The pressure myth

The pressure you think drives your success may actually be the fear quietly controlling your leadership writes Erika Alessandrini, author, Maybe It's Me: Looking Inward to Create Real Change Through Conscious Choices.

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Most high-performing leaders I work with will tell you they thrive under pressure.

They wear it like a badge. Pressure, they believe, is what sharpens them, what separates them from the rest, what has always driven their best work.

What they rarely see is what the pressure has become.

Over more than two decades in executive leadership and more than ten thousand hours of coaching leaders across industries, I have observed the same quiet transformation happen again and again. The pressure that once felt like fuel gradually converts into something else entirely: fear. Fear of failure. Fear of not being enough. Fear of losing control. Fear that if they let up, even slightly, everything they have built will unravel.

Leaders do not recognize this shift because fear does not announce itself. In high performers, it dresses up. It shows up as responsibility, as high standards, as caring deeply about outcomes. It looks like leadership. It feels like strength. But underneath, it is fear running the show.

And fear, left unexamined, does what fear always does: it reaches for control.

The pressure drives fear. The fear drives control. And control, over time, drives a cost that most leaders never stop long enough to calculate: eroded trust, diminished teams, relationships running on empty, and a chronic dissatisfaction that results cannot seem to fix.

At the centre of this cycle are five beliefs that high performers treat as self-evident truths. They are not. They are myths. And busting them is where real change begins.

MYTH: I know what's right

TRUTH: Certainty is costing you more than you think.

High performers develop strong instincts. They make fast, accurate decisions. Over time, that pattern hardens into a belief: I know what's right. And because they are often correct, this belief gets reinforced at every turn.