Change leadership in peak anxieTy: 5 Tools to Adapt At the Speed of AI

Adapting at the Speed of AI

Change is accelerating. AI is accelerating it further.

Digital technologies now evolve, recombine, scale, and spread with extraordinary velocity. Human neural change is slower. Organizational change is slower still because organizations multiply individual nervous systems through relationships, habits, systems, cultures, incentives, identities, and politics.

That means the central challenge of the AI age is not simply developing more powerful technologies. It is developing people and organizations that can adapt fast enough to use them wisely.

This requires technological literacy, of course. But it also demands emotional range, nervous system mastery, curiosity under pressure, courage in uncertainty, and the capacity to let go of ways of thinking that once made us successful.

It requires us to metabolize disappointment, disruption, and failure without letting them define us. And it requires us to turn the enormous energy created by uncertainty into learning, creativity, experimentation, connection, and action.

Yet humans don't update like software. A digital system can be upgraded, replicated, or reconfigured almost instantly. We have to learn, experiment, fail, reflect, sleep, practice, build new neural pathways, let go of old habits, and develop confidence in unfamiliar ways of working.

We are organisms, not algorithms.

This creates one of the defining leadership challenges of the AI age: the speed gap between how fast our technologies can change and how fast human beings can meaningfully adapt.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030, with resilience, flexibility, agility, creative thinking, curiosity, and lifelong learning all rising in importance.

This is why I increasingly talk in my keynotes on change, leadership, and Artificial Intelligence about the need to adapt at the speed of AI.

We can become much better at learning, adapting, experimenting, changing our minds, and letting go of ways of working that no longer serve us.

Change Anxiety Is Energy

One of the biggest constraints on this adaptability is emotional. Change creates anxiety. When we encounter significant uncertainty, our bodies frequently react before our conscious minds have worked out what is happening.

A major restructuring is announced. AI starts changing the skills required in our profession. A new competitor appears. A strategy we believed in suddenly looks questionable. A role we have mastered starts to disappear.

Our breathing changes. Our muscles tighten. Our attention narrows. We become more vigilant for threats.

This response makes evolutionary sense. Anxiety is energy mobilized in response to an uncertain future. But the meaning we give that energy matters enormously.

If we interpret activation automatically as evidence that something is wrong, we can easily become trapped in protective responses precisely when we need to become more open, curious, creative, and experimental.

Research on anxiety shows how strongly it can bias attention toward potential threats, ruminate over uncomfortable losses, and constrict what we perceive. Yet navigating complexity and disruption demands almost the opposite capacity: widening our field of awareness, spotting possibilities, questioning assumptions, connecting disparate information, and experimenting with what might come next.

That is why emotional mastery isn't separate from adaptability. It is one of its foundations.

In Now Lead the Change: Repurpose Your Career, Future-Proof Your Organization, and Regenerate Our Crisis-Hit World by Mastering Transformational Leadership, I write about our capacity to metabolize constant change around us—including the energies and emotions it triggers within us—into insights, ideas, and new superpowers that can create value in the world,

I use the word metabolize deliberately.

Our physical metabolism takes food entering our system, breaks it down, transforms it, and makes its energy and nutrients available for life. In much the same way, we can learn to work consciously with the emotional energy created by uncertainty, disruption, disappointment, and change.

We do not need to suppress that energy. We can learn to metabolize it. We can transform it within us into excitement for, and new capabilities to engage in, adaptation to the changing world around us.

State Is Strategy

For decades, strategy has largely been discussed as something cerebral: choices, plans, scenarios, resource allocation, competitive positioning, markets, and execution.

But every one of those choices is made by a human nervous system. Our state shapes what we notice, what we ignore, what we perceive as threatening, how much uncertainty we can tolerate, how deeply we listen, how creatively we think, and how quickly we revert to familiar patterns.

This is what I mean when I say state is strategy.

In a relentlessly, radically, ruthlessly, and rapidly changing world, learning your own nervous system becomes a serious leadership discipline. Some of us attack when uncertainty rises. Others withdraw, freeze, overwork, appease, micromanage, obsess over details, have flights of entrepreneurial fantasy, or attempt to think our way into absolute certainty.

Within my work, I describe these as F-States: protective patterns such as fighting, fleeing, freezing, fawning, fussing, fixing, and compulsively figuring things out. They are not character flaws. They are intelligent protective responses that evolved to keep us safe.

But when we repeatedly live and lead from them, they reduce our capacity to adapt.

The alternative is what I call the C-States: curiosity, connection, courage, calm, confidence, contemplation, collaboration, and creativity. These states give us a much richer platform for learning, innovation, experimentation, and transformation.

You cannot reliably adapt to an unfamiliar future while your biology is desperately attempting to reACT TO a familiar past.

