You probably have a hard time staying calm under pressure. No judgement, I just know that a lot of people do and so you probably do too. It might not be all the time (sometimes we’re good at keeping our cool at work but not at home, for example), but it’s at least some of the time.

We tend to get a lot of advice about how to stay calm, but a lot of it comes down to “just stay calm.” As if calmness were a choice that was easy to make, or, in fact, a choice at all. If anxiety is a proto-emotion, and maybe it is(!), then we’re not choosing to stay calm so much as we’re choosing to deal with those emotions in a specific way.

And if staying calm in the face of these emotions is the problem we’re struggling with, "just stay calm" is pretty 💩 advice!

Real advice should give us a mechanism by which to deploy it. So, in concerns to staying calm under pressure, here’s the Stoic mechanism (summarised in a list to spare you further word count):

1️⃣ Spot the fiction. Your project lead calls out sick and within thirty seconds you've authored a tragedy that rivals Shakespeare (deadline slips, client walks, reputation takes the hit, lose job, become homeless, live in a box, die alone). Recognise that you’re doing this, call it out.

2️⃣ Strip the circumstances down to facts alone. The deadline is tomorrow. The client expects delivery. You promised to deliver. That’s it. Stop catastrophising.

3️⃣ Drop the guarantee, you’re not god. You can't promise the outcomes. You're not an all powerful magician. It is absolutely your duty to try, because of the role you occupy, but you must recognise that outcomes are not within your domain of choice. All you can choose is what you do next.

4️⃣ Ask what your duty ask of you in taking the next step. "What does fulfilling my duty here actually look in this scenario? What would a dutiful XYZ do next first?" Direct questions cut through uncertainty in a way vague abstractions cannot (like “what would a good leader do in a stressful situation like this?” get specific; this is this situation, and the person making the choices is you, not some imaginary perfect other person).

5️⃣ Act, then repeat. Do the thing your answer points to. Then run the loop again until you've done all you can.

Good decision making has never been about guaranteeing results. It's been about making defensibly good choices. Make enough of those and the results tend to follow.

Good luck out there this week.