Day 1: How to Lead Calmly When Things Feel Uncertain
Calm leadership begins with understanding and regulating your nervous system.
Coming Up
What calm leadership actually means (hint: it’s not fake positivity)
How to recognize when your nervous system goes into survival mode
What to do when you’re leading without answers or a clear roadmap
Four proven techniques to regulate your stress response in real time
It seems like everywhere you look these days, things are in flux.
Maybe your entire team was just let go and you’re figuring out new processes on your own. Perhaps leadership above you has gone quiet, leaving you waiting for a roadmap that never comes. Or maybe you’re quietly wondering how long you’ll have your job as AI workflows reshape everything.
Whatever the case, things feel particularly unstable right now for a lot of people. And if you’re like me, you’re one falsely chipper “I’m great!” response away from pulling your hair out.
So how do you stay steady when the ground keeps shifting? How do you lead when your team keeps looking to you for answers you don’t have?
I believe it starts by emulating the traits of great leadership: staying calm under pressure, developing accountability, focusing on what you can control, preparing for the worst, and coping with uncertainty.
Maybe you wish these traits were showing up in the leaders above you. But we don’t have the power to control others – only our own actions. All we can do (apart from managing up) is bring these traits into our own sphere of influence and model the leadership we want to see.
That’s exactly what this 5-day Leading Through Uncertainty Challenge will help you do. Each day strengthens one timeless leadership trait and the self-leadership skill that builds it.
Here’s what you’ll learn over the next week:
Day 1: Remain Calm Under Pressure (You Are Here)
Day 2: Take Accountability
Day 3: Stay Within Your Three-Foot World
Day 4: Prepare for the Worst
Day 5: Understand Your Coping Style
What It Means to Be a Calm Leader
Calm leadership means staying emotionally steady while acknowledging what’s actually happening. It’s the ability to hold space for uncertainty without creating panic, to validate concerns without spiraling, and to say “I don’t know” without losing your team’s trust.
It does not mean you always have to be composed, show endless patience, or never succumb to frustration.
When things are hard, calm leaders acknowledge that difficulty. They don’t force optimism, shut down hard conversations, or tell people to simply “look on the bright side.” That’s trending perilously close to “toxic positivity” territory.
Toxic positivity says, “Everything will work out!” Calm leadership says, “I don’t know what’s coming, but we’ll figure it out together.”
The first creates distance, but the other builds connection. See the difference?
Calm leaders ground their teams in reality – and that’s what builds trust when everything else feels unreliable.
When someone on your team is struggling – or when you’re facing toxic positivity from above – pause. Instead of dismissing the reality of a difficult situation, acknowledge it. Try saying: “This is a tough situation. Let’s talk about what we can actually do.” With calm honestly, you’re creating space for potentially difficult but necessary conversation.
Recognizing Your Fight or Flight Response
Now that you understand what being a calm leader means, let’s talk about how to build the foundation for that kind of leadership. It all starts with awareness of what’s happening in your body when stress hits.
Did you know that your body registers stress before your conscious mind catches up?
It’s true. Just imagine what would happen if you opened your work calendar and saw that your boss had scheduled a surprise 15-minute “sync” call. You’ve watched these sudden meetings pop up for other people over the past month – and no one has returned after them. Are you about to be laid off? Or be told that you have to lay off a highly valued member of your team?
Within seconds, your body responds. Your breathing gets faster and shallow. Your heart rate spikes. Your jaw clenches, your shoulders creep toward your ears, your palms get clammy.
This is your fight-or-flight response activating. Your nervous system evolved to keep you safe from physical threats – tigers, lions, actual danger. But your body can’t tell the difference between a calendar invite and a wild animal. The response is the same.
And here’s the problem: When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, your thinking brain essentially goes offline. Your prefrontal cortex – the part that handles complex reasoning, empathy, and nuanced decisions – gets overridden by survival instincts.
