Before a big presentation, difficult conversation or high-stakes meeting, leaders often ask me some version of the same question: how do I stay calm?
I think we are asking the wrong question. The goal is not to feel nothing, because nerves are not proof that you are unprepared and experience does not make them disappear. What you can learn to do is recognise the state you are in and deliberately shift towards one that will serve you better in that particular moment.
That is a mental skill, and like any skill, it can be trained.
I was reminded of this in my recent conversation with broadcaster Christian O’Connell. Here is someone who has done thousands of hours of live radio, built a breakfast show to 2.5 million listeners in the UK and then, in his mid-forties, walked away from it to start again in Australia. Despite all that experience, Christian told me he still gets nervous. Sometimes it happens before a show and sometimes it can arrive an hour into a show that is going perfectly well.
What has changed over the years is not the presence of nerves, but what he can do when they appear. Christian has built small routines that allow him to shift his state in a minute, sometimes in seconds, even while he is live on air. He grounds himself through his feet, wiggles his toes, feels the weight of his body in the chair and deliberately brings his attention out of the noise in his head and back to what is actually happening in front of him. He is not waiting for confidence to magically arrive; he is actively doing something to change his state.
Experience does not remove the nerves
I liked Christian admitting that he still gets nervous because we often misunderstand what expertise looks like. We assume the experienced performer no longer experiences the uncertainty, doubt or nerves that the rest of us do, when often the difference is that they have simply built a better response to those feelings.
Christian described live radio as a constant dance in and out of flow. After thousands of hours behind a microphone, he does not expect himself to find the perfect state and somehow remain there for three hours. He notices when he starts moving away from it and has developed ways of bringing himself back.
I see exactly the same thing with athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs. You walk towards the stage, into the boardroom or towards an important conversation and suddenly your mind starts running: don’t make a mistake, what if I get this wrong, what will they think of me, what if I don’t know the answer?
Trying to force those thoughts away usually gives them more oxygen. Mental agility is not the absence of that response; it is having enough awareness to recognise what is happening and enough skill to choose what you do next.
From impress mode to express mode
Christian has a simple way of describing one of his most useful shifts. He calls it moving from “impress mode” to “express mode.”
In impress mode, your attention collapses back onto yourself. You start wondering how you are coming across, whether people think you know what you are talking about, whether you are funny enough, credible enough or even belong in the room. Christian finds it far more useful to shift his attention towards what he is genuinely excited to share.
That changes the focus completely. Instead of monitoring himself, he starts thinking about the conversation, the audience, the stories he might hear and the opportunity to connect. He reconnects with why he enjoys doing the job in the first place. The nerves have not necessarily disappeared, but they are no longer driving the performance.
I know this one myself. Every time I start with a new sporting team or group of senior leaders, I still have that green-room moment. Before my first session with the Wallabies, the thoughts were there: I never played rugby union at that level, so what am I doing here?
The useful shift is remembering that I am not there to prove I can play rugby. I am there because I have experience and domain expertise that can help those athletes perform under pressure. My attention moves away from How do I prove myself? and towards How can I help them? It is exactly what Christian means by moving from impress mode to express mode.
That distinction matters in leadership because protecting your own image and actually serving the room are not the same thing, particularly when the pressure is on.
The radio dial
The most powerful example Christian gave me happened shortly after he moved to Australia. His new show was struggling, many listeners did not want him there, and his family had only been in the country a few weeks when his wife flew back to England after her mother suffered a massive heart attack.
Shortly before Christian was due on air, his wife called. Her mother needed an 11-hour operation and had been given a 50 per cent chance of surviving it. Christian was overwhelmed and found himself having a panic attack in a bathroom stall at the radio station while the opening jingle for his own show was already playing.
The show still had to go on, and in that moment an image came to him: an old analogue radio tuner. Christian imagined the dial sitting on fear and then deliberately moved it towards joy.
What I find particularly interesting about the story is that Christian was not pretending the fear had disappeared. As he explained it to me, “It wasn’t denying what I was feeling.” He was genuinely scared, but something else was also true at exactly the same time. He wanted to enjoy the show, make this new life work and do his best for his family, so he deliberately chose which of those states he wanted to turn towards.
That distinction is important because shifting state is not about replacing what is real. You are choosing which real thing leads.
Find the state that serves the moment
The useful state will not always be joy. Before a board presentation, you might need to move from doubt towards curiosity; during conflict, from defensiveness towards understanding; before delivering difficult feedback, from anxiety towards courage; or before a keynote, from proving yourself towards helping the audience.
There is no single high-performance emotional state that works in every situation. The skill is being able to recognise where you are, understand what the moment requires and deliberately move towards something more useful.
What Christian had built intuitively is something I have spent much of my career helping performers and leaders learn deliberately. When I listened to him describe the radio dial, I could hear a number of familiar mental-performance skills working together: awareness and self-talk, imagery, mindfulness, gratitude and a repeatable routine he could return to in future performance situations.
The radio dial is Christian’s cue. Yours might look completely different. Across sport, leadership and performance psychology, people use breathing, imagery, grounding, self-talk, physical cues and changes in attention to achieve a similar objective: interrupt the automatic response and create enough space to choose what happens next.
That is where an interesting story becomes a useful performance skill.
Build your own dial
For leaders, I think about the process in three parts: notice, choose and shift.
First, notice what is actually happening. Before your next high-stakes moment, ask yourself what state you are genuinely in, rather than what you think you should be feeling. You might be nervous, defensive, distracted, frustrated, excited or doubtful. The important thing is being accurate enough to recognise it before it starts making decisions for you.
Then ask what state would serve the moment better. This is not about choosing what would make you look good; it is about understanding what the situation and the people around you need. It might be curiosity, courage, focus, energy, patience or connection. More than one emotion can be true at the same time, which means you have some choice over which one you allow to lead.
Finally, shift. Use something you have practised before: ground your feet, change your breathing, alter your self-talk, use an image or deliberately move your attention away from yourself and towards the people you are there to serve. Your version does not need to involve a radio dial, and there is no single technique that works for everybody. What matters is having something familiar enough that you can access it when the stakes are high.
None of this is particularly complicated, which is partly the point. The challenge is not understanding the technique; it is practising it often enough that it becomes available under pressure. Knowing that you become defensive when challenged does not stop you becoming defensive, just as knowing you get nervous before presenting does not make the nerves disappear.
The work is to practise the shift in lower-stakes moments, so that when the board meeting goes sideways, the negotiation gets tense or you walk onto a stage with your heart racing, you have something familiar to reach for.
High performers still get nervous and experienced leaders still doubt themselves. Mental agility is not about eliminating those states. It is about becoming better at recognising them, deciding what the moment requires and shifting deliberately rather than letting the pressure decide for you.
That is the difference between hoping the right version of you turns up and having trained yourself to access it.
Train the shift
Closing the gap between knowing how you want to lead and being able to access that state when pressure is real is a big part of the work we do with senior leaders and teams at Performance Intelligence.
Mental agility is not about staying calm all the time. It is about building the awareness, tools and repeated practice that allow you to respond more deliberately when the moment matters.
If you want to build this capability across your leaders and teams, there are two ways we can help.
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About the Author
Andrew May is a mental skills coach, leadership advisor, keynote speaker and author. As founder and CEO of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior executives and high-performing teams across Australian business, elite sport and the Australian Defence Force to build the systems, culture and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Exercise Physiology and a Master’s in Coaching Psychology, and has worked as a mental skills and leadership coach across elite Australian sport. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
