Why I Created Pressure Literacy, and What 30 Years Inside Broken Systems Taught Me About Invisible Pressure

This is not a wellbeing story. It's a system story.

I've been inside this. Not once. Not in one role.

Across 30 years, in every setting you can imagine.

I've been the employee and the leader who worked herself into the ground for a system that didn't notice until I broke. 72-hour weeks paid as 36. Concerns raised multiple times about problems that needed dealing with and systems that were not working. In one role, I inherited a Pandora's box from the person I took over from. I was continually shut down.

I was not one of the favourites, the nodding dogs as I called them. I was seen as extremely capable. But why did I always have to raise issues or challenge procedures?

I always did it respectfully. I genuinely wanted those above me to know that things were not fine. But they just didn't want to know. So I stopped saying anything and slowly eroded.

When I submitted my resignation they were genuinely shocked. They had no idea I was a flight risk. Looking back I had given them so many warning signs. They had no clue how to read them. They lost an exceptionally loyal, capable and high achieving member of their department all because they were leading with blinkers on.

But I didn't just live inside it. I then spent years on the other side of it.

As a practitioner, I treated thousands of patients whose bodies and minds were carrying the fallout of pressure that nobody upstream had ever addressed. The back pain with no physical cause. The anxiety with no medical explanation. The headaches, the panic attacks, the digestive issues, to mention just a few. The tears that arrived in my treatment room the moment someone finally felt safe enough to be honest.

Same pattern. Every patient. Every sector. Every continent I've worked on.

What I observed across all of it was this. The pressure was always there before the person arrived in front of me. It had been building for months, sometimes years. It had left signs that anyone trained to read them would have recognised. A change in pace. A flattening of tone. Small errors from someone who never made errors. Single sick days that nobody connected. Withdrawal from someone who used to go above and beyond.

The signs were there. Nobody knew how to read them.

And here's what I know for certain. None of it changes if you only treat the person.

You can support them, counsel them, rehabilitate them. But then you send them back into the same system that broke them in the first place. And so it'll break them again. Because the system hasn't changed. The pressure hasn't moved. Leaders aren't reading it.

Seeing repeat patterns of suffering in people stuck in cycles of unrelenting work pressure became soul destroying. The fear. The shaking of heads when I suggested they raised the work related triggers or causes with their managers. The look that said you don't understand what it's like in there.

I understood exactly what it was like in there. I'd lived it.

That's why I created Pressure Literacy.

Not to fix people. To fix what's pressing on them.

I'm done with hearing so many people talk about how much work is affecting them. I'm done with listening to people being forced to feel grateful because the system that is breaking them has arranged a fruit bowl for them.

Pressure Literacy is not a wellbeing programme. I'm not here to hand out mindfulness apps and call it progress. It's not a resilience workshop. I'm not interested in teaching people to absorb more of what shouldn't be there.

It's a governance capability. It sits alongside financial literacy and risk literacy. It reads where pressure enters an organisation, where it concentrates, and who is absorbing what the system should be holding.

I don't soften findings to protect egos. I don't produce reports that sit in drawers gathering dust. And I don't blow sunshine up anyone's backside about a system that's quietly falling apart.

I was a good leader. But I was led by leaders who were happy to take their grossly inflated salaries whilst leading blind. Making serious decisions based on fiction. Whilst their people absorbed loads their systems should have been holding.

I work with leaders who'd rather know the truth than be comfortable. The ones who'll roll up their sleeves, get in the trenches, and face what they find. No hierarchy. No blinkers. No egos. Just honest work that actually changes things.

If that's not you, I'm not your person. And I never will be.

But if you're sensing something in your organisation that you can't quite name. If the engagement scores say one thing but the corridors say another. If your best people keep leaving and nobody can explain why. Then that's pressure. And nobody ever taught your leadership team how to read it.

That's what The Pressure Brief is for. The patterns. The data. The stories nobody else is telling. The stuff that needs to be said out loud.

This isn't wellbeing work. This is system repair.

I hope you'll stick around.

Nikki

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If any of this sounds uncomfortably familiar, start here.

The Pressure Blind Spot Report is a free download. Five things your organisation is losing that nobody is measuring. No solutions. Just an accurate description of what's almost certainly already happening.