Now Jonathan is telling Simone that his team was not able to include a critical feature in the latest iteration of the software. But no matter what she does, they keep falling further and further behind schedule. She is doing everything she can to support her people, often staying up late to complete work when one of them seems overwhelmed.

It’s critical for the company that customers start using these new products at scale to meet market demands, grow the business, and give the company access to valuable patient and healthcare data.įor months, there has been tension, disagreement, and strong emotions between the two departments that Simone leads, and she is beyond frustrated. Simone is a senior vice president in charge of both the department that is developing the new software, applications, and features and the department responsible for embedding these products into the business. The healthcare company they work for is undergoing a digital transformation that involves creating new software to change how the company engages with and supports healthcare providers and patients. She looks at Jonathan, her product design lead, and shakes her head in disappointment. Simone simply cannot believe what she is hearing. In this excerpt from Deliberate Calm, we look at how leaders can go through five levels of awareness on their way to developing dual awareness. It has never been more important than at a time like now-when corporate resilience is challenged by what many executives consider the most difficult operating environment they have ever encountered. The ability to do this amid changing, complex circumstances is a critical part of leading with deliberate calm through uncertainty. We are in a position to choose a response instead of fully identifying with and getting swept away by our emotions and reacting out of habit.

We still feel emotions, and we still may think negative or hurtful thoughts, but we can notice and accept those thoughts without fully identifying with them. This requires a certain detachment from our feelings and thoughts, where we can observe ourselves having an experience and can observe our feelings and thoughts about that experience. With this awareness, we are able to access a state in which we can act with intention and perform at our best no matter what is going on around us. In their new book, Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World (HarperCollins Publishers, November 2022), authors Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron De Smet, and Michiel Kruyt investigate a concept they call “dual awareness,” the integrated awareness of our external and internal environments and how they affect each other.

They called us enemy full book