Perform At Your Peak Under Pressure, Without Burning Out.
Nervous system-informed executive coaching for senior leaders who need to perform at the top of their range and hold it.
Andre Duquemin, Coach, Somatic Therapist
Everyone thinks you're thriving. You know you're running on empty.
From the outside you're the one who has it handled. Sharp in the room and decisive. The person everyone else can rely on when it gets heavy. That's the version they see, and most days you can hold it. What they don't see is the cost of holding it.
The fog that rolls in by mid-afternoon. Decisions that take more out of you than they used to. And the walk through your own front door, where the energy just goes and being present with the people who matter most feels like one more thing being asked of you.
You’re Performing, But At What Cost?
Senior leaders operating under relentless pressure often don't realise their nervous system is running the show.
At Work
You’re Sharp In Meetings But Foggy By The Afternoon
Decision Making Feels Harder Than It Should Do
Small Frustrations Trigger Bigger Reactions
You Know You’re Capable Of More But Can’t Reach It
At Home
Energy Crashes The Moment You Walk In The Door
Presence Feels Impossible, Your Mind’s Still At Work
Sleep Doesn’t Restore You Like It Used To
You’re Going Through The Motions Rather Than Being Fully There
When it gets harder, you Hold On Tighter. That's the trap.
The instinct, when performance starts to cost more than it should, is to apply more of what got you here. More discipline. More control.
But trying to hold on tighter is one system trying to do the work of three.
How you perform under pressure runs across three systems, each speaking its own language.
The Survival System
Your body — the oldest, fastest part of you, reading for threat and safety far below conscious thought. It speaks in physical sensation. When it's overloaded, nothing above it works cleanly, and no amount of thinking overrides it.
The Feeling System
Emotion — the translator between a body built for speed and a mind built for meaning. When it's shut down or talked over, the body and the thinking can't actually reach each other.
The Thinking System
Thought, language and narrative is where strategy lives, and where most leaders are most fluent. It's also where most coaching stops, because it's the easiest one to talk about.
These three are in constant conversation, reading and shaping each other every moment.
A racing heart becomes "I'm under threat" or "I'm ready" depending on the story the thinking system tells about it. A thought about a hard meeting fires a survival response before the meeting exists.
This is why working on only one of them stalls.
Most performance advice lives in the thinking system — reframe it, plan it, push through it. But you can't think your way out of a depleted nervous system, and trying to is the single most common place leaders hit a wall they can't explain.
So the skill that changes it isn't another technique to layer on top. It's discernment — reading which system is actually driving, in you, right now, and starting there. Not the one that's easiest to talk about. The one that's running the show.
That read is the whole game. Without it, you're guessing.
Regulate Your Nervous System. Reclaim Your Edge.
Most advice treats pressure as the enemy and calm as the prize, but this is the wrong target. You don't want to be softened or managed, you want your edge back, and you want it to hold.
There's a band where you do your best work: clear enough to think, grounded enough to feel, steady enough to decide and lead without tipping into overdrive or fog. That's your window of regulation and peak performance sits at the top of it, not outside it.
The work is widening that window, so you can:
Make sharp decisions even under intense pressure
Stay emotionally grounded without suppressing what you feel
Maintain energy throughout demanding days
Lead from clarity instead of running on adrenaline
Why I see what your last coach didn't.
My name is Andre Duquemin. Most people who work with leaders are trained in one discipline. I'm trained in three that rarely sit in the same practitioner.
I'm an osteopath who spent two decades reading what bodies do under pressure. A clinician grounded in the neuroscience of pressure and performance. And a performance coach who works with the thinking, the meaning and the values that turn a settled system into actual decisions and action.
More than 5,000 clients over twenty-plus years.
That combination is the point. Because I read the body, the emotion and the thinking together, where most read one and miss the other two.
I can see what's actually limiting you, not just the symptom you walked in describing.
The fog, the shortening fuse, the energy that vanishes at the door: those are rarely the problem. They're what the problem looks like from the outside.
I work with what's underneath.
