Coaching for Leaders - Talent Management | Leaders
701: How to Handle High-Pressure Situations, with Dan Dworkis
Every leader at least occasionally faces emergencies. In an emergency, the only way out is through. In this episode, the mindset and tactics that will help us handle the most difficult situations. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 700-1. Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahofiak. Leaders are born. They're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Part of leadership for all of us is working under pressure, applying our knowledge under pressure. Oftentimes, we know what we need to do. We know the steps, but when we're in a heated situation, when the stakes are high, it's a lot harder for us to be able to do the things that we want to do that are going to help out the others around us and support our organizations. Today, so glad to have an expert with us who has helped so many to do this better to really perform well in tough situations. I'm so pleased to welcome Dan DeWercus. He is Chief Medical Officer at the Mission Critical Team Institute. He's an emergency physician who helps individuals and teams apply knowledge under extreme pressure and perform at their best when it matters most. He is the author of the Emergency Mind, Wiring Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure. Dan, a pleasure to have you on. Dave, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here. This is a fascinating book. Oh, my goodness, and you, of course, are coming to this from the perspective of the physician, but there is so much here that's helpful to leaders in all kinds of situations in working under pressure. And you start the book by talking about emergencies and what emergencies are. And you've shared with me that emergencies are not just worse bad days. Tell me a bit about that. What's different about an emergency? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great place to start. And whether you're in medicine or not, like you're probably going to hit emergencies in what you do. And it's worth being aware of them and getting into them ahead of time. And I don't know. I guess I can agree with myself that, yes, emergencies are not just worse bad days. It's really not linear, right? You can have a bad day. You can have some dropout of some of your protocols or something can not work for you. And most of the time, the systems that you have in place, whether you're a startup or a doctor or whatever, are probably going to continue to work to some degree. But then you get into this space that's different. That's just completely different. It's nonlinear. You cross some boundaries and you're in this environment where everything is just going wrong, essentially, an emergency, right? And when you're in that space, the stuff that works for you in normal times, not only will it not work, but it might actually hurt you and vice versa. So one of the things we talk about is that when you're able to recognize when you're in an emergency, you use emergency things. And when you're not in an emergency, you use non-emergency things. Now, that seems kind of obvious and ridiculous, but it's actually pretty hard to figure out sometimes. And it's an important thing to keep in mind. Just as a really concrete, like, perhaps overly visceral example of this, if you come into the emergency department and you have like a sucking chest wound, right? Like you have some terrible injury to your chest and there's air rushing in. That air is going to maybe shut down the way that your heart's working. I'm skipping over a lot of medicine here. And what you need to do in that case is put another hole in the person's chest. You need to cut their chest open, right? That is the most humane, kind, compassionate, wonderful thing you can do for that human being is to stab them in the chest with a knife. Now, that is typically not the right answer outside of that circumstance, right? You can't go around and you shouldn't go around stabbing people in a chest with a knife that's usually not the right answer for what to do. But in an emergency situation, right? Thank you for agreeing with that. Yes. But in an emergency situation, you sometimes need to do things that are antithetical or very different to what your normal tools might be. So there's this sense of am I an emergency or not? And in the book, I talk about these three sort of pillars of understanding what an emergency is. And actually, my thinking has evolved quite a bit since I wrote this piece of it. So there's actually five now. I think it's probably worth exploring through them real quick. Sure, please. So the three that are in the book are pressure, uncertainty, and impact, right? So emergencies have pressure. There is a difference between the supply and demand of resources that we have for one thing or another, right? There's not enough time to make a decision or there's not enough capital run away to decide whether to really investigate something. We have uncertainty. We don't know what the situation is or what our response should be. And we have impact, which in my world is usually life or limb, but could be, you know, the risk of shutting down of an organization or losing a key component or failing a mission depending on sort of what domain you're in. And the two that I've really added since then are this idea of complexity and liminality. So complexity is the idea that there's multiple interactions between the pieces of a system that react non-linearly. So an engine is a complicated system. You can take it apart, look at the pieces, study them and put them back together. But a human is a complex system. There's interactions between the different parts of us, our heart, our lungs, our kidneys. You can't just take one thing and assume it'll work by itself. And then finally, and I actually think this one's maybe the most important