The Moments That Build Us.

The Moments That Build Us

Small stakes, serious practice

Strong Ground, week commencing 14 September 2026

We promote people for polish. Then we are surprised when the decisions fall apart under pressure.

I have been thinking about this for a while. The quality of our decisions in the high-stakes moment is mostly determined by what we did in the low-stakes ones. The unremarkable meeting. The routine call. The conversation where nothing was riding on the outcome. Those are the reps. That is where the muscle gets built.

The hockey field

My first thought was hockey, many years ago. The ball is coming to me and I have to decide where to put it.

I remember that very beautiful feeling of reading the field, seeing people moving, making models in my head of where they might go and where I could put the ball so that it worked to our advantage. And I distinctly remember the feeling of holding it, those extra few milliseconds, to find the sweet spot. Everything coming together so I could move into the space I wanted. It did not always work. When it did, wow. Time slowed down.

I did not build that capacity in the moment the ball arrived. I built it in hundreds of training sessions where nothing was riding on the outcome.

Before: the preparation nobody sees

Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review recently interviewed eleven elite sports coaches across US, European, Australian and New Zealand leagues. What they found was not a formula. It was a set of practices that unfold before, during and after the moment.

Before the decisive moment arrives, elite coaches anticipate the decisions they are likely to face. If this happens, we do that. If that happens, we do this. The plays are agreed in advance.

I recognise this from training speech and language therapists. We had them script their moves before they ever sat down with a client: push the challenge up a notch if the client responds well, drop it down if they are struggling. We explored which supports could be pushed in and pulled out, and what that volume control of support looks like in practice. None of that scripting ends up in a real session. That was never the point. The point was that students had already thought it through, so the thinking was available when they needed it.

Elite coaches are also fierce about their data. They control what reaches them, in what form, and to what standard. Opinion is not data. Barry Prizant, whose work shaped how we assess communication in autistic children, insisted on evidence across three contexts of place and person before a skill could be recorded as genuinely present. A good performance in one setting tells you very little, which is worth remembering next time you are deciding who is ready for a bigger role.

Rebecca Lowe makes the same case from a very different chair. She fronts NBC's Premier League coverage and was Fox's 2026 World Cup presenter, and on a recent podcast she described preparation as her real superpower. She reads everything. She knows the data. She goes on air knowing she will use only a fraction of it, and that is precisely the point. She is preloaded, which frees her to be fully present.

During: regulate, read, recognise

The primary skill in the moment is managing emotion. Not eliminating it. These coaches don’t suppress what they feel. They notice and dial the volume down to bring their focus back to what matters right now, and only right now.

Then they read the room. Everything: visual cues, language, movement, subtle shifts in energy. And while they are reading, they are checking against other observers, gathering data points. If the same worrying signal shows up three or four times, they change something.

I love the clarity of turning preparation into instinct. The researchers compare it to clinical reasoning: scanning the situation, matching it to known patterns, narrowing the options almost instantaneously without consciously working through every alternative. Our gut reactions are deeply embedded wisdom built from a great deal of data and experience.

"The recognition comes first, the explanation follows."

Yes. That is exactly it. I know what I am going to do before I can tell you why. It is often not until afterwards, reflecting, that I understand what was driving the decision.

It plays out the same way in meetings. Someone has just said something unhelpful to me or openly critical of me, and I have a few seconds before I respond. Those seconds are the hockey field. What helps most is that I am in service of the shared outcome rather than my own position. There is far less to protect, and that frees up a surprising amount of attention for reading what is actually going on in the room.

After: own it, repair it, change the system

The coaches normalise being wrong. Mistakes are expected, and learning from them is the work. They repair trust immediately rather than letting it sit. And they keep improving their systems based on what each event taught them.

(We all need to get better at repair, and I'll be tackling this challenge in a later article.)

Pocket presence

Brené Brown uses the term pocket presence in place of executive presence, because it describes the ability to perform in the tightness of a pocket of time and space. Being good in the pocket draws on trust, courage, self-awareness, humility, discipline and emotional regulation, developed over years.

I warm to this enormously. It describes an actual skill set.

I was once asked to resubmit a head and shoulders shot for a large proposal. The request was: could I please put on a jacket. I understood the ask and I was happy to do it. My response was, if only it were that simple. If only putting on a black tailored jacket gave people the skill set required to do the job.

Brown makes a related point about how we assess people. Asked to give an opinion on somebody's performance, she goes to the data: track record over time, contributions to accomplishments genuinely attributable to that person, how they build trust, how they think about their teams and how their teams think about them, how they respond under pressure. Watching somebody perform in a training room tells you how they perform in a training room but that doesn't necessarily translate to their workplace challenges.

What this costs us

So there is no shortcut. There is preparation, practice, and learning from the feedback of that practice. It takes time and investment, and it is shocking how little we put into it.

Here is the smallest version of this you could try this week. Pick one meeting where the stakes are genuinely low. Before it, name the one decision you are likely to have to make. Afterwards, give it two minutes: what actually drove the call you made? That is a rep. Nobody is watching and nothing is riding on it, which is exactly why it works.

Writing this has shown me something I need to change in my own work. I teach the before and I teach the during. The after phase is the one I need to tackle and strengthen. Reviewing a real decision once it has happened, working out what drove it, and adjusting accordingly.  I’m working on some exciting ways to teach it and some systems to embed it!

Here is the other thing I keep noticing. I meet a lot of people in leadership roles, and I am regularly struck by the incredible level of awareness, skillset and mindset I witness these junior managers and team leaders. I also hear that they get overlooked, because they do not have the style and the executive presence of the people above them.

Imagine how much stronger our organisations would be if we had reliable ways of noticing the quiet brilliance already bubbling along inside our teams.

Someone in your team is already good in the pocket and is waiting to be noticed. The longer that takes, the more likely they are to take it somewhere else.

References

McCall, A., Wolfberg, A., Bilsborough, J., & Pruna, R. (2026). How Elite Sports Coaches Make High-Pressure Decisions. Harvard Business Review, July-August 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/07/how-elite-sports-coaches-make-high-pressure-decisions

Brown, B., & Grant, A. (Hosts). (2026, 6 August). Leading Under Pressure with Rebecca Lowe [Audio podcast episode]. The Curiosity Shop.

Brown, B. (2025). Strong Ground. Chapter 14, on pocket presence.

Prizant, B. M., Wetherby, A. M., Rubin, E., Laurent, A. C., & Rydell, P. J. (2006). The SCERTS Model: A Comprehensive Educational Approach for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Paul H. Brookes Publishing.