What two executive coaches are hearing from senior leaders right now, and why doubling down is making it worse.

There's a question that keeps surfacing in leadership coaching rooms right now. It rarely gets asked directly. It sits underneath the presenting issue: the strategic challenge, the team conflict, the decision that keeps not quite landing. Leaders arrive carrying it without always having the words for it.

The question is: How do I keep performing at a high level without burning out the system that makes it possible?

We spoke with two executive coaches, Abi Harmon and Kevin Silk, as part of a new editorial series on what senior leaders are bringing into the room right now, the patterns emerging under sustained pressure, and what building Stress Intelligence actually changes in practice.

Their perspectives were consistent in diagnosis, and precise in what they point to.

The hidden gap in high performance

Abi Harmon works with senior leaders at the sharp end of demanding environments. What she hears most often isn't a strategic problem or a skills gap but something more fundamental.

"Most leaders aren't lacking ideas. They're carrying sustained pressure without enough recovery."

The phrases that keep coming up from the leaders she works with:

• "I need to stay sharp in this pace."

• "I'm making decisions faster than I can process them."

• "I don't feel as clear as I know I can be."

These are clear signals coming from systems running at high output for too long, without the input that sustains it.

Under sustained pressure, Abi observes, the signs are subtle enough to miss. Thinking narrows slightly. Decisions come faster but feel less clean. Patience shortens. The broader perspective that good leadership requires becomes harder to access. The leader is still performing. The system is paying a price they haven't yet been able to see.

"From the outside, it can look like momentum. Internally, it's often a system running hot for too long."

When the response makes it worse

Kevin Silk coaches senior leaders navigating what he describes as an increasingly unpredictable, fast-moving, and highly demanding business environment. His observation of how leaders typically respond to sustained pressure is precise.

"A common pattern I see is leaders trying to manage this stress at a surface level with tactical fixes that often make things worse. They double down on time and effort rather than stepping back to work more strategically."

More effort leads to increased stress and exhaustion. Exhaustion impairs the very decision-making and focus leaders are working so hard to protect. The downward spiral tightens, and can ultimately lead to burnout and health consequences that no amount of additional effort could have prevented.

The instinct to push harder is understandable. It is also, as Kevin notes, a capacity problem being treated as a motivation problem. Those require very different solutions.

What leaders actually need (and struggle to name)

Both coaches identify the same underlying gap. And it isn't a new tool or a time management system.

Leaders need to be able to see their own state clearly, while they are still inside the demand. To know how depleted they actually are, how reactive their thinking has become, how narrow their perspective has gotten. Under sustained pressure, that self-visibility is exactly what erodes first. And its absence is what makes everything else harder.

Kevin's work involves helping leaders identify what he calls "energy suckers": activities or dynamics that don't take much time but disproportionately drain energy. These often go completely unnoticed. Yet they are major drivers of stress. Once identified, leaders can redirect energy, break the cycle, and improve performance. By working smarter, with a clearer picture of where their capacity is actually going.

Abi frames the same need from the inside: awareness of internal state. Flexibility in how leaders respond under pressure. The ability to reset without losing pace.

"What once were considered 'soft skills' are now critical infrastructure."

Where Stress Intelligence fits

Stress Intelligence builds this capability. Not the ability to feel less. Nor the instruction to slow down. But the ability to notice earlier:

• to catch signals before they compound into something harder to recover from,

• to understand what the system is asking for,

• and to make cleaner decisions under pressure because the noise has been read rather than overridden.

As Kevin puts it: stress, when managed proactively, can be a powerful motivator. When it lingers beneath the surface unchecked, it undermines both performance and long-term health, often before a leader realises what’s happening.

Stress Intelligence is what closes that gap.

Abi describes what this shift produces in the leaders she works with: cleaner decisions under pressure, greater access to perspective, and the ability to sustain performance rather than burn through it.

"More range, not less drive. Same environment. Different capacity."

That is the change Stress Intelligence makes. The environment stays demanding. The capacity to operate within it clearly, intentionally, sustainably grows.

Stress is not the enemy. Unread stress is.

Building the capability

The leaders Abi and Kevin work with are performing in demanding environments and intend to keep doing so. The question they are asking is how to do it without the hidden cost.

Stress Intelligence is how that becomes possible. The pace doesn't have to change. What changes is the ability to read what the pace is doing, respond to it with intention, and stay sharp inside it for the long term.

If any of this resonates, follow along, and share it with a leader who needs the language.

Abi Harmon is a performance strategist and founder of House Harmon, working with senior leaders through keynotes, corporate workshops, and retreats to build capacity for sustained high performance.

Kevin Silk is an executive coach specialising in helping senior leaders to develop resilience and long term sustainability as they evolve their careers.

WONE builds stress intelligence: the capability that turns stress into resilience, and resilience into a performance advantage.