thing that defines an emergency is the idea of liminality. Liminality is the sense of you can't go out, you have to go through, right? In other words, you have jumped out of a plane and you cannot reverse time and jump back into the plane. The only way out is through, right? So when you find yourself in these circumstances, there's sometimes a tendency to want to just run away and shut the whole thing down. But when you're really in the grips, the jaws of a crisis like this, the only way out is through. And I'm going to get off my soapbox about this because I've been rambling about that for a second. But I think if you recognize situations in your space of influence that have those characteristics, pressure, uncertainty, impact, complexity, and liminality, then whether or not you're in an emergency room, you have found yourself in an emergency. And one of the truths you highlight about emergencies is that they also require us to make decisions, don't they? Absolutely, absolutely, right? I mean, it's up to you as a leader of yourself for your team or whatever it is to identify that space and then to start acting on it, to start controlling the controllables and moving your team forward towards whatever sort of a solution to that problems that you can get. You write about so many of your experiences in the book and you talk about the first cardiac arrest case that you handled as a team leader. And you write junior level responses to emergencies like a cardiac arrest are often chaotic, disorganized, and centered around trying to simply move faster in every direction all at once. Experienced emergency providers run a cardiac arrest case entirely differently. What's different about the junior level person and the person with experience on just how they approach a really big emergency like that? Hopefully there are a lot of differences, right? And as you get better at what you're doing, you're able to see more and more of the space. So what do I mean by that, right? So when you first start confronting problem sets, you're often hyper-focused on what's directly in front of you. You're trying to solve the small facet of the problem that you see. And that's possibly because you can't see the rest of the things or you don't have enough experience to understand what connects to what, right? So more senior people will think through the higher order effects of their actions and choices. They'll try to visualize and imagine, OK, if my team does this, what's going to happen next? A sort of shorthand way of thinking about that is to say you're thinking around the corner, right? You're trying to decide what's coming after this thing and to set yourself up for success, not just in this second, but for the next thing that's going to come down the line. Another important split is that more junior folks tend to focus more internally on themselves, right? How am I doing here? How am I being perceived? What is my next move? Where the more senior people understand that this is a lot more of a team sport. So when you are doing emergency medicine when you're running a cardiac arrest, you really need the entire team working on the same problem set. So rather than thinking about how you are performing, one of your big goals is to think about holistically as a team. How is my team performing? And you really want to optimize for that. Now, that might mean changing the way that you speak, the way that you stand. That might mean taking suggestions from different members of your team because you want the ideas to keep flowing or it could mean just thinking out loud saying, "Folks, here's what I think is happening. Here's what I intend to do about it next." There's a really brilliant physician, Dr. Robert Neibone, working out of London. The unique guy, he was a trauma surgeon and a general practitioner, which is a very strange career path. And he wrote this book, "Expert," where he talks to jugglers and carpenters and magicians and all these people that have to master a craft. And one of the big things he talks about in the path to mastery is the changing of point of view from internally focused, how am I doing to externally focused? How am I seen from the consumer of my services, from the point of view of them? And that sort of shift happens also when you're thinking about running cardiac arrests, right? It's not just about you, it's about your team and what's going on for the person and their family. And so the more experienced you are, the better able you are to make that jump in perspective. And the good news is we can get better at this. And one of the real gifts of the book is that there's a whole bunch of tactics and mental models that we can utilize to help us actually to do a better job at being able to apply our knowledge under pressure. And one of the ones that you feature in the invitation you make is to apply graduated pressure. Tell me about what that means and what's helpful about that. Right. So I think this is one of the most concrete examples of how anybody listening to this can get better at performing under pressure. And the concept here, the intuition here is a wedge, just like a wedge you'd put under a door or something like that. So if there's some really hard task now in medicine, for example, we might say, hey, I need you to put a central line in, which is a really large bore IV that goes into the neck or the leg to deliver really powerful medicines. And it's a pretty complicated procedure to put in. There's some risk and technical difficulty to it and stuff like that. So it's got some steps and some complication. So if I ask you to go do that and you've never done anything like that before, chances are pretty high that you're going to fail. And you're going to fail without necessarily knowing why, right? Did you fail because you missed a key step? Did you fail because you didn't even know where the equipment was? Did you fail