Toni:

How comfortable do you feel communicating in high stakes situations? Can you communicate with clarity under pressure? This is one of those skills that is underrated for us as women in tech. You might be great at communicating when things are calm. You’ve had time and the emotional capacity to prepare, whether that preparation has hours or days before you, or in the moment when you collected your thoughts, that’s also preparation. The key is that you were able to prepare and collect your thoughts together in some form or other. But the reality of leadership is one of the most important communications you’ll ever do is when the stakes are high, tempers afraid, personalities collide, and it really matters that the right decisions are made, even though no one can see the correct path forward with certainty, when someone challenges you in a meeting in front of the leadership team, when an executive asks you a question you were not expecting, when you are being pushed back on and you can fill the room watching to see how you respond, or when you know something you’re saying is important, but it doesn’t seem to be hitting the mark, that is where it gets hard, but is the most important part of the job as a leader, yet it’s not something we see modeled well earlier on in our careers. So if you’re ready to learn how to lead with a voice of power, let’s dive in.

Welcome to the leading women in tech podcast, the show that celebrates women in technology leadership. I’m your host, Tony Collis, and this podcast is the result of my passion for building better tech by diversifying the leadership of the technology sector. Join me on this journey as I discuss all things leadership, what it takes to be innovative, breaking through the glass ceiling be a great leader, and how to navigate the unique experiences we face as women in tech. So sit back, grab your headphones and get ready to be inspired to become a better leader.

Let’s consider your next critical or uncomfortable conversation you’re in a meeting, it could be a leadership team review, a board update, a project kickoff with senior stakeholders, a budget conversation, the kind where the people in the room matter and what you say matters, you have prepared. You know your material, you’ve thought through what each personality is likely to want to hear you walk in feeling a reasonably confident then someone asks a question you were not quite expecting, or someone pushes back on your recommendation in a way that feels pointed rather than curious, or there is a moment of silence and all eyes land on you, expectant, waiting, and something happens. Your mind goes slightly blank. The words start coming out of your mouth are not quite the words you had in your head. You hear yourself adding qualifiers. I think probably I might be wrong, but you’re not sure where they came from, because you absolutely knew the answer 30 seconds ago. You start over explaining. You loop back to a point you already made. You finish the sentence and you’re not entirely certain what you just said. You go through your detailed methodology, while pushback seems to build and build in the room. You go from owning the room to feeling like everyone is against you unreasonably. So then the meeting ends, you close your laptop, or you walk back to your desk and you replay it, you ruminate, why did I just say X? I knew X, X was right there. Why did I say all that other stuff instead? Often, that’s when someone comes to me. If any of that felt familiar, you are in exactly the right place for this episode, because what I just described is not failure of intelligence, preparation or expertise, is what happens when a capable, high achieving woman, that’s you, by the way, it’s a pressure trigger in a high stakes environment, and our communication falls apart exactly the wrong moment, the moment we need it most. And I’m not saying this is just a woman issue. Men do this too, by the way, but they’re more likely to have an advocate in the room that rescues them in the moment and calms the situation. Men are more likely to be taken quietly to one side and coached in how to have that conversation again, and they’re more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Now I hope that’s true for you too. I really hope you have an advocate, you have a mentor, you have an ally, you get given the benefit the doubt, but the stats suggest that on average, we’re less likely to get that support. So that’s what we’re tackling head on today, because you can learn how to navigate this, even if you don’t have those folks lifting you up in the moment and the men listening. I know we have a few men who listen to the show. This works for you, too, but I also ask you to watch out and see if women are getting as much support as much support as men in your workplace in situations like this, and if not, do something about it. So let’s talk about what is actually going on in that moment, the different ways it shows up, and what might be going on you might find it turns up in a specific ways for you might be multiple ways it shows up, but with different triggers. Everyone’s different. So the whole point.

