Hi Reader.
I caught myself feeling rushed the other day, moving faster than I needed to, feeling behind without being able to point to a single reason why. Nothing was actually happening. No one was waiting on me. No deadline was looming. And yet, there it was, that familiar tightness that says you should be doing more or doing it better. I remember stopping and thinking how strange it was to feel that much pressure when no one had actually asked anything of me.
And it got me thinking...
Most pressure does not arrive loudly. It does not come with a speech, a demand, or a clear moment where someone says, “Here is what I expect from you.” It shows up quietly. It sneaks in through assumptions, comparisons, and stories we start telling ourselves without ever realizing when they began. By the time we notice it, the pressure already feels real, heavy, and personal.
Jonathan Haidt often talks about how environments shape behavior long before awareness ever catches up. That idea fits here. Pressure is rarely created by a single moment. It is created by the environment we move through every day and the signals we absorb without realizing we are absorbing them. When expectations are vague, the mind fills in the gaps, usually in the harshest way possible.
That is what makes this kind of pressure so tricky. No one officially handed it to us. There was no conversation. No agreement. And yet, it sits there anyway, shaping how we move, how we think, and how we judge ourselves. Doug Lemov writes about clarity being one of the greatest reducers of anxiety. When expectations are clear, people settle. When they are not, pressure rushes in to fill the space.
A lot of this pressure grows out of expectations that were never actually spoken. We start filling in the blanks. We decide what we think others want from us. We assume what success should look like by now. We create timelines in our heads and then quietly punish ourselves for not matching them. Patrick Lencioni often reminds leaders that assumptions are the fastest way to erode trust. That includes trust with ourselves.
Comparison adds another layer. We look around and convince ourselves that everyone else is ahead, more confident, more prepared, more settled. We compare our behind the scenes to someone else’s highlight and then wonder why we feel so tight and uneasy. No one tells us to do this. We just do it automatically. Over time, that comparison becomes another invisible weight we carry without questioning where it came from.
Pressure does not need to be accurate to be effective. It only needs to feel believable.
The problem is not pressure itself. Some pressure can be useful. The problem is carrying pressure we never agreed to carry in the first place. Pressure that was built silently, reinforced internally, and never checked. Naming it matters. Not to eliminate it, but to see it clearly. Once pressure stops being vague, it loses some of its grip.
I was reminded of this recently while watching a young athlete before a competition. No one was yelling. No one was demanding. Everything on the surface looked calm. But you could see it in the way they were moving. Tight shoulders. Short breaths. Rushing through warmups. When I asked what was wrong, the answer surprised me. “Nothing,” they said. “I just don’t want to mess this up.” No one had said they would. No one had threatened anything. The pressure was already there, fully formed, before anyone asked a single thing of them.
That moment stuck with me because it happens everywhere, not just in sports. We carry pressure into rooms, conversations, practices, meetings, and relationships long before anyone places expectations on us. Sometimes the most important work is not pushing harder, but pausing long enough to ask where that pressure came from in the first place.
So this week, notice it. The moments where you feel rushed, behind, or heavy without a clear reason. Ask yourself a simple question: did someone actually put this pressure here, or did it show up before anyone asked? That awareness alone can change how much weight you are carrying.
Sometimes the pressure we need to let go of is the pressure we never consciously chose at all.
