When Dr. Sarah Hewitt asked the room of executives to rank 10 uncertain situations from one to 10, the results were immediate. Some circled low numbers, confident in their comfort with risk. Others marked every line with a ten. Then she asked them to turn to the person beside them and compare.
Around the tables, people started realizing how differently each of them experienced uncertainty.
“For some people, some of these scenarios really aren’t that stressful at all, and for other people… they’re super stressed by absolutely everything,” said Hewitt.
Hewitt, a neuroscientist and professor at Mount Royal University, led Beneath the Surface, one of three afternoon workshops at Leadership at the Speed of Science in Calgary. The summit, hosted by Cortical Consulting & Coaching in partnership with the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, brought together scientists, business leaders, and athletes to explore how stress shapes performance.
Hewitt was joined on stage by entrepreneurs Craig Latimer and Jason Rakochy. Together they guided participants through what happens to the brain under pressure, what awareness looks like in the moment, and how leaders can learn to recognize their own thinking before it turns reactive.
Nancy Penner, senior consultant at Cortical, said that intersection of science and behaviour is the foundation of her work helping leaders think clearly and perform under pressure.
“Clarity isn’t something leaders impose,” she said. “It’s something teams create together. The work starts by noticing what pressure does to you and then building systems of trust that help others do the same.”
When stress narrows how leaders think
Hewitt began with a quick primer on what happens in the brain when pressure rises. The brain, she explained, acts as a kind of prediction engine, constantly matching what’s happening now to what has happened before.
“Your brain kind of acts like a predictive model,” she said. “As all of these inputs are constantly streaming in through all of our senses… your brain is comparing all of the current inputs to some previous experience that you’ve had before.”
That predictive system works well, until it doesn’t.
When something unexpected happens and the brain has no prior experience to compare it to, she explained, it can trigger a stress response.
“The stress response is a completely normal physiological response,” she said, adding that short bursts of stress are manageable. But Hewitt also cautioned that chronic stress can change how people think.
Under sustained strain, the brain narrows its field of view, shifting from reflection to reaction and giving you tunnel vision.
As the science settled in, people began recognizing their own reactions.
Some began describing how stress at the top of an organization filters down through teams. One person called it “the doom loop,” a cycle where urgency becomes the culture. Another compared it to a contagion, where a leader’s reactivity spreads through the system.
Hewitt said those patterns make sense once you understand where they come from.
“Every single experience you personally have had in your life laid down different neural pathways and different patterns, which is why we all respond to stressors differently,” she said.
Stories from the edge of awareness
That shift from reflex to reflection came alive in the stories Latimer and Rakochy shared.
Latimer, who has built and sold multiple cleantech and finance ventures, spoke about how pressure became part of his identity.
“I’m going to be a pretty open book here,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of people that have that ‘never too good enough’ syndrome in their own head.”
He was talking about the inner voice that insists you’re never quite enough. Even when you succeed, you focus on what went wrong instead of what went right.
He told the audience he “thought it was normal to dry heave every morning before you go to work,” drawing a ripple of laughter before the room fell silent. After joining a small CEO group, he began to see stress differently. The group required total honesty, and the act of naming how he felt forced him to stop pretending he was fine.
“Part of the charter was we had to be extremely transparent about how we were feeling,” he said.
At first the exercise felt uncomfortable. Over time, it became grounding.
“There’s this sense of camaraderie in the fact that this is actually not unusual, to have these kinds of feelings and these physical effects,” he said.
That shift from isolation to shared awareness mirrored what Cortical’s leadership and coaching work helps teams create. Penner often describes awareness as a collective skill, not an individual one.
“Leaders learn to notice what’s happening in themselves first,” she said. “And then extend that awareness to how their team is functioning. That’s where clarity starts to build.”
Rakochy, a senior executive in the energy sector, described a similar lesson from earlier in his career. He once led a large project team and was asked to cut it nearly in half.
“That experience stuck with me,” he said. The conversations that followed weren’t about performance, but about people. Years later, those moments resurfaced during a company town hall as he delivered a message of optimism to thousands of employees while another story played in his head.
“I was picturing my two sons, my wife, and those past conversations of layoffs,” he said. “I had a panic attack in front of everybody.”
The experience forced Rakochy to slow down and rebuild his footing. He reached out to friends and colleagues for support, began exploring mindfulness therapy, and tried to restore the balance he’d lost between work and physical health.
“It caused me to have to be more introspective and take a pause and a step back,” he said.
In that process, he also looked for ways to face discomfort differently. On a whim, he signed up for a comedy improv course which was something far outside his comfort zone. He did it to learn how to stay present when things felt unpredictable.
“It was fantastic,” he said. “Something completely out of the ordinary, and it allowed me to do a bit of a reset.”
His story echoed what Penner describes in Cortical’s resilience and agility work, which helps leaders and organizations adapt under pressure rather than simply endure it. The focus, she said, is on awareness.
“When you understand how pressure changes your thinking, you stop leading from fear and start leading with awareness,” she said.
Turning awareness into a leadership practice
So what happens next? If awareness is the first step, what does it look like inside real teams?
One participant described how their own stress behaviours shaped the people around them.
“In a leadership position, you start to see the same behaviours in your team,” one participant of the workshop said. “Their decision-making starts to align with how you’re showing up. When I get into crisis response mode, focused on the fire of the day, the team shifts too, doing whatever they can to get my attention on that fire. It becomes self-repeating.”
Hewitt agreed.
“That idea of looking for patterns has come up quite a number of times already today,” she said. “Trying to recognize what you’re doing and try to recognize patterns before they kind of get to the point they’re handling them.”
Penner sees that same process play out inside organizations she works with. Her team performance work focuses on helping groups notice shared reactions before they harden into culture. When teams learn to name what’s happening in the moment, whether it’s tension, urgency, or reactivity, decision quality improves.
“Resilience isn’t something leaders possess,” she said. “It’s something organizations learn together. Awareness spreads the same way stress does. It’s contagious in the best sense.”
Back at the event one workshop participant summed it up by suggesting that when things feel difficult, it helps to take a step back and focus on what’s still working.
Hewitt described that process as metacognition, the ability to notice your own patterns before they take hold.
Learning to see the system
What emerged through the session was a shift from self-regulation to system intelligence.
Stress may start as a chemical reaction, but its impact unfolds socially. The room kept returning to the same insight: awareness isn’t an individual trait but a property of the system leaders create through example.
Penner believes that connection is where leadership starts to evolve.
“Awareness is what makes every other skill possible,” she said. “It’s how people make better decisions together when things are uncertain.”
The insight may sound simple, but it represents a change in how leadership is understood. Rather than asking people to be tougher, the conversation at the event asked what it means to stay open, observant, and adaptable when pressure rises.
Final shots
- Awareness is not a soft skill. It is a form of intelligence that determines how leaders think and act under pressure.
- When a leader’s stress narrows, the system narrows with them. Awareness is what opens it back up.
- Resilience is not built in isolation. It grows through teams that pay attention together.
- Leadership under pressure begins where awareness returns and reflection replaces reaction.
Digital Journal is the official media partner of the Leadership at the Speed of Science summit.
