The Leadership Cost of Constant Mental Anticipation

[00:00:01]:
So you’re reading that email that’s just come into your inbox, and before you’ve even finished it, something in you has already reacted. Your jaw tightens, or your stomach drops a little bit, or there’s that quiet lurch arriving before your mind has actually caught up with what it said. I had this conversation with a client recently. She’d received some feedback on a piece of work. It was constructive. It wasn’t harsh. It wasn’t personal. But it wasn’t positive either.

[00:00:31]:
It named something that actually needed to shift. And by the time she’d finished reading it, she wasn’t only thinking about that piece of work anymore. She was thinking about the paper that was still unfinished on her desk, whether she actually knew what she was doing, or whether this was the moment that everyone was finally going to realise that she did not know what was going on. One sentence about one piece of work, and somewhere in her it had already rewritten what she believed about her own competence and how much she trusted herself to do the next thing well. She’d already moved 3 steps ahead into a version of next week that hadn’t happened yet, and she’d started to respond to it from somewhere underneath all of it. That quiet voice, I’m not actually any good at any of this. And I’m about to be found out. And later we’ll sit with why the version of you that calls this just being prepared might be standing inside that exact same pattern but wearing a different name.

[00:01:35]:
So this thought, I’m about to be found out. For her, that thought didn’t stay where it started. It moved into the paper that was still sitting open on her laptop, the one that wasn’t due to anyone yet. It was still hers to touch, still hers to redraft, still hers to change. So she read the first paragraph of that paper and it said exactly what it needed to say. She knew that and she read it again anyway. Her eyes landed on one sentence, so she deleted that sentence. She typed something else in its place, read it back, and it wasn’t right either.

[00:02:13]:
So she deleted that too. And what came out the third time was almost identical to what she’d started with. And she sat there for a moment looking at both versions, the one she’d just written and the one she remembered writing an hour earlier, trying to work out which one sounded like someone who knew what she was doing. She put the original back in word for word. Then she read the paragraph after it and the one after that. Nothing in either of them was wrong. She adjusted a comma, moved it back, read the sentence both ways out loud this time, quietly, to hear which one sounded more certain. At some point she noticed her shoulders were up near her ears.

[00:03:00]:
She hadn’t done that on purpose. She couldn’t remember when that had started. Now there wasn’t a deadline pushing any of this. Nobody was waiting on that document. Nobody had asked to see it early. Nobody had given her a reason to doubt anything that was in it. The only reader in the room was the one she’d built herself, sitting somewhere just behind her shoulder, reading over the same words that she was reading, waiting to find the thing that would prove that she didn’t actually know what she was doing. She wasn’t editing the paper anymore.

[00:03:38]:
She’d been editing herself for the last 40 minutes and she’d called it proofreading. So what’s actually going on underneath that email and underneath that paper? Well, in this case, somewhere back in her history, one piece of work was called not good enough, and that was somebody’s opinion. One person’s read of one piece of work on one day. We don’t even know what was going on for the person who was reading it. But it didn’t stay an opinion. It got filed within her as a fact. And instead of staying attached to that one piece of work, it got rewritten into something much bigger. Something that sounds a bit like, I’m not competent.

[00:04:26]:
I don’t know what I’m doing. And that became her program, not because the evidence supported it— most of her actual track record argues against it— but because that’s the conclusion her system had already reached, and it doesn’t reopen a closed case just because some new evidence happens to show up. Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work points to most of our core beliefs forming by around the age of Before we’ve developed the critical thinking to question what we’ve been told or shown about who we are. And this means that whatever verdict that she’s carrying likely isn’t new. It’s probably a much older belief that found a new piece of evidence to attach itself to, wearing a slightly different outfit than it wore the first time. And she’ll be stacking this evidence Making that belief feel stronger and more ingrained. So when this new feedback landed and it was about something completely different, it wasn’t assessed on its own terms.

[00:05:31]:
It went straight into that old file, not because it matched exactly, but because it was close enough to be filed there. For her, competence was never allowed to settle into something she simply has. It’s a verdict that has to be continuously re-earned, or at the very least, something that’s not yet disproven. Which means there’s no version of I’m capable that gets to just sit there, finished, end of. There’s only not yet found out. Now, for another woman, this exact same tightening, the rereading, the retyping, the mental rehearsal, It might be running underneath a completely different verdict. Maybe it was never about competence. Maybe somewhere back in her history, being needed was what kept her safe.

[00:06:24]:
So her verdict isn’t, I’m not competent, it’s, I’m not necessary, and every unanswered message becomes evidence of it. Maybe for another woman, it was never being a burden. So her verdict is, I take up too much space. And she’ll rewrite an email 4 times, not because there’s anything wrong with what’s in that email, but because someone might read it and assume it’s asking for too much. Maybe for someone else, it’s about being liked. So her verdict is, if they really saw me, they’d pull away. And she’ll replay a conversation for hours looking for the exact moment that her tone gave her away. Different content, same architecture underneath it.

