This weekend my daughter went to her friend's school ball. The group she went with are the children of friends I went to school with, and many of those friends are still in my life now. Several of the grandparents are also friends with my parents. It's a beautiful intergenerational feeling of being known.

I came home from work on Friday night expecting to be done in. I usually am at the end of a travel week. This time I was something closer to exhilarated, which surprised me enough that I noticed it.

My daughter debriefed me when she got home from the after party. Her ball partner was done in at the end of the night, and she'd sat with him for the last half an hour while he came back to himself. That's the kind of person I want in the world. It's also the kind of person I'm trying to be in my work, rising from a hard chapter into something I'm building deliberately.

The week itself had its share of pressure. Local government reform conversations are live across the country right now, and the timeframes are tight. I've been working with councils trying to do meaningful engagement in compressed windows, and the work has demanded everything I had.

What I noticed on Friday night is that pressure like this used to activate fight mode in me, and I didn't always understand my own response.

Now I do, and I know to run towards it because I trust myself in it. That pressure now sharpens my thinking rather than scattering it.

There are people who work in this kind of pressure for a living, and they're some of the best people I know.

When I worked on the recovery alliance after Cyclone Gabrielle, I was surrounded by civil construction professionals who had been in the emergency response phase from the first night. Roads closed, no power, infrastructure unstable, communities cut off. The conditions were genuinely dangerous, and they ran towards it.

When the work moved into recovery, the same people brought the same drive to a different kind of timeframe. Huge projects, compressed schedules, planning and project management layered over the top, and still the relentless intensity that had served them in the dark.

Local government has people like this too. When a state of emergency hits, it's council staff coordinating the emergency response, getting information out, doing the mahi to serve the community in the best way they know how. They're often invisible until something goes wrong.

This operational skill set is rare, and I have huge respect for the people who carry it.

There is a different kind of pressure cooker, and the same skill set doesn't always carry over.

Standing in front of an angry community is not the same as standing on a closed road in the dark. The road needs decisions, action, and speed. The community meeting needs presence, patience, and the ability to hold your own response before it leaks into the room.

The instinct that makes you brilliant in the first situation can work against you in the second. When emotional pressure rises, the body responds the way it always has. There is the feeling that you can't understand why the community is ticked off when you feel you couldn't be working harder and are dog tired at the end of each and every day. There is the urge to fix the problem in front of you by explaining harder, defending the position, or pushing through.

All the things that served you in the technical work are now the things that erode the trust you need.

This is simply a recognition that the two situations are asking for different things, and the second one has to be learned.

The research tells us what's happening underneath. The same nervous system that helps you perform under operational pressure responds to emotional pressure as if it were a physical threat. The body doesn't distinguish between a closed road and a room that has turned on you. It floods you with the same chemistry and pushes you towards the same instincts.

The difference is who you're working with. Operational pressure puts you alongside colleagues who are reading the same conditions and moving in the same direction. Emotional pressure puts you across from people who have lost trust in the process, the institution, or you personally, and they are not moving in your direction at all.

Learning to notice the response rising before it shows up is the first skill. The heat in your chest, the tightening in your jaw, the impulse to push back. Recognising what's happening gives you a small window between what you feel and what you do.

The second skill is what you do with the window.

Most of it comes down to giving your nervous system a brief but critical reset so you can listen with intention, and answering what's actually being said rather than the version your nervous system is constructing.

The reason this matters is that the people doing this work are doing it in service of their communities. The drive and the intensity come from caring about the outcome. When the response to emotional pressure goes sideways, it isn't because anyone has stopped caring. It's because the body got there first.

Learning the second skill set is how you keep showing up the way you intended to. With the grace and the integrity that brought you to the work in the first place.

That's the kind of person I want to be in this work too.

Until next week,