Which Animal Are You Under Pressure?

Think about the last time one of your people hit a performance wall.

Did you jump in to fix it? Back off completely? Push harder with logic and data? Feel your chest tighten with frustration you tried to hide?

Here’s the real question: Did your response unlock their capability or cap it?

Most leaders know the answer viscerally. The gap between intention and impact shows up in real time. Your responses under pressure feel automatic and unchangeable.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s neuroscience. Under pressure, your nervous system defaults to patterns that once kept you safe. Patterns that may have even made you successful earlier in your career. But what worked when you were the star performer doesn’t always translate when your job is developing other stars.

Dr. Janet Treasure and her team at the Maudsley Hospital in London developed animal metaphors as part of the New Maudsley Method to help parents and caregivers recognize how their automatic stress responses limited their ability to support and motivate loved ones.

I’ve adapted their framework for high-performance leadership because the same nervous system dynamics that show up in parenting and caregiving show up identically when you’re leading under pressure. (Honestly, if you’re a parent, you’ll recognize these animals from your kitchen table too.) Under stress, we all become animals: predictable and less evolved versions of ourselves.

The best leaders I’ve worked with know which animal they become when stakes are high. And they’ve learned to shift their pattern to unlock the most potential in their people.

The Five Patterns: Which One Shows Up For You Under Pressure?

These aren’t good or bad. They’re automatic. And recognizing your default is the first step to expanding your range as a leader.

The Jellyfish

Too much emotion, not enough control.

You feel everything deeply. When someone on your team struggles, their stress becomes your stress. Your frustration shows. Your anxiety is palpable. You’re transparent in a way that feels authentic but creates unintended consequences.

The challenge: The person walking into your office can feel your nervous system before you say a word. Instead of bringing you their real challenges, they focus on managing your emotional state. (Same dynamic happens when your kid walks in after a bad game and immediately starts managing YOUR disappointment instead of processing their own.)

The impact on potential: Your highest performers start filtering what they share. Critical information gets buried. Innovation slows because bringing you ideas that might fail adds emotional volatility to an already high-stakes situation. You lose access to the intelligence you need precisely when you need it most.

The opportunity: When you build capacity to regulate your own nervous system first, you create space for others to access their best thinking. Regulated leaders become the calm in the storm. That’s when the real work happens.

The Ostrich

Avoidance of emotion and complexity.

You’re skilled at keeping things practical and focused. Emotions feel unpredictable, so you channel energy toward what you can measure and control. It’s served you well in driving execution.

The challenge: When performance issues have an emotional component, staying in the spreadsheet means you’re working with incomplete data. The conversation you’re avoiding is the one that would unlock the breakthrough.

The impact on potential: Your team interprets avoidance as a signal that growth conversations aren’t valued here. Your most capable people start looking for leaders who will actually develop them. You end up managing compliance instead of cultivating the kind of ownership and innovation that drives exceptional results.

The opportunity: Emotional intelligence accelerates performance, it doesn’t slow it down. When you are willing to show up for hard conversations, use emotion as data rather than something to be avoided, you unlock a different level of commitment from your team. You have less turnover. You get better results because you see the whole picture clearly, not ignoring data because it’s messy or ‘emotional.’ Bottom line: You’re more efficient and effective when you get your head out of the sand.

The Kangaroo

Trying to make everything right by doing it for them.

You’re a problem solver. When you see someone struggling, your instinct is to step in and clear the path. It comes from genuine care and a desire to help them succeed.

The challenge: The very support that feels caring in the moment can prevent the development of independent judgment and resilience they’ll need for their next level of leadership. Think about the coach who always calls the plays versus the one who develops players who can read the game themselves.

The impact on potential: Your high performers develop a dependence on your intervention rather than building their own capacity to navigate complexity. They feel capable only when you’re managing the details. As the organization scales, you become the bottleneck because you’ve inadvertently trained your team to wait for your direction rather than develop their own.

The opportunity: Your job isn’t to eliminate challenge. It’s to build the muscles they need to handle progressively more complex challenges independently. Stretch assignments with calibrated support create future leaders. When you step back strategically, you create space for them to step up. Allowing people to demonstrate and put their strengths to good use helps them feel like they matter. It builds competence and confidence. It gives a sense of agency that everyone wants and needs to excel.

The Rhinoceros

Using force and logic to convince others to execute your strategy.

You can see the path forward clearly. When others resist, you bring more data, build a stronger case, push harder on the logic. You’re trying to help them see what you see.

The challenge: The more you argue for the answer, the more you position them to defend against it. What you experience as leadership, they experience as being told rather than developed.

The impact on potential: Compliance without genuine buy-in produces mediocre execution. Your best strategic thinking stays locked in your head because no one is listening. The more you hammer and push, the more they pull away and disengage. They feel muzzled. The innovation that emerges from real intellectual partnership never surfaces because you’ve signaled you already have the answers.

