I walked into Anna’s office 11 years ago for a coaching session that didn’t happen. Again. It was the fourth time “something had come up.” After six weeks of my showing up, we still hadn’t had a single real undistracted, productive, focused session. Anna worked in a political organization, and everything felt urgent to her. She moved fast, reacted quickly, and treated nearly every issue like it couldn’t wait.

She blurted out to me, “I am having a really bad day.” I said, “You seem to have a lot of them.” She was taken aback. She actually stopped for a moment, which was quite uncharacteristic. It gave me a moment to watch her pause and consider, possibly for the first time, the chaos she was creating.

What I had noticed was that her team rushed too. Planning was an afterthought, mistakes were the norm, and communication was sharp and transactional.

The organization thought Anna had an anger problem. Perhaps, but under the anger, there was an anxiety that created chaos and urgency all around.

When everything feels urgent, we stop thinking clearly, we react instead of thinking, and we trade intention for speed. We invite mistakes, and those mistakes cost us more time, more energy, and often ill will.

The pressure and urgency affects how we show up in our work and its result is often a shorter fuse, a harsher tone, less forgiveness, less trust, and of course, more mistakes. When we feel this way, we usually blame outside forces, such as the organization or our clients. Yet often we have far more control than we acknowledge.

We can always choose to prioritize differently, to set boundaries, and to stop and truly listen to those people in our lives, be it at home or at work. We can slow our pace and see how those around us will eventually slow down as well.

Anna had been creating conditions where good decisions were almost impossible and mistakes were destined to happen. Strong leaders pause long enough to ask:

What am I treating as urgent that isn’t?

Where am I driving unnecessary pressure?

How is my pace impacting my team?

Want to do a self-check? How often do you say either in your head or out loud, “Today was a bad day,” “I need this ASAP,” or “I will never get all this done”?

If your team is truly making too many mistakes, go deeper and ask, “What are the conditions I have created?”