WEBVTT
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You did the work, you learned a better way to respond in the hard moment.
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You even used it once and it went well.
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And you thought, hmm, good.
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That is who I am now.
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Then the next hard moment came faster and heavier than you expected.
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And you watched yourself reach automatically for the old reaction.
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The one you were trying to leave behind.
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It arrived before the new one even woke up.
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And the quiet voice said the cruel thing.
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See?
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It did not take you right back where you started.
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You're not.
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And today I want to tell you why.
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Hang on with me.
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Welcome to the AI Cafe Conversations.
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I'm Sahar Andradi.
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This is where the neuroscience of pressure meets the future of leadership.
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This month we are following one question: who leads when pressure rises?
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One line I say at the start of every episode.
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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, it's not a fact about you.
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You decide what fits.
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And like I said in the last episode on Wednesday, this week, two episodes are dedicated to my beautiful friend Kathleen that got her wings on Sunday, September 20th.
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I love you, Kath.
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This is for you.
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Today is Friday.
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It's the shorter, more practical edition.
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One clear question, a direct answer, and something you can use.
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The question is this why do leaders fall back into familiar reactions under pressure even after they have learned a better one?
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And the answer is not the one cruel voice gives you.
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Here is the moment I want to name because so many leaders live it and read it wrong.
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There is a leader who changed how they respond.
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Not in theory, they did the actual work.
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They found a better reaction to the thing they used to set them off and they practiced it.
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And one day they used it under real pressure and it held.
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That's a real win.
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And then weeks later, in a harder moment, they slipped back.
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The old reaction came out, not because they forgot the new one, because the old one got there first.
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I want to say the honest version of this out loud.
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Because leaders described it and rarely hear it named.
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Someone can change their habits and still slip back.
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And when they change the habit, but not the structure around it, that is the new response was real.
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The room it lives in did not change.
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And under enough load, the room won.
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That is the moment, not a collapse, a slip.
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And what the leader does with that slip in the next 10 minutes decides almost everything.
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And I want to name the trap in that word, structure, because this is where the honest version lives.
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You can change what you do and leave untouched the thing that made the old reaction necessary in the first place.
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The overloaded calendar that guarantees you are depleted by the time the hard meeting arrives.
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The role where you are the only one who can say the hard thing.
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The relationship you never renegotiated.
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Change the reaction and leave that in place.
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And you have asked a new response to win on the exact ground the old one owns.
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Sometimes it does underload, often it does not.
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Listen to what leaders actually talk about this and how they do.
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Because it's more honest than the advice they get.
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They will say some version of, hey, I changed the behavior, but not the situation, so it slipped back.
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Read that again.
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They know.
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They can feel what the new response was real and that something underneath it did not move.
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So the moment it got heavy, the old one returned.
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That is not a failure of will, it's a math problem.
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One response that has been running for years, maybe decades.
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It's fast, automatic, and available.
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The other response is a few weeks old and you have used it only a handful of times.
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When the pressure is low, you have room to reach past the fast one and choose the new one.
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When the pressure is high, that room shrinks and the fastest thing wins.
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The fastest thing is almost always the oldest thing.
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So when a leader says, I am back to where I started, I want to correct one word.
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You're not back to the start.
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You are one good day and one slip further along than you were.
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Those are not the same place.
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They only feel the same because a slip is loud and progress is quiet.
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Here is where the reading goes wrong.
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And where a lot of good leaders lose momentum.
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They read the slip as a verdict.
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It came back.
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So it must have not have taken.
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I'm not really capable of this.
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The old me is the real me.
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That is the story, and it's the most expensive story in behavior change.
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Because it makes people quit right at the point where they were actually making progress.
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Let me put the AI part in it.
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Because it makes the misread worse right now.
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We live surrounded by software that updates overnight.
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It behaves one way on Monday, you push an update, and Tuesday morning it's different.
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Permanently, no transition.
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Like ChatGPT Astra 6.
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I was working on it last week till midnight, woke up at 6 a.m., it had moved to work.
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No longer a ChatGPT.
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This is a small example.
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And the changes are permanent with no transition.
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And somewhere in all that, leaders started expecting the same of themselves.
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Learn the better response on Monday, be a different leader on Tuesday, and if you're not, something is wrong with you.
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A person under load does not update like software.
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You do not get overwritten.
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The old response does not get deleted the moment you learn a new one.
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Both are in there.
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And under pressure, the older one is faster.
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That's not a defect.
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That is how a practiced action works in every human being who has ever lived.
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So the slip is not the verdict, the cruel voice claims.
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The slip is data.
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It's telling you exactly where the old response still lives and under how much load it still wins.
