The best leaders don't avoid pressure; they learn how to respond to it in a healthy way.

Pressure reveals how well-prepared or ill-equipped leaders are for the job of leading and managing teams and organisations.

In this third episode of our Emotional Intelligence series, Rich and Dave explore why even experienced leaders can lose their calm, clarity and presence when the pressure rises. From difficult conversations and challenging meetings to presentations and conflict, leadership is rarely tested when everything is going well. It's tested most when the stakes are high.

Drawing on lessons from Navy SEAL training, motorcycle riders, Formula One drivers and Zentano's Connected Leadership model, Rich explains why leaders don't rise to the occasion under pressure. Instead, they fall back on their deepest habits and default preferences.

The conversation explores what happens psychologically when our fight, flight or freeze response takes over, why we lose access to our emotional intelligence, and how leaders can recognise the signs before those reactions begin to affect the people around them.

Rich also introduces Zentano's practical SONAR model, a simple framework that helps leaders pause, regain perspective and reconnect with their Connected Centre before responding.

If you want to lead with greater confidence, presence and influence when it matters most, this episode offers practical insights you can apply immediately.

Key Talking Points

• Why leaders fall back on ingrained habits when pressure increases.
• How stress narrows thinking and reduces access to emotional intelligence.
• The difference between grounded and reactive leadership.
• Practical signs that you've drifted away from your place of calm and grounded confidence, the Connected Centre.
• Using the SONAR model to regain calm, clarity and intentional choice.
• Why leadership presence is something others feel, not just see and hear.

Welcome to the Connected Leadership Podcast by Zentano. For forward thinking leaders who want to lead with confidence, clarity and impact.

We bring you grounded wisdom, real stories from real leaders, conversations that leave you thinking differently, feeling inspired and ready to act. Let's dive in. So, hello and a warm welcome back to the Connected Leadership Podcast by Zintano.

This is one of our Leadership Unscripted episodes where Rich and I explore leadership as it shows up in real life, particularly today when things get sticky and tricky.

So in the last episode, Rich and I talked about self awareness and why so many leaders, even with the best intent, simply don't see the impact they're having on the people around them. But awareness on its own is not enough. The real test of your leadership capability doesn't happen when things are calm and considered.

It happens when you're under pressure.

So when time is tight, when stakes are high, when emotions are running, and in those moments something shifts, leaders start to rush or over control or withdraw. Conversations change, presence changes and impact changes. So today we're asking a very practical question.

What does it mean to stay grounded under pressure? And why does it make such a difference to how leaders are experienced by others? So, Rich, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Dave. Thank you.

Let's start there. What is it about pressure that so often changes the way that even experienced leaders show up?

So in the last podcast, I talked about a phrase that is used often by the Navy seals, and the phrase goes like, under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training. So let me say that again. So under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training.

So let me give you a bit of an analogy about what that means in practice. So those of you that have listened to the podcast before will know that I'm a keen motorcyclist with my. With my wife, she rides as well.

And we've been riding motorbikes for about two years now, and we've undergone quite a lot of motorcycle training, from the basic to the sort of the more advanced level. Now what's really interesting is you can read in a book how to go around a corner on a motorbike, okay?

And I've got manuals and stuff that talk about, you know, how you go around the corner on a motorcycle, and it's what you know, it's one of the most challenging things you can learn to do on a motorbike. But the key thing for a motorcyclist is what happens when they're under pressure.

So if you're going around a corner and it's sunny and everything's fine and the road is clear and you can see everything, you can usually corner. Okay, that's not a problem.

The challenge comes that if you're in a corner and then suddenly you get an animal run out in front of you or something like that, what usually happens is you don't rise to the occasion and suddenly, you know, just, just apply the brakes in a controlled sort of manner, you sink to your level of training. So when the Navy SEALs talk about training, what they mean is your most deeply ingrained habits.

So if your motorcycle training is not taught you under pressure, to apply the brakes in a slow, controlled manner, what's more likely to happen is under pressure you're going to snatch at the brake. And in a motorcycle, if you snatch at the front brake, that unsettles the bike and usually you're off.

Okay, so it's something to actually, really learn. So actually you need to learn how to do that sort of thing under pressure and practice it, I guess, and to practice it and to practice it.

So let's go back to the, to the leadership thing. So a lot of leaders do leadership training and a lot of organisation commission leadership training.