because you haven't done the background homework to understand why we're doing the thing? Where's the failure come from and how do we address it? It's really hard to figure that out. If, however, I guide you through the steps ahead of time. So I take you on dry land, so to speak, away from the chaos. And I'm like, all right, here's the kit. Open it up. Look at the pieces. Let's talk through how it works. Let's assemble it slowly and carefully. Now let's have you practice on a task trainer mannequin. Now let's have you practice on a task trainer mannequin while people are yelling and you sort of gradually increase the amount of stress and energy in the room. Then when you get to the point of impact when you have to actually perform the skill to solve a problem set, you're much more likely to succeed. Or if you fail, we're much more likely to know why you fail because you've graduated all the different components that get you there, right? So applying graduated pressure is this concept of crawl, walk, run, right? Now I'm certainly not the first person to talk about that, but it's something we see all the time in emergency medicine. And again, the intuition here is this wedge. So if full speed is high wedge, then the question is, what can you find if that's a low wedge example of the same thing? How do you build low wedge practice into your day, your week and your system? I think there's some really interesting things you advise on this in the book on just how you can utilize just some everyday things as far as applying graduated pressure. Like one of the examples you give is after you do a hard workout, when you're like your blood is pumping and you're like fatigued, you can actually borrow from other events. Like when your body's in that state, that may be the time to then try something that is more challenging or pushing yourself at the edge a bit and actually looking for those opportunities and training yourself to do that. Yeah, absolutely. One of the technical skills we work on is the first couple of things that you say when you enter a room where a cardiac arrest is going on. So imagine there's a patient in a hospital, they suffer a cardiac arrest, their heart stops, somebody sees this and hits the code blue button, they start doing CPR and then sort of this swarm team descends on the room to try to solve it. One of the things that has to happen in that first moment is somebody has to take command and you have to have this sort of self-organization property of the team that's working the problem. So when I'm training the types of doctors who go to these rooms to start running these cardiac arrests, one of the things we train on is the technical skill of what do you say when you first arrive, which is a little bit harder than it looks at first blush, right? Because you have to size up the situation to determine leadership, take over if you need to and sort of organize the team. Anyway, we train them on how to say this stuff and one of the recommendations we always have is practicing it at the end of a workout. When your heart rates up, when you're tired, when you're gasping for breath, and just know that it's going to sound like that when you are hitting the room. You're not going to sound maybe how you want to. You might not have quite enough breath to get the whole sentence out. So figure out a way that you can do it where you're not shocked by that and you're not knocked off course, right? Where you're expecting the shorter performance that you're going to get in real life. And then you're more likely to keep moving forward after that, I should say, which I think is a great lead into one of the other models and tactics, which is to practice the discipline of suboptimal. What do you mean by suboptimal? Oh, man, I love this one. I'm debating getting a suboptimal tattoo, actually. So the reality is that there is failure and that we don't control everything and that there are times when things are just really really hard, right? There are times when things are just completely off the rails. Our teams are working problem sets that we don't want to be working. They're challenging or dangerous or both. And it's just a lot of suck to put it, honestly. So as leaders, we have to figure out a way to help our teams move forward towards these problem sets and hopefully go through them. And we're faced with this choice, right? So on the one side, you have the people who respond to this real chaos by pretending it's not happening. Everything's great, folks. Let's just keep going. Here's a pizza. Let's rock forward. And then on the other side, you have the types of leaders who get so swept up in the moment that they get crushed by it themselves, right? They're like, this is terrible. Everything sucks. Why are we even doing this? And I'm sure that you've seen enough teams to know that people live in each of these camps for one reason or another. And it's hard, right? Neither of those camps is particularly motivating for the team and it's pretty challenging to recover from those circumstances. What we try to do in the emergency department is find some sort of a middle ground that both identifies and connects with the really hard reality that you're facing and is also optimistic and forward-thinking enough to help you move forward towards the problem. So for me, the way that I've found to do that is just to say out loud, well, this is suboptimal, right? Because usually you're talking about this when somebody is just shot by a bow and arrow and then run over by a car or something and they're like maybe on fire and it's real bad. Like it's real bad, right? There's blood everywhere and the power has failed in the hospital and you're out of some crucial component and the deck is just like really stacked against you. And in that moment, if you can summon whatever it is to say, well, this is suboptimal and sort of a deadpan voice, you're