What you do in the ninety seconds after?
Every leader has a moment where the room gets tense and the default wiring kicks in. Someone pushes back. Numbers are down. A conflict that’s been simmering finally boils over. The question isn’t whether that moment comes. It’s what you do in the ninety seconds after it does.
A Resilient Leadership approach comes down to three moves, repeated over and over: SEE the emotional pattern underneath the problem. THINK your way past the urge to react. LEAD by choosing your response on purpose. Then do it again in the next meeting. And the one after that.
Here’s what that looks like in practice — the first three we want you to know:
- Practice Systems Thinking. Zoom out from the immediate flashpoint and notice the wider pattern — who’s avoiding what, who’s over-functioning to compensate, who’s gone quiet and cut off. The visible conflict is rarely the whole story.
- Take Frequent Pauses. A pause before you respond gives your anxious brain time to settle. That gap is where intention replaces impulse. It can be as small as taking one breath before you answer a pointed question in a meeting, instead of firing back.
- Lead with Curiosity. Curiosity is the fastest way to interrupt anxiety. It turns fear-based assumptions into open questions, and open questions are what actually move a group toward clearer thinking.
These three practices are simple to name and genuinely hard to live out under pressure — which is exactly why we built our programs around practicing them, not just discussing them. Next month, we’ll share three more.
If you want to go deeper on this work now:
→ Join our next Practice Forum
Our monthly Practice Forums are 45-minute discussions where we work through how these practices play out in real team dynamics.
This month’s session will be Friday, August 7th @ 12:00 PM EST.
→ Explore the RL Coach Certification Program if you’re ready to bring this framework to other leaders. https://www.resilientleadershipdevelopment.com/resilient-leadership-coach-certification-program/
Article Contributors
RL Trainer, John Moyer contributed to this article.
As a 30+ year veteran of education, John has trained and coached both student and adult leaders. Through his work primarily in education, John has helped leaders of all ages discover that leadership is influence- which starts with the leader becoming a less anxious presence. Email John
Robert Wilkins, contributed to this article.
As a 35-year veteran of website design, development, and content creation, Robert brings that same discipline to his work at RLD. A long-time practitioner of Resilient Leadership principles himself, he's seen firsthand how the model shapes not just leadership, but the everyday work of building and communicating. Email Robert.