Why smart leaders lose it during meetings

High-pressure situations at work, like an important meeting, are often the backdrop for our most reactive professional moments. In 2025 nearly two-thirds (60%) of employees who spent more than 15 hours a week in meetings reported experiencing severe stress levels, according to a Wiley Workplace Intelligence report. When conflict arises, our bodies often react before our brains. You might lose your temper, lose your words, or find yourself anxiously agreeing to something that you don’t actually have capacity to do. It can feel deeply frustrating, and even shameful, when your responses feel impulsive and out of your control. But is it the stressful meeting itself that causes our reactivity, or are we bringing it into the room before the meeting has even started? In today’s “infinite workday” (the term coined by Microsoft in their 2025 Work Trend Index) of constant emails, meetings, and notifications, staff are already stressed and on the back foot. In this reactive state, you’re expecting the worst—listening out for annoyances, slights, and irritations. In my experience as an executive coach, our reactivity can go even deeper than that. It’s a survival response laid down long before you got your current job title. What does reactivity look like? Reactivity in high pressure meetings manifests as freeze, fight, or fawn. Freezing doesn’t always look like paralysis. It’s going quiet when you have something to say. Fighting doesn’t always look like aggression. It’s a sharpness in your voice that you catch a beat too late. And fawning is agreeing when you don’t, accommodating when you’re seething, making yourself smaller in a room where you have every right to take up space. What starts as occasional reactivity can become reflexive, meaning that your body has learned this response as the path of least resistance. There’s a gap between what high-achieving leaders expect of themselves and what they actually have available when it counts. Wh