For many professionals, pressure is no longer something that comes in waves, it’s the background to everyday work.

People are still performing and meeting expectations, but many are also exhausted. Not just physically, but mentally. Attention is constantly pulled in multiple directions, decisions stack up, and the pace of change keeps accelerating. With AI adoption, continuous change and an always-on flow of information and data, the demand on mental bandwidth has never been higher.

In this environment, familiar advice starts to fall apart. Working longer and harder reduces the margin for error, productivity becomes a judgment rather than a benefit, and resilience alone isn’t enough when pressure never really eases.

This keynote challenges the idea that sustainable performance comes from pushing harder, optimising more, or bouncing back faster. Instead, George Anderson offers a more realistic perspective on what it now takes to perform well when pressure is permanent.

The session explores why performance becomes unreliable under sustained pressure, and what needs to change if it’s going to hold up. George looks at how capacity is created and depleted, how performance becomes inconsistent when it relies on motivation, energy or ideal conditions, and how composure under pressure isn’t just about staying calm, but about how leaders think when constraints are real and trade-offs are unavoidable.

Drawing on behavioural science, physiology and two decades of real-world experience, George reframes wellbeing as a performance capability – something that can be intentionally designed into how people work, lead and make decisions under pressure.

Rather than settling or slowing down, the focus is on redesigning the small, often overlooked factors that determine how people show up when work is busy, complex and demanding. The result is performance that holds up more reliably, without exacting an unsustainable human cost.