually fails. The other is genuine nervous system recovery, which looks nothing like “just trying harder to seem fine.”
I spent years thinking that managing my visible reactions was the same thing as managing my internal state. I was wrong.
I first encountered this understanding when I was working towards gaining my commercial driving license so I could drive adventure travel tour buses, and was a proud attendee of the Western Pacific Truck Driving School.
This was in my early 20’s, when I was teaching high school English. Truck driving school was hard for a number of reasons that you might guess: you’re driving a vehicle that’s WAY bigger than most things you’ve driven, learning new rules and skills, and creating a new idea of who you are and what you’re capable of.
It was also hard because my schedule was: teaching high school from 7:30 am- 3 pm and attending truck driving school from 4 pm- 11 pm. It was only for a couple of weeks, but yes, I was tired as well as mentally and physically challenged (the perfect recipe for epic melt-downs, in my experience!)
We were driving in the dark. Often it was rainy. And I had to learn to double-clutch because it was a manual transmission, and that’s how those rigs work.
I remember making a mistake and immediately beating myself up out loud, as well as wondering what else I was doing wrong and being a huge stress ball… basically letting my internal monologue be external, and it wasn’t pretty.
My instructor, Gary, was the loveliest man. I remember him saying in a super calm voice: “It sounds like you might be getting worked up. There’s nothing to get worked up about. We’re just driving and learning.”
And once I became a driver of the Green Tortoise, the company I worked for for many years, I remember Lyle, the owner, saying during one of our training sessions, “Nobody wants to be in a bus where the driver is screaming at the windshield.”
SO TRUE, Lyle. So true!
Ok, so in that scenario, my passengers weren’t technically “my team”. But they were people who were very powerfully and directly influenced by my and my co-drivers’ demeanors.
Gary co-regulated me and brought me down from my freak-out. And Lyle helped me understand in very visceral terms what a lack of real regulation in myself would feel like to the passengers.
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The leaders I’ve worked with who are genuinely steady under pressure share a few things in common, and none of them are personality traits they were born with.
The first is that they know their early warning signals, not what they look like to other people when they’re stressed, but what happens inside them before it’s visible externally.
Maybe they go very flat and quiet.
Maybe thinking speeds up, and they start interrupting.
Maybe it’s a tightening in the chest or a specific flavor of impatience.
The earlier you catch the signal, the more options you have.
The second is a recovery practice, something concrete they do in the gap between the trigger and their response.
Stepping out to get water.
Getting up and walking around.
Giving themselves thirty seconds before they reply.
Naming what’s happening internally, just to themselves, which research on affect labeling suggests genuinely reduces the intensity of the stress response by giving the prefrontal cortex something to do. The particular technique matters less than the consistency.
The third takes the longest to build. These leaders have practiced their recovery routine so many times in ordinary daily friction that it’s available automatically when things actually go sideways.
I mean the routine stuff: the passive-aggressive email, the meeting that runs off the rails, the pointed question in front of the full room.
Those low-grade moments of activation are where the skill actually gets built, because they happen all the time.
If you only try to regulate yourself during a genuine crisis, you’re attempting something you’ve never practiced.
The crises are the exam; the small irritations are the study and the practice.
You don’t build the capacity to stay steady in a genuinely hard moment by trying really hard during the genuinely hard moment.
You build it by noticing your own activation in the smaller moments, using your recovery practice there consistently, and letting your nervous system learn through repetition that it can come back down.
That’s what makes regulation available when you actually need it.
A P&C manager I worked with recently started noticing how differently her team moved depending on what kind of meeting they’d just come out of.
After a calm, focused meeting, the afternoon was noticeably more productive.
After a meeting where the senior leader had been scattered and reactive, the team was slower to settle, quieter, and less likely to make decisions without checking in first.
She hadn’t changed anything about how she managed them. The only variable was the emotional tone of the room they’d been in an hour before.
This is exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t show up in performance data until it’s been happening for months. By the time you can see it in outputs, you’ve already been paying the tax for a long time.
When you get this right, the team stops absorbing the cost of your unprocessed stress.
Thinking gets clearer at the moments when it most needs to be.
People bring problems to you earlier because they trust you’ll respond to information instead of react to it.
And you stop spending the hour after a hard conversation wondering who that person was and whether you can undo the damage.
Leadership built on genuine steadiness, instead of performed calm, is a different experience entirely, for you and for everyone in the room with you.
Maybe there should be an update to the classic Warren G song ‘Regulate’? ‘Co-regulators, MOUNT UP!’
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
Cassa Grant is an executive coach and facilitator based in Nelson, New Zealand. She works with leaders navigating career transitions, identity changes, and the practical realities of managing people well. She publishes The Better Leadership Blueprint on LinkedIn and is the director of Chalkbox, a New Zealand workplace skills training company.
