The Sign You’re on the Verge of Something

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the cost of trying to look bulletproof. What happens next is what this post is about: what happens once you stop protecting the image and actually let yourself feel what’s been building underneath?

If things have been feeling like they’re coming to a head lately – if there’s an emotion sitting just under the surface that you’ve been managing rather than facing – I don’t think that’s a warning sign. I think it might be the opposite. You may be on the verge of the kind of transformation that can take your leadership to an entirely new level. But only if you stop pushing it down long enough to actually feel it.

I hear a version of this constantly from the executives I coach, and I’ve felt it myself. Many of them come to coaching wanting to improve performance, often because they want to inspire more engagement in the people they lead. But what they’ll admit, quietly, is that they’re not really feeling engaged themselves. What used to work for them doesn’t anymore. They’re hitting wall after wall, feeling stuck, beaten down, exhausted.

And still, they keep pushing through – sucking it up in the name of forward momentum, shutting their hearts down along the way. Frustration, disappointment, discouragement – all of it gets stuffed down, right alongside whatever else is weighing on them personally.

Here’s the part that surprised me most when I first noticed it in myself: the pain of stuffing an emotion down is usually greater than the pain of just feeling it in the first place. And it’s not only the hard feelings that get buried. Joy gets buried too. Connection. Creativity. The ability to see past an obstacle instead of just staring at it.

Worse, shutting your heart down at work doesn’t stay at work. It doesn’t toggle back on the moment you walk in your front door. You end up moving through your whole life – home included – only partially present, with the most vital part of you stuffed down and denied.

That’s no way to live. And it’s no way to lead, either.

When you show up but you’re not really there, you can’t offer the best of what you have. And when you’re not bringing yourself, you can’t inspire anyone else to bring themselves either. Real leadership doesn’t start by changing your environment. It starts by giving yourself back what you’ve been denying.

A simple practice

This doesn’t require an overhaul of your life. It starts with something much smaller: spending a little time in stillness, and letting whatever wants to come up, come up. Not to relive it. Not to dwell in it. Just to notice it, sit with it, and let it move.

Because here’s what I’ve found: when you actually feel an emotion instead of resisting it, it changes shape. Anger, fully felt, often reveals itself as passion – the same energy, redirected into something constructive instead of destructive. Sadness can turn into compassion. Frustration can become the very energy that helps you push past the obstacle in front of you. Loneliness, felt all the way through, often turns into a genuine desire for connection.

None of this takes an enormous amount of time. It takes a willingness to slow down long enough to be with yourself the way you’d be with someone you love. 

If you’d like some help getting started

I know this can feel unfamiliar if you’re not used to sitting with your own emotions – I remember what that was like when I first started. So, I recorded a short, guided audio to walk you through the process. You’re welcome to use it as often as you’d like, until you’ve found your own way of doing this.

You can download it here:  VergePractice.com

If something in you has been feeling like it’s about to come to a head, don’t rush to shut it back down. That discomfort might be the clearest sign you’re on the verge of something – not a warning, but an invitation. The only way through it is to actually feel it.

Give that part of you a little time and attention, and you’ll find it has more to offer than you expected. Once you do that for yourself, you model the way for everyone around you to do the same. Real leadership inspires real leadership. And it all starts from the inside out.

The Bulletproof Trap

 

A few weeks ago, I made the case that heart beats mind when it comes to leadership that actually lasts. But knowing heart matters and knowing how to lead with it are two different things. So, what does it actually look like in practice?

It starts with giving up something most leaders have been trained to protect: the appearance of having it all together.

I can’t count how many leaders I’ve worked with over the years who believe that to be credible, they have to seem infallible — rock solid, always with the answer. Newer leaders often stay quiet in meetings because they’re afraid that asking a question will expose how much they don’t yet know. Meanwhile, the very questions they’re not asking, born of real curiosity, are often exactly what the room needs to see a problem with fresh eyes.

On the other end, I meet leaders who have it together on the surface — poised, polished, seemingly unshakeable. And they’re often mystified about why they can’t get their people to bring their best. When I go looking for why, the answer is usually the same: the polish itself is the problem. It’s hard to connect with someone whose “together” persona doesn’t feel like a real person is behind it. And you cannot engage people’s hearts and minds — which was the whole argument last time — without first letting them connect to yours.