And that's all well and good because you talk about the theory, maybe you'll do a little bit of practice in the context of the workshop.

But under pressure, you know, if you teach somebody on a workshop to, you know, to listen more effectively and to stay grounded during a conversation, usually what happens is when they're under pressure, when they're rushed, for example, or they're in a meeting having a one to one with one of their staff and they know they've got something else to go to in a couple of minutes, usually what they do is they will revert to their most deeply ingrained habit under pressure, that the theory they've learned goes out of the window. You know, the theory they've learned goes out the window.

So that's why with leadership training and with leadership, if you learn about something, the most important thing to do with the learning is to ingrain, that is to practice it so it becomes a deeply ingrained habit. It's what the Navy SEALs would do, you know. So part of their training was about embedding and practicing and ingraining it so it becomes habitual.

So under pressure you can perform in a way that is appropriate to the situation. So leadership isn't tested in calm situations. And I'm guessing most of the leaders out there, if I ask Them, are they under pressure in their role?

They'll probably say they've got too much to do. The pressures are huge. I mean, the market is really challenging at the moment. Profitability and budgets are a huge challenge inside organizations.

Prioritizing and change and all that sort of stuff puts press, puts pressure on leaders. So the challenge is that leaders would default to the most deeply ingrained habits in those occasions.

There's two issues that come out of that. What you've just said there, Rich, is for those leaders that have had some degree of training, whether, you know, and that might be.

I've read, I read some books, I listened to some podcasts. I've been on a course, a workshop, what have you.

If you haven't taken whatever you've learned from all of that and embedded it day to day and practiced the skill and what have you, don't expect to turn up in a pressure situation and suddenly you're going to cope with it calmly.

The other issue around that, Rich, and probably the more worrying one, is actually there's a huge amount of leaders out there that have never been trained or very, very little training. So again, if they're working in pressure situations, how would you expect them to be their best in those situations?

So anybody listening to this, think about if you have done some training, have you properly embedded it, Our experience would say that's where it tends to go wrong. If you haven't trained your people, give some serious consideration to what you need to do about that.

Because as you said, Rich, there's an awful lot of people out there working under pressure at the moment. And that's probably likely to continue with the way the world's going at the moment.

So if you want the best from your leaders, you're gonna have to equip them to deal with that.

Yeah.

So the thing to think about here is to make the theory experiential and to, you know, to test it in the world, so to speak, and to embed it in the world. Just because a leader has been on an EM intelligence course, for example, doesn't make them emotionally intelligent. You can understand the concept.

But to become emotionally intelligent is a process and a journey. And, you know, emotional intelligence comes under the most pressure. We show our true emotional intelligence when we're under pressure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, let's move the conversation on then, because I want to sort of explore what goes on internally for people so when the pressure hits us in real leadership situations. Rich, what's happening internally for leaders and why does it impact the way they respond?

So under pressure, our fight flight freeze response gets triggered. And when that happens, it happens with animals in the wild, we tend to get laser focus. Our attention narrows.

Because if you think when we used to be cave people and you hear a lion roar, suddenly your attention gets, narrows, it focuses. You're looking around to see where the roar comes from and you're looking for somewhere to run to. So it's an ingrained evolutionary response.

So it triggers urgency and reactivity, which under physical pressure, they're usually helpful instincts.

Yes.

And reactions. But often in, you know, usually for a leader, you know, they don't have real lions waiting.

Well, I don't know, they might do, but they, they don't have real lions waiting for them in the next meeting room. You know, they might have the metaphorical line waiting for them in the next meeting room.

So, so, so then they're not under, under physical danger, but they still get the same instinctive response.

So the danger of losing perspective for getting load to increase and to cloud the judgment alongside the narrowing of focus, that can be a real challenge to deal with under pressure. So an emotionally intelligent person will be self aware and has the ability to self manage.

When we talk about self management, what we're talking about is the ability to regulate ourself, particularly under pressure. So self management is a combination of three things. It's awareness, regulation, and it's choice.

Yeah.

And if you think about just what I've just said, our fight flight freeze response is triggered. Usually we're in reactive mode and there's not intentionality and choice that goes along with our thinking and our behaviors.

Okay, so what you're really saying, Rich, here is that in pressure situations, leaders don't lose their intelligence, they're still there, but they just lose access to it.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yes, I like that.

