There’s a fear that my clients don’t often admit to themselves. They aren’t as afraid of failure as you’d think. They’ve handled failure before.
They’re often more afraid of this: If I slow down enough to regulate, I’ll lose my edge. If I take a step back to calm down, I’ll become soft, complacent, or ordinary.
Your entire identity is built on stress and pressure. You’re the one who can handle more. Go longer. Stay sharp under strain.
What happens if you stop pushing so relentlessly hard?
It may not be what you think.
Regulation doesn’t make you lose your edge. It makes you more precise, giving you access to more appropriate responses.
Think about the worst business decision you made in the last year.
You didn’t make it from clarity. You made it from stress and reaction.
One of my clients told me that he overreacted after a competitor’s win. Then he doubled down on a product that had worked before but was clearly not working now. To make matters worse, he said yes to an important new hire because he was too depleted and stressed out to notice the red flags.
A full year of sunk financial, team, and personal costs.
Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a market threat and a threat to your survival. It floods your body with the same chemicals: cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline.
When you live in that state long enough, you lose access to the intelligence that built your success in the first place.
Mindset won’t fix it. You can’t outthink that.
For a solid year, my client pushed harder, convinced that more effort and more money would fix it.
His body was signaling him to stop. He interpreted those signals as weakness.
When he became willing to treat his nervous system as data rather than an obstacle, our work focused on restoring regulation. Once that shifted, his decisions did too.
Not his ambition. Not his work ethic. His clarity.
From a regulated state, he could see what his dysregulation wouldn’t let him see. The product was never going to work again; the climate and algorithms had changed. The important hire wasn’t going to work out.
He pulled the product and let the hire go, then redirected the freed-up resources. Next, he built something aligned with the current climate, algorithms, and demand. He stabilized his company, and revenue doubled within six months.
That’s what regulation can do. Not less drive. Better aim.
Regulation doesn’t reduce effectiveness.
It restores access to intelligence you’re currently operating without.
