I typically start from my feet and go to top of my head, then back down to my nose. It typically takes me about 10 minutes.
Then, I ponder what I remember of my coffee, breakfast, dinner the night before, how I felt when I woke up. Then I imagine how I want to change things. I do this 2-5 minutes.
At that point, I plan my day.
It works for me. I know there are a ton of different ways to do it, but for me it's simply a time for reconnecting to my internal and external self. Because its the same format with new content (what I feel now, what happened most recently) it feels more like a common exercise routine than a hard thing. But it took a few weeks of frustrating effort to learn to keep focus.
I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.