definitely acknowledging the craziness of the situation and you're also diffusing it a little bit, right, by having this little bit of humor. And that sort of mild humor response to a really difficult situation is just a great leadership tool for acknowledging the SOC and then also getting the team moving forward again. I don't know that there's anything magical about the words, well, this is suboptimal, right? Like I have a teammate who has decided his version of this is to say, oh, SpaghettiOs. I think that's an interesting tactic. To me, that doesn't work as much, that doesn't feel as honest with who I am, but it really does for him. I always give folks the advice after telling that part of the story that if you're going to say, oh, SpaghettiOs, you should probably tell your team ahead of time what that means to you. Right, exactly. Otherwise, you're just the guy saying, oh, SpaghettiOs, when everything's on fire. But if you can say that, if you can say, hey, look, there's going to be times that we're going to face that are super hard. We're not going to want to be there, things are going to be rough. You might hear me say something that sounds like this. When you hear that, here's what that means. It means I understand that we're in a bad place and I believe we're going to get through it, right? And I'm going to do this just to help you get that motion going forward a little bit. You know, from physics that the coefficient of static friction is always higher than the coefficient of moving friction. In other words, it's always harder to start moving than it is to keep moving. So if you can get your team moving forward, even when it's dark and things are shut down and it looks pretty grim, that is a huge, huge thing as a leader. Hence, maybe this suboptimal tattoo, I haven't really decided on that. Yeah, well, I appreciate the two different examples. And you really go to Pains in the book to say, like, it's not so much the word itself. It's the find the language that's going to work for your team, whether it's suboptimal or spaghettios or whatever, that's part of the labeling this, right? Like I'm labeling a situation. We know this is tough. We are going to get through it. And then part of this too is also then the processing, like processing for the team and taking the next step. And that's also part of the discipline of this, right? Absolutely. And you mentioned labeling in the book around this. I'm like practicing this discipline. Is the labeling the saying that to yourself or someone else, saying the suboptimal or whatever the word is out loud? Is that labeling or is it something else? I think you're on the right track with it there. I think a lot of the times, and this is a step back from emergency is just into sort of the realm of mental models and how leaders use mental models in general, right? You can think of mental models in some sense as a playbook, right? You all have come together and said, all right, here's the different plays that we know how to do. If this is a firefighting situation, maybe we know how to use hand tools to cut a fire line or engines to drop water or air attack to drop retardant. If this is a startup, maybe we know how to run an A/B test, how to create a sales funnel and how to have client meetings. Like we know these different plays, right? Medicine, they might be we understand the first three moves to do pretty well when somebody's having a seizure or when somebody's having an acute heart failure exacerbation. So if you have these plays and you've rehearsed them and you understand how to use them, then one of the points of labeling is really getting everybody in the room to solve the same problem, right? There's this big concept in emergency medicine. The room is always smarter than any one person in it. I think that holds true well outside of emergency medicine as well, right? But the room is always smarter than any one person in it. And there's a corollary in there, right, which is that the room is smarter than you. And sometimes that's the harder thing to remember, right? It's easy to be the room is smarter than everybody in it, you know, not including me, right? But you sort of have to include yourself in that and realize that actually, if you can get everybody in the room working the same problem, the outcome will be better than if you do it yourself. Okay, so how do you get them working the same problem? Well, this is a little obvious, but you have to tell them what problem they're working, right? They have to understand which problem they're facing. Otherwise, maybe the left half of the room thinks it's working on a asthma attack and the right half of the room thinks it's working on an allergic reaction. Two things that can, in some circumstances, look similar depending on how they present. Those two plays are run very differently. What's normal? What's expected? What's the watch out for? Even if you have exceedingly highly skilled doctors and nurses, you tell half of them they're running asthma, half of them they're running allergic reaction, that team's going to have a really hard time coming together and solving a problem. So labeling is one way that we can get around that. We can get around that just by saying out loud as the leader, this is what we're doing, right? Now, it's even a little better than that when we're able to express some hesitancy or to express some uncertainty in that sentence, right? So often I will say that as, "Hey, team, I think this is a heart failure exacerbation. Let's run that play." Now, that says, "All right, let's start activating our heart failure mindset and our playbook." But also, Dan, the leader said he's not 100% sure. So if I see something that I don't really think makes sense, maybe it's a little psychologically safer for me to speak up about it because we don't have a 100,000% answer, this is what we think is happening