Here’s the thing about needing to look bulletproof: almost nobody actually is. Fear, insecurity, not knowing enough — these are about as universal as it gets. And paradoxically, the things we’ve been taught to hide are often what connect us to each other most.

Think about the people who’ve genuinely inspired you — a mentor, a parent, someone in your field you admire. Chances are what moved you wasn’t their achievement. It was what they had to move through to get there: failure, doubt, a setback that could have ended things.

Letting a little more of that be visible does two things.

First, it takes the pressure off you. When you stop needing to look like you have all the answers, you get to actually be present with people — curious about their thinking instead of guarded about your own image.

Second, it gives other people permission. When they see that your steadiness isn’t the absence of fear, but something built in spite of it, it tells them they can find that same strength in themselves — and use it for something bigger than just getting through the day.

This is what it means to bring heart back online: not toughening up, but letting yourself be seen. The leaders who create the kind of engagement I wrote about last time aren’t the ones with the most polished exterior. They’re the ones willing to be known.

If this resonates, the Real Leader Revolution Manifesto goes further into what it takes to lead from that place instead of from behind a persona. You can download it free at RealLeaderRevolution.com.

Why Smart, Skilled Leaders Still Fail – and the One Thing That Can Change That

 

Last time, I left off with a question: why does any of this – the suffering, the feeling, the processing – actually matter for the work you do all day? Here’s where it leads.

If you get a group of leaders together and predict which of them over the next ten to twenty years will create and sustain success for their organizations, their people, and themselves, only a vital few will make the cut.

You may think the differentiator is experience, education, or intelligence. Or skill – in communication, making decisions, strategic thinking, creating accountability. Or qualities like decisiveness, confidence, resilience, agility, or focus.

Those are all great attributes. But without one critical component, no combination of the others is enough. And that one quality is heart.

The business world is far more partial to the mind than the heart, which is often considered soft and irrelevant to generating profits, expanding market share, achieving operational efficiency – all the hard measures of business success.

But the heart is what fires the accomplishments of the mind – and all the actions that go into creating bottom-line business results. In fact, one of the greatest dangers that leaders face today is over-reliance on the mind at the expense of the heart.

The mind without the heart takes a path that emphasizes power and control, relies on authority to get things done, and prioritizes profits above everything else.

When the mind eclipses the heart, people feel expendable, disillusioned, disconnected, and ultimately disengaged. They lose their connection to their work, to each other, and to themselves.

What that looks like in an organization is people running around with their hair on fire, talking at each other while withholding information, looking over their shoulders, creating silos, hedging their bets, doing only what is necessary to get by. There is no light in their eyes. They show up, but they are not really there.

Performance declines, trust erodes and people burn out.

Leaders who will be able to create and sustain know that when the heart comes online, engagement and performance follow. There is little need to rely on authority to get things done, because people feel connected to the why behind the what. And as a result, they generate the energy sufficient to figure out and accomplish the how.

Many of these leaders are experiencing the fallout of a way of doing business that has long run its course. They know rising to the challenges and opportunities of the future, a new way of living and leading is required. They are awakening to the call to reconnect to the heart – in themselves and each other – and to utilize the power it generates to change the game of business altogether.

Perhaps you are one of them.

If this resonates, the Real Leader Revolution Manifesto goes deeper into what it takes to lead from heart instead of autopilot. You can download it free at RealLeaderRevolution.com.

 

 

What Happens When You Actually Let Yourself Feel It

 

Last time, I left you with a question: what happens once you stop resisting an emotion and actually let it move?

Here’s what I’ve learned, mostly from doing this myself, imperfectly, over and over.

An emotion, felt fully, doesn’t stay the same shape for long. It starts as a heavy feeling in your gut. A few seconds later it becomes a burning sensation across your shoulders. Then a tightness in your chest. If you sit with it and just breathe – if you don’t reach for your phone, don’t start problem-solving, don’t get up to go do something – it moves through you almost like a wave breaking over you in the ocean.

And if you sit with it long enough, it breaks. It releases. It transforms into something lighter, something brighter – something constructive instead of corrosive.

This is the part most of us never discover, because we don’t stay long enough to find out. We treat the first uncomfortable sensation as the whole story and bail before the wave finishes breaking.

The belly of the whale

There’s an old idea – the hero swallowed by the whale, sitting in the dark of its belly before being released onto shore, changed. It’s a strange image, but it’s a fair description of what this actually feels like. You go into something. It’s dark and uncomfortable and you have no idea how long you’ll be in there. You don’t get to skip that part. But you don’t stay there either – the belly of the whale isn’t the destination, it’s a passage.

