Leaders invest a lot in developing themselves. They attend leadership programs, work with coaches, strengthen their teams, and look for ways to improve performance. But there's one part of their professional toolkit that rarely gets the same attention: the nervous system.
It influences how we think, respond, make decisions, and interact with others. Yet most of us give little thought to how it works or how much it affects our experience of leadership.
Consider the scale of Texas's business community. Texas is home to the most Fortune 100 companies, ahead of New York and California. Also, per the Texas Comptroller, Texas boasts approximately 3.5 million small businesses that employ more than 5.1 million Texans and accounted for 84 percent of the state's annual job growth in 2024. Behind those numbers are executives, teams and business owners navigating growth, uncertainty, and competing demands.
Leading people requires us to make sound decisions, manage difficult relationships, adapt to change, and keep moving forward, sometimes all in the same afternoon. How we handle those demands has a lot to do with what's happening inside our own bodies.
The Waves Don't Stop
The pressure on leaders is relentless. Decisions arrive faster than data. Conflicts surface on Monday morning. Someone needs you to be inspiring at 9, decisive at 11, and empathetic at 2, with a board presentation in between.
You can't turn the ocean off. What you can change is how you respond to the waves.
In my work with executives, I've seen highly capable leaders struggle on days when they don't feel or perform at their best. Their experience and skills haven't changed. Often, what's different is the state they're in when they need to use them.
The Hidden Variable in Leadership Performance
At LAeRRICO & Partners, we look at leadership through three interconnected dimensions:
● Experience: How you feel. Your physical and psychological experience of work and leadership.
● Competencies: What you can do. Your cognitive abilities, such as decision-making and problem-solving, and emotional capabilities, including empathy and connection.
● Results: What you achieve. The outcomes you produce through both tasks and relationships.
Leadership development often concentrates on competencies and results. We work on becoming better communicators, stronger decision-makers, and more effective managers. But how we feel along the way can get overlooked.
Imagine these three dimensions as overlapping circles. At the center, influencing all of them, is the nervous system.
Your nervous system constantly takes in information and responds to what it perceives as safe or threatening, often without your conscious awareness. When you feel relatively safe and regulated, you're generally better able to think creatively, consider different perspectives, and connect with others. When your system perceives a threat, it shifts toward protection. Your thinking may narrow, your reactions quicken, and your attention turns toward what needs to be managed or avoided.
That response is useful when immediate action is necessary. It's less helpful when you're giving constructive feedback, navigating a disagreement, or leading a team through organizational change.
And the people around you feel the effects. A leader operating under constant pressure may become less patient, less approachable, or less willing to hear a different point of view. Learning to recognize these patterns gives us more room to choose how we respond rather than simply reacting.
Calm Is Not the Goal
This isn't about becoming a serene monk who never gets rattled. A leader who is calm 100 percent of the time is either unusually gifted or not paying attention.
Stress is part of leadership, and some degree of activation is useful. It brings energy and focus to a challenging conversation, an important presentation, or a high-stakes decision.
With Nervous System Mastery, we're not trying to eliminate stress. We're helping leaders develop greater awareness and flexibility: recognizing when they're becoming overwhelmed or reactive, making adjustments when needed, and recovering after a difficult moment.
I often think about a skilled sailor. She doesn't expect the water to stay flat. She learns to read the conditions, adjust her approach, and keep moving. Leadership is much the same. The challenges aren't going away, but we can get better at navigating them.
Optimizing the Operating System You Already Own
I like to describe nervous system mastery as optimizing your built-in operating system. You don't need to install something new. You need to understand how the system you already have works and learn to work with it.
That starts with paying attention to yourself.
Notice your patterns. Under pressure, do you speed up, withdraw, over-explain, or go silent? These patterns are information, not character flaws.
Try a different response. Pause before responding, adjust your posture, or take a slower breath before a difficult conversation. Notice what helps.
See what changes. Did you approach the situation differently? Was the conversation more productive? How did the people around you respond?
Keep practicing. One successful experience won't change every pattern. It takes repetition to build new responses and make them more accessible when pressure returns.
Start With a Question
When I work with leaders, I encourage them to think beyond what they want to accomplish and consider how they want to experience leadership along the way.
Start with three questions to answer What do I want my experience of leadership to be?
● How do I want to feel?
● What do I want to be able to do?
● What do I want to achieve?
Think about what those three things would look like together. Then consider whether your current patterns and responses are helping you get there.
We spend so much time developing the skills and strategies that make us better leaders. It's worth giving some attention to the system that influences how we put those skills into practice. Your nervous system has been part of your professional toolkit all along. Learning to understand it and work with it may be one of the most valuable investments you make in your leadership.
Leigh Ann Errico is CEO and Founder of LAeRRICO & Partners, where she works with executives and organizations to strengthen leadership effectiveness and organizational performance. A certified Executive and Team Coach, Leigh Ann previously held global HR leadership roles in the pharmaceutical and financial services industries.
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