Of this list I’m about to give you is to identify your way that things like this show up, because identity is the first step in taking control of a situation. If you understand what’s happening, you can interrupt it. The first way I see this showing up is over explanation. You have a clear answer, but under pressure, you do not trust that the clear answer is enough. You bury in context, backstory, caveats, supporting detail, yeah, I’ve done that. Been there. Got all the T shirts for this one. In the moment, you feel like this is what’s needed, but the reality is that the original point you were trying to make is completely lost. I spend so much time coaching clients on this one in how to give just the right amount of explanation when aiming to explain the situation, get buy in or get approval on a project or a decision without giving all the additional detail that help you make your decision, but is not useful to the people in front of you, but under pressure, that training, that training that I teach women, can often evaporate. The person who asked has forgotten what they asked you by the time you finish answering. That’s the key problem. They’re likely digging into weeds that are completely irrelevant. I have conversations with women who are so frustrated I don’t know why. So and so is spending so much time on that detail. I’m like, Well, why did you bring it up? And that’s not relevant, why is it brought up? And it’s often this need to over explain because we’re feeling unsteady.

The second way I see this showing up is in the hedge spiral, as I call it. Every statement gets softened. I think I feel like I might be wrong. That was my personal favorite statement or this is just my perspective, just my perspective. Your perspective is valid. My love. All of these turn up uninvited and dilute your message before it lands again. I will work with women to get rid of these statements and then some triggers, and they come straight back. What started as a confident recommendation ends up sounding like a question, an apology, so often we did this early in our careers, and perhaps you’ve managed to remove these hedging statements a lot of the time, only for them to come back when the pressure builds. The third way we lose clarity under pressure is when we shut down when under pressure, particularly when challenged or criticized, the voice just stops. It’s a short answer of retreat into agreement, even when there is no agreement that makes sense. In those moments, our inner critic voice that that piece of us that says no, no, no, stay quiet convinces us it’s safer to say nothing than to risk saying the wrong thing. This one, this one breaks my heart every time I hear it. And often, we don’t realize that’s what going on until you describe it to somebody like me. And then the fourth way this shows up, the ramble pressure creates a kind of verbal static. You’re talking the words are coming up, but there is no organization. There’s no idea pulling it all together, you are generating sentences rather than communicating a message. Most often that the women I work with find themselves in more than one of these, right? It might not be all four, but it’s often a couple of them stacked together, depending on the situation. It’s worth understanding what pattern shows up for you. Because when you understand that, when you understand when you’re challenged by a senior stakeholder, it could be that that is the thing that you recognize first, the other thing is to recognize how these patterns show up. It might be that one person triggers one set of responses, and then in another situation, it’s unexpectedly a completely different set of ways that you show up. So it’s worth understanding the patterns. What do they have in common? What are they saying to you about how you’re reacting? None of them, by the way, are about what you know that’s really important for you to hear. They’re about what happens between knowing something and saying it under pressure, the knowledge is there. You are extraordinary. If you’re listening to this, you are not a dumb person. I just want to say that, like some of us go through like going, oh my god, am I really this stupid? No, you’re not. You’re in a leadership position. The expertise is there, the preparation is there. The gap is in your brain’s ability to translate in that high stakes moment. That is not an expertise problem, it’s a communication under pressure problem, and those require very different solutions, which is why you’re here, right? Because let’s talk about what’s actually going on when we are under pressure, our nervous system response. That is not a metaphor. This is genuine physiology happening right the moment you register a threat, a challenging question, a dismissive tone, a sudden silence where all eyes are on you, your brain activates that stress response. The stress response redirects neurological resources. It prioritizes the parts of your brain useful for immediate survival and temporarily dials down the parts you need.

