I Started Saying “Good” to Everything Bad

People get a particular look when they read my CV. Eyebrow up, head tilted slightly, trying to make the pieces fit. The titles, the hospitals, the budgets, the academic programs built from scratch. On paper, it reads like a career someone planned out, as if I sat down decades ago with a map, circled a destination, and simply followed the exits.

I always smile at that look.

The honest version is closer to a county road after a hard rain. Detours. Potholes. The occasional washout you did not see coming until the front tires were already committed. And the part that actually defines you as a leader rarely makes it onto the page anyway. It lives in the moments that never make the official record: the hallway exchange, the meeting where three unrelated problems show up wearing one trench coat, the half-second where you feel your patience thinning and have to decide who is about to answer.

I learned that lesson the hard way on a Tuesday morning in early 2017.

The Morning I Saw Myself Too Clearly

At the time, I was Medical Director of a veterinary technology program a colleague and I had built from scratch. We had just come through our first AVMA accreditation, the kind of milestone that leaves you proud, exhausted, and permanently suspicious of binders. On the side, I was running an e-commerce business in the evenings, because apparently a full-time job was not providing sufficient chaos.

That Tuesday started with a budget meeting where equipment we genuinely needed got denied, again. I left the room already running mental math on a workaround. Halfway down the hall, a faculty member stopped me about a student issue that needed attention right then. My phone buzzed: a shipping problem in the side business. It buzzed again: a compliance requirement had surfaced early and now needed handling that same day.

All before eleven in the morning.

I could feel it stacking. Tight chest, thoughts speeding up, that internal narrator asking why everything was happening at once, why today, and what was coming next. Then a colleague walked up with a perfectly reasonable question about an upcoming accreditation visit.

Not urgent. Not out of line. Exactly the kind of question their job required them to ask.

I snapped at them.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just enough edge that I watched their expression shift from surprise to hurt before they backed off.

That look stayed with me the rest of the day, because I knew exactly what I had done. They had come to me doing their job, and I had made them feel like they had done something wrong. Poor stress management costs you more than a bad moment. It spends trust that took months to build, in about five careless seconds.

I did not want to lead that way.

The Pattern I Could Not Ignore Anymore

I would love to say that morning was an isolated glitch. It was not. That edge showed up whenever pressure stacked high enough, not constantly, but often enough that I could see where it was headed. I could handle one problem patiently. Usually two. The third one is where some less admirable version of me started reaching for the microphone.

Leaders rarely become difficult all at once. They become difficult in patterns. People learn the weather system. They figure out when to approach, when to wait, and when to take the long way around your office because you currently look like a man negotiating with thunderclouds. I had seen that kind of leader before, the kind people work around instead of with. I had no interest in becoming one.

The problem was that recognizing the pattern did not automatically give me the ability to interrupt it. Awareness is useful, but it is not a strategy by itself. I needed something small enough to use in the actual moment, before stress finished writing my lines for me.

A Word I Almost Dismissed

A few months later, I picked up Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans and found a section about Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink. His approach to setbacks came down to a single word, said to yourself the instant something goes wrong:

“Good.”

Plan falls apart? Good. Someone drops the ball? Good. Priorities shift without warning? Good.

My first thought was that this seemed absurdly underpowered, like showing up to a barn fire with a teacup. When you have seventeen things demanding your attention, one word does not feel like much of a strategy. But I still had that hallway moment in my head, and gritting my teeth clearly was not working. So I tried it, mostly because I was tired of the alternative.

Why It Actually Works

The brain is not always as sophisticated under pressure as we would like to believe. The amygdala, your brain’s threat detector, can hijack the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for reasoning and judgment, in milliseconds. It does not always distinguish well between a genuine physical threat and a denied equipment request. Both can register as trouble, and both can trigger the same fight-or-flight machinery.

That is useful if you are being chased. It is less useful when your job is to respond thoughtfully to a colleague who just asked a normal question.

Saying “Good” does not fix the budget, the staffing, the deadline, the supplier, or the person standing in front of you with a problem you did not schedule. It does something more modest and, for me, more useful. It buys one second for the thinking brain to come back online before the reaction takes over.

It is not optimism. It is not pretending the moment is fine. It is a way of catching yourself mid-fall.

What Changed

The next time things started piling up, I tried it.

Equipment denied again? Good, now I knew I needed a different approach. That eventually became a phased equipment plan that got approved months later. A student issue needing immediate support? Good, better to address it now than during finals week. A delayed shipment? Good, now I knew that supplier was not reliable enough. A compliance deadline arriving without warning? Good, this was telling me to build a system instead of relying on memory, which is a charming but deeply unreliable employee.

It felt forced at first. My stressed brain fought it every time. It preferred its familiar hobbies: spiraling, muttering internally, predicting doom, and treating inconvenience as if it had personally insulted my ancestors.

But over time, something changed. I stopped spiraling as far. I stopped carrying one problem into the next conversation. I stopped handing my stress to people who had not earned it. I never told my team what I was doing. They noticed anyway.

A few weeks later, the colleague I had snapped at mentioned, almost in passing, that I seemed “more like myself lately.”

That is when I knew this was not just a coping trick. It was becoming a leadership practice.

Nine Years In, Still Imperfect

I have used this since 2017, through career transitions, through building things that did not exist before, through more complexity and more people counting on me. It does not work every time. Recently, a critical service was unraveling, we were short-staffed, and a real safety concern landed in the same afternoon. I said “Good,” and my brain basically replied, “That is adorable,” before heading straight toward panic anyway.

So no, this does not make you superhuman.

But leadership under pressure is not about perfect control. It is about improving your odds. It is about increasing the number of moments where you respond instead of react. A leader who improves their response even a little changes what it feels like to work around them.

That matters.

Where It Actually Matters

You do not need my job title for this. You just need to be alive. The dishwasher breaks. A deadline moves. A kid melts down. A colleague sends a vague email with just enough punctuation to seem ominous. Your boss schedules a “quick meeting,” which is almost never quick and rarely just a meeting.

Each one may be manageable on its own. Stacked together, they wear you down. And that is exactly where many leadership mistakes happen. Not from a lack of intelligence. Not from a lack of commitment. But from losing access to your better self at the precise moment other people need that version of you most.

Saying “Good” is not about pretending the moment is fine. It moves you from “Why is this happening?” to “What can I do with this?” That is a small shift, but under pressure, small shifts can change the whole room.

A CV will never show that pause. It will never capture the private decision not to snap at someone, not to spread your stress around, not to let a bad morning become someone else’s bad memory. But that is where real leadership often happens: in the breath before you react, the second before you spiral, the choice about who shows up next.

Something will go sideways today. When it does, try it once.

One breath. One word.

Good.