The opportunity: When you shift from convincing to co-creating, you unlock engagement and commitment that actually drives results. Create conditions where your team discovers why change matters and builds ownership over the solution. Help them be agents of change. Notice and affirm their strengths to develop the intrinsic motivation that elevates performance. That’s how you get the effort that separates good performance from exceptional and drives results.

The Terrier

Persistence that lands as criticism.

You’re committed to follow-through. You check in, remind, follow up because you care about results and want to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. You’re trying to drive accountability.

The challenge: What feels like supportive accountability on your end can land as micromanagement on theirs. The line between helpful persistence and eroding trust is thinner than most leaders realize.

The impact on potential: They tune out the signal because there’s too much noise. Energy that could go into solving real problems gets redirected into managing your follow-ups. Initiative dies. You get exactly what you explicitly ask for, but you lose the discretionary effort that produces breakthrough results.

The opportunity: When you notice you’re repeating yourself, that’s information. It means either the expectation wasn’t clear, the capability isn’t there, or the psychological safety is compromised. Go back to curiosity, connection and clarity (of roles, of expectations) before you go back to checking in or asking for more from them. When people feel you trust them to know their gaps and how to fix them, they do it faster. They share mistakes earlier so you can problem-solve together towards the best solution. They feel respected, competent, and motivated enough to persist.

What Actually Drives Peak Performance

Picture the leader who brings out the absolute best in people. What do they embody?

Dr. Treasure’s team identified two animal models that represent optimal patterns. In leadership, these same qualities unlock sustainable excellence.

The Dolphin

Adaptive guidance that meets people where they are.

The Dolphin leader reads what’s needed in real time and adjusts their approach accordingly. Sometimes you swim ahead, modeling new possibilities and showing the path forward. Sometimes alongside, offering real-time coaching and support. Sometimes behind, signaling trust and building their confidence to navigate on their own.

You’re attuned to where each person is developmentally. The same challenge gets different scaffolding depending on whether someone is building new capability or refining existing strength. You create the conditions for people to perform at their peak without creating dependency on you to get there.

This is the “just right” balance of structure and space, tailored to the individual.

The St. Bernard

Steady, reliable, compassionate strength.

The St. Bernard leader brings calm consistency and unwavering belief in people’s capacity. You communicate clear standards AND the conviction that they can meet them. You show up reliably regardless of circumstances. Your presence doesn’t waver when things get hard. When someone is lost in the storm, you find them. You bring what they actually need, not what you assume they need.

You see their potential before they do and you call them into it without crushing them with impossible expectations. You make people feel both challenged and safe. That combination is rare and powerful.

This is the “just right” balance of high standards and genuine care, consistently applied.

The difference: The Dolphin is about dynamic responsiveness and adapting your approach. The St. Bernard is about steady presence and reliable support. Both matter. Elite leaders develop capacity for both.

Bridging the Mental Health - Performance Gap

This isn’t about choosing between wellbeing and results. That’s a false choice that keeps teams and organizations stuck.

The real work for leaders is simultaneously attending to both the human needs that allow people to feel safe enough to take risks AND the performance standards that push them to discover what they’re actually capable of achieving.

When leaders operate from regulated nervous systems and create genuine connection, they unlock access to people’s best thinking, boldest innovation, and deepest commitment.

This is how you bridge the gap between mental health and peak performance. Not by sacrificing one for the other, but by recognizing they’re interdependent.

Your team needs to know they matter as humans. And they need to be challenged to deliver at the highest levels. Both warmth AND firmness. Challenge AND support.

(P.S. Years of research says the same goes for being the most effective parent!)

What To Try This Week

Pick one person on your team. Not just someone who’s struggling. Pick someone with untapped potential you want to unlock. (If you want bonus points, try this with your teenager too. Same principles, different stakes.)

Before your next conversation with them, ask yourself:

Which animal am I becoming under pressure with this person?
What pattern do I default to when I’m trying to drive their performance?

What does my nervous system need first?
Am I bringing regulated presence or reactive pressure?

What would the Dolphin or St. Bernard do?
How would I show up if my goal was to unlock their peak potential, not just fix a problem?

Then experiment with one specific change in your approach. Notice what shifts when you shift.

Maybe it’s asking them what they see instead of telling them what to do.
Maybe it’s challenging them to solve something you’d normally solve for them.
Maybe it’s staying present when emotion shows up instead of rushing past it.
Maybe it’s trusting them to figure out the fourth quarter strategy instead of calling every play.

Peak performance doesn’t come from people feeling comfortable. It comes from people feeling capable of handling the discomfort that growth requires. Your job is to create the conditions where they can access that capability.

Unleash your inner Dolphin or St. Bernard. That’s how you elevate performance for every member of your team and drive sustainable excellence for your organization.

Want to develop this capacity in your leadership team? I work with executives and senior leaders to bridge the mental health-performance gap through psychological flexibility, nervous system regulation, and leadership practices that simultaneously drive exceptional results and wellbeing. This isn’t soft skills training. This is the neuroscience and performance psychology that unlock peak performance under pressure and sustainable excellence.

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