You Knew Exactly What to Do. So Why Didn't You?

I walked into the conversation with a plan.

I knew this leader. Our history wasn’t good, and I could feel myself on guard before he said a word. So I coached myself the way I coach others. Stay grounded. Listen to understand. Don’t defend. Don’t perform.

And for a few minutes, it worked. I was listening. Actually listening.

Then his tone shifted.

Condescending. One-up. The small vocal move that says I’m above you.

And I felt it happen. My listening stopped. My brain quietly changed jobs. It was no longer trying to understand him. It was gathering ammunition.

When my opening came, I took it. My skill with words did what it was trained to do. I was articulate. I was sharp. I put myself back on top.

I won the exchange.

And lost the conversation.

What that moment needed was mutuality, not dominance. I knew that going in. I could have taught a workshop on it that morning.

But knowing didn’t matter. Under pressure, something older and faster took over, and it used my best skill to do it.

This is what we have to start discussing: the gap between knowing and doing is bigger than you think.

Sometimes it looks like going quiet when you know you need to speak up, but leadership sees compliance. Sometimes it looks like the sharp reply you swore you wouldn’t give. And sometimes it looks like winning.

If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting replaying what happened and thinking, I knew better than that, you know this gap. Every leader does.

Here’s what I want you to understand: that gap is not a knowledge problem. You cannot close it by knowing more.

What Actually Happens When the Pressure Rises

Your thinking happens in your prefrontal cortex. That’s where your logic lives, your reasoning, everything you know to be true about how a good leader responds.

But when your brain registers a threat from feeling disrespected, dismissed, or made to feel less than, your limbic system takes over. It sends signals straight down into your body without consulting your smart brain. It doesn’t pause to check your leadership training. It just acts.

In that moment, knowing what you should do is completely out of the picture. You’re not choosing your response anymore. Your nervous system is choosing it for you, based on rules it learned a long time ago.

This isn’t just a feeling. Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten at Yale has shown that even mild stress, when it feels uncontrollable, rapidly impairs the prefrontal cortex and hands control of behavior to older, faster brain systems. And Naomi Eisenberger’s research at UCLA found that social threats, like being dismissed or devalued, activate some of the same neural circuitry as physical pain. Your brain treats “less than” as danger. It doesn’t wait for your permission.

I can trace my own version of that rule now. There had been seasons of my life when I felt pushed down. When my voice was silenced. When, because of who I was, I didn’t matter as much in the room. And something in every one of our brains wants to matter, wants to be valued, wants to be respected. Mine had learned a rule to survive those rooms: when someone’s tone says you’re beneath me, safety means getting back on top.

So when his tone changed, my subconscious didn’t consult my thinking brain. It flipped it offline and reached for the fastest protection it had. My version of fight was words. Thinking quickly on my feet, overcoming every objection, reversing the order until I was back on top.

That rule made sense once. It protected me. People even complimented me on it. But in that conversation, it was answering an old room, not the one I was standing in.

This is why the leadership books haven’t fixed it. This is why you can watch yourself do the opposite of what you know, in real time, and feel powerless to stop it.

So Are We Just Stuck?

No. And this is the part I wish someone had told me years ago.

Underneath all of it, your limbic system is asking relational questions. Do I matter? Do I belong? Am I valued?

When a hard moment seems to answer no, your nervous system reacts as if something essential is at stake. Because to your brain, it is.

But here’s the hope: you don’t have to get those needs met by the person in front of you, at that moment. You can meet them separately. On purpose. Ahead of time.

Think about how you eat. You don’t wait until you’re starving to think about food. You eat two or three times a day so you never get to that desperate place.

Your relational needs work the same way. When you have regular interactions with people who reinforce that you matter, that you’re valuable even when you’re a mess, you are feeding the relational part of your mind. Two or three solid connections a day. That’s not a luxury. It’s one of our core human needs.

And it changes what happens under pressure.

When you’re anchored like that, and someone in a meeting treats you like you don’t matter, your brain has something to push back with. Yeah, but remember this morning, when you talked to someone who knows you and values you?

That memory gives you extra strength. You become less dependent on the moment in front of you to answer the question of whether you matter.

That’s what I didn’t have back then. My sense of mattering was riding on that one interaction, so my nervous system treated it like an emergency. Knowing evaporated because, relationally, I was running on empty.

What to Practice This Week

Don’t try to perform better in hard moments. Build the rhythm that feeds you before you get there.

You already know the frequency: two or three real connections a day, the same way you eat. Here’s what to do inside them.

Check in with yourself as you come into the day, and again as you come into the evening. What emotions are you actually feeling? Name them.

Then connect with somebody and share what you found. As you do, notice what you’re needing. Comfort? Encouragement? Perspective? Ask for it.

And then comes what might be the hardest part: receive it. For some of us, asking is the struggle. For others, it’s letting the care actually land. Let it land.

Once you receive it, you’ll find you can connect back to your purpose. The day makes sense again.

Do this proactively, over time, and you are building the internal capacity to stay regulated when it counts.

And if the next hard moment arrives before the rhythm is built? Start smaller. In the moment, just stop and recognize: I’m flipped. That one act of naming it begins to bring your thinking brain back online. Then, when you can, share the moment with a friend or confidant. That simple step opens the door to the rest.

You’re not building willpower. You’re building an anchor.

Resilience Is Not the Whole Story

In his newest book, The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature, Allan Schore draws a distinction I keep coming back to: the difference between resilience and malleability.

Resilience, as Schore describes it, is “the adaptive ability to bounce back from adversity.” It weaves together our emotional, social, and cognitive lives, and researchers across disciplines now agree it sits at the center of how we develop and change.

Feeding your relational needs builds exactly that kind of resilience. When you’re anchored, you recover faster. The hard meeting still lands, but it doesn’t take you out for the rest of the day.

But notice that traditional resilience often refers to simply bouncing back. Returning to where you were.

But what Schore is proposing is something different. It’s the nervous system’s capacity to be reshaped by experience. Not to come back, but to come back differently.

This is the distinction I watch play out in leaders all the time. Many leaders can recover from the moment their knowledge evaporates. Many of us have learned reactive coping skills.

But a leader whose nervous system has actually been reshaped stops losing their knowledge in the first place. The old alarm doesn’t fire, because the old rule underneath it has been revised. I don’t know about you, but if I have a choice, I’d rather put out the fire vs have to fight it.

And here’s what Schore’s decades of work make clear: that reshaping doesn’t happen through information. The right brain, where these patterns live, learns through felt, relational experience. In summary, it changes the same way it learned the old rules in the first place.

Information can create insight. Experience creates transformation.

Traditional resilience helps you survive the gap between knowing and doing. Malleability is how the gap actually closes.

If You Want to Go Deeper

If you’re realizing your knowing-doing gap is bigger than a habit, start by taking my free nervous system audit at braverestoration.org. It will help you see the pattern your body runs when pressure rises, which is the first step toward changing it.

And if you already know you’re ready for the deeper work, the kind that reshapes rather than just restores, reach out at julia@braverestoration.org. Your nervous system is more malleable than you’ve been led to believe. I’d love to walk with you.

Bravely on, Julia

Sources

• Schore, A. N. The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature (W. W. Norton, Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology), p. 29. allanschore.com
• Arnsten, A. F. T. Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. nature.com
• Eisenberger, N. I. Social Pain and the Brain: Controversies, Questions, and Where to Go from Here. Annual Review of Psychology. annualreviews.org