Why Steadiness Is the Key to Resilient Leadership – Interview with Luisa Hogan
- Jul 26
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 4
Luisa Hogan is the founder of Vermelho Consulting, where she works with founders and senior leaders who are still performing under pressure but paying for it internally. Her practice centres on helping leaders and teams navigate change and high pressure with steadiness, clarity, and precision, not resilience as endurance, but as a trained leadership skill that determines whether a leader’s best thinking stays accessible when conditions get hard.
Her approach draws on change psychology, neuroscience, and practical leadership strategy, shaped by two decades in senior roles including COO, CDO, and CEO. She holds an MBA, is an accredited Change and Resilience Practitioner, and was a finalist for the AIM Leadership Excellence Awards. Vermelho Consulting is an award-winning practice, a recognition Luisa ties back to the same principle that runs through her work, steadiness, applied consistently, over time.
In this interview, Luisa talks about what inspired Vermelho, the inner dialogue she calls the Second Voice, and why steadiness has to be built before a crisis arrives, not during one.
What inspired you to build Vermelho Consulting around the idea that resilience is a daily leadership practice?
Ten years ago, I was leading an organisation through its closure. It wasn’t a slow, comfortable ending. It was sustained pressure, hard decisions, and a team that had to keep functioning while everything around us was uncertain. What got us through wasn’t endurance or pushing harder. It was steadiness, staying honest with each other, staying findable, making decisions clearly even when the ground kept shifting.
When it was over, I recognised something. My team and I had built a way of leading through change and pressure that most leaders are never taught. I knew there were other leaders sitting in their own version of what I’d just been through, still functioning, still capable, but losing access to their best thinking under the weight of it. Vermelho started because I wanted to give them what my team and I had found for ourselves. A way to navigate pressure and change with real steadiness and resilience, not a performance of holding it together. That work is even more relevant today.
You often talk about self-awareness under pressure as a learnable skill. What does that look like in real leadership moments?
It usually shows up in small, specific signals before it shows up in a decision. Your tone sharpens in a meeting. You start talking faster, or you go quiet in a way that isn’t really calm. You notice you’re about to answer a question just to make it go away, not because you’ve actually thought it through. Self-awareness under pressure means catching that shift while it’s happening, not explaining it afterward.
In practice, it looks like a leader mid-conversation who feels the pull to react and pauses instead of speaking immediately. It looks like naming the pressure out loud to a team rather than letting it leak into your tone. It looks like knowing the difference between a decision that’s actually urgent and one that just feels urgent because you’re overloaded. None of this requires calm. It requires noticing. That’s the learnable part, you can train yourself to catch the moment before you’re on autopilot.
How did leading an organization that ultimately closed reshape your definition of successful leadership?
For a long time, my definition of successful leadership was tied to outcomes, did the organisation survive, did the numbers look good, did we win the contract? Leading a team through an ending that had already been decided by conditions well beyond any one decision in the room took that definition apart. The organisation still closed. Nothing I did changed that fact.
What I could still control was how people were led through it, how honestly I communicated what was happening, whether I stayed findable instead of disappearing into my own stress, and how quickly I repaired the moments I got wrong. That experience taught me that successful leadership isn’t the absence of a bad outcome. It’s the steadiness you bring to people while it’s unfolding. I walked away from that closure with a much smaller, much more honest definition of success, did the people I led trust how I showed up, even when the ending wasn’t in my hands? That question now sits underneath everything I teach.
Why do you believe resilience should be developed before a crisis rather than during one?
Because a crisis is the worst possible moment to be learning a new skill. When pressure arrives, you don’t rise to your aspirations, you fall back to whatever is already trained. If steadiness isn’t already built into how you notice, pause, and respond, you won’t be able to access it when it actually matters. You’ll default to whatever your system does under load, usually reacting fast, masking discomfort, or pushing harder.
Building the skill before the crisis means the pattern is already familiar when pressure arrives, you recognise the early signals in yourself, you have a way to interrupt automatic reactivity, and you’ve practised choosing a steadier response enough times that it’s available under real load. Waiting until the crisis to develop this is like trying to learn to swim once you’re already in open water. The work must happen in calmer conditions, deliberately and repeatedly, so it’s there when the water starts to get rough.
