Teams

“Is it safe?”

If you’ve ever seen the movie Marathon Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, you know just how scary this question can be.

It can be a scary question for your team as well (although without the unpleasant dental work—watch the movie if you’re confused).

When you’re leading your team through a high-pressure situation, they’re looking to you (I’ve written about this before). They’re looking to you…

• …to see what you’re going to do (how you’re going to solve the ...

“Your engine just quit. Where are you going to land?”

The voice came from the right-hand seat—the co-pilot’s seat.

Sounds dramatic, right? Actually, it was quite routine. The person in the right-hand seat was my flight instructor, and it was, like, the thousandth time he’d asked that question over the past few months. If you’ve ever had any flight instruction, you’ve probably heard this question as well. And probably more than once.

See, in flight training, you’re always preparing for the worst. (And, ...

“The confused mind says no.”

You’ve heard this before, right? It means that, when faced with too many options, the brain doesn’t make any decision and simply shuts down. This is why you will often see well-dressed people standing, zombie-like, in front of the mustards section of Whole Foods. Eventually, a Whole Foods employee will check the zombies’ wallets for IDs and arrange for Ubers to take them home, where a nice Pinot will bring them back to consciousness.

For those of ...

According to the traditional rules, I could never run for public office.

Not that I want to run for public office. I don’t! I’d be terrible at it. But my point is that, according to the traditional rules (which may not even be a thing anymore), I couldn’t run. That’s because, at some point during my campaign, some reporter would begin a question with:

“Mr. Stainton, isn’t it true that you once said…”

And my honest answer, even without hearing the rest of ...

Let me give you a hypothetical high-pressure situation.

You’re the pilot of a small, single-engine airplane. You take off, alone, in this single-engine airplane, and head out over a large body of open water. At about 800 feet above this water, your single engine starts to sound funny (and not in a “ha-ha” way), and you notice you’re not gaining altitude at the rate you should be. At around 1200 feet above the water, your single engine quits.

This is a high-pressure ...

We all love the “oh-so-cool” person who can just “wing it” in any situation, don’t we? That’s why we admire (and secretly want to be) James Bond — the guy who can go through a brutal, life-or-death fight with armed assassins, and then thirty minutes later stroll into a high-stakes poker game (in a perfectly-tailored, freshly-pressed tuxedo, of course) looking like he just had a facial and manicure.

We all want to be the person who, off-the-cuff, always says the perfect ...