What if the best thing you could do right before the hardest conversation of your week was… relax?

It still confuses me – but I have experience that this works. Stay with me.

My husband Simon has been training in martial arts for eight years. In the early days, the feedback was what you’d expect. Kick higher. Watch your form. Take a wider stance.

But as he’s progressed in his black belt journey, the most consistent thing he hears – no matter what he’s doing in the dojo – is:

Relax, Simon. Relax.

Not a skill correction. A state of mind correction.

I hear the same from tennis commentators. She seems tighter than usual. I wonder if she can reset. They’re not questioning her ability. They know she must change her state of mind to have a chance of winning.

Here’s what founders and leaders rarely consider: before you say a word, your state of mind has already spoken. You walk into a room tense, and the room reorganizes around it. The person across from you braces. The conversation you were hoping to have is already harder – and you haven’t opened your mouth yet.

The other thing tension costs you is precision. A tense leader lands harder than they intend. In the dojo, that means hurting your sparring partner (and often, in return, they’ll hit you back harder as well).

In your world, it means saying the thing you can’t take back or shutting down the person you most needed to hear from.

Relaxation isn’t going soft. It’s how you stay in control of what you’re actually trying to do.

Chris Voss spent 24 years as an FBI hostage negotiator. Today he teaches executives and leaders the same techniques he used in the field. His signature move isn’t a clever line or a tactical maneuver.

It’s a voice.

He calls it the late-night FM DJ voice – calm, slow, measured. His reasoning: calm is contagious. When you use it, you hit the other person’s mirror neurons and slow their brain down – involuntarily. They can’t help it.

Same principle. Different rooms.

  • The sensei says relax.
  • The tennis commentator watches to see if she can reset.
  • Voss teaches leaders to embody calm so completely that the other person’s nervous system follows.

This isn’t soft advice. It’s what the highest-stakes practitioners – martial artists, elite athletes, executives in the room where everything is on the line – all landed on independently.

So back to the question.

What if the best thing you could do right before the hardest conversation of your week was relax?

Not because it’s comfortable. Not because the stakes aren’t real.

Because your state of mind is the first thing in the room. And everyone else is already responding to it.

Until next time,
Margalit