Most of the discomfort in this process isn’t the emotion itself. It’s the not-knowing how long the wave will take, and the fear that if you let it in, it’ll never let you out. It will. Emotion, actually felt, is remarkably efficient. It’s emotion resisted that lasts forever, because resistance is what keeps it circling instead of completing.

What’s underneath

Here’s the part that surprised me most: underneath the emotion, there’s energy. Strong, powerful, unharnessed energy that doesn’t disappear when the wave passes – it just changes form. It becomes available for something else. Creativity. Clarity. The ability to see a solution that wasn’t visible five minutes ago, or an opening between two things that looked like a wall.

It also becomes something you can offer other people. Not by narrating your process to them, not by making your feelings their responsibility – but as a kind of steadiness that’s actually earned rather than performed. People can tell the difference between someone who’s calm because they’ve processed something and someone who’s calm because they’ve buried it. One holds space. The other just holds the door shut.

This is why I don’t think of feeling your emotions as a detour from getting things done. It’s closer to maintenance. Skip it long enough, and the exhaustion I wrote about last time – the kind no amount of sleep fixes – is the bill coming due.

A place to start

You don’t need an hour of stillness or a retreat to try this. You need a few minutes and a willingness to notice a sensation without immediately trying to fix it, explain it, or push it away. Where do you feel it in your body right now? Can you stay with that sensation for thirty seconds without doing anything about it?

That’s the whole practice. It’s smaller than people expect, and it’s also the thing most people never actually try.

I’m working on a short, guided version of this – a few minutes, nothing fancy, just something to walk you through it the first few times so you’re not doing it cold. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

If you’re wondering why this pattern – suppress, perform, go numb – is so easy to fall into in the first place, that’s really what the Real Leader Revolution Manifesto is about. This is one way to interrupt autopilot in the moment. The manifesto goes into where autopilot comes from and what it actually takes to come out of it for good.

In the meantime, there’s a bigger question underneath all of this: why does any of this matter for the work you actually do all day? Turns out, more than you’d think – especially right now. That’s next.

What if You’re Not as Fine as You Look?

 

 

Someone I love is suffering. Which means I am suffering.

As I’ve tried to navigate this most unpleasant experience, I’ve become aware of something: more people are suffering right now than I ever realized. Clients. Friends. Family. Neighbors. Strangers in passing. The next time you’re surrounded by people — in a meeting, at the grocery store, scrolling past faces on a screen — take a look around. Chances are someone you see is suffering. Or maybe it’s you.

And suffering has a way of tearing you apart, because despite your best efforts to make everything better, you eventually run into the truth: some things are outside your control.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. Regardless of the cause, suffering brings emotions that are uncomfortable, inconvenient — the kind we’re conditioned to hide. We live in a culture that prides itself on having it all together. Social media rewards the highlight reel. And work asks for a particular kind of performance: leave your problems at the door, put on the happy face, get the job done.

So we suck it up. We push it down. We deny the feeling, deny the reality that we’re suffering at all.

It’s a survival tactic, and it’s socially rewarded. You can put on a semi-happy face, tend to the business at hand, show up, produce. You can muster the energy to keep moving while leaving your heart behind you. You can hold everything and everyone at a polite, boundaried distance.

But it comes at a cost. And the cost is steeper than it looks.

What denial actually costs you

It takes an enormous amount of energy to resist an emotion that’s already welled up inside you. That effort shows up as exhaustion at the end of the day — the kind no amount of sleep touches, because it was never physical to begin with.

What I’m realizing is that our attempts to escape pain wall us off from the very thing that has the power to relieve it. Shutting the door on your heart will, in fact, keep the pain out. But it’ll also keep out joy, connection, inspiration, presence — everything on the other side of that same door.

Something vital departs. The work goes stale. Conversations become droll. Meetings get attended by a version of you that checked out somewhere around the parking lot. You go through the motions, check the boxes, but you yourself are not really there.

And you can’t connect to others when you’re not connected to yourself. People feel the distance — and they tend to meet it with more distance. It becomes a quiet, compounding cycle that alienates the very people you love and lead. Left unchecked, you risk becoming a hollow shell of what you once were: still moving, still producing, but lifeless underneath it.

So is the answer to swing the other way?

