On sustained performance without the quiet destruction of the person doing it
Anyone who has lived in this part of Texas for a full year knows that the seasons do not apologize. The summer heat presses from both sides. The storms arrive on their own schedule. Drought settles in and stays longer than it should. You do not negotiate with any of it. You plan for what you can, absorb what you cannot, and hope the well holds.
Leadership runs on the same clock. There are seasons when the work exceeds the week, when the strategy shifts, when the team is short, when the market is unforgiving, when the board is impatient, or when all of that is happening simultaneously. These seasons are not signs of bad planning. They are native to the work. The question is never whether they will arrive. The question is only whether you will still be standing on the other side of them, and whether you will still be recognizably yourself when you are.
“The measure of a pressured season is not what got produced during it. The measure is who you were on the far side of it, and what you still had left to give the people who depended on you.”
The two kinds of pressure that look alike and are not
Not all pressure is the same, and much of what breaks leaders is their inability to tell one kind from another. There is honest pressure, which is the natural weight of consequential work done by a finite person. A hard decision, a tight deadline, a difficult quarter — these produce pressure that is real, and sometimes considerable, but that also produces growth, depth, and often the best work of a leader’s career. The pressure is a companion to the work. You do not want to get rid of it. You want to carry it well.
And then there is the other kind, which I would call manufactured pressure. It is the pressure that comes not from the work itself, but from our response to the work. The relentless checking of the phone, the inability to put the laptop down at dinner, the interior running commentary that refuses to stop, the conviction that if we just work one more hour everything will finally feel handled. This pressure is not produced by the task. It is produced by a leader who has not yet learned to distinguish between the demands of the role and the demands of the anxieties that have attached themselves to the role.
The trouble is that both kinds feel the same in the body. The chest tightens. The sleep thins. The shoulders sit a little higher than they should. Without discipline, we address them the same way too — by working harder. But harder work is the right response to honest pressure and the wrong response to manufactured pressure, and leaders who confuse the two end up grinding hardest against the pressures their own work would not have required of them.
Scripture is sharper about this than most leadership books. Jesus says to Martha, in a verse I have returned to many times, “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful” (Luke 10:41-42, KJV). Careful and troubled. The words are not describing the legitimate work of serving. They are describing the interior state of a person who has let the work become larger than the work itself actually is. One thing is needful. Not many things. Most of what is pressing on the average leader on a Tuesday afternoon is not one thing. It is a thousand things that have not been sorted.
What the well tells you about the rain
Out here, old farmers can tell you a great deal about the state of a well by looking at the land around it. If the pasture is brown and the cattle are restless, you do not start by worrying about the cattle. You start by walking out to the well. The condition of the well tells you what the pasture is going to look like next month, regardless of what the weather does.
A leader’s interior life is the well the organization draws from. In pressured seasons, most leaders focus on the pasture — the output, the deliverables, the visible signs of effort. The wiser leader keeps one eye on the well. If the well is clouding, no amount of attention to the pasture will save what is happening below the surface. And the well, in this metaphor, is usually clouded by things that look invisible — a sleep pattern that has been off for three weeks, a marriage that has been thin on conversation for two months, a practice of prayer or quiet that was the first thing sacrificed when the pressure rose and has not been restored. The well is cloudy before anyone can see it. And the pasture follows, eventually, without fail.
“You cannot give, in any sustained way, what is not being replenished somewhere. The well is not a metaphor. It is the most literal description of leadership I know.”
Three disciplines for the long pressured season
Protect the few things that compound
Under pressure, most leaders do more of everything. The disciplined ones do less of more things. There are two or three activities, in any given leader’s life, that compound — that make every other hour of work more effective, every other decision clearer, every other relationship more intact. For most people they include sleep, the weekly conversation with the spouse, the one-on-one with the key person whose drift would cost the organization more than anyone else’s, and some form of quiet reflection at the start or end of the day.
In pressured seasons, these are almost always the first things sacrificed, because they are the things that do not scream for attention. The email screams. The meeting screams. The sleep, the marriage, the reflection — they whisper. Until one day they do not whisper anymore, and by then the damage has been done. Identify the compounding few in your life. Protect them first. Cut almost anything else before you cut them. A leader who sustains the compounding activities through a hard season will come out of it stronger. A leader who sacrifices them will come out of it with output that cannot make up for what was lost.
Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16, KJV). He is speaking theologically, but the pastoral implication for leaders is plain. The body, the soul, the interior life of the person doing the leading — these are not expendable resources. They are the place God has chosen to dwell. Treating them as consumables, to be spent down in service of a pressured quarter, is a theological mistake as well as a practical one.
Distinguish urgency from panic, in yourself first
Urgency is an external condition. Something must move quickly. The situation is real, the stakes are real, the need for speed is not imagined. Panic is an internal condition. Something in your own nervous system has concluded that the situation is unsurvivable, and has begun to transmit that conclusion to your body, your tone, and, almost certainly, your team.
The two feel identical until you have learned to notice the difference, and most leaders have not. They operate from panic while believing they are simply responding to urgency, and they transmit the panic downstream in every meeting, every email, every tight-jawed conversation with the person who was already trying hard. The team picks up the panic, mirrors it, and begins making panicked decisions of their own — poor ones, because panic narrows thinking rather than sharpening it.
When you feel the pressure rise in yourself, before you send the next message or convene the next meeting, do a simple check. Is there something that must move in the next thirty minutes — actually must — or is my interior state telling me there is? If the answer is the second, the most productive next move is almost never another email. It is a walk. A phone call to a steady person. A few minutes of quiet. A pause long enough for the urgency to reassert itself without the panic underneath it. David, in the Psalms, models this repeatedly. He describes his interior state honestly, then re-centers. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God” (Psalm 42:5, KJV). He does not deny the disquiet. He speaks to it. He reminds his soul of what is actually true. Then he returns to the work. That is the pattern.
Set a visible end point, even an artificial one
What actually breaks people is not hard work. It is not long hours, or difficult quarters, or demanding seasons. People can carry enormous load, for long periods, if they can see the end of the road. What breaks them is open-ended pressure — the absence of any visible horizon, the sense that this is simply the new normal, that it might never ease.
Give the season a shape, even if the shape is artificial. “We are running this intensity through the end of the quarter, and then we are stopping to reset.” Or, “We are in this mode through the launch, and after the launch we are taking a real breath.” The end point may shift — it usually does, at least a little — and the team can absorb a shifted end point far better than they can absorb an endless one. You can too. Name the horizon, publicly and privately, and keep naming it as the season unfolds. Even an approximate horizon is enough to carry a person through terrain that would otherwise feel unsurvivable.
Leadership Reflection
• What are the two or three compounding activities in your life that, if they hold, make everything else possible? Are you currently protecting them, or have they been the first things sacrificed in this season?
• When the pressure rose this week, were you operating from urgency or from panic? What would the next hour look like if you could reliably tell the difference?
• What is the visible end point of the current pressured season, and have you said it out loud, to your team, to your family, to yourself?
• What is the current state of the well below your leadership? What would have to change in the next thirty days for it to begin refilling?
The season that will pass, and the leader who will remain
Every pressured season ends. That is the first thing to remember. Not when we want it to, not as cleanly as we hope, but it ends. The storms pass. The quarter closes. The launch happens. The new hire starts. The conditions that felt unsurvivable resolve, usually in ways that, in hindsight, were always going to resolve if we could have seen a few weeks further than we could see at the time.
What matters, on the other side, is who is standing there. Did you keep your judgment? Did you keep your marriage? Did you keep the small practices that make you a person your team can follow and your family can recognize? Did you come through the season stronger, or did you come through as a version of yourself that you would not have chosen if anyone had asked you at the start of it what kind of leader you wanted to become?
The work will keep asking for more. It always does. It is, in some sense, its job to ask. What the work cannot ever give you, not in any quarter, is a legitimate reason to trade the person you are for the output a pressured season seems to require. That trade is always on the table. It is always bad, and the best leaders I have known refuse it, especially in the seasons when the math seems to make it look reasonable. Those are the seasons when refusing it matters most.
Walk out to the well. See what is happening below the surface. Restore what can be restored, starting this week. The pasture can wait a little longer than you think. The well cannot.
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A note from Lee: If any of this lands where you are right now, and you would value an unhurried conversation with someone whose job is to help you see clearly, the door is open. connect.msgresources.com/leadership-advisory
