How Your Mind Shifts When Life Spins Out of Control
Bottom Line Up Front: Fear of losing control isn't just stress—it's a strategic saboteur that hijacks executive decision-making, triggers defensive leadership patterns, and destroys the innovative thinking essential for competitive advantage. Leaders who master control over their survival mind maintain strategic clarity and superior performance while their fear-driven competitors make reactive decisions that kill competitive positioning.
We are wired with an innate fear of being out of control.
Imagine waking up to news of a mysterious and deadly virus spreading across the globe. Every day, the situation worsens: hospitals are overwhelmed, death tolls rise, and scientists scramble for answers. Suddenly, the world feels unstable, dangerous, and completely out of your control.
The COVID-19 pandemic delivered this shock to billions of people. But it wasn't just the virus that caused fear—it was the unsettling realization of powerlessness. You couldn't protect yourself fully, and you couldn't predict what would happen next.
The Strategic Reality: During my 30+ years of business strategy work, I've watched how loss of control triggers the same survival responses whether you're facing a global pandemic, market volatility, competitive threats, or organizational change. The fear response is identical—and equally destructive to strategic thinking.
This fear of losing control, born from shock, doesn't happen in the abstract. It activates the brain's survival mechanisms, setting off a cascade of responses that can linger long after the initial crisis—destroying strategic capacity and competitive advantage.
In today's world, we are experiencing more and more of these shocks, in rapid succession. Read the business headlines and you feel your heart race, your breath catch, your strategic optimism drain away. Market volatility, competitive disruption, regulatory changes, supply chain crises—it's a new reality for business leaders that we all need to recognize and adapt to strategically.
Understanding how these mechanisms work—and how they can trap us in cycles of fear that destroy business performance—is key to reclaiming control over your mind, your strategic thinking, and your competitive advantage.
Fear of Losing Control Triggers Our Survival Mind
When faced with sudden shocks, like realizing during the pandemic that your business model could collapse overnight, your brain activates a sophisticated survival system designed to protect you. This process is fast, automatic, and driven by ancient evolutionary mechanisms that prioritize survival above strategic thinking.
The first responder is the amygdala, a small but powerful part of the brain that acts as your internal alarm system. The amygdala constantly scans for threats, and when it detects danger—like news of market crashes or competitive disruption—it triggers the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis).
The Strategic Cost: The HPA axis floods your body with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones prepare you for action: your heart races, your breathing quickens, and your muscles tense up. This state, known as the fight, flight, or freeze response (what I call Survival Mind), directs your focus to lock onto surviving the immediate threat—not strategic innovation or competitive opportunity.
During the early days of COVID, this response was adaptive for both personal and business survival. It drove leaders to protect cash flow, secure supply chains, and take immediate precautions. But for many executives, the realization of business mortality—my company could fail, and there's nothing I can do to stop it—kept the alarm bells ringing far beyond adaptive response.
Business Reality: That's because our survival system wasn't designed to stay on indefinitely for strategic decision-making, but executive minds don't always know when to shut it off. When it doesn't shut off, leaders cycle into more and more business fear and repetitive worst-case strategic scenarios, not to mention damaging their leadership effectiveness and competitive positioning.
Neuroplasticity: How Fear Gets Wired Into Your Strategic Mind
The brain doesn't just respond to fear—it learns from it, including business and strategic fears.
This ability to adapt, called neuroplasticity, allows the brain to rewire itself based on repeated experiences. While this process helps us learn and adapt strategically, it also makes us vulnerable to getting stuck in patterns of business fear that destroy competitive advantage.
Take the example of economic uncertainty during the pandemic. As businesses shuttered and markets crashed, leaders began imagining worst-case strategic scenarios: What if we lose our biggest clients? What if we can't make payroll? What if this market disruption never ends? What if our competitive position is permanently damaged?
My Strategic Experience: I found myself scanning my entire business world, looking for competitive threats, expecting market disasters, and even creating and preparing for unrealized and highly unlikely business failures. My strategic optimism—built over decades of successful launches—was replaced by defensive thinking that killed innovation.
Each time these thoughts replayed, the brain strengthened the neural pathways associated with business fear and strategic anxiety. The cycle repeats as it gets stronger and stronger.
Here's how this works on a strategic level:
Business Fear Pathways Strengthen: The amygdala becomes an overachiever, sensationalizing anything in your business environment as a threat, which then triggers your survival mind—whether you are in a truly threatening strategic situation or not. We turn on the high alert button and constantly search for and expect the worst possible business outcomes.
