The Work That Matters Most
7/7/2026
“How do I show up right now?”
That question doesn't care about your resume. It never shows up in a performance review or a dashboard. It shows up in the sixty seconds after the hardest conversation of your week, or right before you walk into a room where people are counting on you and you don't feel ready. Nobody measures that moment. But it's the moment that decides everything else that happens that day.
I've been sitting with that question since I recorded episode 28 of the podcast with Stacie Baird, Chief People Officer at Community Medical Services. Stacie has spent her career building self care and resilience practices inside HR, and lately she's been wrestling publicly with a harder version of the same problem: how you stay human while you're also asking your organization to move faster with AI. Her answer had almost nothing to do with a framework. It had to do with what she does in the sixty seconds before she walks into a hard meeting.
Resilience Is a Practice, Not a Switch
There's a misconception that resilience is something you either have or you don't. That strong leaders bounce back, power through, flip a switch, and keep going. Real leadership doesn't work that way. It's built in small, repeated decisions.
To pause instead of react.
To reflect instead of rush.
To choose on purpose instead of defaulting to whatever the pressure demands.
I've watched a lot of leaders move through hard change over the years I've spent doing this work. The ones who build teams that actually perform aren't the ones who avoid stress. They're the ones who learned how to move through it with their eyes open. You don't bounce back from hard moments. You move through them, and what you build in that process becomes your leadership.
The Sixty Seconds Nobody Sees
Picture this. You're walking into a situation that's going to demand everything from you: emotionally, mentally, physically. You can feel the weight of how your energy is about to land on everyone else in the room. And right before you walk in, you get a choice.
Do you carry that weight in with you? Or do you take ten seconds to set it down first?
This is where a lot of leadership development misses the point. We teach strategy. We teach communication. We teach execution. We don't spend nearly enough time teaching leaders how to regulate themselves in real time, and that's exactly where leadership is won or lost.
A Practice Worth Stealing
Here's the three step version I use, and the same one Stacie described building into her own routine before high stakes conversations.
- Pause.Take one breath. Interrupt the automatic response. Give yourself just enough space to choose instead ofreact.
- Talk to yourself like someone you care about.Not with pressure. Not with judgment. With the samepatience you'd offer a friend.
- Ask what you actually need right now.Not what the situation needs. Not what everyone else expects.What you need, so you can show up the way the moment actually requires.
You cannot create clarity or trust in other people if you're operating on empty yourself. That's the whole case for this practice in one sentence.
This is also where Stacie's point about AI landed for me. As we hand more of our process to tools and automation, the pause is the one part of the job that can't be automated. You can move fast with new tools, or you can stay connected to the people you lead. The leaders who figure out how to do both are the ones who protect that sixty seconds, no matter how much faster everything else gets.
What Are You Carrying Into the Room?
Ask yourself that before your next hard conversation. Not after. Leadership isn't tested when things are easy. It's revealed the moment they're not, and it's revealed in whether you paused long enough to choose your response instead of just having one happen to you.
The leaders who change a room don't just drive results. They build trust, hold steadiness, and bring a presence people can rely on, built one pause at a time.
Key Takeaways
- Resilience is a repeated decision, not a personality trait. Build the pause on purpose.
- Use the three step practice before any conversation that matters: pause, speak to yourself with patience, ask what you need.
- Protect that pause as your tools and workload speed up. It's the one part of leadership that automation can't do for you.
- The question that matters most isn't “what do I know.” It's “how will I show up in the next sixty seconds.”
Listen to the full conversation with Stacie Baird on episode 28 of the Unleashing Leaders Podcast.
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