LEAD WITH THE HEART AND THE BRAIN ALIGNED
You’ve replayed the moment a dozen times since. The tone, the timing, how it looked to everyone in the room.
What’s Actually Happening
- A threat response can override logic in under a second
- The composed, rational version of you doesn’t get a vote in that moment
- That’s not a character flaw — it’s biology moving faster than judgment
A Story
An executive lost composure in front of his team during a high-pressure quarter — something he’d never done before, and was deeply embarrassed by. Rather than treating it as a willpower failure, we worked on the biology of an amygdala hijack and, more importantly, how fast someone can learn to recover from one. Within months, the same pressure produced a visibly different response — not because the stress was gone, but because his recovery time had shortened dramatically.
Try This
- Name it internally: “this is a hijack, not a decision”
- Physically pause, even three seconds helps
- Return once, briefly: “I want to come back to that more calmly”
The Takeaway
The goal isn’t never reacting. It’s training the recovery — and that’s trainable.
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