What’s Actually Happening When You “Lose It”
Let’s be honest about what “losing it” looks like for most high-performing leaders. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s more subtle, and in some ways, more costly.
It’s going quiet in a conversation when you actually have something important to say. It’s over-explaining or over-controlling when you feel uncertain. It’s a flash of irritation you mask professionally, but your team feels anyway. It’s saying yes when you meant no or no when curiosity would have served you better.
It looks like the gap between the leader you intend to be and the leader who shows up when the stakes are real.
Here’s what research and 15 years of working closely with leaders have shown me: this gap isn’t closed by trying harder or knowing more. It’s closed by gaining clarity about what’s actually happening inside you when pressure hits, so you can strategically do something about it.
Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a grizzly bear and a difficult performance review.
Research shows that under stress, the brain shifts toward automated response patterns and this correlates with reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking, empathy, and sound decision-making. In other words, pressure doesn’t just feel harder, it physiologically changes how you think.
When a threat is perceived, big or small, your body responds, and your thinking narrows. Your emotional triggers activate, and the patterns wired into you over a lifetime take over.
The most skilled leaders I’ve worked with aren’t immune to this; they’re human. What sets apart those who lead with consistency, curiosity, and integrity under pressure isn’t the absence of patterns, but their awareness of them and ability to leverage them.
The Blind Spot That Changes Everything
Here’s the thing about patterns: they’re almost invisible from the inside.
That’s not a character failing, it’s neuroscience. We’re often the last to see our own automatic responses, because they happen below conscious awareness. We don’t choose or plan them; they simply run.
Which means that no amount of willpower, positive thinking, or leadership training will reliably interrupt a pattern you can’t see.
I learned this the hard way, not in a coaching room, but through years of high-pressure performance as a competitive swimmer and in the high-pressure entertainment industry. I knew how to perform, and I certainly knew how to push through. What I didn’t know was the pattern that was running me in the moments I most needed to be at my best.
Seeing the pattern clearly, precisely, and without judgment changed everything for me. Not because the pressure disappeared, but because, for the first time, I understood why it was there and what impact it had, and I had a choice in how to respond.
That’s what I now help leaders do.
Why “Just Be More Self-Aware” Isn’t Enough
You’ve probably heard that self-awareness is the foundation of great leadership. And it’s true, as far as it goes.
But there’s a critical distinction that’s rarely made: there’s self-awareness on a good day, in a calm environment, when you’re rested, and nothing is on fire. Then there’s self-awareness under pressure; in the room, in the moment, when the stakes are high, and something inside you has already started reacting.
Most leadership development builds the first kind. It’s valuable. But it’s not what determines how you show up when it counts.
The leaders who consistently lead well under pressure, who can be curious rather than reactive, connected rather than defensive, and clear rather than scattered, have done the work of knowing their stress response specifically. Not their personality type. Not their communication style on a neutral day. Their actual, measurable pattern under pressure.
That’s a different kind of self-knowledge, and it requires a different kind of tool.
The Moment Everything Shifts
In my work with leaders, there’s a moment I see again and again. It happens when someone looks at a precise map of their own stress response pattern, not a general personality profile, not a broad archetype, but a specific picture of what actually happens inside them when pressure hits, and they say some version of:
“Oh. That’s what’s been happening.”
Specific moments click into place. Recurring conversations make sense in a new way. The thing they’ve been trying to manage with willpower suddenly has a name, a shape, a pattern they can actually work with.
The moment of recognition is where real change begins. Not because awareness alone fixes everything, but because you can’t change what you can’t see. Once you can see it, you’re no longer at the mercy of it.
This is why I built the Leadership Performance System around one foundational question: What’s actually happening inside you when the stakes are real?
Not who you are on paper. Not how you lead when everything is going well. But what happens in the times that have always been hardest for you, and what becomes possible when you finally understand why.
What This Means for You
If you’ve read this far, something here probably resonated. Maybe it’s the meeting that still sits uncomfortably. Maybe it’s the nagging sense that there’s a version of you as a leader that you haven’t quite been able to access consistently. Maybe it’s the recognition that the advice you’ve tried hasn’t quite reached the thing that needs to change.
That’s not a failure. That’s a signal.
It’s a signal that the work isn’t about doing more or knowing more. It’s about seeing more clearly; specifically, seeing the pattern that’s been running your high-pressure moments, often without your awareness or permission.
And here’s what I know to be true
after fifteen years of this work: when leaders finally see that pattern with real clarity, things change. Conversations that used to derail start to land differently. Relationships that felt stuck begin to move. The gap between who you intend to be and who actually shows up under pressure starts to close.
Not because you tried harder, but because you finally had the right map.
Ready to See Your Pattern?
The first step in the Leadership Performance System isn’t a strategy session or a skills workshop. It’s the WE-I Profile, a precise tool that captures your stress response in high-pressure moments. Not who you are on a good day. What actually happens inside you when the stakes are real.
For the first time, you’ll have a clear, specific map of the pattern that’s been running your most important moments.
That’s where everything changes.
Kirsten Siggins is the co-founder of the Institute of Curiosity, a TEDx speaker, and co-author of the Amazon bestseller
The Power of Curiosity. She works with leaders and teams to build the self-awareness and conversation skills that hold up under pressure, when it counts most.
