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How Managers Can Stay Grounded Under Pressure

Years ago, Jay Abbasi was a top performer at SolarCity. His manager quit, publicly and unexpectedly, and the next thing Jay heard was his director telling him that he'd be the new manager. He went home that night carrying it like a promise. The next morning, the VP called him in and told him the director shouldn't have said that. The promotion wasn't his.

"I was just broken," Jay says. He'd already wrapped his identity around a job that, twelve hours earlier, hadn't even been real.


In a recent episode of The Modern Manager, Jay Abbasi, a global keynote speaker, coach, and former Tesla leader who now works with leaders at companies like Google and Wells Fargo, made a case that this kind of moment is where most people misunderstand resilience. 


The popular definition treats it as the ability to push through, as if a manager were a machine designed to keep grinding no matter what. Jay's working definition is different. Resilience is adaptability, the capacity to maintain clarity, energy, and focus even through high-demand seasons. It's less of a wall holding back a flood and more of a plant flexing in the wind.


Attachment Is What Actually Breaks You


The SolarCity moment didn't break Jay because the promotion vanished. It broke him because of how tightly he'd bound his sense of worth to it. He calls this attachment, and he defines it as desire fueled by the belief that your happiness or safety depends on the outcome arriving exactly the way you pictured it.


If the meaning of "I'm okay" lives inside a specific result, then any setback isn't just a setback. It's a referendum on you. That's why two managers can experience the same disappointing news and one shakes it off in a day while the other carries it for weeks.


The alternative isn't to stop wanting things. It's to stop needing them in a way that ties your identity to the outcome. Jay names the difference plainly. You can pursue a promotion, a deal, a result. You just don't have to invest your sense of self in whether it lands.


Charge Your Phone, Charge Yourself


When managers tell Jay they don't have time to take care of their mental and emotional state because the season is too busy, he asks them how often they charge their phone. Once a day, sometimes twice. And when the apps are all open, navigation is running, and they're shooting two-hour videos? They charge it more.


We're the same. The mistake is thinking the busy season is the time to skip the recharge. It's the season that requires more of it.


Recharging doesn't have to mean an hour of meditation. Jay teaches a framework he calls the Fundamental Six, the categories that determine how much daily charge you have access to. They are: healthy diet and hydration, sufficient sleep, physical fitness, social connection, mental fitness, and positive consumption. Most managers focus on the first three. Social connection is the one that surprised Jay when he first looked at the research. Strong social connections raise your likelihood of a longer life by fifty percent or more. Roughly the same effect as quitting smoking. A Zoom call about Q3 strategy with a colleague you like doesn’t count. A real call with a sibling, a friend, someone who knows you.


Mental fitness, the fifth category, is what the hobbies that put him in "flow state" feed. One man told Jay he builds cars in his garage every Saturday and only realized after hearing the framework what those Saturdays were doing for his emotional well-being.


Fight, Flee, Fuel, Or Feel Under Pressure


When pressure hits, Jay says people default to one of four responses. The first three are familiar and ineffective. You can fight the feeling by suppressing it until the pressure cooker explodes. You can flee it by reaching for your phone, the fridge, anything to distract yourself. You can fuel it by replaying the loop in your head, analyzing it, and dwelling on it.


But the one that actually moves you through is to feel it. To sit with the discomfort the way you'd sit with a crying three-year-old. If a small child were sobbing in front of you, your first move wouldn't be to lecture them. You'd ask what's wrong, and you'd hold them. Jay's question is the obvious one. Why don't we do that for ourselves?


He tells the story of being passed over for a major keynote opportunity just last week. He felt the same ping he would have felt fifteen years ago, the spiral of "I'm no good." But this time, instead of letting it run for days, he sat down on a meditation cushion and said, over and over, "be with it." Thirty minutes. That was the cost. Same emotional event, completely different relationship to it, because of years of practice.


ARIA: A Path Through Hard Moments


The four-step process Jay teaches to help anyone sit with and process their emotions has an acronym, ARIA. Accept what's happening. Reflect on what you can take from it, including a reminder that you've been resilient before, because you're still here. Inspect your real options, including the ones you'd see if this were happening to someone you admire. Then act, take whatever the next step is.


The order is what makes it work. Skipping straight to action, which is what most managers do when stress lands, is what leaves them stuck in the same patterns. Acceptance comes first because nothing useful happens until you stop fighting the reality of the moment.


Stress Is The Signal, Not The Enemy


A life without stress, Jay says, is a life without meaning. Stress means you care. Take away every meaningful thing in your life and the stress goes too, but so does the growth, the purpose, and the work that actually matters to you.


The move isn't to reduce stress. It's to relate to it differently. To meet it with curiosity instead of resistance. To finish the sentence "I'm doing this so I can…" with an answer that holds up, and let that meaning carry the effort.


The phone analogy lands again here. The point of the charge isn't to keep the battery at one hundred percent forever. The point is that you can use what the battery has for the things that matter. Resilience is the same. You're not avoiding the drain. You're staying able to put your energy where it counts.


Resilience isn’t a one-time mindset shift; it’s something you develop through practice. Challenges won’t go away, but your ability to handle them improves. You recover faster, think more clearly, and lead with more confidence.


As Jay says, our job is to adapt, not push through. The plant survives the storm by bending.


Watch or listen to the full interview here.


Keep up with Jay Abbasi

Guest Bonus: 7 Strategies to Build Unshakable Resilience

Jay's PDF blueprint with the seven practices he's seen produce real results for leaders working in fast-paced, high-demand environments. It's a practical companion to the episode, with guidance you can come back to whenever the pressure spikes.


Become a member of Podcast+ to get this guest bonus: www.themodernmanager.com/more

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The Modern Manager is a leadership podcast for rockstar managers who want to create a working environment where people thrive and great work gets done.

 

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