How to Navigate Stress as a Leader: What Stress Is and Why Joy Helps

The Silent Strain

For years, I thought stress was something that happened to me. The packed schedule, the hard conversation, the season that wouldn't let up. I treated all of it as the stress itself. It isn't. And understanding that changed how I lead.

Stress is an inside response

Stress is an internal response, a feeling that occurs in reaction to an external challenging situation. The pressure is real. Deadlines, diagnoses, and difficult seasons exist outside of us. But the stress itself rises from inside, from how we react.

This matters more than it sounds. The body doesn't know the difference between a wild animal and a project deadline — the amygdala fires that fight-or-flight response either way. Two leaders can sit through the identical hard meeting and walk out differently, one depleted and one steady. The room was the same. The internal response was not.

I learned this the hard way. Years ago, practicing family therapy, I spent my days absorbing everyone's pain and started taking it home. I became jumpy, developed migraines, couldn't sleep at night nor stay awake at the dinner table. The stressors were outside of me, but the stress creeped in.

Why this is good news

If stress were purely external, we'd be at its mercy. Because it's an internal response, we have a point of influence. We can't always control the pressure, but we can strengthen how we meet it.

That is what resilience really means: the ability to stay strong in the face of stress. One form of it is intellectual resilience, the capacity to take challenges head-on while staying focused on solutions and progress toward our goals. And underneath all of it is something simple: knowing who we are and what we want to achieve. When we're anchored in that, the hard season still arrives, but we meet it as a problem to solve, not a wave that crushes us.

Here are two things worth doing this week.

First, name what's actually ours. Most of what weighs on leaders is chronic, not acute. It doesn't spike and pass; it stays. When I work with executive teams on the What's Your Sphere of Resilience®, the first step is always honest mapping: which areas are depleted, which are strong. We can't strengthen what we've never really looked at.

Second, dial up our why. This is the heart of it. Joy is not the prize waiting on the other side of stress; it's part of how we move through it. My friend Josh Landay said it beautifully: if there's no why in the work, then it's only stress, but when we dial up the purpose and the joy within it, that good begins to outweigh the strain.

The question I keep coming back to

Stress is something we have to be aware of and prepared for. And we can do that only when we slow down long enough to pay attention to how it's actually showing up in our lives.

I'll leave you with the question I keep returning to myself, and one I've put to more than a few rooms of leaders: How is stress affecting you — your thoughts, your body, your time, your relationships, your spirit?

You do not have to feel less stress than everyone else to lead well. You just have to be willing to look at it honestly. This week's blog goes deeper into the two kinds of stress, what unchecked strain costs a whole team, and how the Ready–Set–Go® framework turns awareness into a plan. Read more here.

And if your organization is navigating sustained pressure, this is the work I bring to stages and leadership teams. Let's connect or explore speaking here.