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Washington DC 2016, a convention hall, over two thousand people in the seats, thousands more watching online.
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The keynote speaker walks out.
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And this is not a nervous beginner.
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Ed Tate won the World Championship of Public Speaking in 2000.
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Speaking is his profession.
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He has spoken in 25 countries on five continents.
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He takes his stance, he gets his first laugh, and then he forgets his opening line.
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He wrote about it four years later.
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In Toastmaster's magazine, in a piece he titled Seven Seconds of Terror.
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Here are his words as printed.
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I forgot my opening line, I blanked out, for over seven prolonged and painful seconds.
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Seven seconds.
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On a stage, in front of thousands, a word champion, silent.
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And now here is the part I want you to hold on to because it's the whole episode.
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It came back.
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In his words, I remembered not only my opening line, but my entire speech.
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He finished that keynote.
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He wrote that he received a standing ovation.
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The answer left.
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And then the answer came back.
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So today I'm not asking why it left.
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I am asking something better.
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Why does it come back?
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Welcome to the AI Cafe Conversation Podcast.
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I'm Sahar Andradi, a neuroleadership coach.
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This is where the neuroscience of pressure meets the future of leadership.
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Everything I share comes from my experience and my opinion as a coach.
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It's not a diagnosis and it's not a fact about you.
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You decide what fits.
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This month we are following one question.
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Who leads when pressure rises?
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Today we follow that question into one moment.
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The moment a leader knows the answer and cannot reach it.
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And the moment after, the moment it returns.
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Let me tell you what I am not going to do today.
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I'm not going to spend 20 minutes on the blank.
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We have talked about the blank on this show before.
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The silence, the empty space where the answer should be.
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Today is about the return, because the return tells us something the blank never could.
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Go back to Attait for a second.
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Seven seconds of silence, and then the speech, his speech, the one he had prepared.
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He did not learn it in those seven seconds.
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He did not go backstage and read his notes.
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Whatever he had built was not gone.
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It was out of reach.
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And then it was within reach again.
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Hold on those two words, out of reach, within reach.
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This is the whole difference between a leader who does not know and a leader who cannot get to what they know in that moment.
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From the outside, those two leaders look exactly the same.
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Same silence, same face, same room watching.
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From the inside, they are living two completely different things.
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Let me put words to this.
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The way leaders put words to it, because leaders almost never describe this moment with science.
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They describe it with their bodies.
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They say they want to be able to stand their ground without getting overwhelmed.
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They talk about the voice, the voice that's shaken when the conversation gets hard, the breath that goes fast and shallow behind a closed door.
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It is as if the body votes one way and the title votes another.
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And here is the other side of the room, because there is always another side.
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While the leader is in that moment, the team is watching.
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Teams read the leader's face the way you read the sky before you leave the house.
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They notice the pause before anyone says a word.
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They adjust to it.
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Sometimes they go quite too.
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Last week, in the pressure room, we gave this moment a picture.
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From the outside, it can look like the person went on mute.
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From the inside, it feels like a fog wall dropped between them and what they know.
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The road might still be there.
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The knowledge has not necessarily disappeared.
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But the fog is so thick that you cannot see far enough to take the next step.
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And the sentence we handed that room was four words long.
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I hit a fog wall.
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Say it once in your head, I hit a fog wall.
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Notice what the sentence does?
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It names the weather.
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It does not hand down a verdict.
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In that moment, many leaders reach for something much harder than a description.
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They reach for a verdict about themselves.
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That is the first misreading, and it's the most expensive one.
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The misreading is that the leader did not know, that they were unprepared, that the silence is proof of a gap in competence.
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He was not short on preparation.
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This is not a knowledge problem, it's an access problem.
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And the second misreading follows right behind the first.
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It says, if the answer is out of reach, reach harder.
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Push.
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Grab for the whole answer.
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All at once.
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Faster.
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Hold that one.
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We're coming back to it because it's exactly the move that makes the fog thicker.
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Now let me add what this year is asking of leaders on top of all this.
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The KPMG 2025 US CEO Outlook put it this way: 50% of CEOs agree managers in the business will be primarily responsible for managing the performance of AI agents rather than HR and IT departments.
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Half of the CEOs, managers, not HR, not IT.
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Think about that means, what that means for the moment we're talking about.
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This is not one more tool.
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That is more streams to hold in mind at the same time.
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More outputs to check, more summaries arriving before the meeting, more questions arriving inside the meeting that nobody saw coming.
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In my opinion, cognitive overload in leaders is not a future risk.
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It's the job description being written right now.
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Every added stream is one more thing competing for the same limited space a leader uses to hold an answer together.
