I talk a big game when it comes to achieving buoyancy in the face of stress and uncertainty.

But that doesn’t mean I live a perfectly balanced, blissful life, facing all challenge and adversity with the ruthless grace and aplomb of an NBA starter at a neighborhood pickup game.

I dove into the study of stress and resilience, neurological imbalance and rebalance because I freaking needed it in order to navigate my own life.

I stress test my own IP every day. Necessary, frankly exhausting, and honestly a good thing.

Because I’m so far away from the “expert’s curse” — so close to being a struggling beginner myself — I can totally empathize with what my clients are going through.

My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night

Take two nights ago, for example.

My bladder helpfully woke me up at 3am, at which point my mind checked its agenda and called to order a full scale cosmic emergency.

First, the warm-up: This problem. That problem. This unresolved situation. That fraught relationship.

Then the main event:

• What do you have to show for your one wild and precious life?
• Have you utterly wasted your potential?
• Are you even now acting irresponsibly by trying to go back to sleep instead of dragging your ass to your desk and sending 10 prospecting DMs on LinkedIn?

That’s when I remembered that I’m the damn author of The Buoyant Leader, and I am the Driver of the unruly bus that houses my Internal Dysfunctional Family.

So I tried every cognitive trick I could think of to quiet the bedlam so I could return to sleep.

Defusion.

Reframing.

Perspective taking.

Curiosity.

Gratitude.

Nothing worked.

Every technique felt like repression rather than management. Like I was hiding a low-battery smoke detector in the freezer to block out the damn beeping, beeping, beeping.

Try Breathing

And that’s when my agitation woke up my wife, who mumbled, “Can you try breathing or something?” before turning over and resuming her own slumbers.

Well, yes, I could.

I went into a round of Xi breathing, a technique I learned from Qigong teacher Robert Peng. (Here’s more info if you’re interested.)

By round 3, I was floating in a completely different head space.

I hadn’t banished the Doom Agenda, but it no longer had the same purchase. The accusations and perseverations were floating around my consciousness with the weightlessness of dust motes, there but no big deal.

Instead of treating my thoughts like fast-growing weeds, yanking them out in a losing game of whack-a-mole, I changed the composition of the soil, making it an unfit medium for them to take root and multiply.

The Weeds and the Soil

As it turns out, I do have something useful to share, despite my own personal challenges.

And that is, the body is where the action is when it comes to managing the mind.

Changing your physiology through breath, or movement, or muscular contraction and relaxation — this is the node of highest leverage.

That’s because your body is the soil in which thoughts land. You can’t stop thoughts from hitting your consciousness any more than you can stop the rain from falling.

Though it doesn’t feel this way, your thoughts aren’t even personal; they’re just free-floating, and which ones land on you in any given moment is more or less random.

Once they land, though, the soil determines the rest of their fate. Whether they germinate (or not), thrive (or not), and reproduce (or not).

If you want to show up as the person you mean to be in high-stakes situations, work the soil of your body so your mind can hold the most empowering, creative, and curious thoughts you’re capable of.

Because your thoughts determine your “read” of every situation — whether you’re blinking into a threat or an opportunity.

Had I brought my worried mind into a meeting, I would have perceived every word, every tonal shift, every facial expression, and every physical movement through the lens of potential danger.

And every self-instruction to the contrary would just have passed through that same negativity bias, landing as a criticism or attack. A self-sabotaging feedback loop, shrieking louder with each pass.

Changing my breathing changed my blood chemistry. Releasing the tension locked in my ribs and back replaced the PA speakers at a high school gym dance with a mellow pair of Harbeth Super HL5 Pluses.

The sharp and painful thoughts could not thrive in that new environment. Other, more nurturing and helpful thoughts, were encouraged to take their place.

So, neither you nor I have to be perfect.

We just need access, in the moments that take us, to the sleepy wisdom:

“Try breathing.”