Imagine this.
It’s been a full day in Cyprus. You started with emails that arrived overnight from the US, followed by a morning meeting with Dubai. Then it was straight into an exciting project with a team in Central Europe, before finishing the afternoon in a long meeting with your team here in Cyprus.
Sitting where we do, between time zones and business cultures, is one of our great advantages. It also means the working day rarely has a clean edge.
It’s been a good day. Productive, exciting even. But it’s now 7pm and you’re mentally tired. You’re home, and winding down with your family feels like exactly what you need.
Then you glance at your work emails, and one lands with a bang.
One of your most valued clients in the US is clearly unhappy. They feel you haven’t delivered on something they expected.
Ouch.
Your heart beats faster. You feel the heat rising. Your mind jumps straight to what this could mean: an important client, a relationship you can’t afford to lose.
The urge to act is immediate.
Suddenly, the light-hearted conversation around you becomes irritating. You snap at your partner or your children. The intention you had only moments earlier — to switch off, be present and enjoy your family — has disappeared.
In a split second, everything changed.
International business doesn’t only create more activity. It can create more reactivity.
The 30 seconds after the email
Here is what I find most interesting about that moment: very little of it is actually about the email itself.
When something feels threatening, our stress response can activate quickly. The threat doesn’t have to be physical. A perceived risk to an important relationship, our reputation, financial security or even our sense of competence can be enough.
Our heart beats faster. Our breathing changes. We feel tension or heat in the body. Our attention narrows towards the problem and we experience a strong urge to do something about it now.
That narrowing of attention can be useful if we need to react quickly to immediate physical danger. It is much less useful when we need to read a client’s message carefully, consider what they actually mean and decide how best to protect a long-term business relationship.
Research suggests this isn’t simply a feeling. A meta-analysis examining the effects of acute stress on executive functioning found that acute stress can impair working memory — the mental workspace we use to hold and work with information — and cognitive flexibility, our ability to shift perspective and adapt our thinking.1
These are precisely the abilities we often need when dealing with complex situations.
So, ironically, the moment when we feel the greatest urgency to act may also be a moment when creating some space before acting matters most.
The urgency feels like clarity. It isn’t.
That’s why self-awareness isn’t a nice extra. It’s part of leading well.
In international business, we make important decisions across cultures and time zones, sometimes quickly and at the end of a long day, also under pressure. If stress quietly narrows our thinking, then noticing what is happening inside us isn’t soft. It’s practical.
Same message, different meanings
International business adds another dimension.
When we work across countries and cultures, the same words, tone — or even silence — may be interpreted differently depending on cultural expectations, individual communication styles and context.
Take a simple example.
A two-line email saying, “This doesn’t meet our requirements. Please revise,” may have been intended as brief and efficient, yet be received by someone else as cold or even hostile.
Silence after sending an important proposal might immediately trigger the thought, “They’re not interested,” when there could be many other explanations.
When information is incomplete or ambiguous, our minds naturally try to make sense of it. But our interpretations don’t arise in a vacuum. They can be shaped by previous experiences, expectations, beliefs and habitual patterns of thinking.
Add a stress response that has already narrowed our attention, and it becomes even easier to mistake our interpretation for fact.
We are no longer responding only to what happened. We are responding to the story we have created about what happened.
This is where something very simple can become a powerful self-leadership practice:
NOTICE. PAUSE. CHOOSE.
First, NOTICE what is happening within you before doing anything about it.
My heart is racing. I feel anxious. I’m worried about losing this client. I have a strong urge to answer immediately.
That moment of awareness creates the possibility of a PAUSE.
The pause doesn’t mean ignoring the problem, pretending everything is fine or avoiding a difficult conversation.
It simply gives you enough space to ask:
What do I need right now so that I can respond well?
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Perhaps it’s a few slower breaths. A glass of water. Stepping away from the screen. Maybe it’s a short walk where you deliberately bring your attention to what you can see, hear and feel around you.
