Why We're Risking So Little But Still Expecting So Much

I keep noticing a concerning pattern in my practice. Client after client is bracing. Waiting for the next disruption, the next thing that confirms it isn't safe to relax yet. And still, they want the big life. The great presentation. The promotion. The keynote slot at the conference that actually matters. Ambition hasn't gone anywhere. What's disappeared is the willingness to do the work that ambition used to require.

TL;DR: There's real research behind this feeling that something has shifted. It shows up in how uncertainty rewires our appetite for risk, in why so-called "safety" behaviors quietly keep us stuck rather than protect us, and in why effortful practice has always felt this unpleasant, pandemic or no pandemic. None of it means your instinct to brace is wrong. It means the bracing itself may be the thing standing between you and the presence you're trying to build.

Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between a pandemic and a headline

Is this pandemic residue, or something broader? National instability, global instability, the sense that the ground keeps shifting? The research suggests it's less "either/or" and more "same mechanism, different trigger." A study that tracked people's decision-making patterns through the early months of COVID-19 found that people who already showed a stronger aversion to uncertainty in behavioral tasks went on to report higher perceived threat and more anxiety as the pandemic unfolded. Those who found uncertainty hardest to tolerate stayed reactive longest, with their sense of danger continuing to grow over the following two months even as circumstances weren't necessarily getting worse.[1]

What's notable is that this isn't specific to a virus. It's a trait-level sensitivity to not knowing, and once that sensitivity is activated, it doesn't need the original threat to keep firing. A contentious headline, an unstable market, an unpredictable client will do just fine. Your instrument (your voice, your body, your presence) is the thing that has to function in front of other people regardless of what your nervous system thinks is coming next. That's precisely why it's the first thing to tighten.

Bracing feels protective. It's actually what keeps the threat alive.

This is the part I think gets missed most often, including by smart, capable people who would never describe themselves as anxious. In the clinical literature, the small precautions we take to feel safer in an uncertain moment (hedging a request, softening a stance, rehearsing the "safe" version of a talk instead of the true one) are called safety behaviors. They work in the short term. That's exactly the problem: engaging in a safety behavior when there's no real danger tends to backfire, reinforcing the sense of threat rather than relieving it.[2] In plain terms: the more you protect yourself from a risk that isn't actually there, the more real that risk starts to feel.

I see this constantly in the room. A client already has the content, the credibility, the argument. What they don't have is permission to actually inhabit it: to let their voice carry weight, to hold a pause, to be seen wanting something. So they hedge. They flatten. They read from the deck instead of speaking to the room. Every one of those small acts of self-protection is a safety behavior, and every one of them quietly confirms to the nervous system that presence itself is dangerous.

See if you recognize this in yourself right now

Safety behaviors rarely announce themselves. They feel like professionalism, or preparation, or just being careful. So take a moment and actually check. Are you speaking a little faster than you need to, so no one has time to interrupt or push back? Softening a request into a question so it can't really be refused? Rehearsing a joke or a caveat in your head right now, before you've even said the real thing, just in case it lands wrong? Reaching for an affirmation instead of actually sitting with what's underneath it, because introspection would mean staying with something uncomfortable a little longer? Keeping your hands still, your voice even, your face pleasant, because something in you has decided that any visible reaction would cost you? None of these are character flaws. They're your nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do. But each one is also a small vote for the belief that speaking plainly, taking up space, or being seen wanting something is unsafe. Noticing the behavior while you're in it is the first place anything actually changes.

The canned course is the safety behavior of professional development

This is where the appeal of YouTube tutorials, Masterclass, and canned digital trainings lands hardest for me. They aren't the problem. They're a symptom of the same bracing. A course you can pause is a course that never asks anything real of your body. It doesn't ask you to be seen not-yet-good-at-something in front of another person. It doesn't ask your voice to shake before it steadies. It is, in effect, risk management applied to becoming, and becoming has never been available at low risk.

There's a well-known body of research behind this, and it's worth knowing what it actually studied. In 1993, psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues set out to explain why some violin students at a top Berlin music academy became elite performers while others, with similar training hours logged, plateaued as merely good. The answer wasn't talent or even total hours. It was how those hours were spent. The students who reached elite status spent theirs in what Ericsson named deliberate practice: work built specifically to sharpen the weak points in current performance. It's demanding, repetitive, dependent on real feedback, and often not enjoyable while you're in it.[3]

I know this from the inside, not just from the research. Years as a professional opera singer meant hour after hour spent inside the minutiae of a phrase: the exact shape of an articulation, the placement of a breath, the emotional truth underneath a single sustained note. None of that refinement happened in isolation. It happened in a room with a trusted set of ears, a teacher or coach who could hear what I couldn't yet hear in myself, and who would send me back to the same eight bars until the sound and the meaning actually matched. That's deliberate practice in its original, literal form, and it's exactly the mechanism a video course can't replicate no matter how good the production values are.

Ericsson's research also found something people rarely want to hear: even when performers knew deliberate practice would improve them, they still avoided it, gravitating instead toward whatever felt rewarding in the moment or came with an external payoff.[4] We have always preferred the version of growth that doesn't cost anything. What's different now is how much more sophisticated the low-cost alternatives have become, and how convincingly they've been made to look like the real thing.

Working with your instrument, actually knowing how your own breath, resonance, and nervous system behave under pressure, isn't available in a format you can consume passively. It requires a witness. It requires the risk of doing it wrong in front of someone. That's not a design flaw in the coaching model. That's the mechanism.

Where this actually points

I don't think the answer is "just take more risks." That's both unhelpful and a little glib, given what the research shows about how threat perception actually works. Telling a bracing nervous system to relax rarely works from the outside in.

But there's something worth sitting with in the AI comparison. The tools proliferating right now are extraordinarily good at producing the appearance of competence: a polished script, a smoothed-over talking point, a technically correct answer. What none of them can do is stand in a room, feel the temperature of the audience shift, and adjust in real time from an internal, embodied sense of what's true. That capacity isn't a nice-to-have. It's specifically, structurally human, and it's built the same way it has always been built: through effortful, sometimes uncomfortable, repeated contact with your own instrument, ideally with someone in the room who can see what you can't.

The bracing isn't irrational. It's just optimized for a threat that presence doesn't actually pose.

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Curious how this shows up in your own speaking? Book a consult or start with The Body Leads for a first look at doing the inner work yourself.

References

1. Bottemanne, H., et al. "Computationally-defined markers of uncertainty aversion predict emotional responses during a global pandemic." PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9942526/

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2. "Safety behaviours or safety precautions? The role of subtle avoidance in anxiety disorders in the context of chronic physical illness." Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 2018. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735822000113

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3. Based on Ericsson, K. A. (2003, 2007, 2008) and Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer (1993), as summarized in "How Experts Practice: A Novel Test of Deliberate Practice Theory," American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/xlm-a0034302.pdf

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4. Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406, as summarized in "Deliberate Practice - an overview," ScienceDirect Topics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/deliberate-practice

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