There’s a moment in every stressful meeting I used to sit in where someone would lean forward, lower their voice, and say the words that were supposed to change everything: We need to move fast on this.
For years, I took that at face value.
I thought urgency meant what it sounded like, that the situation had a clock, and the clock was real, and my job was to respond to it.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice that the clock was almost never attached to the situation.
It was attached to the person saying the words.
They were in the grip of something—a fear, a deadline someone else had given them, a status risk they didn’t want to sit with—and they were passing it along the only way they knew how: By making it mine.
Most urgency is borrowed
Spend enough time in rooms where money, reputation, or leverage is on the table, and you start to see a pattern.
The crisis everyone is responding to is rarely the crisis it claims to be.
Most of what gets called urgent is actually someone upstream of you trying to off-load their discomfort: A boss who hasn’t prepared for a board meeting calls it urgent, a client who feels behind schedule calls it urgent, or a vendor whose deal is slipping calls it urgent.
The urgency is real for them, but that doesn’t automatically make it yours.
The people I worked with over the years who handled pressure best were not, as a rule, the calmest personalities.
Some of them were quite anxious underneath.
What they shared was something else: A habit of asking, before they reacted, whose panic this actually was.
If it was theirs, they handled it; if it was someone else’s, they made a deliberate decision about whether to catch it.
The quiet trick of not catching it
I kept a notebook during meetings for most of my career.
Still do, actually! Mine has arrows, names, question marks, and a running note I’d jot in the margin next to whatever someone had just said: Real issue?
Those two words probably did more for me over thirty-some years of work than any framework, any course, or any piece of advice I was ever given.
The thing that looks like the problem in the room is almost never the problem in the room.
Someone’s demanding an answer by end of day: Why today? What happens if it’s tomorrow? Who’s actually waiting?
More often than you’d expect, the trail runs cold about two links back.
The deadline was invented, or it was inherited from a fear that no longer applied, or it existed because somebody decided they wanted to feel decisive this week.
The people who handle pressure best are the ones who’ve trained themselves to follow that trail before they start running.
Calm is often the wrong tell
Part of what confuses people is that we tend to look for pressure-handling in the wrong place.
We look at whose voice is steadiest, whose face is most composed, and who seems unbothered.
However, calm is surface and some of the calmest people I’ve worked with were simply detached, which is not the same thing as effective.
Meanwhile, some of the twitchier ones were doing the hardest thinking in the room.
What actually matters is whether they can keep their attention on the actual situation while other people are trying to hand them a different one.
That skill looks like patience from the outside, but inside it’s more like stubbornness; a quiet refusal to accept the framing someone else brought in the door.
I’d pause before answering in meetings, sometimes longer than was comfortable for the room. That was me buying enough time to work out what was really being asked, because whatever was on the table was usually a repackaged version of a different question.
Once you can name the real question, most of the urgency melts. You’re no longer trying to solve the panic.
What I wish I’d learned at thirty
I got married later than most of my peers—at thirty-five—partly because my twenties and early thirties belonged entirely to work, and work in those years felt like it needed every hour I had.
I believed that. I would have argued for it as the pace I was keeping felt like proof that the work mattered.
It took me another decade to understand that almost none of those years contained genuine emergencies.
They contained other people’s panic, which I was catching because I hadn’t yet developed the reflex of checking first.
I was a good catcher. I was reliable, available, responsive.
Those are useful traits, yet they also cost me more than I realised at the time because they meant I spent years running on someone else’s clock and calling it ambition.
If I could say one thing to my younger self, it wouldn’t be to slow down. He wouldn’t have listened, and he probably didn’t need to slow down anyway.
It would be: Learn to ask whose panic this is before you carry it.
You don’t have to carry all of them. Most of them, actually, aren’t addressed to you.
The long walk home
These days I walk most afternoons.
Nothing formal, no strict route. Walking is where I do most of my real thinking, and this is one of the things it’s clarified for me more than anything else.
You’d be surprised how many situations that feel urgent at a desk stop feeling urgent about twenty minutes into a walk because you finally had time to separate what was actually happening from what someone was trying to make you feel was happening.
I don’t think this is a mystical thing but, rather, I think it’s just that panic is contagious the way yawns are, and the only reliable way to stop catching it is to step out of the room where everyone’s already caught it.
The people who learned this already knew
The colleagues I most admired—the ones who held up over decades of high-stakes work without hardening or burning out—had all figured this out at some point.
None of them were the fastest in the room, and none of them were necessarily the calmest either.
They were just the ones who’d stopped treating every fire as their fire, and had gotten comfortable with the small cost of being slightly slower to respond than the pace everyone else was setting.
It’s not a glamorous skill, and you don’t get praised for it. In the short run, it can even look like you’re not pulling your weight.
However, over twenty years, the difference between someone who catches every panic and someone who catches only their own is the difference between a career you can still be inside at sixty-four and a career that used you up by fifty.
The pressure never really goes away; you just stop agreeing to carry the parts of it that were never yours in the first place.
