Tuesday Reset, June 30, 2026
The physiological sigh! Ahhhhh!
I read an email yesterday 3 times, and by the third pass I’d written a reply in my head that would’ve cost me … cost me a lot! Jaw tight, shoulders climbing toward my ears. Fingers already drifting to the keyboard.
That’s the body going into fight-or-flight over a block of text. No bear in the room. Just words on a screen, and my nervous system reacting like a threat walked in the door.
Here’s the thing about that moment. Between what happens to you and what you do about it, there’s a gap. Tiny. Maybe a second or two. And almost everything that matters about how you lead and how you live happens inside that gap. React, and the email writes itself. Respond, and you get to choose the words.
The reset I use to find the gap
One long exhale. That’s the whole thing.
Breathe in through your nose, add a small second sip of air on top, then let it out slow through your mouth, longer than the breath in. Once or twice is plenty. The long exhale is the part that tells your nervous system the threat is over, so the body can climb down out of the rafters.
You’ll still feel the spike. The breath doesn’t erase it. What it buys you is a couple seconds of clear air, enough to ask “what do I actually want to happen here” before your thumbs answer for you.
I came to this late, and not by choice. After I left the SEAL Teams I had plenty of spikes and no gap, just stimulus straight to reaction. Learning to breathe on purpose was one of the first things that gave me my responses back.
So yesterday I exhaled. Read the email a fourth time. Turns out the guy wasn’t even upset. I was. I sent two clean sentences instead of the paragraph I’d have regretted, and went on with my day.
One long exhale. You can do it in a meeting and nobody knows. At a red light. Outside your kid’s door before you walk in.
When was the last time a screen put you into fight-or-flight? What did you do with it?
Tomorrow’s Wednesday Reps is about the boring daily work that keeps you steady enough to find that gap in the first place.
A few free tools if you want to put this into practice:
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