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That is useful.
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A verdict ends the work, information continues it.
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Let me make it concrete because the abstract version is easy to nod and hard to use.
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Say the old reaction is to take the work back the moment a project wobbles.
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You learned a better one.
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You let the team carry a wobble last month and it was fine.
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And you felt the shift.
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Then a bigger project wobbled this week with more eyes on it.
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And you took it back before you had finished the thought.
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That is not the change failing.
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That is the heavier moment reaching the older reaction faster.
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Same leader, more load, the oldest habit winning on speed.
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Let me bring in the science and let me be careful about what it says and does not say, because this is where people overreach.
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There is a study from 2009, Schwab and Wolf, in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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It's called plainly stress prompts habit behavior in humans.
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In the lab, they had people learn a simple trade action to get a reward.
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Then they changed things so the reward was no longer wanted.
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The question was: would people keep doing the trained action anyway out of a habit, or would they switch to the smarter choice now that the goal had changed?
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And here's what they found.
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This is the real evidence.
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People who had been stressed beforehand were more likely to keep doing the trained action even it no longer got them what they wanted.
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Stress tilted them toward the habit and away from the goal-directed choice.
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The unstressed people adjusted more easily.
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Let me translate that plainly.
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Because the terms here matter.
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Goal-directed means you are choosing the action for what it gets you.
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And you can change it the moment the goal changes.
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Habits means you are running the action because you have run it so many times that it no longer waits for the goal.
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The stress people in that study kept running the habit even after the goal moved.
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They were not being foolish.
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Under stress, the deliberate goal checking version of choosing got harder to reach, and the practiced version was simply there first.
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Now, here is what that study does not say.
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I will say it out loud because someone will try to sell you the overreach.
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It did not study leader, it did not study meetings, it did not study anyone changing a leadership habit over months of coaching.
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It was a controlled lab task with a small reward.
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That's it.
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So let me draw the line clearly.
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On one side, the evidence in a lab stress made people more likely to fall back on the practiced action instead of deliberate one.
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On the other side, my inference, labeled as mine, under real load, a leader's practiced response can be the one that arrives first, before the newer one has a chance.
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Can tilt, not does, not always, not you specifically, but it lines up with exactly what leaders describe.
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The old reaction is not stronger because it's better.
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It's faster because it's older.
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Now I can hear the objection, and it's a fair one, and I would say it in your words.
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You might be thinking, so if I slip back after all that work, doesn't that just prove that the change is not real?
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Was the whole thing a waste?
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No.
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And here is why: straight.
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One good day with the new response against years of the old one is not a fair fight under pressure.
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It was never going to be.
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If you expected the few weeks old response to be the 20-year-old one on the hardest day, you set a test the new response could not pass yet.
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And then you read it sloss as proof it does not exist.
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The change is real, it's just young.
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And young does not mean fake, it means it needs more reps in the exact conditions where the old one still wins.
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The slip did not erase the work.
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The slip showed you the one room where the work is not finished.
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That's not a waste, that's a map.
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So, what do you actually do with this?
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I have one direction and I'm going to be honest about it.
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What it is and what's not.
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Here it is.
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Practice the new response in the one recurring room where the old one still lives.
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And read every slip as information, not as a verdict.
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Let me unpack both halves.
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First, the room.
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Most leaders practice the new response in the easy places where the old one was never that strong.
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That feels good and changes little.
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The old reaction does not live in the easy room.
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It lives in one specific recurring situation.
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The weekly meeting with the person who gets under your skin.
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The status update where you always overpromise.
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The one-on-one where you always go soft when you meant to hold.
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That recurring room is where the reps count because that is where the old response is fastest.
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Bring the new response there on purpose, knowing it's the hard road.
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Second, the slip.
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When it happens, and it will not do not spend it on shame.
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Spend it on information.
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Ask what the load was.
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What got heavy right before the old reaction came out?
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How far into the meeting it happened?
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That is data you can use.
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Shame just tells you to quit.
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Now let me be clear about what I'm not promising.
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I'm not telling you this makes the new response stick.
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I'm not telling you it will win next time.
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Or that repetition guarantees anything on any timeline.
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I do not know your rules on your reps.
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This is my point of view from coaching leaders through exactly this.
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Practice it where the old one lives and treat the slip as a map instead of a verdict.
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That's the direction.
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The outcome is yours to earn, and I will not pretend to hand it to you.
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We have been talking about the slip and about the young response that is not yet fast enough to win under load.
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There is a next question sitting right underneath it, and this is the one I actually care about most.
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What does it take for a new response to become the familiar one?
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Not just used, familiar.
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The one that arrives first automatically on the hardest day.
