The Leadership Muscle That Atrophies First Under Stress | Episode 361

Scott McCarthy:
Foreign. Welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team and leading your organization. This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as a Senior Senior Canadian Army Officer with world class guests to bring you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website@movingforwardleadership.com and with that, let’s get to the show. If you find yourself asking and pondering the question, how do I protect and sharpen my judgment under sustained pressure so I keep perspective and make better decisions without burning out myself or my team, then you’re in good company. Because so many of us leaders out there ask ourselves that exact question on a regular basis. Things are just so fast this day and age.

Scott McCarthy:
There is so much demands on us as leaders. The revolution of AI is just speeding up the pace and with it goes the pace of decision making. And simply put, we’re burning out and with it so with our teams and it’s terrible, absolutely terrible. Now, before I dive into answering that question for you or helping you ponder the answer for yourself and what’s going to work for you, I do got a couple of announcements. Yes, it is your Chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy. And thanks for tuning in. First off, now here’s the other announcements. I am excited, proud, just as we say back home, stoked to announce that my book, my first real published book, you don’t know sh about leadership and neither do I is a month away from release.

Scott McCarthy:
If you’re listening to this real time at the end of January 2026, it is just a month, not even a month away. Set to be Released on 25th February 2026, this book is going to give you a complete and fresh perspective on what it means to be a leader, how to lead and most importantly, how to be effective. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is not a self appointed hero book per se. It’s and the reality is I don’t talk about good things, about what I’ve done in the past. But reality is I talk about the things that how I’ve screwed up and how I’ve messed up and the mistakes I’ve made. Yet you get the experience and wisdom out of the close to 300 guests we’ve had here on the show over the years. So if you’re ready to grab a copy, you can actually pre order autograph copies forum directly from me. If you go to lead don’tboss.com buy as in bui as in buy the book, you will go ahead and you will do pre order your own copy which will get shipped from me to you personally, autographed with a message or you can buy for a friend and I will send it to them and make it out to them as well.

Scott McCarthy:
So again, jump on this, jump on this deal. It is here for you. Go to lead don’tboss.com buy and grab your pre order copy of my book. You don’t know about leadership and neither do I. Coming soon. Everywhere. All right, so with further ado. So let’s dive into today’s topic in today’s episode.

Scott McCarthy:
And that is the leadership muscle that atrophies first under stress. And like I said, you know, we’re currently, the reality is for you, for me, for all leaders out there, we’re currently navigating relentless inputs. Whether that is emails, slack messages, team messages, text messages, face to face conversations, video calls, conferences. There are constant relentless inputs, inputs from the data of our computer systems and now AI on top of that, shifting priorities and targets that just simply won’t wait for clean calendars. The pace is slowing. And the reality is today it’s actually easy to confuse activity with effectiveness and urgency with importance. So fast paced, constant inputs, compressed timelines. And when timelines compress we as leaders, we don’t become reckless, we become absorbed.

Scott McCarthy:
Our attention funnels towards what’s the loudest, not necessarily what’s the most consequential or what’s the most important. When our inbox never empties, our best thinking can gets crowded out by that next ping. Okay, so the reality is, is that most of us high performers will push through almost anything. And endurance is a strength until it turns into though, tunnel vision. We all know tunnel vision, ladies and gentlemen, is a killer. It will take you out, it will take out your team. And most importantly, and most of us leaders, we often won’t admit that under sustained pressure, our perspective shrinks before our performance drops. Okay, this isn’t about just motivation or burnout.

Scott McCarthy:
This isn’t just a motivational deficit. Many of us are disciplined, committed and still effective under pressure until our decision making quality subtly degrades. And that’s what we’re getting at today. And that’s the muscle that atrophies when we go under stress. It is that decision making. So let’s talk about why that happens and what stress actually does to us leaders. Stress doesn’t actually make us careless. Most of us actually.

Scott McCarthy:
If you’re listening to the show, you include it Obviously you care deeply. It’s not the issue. Cognition is. Stress alters what you notice and how you process it. So stress narrows our field of view. And while we’re under a load, we prioritize the immediate and the visible peripheral data. So it’s just dissenting opinions, weak signals from the team and. And longer term risks generally get filtered out.

Scott McCarthy:
And this becomes a risk in itself because what it does is it shortens time horizons. It shortens and therefore short cycles dominate. We start asking questions like what needs to move just today, very simply, what do we need to achieve to be positioned correctly six months from now? You see strategy loses oxygen to activity. And research on execution gaps show that most organizations fall short on strategic results. In prolonged stress, that gap widens as near term firefighting crowds out long term positioning. And now if you’ve listened to the show for a long time, you will no doubt hear me talked about already that us as leaders, we need to be thinking long term. We cannot be just doing the short term vision. We need to be looking at the long term.

