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 recently shared her tips with Business Report for doing just that.
First, she encourages calm at the leadership level, saying culture follows behavior.
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.
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