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The old one got there through years of repetition, nobody chose.
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Can you get a choosing response there on purpose?
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And how?
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That is the question we keep walking toward.
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If you are in the middle of this right now, learning a better response and watching it lose to the old one under pressure, and you want to think it through with someone who works on this exactly, that is what the leadership clarity call is for.
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30 minutes, no pitch, just clarity.
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You can book it at canandly.com slash sahar and radi.
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I'm gonna have it also in the notes.
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Bring the recurring room where the old response still wins.
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We will look at it together.
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Um, Sahar Andradi, thank you for being here.
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Leadership doesn't fail, nervous system do.
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And before I leave, as always, show me some love, comment, rate, share, subscribe to our podcast.
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Thank you for your support for making us one of the top 2% global podcasts.
00:15:53.200 --> 00:16:04.080
And like I said in the beginning, this episode as this week is dedicated to my beautiful friend Kathleen, who got her wings last Sunday.
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I love you, Kath, and I miss you.
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I will see you on Wednesday.
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You did the work, you learned a better way to respond in the hard moment.
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You even used it once and it went well.
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And you thought, hmm, good.
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That is who I am now.
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Then the next hard moment came faster and heavier than you expected.
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And you watched yourself reach automatically for the old reaction.
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The one you were trying to leave behind.
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It arrived before the new one even woke up.
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And the quiet voice said the cruel thing.
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See?
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It did not take you right back where you started.
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You're not.
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And today I want to tell you why.
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Hang on with me.
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Welcome to the AI Cafe Conversations.
00:01:02.320 --> 00:01:03.679
I'm Sahar Andradi.
00:01:03.759 --> 00:01:07.760
This is where the neuroscience of pressure meets the future of leadership.
00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:12.560
This month we are following one question: who leads when pressure rises?
00:01:12.959 --> 00:01:16.560
One line I say at the start of every episode.
00:01:16.719 --> 00:01:20.480
Everything I share comes from my experience and my opinion as a coach.
00:01:20.640 --> 00:01:23.680
It's not a diagnosis, it's not a fact about you.
00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:26.239
You decide what fits.
00:01:26.959 --> 00:01:39.359
And like I said in the last episode on Wednesday, this week, two episodes are dedicated to my beautiful friend Kathleen that got her wings on Sunday, September 20th.
00:01:39.519 --> 00:01:40.560
I love you, Kath.
00:01:41.359 --> 00:01:42.640
This is for you.
00:01:44.400 --> 00:01:46.159
Today is Friday.
00:01:46.319 --> 00:01:48.719
It's the shorter, more practical edition.
00:01:48.879 --> 00:01:52.879
One clear question, a direct answer, and something you can use.
00:01:53.040 --> 00:02:01.040
The question is this why do leaders fall back into familiar reactions under pressure even after they have learned a better one?
00:02:01.280 --> 00:02:04.799
And the answer is not the one cruel voice gives you.
00:02:05.040 --> 00:02:10.639
Here is the moment I want to name because so many leaders live it and read it wrong.
00:02:10.879 --> 00:02:14.000
There is a leader who changed how they respond.
00:02:14.159 --> 00:02:16.960
Not in theory, they did the actual work.
00:02:17.199 --> 00:02:21.759
They found a better reaction to the thing they used to set them off and they practiced it.
00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:25.439
And one day they used it under real pressure and it held.
00:02:25.599 --> 00:02:26.879
That's a real win.
00:02:27.039 --> 00:02:30.639
And then weeks later, in a harder moment, they slipped back.
00:02:30.879 --> 00:02:38.319
The old reaction came out, not because they forgot the new one, because the old one got there first.
00:02:38.879 --> 00:02:43.280
I want to say the honest version of this out loud.
00:02:43.680 --> 00:02:47.280
Because leaders described it and rarely hear it named.
00:02:47.680 --> 00:02:50.879
Someone can change their habits and still slip back.
00:02:50.960 --> 00:02:58.879
And when they change the habit, but not the structure around it, that is the new response was real.
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The room it lives in did not change.
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And under enough load, the room won.
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That is the moment, not a collapse, a slip.
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And what the leader does with that slip in the next 10 minutes decides almost everything.
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And I want to name the trap in that word, structure, because this is where the honest version lives.
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You can change what you do and leave untouched the thing that made the old reaction necessary in the first place.
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The overloaded calendar that guarantees you are depleted by the time the hard meeting arrives.
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The role where you are the only one who can say the hard thing.
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The relationship you never renegotiated.
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Change the reaction and leave that in place.
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And you have asked a new response to win on the exact ground the old one owns.
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Sometimes it does underload, often it does not.