For clear, organized, articulate speech. Your prefrontal cortex responsible for organizing thoughts, retrieving memories, producing coherent language, it takes a back seat. Your threat detection system takes over. So basically, under threat, your IQ literally drops because you’re focused on survival, not logic or problem solving. Yes, it literally drops so a little like side note here. This is one of my it’s one of my theories about one of the reasons why so many folks have gotten away with saying that certain groups are less intelligent quotes than others, something that has been proved to be demonstrably untrue over and over again. And yet, some groups women being one of them, but we are aware of ethnic groups as well that are class this way. I’m not going to name it here on the podcast, because that’s not this is all about but a group is labeled as less intelligent. It’s leveled at women many, many times over, over the centuries. And what’s actually going on, in my opinion, and the reason they get away with it for so long, makes me so angry, by the way,

is that when you put a person into a group where they feel alone, they’re made to feel different, or that group operates differently, they will respond with a threat response, IQ drops. We know this. So put a woman in a room full of angry men and yeah, most women are going to respond in a way that means you are operating at limited capacity, diminished capacity, not at your full capabilities, and not like if you were like as a percentage of your full capability, you’re going to operate a lower percentage than the men in the room, irrespective of everybody’s intelligence, because you are operating in a man’s world, and that hinders our ability to operate to our full potential. Now we can walk into rooms full of men where we don’t feel this way, and that’s brilliant, and we want more of that. And that’s what I try and do with this podcast, actually, is to change the world of work. The extraordinary thing in my mind is how amazing we are anyway. Can I just give you a little round of applause for being so amazing you’ve got to where you are despite all this going on. So okay, sorry, not over many experiences, too. By the way, putting a man in a room where they don’t feel comfortable and they will also experience a fight or flight response. So yeah, you can be a man in a room full of women, and this happens, and this is why just being more like the men in the room isn’t going to fix this for you. They aren’t experiencing this world the same way you are. The same words, the tone set to a man will be experienced differently if they are in a less threatened state to begin with. Have you ever noticed how something that would have bothered you a few years ago doesn’t anymore even something completely different from the world of work. Consider it the first time you drove a car, if you’re like most people, the first time you got behind the wheel of the car. Was a little bit anxious, making high cortisol. You were ready for something, ready for anything. The adrenaline was up. You were ready to respond to everything and anything, because it was new and different and anxious making I mean, maybe anxious is too strong for you. Maybe you really enjoyed it. I certainly enjoyed the first time I drove. But I was very hyper alert, hyper vigilant, right? If someone in that moment threw you a curve ball, you wouldn’t have responded with all the calm and clarity that perhaps you know you’re capable of. We all do this all the time. Put us in a stressful situation and ask us something, we will respond differently than we would in a less stressful situation. If you fast forward years of driving, it seems insane now that that was the case, but it almost certainly was now. Think of the workplace. You’re in front of a group of people that perhaps make you uneasy, or, you know test you or it’s your first time on this stage in front of this group of customers or board members, and then the curveball hits. Same issue. Staying calm under pressure is hard. That is why the words you had clearly in your head did not always make it out clearly. It is not because you did not know them. Is because the part of your brain holding them is temporarily offline. And here’s where it gets more layered and more specific to the experience of us as women in tech. Most of us have spent years operating environments where our ideas were questioned more than those of our male counterparts. Again, one of the reasons we’re doing this work to change that, but we have had to provide more justification for our recommendations, where we have been interrupted, talked over, or watched our contributions get credited to someone else. Understanding and handling bias in these kinds of environments matters, but the impact does not disappear when you move into a more senior role. It gets absorbed into your system. And what that means in practice is that the pressure trigger for many women in tech leadership is not actually the question or the challenge itself. It is the accumulated weight of all the previous times a question or a challenge did not go well, your nervous system learns.

Tends to brace itself. It hears a particular word or phrase and goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, something’s about to go wrong. Cortisol rises, adrenaline rises, fight or flight, response gets triggered. For women who have historically had to fight harder to be heard over explanation often started as a completely logical strategy. If you know you’re going to be questioned harder, you preempt it. Why wouldn’t you? You build in context and justification upfront. You make your reasoning water tight before anyone can challenge it. That was a rational, intelligent adaptation to a genuinely difficult environment. The problem is that strategy outlives the specific environment that created it and where what works lower down in an organization, when you’ve got a boss who knows your job intimately, over explanation, talking through everything you’ve done, actually can help but when you move into a different role, a different organization, a role where your peers don’t know your job intimately, where your boss definitely doesn’t know your job because they’ve never done it or did it so long ago they don’t know what it’s like anymore. The old pattern keeps running on autopilot, but is no longer protecting you. It’s working against you.