Acceptance Comes Before Adaptation

We waste enormous quantities of psychological and emotional energy fighting with what is already happening.

AI should not be moving this quickly. My industry should not be changing. My expertise should still be enough. This strategy should still work. My organization should not need another transformation.

We may have excellent reasons for wishing things were otherwise. Yet once reality has shifted, adaptation begins with seeing what is happening clearly and accepting it as reality, whether we would choose it or like it or not.

Acceptance frees the energy that resistance consumes. It lets us move from defending ourselves against what is happening to engaging intelligently with what is emerging.

We must accept before we can adapt.

Once we accept reality as it is, a much more generative set of questions becomes possible:

• What is actually changing?

• What am I feeling about the change?

• Have I felt like this before about previous change?

• What am I frightened of losing?

• What assumptions am I still holding onto?

• What might I need to learn?

• What might this change make possible?

• Who might help me see what I cannot yet see?

• What part of me may need to evolve?

This is how adaptability happens in real time. And acceptance unlocks the doors.

Learn Your Own Nervous System To Cope with Peak Anxiety

Telling people simply to "embrace change" rarely achieves much.

People may understand perfectly with their cognitive smarts that adaptation is necessary, while their emotional reality—and underneath this, the state of their nervous system—registers profound uncertainty about competence, status, livelihood, belonging, identity, control, and meaning.

We are in peak anxiety: war, gas prices, economy, AI, climate, earthquakes. These realities are likely to activate our nervous systems. The job is to work with our nervous-system reality, not try to bypass it.

The encouraging thing is that human beings have far more capacity to influence our internal state than we often realize. We cannot choose every nervous system reaction and emotional response that arise, but we can become increasingly masterful in how we experience, contain, interpret, and act.

We start by learning our own unique nervous system and where it goes under pressure, in uncertainty, and through anxiety.

This is central to the neuroscience-led BTX® Method we have developed over decades of working with leaders through innovation, disruption, and transformation.

We can all learn our own nervous system and, in doing so, learn how to ethically influence, guide, and shape the nervous system states of those we lead.

Often we don't feel anxious at first glance. We have all learned ways to mask anxiety and make however we react look logical, legitimate,e and even optimal.

As an article in McKinsey Quarterly this year put it:

“When under pressure, leaders rarely experience themselves as “emotional.” What they notice is urgency—the pull to move faster, end debate, or resolve tension quickly. That urgency is often the first signal that the body has gone on high alert… Unmetabolized fear does not disappear. It narrows thinking, distorts judgment, and filters out [crucial information].”

Responding to change with adaptability starts with noticing what your own system does under pressure.

We might begin by becoming curious about:

• What happens in my body when uncertainty rises?

• Where does my attention go?

• Which F-States do I most easily fall into?

• How do I start to feel because of these F-States?

• What stories does my mind start generating because of these F-States?

• What behaviors follow?

• Which C-States would allow me to meet this situation more effectively?

• Which C-States would help me accept and adapt to this situation elegantly?

Such radical self-awareness of our own nervous systems gives us more choicefulness.

5 Ways to Start Metabolizing the Emotions of Anxiety Into Adaptability

Simple evidence-based nervous system practices can help us contain nervous system activation enough to co-create with it rather than be consumed by it, ensuring we have emotions and are not had by them.

1. Name what is happening

How to Start Metabolizing the Emotions of Anxiety Into Adaptability

Simple, evidence-based nervous system practices can help us contain activation enough to co-create with it rather than be consumed by it, ensuring that we have emotions rather than being had by them.

None of these tools is designed to suppress or bypass what we feel. They help us create enough space between sensation and reaction for consciousness to come back online, making it easier to move out of protective F-States and toward the curious, connected, courageous, calm, and creative C-States that support adaptation.

1. Name what is happening

One of the simplest practices is called affect labeling, putting our emotional experience into words. Instead of becoming completely fused with the emotion, we notice and name it: I am feeling anxious about this change. I feel threatened by what this could mean for my role. There is fear here about whether I can adapt in time before I become obsolete.

Research by UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and colleagues found that putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala and other limbic regions in response to negative emotional stimuli, while increasing activity in a prefrontal region associated with emotional regulation.

Try it: Pause and put one or two reasonably precise words on what you are experiencing. If useful, add what the emotion seems to be about: anxious about uncertainty, angry about losing control, afraid of becoming irrelevant.

Naming an emotion doesn't make it disappear, but it can help us release it surprisingly quickly. It shifts state so we can start to metabolize that emotion. We move from I am anxious toward I am noticing anxiety arising.

That small shift can create enough distance to become curious about the emotion rather than automatically enacting it. Curiosity is a powerful C-State.

2. Guide your breathing

Breathing is one of the few places where conscious intention can directly influence processes mostly governed outside conscious awareness.