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Listen to what leaders actually talk about this and how they do.
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Because it's more honest than the advice they get.
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They will say some version of, hey, I changed the behavior, but not the situation, so it slipped back.
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Read that again.
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They know.
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They can feel what the new response was real and that something underneath it did not move.
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So the moment it got heavy, the old one returned.
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That is not a failure of will, it's a math problem.
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One response that has been running for years, maybe decades.
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It's fast, automatic, and available.
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The other response is a few weeks old and you have used it only a handful of times.
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When the pressure is low, you have room to reach past the fast one and choose the new one.
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When the pressure is high, that room shrinks and the fastest thing wins.
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The fastest thing is almost always the oldest thing.
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So when a leader says, I am back to where I started, I want to correct one word.
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You're not back to the start.
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You are one good day and one slip further along than you were.
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Those are not the same place.
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They only feel the same because a slip is loud and progress is quiet.
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Here is where the reading goes wrong.
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And where a lot of good leaders lose momentum.
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They read the slip as a verdict.
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It came back.
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So it must have not have taken.
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I'm not really capable of this.
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The old me is the real me.
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That is the story, and it's the most expensive story in behavior change.
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Because it makes people quit right at the point where they were actually making progress.
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Let me put the AI part in it.
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Because it makes the misread worse right now.
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We live surrounded by software that updates overnight.
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It behaves one way on Monday, you push an update, and Tuesday morning it's different.
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Permanently, no transition.
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Like ChatGPT Astra 6.
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I was working on it last week till midnight, woke up at 6 a.m., it had moved to work.
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No longer a ChatGPT.
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This is a small example.
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And the changes are permanent with no transition.
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And somewhere in all that, leaders started expecting the same of themselves.
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Learn the better response on Monday, be a different leader on Tuesday, and if you're not, something is wrong with you.
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A person under load does not update like software.
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You do not get overwritten.
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The old response does not get deleted the moment you learn a new one.
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Both are in there.
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And under pressure, the older one is faster.
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That's not a defect.
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That is how a practiced action works in every human being who has ever lived.
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So the slip is not the verdict, the cruel voice claims.
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The slip is data.
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It's telling you exactly where the old response still lives and under how much load it still wins.
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That is useful.
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A verdict ends the work, information continues it.
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Let me make it concrete because the abstract version is easy to nod and hard to use.
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Say the old reaction is to take the work back the moment a project wobbles.
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You learned a better one.
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You let the team carry a wobble last month and it was fine.
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And you felt the shift.
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Then a bigger project wobbled this week with more eyes on it.
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And you took it back before you had finished the thought.
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That is not the change failing.
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That is the heavier moment reaching the older reaction faster.
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Same leader, more load, the oldest habit winning on speed.
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Let me bring in the science and let me be careful about what it says and does not say, because this is where people overreach.
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There is a study from 2009, Schwab and Wolf, in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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It's called plainly stress prompts habit behavior in humans.
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In the lab, they had people learn a simple trade action to get a reward.
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Then they changed things so the reward was no longer wanted.
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The question was: would people keep doing the trained action anyway out of a habit, or would they switch to the smarter choice now that the goal had changed?
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And here's what they found.
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This is the real evidence.
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People who had been stressed beforehand were more likely to keep doing the trained action even it no longer got them what they wanted.
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Stress tilted them toward the habit and away from the goal-directed choice.
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The unstressed people adjusted more easily.
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Let me translate that plainly.
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Because the terms here matter.
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Goal-directed means you are choosing the action for what it gets you.
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And you can change it the moment the goal changes.
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Habits means you are running the action because you have run it so many times that it no longer waits for the goal.
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The stress people in that study kept running the habit even after the goal moved.
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They were not being foolish.
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Under stress, the deliberate goal checking version of choosing got harder to reach, and the practiced version was simply there first.
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Now, here is what that study does not say.
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I will say it out loud because someone will try to sell you the overreach.
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It did not study leader, it did not study meetings, it did not study anyone changing a leadership habit over months of coaching.
00:10:16.480 --> 00:10:21.039
It was a controlled lab task with a small reward.
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That's it.
00:10:22.399 --> 00:10:24.080
So let me draw the line clearly.
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On one side, the evidence in a lab stress made people more likely to fall back on the practiced action instead of deliberate one.
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On the other side, my inference, labeled as mine, under real load, a leader's practiced response can be the one that arrives first, before the newer one has a chance.
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Can tilt, not does, not always, not you specifically, but it lines up with exactly what leaders describe.
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The old reaction is not stronger because it's better.
00:11:00.240 --> 00:11:03.440
It's faster because it's older.
