This week I was ill in a way I haven't been in years, something that felt like COVID without testing positive for anything, bones aching like they were arguing with each other every time I moved or sneezed, and a migraine behind my eyes for days on top of a cold. Physically, I was a hot mess.

It landed on top of business news that had come in at the start of the month, the kind of last-minute update that rearranges a whole timeline in one phone call, big enough that working harder or thinking longer wasn't going to fix it, and the runway kept shrinking while I tried anyway.

I had nothing left to manage any of it with, no discipline, no strategy, not even the energy to think it through, so I scrolled to take my mind off things. What kept coming up on my feed wasn't something I'd gone looking for: faith, founders who'd been closer to losing everything than I was and were still standing, reminders that the fear I was feeling had a name and other people had lived through naming it.

None of that was something I chose in the moment; I didn't have it in me to choose anything that week.

You tell yourself that if it gets bad enough, you'll find the discipline, or the strategy, or the mental trick that gets you through, and that isn't what happens. When it's bad enough, you don't have the capacity to choose your way through anything.

Whatever shows up in your head that week isn't something you decide on the spot, it's whatever was already put there, long before, by whoever or whatever had access to you at the time, and you don't find out what that was until you're too wrecked to fight it.

Here's what I noticed, lying there unable to do much except scroll, I wasn't spiralling. I should have been, nothing about the business had changed, the money, the timeline, the people relying on me and still I was calm enough to sleep between the coughing fits. It wasn't because I'd found some new mental trick, I didn't have it in me to find anything that week. What kept me calm was already there before I needed it.

I don't fully know when it arrived, and I don't get to take credit for it. None of that solved the actual problem. What changed is smaller and stranger: for the one week I had nothing left to manage it with, something I hadn't installed that day held me anyway.

There's a line older than any framework I could build: be transformed by the renewing of your mind which comes from Romans 12:2 in the Bible. Most people hear that as something you do in the moment, gather yourself, think positive, but that isn't what happened to me. I had nothing left to do it with.

Renewing isn't a mood you talk yourself into when the pressure lands, it's whatever got installed in you long before, by whoever had access to you at the time, so that when the moment comes and you have nothing left, there's already something there waiting.

Most leaders I work with think the work is choosing better in the crisis. It isn't. By the time the crisis lands, there's no bandwidth left to choose anything. The real work happens earlier, in the calm stretch before, deciding who gets access to your head and what they're allowed to put there. I got lucky this week, because years ago I let the right things in without knowing I'd need them, and I don't want to keep building a life on getting lucky.

This week, write down who or what actually has access to your head: the people you let call you, the voices you keep coming back to, what you'd reach for with nothing left to think with. Then ask whether you chose them on purpose, or whether they just ended up there. If you wouldn't choose them again, this is the calm stretch to do something about it, not the week everything falls apart.

• Who actually has access to your head right now, and did you choose them, or did they just end up there?
• If you had nothing left to manage tomorrow's crisis with no discipline, no strategy, what already installed in your that would up instead?
• What if the version of you that turns up in the real crisis isn't the version you've been practising in public? What if it's the version whoever's had the most access to you has quietly been building, and you don't actually know who that's been?

See you next Monday.

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