The Courage to Act and Lead With Confidence Under Pressure – An Interview with Clio Bushland
Most of us know what we need to do. Courage is what gets us to actually do it. Clio Bushland helps entrepreneurs and leaders choose courage under pressure. As a coach, speaker, and founder of Clio Bushland Consulting, she brings together personal experience, a Master of Science degree in marriage and family therapy, and years of nonprofit and business leadership. That mix shapes her practical, human approach to equipping and supporting people to communicate more clearly, lead more effectively, and take meaningful action, even when they’re afraid.
In this interview, Clio talks about fear, courage, regulation, and what it takes to lead when the stakes are high.
Clio Bushland, Courageous Living & Leadership Specialist
What first led you to make courage the foundation of your work with people and leaders?
Courage saved my life long before it became my work. When clients kept describing our work with fear as transformative, I realized how deeply fear had shaped my early life. My childhood and young adulthood were steeped in abuse and trauma, rooted in my parents’ mental health struggles, addiction, and trauma histories. Life was often unstable or unsafe, and I made most of my decisions out of fear.
Eventually, I hit a crisis point. A police officer told me, in effect, that if I stayed in my abusive relationship, I was going to die. Surviving meant making a major life change, and the only thing that could help me do that was courage. I had no confidence and no sense of my own worth. But I dared to ask for help and start over.
I succeeded! Though I would have a few more bumps in the road, I was never in that kind of danger again. I created a stable life. It wasn’t long, however, before survival wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted my life to be about pursuing what mattered to me, not just staying out of danger. To my surprise, living at that level took even more courage.
When I made these connections, I started studying the neuroscience of fear and courage. Fear shaped my early life. Courage shaped everything after.
What do most people misunderstand about fear and courage?
Fear is data, not a decision-maker. Fear is powerful and can be pervasive. Fear shapes how we see the world and the decisions we make. Fear is not an enemy, obstacle, or character flaw. Fear has one job: to keep us safe. It is one piece of a complex picture.
Courage is also powerful, and I love it as a topic because it is inspiring. Modern life and work can feel reductive. Courage is how we reach for more.
Courage isn’t reserved for big, dramatic moments. It shows up in everyday choices. Do you tell the truth or avoid it? Do you have the conversation or wait for the problem to go away? Do you ask for what you want or just hope it happens? Courage is choosing your values and goals over your fear.
How does that understanding of courage shape the work you do with leaders and individual clients?
You can’t train courage directly. It is a choice made in the moment. But you can make courage easier to choose.
In my corporate work, I help leaders understand how stress, emotion, and nervous system activation affect the way they think, communicate, and behave under pressure. We look at how emotion and logic both provide useful information.
When leaders understand (and even anticipate) fear and value courage, they can stay clear and regulated even when the stakes are high. I also find that work satisfaction goes up because being a courageous leader is inspiring and rewarding in itself. People can better find meaning in their work.
With individual clients, understanding fear and leveraging courage helps to neutralize shame about feeling afraid or stuck. It also helps us identify and build on their strengths to overcome challenges. Shifting perception from stuck to courageous makes people feel more powerful and resilient. It’s hard to beat someone with both of those qualities!
Across both individual and corporate domains, I help people act and speak in alignment with their goals and values. Emotion, thought, identity, and behavior are deeply intertwined. Using the fear and courage framework helps us reach all of them. We work with intangibles, but the goal is to create change you can measure.
Why does courage need to come before confidence when someone is facing uncertainty or change?
Confidence is lovely, but if it comes at all, it comes with or after courage, never before. Confidence takes time and repetition. You build it by doing the thing, courageously and consistently, until it feels familiar. It also depends on context. You might feel confident at work but not on a first date, and your mood, stress, and nervous system all affect it too. Courage doesn’t depend on any of that. It’s available at any time, in any situation.
Even when you feel confident, you still need courage. Seasoned performers still get stage fright. You can be confident and afraid at the same time.
One of my clients knew she needed to do cold outreach to get her business off the ground, but she dreaded it. She drafted her emails, then wrote to me: “I’m not confident enough to do this. I’m shaking. I feel nauseous.” I wrote back, “You can hit send even if you’re shaking and nauseous!” She did. She landed two clients, and her business took off.