Scott McCarthy:
So what happens? We create this false sense of urgency. Everything starts carrying that now step now, now, now, now, and we start making the mistake, that speed of decision for quality of a decision, confusing motion with traction. Okay, just doing things isn’t good enough. I asked my team on a regular basis, yes, we are doing amazing work, absolutely love it. But are we doing the right things? And that’s because stress changes how decisions are made, not how much you as a leader care. So let’s talk about why judgment actually goes and what it is. Judgment is about weighing trade offs. You know, balancing financial team customer balance sheets at the same time.

Scott McCarthy:
And you’re never really over optimizing one at the expense of the other. You’re seeing second and third order effects. You’re anticipating how today’s win could, could become tomorrow’s problem. And you know when to push versus pause, distinguishing that false sense of urgency from true inflection points. But why is judgment fragile under sustained pressure? See, constant load creates cognitive crowding. Your head just gets just crowded. You ever feel like, oh God, I just need a moment, I can’t feel think here. That’s what’s happening.

Scott McCarthy:
You need space to compare options. You need to be able to challenge assumptions. You need to test risks, and you need to be able to basically look at what’s familiar rather than what’s fit for the situation. And you might be asking yourself, how is cognitive load and identity a threat to degrade decision quality? Well, when your identity is Tied to being the person who always delivers pressure to maintain that image makes you less likely to seek dissenting input. That is challenging input. Remember that psychological safety super important. You know you’re putting that off to the side and you react to protect competent signals instead of updating your view as new data comes in. Remember I said you make a decision now and you can carry on with that.

Scott McCarthy:
But once you make, once you receive new information about that situation, you now have a new decision to make. That is that new data. Judgment is a muscle and like any other muscle, it atropies when it’s constantly overworked and never recovered. So basically what I’m saying is we need time to recover. We need time to hit that relief valve. So how does this show up day to day, AKA what are the warning signs that you should go, maybe I’m not taking time here to enable my judgment muscle to relax, recover and then come back and start making some better decisions. One of the first ones is your decisions get faster but worse, you feel decisive, yet the amount of rework, reoccurring work increases. Teams cycle through corrections.

Scott McCarthy:
Those quick wins stall deeper and deeper. Okay. As you progress through, you as a leader tend to default to familiar patterns instead of situational thinking. You know those past playbooks override the present. Context familiar feel safe, fit for purpose thinking drops basically fall back to where you feel comfortable. Short term fixes replace long term positioning. We had talked about this. You meet the metrics but you miss the movement and activity goes up while advantage goes down.

Scott McCarthy:
You stop asking questions and you start issuing directives. Psychological safety of roads. People tell you what you want to hear, voice what you want, what you need to hear. Sorry. And you get fewer and fewer edge cases and more yeses. So less people challenge you and more people simply just agree with you. And then teams sense hesitation or inconsistent behavior, favorites, avoidance, tough calls emerge and execution slows even as urgency arises. These are all warning signs.

Scott McCarthy:
And if you hear some of these things and you go, oh my God, I hear these, that means your judgment muscle needs a break. Okay, so what, why are, sorry, why are smart experienced leaders most at risk? So if you’re smart, which you are because you’re listening to the show, you’re no doubtly experienced, you are actually most at risk. Because we’re used to as high performance, used to pushing through grit and going through the pain, recovery and reflection we get, we frame it as nice to haves, not must to haves. Our past successes also reinforce endurance over awareness. Like it worked before Vice asking Okay, is this going to work now though? The more you’ve won in the past, the more tempting it is to repeat rather than adapt. We as high performing leaders also mistake resilience for sustainability. Sure, you can endure a sprint, but you can’t live in one. You can’t sprint a marathon.

Scott McCarthy:
Okay. We confuse the stamina for strategy and judgment is what pays the price. And then finally, experience can become a liability. Yes, it can come a liability. When our reflection disappears without deliberate looning, learning loops, we need to take that time to reflect and go over what it is we’ve done. We’ve achieved what we learned from it. Those mistakes we made, these things take time. And who pays the price? Our teams pay the price.

Scott McCarthy:
Because confusion without obvious direction causes chaos. Priorities will shift midstream, people will adapt. But cohesion phrase. Why? Because everyone become starts working on what they believe to be the main priority is what should be the priority. Execution slows down despite the fact everything is urgent. But when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. And basically what ends up happening is decisions boomerang back for clarification, quiet disengagement. People start offering, stop offering hard truths.

