You are not bad at handling pressure. Your nervous system just never got the memo.

It was a great session.

Insightful. One of those conversations where you can feel the shift happening in real time. I felt good — like I had genuinely helped guide my client to something insightful.

I teach people how to pause before reacting. I help people identify their inner bugaboos (we could call them deeply embedded subconscious fear responses rooted in early conditioning, or we could just call them bugaboos and everyone immediately knows what we mean) and sit with them.

Then my kid came downstairs and asked for something five times.

I snapped.

This happens.

Not occasionally. Not just to people who haven’t done the work. To all of us. To everyone — except maybe Buddhist monks. I aspire to that. But I digress.

Because here is the thing nobody tells you.

Knowing something and being able to access it under pressure are two completely different skills.

Think about every skill you were ever taught. How to write. How to speak. How to present. How to appear. All of it outward-facing. All of it for external metrics. We manage the calendar, communication, image, and brand.

And then something small happens — a tone of voice, an unexpected change of plans, a child who has asked for the same thing five times — and we are suddenly operating from a version of ourselves we did not choose and did not see coming.

That is the blind spot.

Not a leadership one. Not a corporate one. A human one. The kind that lives in the boardroom yes, but also in the car, the kitchen, the mirror on a Tuesday when nothing is particularly wrong and yet everything feels like slightly too much.

The nervous system does not care about your credentials, your image, or your brand before deciding how to respond to pressure. It does not pause to consider the very good intentions you had when you woke up this morning. It just responds. Quickly. Automatically. The way it was designed to.

And here is the uncomfortable truth — most of us have been so busy managing everything on the outside that we have never learned to recognise what is happening on the inside. The moment pressure arrives, the body reacts before the brain catches up. The moment the version of you that you actually want to be has left the building.

The repeated sound is interfering with a happy moment. Your jaw tightens before your brain registers why. Your thinking shrinks to a pinhole. The room gets smaller. One minute, you are a reasonable adult. Next, a child repeatedly asking for a snack is somehow the final straw. And occasionally you snap at a child who, in fairness, did ask five times.

Meditation helps. I say this as someone who teaches it. Before anyone dismisses it as woo woo, it genuinely reduces reactivity. It is not magic, and it is not perfect, but it does have real and documented purpose and results. The problem is, we want the practice to be a one-hit wonder. We have been trained to chase those.

One you return to again and again. Not because you failed, but because that is how it works. You notice. You regulate. You return. And then life asks something of you again, and you do it all over.

It is not perfection. It is not a destination. It is the quiet, unglamorous, genuinely life-changing work of catching yourself a little sooner each time.

I still snap sometimes. I also catch myself faster than I used to. Both things are true.

That is not a failure of the practice.

That IS the practice.

Until next week,

Myriam