/Nobody is taking your shield

Tim Wright is a psychotherapist, and almost everyone he sees is a senior leader. Which means he spends his working days with people who cannot afford to look uncertain anywhere else.

Early in our conversation, he drew a line I’ve been circling for years without naming it this cleanly.

Stress is weather. Pressure is what you do with it.

Stress is outside you. Workplaces generate it; you can adjust the culture a little at the edges, but mostly it’s weather. Pressure is what you do with the weather. And pressure, in his account, comes out of the relationship you have with yourself.

Then he took it somewhere I didn’t expect:

The work I’m really interested in is trying to understand how your inner world walks into every aspect of your life, every meeting that you go into, every relationship that you have, and shapes those things.

This collapses a distinction most of us rely on. The personal work and the professional work turn out to be the same work. You don’t get to keep them in separate boxes, because the same person walks into both rooms.

The armour

Most of the conversation is about armour. Tim’s position is that we all wear it all the time, and that this isn’t a flaw to be corrected. Under pressure, leaders tend to work faster.

They’re more decisive and more directive. They lean harder on whatever leadership style has worked for them before. He won’t call any of that wrong.

“There are ways, and there are trade-offs, and there are consequences to those ways.”

What he’s after is the half-second before the armour goes on. Noticing it. Knowing what it costs you, and what it costs the people on the other side of it.

Nobody is taking your shield

Then he said the thing that made the episode for me. It’s the objection he hears from the people he works with, and I’ve heard versions of it in my own coaching rooms for years without ever hearing it put this plainly:

Will this lower my guard? I need my defences. I need my guardedness. I need my armour. I’m going into battle almost. Will you be weakening me, taking my shield and my sword away from me?

His answer: no. Nobody is taking your shield.

Anyone who has trained in a martial art will recognise the logic. Awareness doesn’t leave you undefended. It gives you the choice of when to raise your guard, which is a different thing entirely from never being able to put it down.

What else is in the episode

There’s a lot else in here. His three tangibles, which are self-awareness, respect and trust, add up to a very different account of emotional regulation than the one I usually teach.

It’s about accessing a quiet confidence that when something rises up in you, you’ll be okay. There’s also an argument I didn’t see coming: that executives should have supervision in the way therapists are required to, because the intensity is comparable and the obligation to reflect on it isn’t.

He closes by turning it on the listener. If you’re the steadiest-looking person in your organisation, who sees the part of you that isn’t? And how often?