Calm is a Competitive Advantage
There is a misunderstanding in the business world that refuses to die. One that equates constant intensity to leadership. It says go fast or go home. And it tries to make everything urgent and urgency everything.
The cost of these beliefs is quietly taking out some of the most talented founders I’ve met. It’s what causes countless sleepless nights and missed opportunities.
What most founders don’t realize is that the antidote is hiding right in front of them….calm. Calm is a superpower. It’s an under the radar competitive advantage.
Calm, in its truest business sense, is the ability to think clearly when the fire alarm is going off. It’s not reacting right away when a key employee quits, or when cash flow is reporting low even after securing that deal that was supposed to fix everything. It’s adjusting to what’s happening in the moment, processing what this means in reality versus the story we’re telling ourselves and making sound decisions for the longevity of our business.
The Intensity Addiction
Something else that holds true for most founders is that we’re addicted to intensity. And yes, I said we. Hi, my name is Patrick and I’m a recovering intensity addict.
It’s hard not to be these days. Based on most information available out there, your business is about 5.3 seconds from being left behind. Not only that, but it feels productive. It feels like you’re moving the needle because “Look at all the stuff I got done.”
Imagine this, it’s a Tuesday morning, you’ve just gotten into your office and your Slack is on fire. You read last month’s financial reports and notice a huge cash flow swing. A new hire quits (via text) and one of your most important clients sends an email with the subject line “We need to talk”.
Instantly your nervous system lights up. You start firing off to-do’s to your employees on slack while analyzing all your marketing campaigns and where you can cut money to try that shiny new marketing campaign you heard on a podcast. Then you post a job ad on Indeed with the same job description used to hire the now former employee and push your weekly high level meeting so you can call your client. Sound familiar?
There is always pressure that causes a reaction seeking relief. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s like scratching that itch that never goes away.
But what is constantly obeying every bit of volatility costing you?
Sit with that question for a second, that feeling in your chest.
When volatility becomes your operating rhythm, you no longer control pace. Pace controls you. Calm leaders break this loop. They experience the pressure. But they don’t interpret pressure as a command.
Real Calm vs. The Absence of Problems
I’m sure some of you at this point are imagining that one business owner we all know who has it all together. Always calm under pressure and business as usual. And they’re out there, for sure. But a lot of them just seem calm because nothing is currently going wrong. Throw a wrench in the gears of their business and watch out!
This isn’t calm though. This is the absence of “you know what” hitting the fan.
Real calm is visible when things go wrong because it is built on a foundation of structural stability. And focusing on developing structural stability is how you can build your calm muscle.
Structural stability is when you choose to focus on what is important, not just the things triggering the urgent alarms. It’s pausing to ask yourself “How did we get here?” when something goes wrong instead of immediately jumping in to solve a problem.
Take our earlier examples of all the things that can go wrong on a daily basis in your business. When you open your computer and your team is blowing up your Slack, structural stability would have you pause to see if reading and responding to these messages is the most important thing to do at the moment. Or when that new hire quits, it’s sitting and thinking through your hiring and training process to see where things could have gone wrong and making any needed adjustments before finding a replacement. When the client emails with “We need to talk”, it’s taking time to examine the boundaries or lack thereof you have with your clients and if there is a way to improve communication.
Most business owners are like a pendulum swinging back and forth between sprinting and stability. It feels like progress, but it’s not.
Learning to live and work with more structural stability is the key to harnessing the power of calm in your business.
Volatility is Expensive
Solving problems as soon as they pop up feels like progress. But the long term cost of running your business this way far outweighs the benefits.
Let’s again jump back to our Tuesday morning example. If you were to jump into action and resolve every one of those problems before anything else, your ability to make strategic, well thought out decisions the rest of the day would be absolutely shot.
Think back to a time where you had a morning like the one we described. How was your decision bandwidth for the rest of the day? How much did you prioritize short-term relief to problems after that? How much of that reactive behavior did your team take on?
And these costs only compound day after day when you begin solving the wrong problems because they feel urgent. You make hiring decisions to relieve workload instead of build capability. You chase opportunities to get quick wins instead of building the long game strategy.
You begin to believe this is what you’re supposed to do because it feels good. Then your team starts to believe the same thing. You celebrate because you’re all doing more. This is the true cost of volatility. When your whole team normalizes stress cycles and calls it productivity.
Meanwhile the pressure builds. And when the pressure gets too high, the cracks start to show. Balls start being dropped. Clients get upset. Employees quit. And the cycle to fix it right this second starts all over, costing you time, energy and money each and every time.
Calm Leaders Process Pressure Differently
There is a quiet trait shared by the highest performing operators I work with. From the outside it looks like a super power, but when further explored, it is really just an intentional way of handling pressure that involves an extra step or two from how most founders operate.
This trait is the ability to orient to what is happening once the pressure hits. It is a way of processing what is going on without it hijacking your decision making.