When I say this, by the way, this is not a character flaw. I mean it completely when I say that what you are dealing with is a lifetime of conditioned nervous system response. It was logical. Once it saved you, it kept you safe. The work now is recognizing that it’s no longer serving you and building something to replace it. And that’s what we’re going to do right now, before we get onto some practical tools, though, there’s one other thing to do, and that’s to ensure you have the most useful mindset to understand what’s going on here, the reframe I find most useful with my executive coaching clients is to recognize that your current ability to communicate with clarity under pressure is not a personality trait. It’s not set in stone. You can learn how to handle this. You can grow it isn’t something you magically have or don’t have. In fact, I’d argue, even those folks who seem to have it now and have scope for improvement, it is not evidence of confidence level, seniority, readiness for leadership. It’s trained deliberate practice skill. The leaders who seem completely unruffled when challenged, who answer hard questions cleanly and crisply, they have either worked in specific environments long enough that the response has become automatic, or they have actively trained themselves to do it, most likely a bit of both. What you are not seeing is something innate. You are seeing the product of practice, repeated practice, building credibility as a leader is at its core about showing up consistently, even when conditions are difficult. And this is one of the most powerful ways to do exactly that. Let go of the idea that you should be able to do this naturally, the fact that right now, your capabilities to communicate breakdown right now does not mean anything about your suitability for the level of leadership you are stepping into. It means you have not had the training to deal with this particular issue. That’s the whole story. That’s it. The second part of the mindset reframe that I want you to hold on to here is the goal is not to eliminate the pressure response. A little bit of cortisol is good for you. A little bit of adrenaline makes you perform better. You are not aiming for the point where you feel completely calm and unfazed in every high stakes conversation that is neither realistic nor useful appropriate sensitivity to what is at stake is part of what makes you a thoughtful leader. The goal is to build the skill so that even when you feel the pressure, even when you notice that slight freeze, the blank, the wobble, you have a framework that carries you through anyway you can feel the pressure and still communicate clearly those two things absolutely can coexist once the skill is built. So here are five tools you can start building into your practice right now. I really want you to just pick one to start with, but let’s go through all five.

These are things I use every day with clients, when we’re talking about communication and pressure and showing up in a way that makes a change. So these tools are really, really powerful. I know they work. All of them work, but listen to them, and then you can pick one to start with. So tool one anchoring your thoughts to one key point. This is the foundation, I would say, if you’re going to pick one, this is the one. This is the work that happens before you walk into the room. So it’s actually really useful, because you can do it when you’re calm for any high stakes conversation, meeting, presentation, your preparation, which I’m sure you do, should include completing this one sentence. The one thing I need to land in this conversation is the one thing, one thing, one sentence, not three key points, not a paragraph,

one sentence that captures the core of what you are trying to communicate. Write it down. Say it out loud. Know it cold before you are going in under pressure without a clear anchor, your brain goes searching. It’s looking for what the most important thing is, what you should lead with while it’s searching, you.

Are generating words to fill the space, context, background, caveats, all of it buying time while you try to locate the actual point that’s just gone. Whoosh. Bianca gives your brain somewhere to return to when you feel yourself going off track, when you hear yourself heading into La, la, la. That’s that’s what happens with me, right? Or the third sentence of context, and you’ve just lost the thread completely,