That’s why I focus on courage. For so many clients, confidence was a dead end. Courage got them moving. Confidence is a feeling. Courage is a choice.
How has your background in marriage and family therapy shaped the way you approach leadership and workplace behavior?
The most technically perfect plan will fail if it doesn’t account for human behavior. Clinical work trained me to see behavior on several levels at once: the individual, their relationships, and the larger system around them. Behavior makes sense in context. At work, a communication problem might be a skill gap, a strained relationship, or a culture that punishes honesty. Traditional training usually focuses only on the first.
My business leadership taught me practicality. As an executive director, I had to justify every dollar and decision to a board. Every resource had to produce measurable results.
My work draws on both my clinical and business experience. It’s educational and experiential, with a strong bias toward practical application. People don’t need more theory or more sound bites. They need skills that hold up under pressure.
People in the workplace are people. They come with emotions, relationships, and histories. Good leadership accounts for all of that.
Why do managers still avoid difficult conversations even when they have been trained in feedback and communication?
Managers avoid difficult conversations for the same reasons the rest of us do: on some level, they feel scary. That’s why we label them “difficult”! Many fears can pop up, but three come up regularly.
Managers fear being seen differently. This is especially hard for newer managers who now lead former peers. Holding a former coworker accountable can feel like a betrayal, and many worry about coming across as bossy or unlikable. But even experienced managers can hesitate to have a conversation that might get them seen in a negative light.
Managers often worry a great deal about how others will react. We tend to see negative emotion as a signal that something has gone wrong. In reality, anger, frustration, embarrassment, fear, and even sadness are normal reactions to difficult news or challenging feedback. We want to keep these conversations kind and respectful, but negative emotions don’t necessarily signal failure.
Many managers step into their roles thinking their job is to know everything. Saying “I don’t know” can be quite scary. Admitting they don’t have answers can feel like failing or like they don’t belong in their role. In today’s rapidly changing workplace, many difficult conversations require calmly and clearly communicating what you don’t know as well as what you do.
Avoidance brings relief, but the issue doesn’t go away, and the longer we wait, the harder it gets. Each time we avoid, our brain learns that avoiding works, and we never learn that we could have handled it.
Choosing discomfort hurts in the short term but is easier in the long term. Avoiding it is easier in the short term, but the pain lasts much longer.
What is missing from leadership development when it teaches communication skills without preparing people for emotional pressure?
Communication is both emotional and logical, but we teach it as if it’s purely logical. Most communication training relies primarily, sometimes exclusively, on logic. You learn the framework, plan the conversation, and feel prepared. Then, when it’s time to have the conversation, you become avoidant, freeze up, or sometimes even become combative. Those are flight, freeze, and fight responses. A script by itself won’t override that.
A woman I know spent weeks preparing a pitch for an idea she planned to deliver at a board meeting. The project mattered a lot to her, and she practiced her opening lines and her delivery, even planning her outfit. She didn’t prepare for her nerves. She kept waiting for the right moment to speak up in the meeting, but it never came.
The next time, she asked to be put on the agenda and prepared to be nervous. Because feeling afraid did not feel like a surprise or a failing, she could clearly articulate her vision despite her nerves. The project moved forward.
She didn’t need a better script. She needed the emotional skill set: understanding her nervous system, recognizing what she felt in the moment, and regulating enough to act. We all do.
Those skills are what let you think clearly, communicate effectively, and lead well under pressure, but they’re largely missing from traditional communication and leadership training. The good news is that they’re learnable. Logic and emotion are both data. Great communication uses both.
How can someone tell the difference between fear that protects them and fear that holds them back?
Fear responds the same way to real danger and perceived risk, so telling them apart takes both logic and emotion. Both are important. Neither is infallible.
Have you ever said to yourself, “I knew something was off, but I didn’t want to be rude or too emotional”? I’ve ended up in bad situations, both personal and professional, that I could have avoided by listening to that feeling. But I have also missed opportunities because I inflated the risk.
