How do some women stay composed under pressure while everyone around them tightens up? It is not temperament. It is training. In this episode of The b.reathe Blueprint Podcast, Katie Harvey makes the case from her book The Success Hangover that calm is a skill, not a personality trait, and shows you exactly how to build it.

Katie knows the stakes from both sides: years spent as the only woman on construction sites, where composure was watched and judged differently, and years of Muay Thai, where the lesson is physical and immediate. Tension makes you slower. Panic makes you worse. The fighter who controls her breathing controls the exchange. You will learn what pressure does to your thinking, the breath and body levers that keep your reasoning brain online, and the exact protocols for before, during and after high-stakes moments.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why calm under pressure is trainable, and what is actually being trained
• The extra tax on composure when you are the only woman in the room
• The Muay Thai lesson: relaxed is faster, panic makes everything worse
• The exhale: the most direct lever you have on your own nervous system, backed by Stanford research
• A one minute protocol before high-stakes moments, and resets for during and after
• Why calm is a power move, not passivity

The b.reathe Blueprint Podcast is for the woman who holds it all together: female founders, leaders and high performers who want to keep performing without losing themselves. Hosted by Katie Harvey, author of the Amazon No.1 bestseller The Success Hangover.

Take the Success Hangover Check-In. A two minute check-in that shows how your system is really coping right now, and what to focus on first: https://breatheblueprint.com/hello

Jimmy Burroughs was promoted to a GM role in his mid-thirties, ten to fifteen years younger than everyone around him. The business was restructuring. The executive team was falling apart. People were taking their own lives. And then the government changed immigration rules overnight, costing the business twenty million dollars. He was told to fix it.

He worked twenty-hour days. Travelled offshore ten days out of thirty. Drank wine to calm his nerves. Took paracetamol and Coke Zero to get going in the morning. Skipped the gym. Ate takeaways. And told himself it would slow down eventually.

One morning in 2017, he sat on the edge of the bed and thought, if I do not do something different, I am going to kill myself or kill somebody. That was the day he resigned.

In this conversation, Jimmy talks about the signs he missed, why he calls the early stage of burnout "justifying," and the difference between a high-performance leader and one who is simply trying to do everything. He also shares the rubber ducky analogy that explains why burnout gets harder to escape the longer you leave it.

This one is for any leader, manager, or founder who is rowing through treacle and telling themselves it will ease up. It will not.

If anything in this episode landed, take The Success Hangover Scorecard to find out where your performance is costing you. breatheblueprint.com/hello

Contact Jimmy: www.jblhighperformance.com

Cass is a Nigerian-born nurse turned entrepreneur who has lived in Dominica, London, and Newcastle. She built The Tolicious Brand as a side hustle while working full-time in the NHS. Then, on 16th August, she almost lost her life and her newborn's life during an emergency caesarean section.

That was the moment everything changed. She went back for a few shifts, then walked away from the NHS and went all in on Tolicious.

In this conversation, Cass talks about what burnout actually looked like for her. Not doing too much, but doing everything and not seeing the result she expected. She talks about the imposter syndrome she still carries, the moment she walked up to a speaker shaking and sweating and secured funding for her brand, and why self-care is not selfish. It is survival.

This one is for anyone building something while holding everything together. For any mother, any nurse, any woman who has been pouring from an empty cup and wondering why there is nothing left.

If anything in this episode landed, take The Success Hangover Scorecard to find out where your performance is costing you. breatheblueprint.com/hello