You describe an inner dialogue called “The Second Voice.” How does that conversation influence the way leaders make decisions and lead others?
The Second Voice is the internal dialogue most leaders have but rarely use on purpose. The First Voice is fast, reactive, protective, focused on control. It’s the one that answers immediately, defends a position, or pushes through discomfort without examining it. The Second Voice is steadier, measured, grounded, capable of perspective and intuition. It’s usually there, but underdeveloped, because most leaders have never been taught to deliberately choose it.
In decision-making, the shift from First to Second Voice is the difference between reacting to a situation and actually responding to it. It creates a gap between what’s happening and how you act, and that gap is where good judgment lives. In how you lead others, it shows up as consistency. Your team can predict your values and your presence even when they can’t predict the circumstances. That predictability builds trust faster than any single decision does. Choosing the Second Voice, again and again, is what steadiness actually looks like in practice.
What is one daily habit that helps leaders stay calm and clear when the pressure starts to build?
I anchor before I open anything. Before I look at messages, before the day’s first meeting, I take two minutes to notice what state I’m actually in, not the state I’m performing. That’s it. No elaborate ritual. Just a genuine check, am I steady right now, or am I already reacting to something that hasn’t happened yet?
That small habit matters because most pressure doesn’t announce itself. It builds quietly through the day, one rushed decision or sharp tone at a time, until you’re operating from a place you didn’t choose.
Starting the day by noticing your actual state, rather than assuming you’re fine because you’re functioning, makes it much easier to catch the drift later, in a hard conversation or a fast decision. Steadiness isn’t something you arrive at once and keep. It’s a practice you return to, and a two-minute anchor is the simplest version of that return I know.
How can a leader create psychological steadiness across an entire team without pretending to have all the answers?
You don’t create steadiness by having every answer. You create it by being findable, consistent in how you show up, honest about what you know and don’t, and willing to name reality plainly instead of dressing it up. Teams don’t actually need a leader who’s never uncertain. They need a leader whose character doesn’t shift with the conditions, even when the conditions are bad.
In practice, that means saying “I don’t know yet, and this is how we’ll find out” instead of manufacturing false confidence. It means naming pressure out loud rather than letting it leak sideways into tone or decisions. It means that when you get something wrong, you repair it quickly and openly instead of letting it sit. None of that requires pretending. It requires steadiness under exposure, being willing to be seen accurately, uncertainty included, without that uncertainty becoming chaos. A team follows that kind of consistency far more readily than it follows an act.
What have your own leadership experiences taught you about the difference between appearing resilient and genuinely being resilient?
Appearing strong is a performance. It’s holding your face together, keeping your voice level, saying the right words, while everything underneath is still reactive. I did that for years, and it worked, in the sense that people around me couldn’t always tell. But it cost me. Performing calm while internally overloaded doesn’t actually protect your thinking. It only hides the fact that your thinking has already narrowed.
Genuine steadiness looks less impressive from the outside. It might include saying “I need a minute to think about that” mid-conversation, or admitting a decision needs more thought before it’s made. It’s slower to perform and harder to fake. The real test isn’t how you look in the room. It’s whether your judgment holds when no one is checking your performance, in the decision you make alone, at the end of a long day. My own leadership taught me that the moment you stop needing to look strong is usually the moment you actually become it.
If every leader embraced one idea about resilience tomorrow, what would you hope it would be?
That steadiness is not personality. It’s not something you either have or don’t, and it’s not the same as being naturally calm. It’s a trained leadership capability, built the same way any other skill is built, deliberately, repeatedly, in the conditions that will eventually test it.
If every leader believed that tomorrow, I think a lot of unnecessary pressure would come off the table. People would stop measuring themselves against leaders who seem naturally unshakeable and start asking a more useful question, what’s the actual practice that builds this in me? Steadiness is the new strong. Not because strength doesn’t matter, but because pushing through was never the whole answer, and most leaders already have more capability than they can currently access under pressure. Closing that gap, on purpose, every day, is what works. That’s the idea I’d want every leader to carry into tomorrow.
“Steady is the new strong.”
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