So you're going to say that again for the listeners just so you can, you know, focus in on that. When you're under pressure, you do not lose your intelligence.

Whether it's your fluid intelligence, your emotional intelligence, it's still there, but you may lose access to it for all the reasons that Rich has just described. So Rich, let's move that on again then. So let's talk about how pressure shows up externally. You've just talked about what happens internally.

So what are the behaviors that you see where you can tell immediately that a leader is no longer in that sort of calm and grounded state?

Yeah, so there'd be a number of things I think you could recognize. So for example, talking more Quickly or stuttering.

It's one of the things I've personally had to learn when we've been recording podcasts is I have a tendency when I'm nervous or under pressure to rush what I'm going to say. I have a tendency to stutter. And people will notice in this podcast, there's little stutters.

That's a natural part of how I speak, and I'm trying to correct that. But under pressure, that becomes amplified.

Okay.

And more difficult to manage. So the challenge for me is to stay calm so I have the space to think and the ability to slow my talking down in real time. So talking faster.

Alongside that, a lot of leaders will interrupt people. So they get impatient, they want to rush people, they may want to rush decision making.

If they're under pressure, they might want to over control conversations or outcomes of conversations in meetings.

Yeah.

The other extreme might be, so if you're a natural extrovert or somebody who's quite expressive, those sorts of things might come out. But maybe you're the sort of leader that tends to withdraw. Perhaps you go quiet, maybe you get a bit passive aggressive. I don't know.

Whatever that might be, you go in on yourself rather than push. So it just shows itself with things like just jump into solutions too quickly, increased impatience, defensiveness.

All of those things are evidence, actually, that you're actually under pressure.

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? So some of these behaviors, they are real signs that pressure is taking over, but we don't always spot them, do we?

No, exactly. Right. Yeah. So those behaviors look like sometimes what the expectation of leadership should be in our culture.

So sometimes people expect leaders to be able to jump in and make decisions quickly and all those sorts of things. And that might be true. But the key thing is, actually, I think it's still possible to work at pace, but from a. From a place of grounded calm.

Yes.

Okay. So the important thing is, you know, if you are making quick decisions, are you making it from a grounded sort of connected place?

And that's where you need to. We talked about this before, but you've got to spot the language. You've got to spot body language.

All of that kind of stuff will give you some more clues on that. Let's dive into this grounded versus ungrounded state that, you know, leaders either need to be in or don't need to be in.

So we often talk about leaders being grounded. Obviously we're now talking about them under pressure, being ungrounded. What's the difference in practice and more Importantly, why does it matter?

So when I talk about the grounded state, and in the context of our connected leadership model, we call that the connected center.

Yeah.

So how would that feel? It would feel like you're calm, your presence and your intentional.

You're thinking clearly, you're aware of your emotions, you're regulating those in a healthy way that's proportionate to the situation. And more importantly, so this is not necessarily just an inward thing. The connected center means you stay connected to those around you.

So it's not about going in on yourself. It's about your ability to connect with those around you from a place of calm, presence and intentionality. So that, for me would be how it feels.

So that's a place where you can operate at pace from if you need to. I've used the analogy of F1 drivers in the past.

The best F1 drivers are those that don't allow the red mist to take over, and they can take a corner at 170 miles an hour, but they've got the headspace, they're thinking clearly, they're regulating their emotions really appropriately and really carefully, and they're able to drive at those speeds because they're operating from their connected sensor.

So really what you're saying is you're in. Inside your head. You're in the here and now. You're not living in the past, you're not living in the future. You're living in the here and now. Right.

Okay. So that's what a grounded state feels like and looks like. What's an ungrounded state feel like?

So an ungrounded state would. Would feel like you're being reactive, perhaps you're being performative. And what I mean by being performative is it means your.

Your behaviors and mindset are driven probably unconsciously by other people in the room. And, you know, you're.

You're acting in a way that maybe you're trying to seek approval from others, maybe you're avoiding conflict or what might be you're trying to be the nice person in the room. So that's what I mean about being performative.

There could be an element of showing off.

Yeah, there could be an element showing off. It could mean that you're perhaps being over controlling. The opposite end of that is maybe you're withdrawing.

There'll be definitely a disconnection from others.

So if you feel yourself go inward and you're becoming like introspective in a way, that means you're disconnected from those around you, that probably means you're in. In an ungrounded state. And usually, you know, like they often talk in tennis about unforced errors.

