When the pressure is high and the pace is relentless, your brain will try to work against you. Here’s what to watch for.
I was working with a senior leader recently. Talented, experienced, the kind of person her organization depends on. And she said something that stopped me cold:
“I just don’t think I’m cut out for this role.”
She’d had a rough quarter. A major initiative hadn’t landed the way she’d hoped. Two of her strongest people were being pulled toward other priorities. And she was navigating an executive team that seemed to be communicating less the more pressure mounted.
Anyone who’s been through a stretch like that knows the feeling: Is it me? Am I the problem?
She was not the problem. And she was cut out for her role. But in that moment, she had fallen into one of the most common thinking traps for leaders: letting a hard stretch become a judgment about her identity.
Thinking traps are patterns of distorted thinking that feel true in the moment but lead us away from clear judgment and effective action. They’re not new. Over the years, I’ve seen them surface constantly in my coaching work. But these days they’re feeling more common than ever. Right now, leaders are navigating unprecedented complexity, uncertainty and change. Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries faster than most organizations can adapt. Teams are distributed, attention is fractured, and the pace of change has made the job of leading more cognitively demanding than at any other point in my 17-plus years in this work.
Under that kind of pressure, even excellent leaders stop thinking clearly. Trying to protect them from threat, their brains start generating narratives that are unhelpful and just plain wrong.
Why Thinking Traps Hit Leaders Especially Hard Right Now
What makes us vulnerable to thinking traps? You know firsthand that when you’re physically depleted—running on too little sleep, skipping meals, neglecting exercise—your brain feels foggy. That fogginess isn’t just your perception. The exhausted brain shifts into a more reactive mode. The prefrontal cortex, which handles sound judgment, perspective-taking and long-range thinking, gets crowded out by the more threat-sensitive parts of the brain. We stop being strategic. We start being stressed. And the traps follow almost automatically.
The stressed leader reacts instead of responds. Catastrophizes instead of assesses. Assumes the worst about other people’s intentions. Swings between taking on all the blame and deflecting responsibility entirely. Makes decisions they wouldn’t make with a full night’s sleep and a clear head.
The stressed leader operates from urgency—constantly pulled toward what’s loudest and most immediate. The strategic leader protects time for what’s actually important, makes decisions from a position of clarity and builds shared ownership with their team instead of hoarding control or abandoning it.
Thinking traps keep leaders stuck in stress mode. Getting unstuck starts with learning to recognize them.
The 7 Thinking Traps
These seven traps are well-documented in research, and I see versions of all of them regularly in my executive coaching work. Take a moment now to read through them with honest curiosity: Which ones feel familiar? Where do you recognize yourself?
1. Personalizing: Taking the Blame for Things You Don’t Control
What it sounds like: My team is struggling because I haven’t figured out how to lead them through this level of change.
When you personalize, you accept full responsibility for outcomes that are actually the result of several factors—some of which have nothing to do with you.
This trap is especially damaging because it’s common among leaders who care deeply. When things go wrong, they turn inward immediately. They see a client departure—or a disengaged team member, or an initiative that didn’t land—as evidence of their failure.
For some leaders, personalizing might feel like a virtue because they think they’re holding themselves accountable. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, claiming ownership of every variable prevents them from seeing the full picture of what went wrong and finding better solutions going forward.
The reframe:
When something goes wrong, get curious before you get self-critical. Ask yourself: “What evidence supports that this was because of me—and what doesn’t?” You can take genuine responsibility for your contribution without shouldering the weight of everything that was never yours to carry.
2. Externalizing: Handing Your Power to Forces Outside You
What it sounds like: The market shifted. The board kept changing the priorities. The leadership team is dysfunctional, not me.
Externalizing is the mirror image of personalizing, and it’s just as dangerous. It means placing responsibility for your outcomes entirely outside yourself, and in doing so, giving up what you actually control: your own choices and responses.
I’ve watched genuinely skilled leaders stall out because they were so focused on what was being done to them that they never stopped to ask what they could do in response. And I get it—leaders are dealing with a lot right now. AI disruption, competitive pressure, a complicated talent market. Those are real forces. But leaders who get stuck here stop learning, stop adapting and eventually stop leading. They become spectators in their own situation.
The reframe:
What evidence supports that this situation was because of others or external factors—and what doesn’t? Name honestly what is outside your control. Then turn your attention to your own role. You almost certainly have more influence than it feels like right now.
3. Magnifying and Minimizing: Turning Up the Bad, Turning Down the Good
What it sounds like: We lost that account—this whole quarter has been a disaster. Their positive feedback was just them being polite.
When you turn up the volume on the negatives and turn it down on the positives, you get a distorted sense of your performance and your situation.
We work with a lot of high performers, who are particularly vulnerable to this thinking trap. The same high standards that drive them to excellence can make it nearly impossible to let a success land. One difficult client interaction overshadows a dozen strong ones. A single critical comment in a performance review drowns out months of genuine praise.
You can’t deploy your strengths more deliberately if you can’t see them clearly. Overanalyzing your failures while treating your successes as flukes isn’t humility—it’s leading from incomplete data.
The reframe:
Before you analyze what went wrong, identify what went right. Not as a feel-good exercise, but as a data-collection exercise. What specifically worked, and why?
4. Overgeneralizing: Mistaking a Moment for a Trend
What it sounds like: Every time we try something new, it fails. We’ve never been able to retain strong people here.
Overgeneralizing means drawing broad conclusions from limited evidence—and then treating those conclusions as fixed facts about yourself, your team or your organization.