answer. The same thing works on sort of an internal scale when you're thinking about the different thought patterns you might have, like labeling like, "Oh, this is anxiety," or "Oh, this is fear," or "Oh, this is the normal response that happens to me the moments before a patient comes in." I know what this feels like and I know what to do about it. It's sort of a micro-scale, macro-scale kind of approach to it. You invite us also, especially in high-pressure situations, to become a student of "Sangfroid." Am I saying that right, "Sangfroid"? I've always said "Sangfua" as the French part. Oh, I'm sure that's right because it is French, right? And it translates cold-blooded. And you make the point in the book that this is not a fixed personality trait. I mean, we all know someone who's really cool under pressure. And I think a lot of times we think about people like that of like, "Oh, they're just like naturally like that." And of course, some people more naturally have that skill. But it's not fixed, does it? I don't think so. No, I think it's trainable. I really do. I have been fortunate enough to attend the delivery of a number of babies. And I have never seen one be born a fully functional ER doctor. And I don't know anybody else that has either, right? So if nobody's born like this, we all grow into it. And we somehow keep making ER doctors. Then it sort of has to be a trainable skill. I think it's more a matter of how do you train it. And just to, you know, "Sangfua" translates as cold-blooded, right? But what it really means is the ability to maintain a presence of focus and mind in the midst of chaos. So can you, I think it's the Kipling poem, "If," right? Can you keep your head about you when all others are losing theirs? That sense of, are you able to perform at a high level despite the chaos swirling around you and to maintain a bit of ice in your veins as you're doing it? I think it's really helpful to know that it's trainable, right? I mean, I look back at me as a junior practitioner and I have certainly grown in leaps and bounds since that time. Thankfully, thankfully. Yeah, and you point out that experience makes it easier, but it doesn't develop on its own. It's not just like you get more experience and you automatically get it. You really have to specifically practice it. And when you're helping people to practice this and to keep cool under pressure, what is it that works to actually go through the practice of it? So there's a couple of systems in there, right? So I think it's helpful to start. And if maybe you haven't really thought through any of this concretely is to start by just pulling up from your memory a bunch of experiences where you felt like you really were capable of handling the pressure and some experiences where you felt like the pressure got the better of you and you weren't able to perform at your maximum level. One of the models we use for this is the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which is a sort of experimentally derived curve that looks at performance under pressure. But you don't really have to understand that. You just have to get the sense that people are like the strings of instruments, right? If you tune them too tightly, the string breaks, there's too much pressure. And if you tune it too loose, the string is floppy and it doesn't make a sound, right? So you have to have the right amount of pressure to really perform at your best. And that by itself is a bit of a radical thing to say and think about. So, you know, if you're just hitting that for the first time, like, go think about that for a minute. But if you've already thought that through, then your job is really to come up with this list of like, "Okay, well, what does it feel like when I'm really at my best? I'm handling the pressure and I'm mastering it." And then, what does it feel like when it's overwhelming? And how can I start to recognize the times when I am being compromised by pressure? And the better you get at recognizing those features, that provides the scaffolding on which you can layer habits and countermeasures and all sorts of things like that, right? If you read any of like Charles Duhig stuff on the power of habit, right, your idea is to find the triggers that push you in one direction or another and then change the link and the outcome of it. So that's a lot of what it's about when you're actually getting to the nuts and bolts of how to train song flaw. Developing your skill and your expertise so you have more external stimuli that you're doing well, building communities around you that support you in your quest to get better under pressure, building systems that learn and grow from you as you grow with it, and then internally doing the work of rebuilding sort of your habit stack around what pressure feels like for you. And one starting point maybe then, if I'm trying to get better at this, I start, if I haven't done something like this before, I start recording maybe or just writing down or journaling at the end of the day, all right, where did I run into a pressure situation today or in the recent past? And where did that work and where did it not work? And I think part of what I'm hearing you say is like once you have a sense of that, either you go back and you're thinking about things in the past or you're noticing things in real time as they come up, you start to notice those and then you can consider what's going to, what are the ways I effectively am going to handle this situation. And then you experiment with that a bit and try that out. And then that gets you a little bit further down the line of starting to handle this better in the moment. Yeah, and if you're listening to this and you're like, I think that's nonsense. I don't think there's any way I can change my reaction to pressure. I would invite you to do this thought experiment, which is could you make it