When we become anxious, breathing often becomes faster and shallower. Deliberately slowing it can do the opposite. A major systematic review and meta-analysis found that voluntary slow breathing increases measures of heart-rate variability associated with parasympathetic, or vagal, regulation.

This is why in Now Lead the Change I describe breathing as one of the fastest ways to move from a sense of protection toward a sense of connection.

Try it: Relax the belly and take three to six slow, comfortable breaths. Aim roughly for:

• 4 to 5 seconds breathing in

• 5 to 6 seconds breathing out

• An enjoyable moment of stillness as we pause between exhales and inhales

The aim is not simply to "calm down." It is to reduce enough activation to regain access to the wider range of attention, reflection, judgment, creativity, and choice that anxiety can constrict.

We can literally breathe ourselves into a better state from which to adapt.

3. use optic flow and widen your gaze

One of the signatures of anxiety is tunnel vision, both metaphorically and physiologically. Under stress and anxiety, our attention tends to narrow around whatever appears threatening, reducing our ability to process what is happening in the periphery.

Yet adaptability requires almost exactly the opposite. We need to see more of the whole, notice weak signals, discover unexpected possibilities, and connect things that previously appeared unrelated.

This is where optic flow becomes useful. Optic flow involves using our eyes to hack the tunnel vision response and use a wider, looser gaze to tell our nervous system that we are not under threat and it can calm down.

Try it: When anxiety is rising, rather than staring at your phone or fixing your eyes tightly on one point:

• Look ahead into the middle distance

• Soften your eyes rather than staring

• Allow yourself to notice things and movement in your peripheral visual field

• Periodically notice the whole visual field rather than one object within it

• Move your eyes slowly to take in the entire vista

Anxiety demonstrably narrows attention, while locomotion, wide-field visual information, and eye movement engage systems involved in orientation and regulation. Experimental work has found that certain goal-directed eye movements can transiently reduce amygdala activation.

For me, the practical principle is simple: when anxiety contracts our world, deliberately widen it again.

4. Splash cool water on your face

We can access a wonderfully ancient piece of nervous-system machinery through our face.

Splashes of cold water on the face can trigger elements of what scientists call the diving response.

Sensory signals from the cold water on the face, particularly through branches of the trigeminal nerve, can increase parasympathetic influence on the heart and slow heart rate. Human studies of the "cold face test" have repeatedly demonstrated this response.

This appears to be an ancient evolutionary survival mechanism. Diving responses involving a slower heart rate and oxygen conservation occur across vertebrates, including mammals and birds, suggesting that humans retain elements of an ancient biological system designed to help an organism cope with submersion and stay underwater as long as possible by slowing respiration.

Try it: Splash comfortably cool water over your face, particularly around the forehead, eyes, and cheeks, or hold a cool, damp cloth against your face briefly. You don't need an ice bath, breath-holding, or heroic extremes.

5. Reframe anxiety as excitement and readiness

Finally, we can work directly with the meaning we give to nervous system activation.

Anxiety and excitement share many bodily sensations: increased heart rate, heightened arousal, butterflies in the stomach, increased energy, and a feeling that something important is about to happen.

Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks ran experiments involving public speaking, karaoke singing, and mathematical tasks. People encouraged to reappraise their anxiety as excitement felt more excited, shifted from a threat mindset to an opportunity mindset, and performed better than those who simply tried to calm themselves down.

This aligns closely with the practices I use in Speak Electric | Lead Magnetic: rather than interpreting every sign of activation as evidence that we are in danger or failing, we can reframe it as readiness.

Try it: When you notice that familiar activation, experiment with changing the narrative:

• This is energy

• My nervous system is preparing me for something that matters

• Some of what I am calling anxiety may also be excitement

• I am ready to be excited

• I am excited...

This is not positive thinking, and it is not denying genuine danger. Sometimes anxiety is telling us something extremely important that needs our attention.

The practice is to stop assuming that activation automatically means retreat and react.

Adaptability Can Be Practiced

Some people certainly seem more comfortable with novelty and uncertainty than others. But adaptability is not fixed at birth.

In fact, all human beings are extraordinary learning organisms. That's why we still exist and have spread to every nook and niche on the planet.

We are Natural Born Adaptors.

But we might have gotten a little rusty.

Luckily, our nervous systems remain plastic throughout life. We can build new habits, develop new skills, and become far more capable of staying open and resourceful in circumstances that once would have overwhelmed us.

The practices above can help. Practicing acceptance and adaptation makes a difference.

Technology will keep accelerating. The opportunity is to become increasingly masterful at meeting that acceleration.

Sometimes the physical sensations we automatically call anxiety may contain precisely the energy we need to adapt.

The work is learning how to use it.