How leaders and their teams can stay grounded when everything feels uncertain

Uncertainty is no longer an occasional disruption. It’s a constant. For business leaders, the challenge isn’t eliminating uncertainty but learning how to lead through it without burning themselves out or their teams.

Tiffany Stewart, a clinical psychologist and the Dudley & Beverly Coates endowed professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, has spent more than two decades studying psychological resilience in high-performance individuals, from elite athletes to U.S. Army soldiers. Her work offers practical lessons for leaders looking to navigate uncertainty with calm, mindfulness and deeper perspective, and she sat down with Business Report to share her tips for doing just that.

1. Encourage calm at the leadership level

“Culture follows behavior,” Stewart says. Rather than treating calm as a personality trait, treat it as a leadership practice. She recommends beginning executive or team meetings with a brief grounding pause. “I walk into a meeting and we have three to five minutes of just breathing before anybody starts talking,” she says. “It settles everyone.” Leaders should also normalize the vocalization of uncertainty. Saying, “We don’t have all the answers, and that’s OK,” reduces the pressure to react prematurely.

2. Train the nervous system, not just the mind

Stress management is as biological as it is cognitive. “We all need to better train our stress response, not just our mind,” Stewart says. One of the most effective tools is breath regulation. “The speed of your breath influences the speed of your thoughts,” she says. Longer exhales—say, inhaling for four counts, holding for seven and exhaling for eight—send an immediate signal to the nervous system to slow down. She also recommends what she calls “resting in the margins”: Use short breaks between meetings or tasks to breathe and walk instead of scrolling. Even one minute can help you reset.

3. Build perspective into daily work

High stress narrows thinking. To counter that, Stewart trains leaders to intentionally widen their perspectives. “I have them zoom out and imagine what this moment looks like from 10,000 feet or 10 years from now,” she says. “And then zoom in, identifying the next smallest doable action—because, really, all we can control is the right next thing.”

4. Anchor decisions in values, not outcomes

Uncertainty becomes more destabilizing when leaders fixate on outcomes they can’t fully control. Stewart recommends shifting from outcome obsession to values-based action. “Values are stable in a way outcomes never are,” she says. At an organizational level, she recommends embedding values into decision-making. Leaders can ask teams to explicitly cite which value guided a major decision or add a standing agenda item asking, “Which value is this strategy aligned with?” This reframes uncertainty as an opportunity to act with purpose rather than panic.

5. Adopt resilience rituals

Resilience shouldn’t depend on willpower. “Building small, repeatable habits, especially during uncertain times, is really grounding,” Stewart says. She recommends adopting micro-rituals at work, such as protected reflection time after high-stress projects or regular team check-ins that balance discussion of challenges with discussion of wins. On an individual level, she suggests daily reflection questions like: “What am I holding? What can I influence? What can I let go of?”