worse, right? When you're facing the pressure and stress, what could you do that could make it worse? And just start there because my chances are you're going to find something. You know, it could be I could have not slept the night before I could have gotten an argument with my significant other the morning before showing up to my shift or I could have forgotten to wear pants that day or whatever it was, right? Like there are always ways that you can make it worse. And if you can find ways to make it worse, then it's changeable. And if it's changeable, then you can find ways to make it better. And I actually think that's maybe the easiest way to start is just imagine what you could do that would make it worse. And to your earlier point too, that you can use everyday life as a training zone for this. You don't necessarily have to develop this muscle in. In fact, you probably shouldn't try developing this muscle in the most high stress situations. You start off by like someone cuts you off in traffic or you're dealing with an upset customer. Like you notice your response to that in the moment and you practice and you experiment a bit there first before you're trying to make shifts in bigger situations. Right. And in a way, that's getting back to that idea of wedge and applying graduated pressure, right? Yeah. You don't, you know, this is a skill, staying calm under pressure is a skill. Just like putting a central line in is a skill. You wouldn't expect it to work the first time in the middle of a crisis for either of those. You want to train it and practice it ahead of time. Now, what one wrinkle to that is that when we get our new interns, right? These are folks that have just graduated from medical school. It's their first day, their first week of being a doctor and they're entering their emergency medicine training. The programs that I work with, they get me to come in and talk to the interns or the new fellows or whatever about this concept of building song flop. And we do it at the beginning, not because we expect them to get it right from the very beginning, but because we set the tone and say we are an organization that grows and learns and we value our individuals growing and learning. We know this will be hard and is hard for you. We're going to encourage you and we're going to give you the framework from the very beginning that helps you understand how to grow yourself in this direction, right? That's that idea of, you know, pushing forward and inspiring growth person in the middle of a community that supports them, supported by systems that wrap around them like that. So you don't have to get it right at the beginning. You should introduce them to at the beginning and then turn them loose on these experiments like you're saying. This is such a helpful framework for anyone who's in tough situations and pressure situations. And as you know, we've talked about it, it's way beyond medicine. It's so many different complex situations we all deal with in leadership. And Dan, I hope people will reach out, grab the book, but also maybe reach out to you if they've heard something that would be helpful to explore, you know, medicine's learning so much from business, the vice versa nonprofits. I mean, there's so many aspects of this that are important for us to like get better at and applicable across so many industries. And I am curious as you've put this all together, as your thinking has evolved. I appreciate you mentioning early on that, you know, you're adding to just your definitions as you go on this. I'm curious, what if anything have you changed your mind on as the book's gotten out in the world and you've been talking with people about how to get better at handling things under pressure? Yeah. I mean, so much, right? Like the whole idea of becoming a student of song flaw is that you are a student of this, right? You don't know all the answers. You're actively trying and experimenting and learning from the folks around you. And I think that's really, you know, an apt description of the journey that I've been on with this as I've started going. And I'm super fortunate to get a chance to study this in my day-to-day life. The sort of two big things that have changed my mind about this. When I wrote this book, I was pretty -- I wasn't early in my journey from this, but I was more focused internally on what I could do to get better under pressure. So a lot of the book is internally focused and is focused on how individuals can get better. Now, certainly there are aspects of teams and leadership that are implied in that, right? Because you're practicing within this teamwork environment. But a lot of it's internally focused. These days, I spend a lot more time focused on the teams and the systems that are around those teams. Specifically, the systems that exist after a particular -- like before and after a particular team makes their mark. So how do you set teams up for success? How do you learn from teamwork? And how do you build organizations that are continually striving to get better every day? I think the other big aspect is that when we first approach performance under pressure, we tend to focus on the moment of performance. We tend to say, "Okay, I'm going to have to perform in this meeting. I'm going to have to perform in this negotiation. I'm going to have to perform in this trauma resuscitation." And we're hyper-focused on that moment. What we tend to lose sight of is the moment before and the moment after. All right? So if we look at the moment before -- and that could be the day before, the week before, or really just the minute before -- what can I do in that moment of preparation to set myself up for success in the moment of performance? What choices do I need to make? What systems do I need to install? What things do I need to have in place in order to maximize my ability to perform when I'm needed the most? And