Advanced Psychology for Leading Under Pressure

This isn’t a managing program, it’s psychology. It’s about YOU. Your thoughts, blocks, obstacles, stressors, and how they affect you and the people you care for. Within every craft there is always a mental side of performance, and leadership is not different.

There are many ways stress can be viewed in our normal day-to-day struggle, but I’ll do my best to try not to treat it like a superficial topic, and while I wrote this with the intention of it being clear and practical, this is not a how-to guide or a tutorial on deep breathing. There is no quick fix or hacks given, no simple shortcuts to take, the reason is two-fold. First, cheap and quick fixes hardly solve any deep trouble, they often just create more instead. This is not the place where you’ll find someone to tell you what to do, it’s a place for you to seek deeper understanding, sometimes seeing something you might not like to see. My purpose here isn’t to eliminate all stress in our lives, whether that’s even possible, but cutting the unnecessary one and learning to thrive under pressure for the stuff that matters to us. To shape and shift our relationship with fear and stress so we can grow and develop with them. This is what stress and leadership are to me, stress is about self-discovery, leading is about putting that self-discovery into practice and giving back to others.

We will start by analyzing the classic research on the stress response, moving on to define generally what stresses us. We will take a look at our character and how our perception and attitude play a role in defining our stress reaction and how our mind can get us to perform suboptimally under intense pressure. We will see how recovery plays a role in our reaction to stress, both physically and mentally. Finally, we’ll analyze our leadership style and how that can affect the people around us, and how to manage their stress levels.
A workbook is provided as a pdf for you to follow along with the course, take your time to work through those exercises.