You pride yourself on being decisive. Fast. Action oriented. But what if the speed you’ve mistaken for strategic clarity is actually your nervous system trying to outrun a threat that doesn’t exist?
Here’s what I’ve observed across 15 years of clinical work with high performing business owners: the decisions you make under sympathetic dominance feel urgent, logical, even necessary in the moment. But when we map them against your cortisol patterns, a different story emerges. What looks like bold leadership is often biology overriding strategy. Your body is making choices your prefrontal cortex would never approve.
The problem isn’t that you lack discipline or vision. It’s that a dysregulated nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a missed email and actual danger. Both cause the same physical response in your body. Both take over the same parts of your brain that make decisions. And both create patterns that slowly destroy the business you’re working hard to build.
Let me show you where cortisol is steering the ship.
The Premature Pivot
You launch a new offer, service line, or strategic direction. Three weeks in, when results aren’t immediate, you pull the plug and shift again. This isn’t agility. It’s threat response. When your nervous system interprets slow growth as failure, it activates the same mechanism designed to get you away from danger: move, change, do something different now. Regulated leadership gives strategies time to mature. Survival mode mistakes patience for stagnation.
The Reactive Hire
Someone quits or underperforms, and you fill the role fast. You override hesitation about culture fit because you need the gap closed. Six months later, you’re managing the fallout of a misaligned hire who now costs you more than the temporary gap ever did. Cortisol compresses your decision window. It makes “right now” feel more urgent than “right person.” You’re not hiring for the business you’re building. You’re hiring to soothe the activation spike that comes from being short staffed.
The Overcorrection in Strategy
A client complains. A campaign underperforms. A competitor launches something adjacent to your model. You don’t adjust. You overhaul. Survival mode interprets feedback as existential risk, so the response is disproportionate to the data. Regulated leadership makes calibrated shifts. Reactive leadership burns down the house to fix a leaky faucet.
I worked with a founder who had rebuilt her service model four times in eighteen months. Brilliant operator. Deep expertise. But every time growth slowed, her system flooded with cortisol and she interpreted the plateau as proof the model was broken. When we began tracking her decision patterns against her nervous system state, she could finally see it: she wasn’t pivoting toward something better. She was running from discomfort her body had mislabelled as danger.
Within three months of learning to regulate before deciding, she stopped mid pivot for the first time in years. Not because the strategy was perfect, but because she could finally tolerate the vulnerability of staying the course long enough to know if it worked. Her revenue stabilized. Her team stopped bracing for the next reinvention. She described it as the first time she’d felt like she was leading her business instead of being chased by it.
So here’s the question to sit with: when you think back over your last five significant business decisions, how many were made from a calm, grounded state versus a tight chest, racing thoughts, and the feeling that you needed to act now?
If the honest answer unsettles you, that’s not weakness. That’s accurate self assessment. And it’s also evidence that what you’re dealing with isn’t a strategy problem that another framework will solve. Nervous system regulation isn’t something you think your way into. It requires clinical support that understands the biology beneath the behaviour.
Jonathan Riley is a Survival Mode Specialist who helps high performing leaders stop surviving and start leading again. With 15 years as a licensed counsellor, he works at the nervous system level to create lasting change that tactics and willpower cannot. Book a Survival Mode Diagnostic at mypracticeleaders.com.au