Is your internal CPU maxed out before the meeting even starts?

My iMac is six months old and it's been driving me mad.

For the last couple of weeks I've been getting the dreaded spinning colour wheel every time I switch between applications. You know the one, the computer’s way of saying: too much. I can't cope right now.

I got in touch with Apple support and in the process of troubleshooting, I’ve spent a lot of time watching my Activity Monitor. If you haven't opened it before, it shows you in real time exactly how much of your computer's processing power each function is using. And what I found was this: Core Spotlight, the search function, was quietly consuming an enormous amount of CPU, dragging everything else down with it.

A process that should have been running quietly in the background was acting like it was the most important thing happening in the system. And as a result, the whole machine was struggling. A background process had convinced the system it was top priority and everything else was paying the price.

Sound familiar?

I see exactly this happening with many of the senior leaders I work with, people who are highly capable, technically fluent and experienced in their field, but who when changing positions or companies whilst leading in English as a second or third language, suffer a confidence crisis and system overload.

In their cross-functional team meetings, their one-to-ones with senior stakeholders, their project presentations, they're already processing an enormous amount. The content, the politics, the relationships, the decisions in the room. That's a full system load already.

And then there's a background process running constantly on top of all of that.

Is that the right word? Did that sound too direct? Will they judge my accent? Should I have said that differently?

Just like Core Spotlight, this internal language monitor has quietly taken over as the top priority in the system. And the result is predictable: slower thinking, more hesitation, a sense of losing the thread in real time, and crucially the kind of subtle withdrawal that sounds to others like a lack of leadership presence.

This is the part that frustrates me, because these leaders do not have a language problem. Their English is more than adequate for the job. Many of them are articulate, precise, and thoughtful communicators. But the perfectionist inside them has assigned the vocabulary check the same weight as mission-critical functions and that mismatch is what's causing the lag.

It's not a language gap, it’s a calibration problem. Their system is treating something minor as though it were critical and everything else is slowing down as a result.

What recalibration actually looks like.

With my Mac, the fix should have been straightforward: tell the system that Core Spotlight should not be taking priority over everything else and reassign its importance. But it seems machines aren’t so different to humans after all; system updates designed to command it not to prioritise Core Spotlight only work for a few days before it goes back to its old habits.

With people, it's a little more nuanced, but the principle is the same.

In my work with clients, we explore where their internal monitor came from in the first place and what it’s monitoring for. Typically there’s a story behind it: an early experience of being corrected or judged, a cultural context where precision in language was tied to status, a workplace where native English speakers held all the authority and the unspoken message was that your way of speaking wasn’t quite right.

Once we understand that, we can begin to update the instruction. To help the system recognise that the language-checking function which was designed to protect, is now overstepping the mark. To educate it that yes, it can run, but quietly in the background where it belongs. And, similarly to my Mac it can take perseverance and frequent updates until the new process is finally accepted and established.

And when that shift does occur, something shifts quite quickly. Clients describe feeling more present in meetings. More able to hold a line of thinking without losing it. More willing to speak before they've rehearsed every word. Less concerned with whether they're doing it perfectly and more focused on what they're actually there to do.

That's what leadership presence feels like when the system is running as it should.

A note for HR leaders and people managers: If you're reading this and recognising someone on your team, this is worth paying attention to. The leaders I work with are often high performers who have been flagged for "not speaking up enough" or "lacking executive presence" in 360 feedback. In many cases, the root cause isn't confidence or capability. It's cognitive overload in second-language contexts, and it's both identifiable and addressable.

If this is something you'd like to explore, for yourself or for someone on your team, I'd love to have a conversation.