Decision Making Under Pressure: Rational vs Presence

I've made million-dollar decisions under pressure.

But nothing prepared me for a 3-year-old having a meltdown.

For 15 years, I believed high performers stayed calm under pressure.
I built that belief at Hulu, NBCUniversal, and Anine Bing.

Then I had kids, and I realized I only knew half the picture.

The belief wasn't wrong.
Staying level-headed helped me make calls when the stakes were high.

But parenting showed me that being rational isn't always enough.

One night, my son woke up at 2 am crying.

I did what I always do under pressure.
I tried to diagnose it:

- Is he sick?
- Is he hungry?
- Is something hurting?

I ran through the checklist, but nothing worked.
He just needed me to sit on the floor next to him and be there.

The second I stopped trying to solve it, he settled.

That moment separated 2 things I'd been treating as the same:
Managing a situation vs being in it.

Those aren't the same thing.
And under pressure, only 1 of them works.

Rational decision-making lets you process a situation.

Present decision-making analyzes it for you:

✅ What people aren't saying.
✅ What their energy is telling you.
✅ What needs to change before any decision can take place.

When a team's under pressure,
The rational read of the situation is rarely what they need first.

They need to know someone's paying attention.

That's context.
And context improves decisions, and makes them more precise.

Rationality is still an important part of my day-to-day.
But presence is what I rely on when the pressure gets real.

It's what saved me at 2 am when my toddler was screaming the house down.

What's an important lesson that life outside of work has taught you?

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