[runawaybottle]

I can give you a protip for dealing with this. No guarantees, but often the poker hand that leadership has is an ‘ok’ hand. Maybe two pairs, maybe one pair, sometimes just a high card, sometimes just two face cards. To translate, their hands are often not as good as you think. You may believe they have a three of a kind, or a straight (you will be fired), but the bet you have to make is most likely they got a modest hand.

So what does that mean? Often those modest/weak hands mean the worse that will happen to you is that you will fall out of favor.

If you go into the bet like that, and can live with that, you won’t be scared. If you were matched up against the strongest hand like a royal flush (you will be fired for sure), realize you were up against the strongest possible hand to begin with and weren’t going to come out of that alive.

Usually, if someone has a very very strong hand, they will try to conceal it from you so you don’t even know what you are walking into. It’s the weaker hands that need to convince you that you should be scared and back off from the bet.

The takeaway here is that in each of those situations the pressure is contrived (e.g someone’s got you convinced there’s a ton of pressure, or more scarily, that there’s no pressure, neither of which is ever true).

[kucing]

This is really interesting. I never really think of it from their perspective. And the case of:

- either you can, just be calm and act rationally / work within reasonable limit, focus on overall productivity.

- or you won't be able to catch up anyway

makes the case much clearer. I think there would be a category "you might or might not be able to survive, depending on how much work / luck you have" might exist, but the chance to fall on that sweet spot is quite slim.

I like your idea regarding the mind game about hiding/boasting the pressure.