I’ve spent twenty-five years in rooms that reward force and quietly run on power. Kitchens at full service. Boardrooms. Stages. Here’s what nobody put on the training budget.
Most leaders are taught one lever. Push. Push harder, speak louder, close faster. It works for a while, and then it sends the bill.
The morning after we won the Telstra Award, I woke up with a migraine that put me on the bathroom floor. Everyone called me disciplined. I wasn’t disciplined. I was running on cortisol, and my body had finally presented the invoice.
That was force. Force will carry you a long way before it drops you.
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What power actually is
Power isn’t the absence of effort. It is a state. A settled nervous system the room can feel and reorganise around. The calm that settles a meeting. The yes that comes without chasing. The decision that holds under pressure, because the person making it isn’t leaking stress into every corner of the room.
Force consumes the one using it. Power sustains them.
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Why this is the leadership skill, not a wellbeing extra
A leader with a resilient nervous system makes cleaner decisions and holds harder conversations and makes more money. A depleted one floods the room with urgency and calls it drive.
Your team doesn’t follow your words. They follow your state, and they catch it in the first minute, before you’ve said what you came to say.
That isn’t soft. It’s the most practical edge there is, and almost nobody trains it.
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This week
Before your next hard meeting, one thing. One long slow deep inhale followed by an even longer slower exhale. Do that three times and that’s the signal to your body that you’re safe. The room borrows it from you.
With Love, Pauline
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