then when we go to the moment after, this is really a conversation about recovery and evolution. All right? Are we able to come back home successfully, whether that's physically returning from fighting a fire or from a hospital or just mentally coming back to our center after a really complicated set of tasks or negotiation? And then evolution, have I learned something from this? Am I doing enough to learn from what I'm going through in that moment of performance to set myself up for a better chance at success tomorrow? And you can see pretty easily how that ends up forming a loop, right? Prepare, perform, recover, evolve as a loop and as a growing spiral. I certainly had some of that put together when I started this process. But the more time I spend in it, the more I realize how absolutely important the non performance pieces of that cycle are for the ability to perform under pressure. Dan Dorkis is the author of the emergency mind wiring your brain for performance under pressure. Dan, thank you so much for sharing your work with us. Thank you. Thank you for having me and thanks for what you're doing. [MUSIC] If this conversation was helpful to you three related episodes, I'd also recommend one of them is episode 376. How to become the person you want to be. James Clear was my guest on that episode. We talked about his blockbuster bestseller, Atomic Habits. I know many of you have gotten into the book over the years. James and I talked about some of the principles of how do we shift our behavior and one of the things he mentions in the book is the Goldilocks principle of we want things to be challenging for us, but we don't want them to be too hard. We want to find that just right middle zone. And it's a great compliment to some of the things that Dan talked about in this conversation of thinking about our own mindsets and challenging ourselves. We don't want to make it too hard, but we also don't want to make it too easy. Starting point for that episode 376, I'd also recommend episode 404. How to build psychological safety. Amy Edmondson was my guest. We talked about the importance of team and creating a safe environment. And you heard echoes of that in this conversation with Dan of, yes, all of this works well if we are thinking about this individually in our mindset and our practice. It works so much better if we are in it with a team and with team support and we've created that culture inside of the team and organization. The starting points for where to begin Amy Edmondson episode 404. And then finally, I'd also recommend episode 660. How to prevent a team from repeating mistakes. Cuzio Teshner was my guest on that episode and you heard Dan talk about in this conversation that yes, there's the what to do in the midst of the emergency. But just as important is what we do before and after. And if getting better at the after, the debrief is something you and your team need to move on. Cuzio Teshner's work is the work that you should know about and follow. We talked about it in episode 660. How do you debrief better? Cuzio leveraging his experience with the US Air Force overseeing all of their debriefing for many years and taught us some of the key principles in episode 660. A great starting point for you if you're not yet utilizing that practice in your organization. All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website and I'd invite you today to set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com. There are a ton of benefits inside the free membership and one of them is access to my interview and book notes. As I was reading through Dan's book, I was highlighting the key passages. I was taking notes. I'm using that to prep for the conversation as I do for most every conversation here on the podcast. And I make those notes available to you all of our free members. And so if you go to the episode notes on every episode, you'll see a download link for that. And I've highlighted some of the key quotes I think from Dan's book that we didn't get to in the conversation, but that you should know. That's available for almost every interview in the past several years. It is one of many benefits inside of the free membership. So to get access to all of that, just go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership and you'll have full access to that. And I'd also invite you while you're on the website to check out coachingforleaders plus. One thing I'm doing every single week is writing up a brief journal entry from me reflecting on one of the principles. Either I've heard from a past guest, something that's come up in conversations with our academy members or something in my own experience that I think is going to be helpful to you. And a recent journal entry, I talked about the importance of inclusive language. What's inclusive language? Well, it's when a leader gets in front of a group and rather than saying, "You need to do this," is saying, "Let's all do this. We should be in this together." And most of the time, most of us should be using inclusive language in our communications when we talk about the future and vision and team culture. And yet, there are a couple times that we shouldn't use inclusive language. And when it actually is helpful to be a lot more direct, I talked about two of those situations in a recent journal entry and where that distinction is so key and how sometimes we err on the wrong side. It's all part of coaching for leaders plus. If you'd like to find out more, just go over to coachingforleaders.plus for access to that entry and so many more each week. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I'm glad to welcome Jonathan Raymond back to the show. He is the creator of the Accountability Dial. Join me for a conversation with Jonathan. Always fun to talk with him. And I'll see you back next Monday. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]