One difficult presentation becomes “I’m a poor presenter.” A failed initiative becomes “We’re not good at executing new ideas.” Once we get set on those conclusions, they close off the possibility of fresh solutions. If you’ve already decided something “never” works, you stop looking for new approaches.
The reframe:
Replace “always,” “never” and “every time” with “this time” or “in this situation.” One data point is information. It’s not a pattern. And it’s certainly not a verdict about who you are or what you’re capable of.
5. Mind Reading: Assuming the Worst Without Asking
What it sounds like: I haven’t heard from her—she must think my proposal is a bad idea. He was quiet in that meeting; I know he’s frustrated with me.
Mind reading means assuming you know what someone else is thinking—and almost always assuming the worst.
As pressure and stress increase, so does the pull of this trap. When people are busy, communication breaks down. Emails don’t get returned promptly. Leaders get left out of meetings. They feel “in the dark,” and they instinctively start looking for patterns that might explain what’s happening. The stressed mind rushes in with a story, and it’s almost always a negative one—more about our own fears and insecurities than the actual situation.
I’ve seen mind reading cost leaders critical relationships, because they pulled back from someone based on a conclusion that had no basis in fact. I’ve also seen it cost organizations real momentum, because a leader assumed a key stakeholder was skeptical without ever testing that assumption.
The reframe:
Make it a practice to ask rather than assume. “I noticed you were quiet in that meeting—what was on your mind?” takes 10 seconds and can save hours of mental energy spent on a story that may not be true.
6. Emotional Reasoning: Treating Feelings as Facts
What it sounds like: I feel overwhelmed, so this must be an impossible situation. I’m anxious about this, which must mean I’m not ready.
Emotional reasoning means treating your emotional state as evidence about external reality, when in fact it’s only evidence about your internal state.
Emotions are real and they matter. But they are not always accurate reporters about what is happening around you. A leader who feels overwhelmed isn’t necessarily in an unmanageable situation. They may be depleted—physically or emotionally—or working without the right support, or simply in a chapter that calls for a different approach.
I see emotional reasoning showing up frequently around AI right now. Leaders who feel behind on understanding how AI is changing their industry often conclude, based on that feeling alone, that they aren’t equipped to lead through change. That feeling is worth paying attention to: It might be telling you to learn more, to ask for help, to slow down. But it’s not proof that you’re in the wrong seat.
The reframe:
Separate the feeling from the conclusion. “I feel overwhelmed” is a signal that something needs to shift. But “this is impossible” is a claim that deserves evidence before you act on it. Feelings are data, not verdicts.
7. Catastrophizing: Jumping Straight to Disaster
What it sounds like: If we don’t nail this next presentation, we could lose everything we’ve built. If I don’t figure out this AI transition, I’m going to lose my job.
Catastrophizing means jumping from a difficult present moment to a worst-case future—and then responding to the imagined disaster as if it’s already happening. When the environment is uncertain, the brain tries to protect itself by reaching for worst-case scenarios: If I imagine the disaster, maybe I can prevent it. But a mind that’s busy managing an imagined catastrophe can’t think clearly about the actual situation in front of it.
This is the energy drain I see most often in my work with senior leaders. I recently worked with a leadership team navigating intense pressure from key stakeholders—the kind of environment where every quarterly review felt high-stakes. They were spending enormous energy on contingency planning for outcomes that were unlikely, while the real issue—a cadence of communication with the stakeholders that was creating more anxiety than it resolved—went unaddressed. They were managing the wrong fire.
The reframe:
Bring yourself back to right now. Not the 17th step, not the worst-case outcome. Just the next concrete action. What is the first thing you need to do? Focus there. You can’t solve a problem you haven’t arrived at yet.
The Practice: From Stressed Leader to Strategic Leader
Thinking traps are not a sign of weakness or inadequacy. They’re a sign of being human—and of being in a demanding role. Every leader I’ve worked with, at every level of every organization, has experienced some version of every trap on this list. I have too.
We can’t stop our brains from generating these patterns. But we can take back our power by learning to recognize them and developing the habits that help us find our way back to clear thinking.
If you recognize yourself in one or more of the traps on this list, take that as a signal—not that something is wrong with you, but that you need a reset. Start with the physical foundations of self-care. You might be tired of reminders to get more sleep, but it really can change so much. So can real meals and regular movement. When you’re running on empty, every trap hits harder and faster. Protect your energy the way you’d protect any other strategic resource.
Then build the noticing habit. This week, pick one trap from the list—the one that seems to always snare you. Then, just once, catch yourself when you’ve fallen in. You don’t have to fix it immediately. Just notice it. Name it. And then ask yourself what you would say to a trusted colleague who was thinking this way.
You probably wouldn’t tell them the one bad quarter defined their career. You probably wouldn’t tell them that a silent inbox meant a lost relationship. Or that the worst-case outcome was inevitable.
You’d help them see the fuller picture. You’d remind them what they’re good at. You’d tell them the truth with kindness.
Give yourself the same clarity and compassion you’d give someone you respect.
Ready to Go Deeper?
When leaders are stuck in stress mode, the cost shows up in retention, decision-making and the performance of entire teams. For more than 17 years, we’ve helped leaders and organizations across industries build the skills to lead strategically through complexity and change. If you’re seeing these patterns in yourself or your leadership team, let’s talk. Reach out at neena@newberrysolutions.com, learn more about coaching and other offerings or explore New Lens®, our award-winning leadership development platform, at www.newlensleadership.com.