Is the fix to run around telling everyone what’s going on — airing every frustration, narrating every hard day, making your suffering everyone’s business?

No. That’s not it either.

The answer is simpler, and considerably less dramatic: it’s to feel what you’re already feeling. Not necessarily at work. Not while you’re on the hook to deliver something. But somewhere in your life, to actually be present with the emotion that’s asking for your attention.

Emotion is, quite literally, energy in motion. It has a charge. It’s trying to get you to notice it — not so you’ll perform it publicly, but so you’ll let it move.

That’s the part most of us skip. We treat emotion like a problem to solve or a weakness to manage, instead of something that simply needs to pass through. And when it doesn’t get to pass through, it doesn’t go away — it just gets buried under the effort of holding it together.

There’s another way through this

What if, instead of walling yourself off from the sadness, the frustration, the tenderness, you let it move through you the way it wants to? Underneath the discomfort, there’s energy — real, unharnessed energy that doesn’t have to just sit there. It can be redirected into creativity, into clarity, into the kind of presence that lets you actually show up for the people around you.

That’s not a small shift. It’s the difference between a leader who’s performing steadiness and one who’s actually offering it.

I’ll be honest — I don’t think feeling your way through something is the whole answer. It’s the doorway. What happens once you actually let an emotion move — what it feels like, what it turns into, and why sitting with it changes its shape entirely — is worth its own conversation. That’s next.

What I’ve Come to See About the Leaders Running on Empty

 

A while back, I wrote about what it takes to become real — the question at the center of The Pinocchio Principle. The distance between how capable a leader appears and how alive they actually feel.

Since then, I’ve been sitting with that question in a slightly different way.

Because in the intervening years, I’ve watched the pattern deepen. The leaders I coach are more accomplished than ever. And more depleted than ever. They’ve read the books. Been through the workshops. Listened to the podcasts. They know what good leadership looks like. And yet they arrive at coaching sessions with the same quiet exhaustion I have been watching for three decades.

Something is running them. And it is not the workload.

I made a video about what that something is — what I’ve come to see beneath the surface of the leaders I work with, and beneath the surface of my own life during the years I was living out the same pattern.

The video is about sixteen minutes long, and it lays out the whole picture: the invisible modus operandi that runs us underneath our conscious awareness, the false beliefs most of us would never consciously choose but are living by anyway, the five movements that make change actually possible, and — most importantly — the picture of what becomes available when you stop running on the wrong fuel and start running on the right one.

I’ve also put all of it down in a manifesto. It’s called The Real Leader Revolution, and it’s meant to be read slowly. You can download it free at RealLeaderRevolution.com.

Why I’m writing this now

I share the video and the manifesto because they feel like the fullest expression yet of the work I’ve been building for thirty years. The Pinocchio Principle named the question. This new work is my current answer.

Not because I have finished figuring it out — I haven’t. But because I’ve watched enough leaders make this shift that I know it is possible. And I know the map exists.

If you have felt yourself running on empty, and no amount of rest is quite fixing it — this is for you.

If you have wondered why what used to work isn’t working anymore, and no framework or strategy seems to reach whatever the actual problem is — this is for you.

If you have started to suspect that the more you’re looking for is buried beneath the very habits and beliefs that got you here — this is for you.

Watch the video. Read the manifesto. Sit with it.

And if any of it lands, I’d love to hear from you.

Diane

P.S. If you’re new here and want to receive more of this kind of writing, subscribe to my email list — I send thoughtful pieces on leadership, mindset, and the inner work of the outer life, roughly once or twice a month.

What I Wish I’d Known Before Writing a Book Called “The Pinocchio Principle”

 

When I tell people I wrote a leadership book called The Pinocchio Principle, they usually assume it’s about honesty.

It’s not.

Or rather — it’s about a different kind of honesty. Not the honesty of telling the truth to others, but the far more difficult honesty of telling the truth to yourself. About who you are. What you want. Where you’ve been performing a version of leadership that looks good from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

Pinocchio, in the original story, starts out as a puppet — animated but not alive. Capable of movement but controlled by strings he can’t see. And the journey of the story, at its heart, is about what it takes to become real.

That metaphor has never left me. Because I’ve lived it.

How the book began

I didn’t set out to write about Pinocchio. I set out to solve a problem I kept encountering in my work: the gap between how capable leaders appeared and how alive they actually felt.