Yeah.

It will force inconsistent and forced behaviors. You know, the unforced errors, if you like.

Okay, so I guess what you're saying really here is, Rich, that people respond less to what you say and a lot more to the state that you bring into the room.

Yes. And that will be happening unconsciously.

Yeah.

So a person who's being relational, they're connected to themselves and they're connected to those around them. And that has a huge impact on the room, on the state of the room and the feeling of safety in the room as well.

Because people will unconsciously pick up on the fact whether you're grounded or ungrounded.

And that's really important the more senior you are. Because obviously people tend to look up to you when you're more senior and you do have a responsibility there. Yeah. Okay. So yes, you're right.

In our model of what a good leader looks like, we have this concept of the connected center, which is where you're calm and grounded and you're in the present, you're in the here and now. And it's a really important state to get into as often as you possibly can. It's not realistic to be in that all the time.

So let's talk about when you lose that connected center, Rich.

So when leaders become reactive or they lose that grounded presence that you were describing just now, what's actually happening from your perspective in those moments.

So this goes back to what I was saying earlier about our attention narrowing. We lose perspective, we lose the thinking space. We lose the space to be able to be aware, self aware of what's going on.

So what often happens is that this is going back to the Navy Sea. We revert to our most deeply ingrained habits. And I would add to that our preferences in terms of the way we think, in terms of the way we behave.

Yeah.

Now it might be that some of our preferences or habits or behaviors become amplified sometimes under pressure. Actually it pushes us in the opposite direction.

And you know, some other preferences that are not our usual go to approach when we're, when we're, we're grounded, they become triggered as well.

So people will find actually that they behave and different, if you like, different Personas, different preferences emerge when somebody's under pressure. So those default ingrained habits start to take over. We tend to over function. We tend to try to prove ourselves.

We tend to try to be over controlling or perhaps we withdraw. So this happens to everyone. Okay.

It does.

This is, this is, this is normal and natural.

So the goal we're talking about here is not to stay perfectly grounded all the time, because you'd have to be like the most enlightened monk in the world to stay connected all the time. And even the most enlightened monks in the world don't stay grounded all the time.

Another. Human beings, aren't they?

Yeah. And the reason they practice meditation and that sort of stuff is to bring them back to the grounded state. So they're constantly practicing that.

So the goal in leadership is not to become a monk and to become an expert in meditation, although it can be helpful. The goal is to notice the drift.

Yes.

So when we talk about emotional intelligence and self awareness, self awareness is the ability to notice the drift and then self management or self regulation is the ability then to bring ourself back to the grounded state. So, Rich, that's emotional intelligence in a nutshell.

Yeah. You made a really important point in that explanation you were doing then about how people's thinking and behavior changes under pressure.

And we know this because some of the tools we've used, I mean, we use whole brain thinking, as people know, as a really good tool. So a whole brain thinking profile will show what your normal thinking preferences are, but it will also show you how those change under pressure.

Now, for some people, the pressure just amplifies their preferred preference, isn't it? But we also know from those profiles that for some people it flips and almost goes in the completely opposite direction.

So there is no one size fits all here. Don't assume that under pressure your strongest preferences will be amplified and the least ones will be minimized. It could be the other way around.

And also know from using some of the disc profiles we've used in the past, the same thing can happen there where it doesn't necessarily amplify your preferred behavioral preference. It can actually flip and become almost the opposite of what you normally like to be. So that's one way of finding out is you can use a profiling tool.

The other way to find out is go and ask somebody who observes you and see what they say, see what they see. Okay, so that's really useful.

Yeah.

It's really difficult to develop self awareness for precisely that reason because you can be self aware when you're calm and everything's chilled and that sort of thing. To be self aware under pressure is the real mark of emotional intelligence, in my view.

Yeah. And let's make that point that you made about. It's not about being Perfect here.

So leadership isn't about never losing your access to your connected center. That is unrealistic. But it is about how quickly you notice that you've lost that connected center and how quickly you can get back to it.

So that's the real focus here for what really good leaders will do. So let's take it a bit more operational now, rich in terms of reality check here.

So thinking about real operational environments, where do you most often see leaders lose their grounded and calm state? What are the specific moments that they find this really hard?

Yeah, I think a lot of leaders don't like to be challenged. True. Yeah. Or questioned in meetings, because that challenges the ego.