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So the fog does not only come from the board member with the hard question, it can come from everything a leader was already carrying when that question landed.
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Now I want to tell you about the night I understood this in my hand.
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I was driving home after a retreat that I was giving like two hours away, and a storm started.
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The rain was so heavy, it looked like the sky had opened hundreds of water hoses at once.
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And then the fog came in so thick that I did not know whether my headlights were even on.
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They were on, they were on high beams, and the high beams were hitting the fog and throwing the light straight back into my eyes.
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More light was making it worse.
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So I did the only things that worked.
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Maybe out of panic.
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I slowed down.
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I opened my eyes wider.
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I held the steering wheel harder.
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I switched to low beams and I stayed in one lane.
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No lane changes.
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I kept checking whether I could move over every time there was nothing to see.
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So I stayed in my lane.
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Then I found a truck ahead of me and I followed its red lights.
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One lane, low beams, aware of where I was, following the red lights.
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A two-hour drive took me four hours.
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I drove almost the whole way on low beams behind that truck.
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And ten minutes before I got home, the fog lifted.
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Here is what I want you to hear in that story.
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I did not make the fog lift.
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I could not.
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Nothing I did in that car moved the weather.
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What I could do was make the drive smaller than the fog.
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Let's talk about why this happens.
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And I want to be careful here because this is exactly where a lot of content about pressure goes too far.
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I'm going to separate three things for you.
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What the research is, what is reasonable inference, and what is my practice designed in response.
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Those are not the same, and you deserve to know which one you are hearing.
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Start with what the research shows.
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Being watched and judged is not a small thing to a human being.
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In one brain imaging study, researchers put people under social evaluative threat, which is a formal way of saying they were being watched and judged, and then gave them a working memory task.
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Working memory got worse, and brain imaging showed reduced activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in holding information in mind and organizing it.
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So being watched and evaluated can make the mental work of holding and organizing information harder.
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Notice the word can.
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Not every person, not every time, but it's real.
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It has been measured and it shows up in the brain.
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Second finding, a meta-analysis, which means a study of many studies, looked at acute stress and what are called executive functions.
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It found that on average acute stress impaired working memory and cognitive flexibility.
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Holding things in mind and shifting between ideas both harder on average under acute stress.
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The effects vary across tasks, timing and people, but the direction is clear.
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Third finding, and this one matters most for today.
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Retrieval.
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Reaching for what you already stored.
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A 2018 meta-analysis covering 113 studies found that stress around the time of retrieval was associated on average with poorer memory retrieval.
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Hear that one again.
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Not poorer learning, poorer retrieval.
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The information may have been stored, reaching it became harder.
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There is a piece of chemistry in this too, and I want to give it to you at the right size.
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Under acute stress, signaling changes quickly in the brain systems involved in higher order thinking.
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Chemicals like norepinephrine and dopamine rise.
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And here is the interesting part: a little can sharpen the brain.
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Too much can push those systems outside their best range.
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Researchers describe it as an inverted U.
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Up to a point better.
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Past that point, worse.
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Much of that mechanism work comes from animal studies with human brain imaging pointing the same way.
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So I teach it as a strong direction, not a measurement taken inside anyone's meeting.
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I often use a picture for this with leaders.
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An engine needs fuel.
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Too little and it will not start.
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Too much and you flood it and it stalls.
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That is an analogy, not anatomy.
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But it holds the idea, more stress chemistry is not always more performance.
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And then there is a slower stress chemistry.
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In experiments, when glucocorticoid activity was raised, the stress range levels, people had more trouble retrieving information they had already learned.
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That is one part of this picture.
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It does not explain every job that gets harder under pressure.
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I'm not going to tell you cortisol caused adates seven seconds.
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Nobody can know that.
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And the research does not support saying it.
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So here is the evidence, altogether in plain words.
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Under enough pressure, especially the pressure of being watched and judged, holding information in mind, reaching for what is stored, and thinking flexibly can all become harder.
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Producing an organized answer can become harder.
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Now, the return.
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Here is the inference, and I'm labeling it as inference.
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When the pressure state changes, access can improve.
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That may be part of what people experience when the answer arrives later.
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No study followed that answer down the stairs though.
00:15:57.440 --> 00:16:01.440
You walk down the stairs and the answer arrives late.
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Sometimes when the pressure drops, the fog lifts enough for the answer to come back.
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Sometimes it comes back seven seconds later on the same stage, the way it did for attait.
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Sometimes it comes back on the stairs.
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Sometimes it comes back 10 minutes before you get home.
