How do you stay grounded under pressure?
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Published by Sanita Pukite - on July 10, 2025
When the world feels like it’s falling apart.
When people who were just with you… suddenly aren’t.
When someone who was smiling and full of life months ago is now fighting for theirs.
And still - life continues and the work needs to get done.
Your children are looking to you for stability and presence. Your clients look to you to hold the space when they can’t hold it themselves. Your teams and partners need you to bring the energy when theirs is running low.
When you're exhausted but still expected to perform, inspire, and deliver. Emails keep coming. The people around you still need you. And somehow, you need to keep showing up with strength and clarity.
This is the moment your inner core gets tested.
Not the part of you that knows what to do when things are fine. The part that leads when you’re tired, shaken, and triggered, but still choose to act with intention.
These are the moments where clarity, self-mastery, and courage stop being nice words and become lifelines.
In moments like these, there’s no quick fix. No tactic or last-minute strategy that will hold you steady when life throws something real at you. What it does hold is what you’ve built over time - the inner work shaped during quieter seasons.
The habits you practiced when energy was high.
The clarity you cultivated when things were still.
The resilience forged through emotional and leadership challenges that tested your limits.
That’s the work that doesn’t show up on LinkedIn, but defines who you are when the pressure is on. You don’t reach out for something new, you reach inward. You access what’s already there.
Mountains aren’t strong by luck. They’re built by pressure.
It's no different from how mountains are formed. They're not strong because they escaped pressure, they exist because of it.
Mountains are created when the Earth's massive crustal plates move and collide, squashing and folding the rock like a slow-motion car crash, breaking and shoving sections skyward, pushing pieces upward, or when hot liquid rock erupts and piles up over millions of years. That pressure and force doesn't break the crust, it reshapes and elevates it.
And what makes them stable isn't just their height, it's their extraordinary depth. The higher the mountain, the deeper its foundation extends into the Earth. What we see above ground is just the visible tip. Below the surface, mountain ranges have deep crustal "roots" that can extend 30-70 kilometers down into the mantle, foundations that formed through immense time, heat, and tectonic forces.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s geology. However, it can become a metaphor when applied to leadership under pressure.
When the world crumbles and bad news hit – we will be triggered.
Our system will want to shut down, avoid, or control.
It might look like over-functioning, pleasing, spiraling, or pulling away into the depth of avoidance and dismissal. These are not weaknesses. These are adaptive responses that once served us, but they don’t serve the moment we’re in now.
This is when leaders need to return and lead from the inside out.
1. Clarity:
→ What is actually happening here?
→ What is mine to carry, and what is not?
→ What matters most right now?
2. From there, we need to move into Mastery:
→ Regulating our emotional response.
→ Choosing how to focus our attention.
→ Grounding in routine, breath, action.
3. And then we call on Courage:
→ To stay present in pain.
→ To move forward, knowing the blow might come.
→ To lead not because it’s easy, but because it’s ours to do.
When we have options, we gain clarity.
One thing that shifts everything in pressure moments is to remember that we have options.
Even small choices - where to focus, how to respond, what to say - start to build a sense of agency. Choice allows us to move from reactivity to presence. It allows us to create a mental decision-making lattice: a set of internal guideposts that help us operate even when nothing around us is stable.
It doesn’t make things easy. But it gives us a way forward.
The night before the summit is the hardest.
If you’ve ever climbed a real mountain, you know: the hardest moment is just before the summit.
Cold. Exhaustion. Lack of sleep. The altitude is messing with your head. And every part of you is asking, “Why am I doing this?”
Every part of you wants to give up. It’s dark. And you can’t even see the top.
But you keep going. Not because it feels good. But because you committed. Because others are counting on you. Because there’s a part of you that knows, you can go further.
So, you pull from places inside you that you didn’t even know existed. And you climb. One step. One breath. One moment at a time.
That is self-leadership and self-mastery.
When you climb mountains, you don’t build your foundation in the storm. You build it in seasons of calm – through practice, dedication, reflection, and consistent commitment. This is what helps to master the night before the summit, allows you to stand and not crumble. Not because you are a superhuman and unshakable, but because you built your foundations when the conditions were good.
Leaders who stay grounded? They’re the ones who do the work from the inside out.
What are you building when the sun is still shining? Because that’s what will carry you when it’s not.
We each have a role to play, a mission to serve.
Staying grounded helps us to serve.
How can I help?
✧ Explore a signature workshop. Bring the High-Impact Leadership Series™ to your organization - experiential learning workshops on clarity, presence, influence, and courageous leadership under pressure. [Enquire here]
✧ Book private coaching. Step into your next chapter with bespoke executive coaching. For senior leaders navigating transition, pressure, or reinvention. [Schedule a chemistry call.]
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Let’s shape the kind of leadership the future is calling for - grounded, resonant, and deeply human.