Mike Pelfini — 07 April 2025

Leaders face many high-pressure situations. Learning to calm down and stay calm can help you make better decisions and inspire your team.

Leadership often comes with stress.  For the sake of their own health and the health of their teams, leaders must learn how to calm down and stay calm under pressure.  By learning to manage stress, leaders can become the “steady hand at the wheel” their teams and organizations need.  

As leaders, we don’t always rise to the challenge of managing stress calmly. Research shows that more than half of leaders become less calm, more controlling, irascible, and closed-minded in times of crisis.  Another 40% become more heated and angry.  Those statistics tell us that there is a lot of room for improvement.  

Leaders who can stay calm under pressure will find that they make more thoughtful, less reactive decisions.  Learning to calm down will also avoid emotional damage, improve team dynamics, and help team members perform at their best.  

This article examines ways to stay calm under pressure, and to calm down when triggered and agitated.  

Know your stress threshold and triggers

Handling high levels of stress is sometimes considered as a badge of honor for those who buy into the “macho culture”, but the truth is that people handle stress in different ways. While a healthy amount of stress can raise performance levels, too much stress can block creativity, cause people to shut down, or to lash out in anger.  Even the most stress-tolerant leaders can suffer from loss of performance and burn-out.  

Becoming aware of your individual stress tolerance level is the first step towards staying calm under pressure.  Pay attention to the types of situations that provoke the strongest reactions, these are your stress triggers. They may include uncomfortable conversations, information overload, or tight deadlines.  Identify the situations that cause the most stress so you can prepare for them.

Pay attention to your body’s signals

To calm down under pressure, learn to pay attention to your body’s signals.  This is the first step toward emotional regulation. Your body’s defenses – the “fight or flight” reactions – can cause increased heart rates, higher blood pressure, and faster and shallower breathing.  Notice these signals so you can respond to them.

Learn to stay calm by starting with your breathing.  Controlling your heart rate and blood pressure might seem difficult, if not impossible to do. Controlling your breathing is very possible.  If you’ve identified the types of situations you find especially stressful, you can prepare for them in advance.  

Avoid rushing into a critical meeting at the last second.  Take a minute or two to clear your mind and focus on taking slow, deep breaths.  Your heart rate will slow, your blood pressure and anxiety level will come down. Consider this “personal time” as a critical part of your preparation.  Mastering your emotions is just as important as mastering a presentation.

Stay calm through reflection

Learning to stop and reflect is good for both your heart and your head, according to the Harvard Business School.  When you pause to reflect, you can think more clearly about the course ahead.

“Realize that in the heat of the moment, nothing an individual leader can do can solve the whole situation,” according to Harvard professor Nancy Koehn.  “You’re better off acting from your strongest, calmest self than you are taking the first reactive immediate action.”  Giving yourself time to reflect in stressful situations will help you calm down – and lead to better decisions.  

Your team members will benefit from this kind of “self-leadership” as well.  When leaders display impulsive behavior or erratic decision making, team morale can suffer.  

A positive way forward in difficult situations is to display “cheerfulness in the face of adversity,” according to McKinsey. Acknowledge the challenge ahead and attack it in a deliberate, step-by-step fashion to help build confidence.

Keep calm by reframing threats as challenges

Learn to keep calm by reframing problems as challenges, rather than as threats.  Research shows that this approach helps focus attention on the task to be done and the steps needed to succeed.  “A challenge frame [of reference] builds resilience in the face of stress,” according to the author.

Changing your perspective can take some practice.  “When we’re tired from stress, we tend to see negative messages and threats more readily than opportunities and positive messages,” according to a McKinsey article.   “When faced with a difficult situation, ask yourself:  Am I jumping to conclusions too fast? What else can be true at this moment? What is important to me and my team right now?”  

A final way to stay calm under pressure is to face anxieties head on.  People under stress may retreat into irrational fear.  A mistake or missed deadline can spiral into thoughts of catastrophe and ruin.  

Break that cycle by thinking through the consequences deliberately and rationally.  What is really at stake right now? What can be done to mitigate negative consequences?  How can we rise to the occasion instead?  

These are just a few of the ways leaders can learn to stay calm in stressful situations. If you would like to learn more about leadership, emotional regulation, and inspiring your teams, please contact us.

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ForeMeta offers breakthrough leadership coaching to develop CEO self-leadership and leading teams and organizations. We offer both individualized coaching or peer group coaching to help leaders and their teams achieve greater success. To get in touch with us, click here.

 

Copyright ©️ 2025 by Mike Pelfini. All rights reserved.