The foundation of leadership, presence, and innovation is a regulated brain in a dysregulated world.
In some ways I feel like I’ve been spinning like a top and learning how to make it work for me, for almost seven decades. The irony is that you can always be waiting for a break, for things to get less busy, to wake up to good news, and so on, before the spinning ever stops.
When chaos swirls around you—deadlines looming, demands stacking up, and emotions flaring—your nervous system involuntarily lights up like a storm warning. You become like a racehorse just before the gates open, with an accelerated heart rate, shallow breathing, and all your muscles tense. This is your Warrior mode, when all your brain’s resources go online to move you into fight or flight. Thoughts race through your mind like wind-whipped branches, with no concern for pauses or solutions. In those instances, you move from steering the ship to becoming a part of the storm. Your power goes out the proverbial window.
But what if you trained yourself to become the eye of the storm? It may seem counterintuitive, but the eye of the storm is the calm, grounded center where there are usually light winds, clear skies, and even sunshine, surrounded by intense storms and raging winds. The air pressure drops dramatically inside the eye, so that it isn’t pulled by the swirl. It anchors it. What if, through a deeper understanding of how your brain and body operate under pressure, you could move from reactivity to receptivity? In a shorter and shorter time, until it becomes second nature?
You already know that your nervous system is always listening. It’s looking for clues and information from you and its environment, and never stops asking: Am I safe? Do I need to react? Your amygdala, which can be equated with being your brain’s watchtower of threat detection, can’t distinguish between an actual emergency and a perceived one. That email that makes your stomach lurch? That courtroom objection? That sideways comment from a colleague? To your brain, those can register just as intensely as a bear charging at you, unless you teach it otherwise.
That’s where some of your deepest power lies. None of us can learn to completely suppress the storms, because biologically we are programmed to be immediately seeking shelter, fighting those who could impede our safety, etc. You don’t need to become a storm-suppressor; with an impossible task, you need to learn to regulate your relationship to the storms. That quest becomes possible because you don’t have to fight the wind. You just get to find your center within it.
This isn’t just ungrounded theory, it’s biology. When you shift from sympathetic activation (fight/flight/freeze) into a more regulated parasympathetic state, your entire inner landscape transforms. You breathe deeper. Your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for decision-making, empathy, and perspective-taking) comes back online. You access options, rather than just reactions. You can widen the lens and see whatever real or proverbial storms you are looking at from different angles and vantage points. When you do this, you make yourself magnetic to solutions rather than desperate for escape.
That’s when the “magic” begins to happen, as things start coming to you. Naturally. Except that it’s not magic, it’s science. When you’re the eye of the storm, you aren’t chasing calm. You are calm. You aren’t forcing things or fighting for control because you’ve already established agency over your nervous system’s response to the chaos.
This kind of centeredness is a consistent practice, you regulate your nervous system not once, but over and over, moment by moment, breath by breath. You learn to interrupt the loop where your emotions hijack cognition. You tune in to your body’s cues and learn to recognize the early signs before they become bigger problems. You become trustworthy to yourself because you begin to build a felt sense of safety, not through external guarantees, but through internal consistency.
The foundation of leadership, presence, and innovation is a regulated brain in a dysregulated world. That only becomes more and more evident in today’s workplaces and social climates. You’ve seen it. The attorney who speaks slowly and confidently while everyone else is spiraling. The executive who takes a beat before responding, without retreating or attacking. The teacher who meets a meltdown with eye contact and breath, not panic. Even the cashier who remains calm while being attacked by a frustrated customer. These are not superhuman feats. These are nervous systems trained to hold the charge without collapsing into it.
That’s why being the eye of the storm draws things in. You become a steady voice people want to follow and an ideal space for ideas to land. Your presence makes others breathe easier, and clients trust you more without being conscious of it. Solutions surface, creativity flows far more freely, and helpful people and resources seem to appear out of the woodwork.
Of course, the storm never disappears. The storm is life. But the more you orient yourself to calm in the midst of everything swirling around you, the more you’ll start to navigate the world with a different kind of intelligence—one that is as much somatic as it is strategic.
If you’re like me and you prefer concrete examples, I offer you: a practical, neuroscience-backed exercise tailored for attorneys to anchor their nervous systems in high-pressure moments. Adjust accordingly for the industry or situation you are in. Before opening a case file, stepping into a deposition, or prepping for a tough client conversation, take 60 seconds to regulate your state and reframe your focus:
- What to do: Stand or sit upright, do one full body stretch or shoulder roll, then place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. Close your eyes, breathe into your hands, and silently ask: “How do I want to show up right now?” Then choose an anchoring word (e.g., “clarity,” “steadiness,” “command”) and let it guide your posture, tone, and pacing.
- Why it works: Touch helps downshift the nervous system. Intentional self-priming activates neural networks aligned with conscious response instead of conditioned reaction. You’re training your brain to associate legal pressure with presence rather than panic.
You can adjust accordingly for the situations you are working to master. It may look like you’re doing less yet you’re doing the most radical thing possible: not abandoning yourself when the winds pick up. This is what it means to be the eye of the storm.
The storm is not the threat. For an anchored nervous system, it’s simply weather. And you can develop yourself to be calm at your core, regardless of any type of external circumstances.
Remember, you have all the resources at hand to make your life truly Grayt®!
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