One moment, my thinking is clear. The next, I can hear myself over-explaining a point I understood perfectly well thirty seconds earlier. I become more careful. More managed. Slightly less myself.
Twenty years in strategic communication, and I still drift. We all do.
Pressure does something very specific to us, and we still don’t talk about it honestly enough. We talk about messaging. Stakeholder management. Gravitas. Executive presence. Confidence and influence.
What we talk far less about is what actually happens to us when the pressure rises. The specific, familiar shift that most of us know from the inside but rarely talk about.
And there are reasons we don’t. Some of us genuinely don’t notice it happening. Some of us notice and would rather not look at it too closely. Admitting that our communication shifts under pressure is not a comfortable conversation. So some of us just default to what feels more manageable: overprepare the arguments, add more slides, work on the body language. Practical things that we feel we can control.
The thing is, none of it works on its own. People in the room don’t separate the message from the person delivering it. They experience it as one thing. And when pressure changes how we show up, everything we prepared changes with it.
We hold on too tight to the message. We turn up the certainty volume. We take over the conversation instead of staying in it. Or we go the other way. We start overthinking. We hold things back because the thought doesn’t feel ready, or the timing feels off, or we’re not sure it’ll land. And then the moment passes, and the thing we probably should have said never comes out.
Either way, something shifts. We’re still talking, but we’re not quite there anymore. And the version of us that would actually land – the one that’s grounded and open – doesn’t get into the room.
That’s what I mean by drift.
Drift is often quiet, familiar and easy to miss from the inside. In the moment, it can even feel responsible. Professional. Controlled. You think you’re helping the conversation along. You think you’re doing what the room requires.
Meanwhile, people are reading something else.
People respond to how we come across. They notice when we’re listening and when we’re just waiting for our turn to talk. They notice when we’re genuinely in the conversation and when we’re trying to control it. They might not be able to name it. They respond to it immediately, instinctively, and with consequences.
Communication isn’t just what we say. It’s how we say it, how it lands as the conversation unfolds, how people experience us while we’re saying it. The gap between intent and impact opens most often in what happens to us and not the message.
The consequences of drift are rarely immediate and rarely obvious. That’s what makes them so costly.
A conversation that seemed fine doesn’t land in reality. Alignment looks stronger in the moment than it turns out to be a week later. A decision that seemed made starts falling apart. Someone stays quiet because the conversation didn’t feel open enough to say something unfinished. A team signs off on a direction and spends the next month working around the doubts nobody raised. You deliver a compelling case and walk out assuming buy-in. Only to find out later that it didn’t land the way you thought.
This is where trust easily starts to crack. In small, quiet shifts that nobody names at the time.
And here’s the part that’s hard to admit: the more senior we get, the less likely we are to hear about it. People don’t tell you when your delivery shifted. They don’t say “you lost me when you started managing the conversation.” They disengage. Slightly. Politely. In ways that look like agreement and turn out to be distance.
The more we try to sound right, the easier we become to misread. That’s the real cost of drift. We say the right thing — and something in the delivery makes it harder for people to stay in the conversation with us.
So what actually helps?
Usually the opposite of what most of us focus on first. Most of us go back to the message. Rework the slides. Rehearse the talking points.
Sometimes useful. Often the wrong place to start because the message was rarely the whole problem.
Over the years, I’ve found three things that change more outcomes than any amount of message work:
Catch the shift before it reaches the words.
Drift happens in the body before it shows up in the language. The pace changes. The breathing gets shallow. The listening shrinks. You start hearing yourself instead of hearing the room. If you can notice that shift in real time — while it’s happening — you have a choice. It’s easy to miss. We react, and the conversation narrows from there.
This is the difference between leading a conversation and being carried by it. The ones who handle pressure well aren’t the ones who never drift. They’re the ones who catch it early enough to come back.
Stay with what you actually think.
Under pressure, there’s a pull towards the safer answer. The polished version. The one that sounds right but costs you something in precision. Drift often starts there — in the small moment where we edit ourselves before we’ve even spoken. The thought doesn’t feel ready. The timing feels off. The ones who hold the most traction in difficult conversations are usually the ones willing to say the thing that isn’t fully formed yet — because that’s what invites others to think with them, rather than just listen.
Prepare for the pressure, not just the content.
Most high-stakes preparation is about the argument. The data. The anticipated objections. Key messages and the bridge back to them. Almost none of it is about what you’ll do when the pressure rises and your delivery starts to shift. What will you do when the room goes quiet? When a question catches you off guard? When you feel yourself tightening?
There’s an irony worth naming. Most of what we’ve been taught about high-stakes communication is, in itself, a form of drift. Manage the narrative. Control the message. Project confidence. Stay on point.
All of it well-intended. But when we come under pressure, it can pull us away from what actually builds trust – being present enough that people can engage with us and open enough that the conversation becomes useful.
That’s what my book is about.
Authentic Presence in Executive Communication – forthcoming with Routledge, Autumn 2026.
Because most of us aren’t bad communicators. We drift under pressure. And that difference changes more than the message. It changes what those around us trust, say and do next.