that one sentence anchor is what you have to come back to have I landed X yet, no, come back to it. This sounds almost too simple. Most people go into high stakes conversations with a general, somewhat vague sense of what they want to communicate. They have not done the work of distilling it into a single sentence. Actually, that’s quite hard to do, but it is the most powerful thing you can do. That distillation itself is clarifying. If you cannot reduce your ask, your point, your need, the point of the conversation, into one sentence, you do not have the clarity you need to walk in that room confidently. And this is one of those times where I will take tell a client slow down, to speed up. It takes 30 seconds sometimes to slow down enough to ultimately speed up. Knowing your anchor allows you to have a more productive and faster conversation, but you need to slow down in that moment to speed up later, take a moment identify your anchor. Sometimes I find this is where coaching really comes in. People who’ve never done this work really struggle to, like, take the paragraph and make it one thing, and that’s where coaching conversation can really, really help. So if you’re struggling with this, that’s the sign to get a coach. I would say it’s one of the things that most executives lean on for, for coaching for the rest of their careers. They might have done a lot of the personal development work, like a lot of what we talk about on this show, but they’ll have a coach. Most CEOs have, most really successful CEOs have a coach, and it’s sometimes for distilling something like this, just having that safe person to bounce ideas off. So don’t make it wrong if you can’t distill it, it is a skill, but sometimes you still need that partner, that thought partner to do it. Okay, let’s talk about tool number two, the strategic pause. I’ve talked about this on the show before. This is probably not a surprise if you’ve listened for a while. This tool is about retraining your relationship with silence. This is one I struggle with myself just to prove that we all have room to grow out here

when most people feel the pressure of a challenging situation, the instinct is to start talking immediately, filling the space prove you have something to say. The problem is that talking before you have organized a thought is exactly how you end up rambling, hedging, losing the threat before you have found it. The strategic pause is a deliberate decision to breathe, collect yourself before you speak. Have a quick sip of water. Take two to three seconds. You might nod slightly to signal you’ve heard the question. You are considering it. Then you answer from the outside, this reads as composure and authority, exactly the kind of executive presence that I talk about that gets you noticed and rewarded in senior leadership. Inside you might be squirming

If you contrast this with a starting to speak before you are ready, fumbling over the beginning of the sentence, backtracking to try again. Which one is more confident pausing or backtracking, what you need to build is tolerance for the internal discomfort of the pause. And I say that as somebody who’s who has struggled with this, I’m a fast thinker, and I like to put my oar in far too early sometimes. But start practicing in lower stakes conversations there it’s quite easy, team meetings, conversations where the stakes are manageable. Train yourself to pause where it does not cost you anything, so that that habit is available when you do need it. Okay? Tool number three, the pressure proof redirect. This is specifically for when you’re being challenged, when someone pushes back on your idea, questions your recommendation, or ask the point of follow up that feels more like a test, a sharp jab, than a genuine inquiry. The pressure proof redirect has three parts, acknowledge, anchor and offer. So let’s go through these, one at a time. Number one, acknowledge briefly reflect back what you heard without over agreeing or getting defensive something like that’s a fair point to raise. I hear the concern about this something that signals you have received the challenge without either capitulating to it or shutting down. You are not agreeing, you’re acknowledging, you’re receiving and acknowledging and then you move to part two, anchor. Return to that anchor sentence, which is why I think the anchor sentence is the most important thing. What I want to make sure we are clear on is you are not ignoring the challenge. You are saying we’re clear on dot, dot, dot. You’re repositioning to what actually matters, because you’ve done your homework. You know what your anchor is. And then you can move on to the third piece.

Of this pressure proof redirect recipe you offer, you close the loop. You give them something, a next step, a clarification, a commitment to follow up something like, I can share the supporting data after this meeting. Or, why don’t we have a conversation about that offline? Anybody else wants to join and let me know? This demonstrates response enough without requiring you to have a comprehensive answer to everything in real time. What this structure prevents is the two most common failure modes under challenge, that over explanation spiral where you start defending your position with everything you have and lose the thread entirely, and the retreat into agreement situation. And that retreat is often driven by the desire to avoid conflict, but the confidence to say no and to hold your position is learnable. And if you use those three pressure proof redirect points, acknowledge anchor offer, then there’s a practical way to build to saying no. It is. It buys you a little bit of time for your nervous system to calm down, to settle, which is often all you need to get your clarity back. You are a clever cookie. I can’t say this enough in this episode, you are not stupid. You are completely capable, when you’re calm, of handling these pressure points. It’s just when the pressure builds, your nervous system is hijacking you. So what we’re trying to do with all of these things is give you some clarity, give you some calm, buy yourself some time, so your brain can do the work that you are capable of doing. Which brings me to tool number four. Know your trigger signals. Before you can manage your response to pressure, you need to be able to recognize when you are in it and it straight. Sounds strange, I know when I’m triggered. Do you?

