Most leaders I work with don’t come to coaching because they’re failing. They come because they’re exhausted from succeeding.
The calendar is full. The team is performing. The results are there. And yet something feels off — a low-level tension that doesn’t go away, a sense of running on fumes while still showing up, still delivering, still being “fine.”
That’s not a weakness. That’s what chronic pressure does to a nervous system that’s never been taught to regulate itself.
Last week looked like this for me: three client calls, a workshop to prepare, and somewhere in between, my website decided to stop working. Everything was urgent. Everything needed attention. My brain was doing what brains do under pressure — switching, racing, quietly catastrophizing in the background.
I know this pattern well. Not just from my clients. From myself.
And that’s exactly why I want to talk about resilience — not the motivational poster version, but the real one.
The model that changed how I think about stress
Prof. Gert Kaluza, one of Germany’s leading stress researchers, describes stress not as a single event but as a three-layer process. He calls it the Stress Traffic Light — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
🔴 The first layer is the trigger: a deadline, a conflict, a technical failure, an unclear expectation. Triggers are largely outside our control. They happen.
🟡 The second layer is the interpretation: the story we tell ourselves about what the trigger means. This is too much. I should be handling this better. If I can’t manage this, what does that say about me? This layer is fast, automatic, and almost always running below the level of conscious awareness.
🟢 The third layer is the reaction: what our body and mind do in response. The tight chest. The short temper. The decision made too quickly, or not made at all.
Most leadership development focuses entirely on the reaction layer — how to communicate better under pressure, how to make clearer decisions, how to manage your team when things get hard. These are valuable skills. But they’re downstream of the real problem.
Sustainable resilience starts in the middle layer. It starts with the story.
Why high performers are often the last to notice
This is where Transactional Analysis offers something genuinely useful. In TA, we work with five core Drivers – deeply internalized beliefs that develop early in life and shape how we respond under pressure:
🔵 Be Perfect — in overuse: nothing is ever finished, every output needs one more round, the bar keeps moving.
🪨 Be Strong — in overuse: asking for help feels like failure, emotions get suppressed, exhaustion becomes a badge of honor.
🟠 Please Others — in overuse: your own priorities disappear, every request feels urgent, boundaries erode quietly.
⚡ Hurry Up — in overuse: permanent urgency mode, decisions made too fast, presence becomes impossible.
🔄 Try Hard — in overuse: enormous effort, little completion, spinning without landing.
Mine are Hurry Up and Be Liked. Which means my default under pressure is: move fast, keep everyone happy, and figure out the cost later. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see that pattern — and even longer to work with it instead of just through it.
Most leaders I work with have one or two dominant Drivers. In moderate use, they’re often the source of real strengths. Under sustained pressure, they become the exact patterns that quietly undermine performance, relationships, and health. And the awareness that might interrupt those patterns is usually the first thing to go when things get intense.
Awareness is the beginning, not the end
The goal is not to eliminate your Drivers. They are part of how you’re wired, and they’ve served you. The goal is to use them consciously — to catch yourself in that yellow layer, between trigger and reaction, and ask a different question.
Which Driver is running right now? Is it helping? Or is it the thing making this harder than it needs to be?
That pause — that moment of noticing — is where real resilience lives. Not in pushing harder. Not in building a higher tolerance for stress. But in developing the capacity to see your own patterns clearly enough to choose differently.
This is the work I do with leaders. Not fixing what’s broken. Building the kind of self-awareness that makes sustainable performance actually possible — for you, and for the people who look to you for stability when things get uncertain.
Because when a leader is grounded, something spreads through a team that no process or strategy can manufacture: clarity, trust, and the quiet confidence that comes from being led by someone who actually knows where they stand.
If this resonates and you’re curious what this kind of work could look like for you — I’d love to talk.
