Most leaders reading this have a mindfulness app they have not opened in three months. They have a gym membership they intend to use. They have half-finished books on sleep, nutrition, and recovery stacked on the bedside table. And yet the single most powerful performance lever available to them — the one thing that is on, twenty-four hours a day, that costs nothing and requires no subscription — is almost entirely ignored.
You are breathing right now. The question is whether you are breathing in a way that is helping you lead, or in a way that is quietly undermining everything you are trying to build.
In the most recent episode of Impactful Teamwork, I sat down with Lucas Kulbis — a high-performance coach and breathwork expert — and what he shared fundamentally reframed something I thought I already understood. I have been working with horses for years, and one of the first things you learn in that field is that breath is everything. A rider holding their breath communicates one thing to a horse: threat. The moment they exhale, the horse exhales with them. The conversation between nervous systems happens in milliseconds, and it is entirely non-verbal. What Lucas helped me articulate is that the same dynamic is happening in every boardroom, every leadership team meeting, and every conversation between a leader and the people who report to them — whether anyone in the room is aware of it or not.
The Feedback Loop Nobody Talks About
Here is the physiological reality. Most high-performing leaders breathe in the top 20% of their lung capacity — shallow, rapid, chest-driven breaths. Research has established that the average American adult takes 18 breaths per minute, and at that rate the nervous system receives a constant signal that reads as low-level threat. The amygdala — the brain’s fear centre — stays activated. Decision-making narrows. Peripheral vision, both literal and strategic, contracts. And because the nervous system communicates directly to those around you, your team’s biology follows yours. You are not just managing your own state when you walk into a room. You are managing theirs.
The irony, as Lucas points out, is that this is not a stress problem. It is a pattern problem. The shallow breathing came first. The anxiety came second. Most leaders are trying to fix the symptom while the cause runs silently in the background, breath after breath, all day long.
The Counterintuitive Case for Slowing Down
Lucas trained in breathwork after burning out following the launch of a successful startup. The product landed. The revenue followed. And the emptiness was still there, because he had been neglecting everything that actually sustained performance in pursuit of a goal that kept moving. It is a story that will be familiar to many of the leaders I work with — not because they have failed, but precisely because they have succeeded, and discovered that the engine running beneath that success was running on fumes.
What he found, and what the emerging neuroscience supports, is that the exhale — not the inhale — is where the real shift happens. When you breathe out fully, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s rest-and-digest mode. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for strategic thinking, emotional regulation, and complex decision-making — comes back online. You can see the bigger picture again. You can read the room again. You can lead, rather than react.
This is not soft science. Lucas describes what researchers call coherence breathing — breathing in for 5.5 seconds and out for 5.5 seconds — as the point at which the heart, the brainwaves, and the breath come into measurable alignment. Studies show that people who breathe at this rate perform better, connect more deeply with the people around them, and recover from stress faster. Yet in a world where we have optimised almost every other performance variable, most leaders have never consciously regulated their breath for five minutes in their professional lives.
What This Means for the People You Lead
The concept Lucas returns to throughout our conversation is co-regulation — the phenomenon by which nervous systems synchronise with one another. It is ancient and pre-verbal. We first experienced it as infants, co-regulating with our mothers and caregivers before we had language for anything. It never switched off. Every time you walk into a room as a leader carrying unprocessed cortisol from the morning’s fire-fighting, your team’s bodies register it before your mouth opens. The inverse is also true. A leader who has genuinely regulated their state — not performed calm, but actually arrived in it — changes the neurological conditions in the room for everyone present.
This is the part of the conversation that landed most precisely for me. In my work with horses, I have watched this happen in real time, in ways that are impossible to dismiss as coincidence. I will never forget watching a client on horseback, breath held, shoulders braced, and the horse moving with exactly the same anxious energy beneath her. The moment she exhaled — a proper, full exhale, shoulders dropping — the horse settled instantaneously. Her nervous system spoke to his. His body answered. There was no intermediary. And your team is doing the same thing in your Monday morning meeting, with slightly less visibility.
The Three-Minute Practice That Changes Your State
Lucas shares two exercises in the episode that are worth taking seriously, precisely because they ask nothing of you beyond what you are already doing. The first is the physiological sigh: a full breath into the diaphragm, followed by a small second sip of air at the top, and then a long, extended exhale through the mouth. Three repetitions of this will measurably down-regulate your nervous system and shift you out of tunnel-vision reactivity into the wider-field thinking that leadership actually requires. It takes less time than checking your messages.
The second is simpler still — something you can do tonight, as you lie in bed before sleep: place your hands on your chest and your belly and breathe into your diaphragm, feeling your stomach rise rather than your chest. This single habit, practised consistently, rewires the feedback loop that keeps shallow breathing and anxious states cycling together. It is not a mindfulness practice. It is re-establishing a biological baseline that most high performers have inadvertently degraded.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Lucas shared something in our conversation that I have been thinking about since we recorded it. He described research suggesting that each person has a unique breath print — that the pattern of their breathing is as individual as a fingerprint, and that the part of the brain governing breathing overlaps with the region rooted in identity. When you change how you breathe, you change how you think. You change, in some measurable neurological sense, who you are in the room.
For leaders who have built their professional identity on being the person who drives hardest, decides fastest, and absorbs the most pressure — that is a genuinely confronting idea. The question it raises is not whether you can handle more. It is whether the way you are currently functioning is actually the best version of what you are capable of. Not more. Different. More present, more grounded, more genuinely in contact with the people and information around you.
That is a performance question, not a wellbeing question. And it deserves a serious answer.
Listen to the full conversation with Lucas Kulbis on Impactful Teamwork — including the live breathwork demonstration and his explanation of the neuroscience behind coherence breathing — wherever you get your podcasts. If this episode prompts you to explore what a different quality of leadership presence could unlock in your organisation, I would love to have that conversation. Book a complimentary review call at businesshorsepower.com and let us explore what is genuinely possible.
Show Notes
00:46 Meet Lucas Kulbis
01:55 From Startup to Burnout
02:45 Why Breath Matters
04:03 Breathwork for Leaders
05:02 Stress Reset Framework
08:54 Safety and Co Regulation
12:06 Neuroscience of Breathing
15:52 Crisis Breath Exercise
20:02 Sleep and Daily Habits
21:21 Client Results and Revenue
25:19 Coherence Breathing Basics
28:43 Resources and Closing
Connect to Lucas here.