The first question is critical: Is there real, present danger, and what are the consequences of my choices? Your rideshare is here, but something feels off. You can get in, and if you were right about that feeling, the consequences could be catastrophic. If you decide to wait, whether you are right or wrong, the most likely downside is offending your driver, which is manageable. If your physical or mental safety is genuinely at risk, be cautious and stay safe.
On the other hand, most of what sets off our threat detection system (fear) does not have such dire consequences attached, and the threat is not imminent. We have the opportunity to ask questions like “What am I really afraid of here?” “What are the consequences of saying yes?” “What are the consequences of saying no?” My favorite question is “Who do I want to be?” I find that helps me frame my fear and my response in a helpful way. Don’t ignore your fear, but don’t let it make your decisions either.
What helps a leader stay steady enough to communicate clearly when a conversation becomes tense or unpredictable?
When we say “steady,” usually we mean “regulated.” We want someone who can be in a tense situation without becoming reactive.
That doesn’t mean emotionally uninvolved. Suppressing your emotions increases your physiological stress, and in conversation, it raises the other person’s stress, too. Naming your emotions works better. It helps the language and reasoning parts of your brain calm the parts that react to threat.
The point of regulating emotions is not to eliminate or ignore them. Emotions, even negative ones, give us important information. Jealousy or envy, for example, can point us toward dreams or goals we are neglecting. The point is to extract the information we need without letting our emotions drive our decisions unthinkingly.
Here are a few tools you can use to help you. Slow your breathing. Emotions can speed up our breathing. Slowing your breath can calm your emotions.
Talk to yourself by name: “Take a deep breath, Clio.” Talking to yourself in the third person can reduce emotional reactivity quickly, without adding much additional cognitive effort.
I have gotten good results through softening my gaze. The research here is still emerging, but stress may narrow our focus onto threats, and widening it seems to tell the brain, “I’m safe.”
When I slow my breath and widen my gaze, I almost always sigh and relax, and my clients often do as well. Sometimes the most regulated thing you can do is say, “Let’s continue this discussion later.”
Great leadership starts before difficult situations arise. Sleep deprivation, hunger, and dehydration can all affect your mood and make you more reactive. You wouldn’t expect an athlete to perform without sleep or fuel. Don’t expect it of yourself!
What does choosing values and goals over comfort look like in your own life?
Some of the best decisions of my life were highly uncomfortable. One beautiful example was adopting a teenager from Ukraine who didn’t speak English. We met her when a friend hosted her through a program that let kids in orphanages experience Christmas with a family. We already had three kids, including a newborn, and we weren’t financially set up for an international adoption. Many people thought we had lost our minds.
But as our two older children said, she needed a family, and we had one. Generosity is one of our core values, so we began the difficult process of bringing a near stranger into our home.
It wasn’t easy, but it was beautiful. She’s an adult now and thriving, and I can’t imagine my life without my daughter.
Building my business has taken courage too. It has often been terrifying, requiring lots of investment before I had any evidence it would work. The visibility means constantly working through insecurities about my appearance, my age, and how I compare to others. But I feel called to bring what I’ve learned to a larger audience, and that keeps me going. Comfort is a poor compass. Values are a better one.
What is one courageous action you would encourage someone to take when fear has been keeping them stuck?
A wrong step that brings information is better than a right one that never happens. Start by letting go of any shame or judgment about being stuck. Shame drains the energy you need to move forward.
Replace it with curiosity. What’s happening, and why? Do you have an information or skill gap to close? In my experience, that’s rarely the problem. More often, fear, grief, or another emotion needs tending.
Keep breaking your task or project into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a manageable chunk. We are not looking for easy or comfortable. We are looking for doable. “Talk to Alex about missed key performance indicators (KPIs)” might become “schedule a meeting with Alex.” “Raise my prices” might become “quote the new prices on my next sales call.”
A reasonable next move is good enough. It doesn’t need to be perfect! Then do it. Keep doing it, and you’ll build evidence that this big, scary thing is possible.
Finally, find support. Courageous living and leadership are deeply rewarding but can also be difficult and sometimes lonely. Build a community that supports you and holds you accountable. Don’t settle. Be brave. Take the next courageous step. Then take another.
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