Speaking / Workshops / Facilitation
What does pressure make harder to see?
I speak about what happens to capable people under pressure: how it narrows what we see, the moves we make without realizing it, and how we create enough space to choose something different.
01
The 4 Moves You Make Under Pressure
Under pressure, we reach for what has worked before.
Under pressure, capable people tend to reach for the responses that have worked before—absorbing the problem, smoothing it over, turning inward, or deciding everyone else is the problem. In this talk, Meredith introduces four patterns that help people recognize what they do automatically when the stakes go up. The goal isn’t to get rid of the pattern. It’s to catch it early enough that another choice becomes available.
02
When Strengths Become Limitations
The same thing that makes you good at what you do can become the thing that gets in your way.
The strengths that make us successful can become liabilities when we stop choosing them and start relying on them automatically. This talk looks at what happens when capability gets overused—when being dependable becomes carrying too much, keeping the peace becomes avoiding what needs to be said, or pushing forward becomes unsustainable. The work isn’t becoming less capable. It’s noticing when a strength has stopped serving you and having another move available.
03
Awareness Isn’t Enough
Knowing what you do is one thing. Catching yourself in the moment and making another choice is something else.
Most of us can describe our patterns long before we change them. This talk lives in the space between knowing and doing: how to interrupt an old response long enough for a different choice to become available.
How We Can Work Together
Keynotes
Talks for conferences, leadership forums, and internal leadership gatherings. Audiences recognize the pattern they reach for under pressure and leave with a practical way to catch it in the moment.
Interactive Sessions
Smaller, hands-on sessions where participants explore the ideas and apply them to their own leadership. People work through real situations from their roles and practice See, Interrupt, Stay together.
Team Facilitation
Working sessions built around your team’s real conversations, decisions, and ways of operating. Teams name what’s getting in the way, clarify roles and decision rights, and leave with agreements they can carry back into daily work. Selected engagements are co-led with executive coach Maggie Anderson Phelps.