Most of us have encountered a doorman at some point. A club entrance, a live event, a bar with a reputation. Some of those interactions were seamless. Others, less so. But here's a question most senior leaders would never think to ask: what could someone running a high-pressure, high-responsibility organisation possibly learn from a person standing on a door?
During one of my earlier periods training in martial arts, I came across the work of Geoff Thompson. He is a BAFTA-winning screenwriter, a best-selling author, and one of the most respected martial artists in the country. But before any of that, Geoff spent years working as a doorman in Coventry during the 1980s, at a time when it was considered one of the most violent cities in Europe.
The obvious question is: why would someone with his skills choose that environment? The answer is what makes his work so relevant to leaders today.
Geoff understood that true control in moments of conflict is not primarily physical. It is psychological. He wanted to understand fear itself: what it does to the body, how it hijacks cognition, and how to manage it under sustained pressure. Night after night, he placed himself in high-risk, high-adrenaline situations not to provoke conflict, but to study it from within.
Over a decade on the doors, he developed a profound working knowledge of the fight-or-flight response, adrenaline dynamics, and the mental mechanics of confrontation. His book, Dead or Alive, remains one of the most insightful texts on self-protection ever written. For research, he went as far as interviewing violent offenders to understand how they selected targets. What he uncovered went far beyond self-defence. It cut to the core of how human beings behave under threat.
I spent years in the Royal Marines, where I encountered adrenaline in contexts most people never will. But it was only later, through Geoff's work and the science that sits behind it, that I came to properly understand the mechanisms involved.
So what does any of this have to do with running a business?
Your brain does not distinguish between physical danger and professional pressure. The triggers differ. The physiological response does not. When a CEO faces a hostile investor, a boardroom ambush, a difficult dismissal, or a public crisis, the body reacts in the same way it would to a physical threat: adrenaline surges, heart rate climbs, cognitive bandwidth narrows, and judgement deteriorates.
This is not a weakness. It is human biology. But it becomes a serious professional liability if you do not understand it, recognise it in real time, or have the tools to manage it.
The situations that reliably trigger this response in senior leaders include delivering critical feedback to a high-performer, managing visible conflict within a leadership team, presenting under investor or board scrutiny, navigating a high-stakes negotiation, and handling any situation where authority, reputation, or relationships are genuinely at risk.
The stress response that fires in each of those moments is the same one Geoff Thompson trained himself to work with, night after night, standing on a door in Coventry.
White represents a state of unawareness and unpreparedness. The "it won't happen to me" mindset. Yellow is calm alertness, attentive and ready without being reactive. Orange signals a specific identified risk, with the mind beginning to prepare a response. Red is active high-adrenaline pressure, where the stress response is fully engaged. Black is cognitive overwhelm, the state where mental functioning shuts down under excessive load.
The goal for any leader is to live and operate predominantly in Yellow. That means staying attentive and calibrated without being on edge. The practical discipline is learning to notice when you are moving toward Orange or Red, and intervening before it affects your words, your decisions, or your behaviour toward your team.
Most leaders who derail under pressure do not lack competence. They lack awareness of their own internal state at the critical moment.
Understanding the adrenal response is the first step. Managing it is the work. There are several approaches that translate directly from high-risk physical environments into the demands of executive leadership.
The first is recognising adrenaline as information rather than a threat. A tight chest, a quickened pulse, and narrowed thinking are signals worth attending to, not symptoms to suppress. Naming what is happening physiologically gives you agency over it.
The second is breath control. Research consistently supports controlled breathing as one of the fastest and most reliable ways to interrupt a stress response. The physiological sigh, two short inhales through the nose followed by one long, slow exhale, reduces physiological arousal faster than any other voluntary mechanism. It takes less than thirty seconds. It works.
The third is postural intentionality. How you hold your body directly influences your neurochemistry. Standing grounded, slowing your speech, and maintaining deliberate physical presence are not cosmetic choices. They actively shift your nervous system state and project authority regardless of how pressured you feel internally.
The fourth is learning to project calm when you do not feel it. In high-stakes moments, the leader's outward state becomes the reference point for everyone else in the room. This is not about performance or inauthenticity. It is about the practical understanding that your team reads your physiology, and responds to it.
The fifth is structured recovery after high-pressure events. The aftershock of adrenaline is real. It depletes cognitive resources and accumulates over time if left unmanaged. Physical movement, deliberate decompression, and reflective practice are not optional extras for high-performing leaders. They are part of the job.
The adrenal system does not treat all people identically. Different personality profiles respond to different types of pressure in different ways. Some leaders are highly functional under acute, short-duration stress but struggle when pressure is chronic and sustained. Others are the inverse.
This is where psychometric assessment becomes genuinely useful. Hogan profiling, in particular, maps how individuals behave under pressure with a precision that self-assessment cannot achieve. It identifies the specific derailing tendencies that emerge when the bright-side leadership style gives way to the dark-side stress response. That combination of self-knowledge and physiological awareness is what separates leaders who perform consistently under pressure from those who are impressive only when conditions are favourable.
The insight Geoff Thompson spent a decade developing on the doors of Coventry is the same insight that underpins serious leadership development: you cannot manage what you have not understood, and you cannot understand it until you have trained inside it.
The question worth asking is not whether pressure will test you. It will. The question is whether you have done the work to be ready when it does. Understanding the Colour Code of Awareness can give leaders a practical framework for recognising changes in their internal state and responding before pressure begins to affect their judgement and behaviour.
If you want to understand how your leadership team performs under pressure and what happens when the adrenaline hits, speak to RSG Consulting.