Most people do not catch it until there are already several sentences in to ramble to hedge spiral, by which point it’s much harder to course correct. Be honest with yourself, do you know as you start rambling that you’re feeling the way you’re feeling most of us, don’t? I certainly don’t. Your trigger signals are the physical and cognitive clues that tell you I’m in a pressure response situation right now. These are personal to you. Common ones I’ve heard are heart rate picking up obvious kind of thing. But not everybody knows that. Heat in the face, in the chest, it’s like narrowing of attention, where the room seems to shrink, specific cognitive experience of thinking blankly. Well, you know you know something and cannot access it. Now that also comes with menopause, so that’s a whole other conversation, but it seems to come up earlier in our careers, when we’re just triggered, okay, but it can manifest in other ways too. Some of the less common ones I’ve heard from women are slight tightening in the shoulders, pressure in the forehead, almost like a tension headache that never manifests fully. And even gut issues. I used to feel like a little bit of nausea when I was triggered. Some people notice it in their voice. It’s like tightening the pitch, going up the pace, accelerating. Your job is to learn your own signals so you can catch them earlier. Because the earlier you catch it, the more choice you have. Once you notice the signal, which might be a tightening somewhere in your body, as somebody is challenging you, you have something to work with, the pause, the anchor, the redirect, the signal stops being the start of the spiral and becomes a cue that triggers the skill that you’re learning from this episode. That’s it at its core, it’s a self awareness practice. I mean, I think self awareness underpins our executive presence. It is the most important pillar of executive presence. Is self awareness work, and it builds over time. The more self awareness you have, the easier everything’s going to be. But it does build up. So start by noting your signals in retrospect. First pause at the end of today or after a conversation where the pattern showed up, and spend five minutes reflecting on what you felt, physically, cognitively in those moments immediately before you lost clarity, write it down. You’re mapping your own physiology. If you do that for two to three weeks, you will start catching it in real time, earlier and earlier. I’ve seen this over and over again. Two to three weeks is what most people require of either three times a day or at least once a day reflection, you will start being aware in the moment of the physiological response and being to then able to interrupt the cycle that you’re experiencing. Which brings me to the fifth and final tool, the high stakes pre mortem. This is prep work again, but it’s underused in high stakes communication. We typically think of prep work for important meetings by preparing what to say, our key messages, our data, our recommendations, all valid, by the way, or stuff I teach in communication for executives, what almost nobody prepares for is the pressure itself, a high stakes pre mortem asks. What are the hardest questions I could be asked in this conversation? What is the pushback I am most worried about? If this meeting went badly, what would be the trigger for me?

