Breaking the Cycle of Reacting: How to Shift Your Mindset

This is the story of Jannie, a client who came to coaching weeks after a gut-punch moment in her career. Her manager pulled her off a high-profile project, citing insufficient progress, and she feared she was about to lose her job. Instead, she was handed a choice: take an exit package or move to a different role. Either way, it felt like failure — and it reinforced a story she’d been carrying for years, that she wasn’t good enough and had to keep proving herself.

In our sessions, Jannie realized she had two options: stay stuck in the disappointment or work through it and find the lesson inside it. She chose the harder path. She asked for feedback, including from colleagues she didn’t get along with and had clashed with in the past. That wasn’t easy to hear. But she stayed open, listened without arguing, and thanked people for their honesty instead of defending herself.

That willingness to sit with discomfort paid off. She uncovered blind spots she hadn’t seen before, and for the first time in a situation like this, she chose to stay and grow rather than retreat, as she’d done in the past.

Two weeks later, nothing about her circumstances had changed — but she had. That shift in mindset, not a shift in the situation, was the real turning point. It raised a question worth asking any leader: how do you anchor that kind of learning so it’s there the next time you start to spiral, feel the need to prove yourself, or dig in and lose sight of the bigger picture?

An Acronym for the Moment of Spiral: ASAP

Jannie and I built a simple framework for exactly that moment — the one where urgency takes over and everything feels like it has to happen ASAP. That urgency is often the tell: when we feel we have to deliver, overcompensate, or prove something right now, we’ve usually already left the productive mindset and started reacting instead of responding.

Awareness. Notice what’s happening in you — the fear of failure, the urge to prove yourself, the instinct to push harder when things go sideways, the sense that a colleague disagreement is a battle to win. This is also the moment to notice your strengths and whether you’re overusing one in a way that’s working against you.

This is the moment, physiologically, when many leaders lose access to their best thinking. Psychologist Daniel Goleman described this pattern decades ago: under a strong enough emotional threat, the brain’s alarm system can override the part responsible for rational, deliberate thought — a pattern now widely known in leadership circles as an “amygdala hijack.” Recognizing that you’re in it is the first step out of it.

Stop. Take a breath. Recognize that pushing harder isn’t going to change the outcome. Pause, step back, and shift from reacting to reflecting — curiosity instead of fear.

Ask. Pull yourself out of the spiral with better questions. A few that work well:

•        What is the real problem I’m trying to solve?

•        What might my colleagues think the problem is?

•        What’s another perspective I haven’t considered?

•        What am I missing?

•        Who else could I learn from here?

Pursue a path. Choose a new direction based on what those questions surfaced. This is where you move from reacting to being in choice — and it’s backed by more than intuition. Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks found that how we frame a stressful moment measurably changes how well we perform in it: people who consciously reinterpreted their anxiety, rather than trying to suppress or calm it, performed better under pressure across public speaking, math, and other high-stakes tasks. The reframe itself — not the removal of the stress — is what created the advantage.

Where to Start

Awareness is the piece that makes everything else possible. Without it, we can’t shift our mindset, our thinking, or our path — and we’re left repeating the same patterns, even the ones that aren’t serving us. Once you have awareness, you have choice: keep spiraling and let the primitive brain drive, or get curious, ask better questions, and pursue a new path.

That new path deserves the same scrutiny as the old one. Take a step back and check: is it working, or is it leading to more fear and frustration? That check is the learning loop — the thing that keeps you moving forward instead of back into the same cycle.

ASAP, at a Glance

•        Awareness — Name the emotion: fear of failure, the urge to prove yourself, doubling down.

•        Stop — Pause and breathe before you act.

•        Ask — What’s the real problem? What am I missing? What’s another view?

•        Pursue a path — Choose a direction aligned with your values, then check whether it’s working.

Jannie’s shift didn’t come from a change in circumstances. It came from a change in how she saw them.  That’s the work — and it’s available to any leader willing to get curious about their own next spiral before it takes over.

At Northridge Executive Partners, this is the work we do with leaders every day — helping them build the self-awareness and mindset shifts that turn moments of pressure into their best decisions. If you’re ready to break your own cycle, let’s talk.

Michelle Scott, Master Certified Executive Coach and President of Northridge Executive Partners