By: Gesche Haas, Founder of Dreamers & Doers, a curated community and PR Hype Machine™ for extraordinary women entrepreneurs.
Pressure doesn’t pause while you figure out how to handle it. It arrives fast, stays longer than expected, and has a way of exposing every gap in how you lead.
Ambitious founders and leaders from the Dreamers & Doers community know that firsthand. Through personal experience and on-the-job lessons, they’ve also learned that navigating pressure is often about shifting how you relate to the uncertainty underneath it, changing your relationship to adversity and becoming more responsive than reactive. Here, they reflect on those shifts, often hard-won, and inspire others to better handle the intense pressure that comes with making big things happen in the world.
They Stopped Fighting Uncertainty
Making the decision to start something new or take on a leadership role requires a certain fighting spirit, but pushing back isn’t always the answer. Uncertainty is inevitable, and many leaders find that learning to live with rather than combat it is an effective strategy for growth.
“For a long time I treated uncertainty as something to fight: the deal that might not close, the next client that might not show, the move that might not pay off,” says Hannah Schloesser, founder of SALT. “The shift was learning to sit inside that uncertainty instead of trying to engineer it away. Paired with strong pattern recognition, the blank page in front of you stops being scary and starts being interesting.”
For NoomaLooma’s co-founder Lakshmi Balasubramanian, learning to lean into a sense of play was key to overcoming the tendency to fight for constant guarantees in business. Instead of focusing on measurements and fixed destinations, Balasubramanian began looking for learning opportunities, treating work like an experiment and running experiments.
“Letting the path be a little squiggly has made me a better founder and a more useful partner to my team,” she says. “Pressure gets lighter when you’re genuinely curious about what happens next!”
Many leaders are interested in certainty because of their understandable fears of what could go wrong. In entrepreneurship, stakes are high, and getting comfortable with worst-case scenarios can be key to embracing the unknown and more effectively navigating pressure. This isn’t an especially fun exercise, but Envision Horizons founder and CEO Laura Meyer can attest to its positive impacts.
“I’ve learned to spend time mapping out the worst-case scenario and becoming comfortable with that reality before it happens,” Meyer says. “While I’m naturally optimistic, forcing myself to also think like a realist, or even a pessimist, helps me proactively problem-solve, stay grounded under pressure and navigate challenges with far more clarity and confidence.”
Knowing what could go wrong and realizing that it won’t spell the end of the world helps founders and executives embrace the possibilities. Having experienced letdowns in practice and not just theory, Dr. Claire Green-Forde continues welcoming the full range of emotions into her role as the CEO and founder of Dr. Claire SPEAKS!™.
“I started giving myself permission to feel the disappointment that comes with rejection, delay and uncertainty without letting it become the story of my business,” Dr. Green-Forde says. “That shift has helped me lead with more steadiness, discernment and trust in the long-term vision I am building.”
Like these seasoned trailblazers, successful leaders are often the people in the crowd who are most comfortable operating without certainty. Getting to that place requires practice.
They Changed Their Relationship With Setbacks
In business, as in life, no one emerges unscathed from adversity. Finding success in any professional context, especially in a high-profile role that requires big-picture thinking and decision-making, calls for a healthy understanding of what it means to face a challenge. For effective leaders, challenges become information, opportunities or perspective-builders rather than evidence of failure.
The hospitality industry has taught Jennylee Ramos that the way you choose to recover from a mistake is much more telling than the mistake itself. She’s taken this wisdom into her role as founder of Ramos Familia Group LLC.
“A challenge is often the window to delight someone in a way you couldn’t have otherwise,” Ramos says. “That reframe steadied me under pressure and changed how I lead. When we hit a wall, it’s a collective opportunity to learn, not a finger to point.”
In order to rethink setbacks and more comfortably face workplace pressures head-on, Coco Duan had to practice regulating her nervous system instead of constantly swinging between overdrive and shutdown.
“When a LinkedIn post didn’t perform or a sales call turned into a ‘no,’ I would spiral into hours of self-doubt, hopelessness and wanting to hide from the world,” Duan says of how it felt to run her coaching company before she learned to stop tying her work to external validation and focus on internal safety. “As I became more calm and grounded, I started thinking more clearly, showing up better for clients and working with far less hustling.”
Natanya Wachtel’s new perspective on hardship was forced by a series of devastating medical issues. After suffering a spinal injury in 2015, a brain injury took her down again in 2025.
“I rebuilt this company off the floor a second time,” says the founder, angel and host of New Solutions Network. “These days, I sweat the small stuff a lot less, I lean on my team instead of carrying it all myself, and I ask for help out loud- three things the old me would have called weakness. The company got stronger the moment I stopped trying to be the strongest person in it.”
When leaders stop viewing every setback as a threat, they can respond with more creativity, steadiness, and perspective.
They Learned to Respond Instead of React
Kela Lester has felt more empowered to deal with pressure as CEO of thrdspc ever since she stopped waiting for it to pass and instead started moving through it with intention. By responding from a place of values-driven action rather than reacting emotionally, she became a better leader, and this was never more important than when an event she planned gained so much traction it drew a counter-protest.
“My instinct wasn’t to manage the narrative or go silent,” Lester says. “I stayed accountable to what I actually believe in: reaching out to the organizers directly, offering resources and making changes I already knew were necessary, even for decisions that weren’t mine to make. Acting from values instead of fear is what keeps the work, and my reputation, grounded.”
Ultimately, the pressure never fully disappears for leaders and founders. Bigger opportunities often bring bigger decisions, greater responsibility, and higher stakes. Leaders who continue growing develop the capacity to meet it differently.
Across these stories, one theme emerges again and again. Resilience isn’t about becoming unshakeable. It’s about becoming more adaptable. By making peace with uncertainty, treating setbacks as part of the process rather than proof they’ve failed and responding from their values instead of their fears, these founders have built something even more valuable than confidence. They’ve built the ability to keep moving forward, even when the path ahead isn’t clear.
All individuals featured in this article are members of Dreamers & Doers, a highly curated community and PR Hype Machine™ amplifying extraordinary women entrepreneurs and leaders through authentic connections, credibility-boosting visibility, and opportunities that accelerate big dreams. (Explore Dreamers & Doers membership.)