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And sometimes a different answer comes, and sometimes a better one.
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That is why I do not tell leaders the answers was sitting there, whole and intact the entire time.
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I can't promise that.
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What I can say is this the blank in the room is not a verdict on what a leader knows.
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The return is the evidence.
00:16:47.600 --> 00:16:51.679
Now let me show you what this costs when nobody understands it.
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The leader goes quiet, the room moves on without what the leader knew.
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The decision gets made with a piece missing.
00:17:00.799 --> 00:17:05.279
Then the answer arrives on the stairs, and it's too late to use.
00:17:05.519 --> 00:17:10.319
And then the leader starts to replay what I said, what should I have said?
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What they saw.
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And what the next time a hard question comes, they walk already bracing for it.
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They are now being watched by the room and by themselves.
00:17:20.480 --> 00:17:23.519
That is more evaluation, not less.
00:17:23.839 --> 00:17:27.599
More weight on the same limited space.
00:17:28.240 --> 00:17:33.039
This is the loop I keep coming back to on this show.
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Decision load rises.
00:17:36.640 --> 00:17:38.960
A leader's openness drops.
00:17:39.440 --> 00:17:41.680
The team goes quiet.
00:17:42.160 --> 00:17:44.319
Information stops flowing.
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A decision quality can drop further.
00:17:47.839 --> 00:17:53.599
The fog in one's person's head does not stay in one person's head.
00:17:53.839 --> 00:17:56.720
It becomes the weather in the room.
00:17:57.920 --> 00:18:03.200
Now I can hear some of you, and this objection is a good one.
00:18:03.359 --> 00:18:05.440
So let me say it plainly.
00:18:05.920 --> 00:18:08.720
Sahar, this is a preparation problem.
00:18:08.880 --> 00:18:09.839
Prepare more.
00:18:10.160 --> 00:18:12.319
Know your material cold.
00:18:12.799 --> 00:18:15.200
Rehearse until it cannot leave.
00:18:15.440 --> 00:18:16.640
I respect that.
00:18:17.440 --> 00:18:21.359
Preparation matters, so please prepare by all means.
00:18:21.680 --> 00:18:23.599
But go back to the evidence.
00:18:23.920 --> 00:18:29.440
The research we just walked through is not about storing information.
00:18:29.759 --> 00:18:36.240
It's about reaching it, holding it, organizing it under pressure.
00:18:36.559 --> 00:18:40.640
Preparation builds what is stored.
00:18:40.960 --> 00:18:46.079
It does not guarantee access when the room gets heavy.
00:18:46.559 --> 00:18:49.200
At Tate is the example on the page.
00:18:49.440 --> 00:18:53.680
A world champion, a professional speaker, five months of notice.
00:18:53.920 --> 00:18:59.200
Preparation he described as intense as the championship itself.
00:18:59.440 --> 00:19:01.839
And the fog still dropped.
00:19:02.079 --> 00:19:05.039
So preparation gives you more road to work with.
00:19:05.279 --> 00:19:07.759
Low beams are for the day.
00:19:08.079 --> 00:19:09.599
It's not enough.
00:19:09.920 --> 00:19:12.640
And here is the harder part of that objection.
00:19:12.880 --> 00:19:18.559
Under pressure, prepare more often turns into reach harder.
00:19:18.960 --> 00:19:21.039
Grab for the whole answer.
00:19:21.279 --> 00:19:25.519
Every point in the right order, polished right now.
00:19:26.319 --> 00:19:33.200
That is asking the most from the exact systems that pressure makes less efficient.
00:19:33.359 --> 00:19:36.160
It's turning on the high beams in the fog.
00:19:36.640 --> 00:19:39.039
More lights, more glare.
00:19:39.519 --> 00:19:43.519
So, what does a leader actually do while the fog is down?
00:19:44.400 --> 00:19:46.079
We call it low beams.
00:19:46.240 --> 00:19:47.279
It's a practice.
00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:50.079
And I want to be honest about what it is.
00:19:50.319 --> 00:19:52.799
The neuroscience explains the problem.
00:19:53.119 --> 00:19:55.759
Low beam is a response to that problem.
00:19:56.000 --> 00:19:57.200
No study proved it.
00:19:57.279 --> 00:20:02.480
It's a design built on what the evidence shows about limited space under pressure.
00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:04.400
Here it is, three moves.
00:20:04.960 --> 00:20:06.960
Reduce the field, one.
00:20:07.680 --> 00:20:13.920
Choose one workable lane and take it, two, then reassess, three.
00:20:14.480 --> 00:20:18.319
Reduce the field means you stop reaching for the whole answer.
