The feelings of despair and helplessness that rise with every breath you take. The obstacles that build one at a time to torpedo the hopes you build with every sandbag you throw in front of the rising water. The continual battle with your emotions to ignore the fear, ignore the panic, and always the constant effort to keep moving, to keep deciding, to carry on ahead of the tidal wave that never recedes, never lets up. The courage you always find somewhere in your reservoir that makes you proud, even as you wonder if the pressure will ever end.
Leadership is a choice.
Whether you chose consciously, or not, is irrelevant. High performance leadership does not happen by accident. It is developed over time and should be done with the same attention to detail the master trainer brings to a sport. There is a relatively little known sport called Dressage which offers interesting insights to those leaders looking for a path to pull themselves above the chaos. Dressage is a form of horsemanship originally conceived as a methodology for training high performance horses for war.