[00:07:11]:
Each one is still a verdict that’s been formed early, filed as a fact rather than an opinion, that your system now treats as something to defend rather than something to question. Each one still runs the same forecast, competing for the same limited attention, still weighted more heavily towards whatever’s familiar Over whatever’s actually true. Each one still has attention quietly angling towards the evidence that would confirm it, because that’s what’s already been told to look out for. So the verdict changes the story. It doesn’t change the machinery that’s running underneath it. So here’s what stays consistent, whatever the specific verdict is. Your mind runs on prediction. It’s constantly building a forecast of what it thinks is likely to happen next.

[00:08:06]:
And it does this so that you’re not caught off guard. And running that forecast draws on the same limited attention that you’d otherwise have for the task in front of you, which is why part of this feels so tiring, even when nothing seems to have actually happened yet. The fact is that you’re not doing nothing. You’re running a simulation on top of a simulation on top of a simulation, and simulations cost something. There’s also a bias in how your system decides what’s safe. Familiar reads as safe because familiar has already been survived. Unfamiliar reads as a risk, whether there’s evidence for that or not. So once a verdict like hers becomes familiar, Something the system’s run 100 times before, it can start to feel safer to keep running it than to sit inside the much less familiar experience of simply trusting the work or herself and knowing that her standard is actually fine.

[00:09:11]:
And it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because your system’s only interested in you being safe. It’s not interested in you thriving or enjoying. It’s interested in you being safe. And then there’s attention itself. Out of everything happening around her, her system filters for what it’s already decided is relevant. And if the old verdict is still live, then attention starts weighting towards anything that could confirm that verdict. The one flat tone in a reply, even though that tone might have nothing to do with you. The one thing left unsaid, not because that’s the whole picture, but because it’s what the system was already primed to look out for.

[00:09:56]:
Now, none of this is about your personality. It’s simply prediction, familiarity, and selective attention. So 3 very ordinary functions of a very ordinary nervous system, still defending a verdict that was never actually a fact to begin with though. I mean, just take a moment on that, right? Like, how good is her system at doing its job? Amazing. So back when one piece of work was first called not good enough, her nervous system hadn’t yet learned to hold that as one opinion about one thing on one day. So it did something amazing instead. It built a rule that would prevent that exact pain from ever landing again. And the rule might have looked a bit like, cheque everything, guard against the floor before anyone else finds it.

[00:10:48]:
That’s not a system malfunction. That is a resourceful nervous system that’s solving a problem with the tools that it has. And it solved it well enough that the rule is still running years later, exactly as it was designed, regardless of how you’ve moved on in your life and in your career. So the checking, the rereading, the retyping that sentence that was actually already really good, that’s not a woman who doesn’t trust her own competence. That’s a remarkably loyal internal system still doing the job it was given a long time ago. So it’s still trying to protect her from something that already happened once. And the same is true of the version that calls itself preparation. Thinking ahead, walking into a meeting with a sense of what might come up, that’s a real skill.

[00:11:41]:
Oh, and by the way, you’re exhausting yourself in advance when you run that programme for a meeting that hasn’t happened against a version of events your imagination built, and your mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. And that’s the thing, right? Most high-achieving women were never taught to tell the difference between those 2 things. Getting ready for something and trying to control an outcome that hasn’t happened yet by wearing yourself out before it arrives. So an intelligent system did what intelligent systems do. It treated them as the same task and it ran both on the same loop at the same cost. Recalibration in this work means giving that same loyal adaptive system something new to work with. Enough evidence held for long enough that it can finally close a case that’s been running for years. Not because she stopped checking, because the checking is no longer the only thing standing between her and being found out.

[00:12:43]:
So what does it actually feel like when that case finally closes? Well, it shows up in the small, specific moments before anything else. Finishing a piece of work, sending it, and closing the laptop without opening it again to check. Sitting in a meeting, hearing something you didn’t expect, and noticing the thought arrive and letting it just be a thought rather than following it 3 steps ahead into what it means about you. Noticing the old rule try to fire, cheque this again, run it once more, be able to say, not now. This one’s actually finished. And you mean it. Her system isn’t quieter because the work matters less to her. It’s quieter because one piece of feedback no longer has to be checked against the entire history of everything she’s ever produced or everything she hasn’t started yet.

[00:13:40]:
And this is where preparation gets its place back. Real preparation has an endpoint. It’s specific, it’s useful, and it’s finished when it’s finished. What we’ve been talking about today is the version that never actually ends. It keeps quietly running long after there’s anything left to prepare for. So if you’re ready to move on from the checking that doesn’t stop, the rehearsal that keeps rerunning, the sentence you rewrote and then put back exactly as it was, Well, that’s precisely the work we do inside my upcoming free event, When Preparation Isn’t the Problem. It’s happening on the 17th of September. In that event, we’re going to go further into where your particular version of this began and what it would actually take for that case to close.

[00:14:35]:
I’d love to see you there. I’m sending you lots of love. Bye for now.