In 2019, while I was doing my MBA, I was sitting in a conference room on the INSEAD Singapore campus with my study group: four other students and Rudi, our leadership development coach. The exercise that day was to provide feedback to the members of our group about what it had been like to be with each other and complete homework assignments together over the first four months of the program.

When I read mine, a pattern came up from three of my four groupmates: they had felt that I was moving so fast and seemed so busy that they hadn't had the opportunity to connect with me and spend quality time with me in the way that they had desired.

I was surprised. I felt like we had some strong bonds and I didn’t recall rejecting anyone. To dig a little deeper, I asked them: why hadn't they reached out, asked me to hang out, stopped me to talk?

That almost unanimous observation definitely stopped me in my tracks.

I am an extrovert. I love people, I love connecting with them, and having time in my life for those that are important to me. If they didn't feel like they could connect with me, who else felt the same but didn't have the space to tell me that? Who else wanted to reach out but never did, not because I had turned them down, but because I had never seemed available enough for them to ask?

In high-pressure environments, the brain doesn't give equal weight to everything in front of it. It can't. Herbert Simon, an economist who studied how people make decisions under information overload, described it this way:

What gets filtered out first are the quieter signals: the colleague who is unusually quiet in a meeting where they're normally the first to speak, the friend who says "I'm fine" a beat too fast, the person who walked out of the room before you had a chance to ask how they were doing.

Ellen Kossek, an organizational psychologist who has spent decades studying how people manage the boundary between work and the rest of their lives, found that the problem isn't time. It's the gap between where you are physically and where your mind is. When we come home still processing the last decision of the day or sit at dinner with half our attention on a thread we didn't close, the people in front of us can feel the distance even when we can't.

I see it in the people I work with. The strongest leaders in a high-pressure room aren't the fastest. They're the ones who notice when someone is off baseline – a team member’s responses that are becoming curt, dark circles under a colleague’s eyes that look like they haven’t been sleeping, and the high performer of the team who suddenly shows up checked out. That kind of observation requires presence, and presence is the first thing to be lost when everything seems urgent.

A client recently told me he had been very much in his head with tax season, getting things in order at work, and all the various responsibilities he holds as a husband and father. He felt very focused on himself when his desire was to get out of himself and move towards others. He wanted to be open instead of closed. 

What he shared brought me right back to that conference room in Singapore. When we are carrying a lot, our focus turns toward what we're carrying, and away from what the people around us might need help carrying.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much in my head I was and how fast I was moving from one point to another throughout my day. By always thinking about the next thing or the next place, I was never in the moment. This meant that even when I was around people, I wasn't sitting with them in presence. 

In that room, reading those sheets, what I felt first was surprise, like I was seeing for the first time something everyone around me had been seeing for a while. Then, it was something closer to shame: that my speed was creating an energetic frequency that pushed people away instead of pulling them in. I didn't, and don't want to be the person who is too busy or unattainable for others.

I still move fast sometimes. I still catch myself thinking about the next place I need to be while I'm still in the current one. It's not something I solved in Singapore, but it’s something I notice more quickly and can shift out of in minutes.

I think about the two speeds I can personally function at.

The first, very in my head, functioning fast, moving efficiently from point A to point B, always thinking about the next thing.

And then there's the other speed, which is the version of me that I actually prefer. The version of me that is slower, grounded, and more aware of my surroundings. At that speed, I have the time and space to open the rest of my body to the people in my life: open my ears, open my eyes, open my heart, even open my arms for a hug.

Something I know for a fact: the faster I move, the faster time seems to fly, and the harder it is for my brain to remember what happened last week, yesterday, this morning. When I slow down, time expands, and shared moments stick in my memory with feelings and sensations.

It's the difference between a dinner at a restaurant where you get kicked out after an hour and a half for the next table to be seated, and the dinner at a friend's place where four hours in you're still on the couch sipping a digestif. It's the difference between the fast walk around the neighborhood between two meetings, and the catch-up walk with a friend around Lady Bird Lake that turned into a two-hour loop.

When I become aware I'm moving too fast, I like to ask the people around me: what's something from your day or week I might have missed? It gives the other person the opportunity to share something top of mind for them that might not have been for me and it signals something that no amount of planning can replace:

The feedback in that classroom came from people who cared enough to say it in a room designed for honesty. Most of the time, the people around us don't have that room. They just quietly stop reaching.

A bid for connection could have been someone approaching you. Someone asking you a question you deemed random or unimportant. Someone who seemed surprised, like it was too soon, when you said goodbye to them.

Be here. The rest can wait.

PS — The most surprising part wasn't what my groupmates said, it was that I genuinely believed I had made time. I had made space between tasks, but not space for connection.

See you Saturday.

Victoria Grandury
CEO & Founder, Limitless Rebel
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