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Now I can hear the objection, and it's a fair one, and I would say it in your words.
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You might be thinking, so if I slip back after all that work, doesn't that just prove that the change is not real?
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Was the whole thing a waste?
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No.
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And here is why: straight.
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One good day with the new response against years of the old one is not a fair fight under pressure.
00:11:28.799 --> 00:11:30.720
It was never going to be.
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If you expected the few weeks old response to be the 20-year-old one on the hardest day, you set a test the new response could not pass yet.
00:11:43.360 --> 00:11:47.519
And then you read it sloss as proof it does not exist.
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The change is real, it's just young.
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And young does not mean fake, it means it needs more reps in the exact conditions where the old one still wins.
00:11:59.519 --> 00:12:02.080
The slip did not erase the work.
00:12:02.320 --> 00:12:06.559
The slip showed you the one room where the work is not finished.
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That's not a waste, that's a map.
00:12:10.320 --> 00:12:12.639
So, what do you actually do with this?
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I have one direction and I'm going to be honest about it.
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What it is and what's not.
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Here it is.
00:12:20.399 --> 00:12:25.200
Practice the new response in the one recurring room where the old one still lives.
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And read every slip as information, not as a verdict.
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Let me unpack both halves.
00:12:32.480 --> 00:12:33.519
First, the room.
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Most leaders practice the new response in the easy places where the old one was never that strong.
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That feels good and changes little.
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The old reaction does not live in the easy room.
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It lives in one specific recurring situation.
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The weekly meeting with the person who gets under your skin.
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The status update where you always overpromise.
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The one-on-one where you always go soft when you meant to hold.
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That recurring room is where the reps count because that is where the old response is fastest.
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Bring the new response there on purpose, knowing it's the hard road.
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Second, the slip.
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When it happens, and it will not do not spend it on shame.
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Spend it on information.
00:13:31.600 --> 00:13:33.600
Ask what the load was.
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What got heavy right before the old reaction came out?
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How far into the meeting it happened?
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That is data you can use.
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Shame just tells you to quit.
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Now let me be clear about what I'm not promising.
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I'm not telling you this makes the new response stick.
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I'm not telling you it will win next time.
00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:02.159
Or that repetition guarantees anything on any timeline.
00:14:02.399 --> 00:14:05.200
I do not know your rules on your reps.
00:14:06.639 --> 00:14:11.519
This is my point of view from coaching leaders through exactly this.
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Practice it where the old one lives and treat the slip as a map instead of a verdict.
00:14:18.080 --> 00:14:19.279
That's the direction.
00:14:19.519 --> 00:14:23.919
The outcome is yours to earn, and I will not pretend to hand it to you.
00:14:24.159 --> 00:14:30.639
We have been talking about the slip and about the young response that is not yet fast enough to win under load.
00:14:31.120 --> 00:14:37.360
There is a next question sitting right underneath it, and this is the one I actually care about most.
00:14:37.840 --> 00:14:41.919
What does it take for a new response to become the familiar one?
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Not just used, familiar.
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The one that arrives first automatically on the hardest day.
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The old one got there through years of repetition, nobody chose.
00:14:54.399 --> 00:14:57.600
Can you get a choosing response there on purpose?
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And how?
00:14:59.279 --> 00:15:02.399
That is the question we keep walking toward.
00:15:02.639 --> 00:15:17.360
If you are in the middle of this right now, learning a better response and watching it lose to the old one under pressure, and you want to think it through with someone who works on this exactly, that is what the leadership clarity call is for.
00:15:17.600 --> 00:15:20.559
30 minutes, no pitch, just clarity.
00:15:20.720 --> 00:15:26.159
You can book it at canandly.com slash sahar and radi.
00:15:26.559 --> 00:15:28.399
I'm gonna have it also in the notes.
00:15:28.559 --> 00:15:32.000
Bring the recurring room where the old response still wins.
00:15:32.159 --> 00:15:33.759
We will look at it together.
00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:36.720
Um, Sahar Andradi, thank you for being here.
00:15:36.960 --> 00:15:40.000
Leadership doesn't fail, nervous system do.
00:15:40.399 --> 00:15:48.159
And before I leave, as always, show me some love, comment, rate, share, subscribe to our podcast.
00:15:48.320 --> 00:15:53.039
Thank you for your support for making us one of the top 2% global podcasts.
00:15:53.200 --> 00:16:04.080
And like I said in the beginning, this episode as this week is dedicated to my beautiful friend Kathleen, who got her wings last Sunday.
00:16:04.320 --> 00:16:06.799
I love you, Kath, and I miss you.
00:16:07.679 --> 00:16:10.799
I will see you on Wednesday.
