What I Watched at Coronado

I spent time at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado (‘NAB Coronado’) in California, posted there as a Royal Marines officer working alongside United States (‘US’) Navy SEALs on maritime special operations doctrine. I watched trainee classes go through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (‘BUD/S’) training, the selection programme that filters candidates for the world’s most operationally demanding special operations force.

I watched boat crews being put through conditions that, in any other context, would be considered dangerous. I watched individuals reach the edge of what their bodies could do and keep going. I watched teams form under extreme stress in ways I have not seen replicated in any professional environment since.

It changed how I think about what human beings are capable of.

It also left me with a question I have been sitting with ever since.

Simulated Pressure Is Not the Thing

Every trainee who made it through knew one thing, even at their lowest point. There was a defined path. Ring the bell, and it stops. Endure it, and you move to the next phase. The outcome space was fixed. The suffering was real, the mental demands were extraordinary, but the world after the decision had a shape to it that every trainee could see, even when they could barely stand.

That is not real pressure. Not in the sense I mean.

Real pressure is the state in which the outcome space is genuinely undefined. You do not know if endurance leads anywhere. You cannot see the other side of the decision. The people depending on you will bear some of the cost of whatever you choose, and that cost has not yet been determined. There is no bell to ring, and there is no instructor watching to make sure nothing goes irreversibly wrong.

I am not saying this to diminish what happens at Coronado. What happens there is extraordinary, and the people who get through it are exceptional. I am saying that it is a different category of experience, and confusing the two is where most thinking about pressure goes wrong.

What Real Pressure Actually Builds

The most useful thing the Royal Marines gave me was not a decision-making framework or a stress management technique. It was a gradual reorientation through exposure to real consequences, and it has stayed with me through everything I have done since.

I can only control what I can. Everything else is a variable. Everything else is interference, or noise, or a factor I need to account for rather than a threat I need to eliminate. The boundary between those two categories is the most important thing I know about operating under real pressure.

This sounds simple. It is not. Most leaders in business have never been forced to build it, because their environments have never truly required it. There has always been something else to reach for: more data, more time, a conversation with the right person, a decision deferred until conditions improved. The outcome space has always had some shape to it.

The boundary only gets built when you operate in conditions where the outcome is genuinely open, where you cannot reach for more of anything, and where someone else will bear a cost you cannot fully predict. That is when the reorganisation happens. Not through training, not through reading about it, but through the experience of having to move anyway.

What Specifically Changes in Your Thinking

One of the clearest shifts I noticed in myself, first in the Marines and then later while running a startup, was how my mind began to sort decisions. Not by importance or urgency, as most frameworks suggest, but by reversibility.

Before Jeff Bezos made the concept widely known through his Amazon shareholder letters, my founding team and I had arrived at the same principle through necessity. Decisions that were hard to reverse required more rigour, more time, more proof. Decisions that were easy to correct were made quickly, often by one person, without committee. We were not being reckless with the fast ones. We were being precise about which decisions actually deserved the weight we were giving everything.

Under real pressure, your mind does this instinctively, whether you have formalised it or not. Reversibility becomes the primary filter. The question stops being ‘what is optimal’ and starts being ‘what can I undo if this is wrong?’ That can look like over-caution from the outside. Often, it is the most sophisticated risk management you will ever do without realising it.

What You See in the People Around You

I have observed leaders encounter real pressure for the first time across both military and civilian contexts. Two patterns failed consistently.

The loud, vocal type. They have been performing confidently all along. Real pressure does not create a gap in them; it reveals one that was always there. When the performance stops working, there is not much underneath it.

The brilliant introvert who has always preferred to follow. The ability is real, and the contribution is real, but they have always been managing their own exposure. They stay where they can be valuable without being accountable. Real pressure asks them to step outside that boundary, and they will not, not because they cannot, but because it was never the arrangement they were making with the world.

The people who surprised me were a third type. No-nonsense, reliable, present without being loud. Not performing, not hiding. In normal conditions, they were simply doing the actual work. When real pressure arrived, and a switch flicked in them, it was not a transformation. It was just that the conditions finally matched what they had been doing all along.

The signals are subtle, and they are worth looking for. Not in the people making the most noise. In the ones who are quietly, consistently, actually there.

What You Can Actually Prepare For

You cannot train your way out of the cognitive shift that real pressure produces. The reorganisation happens whether you want it to or not. But there are things you can do before pressure arrives, and they are not what most leadership development offers.

Decide in advance what is genuinely yours to control and what is not. Not abstractly. Specifically. What are the actual decisions that sit inside your boundary? Not the outcomes, not the market, not what your competitors do. The decisions. The choices. The things that are genuinely yours.

Build the two-speed habit before you need it. Know which of your current decisions are genuinely irreversible and which only feel that way. The ones that only feel that way are probably being given more committee time, more analysis, and more delay than they deserve. The irreversible ones probably need more rigour than they are getting.

And pay attention to who around you has actually been doing the work in normal conditions. Not who is loudest about it. Who is quietly, reliably, actually doing it. Because when real pressure arrives, those are the people whose switches will flick.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If you are leading something that matters, you will probably encounter real pressure at some point. Your thinking will reorganise. What you consider a good option will shift. What feels like the right constraint will change.

The question is not whether you are ready for it. Most people who ask that question are thinking about difficulty, not about genuine irreversibility. They are imagining a hard thing with a defined outcome: Coronado, not the real thing.

The question worth sitting with is whether you have done the specific work of deciding what is genuinely yours to control, before you are in conditions where you cannot think that clearly.

Most people have not. Most people have the idea of it. That gap is smaller than it sounds, and larger than it feels.