If we're being honest with ourselves when we get challenged, we think as leaders that we should know all the answers and our way is the right way. And all that knowledge and bank, that bank of knowledge and experience that we have, we bring to bear in our conversations and decision making.

And that's a really important bank of knowledge and skills and experience. But don't let ego get in the way of you being challenged.

No, agreed.

So that would be one situation we've mentioned before. I'm a trained mediator, and I've noticed, because conflict is one of the things that I do a lot of work around.

That's a real pressure point for a lot of leaders.

Yeah.

Not allowing the red mist to descend when conflict arises and things start to get a little bit personal and people start to lose the filters and they say stuff that they don't mean. Actually keeping grounded in that place and not allowing yourself to get sucked into the drama at the moment, that's a real challenge.

It is presentations.

I mean, a lot of people come to me for coaching, and some of the presenting issues are confidence in things like presenting or being put on the spot by senior stakeholders, because that impacts a person's confidence to speak up and to manage up and to challenge up. And I think I alluded to this at the beginning of the podcast. Businesses are under huge amount of pressure at the moment.

The economy is shrinking, budgets and profitability is shrinking. Businesses need to pivot and to reprioritize, and that's making time, critical decision making, really crucial at the moment.

And that puts pressure on people. That puts pressure on people. People can get grumpy and irritable when all of these things start to press on them.

Yeah, absolutely. I think you've picked up some really key operational environments that we hear a lot.

I mean, we get asked a lot about how do we deal with these things that you've just talked about. So this is really important.

Okay, so let's talk about how do we, in those situations that you've just described, how do we stay grounded and return to that, what we call the connected center? So what's the difference between staying grounded in the first place and then recovering when you've already lost that calm and grounded feeling?

Yeah, so it's really important, as I said, for leaders to develop their self awareness, to notice when they've drifted.

So you know, it's possible actually to put in place a practice that after you've had a meeting or a one to one, or you've done a presentation or you've engaged with a senior stakeholder, just take a moment or two after that event just to reflect on what's happened. Did I actually drift? Was I good at self regulating in that moment and did I maintain that space?

So that's the ability after the event to reflect back on what's happened. I think the real challenge is to notice the drift in the moment.

So there's a very simple model that we often say to people, we call it the sonar model. And very quickly that suggests the sonar model is an S, an O, an N, an A and an R. Okay, sonar. Okay. And it's a very quick.

Is there five letters there? Yeah, five letters. It's a very quick process to go through in the moment.

Yeah.

So the S is stop. So if you notice you're starting to drift, say in your head stop. The O is oxygen. So take a breath, ground yourself, just settle your physiology down.

And then the N is then notice what's going on, create that space for you to think and then the A is to analyze or assess what's going on. To analyze clearly. So what you're trying to do is to put a gap between the stimulus, the reactive pressure that you're under and the response.

And that's the R. So you then choose to respond in a different way than your reactive responses. Your emotional responses were pushing you towards. So notice the drift, take a breath, just give yourself the head space to think.

What am I going to do to reground myself and to respond in a more effective way. So basically you're noticing, you're pausing and you're reconnecting.

Yeah, I think in terms of staying grounded in the first place, I guess that's where preparation helps, isn't it? Because the more prepared you are, you know, you can probably manage your presence better. You can stay grounded.

We're all going to be pulled away from being grounded and Calm. That's because human nature, it's going to happen. Yeah. So like you said, if that does happen, notice it, it pause.

Don't just keep on pushing, pushing, pushing. Get that sense of control back and that clarity back, and then off you go.

Yeah.

Really important.

Can I just pick up something on what you've just said there, which is really important because I've talked about the sonar model is something you can use in the moment when things are happening. Actually, you can use the sonar moment before you know that maybe you're going to present or you're going to see a senior person.

I used to practice this when I was a leader. There was a.

There was a certain leader where whenever I was in their room and talking to them, I tended to drift out of my connected center and to revert into what I call the child mode, if you like, and become a little bit too submissive.

So what I learned to do is, before I went into the meeting with that person, is just to ground myself, tell myself I'm the adult, just to breathe more deeply, go in prepared, and that's a really good way. Prepare yourself to stay grounded.

Yeah, I think that's really important. Yeah.