Strategic Thinking Deteriorates: Chronic stress shrinks the hippocampus, which controls how you learn and remember strategic information. This shrinking minimizes our ability to learn from market feedback or apply rational thinking to competitive challenges. My brain fog was so bad I couldn't remember strategic details from the day before, couldn't think clearly about market opportunities, couldn't write strategic analyses. My normally positive, innovative self became a negative, fearful executive entity. I didn't even recognize my strategic thinking. I couldn't stop the defensive patterns.
Emotional Decision-Making Dominates: Your amygdala expands, stimulating emotional triggers and letting fear control strategic decisions. This is why I felt those knee-jerk (or is it heart-dropping) reactions to market headlines, competitive news, and over time, pretty much every business challenge I encountered.
These changes explain why many leaders became trapped in worst-case strategic thinking during the pandemic or any time business feels threatened. The mind, wired for survival, focuses solely on potential competitive threats, shutting out strategic logic, market context, and innovative possibilities.
Even after the immediate business crisis passes, the fear pathways remain, leaving the strategic mind stuck in survival mode.
The Cost of Staying in Strategic Survival Mode
While survival mode is crucial in genuinely life-threatening situations, staying in this state for strategic decision-making takes a serious toll on business performance and competitive advantage.
Short-Term Strategic Impacts
When executive minds head into survival mode, they prioritize immediate defensive action over strategic common sense. That can lead to:
Strategic Hypervigilance: You can't relax strategically because you are on high alert for any and every competitive threat that you know is coming, any minute now. Hypervigilance leads to a business nervous system that is constantly expecting market attacks. Leaders never relax strategically, and they damage their decision-making capacity as they stay on high competitive alert.
My Business Reality: My hypervigilance kept me in defensive strategic mode for three years after market disruptions. I couldn't embrace growth opportunities because my mind decided those, too, were competitive threats.
Physical Leadership Symptoms: Headaches/migraines, stomach and digestive issues, heart and breathing irregularities, insomnia, chronic fatigue, brain fog... all of which destroy executive presence and strategic performance. Massive stomach cramps and nausea affected my ability to perform in high-stakes business meetings. My heart would beat out of my chest during strategic presentations, and I couldn't breathe normally. Constant physical aches and fatigue, respiratory issues... I was sick and nothing seemed to help my strategic capacity.
Narrowed Strategic Focus: Executive minds stay focused on the same threatening business stories, repeating and even expanding them, while still on alert for more competitive threats. Threats become the only strategic priority. There were hours when I had difficulty thinking about anything other than perceived business threats. It was like a strategic disaster movie reel playing and playing again, sometimes different versions, sometimes repeats, growing more defensive while awaiting the next competitive threat.
These short-term effects are manageable if the business threat is resolved quickly.
During prolonged market crises, like supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes, or competitive upheaval, these patterns compound into long-term strategic consequences.
Long-Term Strategic Impacts
The resulting long-term impacts of operating in strategic survival mode can deliver powerful business and competitive compromise:
Strategic Cognitive Impairments: Chronic stress affects the prefrontal cortex, reducing your ability to concentrate on complex business problems, make innovative decisions, or remember important competitive details. We all remember times when we literally couldn't think strategically because we were scared for our businesses, our market position, our competitive future. I had days when I couldn't think strategically at all, couldn't process market data, couldn't read competitive analysis and remember what I read. Which is not my normal strategic state.
Executive Emotional Exhaustion: Living in a heightened state of business fear drains your leadership resources, leading to strategic anxiety, decision-making mood swings, and eventually competitive burnout. I was so emotionally drained I could barely function as a strategic advisor. Some days I didn't even try to engage with business challenges. The strategic joy that had pervaded my work disappeared, and my competitive emotional state became one of constant feelings of bereft business future.
Leadership Health Risks: Persistent stress raises blood pressure, weakens the immune system, and increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases—all of which compromise sustained executive performance. I'd been sick since I was a kid, but strategic stress made it worse. I was bedridden in my 50s while trying to run global business operations. Massive inflammation, chronic infections, fatigue, always respiratory issues. I was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and a few of its companions. I could barely get out of bed, and when I did, all I could think about was going back to bed instead of engaging with strategic opportunities.
Strategic Reality: Worst-case thinking fuels these business impacts. By repeatedly imagining catastrophic competitive outcomes—like losing major clients or never recovering market position—you reinforce survival-mode pathways, making it more and more difficult to shift into calmer, more innovative strategic states.
How difficult is it to focus on market opportunities when you're living in competitive darkness?
Recognizing the Signs of a Strategic Survival-Mode Brain
For many business leaders, survival mode becomes so ingrained that they don't realize they're stuck in it strategically.
Recognizing the signs is the first step to breaking free and reclaiming competitive advantage.