Scott McCarthy:
They give you effort, but not their full intelligence. This is where quite quitting starts, affecting coming into play. And you as a leader become the bottleneck without realizing it. Decisions concentrate at the top because psychological safety and delegation fails. Decision fatigue grows because you have so much more on your plate and further degrades your ability to make judged decisions properly. And with that, trust erodes team confidence. And leadership doesn’t necessarily crash, but it definitely drips away through small inconsistencies and missed chances to listen. These are all the effects and warning signs, ladies and gentlemen, that you’re simply running under pressure and your judgment is affected.

Scott McCarthy:
So how do we react? Build it, and most importantly, how do we rebuild it under pressure? Right? Because this pressure isn’t going to go away. This isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing the right things with the right cadence. Right? Remember what I said. Are we doing the right thing? So are you making the right decisions? What decisions do you actually have to do and make? Create a decision recovery space where you protect reoccurring reflection windows. You know, even 20 minutes in your day of undisturbed thinking will actually outperform ad hoc when I can. Reflection time, make it sacred time. Block it out on your counter, close your door, turn off your teams, shut down your phone, watch whatever, just make it sacred time for you to be able to sit there and reflect on the Decisions that you’ve made or the ones that you have upcoming.

Scott McCarthy:
Or simply calm the noise. Separate urgency from importance. I love love love the Eisenhower matrix of either do now, schedule it, delegate it or delete it. And that’s based off urgency and importance. Check it out. It is phenomenal. Install pauses, not escapes. Use micropauses in your workflow.

Scott McCarthy:
You know, do pre mortems before big calls. You know, basically just taking five minutes before you jump on the big call. May making those pauses will actually enable your judgment voice. Avoiding it. Use trusted challenge instead of isolation. Build a small truth telling circle of people. Have your permission to push back. In the military we call this Red team.

Scott McCarthy:
You want people to red team your calls. Ask them what you need to hear. Tell them they have to tell you what you need to hear and not what they think you want to hear. Okay? And then align big decisions with your peak cognitive window schedule. All right. I love the book the Power of when by Dr. Brous. It is phenomenal.

Scott McCarthy:
You should check it out. I have actually aligned my decision making schedule based on my chronotype and when I am at my peak for doing doing that which is mid mornings okay for you, could be a bit different but check it out. And that’s just a practical little practical tip that you can do. And another practical tip is just a quick self check for you right here as I go through these questions. Answer them to yourself and answer honestly. Okay. How often am I reacting vice being proactive? Again, how often am I reacting vice being proactive? Am I solving symptoms or am I solving root problems? When was the last time I changed my mind after new information was introduced? Again, when, when was the last time I changed my mind after new information was introduced? Our decisions getting easier or just faster? Are they getting easier or are they getting faster? Where am I the bottleneck right now and what can I delegate immediately? So where am I at the bottleneck and what can I delegate? And finally, who’s in my truth telling circle and when did I last ask them to challenge me? Okay, who’s in my truth telling circle and when did I last ask them to challenge me? Ladies and gentlemen, we’re in a tough world. You it is dog eat dog out there.

Scott McCarthy:
As a leader, there is a lot on your shoulders. There is a lot of pressure and we all feel it from time to time. This is completely normal. But it’s all about protecting your judgment because your team needs your best thinking, not just your best effort. Okay? We the leaders, we don’t eliminate stress because that’s Impossible. But. But we prevent stress from silently reshaping who we become as leaders. We do that by maintaining perspective, protecting reflection, and inviting challenge.

Scott McCarthy:
So with that, I challenge you to reflect now. Reflect on how you’re doing as a leader. Reflect on how well do you think your judgment is actually doing and how much load you do you have on. And with that, I leave you. I bid you good day. Most importantly, as always, lead, don’t boss. Take care now. And that’s a wrap for this episode.

Scott McCarthy:
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the Peak Performance Leadership podcast. But you know what you could do to try truly support the podcast. And no, that’s not leaving a rating and review. It’s simply helping a friend. And that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them. If you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams, or their organization. So do that.

Scott McCarthy:
Help me help a friend win. Win all around. And hey, you look like great friend at the same time. So just hit that little share button on your app and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more. There’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be, whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organized nation. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership. Com.

Scott McCarthy:
Subscribe. Until next time. Lead, don’t boss, and thanks for coming out. Take care now.