Ask someone how they perform under pressure while they're sitting comfortably and you get a confident answer. Measure it and it's "usually something vastly different." The security version writes itself: everybody swears they'd never click a phishing link, and in a calm room that's true. Add some stress, take away some mental capacity, and they click. Katie sees five things people do when the pressure lands. Drivers take control and forget to check they have the information. Analysts slow everything down. Harmonisers make sure every voice is heard while sitting on the answer. Shifters bounce to the next thing. Sprinters carry everyone and leave people behind. Which is best? Wrong question. "What does the situation actually call for?"

She used to run these sessions in boardrooms with everyone "sitting there having their tea, having their biscuits." Then real pressure landed on their teams and "everything they learned just went out the window." You don't rise to the level of your training, you fall to the level of your instinct, and Katie has a name for it: "You've got a set point of how you behave under pressure." Habits built years ago, sometimes in childhood, now running your boardroom. It cuts the other way too. Learn something under pressure and your brain links the feeling to the memory, so the feeling can pull it back. Think of a moment that made you cringe. You've never done it again, have you?

The first sign of stress isn't performance dropping. It's a change of habit: working later, answering messages at night, quietly giving up sleep and exercise. Output often goes up, you get praised for it, and now it's the standard, while "the rest of the team's picking up that slack, so it's actually draining their capacity." That's where the expensive mistakes come from... "we've just given all our bank details to these guys and now we're losing a million." And fear? Asked whether it supports anything positive, she said no and stopped. Survival mode, tunnel vision, running on the limbic brain rather than the analytical one. "All you're going to be seeing is threats."