00:20:18.480 --> 00:20:24.240
Under pressure, trying to assemble the whole answer can be harder than working with one piece.
00:20:24.720 --> 00:20:31.039
Choose one workable lane means you pick one thing you can say clearly right now.
00:20:31.279 --> 00:20:37.920
One part of the question, one fact you are sure of, one concern, one conclusion.
00:20:38.400 --> 00:20:40.799
That is your lane.
00:20:41.039 --> 00:20:42.960
It might sound like this.
00:20:43.440 --> 00:20:46.000
Let me start with the timeline piece.
00:20:46.240 --> 00:20:49.599
Or the part I'm certain about is the cost.
00:20:50.240 --> 00:20:53.599
Or there are two questions in there.
00:20:53.839 --> 00:20:55.599
Let me take the first one.
00:20:55.839 --> 00:20:57.519
This is not a dodge.
00:20:58.480 --> 00:21:01.680
That is a leader driving on low beams.
00:21:01.839 --> 00:21:03.039
Then reassess.
00:21:03.440 --> 00:21:07.440
You take the lane, you say the one thing, and then you look again.
00:21:07.680 --> 00:21:09.599
Maybe the fog has thinned.
00:21:09.839 --> 00:21:12.240
Maybe the next lane is visible now.
00:21:12.480 --> 00:21:13.519
Maybe it's not.
00:21:13.759 --> 00:21:17.680
And you say, that is what I have right now.
00:21:17.839 --> 00:21:21.039
And I will bring you the rest by the end of the day.
00:21:21.359 --> 00:21:23.440
That is also a lane.
00:21:23.680 --> 00:21:28.960
And here is the line I want you to keep because it's the heart of the practice.
00:21:29.839 --> 00:21:36.720
It's not a way to make the answer come back, it's a way to make the demand smaller than the fog.
00:21:37.440 --> 00:21:39.440
Let that land for a second.
00:21:39.680 --> 00:21:42.480
I can promise you the answer returns in the meeting.
00:21:42.559 --> 00:21:45.519
Sometimes it does, sometimes it waits for the stairs.
00:21:45.759 --> 00:21:54.160
What Low Beams does is keep the leader moving in one lane while the weather does what the weather does.
00:21:54.880 --> 00:21:57.680
That is what I did in that car.
00:21:58.400 --> 00:21:59.759
I did not fix the fog.
00:22:00.559 --> 00:22:03.519
I made the drive smaller than the fog.
00:22:04.000 --> 00:22:10.720
Slow down, low beams, one lane, know where you are, follow the red lights.
00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:19.920
Now let me take you into this room because leaders are not only the ones hitting the fog, leaders are the ones watching someone else hit it.
00:22:20.720 --> 00:22:23.839
A direct report goes quiet under a direct question.
00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:26.319
What happens next is up to the leader.
00:22:26.640 --> 00:22:35.759
What many leaders notice is that when someone in the room goes quite under a direct question, raising the pressure rarely helps.
00:22:36.079 --> 00:22:39.839
Lowering the defend the demand often does.
00:22:40.240 --> 00:22:42.319
Lower the beams for them.
00:22:42.480 --> 00:22:49.440
So instead of walk me through all of it, a leader might say, just give me the timeline piece.
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We can come back to the rest.
00:22:52.799 --> 00:22:58.799
You are handing them one lane instead of the whole road, see what comes back.
00:22:59.279 --> 00:23:07.680
And notice what that does for the whole room, not only for one person, everyone watching learns something in that moment.
00:23:08.079 --> 00:23:12.240
They learn what happens here when someone hits the fog.
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:26.720
Either the leader turns the high beams up and everyone at the table gets a little more careful about speaking, or the leader lower the beams and everyone learns that a pause in this room is survivable.
00:23:27.039 --> 00:23:33.839
That is how one small move in one meeting starts to change the weather of a team.
00:23:34.240 --> 00:23:38.079
This is the other half of who leads when pressure rises.
00:23:38.319 --> 00:23:44.559
Sometimes it's the person who hits the fox, sometimes it's the person who decides what the room does next.
00:23:44.799 --> 00:23:46.559
And now the machine.
00:23:46.799 --> 00:23:49.519
Because this is where it gets very current.
00:23:49.759 --> 00:23:57.920
Remember that number half of the CEOs in that KPMG survey expect managers to carry the performance of AI agents.
00:23:58.160 --> 00:24:02.640
Here is my opinion about what that means in the moment of pressure.
00:24:02.960 --> 00:24:05.759
AI can hand a leader the whole answer.
