A Compassionate Leaders reflection on stress, trauma, and performance
There’s been a lot of conversation over the past few weeks about England’s performances under pressure — particularly during The Ashes.
From the outside, it can look like a technical problem.
➡️ Batting collapses.
➡️ Poor decisions.
➡️ Missed opportunities.
But when I watched the early tests closely, what stood out to me wasn’t technique.
It was stress.
The body language told a deeper story:
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tight shoulders
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shallow breathing
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rushed decisions
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players who didn’t look settled in themselves
This isn’t about a lack of talent.
England has world-class players.
What we may be witnessing is something far more familiar to many high performers: a nervous system that doesn’t know how to return to safety under pressure.
Stress isn’t a mindset problem — it’s a nervous system issue
Research from The Sutton Trust has shown that a high proportion of England’s cricketers were privately educated, many of them at boarding schools.
This matters — not because boarding school creates “weakness”, but because many former boarders were never taught how to down-regulate stress.
Nick Duffell, in Wounded Leaders, describes this clearly:
“Wounded leaders tend not to be well resourced internally, so stress will get the better of them.”
In environments where emotions were discouraged and vulnerability wasn’t safe, many children learned to survive by:
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dissociation
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compartmentalisation
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pushing through at all costs
These strategies can work — for a while.
They often serve people brilliantly in high-pressure systems: elite sport, finance, leadership, politics.
Until they don’t.
When pressure rises, the system freezes
High performance requires the ability to move fluidly between:
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activation (focus, drive, intensity)
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regulation (rest, digestion, clarity, recovery)
Many former boarders — and many leaders — learned only the first half.
When stress peaks, the nervous system can tip into:
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fight
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flight
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freeze
And in elite sport, freeze often looks like collapse.
What’s fascinating is what happened later in the series.
Once the pressure had lifted — once the outcome no longer mattered — England began to play more freely.
➡️ The body softened.
➡️ The mind opened.
➡️ Talent re-emerged.
Nothing technical had changed.
The nervous system had.
This isn’t really about cricket
Cricket is simply a mirror.
I see the same pattern every week in leaders, founders, and executives:
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highly capable
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deeply committed
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outwardly successful
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internally exhausted
People who were never taught how to come back to safety.
Many of my clients find regulation practices transformational — not because they remove stress from life, but because they teach the body that stress doesn’t mean danger anymore.
One simple example I often use:
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recalling a memory of deep safety
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returning to it repeatedly during the day
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letting the nervous system relearn calm
This is not weakness.
This is leadership maturity.
Compassionate leadership starts in the body
Leadership under pressure — whether on the cricket field or in the boardroom — is not about trying harder.
It’s about creating the internal conditions where clarity, presence, and choice become possible.
Until we address the nervous system, we will continue to see:
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burnout
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reactivity
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collapse under pressure
In sport.
In leadership.
In society.
The opportunity now is not to criticise — but to understand.
And from that understanding, to lead differently.