You become reactive instead of thoughtful, miss important details, and are more likely to interpret neutral comments as threats. You might also make snap judgments you’ll later regret.
Do you see how impossible it is to be a calm leader while your nervous system is stuck in survival mode?
The good news is that once you learn to notice these signals, you can work with them. When you catch that tension rising, you have a choice about what comes next.
What Calm Leadership Looks Like in Action
Now that you can recognize when your body is stressed, let’s see how calm leadership actually works in one of the toughest situations: leading your team when the people above you aren’t providing clarity.
Maybe you’ve been promised a roadmap that’s been “coming in two weeks” for two months now. Your team is treading water, getting bored without meaningful work. You can’t start new projects because you’ll likely have to abandon them when the roadmap finally drops – which would make everyone feel like their work was wasted. And underneath it all, there’s the nagging question: will your team even exist in its current form when the dust settles?
This is where fight-or-flight wants to take over. The temptation to overpromise (“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine!”) or fake certainty (“I’m sure the roadmap will be here next week”) is strong. Don’t do it. Your team will see through it, and you’ll lose credibility.
Here’s what calm leadership looks like instead:
Name what’s real. Try: “I know this uncertainty is frustrating. I’ve been told the roadmap is coming, but I don’t have a date I can count on. That’s not fair to any of us, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
Focus on what you can control. Even without a roadmap, you can: maintain team connections through regular check-ins, use this time for skill development or technical debt that always gets pushed aside, or invite your team to identify small improvements they’ve wanted to make. Ask: “What’s something we could tackle that would be valuable regardless of what the roadmap says?”
Be honest about the unknowns. Try: “I can’t promise our team structure won’t change. What I can promise is that I’ll share information as soon as I have it, and I’ll advocate for you in every conversation I’m part of.”
Keep showing up consistently. When everything else is unreliable, your steady presence becomes the anchor. Hold your one-on-ones. Check in on how people are doing. Stay engaged even when there’s nothing new to report.
Your steadiness matters more than having all the answers. You’re not ignoring the difficulty – you’re refusing to let it paralyze your team or erode trust.
4 Techniques to Stay Steady Under Pressure
You understand what real calm looks like, you can recognize your stress signals, and you’ve seen calm leadership in action.
Now let’s build your leadership tool kit with four specific techniques you can use when pressure hits:
Box breathing: Breathe in for four counts, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Repeat three times. This shifts your nervous system from fight-or-flight to rest.
30-second body scan: Stop and notice. Where are you holding tension? Can you feel your feet on the floor? This brings you back to the present moment.
The pause: Before responding to that frustrating email, give yourself three seconds. Take one deep breath. This tiny gap creates space for a conscious choice.
Physical grounding: When your mind is spinning, press your feet firmly into the floor. These simple sensations remind your nervous system that you’re safe right now.
As a leader, your team is watching how you handle uncertainty or stress.
When you pause before responding in a tense meeting, or take a breath and acknowledge frustration without exploding, you’re showing them that emotions don’t have to control decisions. You’re also giving them permission to be human – to notice their stress, work with it, and still be professional.
That permission changes team culture from “push through at all costs” to “respond consciously.” And that’s what helps teams navigate uncertainty instead of just surviving it.
Calm leadership starts with self-leadership. It starts with learning to regulate your own nervous system so you can stay clear and present.
Your Action Item
Now that you have concrete tools, it’s time to use one. Choose one technique from above – box breathing, a 30-second body scan, the pause, or physical grounding – and commit to trying it the next time you feel tension rising.
Consciously choosing regulation over reaction – time and time again – is exactly how you start building calm leadership.
What’s Coming Next
The skills we’ve explored today – understanding what calm leadership looks like, recognizing your fight-or-flight response, staying present without faking certainty, and practicing simple regulation techniques – these are building blocks. You won’t master them overnight, and that’s okay.
Tomorrow in Day 2, we’ll build on this foundation by exploring accountability – but not the kind you’re used to thinking about. Stay tuned!