00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:10.799
12 pages, every scenario, every risk, beautifully organized.
00:24:11.200 --> 00:24:15.599
Under pressure, 12 pages is high beams.
00:24:15.759 --> 00:24:16.799
It's more light.
00:24:16.960 --> 00:24:23.279
And in the fog, more light can bounce straight back.
00:24:23.440 --> 00:24:26.240
So low beams applies to the machine too.
00:24:26.480 --> 00:24:30.000
The night before the hard meeting, do not ask the tool for everything.
00:24:30.160 --> 00:24:31.759
Ask it for one lane.
00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:36.319
What is the one question the board is most likely to ask first?
00:24:36.799 --> 00:24:41.440
What is the number one or one number I need to have called?
00:24:41.680 --> 00:24:45.680
Let the machine help you narrow the field instead of widening it.
00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:47.519
Neuroscience first.
00:24:47.920 --> 00:24:51.680
The tool serves the lane, not the other way around.
00:24:51.839 --> 00:24:56.960
And here is how I would practice this so it's available on the day you need it.
00:24:57.200 --> 00:24:59.759
Pick one low-stake meeting this week.
00:24:59.920 --> 00:25:04.000
Before it starts, choose your lanes in advance.
00:25:04.240 --> 00:25:09.839
If something catches you off guard, what is the first lane you will take?
00:25:10.079 --> 00:25:13.839
One fact, one part, one conclusion.
00:25:14.079 --> 00:25:21.519
Then if the fog drops, even a little, say the sentence to yourself, I hit a fog wall.
00:25:21.759 --> 00:25:26.960
Not a verdict, just I hit a fog wall and lower the beams.
00:25:27.200 --> 00:25:28.960
You will not do it every time.
00:25:29.119 --> 00:25:30.240
That's not the point.
00:25:30.480 --> 00:25:35.680
Practice is how a new response becomes easier to reach under pressure.
00:25:35.920 --> 00:25:37.279
So let me bring this home.
00:25:44.079 --> 00:25:53.119
I lost the road in a storm and I drove four hours on low beams behind a stranger's red light until the fog lifted 10 minutes from home.
00:25:53.359 --> 00:25:55.680
Neither of us made the fog lift.
00:25:55.920 --> 00:25:58.400
Both of us kept moving inside it.
00:25:58.720 --> 00:26:01.440
That is the lesson of the return.
00:26:01.680 --> 00:26:04.960
The blank is not the end of the story, it's the weather.
00:26:05.200 --> 00:26:10.480
And the leader's job in the weather is not to see everything.
00:26:10.720 --> 00:26:16.079
It's not to make the demand smaller than the fog and take the next thing.
00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:21.279
But there is a bigger question underneath this one.
00:26:21.519 --> 00:26:24.960
Because some leaders are not hitting fog once in one meeting.
00:26:25.119 --> 00:26:27.440
They are driving through it every day.
00:26:27.599 --> 00:26:32.720
And the ways of working that carried them for years starts to stop working.
00:26:33.440 --> 00:26:39.920
The next question is what happens when the old way of operating stops serving a leader?
00:26:40.160 --> 00:26:41.839
It stops serving them.
00:26:42.079 --> 00:26:47.519
When the thing that always worked just does not work anymore, what do they actually change?
00:26:47.839 --> 00:26:50.480
That is where we go on Friday.
00:26:50.720 --> 00:26:55.680
And if you want to work on this live with other leaders in a real room, this is your invitation.
00:26:55.920 --> 00:26:57.839
Register for the pressure room.
00:26:58.079 --> 00:27:02.799
The next session is session four, is Thursday, October 29 at 11 a.m.
00:27:03.119 --> 00:27:03.759
Pacific.
00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:12.160
The question we will work together on is why does a small problem suddenly feel like an emergency under pressure?
00:27:12.400 --> 00:27:20.559
It's free, it's alive, it's 45 minutes, and it's built for exactly the moments we talk about today.
00:27:20.799 --> 00:27:26.240
Register at saharandradi.com slash pressure dash room.
00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:28.160
I will see you in the room.
00:27:28.400 --> 00:27:31.599
Leadership does not fail, nervous systems do.
00:27:31.920 --> 00:27:44.000
Before I leave, as every time, I ask you to show me some love, share, rate, comment, save, or subscribe to our podcast.
00:27:44.160 --> 00:27:50.880
Thank you for your support for making us the number two one of the two percent top global podcasts that exist.
00:27:51.119 --> 00:27:52.960
I really appreciate your help.
00:27:54.319 --> 00:28:03.359
Still we meet on Friday in the fourth article right short podcast piece out.