You Are the Weather (A "Reader's Digest" Version of our Weekly Newsletter)
When the world is burning, your team needs to see how you carry what you don't know.
Welcome to the Reader’s Digest Version of our Newsletter... Your Thursday Three Things newsletter, put out by Focus Now Training, the parent company of the Men Talking Mindfulness podcast.
I got one of those emails this week. The ones I’ve been trying to unsubscribe from for eleven years. A shelter-in-place alert from a security list I got put on when I was stationed in Bahrain back in 2014. Incoming missiles. Seek cover immediately.
I’m in Colorado. My kids were eating cereal at the kitchen table. And something in my body still responded to that email before my brain had time to process that I was on the other side of the planet.
That’s what a nervous system looks like when it’s working. The problem is that my kids were right there, and in the three seconds before I got myself under control, they read something in my face. My youngest looked up from her bowl and asked what was wrong.
I told her it was nothing. And she went back to her cereal. But she already had the information she actually cared about, which wasn’t what was in the email. It was the look on my face. That’s the part she filed away.
I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot in the context of leadership. Because what’s true at the breakfast table is true in every meeting room and job site you walk into right now. Gas prices are climbing. People are watching the news at night and waking up with it in their heads. They’re worried about what it means for the economy, for their families, for the future. And they’re also watching YOU... to see how you’re carrying it.
You are the weather in whatever environment you lead. The team takes its emotional read from you before it takes it from any briefing or update or team meeting agenda. If you walk in activated, they activate. If you walk in steady, they have something to anchor to. That’s part of the job. That IS the job.
Here’s what makes this hard. Most of the people I work with who are running teams right now are carrying more than their teams know. The external situation on top of everything else that was already on their plate... it adds up. And the instinct in high-performance cultures is to absorb all of it silently, stay stoic, and project certainty.
That strategy stops working when the body stops cooperating, which usually happens at the worst possible time.
The guys who hold up well under this kind of sustained pressure aren’t doing it by pretending the pressure isn’t there. They’re doing it by staying honest with themselves about what they’re carrying and managing their own regulation before they walk through the door. The regulation has to happen somewhere. If it doesn’t happen in private, it happens in public, and usually on someone who didn’t deserve it.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, Will and I talked about what happens to the mind and body when war news saturates the information environment. The short version: your nervous system responds to perceived danger the same way it responds to actual danger. When that response fires, curiosity goes offline, empathy shrinks, and the part of the brain that does complex reasoning starts to step back. That’s biology, not weakness. But if you don’t know it’s happening, you’re making decisions and leading people from a place you didn’t choose to be in.
The question I kept coming back to is one I’ll put to you directly: When your environment is asking you to panic, what do the people around you see in you?
Not what you say. What they see.
And a quick, shameless plug… I write about this in DIAL in Your Leadership because it’s one of the things that separates leaders who earn lasting trust from leaders who earn compliance. Trust gets built in the hard moments, the uncertain ones, the moments where nobody knows what’s coming and the leader doesn’t pretend otherwise but also doesn’t collapse under the weight of it. That combination... honesty about the uncertainty plus steadiness inside it... is what people are actually looking for right now.
You don’t have to have answers to the geopolitical situation. You won’t. Nobody does. But you can regulate your own nervous system, acknowledge the reality your team is living in, and lead from a place that isn’t driven by fear. That’s available to you.
Full episode is up now on Men Talking Mindfulness. Audio at this link pod.fo/e/3f5fb6 or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Video on the Valor Media Network on YouTube or right on the Focus Now Training Substack. Full newsletter with practical tools at newsletter.focusnowtraining.com or text MTM to 33777.
If this landed, pass it to someone who’s leading people through a hard season right now.
And that’s all we have this week. Until next time, take care.
With utmost gratitude and respect,
Jon and Will