Recently, I’ve been using a rating scale in workshops with executives to assess the current strength of their eight threads. The pattern is consistent. Participants describe their productivity threads as the strongest — particularly mastery, meaning the proficiencies they have built up over their careers. Participants highly rate their capacity to identify their core strengths, regularly find opportunities to deepen their expertise, and find work that energizes them. In contrast, the weakest thread is calm — the capacity and motivation to create space for reflection, center themselves, and protect the activities that restore their energy.

When executives discuss these results, many voice the same dilemma: “I know I need calm, but my job won’t let me.”

And yet, in every workshop, a small minority of attendees — typically around 10% — rate calm as their strongest thread. They are no less busy, no less driven, and no less accountable than their peers. I call them the calm minority. This article explores who they are and what the rest of us can learn from them.

What Distinguishes the Calm Minority

When I’ve interviewed members of the calm minority, what has differentiated them is not their workload but the way they move through it. They face the same pressures as everyone else — the pace, the complexity, the competing demands — yet they manage to maintain a steadiness that others find elusive.

Looking closely, I recognized that their calm tends to arise through three pathways. These pathways reflect the deeper identity question — Who am I? — that runs through my research. Calm is shaped by identity. It emerges from the contexts we come from, the temperaments we carry, and the experiences that form us. In the calm minority, these may be derived from three sources: heritage, personality, and experience.

[Here are the first two Pathways]

Pathway 1: Calm From Heritage — Shaped by Context and Early Norms

Some members of the calm minority grew up in an environment where calm was part of everyday life. Whether they had practices that were cultural, familial, or spiritual, they absorbed slower pacing, rituals of rest, and the belief that pauses are productive. Calm was not something they sought out as adults; it was something they had inherited. It came not so much through instruction as through the micropatterns of daily living.

Executives described families where steadiness was modeled almost unconsciously. They had a grandparent who approached difficulties with measured thought rather than reactivity, or a household where conflict was handled with restraint. Others traced their calm to broader cultural norms that prize composure or collective support. A Japanese executive spoke of traditions that elevate intentionality and restraint; a Latin American executive noted how strong family ties had created a sense that crises would be faced together, not alone.

In people’s long working lives, this early calm becomes a form of psychological capital. It compounds over time, allowing them to navigate transitions and volatility with more ease.

For those who struggle with calm, the lesson is not to mimic another culture or household but rather to look back at their own. Most people can identify at least one formative person or early experience that modeled steadiness. When they reconnect with these individuals or moments — a teacher who listened without haste, a family ritual that created stillness, a community practice that offered grounding — they often rediscover a forgotten resource they have carried for years that they can use more actively today.

Pathway 2: Calm From Personality — Temperament as an Internal Anchor

Some of the calm minority seemed to carry calm within their temperament. They had a tendency to be more introverted, lower in neuroticism, more autonomy oriented, and naturally drawn to deep, focused work. For them, calm was not a goal to be reached but a default way of moving through the world.

Yet, many described how difficult it was to maintain this temperament in open-plan offices and with constant interruption and rapid-fire messaging — factors that erode the conditions that allow their natural calm to thrive. So over time, they learned to redesign their environments or routines to better fit who they were. They blocked out uninterrupted time on their schedules, protected mornings for high-quality work, and reduced their exposure to noise and distraction.

What makes this pathway particularly useful for others to consider is that aspects of it are replicable. Even people who do not share these temperaments can adopt the underlying principles: protecting “deep time,” reducing sensory and cognitive stimuli, setting clearer boundaries, and choosing depth over noise. They can learn, as this group has, that calm often emerges not from slowing everything down but from eliminating unnecessary activation — a shift accessible to far more people than temperament might suggest.