None of us can control whether the ground shifts. Organizations restructure, economies contract, roles disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with our worth or our work. But there is something we can know and that is our own particular footing, well enough that the shifting ground doesn't automatically run us. That's not a small thing to know about yourself. In seasons like this one, it might be one of the more important things there is to know.
Being high-potential and highly visible doesn't exempt you from uncertainty. Sometimes it just means your version of it looks a little different: more scrutiny, more at stake, and more eyes on how you hold yourself while you find your footing. A lot of composed-looking people are, underneath, doing the often lonely and very human work of finding solid ground while under significant pressure.
What I want to offer is not reassurance that this pressure will pass - it will, and it will also reappear. What I want to offer is a different way of understanding what's happening when we feel this kind of pressure. I think there's a common misread: that pressure and stress reveal a crack, some flaw in character that outward calm has been hiding. It doesn't. Pressure doesn't introduce anything new. It amplifies what's already quietly running underneath - the ways we've always managed uncertainty, just turned up loud enough to finally notice.
This amplification is something that both the Enneagram and the Leadership Circle Profile - two very different tools, built for different purposes, speaking entirely different languages - end up pointing at from different directions. The Enneagram describes it as movement: under real pressure, each of us tends to move in a specific, patterned direction, often toward a version of ourselves that looks like coping but is often contraction. The Leadership Circle Profile names something that is adjacent - the ‘reactive tendencies’ each of us defaults to when the ground isn't steady: over-controlling, over-complying, and over-protecting. Different frameworks with different vocabularies and yet with similar discoveries underneath. How we show up under pressure isn't a departure from who we are, it’s often a magnification of it.
I find this magnification enormously useful, not because it makes the unease go away, but because it opens a door to changing our relationship to it. If pressure reveals a flaw, it’s human nature for the task to become about fixing yourself. If stress reveals a pattern, the task becomes something entirely different and much more available to you in the moment that it's happening: noticing your own particular way of gripping, what you are gripping, and intentionally loosening that grip.
This is, I think, one of the quiet gifts of both tools - not that they predict who you'll become under pressure, but that they let you meet that version of yourself with recognition instead of alarm. And recognition, unlike alarm, leaves room for choice. As Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Photo taken by Abby Malan - Whistler, British Columbia, Canada