The hardest thing you will do today is relax
Eight years of martial arts, a tennis commentator, and an FBI hostage negotiator all landed on the same answer.
What if the best thing you could do right before the hardest conversation of your week was relax?
It still confuses me, but I have experience that this works. Stay with me.
My husband Simon has been training in martial arts for eight years. In the early days, the feedback was what you would expect. Kick higher. Watch your form. Take a wider stance.
But as he has progressed in his black belt work, the most consistent thing he hears, no matter what he is doing in the dojo, is:
Relax, Simon. Relax.
Not a skill correction. A state of mind correction.
I hear the same from tennis commentators. She seems tighter than usual. I wonder if she can reset. They are not questioning her ability. They know she must change her state of mind to have a chance of winning.
Here is what founders and leaders rarely consider: before you say a word, your state of mind has already spoken. You walk into a room tense, and the room reorganizes around it. The person across from you braces. The conversation you were hoping to have is already harder, and you have not opened your mouth yet.
The other thing tension costs you is precision. A tense leader lands harder than they intend. In the dojo, that means hurting your sparring partner, and often, in return, they hit you back harder as well.
In your world, it means saying the thing you cannot take back, or shutting down the person you most needed to hear from.
Relaxation is not going soft. It is how you stay in control of what you are actually trying to do.
Before you say a word, your state of mind has already spoken.
Chris Voss spent 24 years as an FBI hostage negotiator. Today he teaches executives and leaders the same techniques he used in the field. His signature move is not a clever line or a tactical maneuver.
It is a voice.
He calls it the late night FM DJ voice. Calm, slow, measured. His reasoning: calm is contagious. When you use it, you hit the other person's mirror neurons and slow their brain down, involuntarily. They cannot help it.
Same principle. Different rooms.
The sensei says relax.
The tennis commentator watches to see if she can reset.
Voss teaches leaders to embody calm so completely that the other person's nervous system follows.
This is not soft advice. It is what the highest stakes practitioners, martial artists, elite athletes, executives in the room where everything is on the line, all landed on independently.
So back to the question.
What if the best thing you could do right before the hardest conversation of your week was relax?
Not because it is comfortable. Not because the stakes are not real.
Because your state of mind is the first thing in the room. And everyone else is already responding to it.
Until next time,
Margalit
Curiosity and deep listening are my superpowers, gifts I inherited from my mother, an entrepreneur and Holocaust survivor who taught me that anything is possible when we challenge our limiting beliefs.
I believe our state of mind is an invisible line on our P&L statement, directly impacting our decision making, leadership, and bottom line results.
As an entrepreneur who grew and sold a seven figure wholesale linen business, I understand firsthand the challenges of building a company and changing course.
Today, I partner with founders, CEOs, and senior executives who are ready to raise their level of leadership while scaling their businesses. I serve as your trusted advisor and thought partner. Together, we will challenge limiting beliefs, improve resilience under pressure, and build the mental agility needed to lead with confidence, clarity, and purpose.