Staying Calm Under Pressure in Business: The Cease-and-Desist That Couldn't Have Gone Better
They gave us a cease-and-desist letter on our property.
If you’ve never gotten one, here’s what it does to you: every scenario starts playing at once. The fight, the delay, the cost, the standoff. I had thoughts of it going to be a disaster. And my whole life, that’s exactly where my head would have gone: straight into the disaster movie, at full volume.
This time I didn’t.
What I did instead of panicking
I thought: I’m not going to do that.
I’m going to let it go. I’m going to be still and just let it come to me and see what happens.
That’s it. That was the entire strategy. No war room, no pre-loaded arguments, no rehearsing the confrontation in the shower. I walked into that meeting still.
And it couldn’t have gone any better. The people on the other side, the ones who sent the letter, sat across from me and said: we have the architect on the way to you. We got you.
The meeting I had scripted as a battle turned out to be a handshake. And I’m convinced the version of me that walked in swinging would have gotten the battle, because people meet you at the energy you bring.
I’m not built calm. That’s the point.
Let me be clear about who’s writing this, because calm-under-pressure advice usually comes from people who were born flatlined.
Not me. I’m a JoJo, the circus freak, when stuff’s going wrong: everything’s panic mode. That’s my factory setting. Alarm bells, ten scenarios at once, motion in every direction.
What I’ve learned is simple: if you can get into that calm zone, you can start to make better decisions. And it’s obviously working a little bit. So if it can work for me, it can work for pretty much anyone. I’m the stress test. If stillness runs on my hardware, it runs on yours.
The calm lake, and what pulls me out of it
Here’s the picture I use for my own head.
On a good day, my mind is a calm lake. Things land on it one at a time, and I can deal with each one.
On the other days, I’ll have all those thoughts going, and instead of making anything happen, I get stuck. Ten or twenty things, all churning at once. I’ll sit there and just kind of stare at the stream, going from thing to thing, and not get anything done.
Notice what that means: the busy state feels like work and produces nothing. The still state looks like nothing and produces the decisions. Every bad stretch I’ve had followed the same pattern: maximum motion, minimum progress. The lake isn’t a luxury for after the pressure passes. The lake is how you handle the pressure.
In the weeds vs. on stilts
The other picture: stilts.
When you’re in the weeds, you’re grinding. You’re just literally chopping, swinging at whatever’s directly in front of you, all day, and the weeds never end.
But when you’re on stilts, you’re above everything. You’re above the noise. You can see where you’re actually going, and you can just do your straight line: straight line to your goal.
Same field. Same weeds. The only difference is altitude.
- In the weeds, every problem is the same size: enormous, because it’s touching your face.
- On stilts, problems have actual sizes. Most of them turn out to be small.
- The cease-and-desist looked enormous from the weeds. From stilts, it was a conversation, and that’s all it turned out to be.
Panic is a weeds-level view. Stillness is what gets you up on the stilts.
The practice is almost embarrassingly small
None of this arrived by insight. I work with a mindset coach, and the routine I was given is this: an affirmation in the evening, and an affirmation in the morning.
That’s the whole thing. Twice a day, morning and evening.
I’m not going to pretend I understand every mechanism behind it, and I’m not prescribing anything. This is just my experience and my opinion. But I notice the difference between the weeks I do it and the weeks I don’t. The practice doesn’t remove the pressure. It changes which version of me the pressure finds: the circus freak, or the guy who walks in still and lets it come to him.
In this business, pressure is not an edge case. Letters arrive. Deals wobble. Markets move. You don’t get to choose whether the disaster movie starts playing in your head.
You do get to choose whether you walk in mid-movie, or still.
What’s your version of the calm lake, and how do you get back to it when everything’s going wrong at once?
The longer version of how I got here (the build, the collapse, the rebuild) is on my story page.