There is a sequence that disciplined leaders follow, whether consciously or not:
Pressure → Orientation → Discernment → Decision
Most founders skip the Orientation step and jump directly from Pressure to Decision because their focus is on relieving the pressure as soon as possible. Chaos ensues.
Let’s look back at our earlier example where your disappointing financial reports led you to chase new shiny marketing campaigns on a whim. What would happen if instead you pause instead of instantly reacting? You take time to dig into the numbers to figure out if it is a marketing issue or not?
This is where the Discernment step kicks in. By digging into your numbers further, you realize that your marketing is doing great, but your sales team is not converting. Now you fully understand what is actually going on and can think through what the best decision moving forward is to resolve the issue at hand.
If pausing to orient yourself when pressure hits feels inefficient, pause right now to think about how many times you’ve solved the same problem over and over again.
Most People Aren’t Born With It
Some people assume calm leaders are naturally wired that way. Most of them are not. Just like other skills, it is a muscle that has to be strengthened through repetition. This is great for us mere mortals. It means that no matter where you’re at now, calm is attainable.
Let’s run a quick litmus test to see where you are. When things start to get hot and the pressure starts to mount, is your initial response to react immediately? Perhaps you internalize the pressure, put your superhero cape on and try to resolve it on your own? Or maybe you transfer the pressure directly onto your team.
If this sounds like you, the first step toward becoming a calm leader is to externalize this pressure into structure.
One of the best systems I have clients use to externalize pressure is the Time Energy Audit. The Time Energy Audit is a simple tool that tracks where you’re actually spending time and what the energy cost on those tasks is.
A real world example of this is when I had one of my 1 on 1 clients go through this exercise when he was beating his head against the wall trying to figure out why he wasn’t hitting his revenue goals. Only when he used this system did he realize all of his time was going towards putting out fires (relieving the pressure), rather than Revenue Generating Activities (focusing on the structure).
Try using this tool the next time the pressure hits and you want to externalize the pressure, instead of carrying the entire business in your nervous system.
Your Nervous System Sets the Tone
This is where most self-help articles fall short. You see, leadership is not purely in the mind. It is in our bodies too.
When the pressure hits and your nervous system activates your focus narrows. You drift towards fast resolutions that instantly relieve pressure in the short-term while grossly underestimating the long-term consequences.
Calm leaders understand that to maintain level thinking, they must manage this activation. And this isn’t about meditation (although I highly recommend meditation to anyone reading this article), it’s about containment.
Let’s go through an example of containment to really understand what I’m talking about. Frequently on calls with 1 on 1 clients, the conversation starts to head in several different directions. Cash flow is low this month, a deal is falling through, and they just heard about a new hiring strategy on a podcast that they’re considering giving a try.
Containment is choosing one of these issues to solve before digging into the next. It is intentionally choosing not to escalate all of these issues at the same time. It is setting the pace with your team and holding emotional intensity without amplifying it. Containment is regulating the emotional temperature of the room.
Calm leaders aren’t the firefighters.
They’re the thermostats.
Containment Leads to Growth
One thing I see time and time again is founders under the impression that growth solves everything.
If you’re reactive at $500k in revenue, the reactivity will only create bigger issues at $5 million.
If you’re grounded at $500k, your company will be more structurally sound at $5 million. You’ll be able to better withstand the challenges that come with the increased revenue.
This all sounds great in theory, right? But what about in the real world?
Take one of my clients. When we started working together, we realized that he was very reactive to revenue dips. If revenue went down one month, he threw more money at marketing campaigns. It was only when we slowed everything down and really looked at how his business ebbed and flowed that we realized the only thing the increase in marketing spend did was drastically reduce his profitability.
Once we contained the issue, we were able to discern the real culprit (which wasn’t the marketing) and solve that issue before anything else. Now his revenue is up, while his expenses are 30% lower than they were.
But his biggest gain from the work we’ve done is that he isn’t reactive anymore. Now that we’ve put Marketing ROI and Sales Pipeline tracking in place to see what works and what doesn’t, my client is able to let his marketing do what it needs to do to get his business where he wants it to be.
Calm is the Long Game
If you want to build something that stands the test of time, stop mistaking adrenaline for effectiveness.
Instead, train containment. Learn to slow your thinking when the pressure rises. Practice pausing to orient yourself before you make a decision. And build systems to hold the pressure.
Learn to lean into calm.
Calm leadership isn’t flashy and it doesn’t get you the big applause. But it does allow you and your business to perform at a much higher level. Because the leader who can remain steady under pressure is more composed and more calibrated for success.
Most leaders aren’t born calm. But anyone can train it to be a competitive advantage. And in a world where most business leaders are reacting 24/7, calm is a superpower.
It’s time we put this “everything is urgent” myth to bed. So the next time you walk in on a Tuesday morning and a tidal wave of challenges is staring you in the face, how will you use calm to face the wave?
If you’d like to learn more about how I help 6-7 figure business owners turn pressure into structure and structure into growth, click here.
