Hold On To What Holds You Up - Leading Under Pressure

When the pressure is on, the first things to go are almost never the things that were weighing you down. They tend to be the things that were holding you up.

The gym. The thinking time. The team brief. The habits that quietly keep everything else functioning. They feel like luxuries when everything is demanding your attention at once, and so they tend to go first - not because you've decided they don't matter, but because there just doesn't seem to be room for them anymore.

I've been sitting with this for the last few months, because it's been the busiest period of my business life, running alongside one of the busiest periods in my family life. Our twins are moving from primary to secondary school, and I genuinely didn't see the full weight of what that would ask of me until I was already in it. And when it arrived, I had to get quite honest quite quickly about what was actually going to make the boat go faster, and what needed to be consciously released rather than just left to collapse on its own.

And one of the professional things I have let go of is LinkedIn. I've posted on LinkedIn three times a week for three years, and for the same three years I've kept to a rhythm that has become almost non-negotiable for me - writing a blog every Monday on my website, turning that into a LinkedIn article on Wednesday, and sending it out to my database on a Friday. That rhythm I've protected completely, and I have no intention of letting it go. But the additional posting, the engagement, the showing up in other people's conversations, the 2-3 hours a week that goes on top, I've had to release. Because right now I need those hours somewhere else, and I made a decision to be at peace with that rather than carry it as something I was failing at.

And I want to be clear that I'm not writing this from a place of having it all figured out. I mean, it’s way more than LinkedIn. There are days when life’s rocky. Days when I have to take a minute, or several. Days when the personal structures and habits I've tried to hold onto feels like it's held together with very little. But even just keeping those rhythms - the Monday blog, the Wednesday article, the Friday email - has given me something to hold onto when everything else feels unpredictable. It hasn't made the pressure disappear. It's just kept me feeling, even slightly, like I'm in the driving seat rather than just along for the ride.

A coach once asked me: when you squeeze an orange, what comes out? Orange juice. And when life is really squeezing you - when the diary is full, the demands are coming from every direction and you're running out of space to breathe - what comes out of you? It's worth sitting with honestly, not from a place of judgment, but from genuine curiosity. Because what surfaces under pressure isn't created by the pressure…….. it was already there.

I think about the hospitality manager at Christmas who decides to cancel team briefings because it's just too busy. And I understand the logic completely because there aren't enough hours, everyone is stretched, something has to give. But that's exactly the moment the team needs more communication, more steadiness, more of a sense that someone has a clear head and a hand on the wheel. The briefing that feels like a luxury is often the thing that's actually holding everything together. And the same tends to be true of the personal practices that keep a leader clear and grounded - the things that feel most dispensable under pressure are often the ones that are quietly doing the most work.

So if you can see a busy period coming - a new opening, a difficult quarter, a significant stretch personally or professionally - it's worth asking yourself before it arrives what you need to protect. Not what you can afford to drop, but what must stay, because without it everything else starts to suffer in ways you might not notice until you're looking back at it from the other side.

And if the pressure has arrived without warning and you're already in it, the question is the same. What is genuinely making the boat go faster right now, and what, if you're honest, is just adding weight?