The Ten-Second Practice That Changes How You Lead

Steven Miyao  |  Coaching Metta

Most of the leaders I coach describe themselves as driven, strategic, maybe a little intense. But underneath the drive, there's often a vigilance that never turns off, a background calculation running before every decision: what could go wrong here, what am I exposed to. It doesn't feel like fear, it feels like being thorough.

I know because I ran that way for years. I’m not going to pretend I’ve fully stopped.

Fear-based motivation is hard to spot in high performers because it looks like excellence. You can prepare for a call with a client or a board member or your CEO because the problem genuinely interests you, or because somewhere in your nervous system, losing their confidence feels like a threat to everything you’ve built. You know the version I mean: you’re reviewing your notes for the third time, adjusting your framing, making sure there’s no angle you haven’t accounted for. From the outside, the preparation looks identical, but one version leaves you energized after the meeting and the other leaves you depleted, even when it goes well.

The thing is, it doesn’t stay contained. When fear is running your decisions, even when you can’t feel it happening, it starts shaping who you hire, how long you sit on hard conversations, and what your people learn is safe to bring you. I’ve seen this play out with clients, and I’ve lived it myself: you build a team that’s optimized for your comfort rather than your growth, and nobody tells you it’s happening. You rehearse the conversation with your CFO three times in your head before lunch, adjusting your framing each time, not because the message is complicated but because something in your gut won’t let you just say it. And if you’re doing that, imagine what the people around you are filtering before it ever reaches you. The best people get tired of that kind of atmosphere and start looking elsewhere, and the problems that could have been caught early arrive late and fully formed. None of it traces back to a single bad call. It accumulates in ways that don’t show up in any single meeting or decision, but over a year, you can feel the difference.

Most of us didn’t choose this. These patterns often trace back to early experiences. Maybe it was a parent who lit up when you brought home the A but went silent when you didn’t, and somewhere along the way, the performance became the point. The strategy worked, so there was never a reason to question it, until the achievements keep landing, but the restlessness in your chest doesn’t go away.

Here’s what I had to learn the hard way: understanding this intellectually changes almost nothing. The amygdala, the part of your brain that decides whether something is a threat before you’ve had time to think about it, doesn’t respond to insight. It responds to felt experience. And the instinct to treat fear as a problem, to notice it, name it, optimize past it, is still the same pattern, just with better language around it.

What I’ve found actually helps is counterintuitive. Before your next high-stakes meeting, add ten seconds to your prep. Not to strategize, just to notice what’s already happening in your body. Is your chest open or braced? Is there a tightness in your gut that arrived before the meeting did? Then, instead of trying to fix it, just let it be there, not as a problem to solve, just as what’s actually happening. The first time I tried this, I was surprised by how much was already going on before I’d even walked into the room. An emotion that’s fully felt, without the story we layer on top, tends to move through you faster than you’d expect. What’s left isn’t a new mindset. It’s just a little more space to see clearly.

After the meeting, check in with yourself: Was I building toward something in that room, or protecting against something? Over a few weeks, that awareness, felt in the body, not just understood in the head, starts to loosen the pattern.

And here’s where it gets tricky. If you’ve read this far, part of you is already turning this into the next self-improvement project. I catch myself doing the same thing. But I’ve noticed you can’t force yourself to let go. Trying harder to relax is still trying. What’s worked for me, when it works, is just seeing the pattern clearly enough that it starts to lose its hold. That doesn’t happen all at once, and I’m not sure it ever fully does.

The leaders I’ve watched make even a small shift here, and they don’t become less driven. They become the kind of leader people want to follow, not because of the title, but because something in how they carry themselves changes. That happens when you stop performing a version of yourself and start letting the real one make the decisions. I don’t think any of us fully arrive there. But even a small shift changes how it feels to walk into a room.

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