A Bit Of My Strategic Story
I was stuck in survival mode for most of my professional life and I didn't know it. As a child, I experienced traumatic circumstances that left me in a constant state of fear. My brain, wired for survival, treated every business situation as a potential threat.
As a professional, I worked 80-100 hours a week to prove I was worthy, which I now realize was compensation for my fear of being strategically imperfect. Imperfection meant pain and terror as a kid—and potential business failure as an adult.
Strategic Connection: My desperate need for business perfection wired my mind into strong and long survival mode. It created strategic health issues for most of my career. Now I'm peeling back the layers on chronic physical issues that affected my executive performance—things I didn't connect to my childhood survival patterns until this past year.
Watch for These Strategic Patterns
These patterns have been consistent in my own and my clients' business experiences:
Strategic "What If" Obsession: You replay business "what if" scenarios constantly, unable to let go of worst-case competitive thinking. I would go through periods when I could not think about anything other than business failure—losing everything, being professionally homeless, alone in competitive darkness like I was as a child. My mind applied my childhood reality as a threat to my adult business life to keep me on strategic high alert.
Business Stress Overreaction: You overreact to minor business stressors, as though every market inconvenience is a major competitive threat. My big strategic AHA moment was when I started paying attention to my Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and the "flinches" that signaled its response to business challenges. I got an email about a late client payment that was incorrect, and I felt my body trigger into high strategic alert. Within an hour I realized I was revving up because of market headlines, competitive conversations, strategic thoughts in my mind. Everything in my business world was triggering survival mode, and I never knew it.
Physical Executive Symptoms: You experience persistent physical symptoms that affect business performance, like tight shoulders during board meetings, stomach problems before strategic presentations, or unexplained fatigue that kills innovation. Over time, the symptoms become chronic and your immune system becomes so weak you can't fight off anything—affecting your ability to sustain high-performance leadership.
These signs are your brain's way of telling you it's stuck in strategic survival mode.
The good news? You don't have to stay there, and your competitive advantage doesn't have to suffer.
Why You're Not Stuck in Strategic Survival Mode
Neuroplasticity, the same process that wires business fear into the brain, also allows us to rewire for strategic resilience and competitive calm. This means you're not stuck with the defensive patterns your brain has learned—you have the power to create new strategic thinking patterns.
How do you do that strategically?
Your strategic focus and attention create mindware programs. We create business challenges because we focus our attention on something that is competitively scary, that makes us extremely anxious about market position. We fixate on it. Market crash news, competitive threat news, economic disruption news, regulatory change news, supply chain crisis news. It's all around business leaders and we get sucked in—and hooked into this defensive cycle. The more attention you give strategic threats, the more of them come into your mind.
Strategic Mind Shift: You change the business pattern when you change your strategic focus and attention. It really is that simple, and that difficult for competitive minds. You spent a long time focusing on business threats, so it can take a while to shift that strategic pattern.
It takes commitment, but you can develop strategic resilience.
Here's a simple technique to get your strategic mind started:
Pay attention to your strategic attention. When you catch yourself paying attention to something negative about business or markets, STOP.
Strategic Daydream. Create a successful business scenario in your mind where you are strategically safe, the market is as you want it, and you are leading as you want. Detail it in every competitive way... See it, feel it, hear, taste and smell your business success. Crank it up until it's a sensory experience that feels absolutely real.
Practice Strategic Visualization. Daydream about business success often. Create more amazing competitive scenarios in your mind.
THEN,
Whenever you catch yourself focused on business negatives—go to one of your successful strategic places; live in it, breathe in it, immerse yourself in competitive success. STAY in it for a few minutes.
Then go on with your strategic day. Pay attention and repeat the above whenever you catch yourself in a fearful business thought pattern.
You'll shift the strategic pattern over time with consistency, attention and practice.
If you want to know more about using your attention strategically, check out my free ebook, The Power Of Attention.
If you want more techniques to shift your business thinking out of panic and back under strategic control, check out my free ebook, 7 Mindshifts to Take Back Control of Your Life.
I'm always available to help business leaders as well if you need strategic guidance or advice. Just reach out on my website.
The Strategic Bottom Line
When business feels out of control, fear is a natural response.
But you're not at the mercy of your strategic survival mind. Regardless of how dire competitive conditions may feel.
With the right strategic focus, attention and commitment, you can rewire your mind to move beyond business fear, break free from worst-case competitive thinking, and reclaim control over your strategic advantage.
Your competitive choice: Will you let survival mind destroy your strategic thinking, or will you master the mental patterns that create sustainable competitive advantage?
You deserve strategic mastery.
Ready to break free from survival-mode thinking that limits your competitive advantage? Let's discuss how to rewire your strategic mind for sustained high performance and market leadership.
