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In 2015, I was running a branch office for an engineering consulting firm.

We were not an oil and gas shop, but that didn’t matter. When that industry went down in 2015, it took the whole rest of the province with it. Capital dried up everywhere. Our clients, the ones we’d worked with for years, had nothing to hand us. Projects got shelved, budgets got frozen, and the calls I made went absolutely nowhere.

So I sat at my desk with five employees looking at me, asking what work I had for them. And I did not have an answer. Meanwhile, my VP called every day. Same question every time. What’s your plan? What are you going to do?

At home, I had six active kids under 16. I was the only driver. I had a mortgage, I had no business carrying, and a grocery bill that never stopped. I was the only income.

Now, this company had been around for 18 years, and I’d been there for 17 of them. We had never done layoffs. It wasn’t that kind of shop. The business unit managers met every week and we talked through ideas. And in all of those meetings, nobody ever said the word.

Then the company burned through about a million dollars of overhead and payroll with almost nothing to show. And the president stepped in and made the call. Layoffs across every business unit.

My five became three, including me.

So the next time my VP called and asked me what my plan was, I finally had one.

I quit.

That was it. Two words. And I want to be honest about how that felt. Because it’s the part that’s a bit unexpected. It felt fantastic. The weight came straight off. The clouds parted, the sun came out, the whole thing. I walked out of that office feeling lighter than I had in months. No more wondering which employee I had to let go next.

No more waiting for the next client to cancel or ghost me.

I got about halfway home before it hit me. What did I just do? How am I gonna feed my family?

I’m gonna leave it there for now because the interesting part isn’t what happened next. The interesting part is what happened in the eight months before it.

Which I didn’t see at the time and which I want to come back to at the end.

Here’s what I’ll tell you now. There was nobody to ask for help.

That’s what I told myself for years. It’s also not true. There were people

I just wouldn’t have asked any of them.

Pressure does not create behavior. It amplifies what you already do. Decisive becomes impulsive. Thorough becomes stuck. The person who takes things on takes on more until they’re underwater.

The tendency that got you promoted is the same one that might cost you under pressure. That was me. I was a grinder. Suppress it, push through, handle it, don’t let anyone see.

And it worked right up until it didn’t.

So here’s what actually happens under pressure. You stop making active choices and you start defaulting. Push harder, take over, withdraw, avoid, overanalyze, go rigid on process.

And this is the part that most people get wrong. None of those is a flaw. Every one of them is correct somewhere. Push harder is exactly right when the finish line is close. Rigid on process is exactly right when the risk is high and people are cutting corners. Withdraw is right when you’re about to say something you can’t take back.

The problem isn’t the move. The problem is running it automatically without checking whether this is the situation that calls for it.

Here’s what that looks like. Say you’re on site for a shutdown. Tight window, your crew mobilized, everything sequenced around starting loop checks Monday morning. Sunday afternoon, you find out mechanical isn’t done and the equipment won’t be released to you until Wednesday.

Now you’ve got people on site with nothing to check, two days of window gone, and the back end of your scope compressing into whatever’s left.

Your default is to take over and resequence the whole plan yourself. Sometimes, that’s exactly right. Sometimes, the faster move is one call to the shutdown coordinator to renegotiate the sequence before your crew burns two shifts waiting.

Same pressure, two different moves. The question isn’t which one is better. It’s whether you picked one or just ran the one you always run.

So here’s something to sit with. what is my default showing up as right now? And is it helping here?

So let me come back to 2015. I left my job doing the only thing I’d ever known how to do. But I figured, hey, I’m a smart guy. I’m gonna bet on myself. I’m gonna start my own consulting company. I was going to help people do something. I hadn’t really figured out what, but I was standing up a company anyway. And I was sure it would just work out. That’s how life had gone up to that point.

at least in my head.

It didn’t work.

And that’s when I started to doubt myself. I convinced myself that the only thing I knew how to do was the one thing I had just walked away from. That is a self-limiting belief. I know that now. It felt completely real at the time. The economy was in shambles. I was getting desperate, and I could not figure out how to pivot into something new.

So I set up a meeting with the president of the engineering firm, the man who hired me in the first place. And I asked for my job back.

I didn’t get it.

I got a job, not the same one. A smaller role, less responsibility, less money. I’d broken trust and burned goodwill, and that was fair.

The president’s wife was in that meeting too, because she ran the HR side of the company. She said she thought I was struggling with something before I quit.

That was the whole conversation.

Now, when I look back at the months leading up to that, the signals were all there. Sleep went first, then my temper, and not at work. At home, where it did the most damage.

I was drinking more than I should have been. I stopped exercising. I ate badly. I let my health go completely. Four flags running for months. I didn’t spot one of them because I was too busy being the guy who handles it.

When your default is push harder, sometimes you push until your executive function shuts down.

And the smallest useful step in that entire eight months was one conversation with one person, which I never had. What I got instead was a loss of income, a loss of role, loss of shares in a company I’d spent my whole career at. and damage to a number of relationships that mattered to me.

Not because I lacked toughness, because I had no tools.

There’s one more piece to this and it took me years to see. If you’d asked me in twenty sixteen what I’d accomplished that previous year, I’d have told you I quit and I crawled back. I told that version for a long time.

It’s also not accurate.

I held a branch together through the worst downturn most of us had ever seen. I made calls nobody wanted to make, and I made them straight. None of that showed up in the version I was telling myself. Because when you’re in it, your memory only keeps the losses.

A few episodes back, I talked about why smart people stay stuck longer than they should. This is the far end of that. You can rationalize your way through eight months of flashing signals if you’re good enough at explaining things to yourself.

So here’s what I’d leave you with. It isn’t a system and it isn’t five steps.

Know your default.

Then next time you’re in it, ask whether it’s the move the situation actually needs.

And on that help question, looking back, there were people I could have talked to.

I just wouldn’t have asked any of them.