There’s a concept in strength training called progressive overload.

The idea is simple: you don’t get stronger by lifting the same weight forever.

You get stronger by gradually, consistently adding more – more resistance, more reps, more range. Your muscles adapt, and what once felt heavy starts to feel manageable, then normal, then easy.

I think about pressure the same way.

When I first joined Google, the ramp-up was intense. New environment, high expectations, everything moving fast and pretty quickly I found myself feeling the anxiety and stress that I’d come to recognise as familiar.

The impostor syndrome crept in too, that quiet but persistent voice questioning whether I actually belonged there.

But this time, I also recognised something else: that this was my pattern.

It had followed me into every new role I’d ever been in, and rather than just waiting for it to pass, I wanted to do something about it. So I made two decisions that would shape a lot of what came after.

The first was the gym. I wasn’t a fitness person, and I definitely wasn’t a morning person, but I signed up for 7am classes before work because that was precisely the point. To do something hard before the day even started, and to train my mind to be okay with discomfort. 

The second was coaching. If the gym was about building resilience from the outside in, coaching was the inside work – a space to reflect, to understand myself better, to develop the self-awareness that high-pressure environments quietly demand. Both felt like investments in capacity rather than coping mechanisms. Deliberate training, not just getting by.

My first gym session, I couldn’t lift the empty bar. 20kg, no plates but it simply wasn’t happening. My trainer swapped it for a lighter compound bar so I could actually move through the motions.

I remember feeling both humbled and oddly motivated by that moment – there was nowhere to go but up and that’s exactly what happened.

Slowly, consistently, rep by rep, I got stronger. What had felt impossible became manageable, then normal, then something I genuinely looked forward to. I can now lift above my own bodyweight, but honestly, more than the physical progress, something shifted in me mentally.

I had proof, in my own body, that capacity is built and not given.

Slowly I saw how that transferred into everything else.

When other hard things came (and they did as with life), on the work front and the personal front, rarely neatly separate – I had a different relationship with pressure than I’d had before.

Not fearless, but more capable. More able to stay steady when things got heavy. The gym and the coaching had been quietly doing their work.

The pressure really is unavoidable. Life doesn’t ask permission before it gets hard – complexity arrives, stakes rise, volume piles up, distractions multiply.

The question was never really whether I’d face hard things. It was whether I’d built the capacity to carry them when they arrived.

The highest performers I’ve observed don’t just endure pressure – in fact, they seek it out and lean into it. They experience hard things, sit with them, reflect, and integrate what they’ve learned.

Over time, what once felt overwhelming becomes more manageable, and their threshold shifts not because the challenges got smaller, but because they got bigger.

That growth doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of accumulated reps of hard things met, carried, and learned from.

What I’ve also come to understand is that there’s a real risk in staying the same.

Just like not exercising a muscle doesn’t keep it where it is, it atrophies. If you consistently avoid stress and stay in the safe zone, your capacity quietly shrinks.

Ordinary demands start to feel heavy. Routine pressure starts to feel like crisis. The baseline shifts, just in the wrong direction.

So I keep looking for the harder path when I know it builds something – the conversation I’ve been avoiding, the role with more at stake, the 7am class when everything in me would rather stay in bed.

I also try to reflect on the hard seasons rather than just survive them, because the reflection is part of what makes the experience stick.

Mental fitness isn’t a fixed trait. It’s something that can be built gradually, consistently, proactively – the same way exercise is something one has to commit to for the long run.

The goal was never to become immune to pressure because that is impossible and challenges are inevitable. It was always to keep expanding what I’m capable of holding.