The Power Skill Behind Your Career Potential

When we talk about career success - especially leadership, communication, decision-making -the emphasis is usually on mindset and performance skills. What’s often overlooked is how stress in the body decides whether our brain can access any of it.

Stress itself isn’t the problem. It’s healthy to be challenged (plus, it’s biologically impossible to avoid it).

What gets in the way is the kind of ongoing, unmanaged stress that narrows our thinking and drains our capacity.

And while we can’t control what comes at us in life, we can choose how we handle it. As the saying goes, we cannot control the waves, but we can learn to surf. My work is about giving you tools to surf with more ease.

The Skill That Shapes Performance, Leadership, and Presence

Listen to interviews with successful investors, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and world-class athletes, about reaching their potential and you’ll hear them speak of managing their emotions.

Ask hiring managers what they value most in a candidate, and over 70 percent say emotional intelligence outweighs IQ, technical skills, or experience.

But what does that really mean?

Emotional intelligence means you have control over your emotions. Not that you are emotionless, but you have awareness and choose how you respond instead of knee-jerk reacting.

That shift changes everything.

When you can respond instead of react, you make wiser decisions, navigate challenges without panicking, adapt to changing situations, and work well with others.

All of that builds a calm, confident presence others naturally connect to.

But emotional intelligence doesn’t exist without a regulated stress response.
Here’s why.

Unless we know how to work with our nervous system, our old wiring as early humans will send us into survival mode of fight, flight or freeze when challenges come our way. 

And those survival emotions like fear, anxiety, anger shut down the pathways in your brain that allow you to see possibilities, perspectives, and solutions.

Or if you’re fried from chronic stress and your nervous system feels like sandpaper, stress chemicals lingering around prevent you from accessing clear thinking.

Why We Miss the Foundation

So, if emotional intelligence is built on mastering your stress response, how do we do that?

The first step is becoming aware of your mind–body connection. We may hear about the mind–body connection, but our modern world with constant noise, distraction, and pressure pulling us outward, doesn’t make it easy to tune into it.  Or maybe it sounds uncomfortably “woo” for you.  But it’s the basis for knowing how to work with our biology to our advantage. 

Think of it like a loop with the mind and body always in conversation. Thoughts in our heads create feelings in the body. Those feelings send messages back to the brain. Over time, this thinking–feeling loop becomes memorized as habit in the nervous system.

Much of what we’ve experienced in life- good and bad -is carried in our physiology. We are, quite literally, wearing it in our bodies. Whether we know it or not. 

That’s why it’s a challenge to think your way into calm if your body isn’t on board. 

Four Shifts You Can Start Today

1. Get clarity (without judgement)
Notice how stress shows up for you. Where do you feel it? How does it affect sleep, digestion, energy, or focus? Do you tend toward fight, flight, or freeze? Where has it held you back?

Many of us have been running on low grade stress for so long we assume this is the norm.  Awareness creates choice.

2. Move and breathe. 
Two of the biggest steps you can take are to discharge stuck stress by moving your body in a way that brings awareness inward -walking, stretching, yoga, dancing.  And learn to breathe in a way that calms your nervous system.  Here’s a guide to start: link, link

3. Notice the connections
Mental health is body health. Body health is mental health. Hydration, nourishment, rest, connection to others and kindness all shape the messages moving between body and brain. When you know the important puzzle pieces, you can figure out where you need to make a change. Am I eating well?  Do I hydrate?  Did I connect to a friend? Say or do something kind? 

4. Begin building in pauses. 

Before picking up the call, responding to the message, or posting that comment… stop.  Take a beat and a breath.  It will give you the space to choose what you say and how you say it (or if it needs to be said at all).  Take a beat before answering a question to thoughtfully respond. Build in a pause between meetings to reset.  All those short moments will create more room in your brain, give you a moment to catch your breath and help you be more present in the moment. 

5. Journal

Remember how thoughts send feeling to the body and the loop forms?  Journaling helps sort what is helpful in that loop and detoxing what is not.  It can be a pretty journal and fancy pen or just a scrap of paper on which you scribble it out illegibly.  Doesn’t matter the form- just get the thoughts from your head out onto paper. 

It’s all connected.

These small habits will help you access powerful parts of your brain- logic, perspective, creativity.  It also brings you into alignment.  How you move, breathe, think, feel, act, speak are all connected. When they are all clicking together that’s your presence. And your presence is your power.