So I guess what we're saying here, Rich, is the most effective leaders aren't the ones that never react because that's actually, that's almost impossible anyway. They're the ones who tend to know how to recover quickly from.

Exactly, exactly. Right. Yeah.

So let's link this now to how do we have presence and how do we have influence in our businesses? Because that's what a leader is trying to do.

So how does staying grounded under pressure a link to having presence, developing credibility, and, you know, developing that influence that you need to have in those leadership roles?

So when we talk about that grounded state, that connected center that's obviously invisible to people.

Yeah.

In terms of, you know, it's behaviorally invisible because it's an internal state as it's a way of being. But that internal state does drive physiological responses and behaviors, you know, so.

And people will unconsciously pick up on your inner state by unconsciously picking up on your. On your outward behavior.

Yeah.

So when we talk about presence, that's what we mean.

That it's like an aura, a shadow that you cast in those environments, and people pick up on that calmness and that presence, and that creates a sense of psychological safety. It builds trust. So under pressure, essentially, a leader is modeling how their team should be self managing under pressure. Yeah.

I guess one of the biggest challenges that we find in all the businesses that we work with is communication and effective communication.

One of the big beauties of this is if you can actually keep yourself grounded and calm and get into that connected center as often as possible, particularly under pressure, which is when it really counts, is that helps you communicate more effectively, probably with more clarity, with more focus. Yeah.

So I think that is really, really important because I guess a lot of the problems we cause ourselves in businesses is when we don't stay grounded, we don't stay calm. We don't therefore communicate very effectively and we create all sorts of.

We start loads of fires, we don't need to start or, you know, we cause all sorts of problems, we don't really need to cut to calls.

Yeah, we talk a lot about confidence in Zentano. And you know, confidence is one of our specialist areas in leadership.

And in our view, true, healthy, sustainable confidence is grounded in this connected center.

Oh, absolutely, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah.

So if you think about it, you know, if we're grounded, it gives us the headspace to allow ourselves not to get drawn by, you know, the outward pressures, the expectations of others around us, the need to perform and to be our best and to prove ourself and to over control. It enabled us actually to sit back and be and to be present and have gravitas, if you like.

Well, I think that's the acid test, isn't it? If you catch yourself performing confidence or pretending confidence that you're confident, you definitely aren't. That's not what we talk about.

Real confidence. Yeah. And the route to getting that calm version of confidence, the thing that's sustainable under pressure is, as you said, rich, to be aware.

So some of the things you've talked about today. So that's probably it for today. Let's just sort of do a summary and wrap up. So, Rich, let's put a few threads together.

What would be your top tips from this conversation for anybody listening to it? It.

So I'll go back to that phrase from the Navy SEALs. You know, under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training.

So in other words, your ingrained habits and preferences and Personas, they are the things that are often revealed under pressure.

Okay.

And if you don't manage those effectively, the tone or the shadow or the mood you set will impact the perceived sense of safety and trust in the room. So grounded leadership is observable, but more importantly, it's unconsciously felt by others.

Interesting.

It's unconsciously felt by others.

And the final thing to say is the key thing is to notice the drift, notice the reaction, and to bring intentionality and choice to your thinking, your feeling and your behaviors.

Interesting. Well, thanks for that. That's a really good summary. So leadership isn't defined by what you do when things are easy.

I think, Rich, you've made that point. But it's defined by how you show up when the pressures hit, I think.

Yes. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right.

Okay, Rich, well, thanks for your time there. So, as we close this episode, here's a simple reflection for anybody listening.

Think about the last time that you felt under real pressure as a leader. A moment where the stakes felt high or the situation felt very uncomfortable. What changed in how you showed up in that moment?

Because often it's not the situation that defines your leadership, as I said just now, it's how you respond to it. And we'll leave that as your parting thought. So, Rich, thank you for your time today.

Thank you, Dave.

In the next episode, we're going to take a step further and look at what happens when pressure becomes sustained and how that can lead into us over functioning, worse still, burnout and ultimately very unsustainable leadership behaviors.

So if this conversation today has resonated with any of you, you can find further reflections and structured learning through our Fords Leadership Academy, including our Forge with Inner Confidence program that Rich has talked about. If you want to know more about any of that, please get in touch with us via LinkedIn by our website.

There's a contact form there and we'd be happy to talk to you more about that. So for today, Rich, thank you very much. This has been the Connected Leadership podcast by Zentano. Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you.

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