Me, what is the question that if someone asked it would most destabilize me? Write those down. All of them. Do not avoid that worst case one, because the whole point is to surface what your brain is quietly dreading. Then for each one, prepare a first sentence of response. Doesn’t need to be a polished, comprehensive answer, not a five minute dialog on your position. It’s a single first sentence for each item, because under pressure, that hardest part is the first sentence. Once you’re into the answer, the content tends to follow, because you’re not stupid. It is the start that causes the freeze and turns into a ramble. So if you’re going into a leadership team meeting and your biggest fear is that someone will question your resource request, your pre mortem gives you a prepared first sentence. For example, the resource ask rests on three specific assumptions about delivery Timeline. Let me walk you through each of them. That’s all you need to begin. Your brain knows what those three assumptions are, but you need that sentence to anchor you in that moment, calm you down, to give your brain the cognition it needs to operate at the level you’re capable of operating at. The pre mortem also removes the element of surprise, which is a significant part of what makes challenges feel destabilizing when you’ve already anticipated a challenge and prepared a response, your brain registers it as something you have already handled. The physiological pressure response is measurably lower, and part of what good leaders develop over time is the resilience to stay consistent under pressure. The pre mortem is one of the practical tools that builds exactly that resilience. If you take nothing else from this episode, take that one. Do a pre mortem to build some resilience. You have five tools. You do not need to implement all five simultaneous In fact, I’d advocate don’t that’s the fast track to overwhelm. This is a sequence build out that you’re going to do start with one sentence. Anchor this week. Pick one upcoming conversation, where the stakes are real. Your next significant presentation, a one on one where you need to make a case, a leadership team meeting where you’re presenting findings. Spend 10 minutes before that high stakes situation, identifying your anchor sentence. Write it down. Notice how it changes your experience in that room once that starts to feel natural, add the high stakes pre mortem. That’s the second one I’d add in those two tools together, the anchor tells you where you’re going to land. The pre mortem prepares you for the moments when someone tries to knock you off that start practicing then the strategic pause. Start in low stakes environment. You could start today practicing the pause in low stakes environments, because then it’s separate from this high stakes work. Build a habit where it doesn’t cost you anything, so it’s available when it does, and then in a month’s time, once you’ve got the anchor and the pre mortem down, you’ll start just bringing that pause in the redirect structure and the trigger signal work are the next layer, the self awareness more nuanced, taking longer to embed the build on the foundation of the first three. Do not skip the foundation, because it makes everything else harder if you don’t have that in place. Remember the goal here is not perfection. It is not that you never lose clarity under pressure again. The goal is to raise your baseline of operation, to shorten the recovery time when you do have this to build enough skill that you can cause to create mid conversation, rather than only in the debrief afterwards, and that moment when you notice yourself drifting and bring yourself back to the present moment where you land the message, even though the conversation got harder than expected, that is the moment you will start to feel different about high stakes rooms, not when it goes perfectly, but when you recover. Well, if you want to go deeper on getting your voice heard, by the way, the strategies that allow you to manage up make sure your message lands with senior stakeholders, go and check out episode 243, of this podcast struggling to be heard, that covers communication strategy, influencing upwards when you are worried about depth. And it’s really worth returning to that episode even if you’ve listened to it before. I will link the episode in the show notes or in the description if you’re watching on YouTube, go and take a listen to episode two for free. Communicating with clarity under pressure is one of those defining leadership skills for women navigating senior roles. It is the difference between being seen as someone who can hold the room, who has respect of everybody in the room, who is viewed as that person that everyone listens to, that beautiful executive presence, is someone who loses authority at exactly the moment it matters most. The reason it breaks down is not a lack of intelligence. I keep telling you that it’s not lack of preparation or suitability for the leadership role. It is a conditioned nervous system response, often layered on top of years of navigating environments where having a voice came with real risk understanding that is not an excuse to stay in stuff.

Work. It is the starting point for changing it. The five tools that one sentence anchor, the strategic pause, the redirect, knowing your triggers and that high stakes pre mortem, they’re going to give you a framework for building out a skill deliberately to challenge us. In you, you’re not trying to eliminate pressure. You’re building a skill that allows you to stay clear within it. With practice, this becomes a thing you are known for. I want you to be the leader who holds the room when everything around her is chaotic, the one whose message lands, even when someone is pushing back hard, that is available to you. It is a skill. It is trainable, and you can start that work today. If this episode has brought something into focus and you want to work on it directly with support specific to your context, your conversations and your environment, look a strategy. Call with me at Tony collis.com, forward slash, let’s Dash Chat and remember, keep leading as the leading woman in tech that you are, you are extraordinary. So let’s make sure the world sees that bye for now.