You’re not trying to make the difficult situation magically disappear.
You’re creating enough internal space to CHOOSE what happens next.
Awareness gives us choice
In international business, self-awareness isn’t merely a wellbeing skill.
It affects how we interpret information, recognise our automatic patterns, communicate across differences, make decisions and respond under pressure.
Put simply: stress narrows our thinking, international business gives us plenty to feel stressed about, and so managing our own reactions is part of the leadership job, not an add-on.
And this is where awareness becomes practical.
Without that space, you might immediately fire off an email explaining why the client’s expectations are unreasonable.
Or fear of losing the relationship might take you in the opposite direction. You apologise excessively, offer additional work at no charge or reduce your fee before you’ve even properly understood what has gone wrong.
Meanwhile, the stress doesn’t necessarily stay at work. It spills into the people around you — the partner or children who, only moments earlier, were simply enjoying a light-hearted evening with you.
Neither reaction necessarily reflects what the situation actually requires.
They may simply reflect the internal state from which you’re responding.
Why such a small pause can matter
It’s reasonable to ask whether a few breaths or a short walk can really matter when an important client relationship is at stake.
The point of the pause isn’t to make the problem disappear.
Its purpose is much simpler: to interrupt the automatic reaction long enough to notice what is happening and create some space around it.
Once there is a little more space, different questions become possible:
What do I actually know?
What am I assuming?
Could there be another interpretation?
What does this client actually need from me?
What response protects both the relationship and the value of my work?
These are very different questions from the one fear often asks first:
How do I fix this right now?
Let’s return to that email.
Perhaps you put your phone down and acknowledge that you need a few minutes. You take a short walk.
Then, if you decide that a response that evening is appropriate, you acknowledge the client’s disappointment and let them know that you want to give the matter proper attention. Perhaps you suggest continuing the conversation or arranging an online meeting the following morning.
Then you return to dinner.
Nothing external has necessarily changed.
The email is still there. The client may still be unhappy. The business issue still needs resolving.
What has changed is the place from which you respond.
Instead of reacting from panic — potentially creating conflict or making an unnecessary commercial concession — you are better able to respond with clarity, protecting both the relationship and the value of your work.
Calm is not the absence of difficulty
The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels stressed, worried, angry or overwhelmed.
Nor is it to build a business in which nothing difficult ever happens.
International business is uncertain. Business itself is uncertain.
There will be deadlines, difficult conversations, cultural misunderstandings, changing markets, financial pressures and circumstances completely outside our control.
The aim isn’t permanent calm.
It’s developing greater capacity to meet what comes without automatically being driven by it.
Like any capacity, this can be strengthened.
Mindfulness and self-awareness help us become more familiar with our own early warning signals — the sensations, thoughts, emotions and habitual patterns that tell us we’re moving into reaction.
Over time, we can learn to recognise those signals sooner.
And that small space between what happens and what we do next can influence an email, a negotiation, a relationship, a business decision — and even what happens around the dinner table that evening.
So the next time a challenging email lands, a meeting doesn’t go as planned or something catches you completely off guard, remember three words:
NOTICE. PAUSE. CHOOSE.
Notice what’s happening within you.
Give yourself enough space to pause.
Then ask:
What do I need right now so that I can respond well?
We may not be able to control the email that arrives, the reaction of a client, the pressure of a deadline or the uncertainty that comes with doing business across borders.
But we can develop greater awareness of what happens within us when those moments arise.
And that awareness creates something incredibly valuable:
Choice.
The choice to react automatically or respond consciously. To protect a relationship without abandoning our boundaries. To make a decision from greater clarity rather than fear.
Perhaps that is where greater calm in business really begins — not with the absence of pressure or uncertainty, but with developing the inner capacity to meet them differently.
Reference
1. Shields, G. S., Sazma, M. A., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2016). The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: A meta-analysis and comparison with cortisol. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 68, 651–668.
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