I had been working in organizational effectiveness and leadership development for over a decade. I’d worked with executives at Fortune 100 companies, facilitated culture change initiatives, designed and taught leadership programs. I had seen every kind of smart, accomplished, well-intentioned leader you can imagine.

And so many of them were exhausted in a way that went deeper than workload. They had achieved what they had worked for — the title, the influence, the results — and found that it didn’t feel the way they thought it would. Something vital was missing.

I recognized that feeling. Because somewhere along the way, I had started living it too.

I was running a consulting practice, raising three kids, trying to do everything well — and I had slowly become a very efficient version of myself who wasn’t sure she was living her own life anymore. I was effective. I was competent. I was, by most external measures, successful.

But I wasn’t what I would call real.

What I discovered

What I came to understand — through my own journey and through the privilege of accompanying hundreds of leaders through theirs — is that the most transformative shift available to any leader isn’t a new strategy or a better system.

It’s a return to themselves.

Not a romanticized, everything-is-easy version of themselves. But the grounded, wise, genuinely engaged version that exists beneath the accumulated weight of expectation, performance, and fear.

I call that version the Genius. And I wrote The Pinocchio Principle as a roadmap for finding it.

The book came out in 2011. In the years since, I have had leaders tell me that reading it gave them permission to want something different. That it named something they had been experiencing but couldn’t articulate. That it started a conversation with themselves they hadn’t known how to begin.

Those conversations are why I do this work. They are, in a very real sense, the whole point.

Why I’m still here

I share all of this not to tell you about a book, but to tell you about a conviction.

I believe the indomitable strength of the human spirit is essential to the future of business — and that it is, right now, largely underutilized. I believe there is a version of leadership that is both more effective and more sustainable than the one most of us were taught. And I believe it begins with the same question Pinocchio was trying to answer:

What does it take to become real?

That question is as alive for me now as it was when I wrote the book. It’s what animates every coaching conversation, every program I design, every piece I write here.

If it’s alive for you too — welcome. You’re in exactly the right place.

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You can find The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader on Amazon here.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, The Real Leader Academy is where that journey continues.

 

 

 

Start Before You’re Ready: 3 Insights for Stepping Into What Excites and Terrifies You

 

Can you think of the last time you did something that terrified and excited you at the same time?

If you’re like me, you can probably also think of a few times an opportunity like that revealed itself — and you let it pass by. We tell ourselves we’re not ready. We succumb to the doubt or the fear. And later, we feel the particular ache of recognizing we were ready for more and didn’t allow ourselves to step into it.

This week’s video is about what helps us step forward instead of shrinking back. I share three insights that have made the difference for me, and I imagine at least one of them will land for you too.

The first is about the discomfort of growth — and why feeling unready isn’t the warning sign we tend to think it is. The second is about a trap I’ve fallen into more than once: the belief that we need one more course, one more credential, one more bit of preparation before we’re allowed to begin. (Spoiler: there’s something a workshop can never give you that taking action will.) And the third is about what we can lean on in those moments when confidence simply hasn’t arrived yet.

We don’t grow by waiting until we feel ready. We grow by stepping into the thing that’s calling us — before we’re as prepared as we’d like to be — and discovering that we had what it took all along.

 

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If this resonates and you’d like more tools for leading from the inside out, you’ll find them inside The Real Leader Academy, including the Just In Time Coaching Library — a growing collection of tips and approaches for the real challenges leaders face.

 

 

When “Good Enough” Becomes the Enemy of Your Greatest Work

 

There’s a particular trap that almost exclusively catches high achievers. It doesn’t catch the mediocre or the disengaged — they’re nowhere near it. It catches the capable, the accomplished, the ones who have built real expertise and a track record of results.

It goes like this: you get good at something. Genuinely good. People notice. Requests come in. You deliver. More requests come. You keep delivering. Over time, you become the person everyone turns to for that thing — which feels like success, because in many ways it is.

Until the day you realize that the thing everyone turns to you for is no longer the thing that lights you up.

You’re good at it. Maybe even great at it. But “good enough” and “great enough” have quietly become the ceiling of what you bring to work every day. And somewhere below that ceiling, your most interesting and generative work is still waiting.

The difference between competence and genius

I use the word Genius deliberately — not to mean exceptional intelligence, but to describe the particular quality of contribution that only you can make. The thinking, the perspective, the creative combination of experience and instinct and care that is specific to you and shows up when you’re doing work that genuinely engages you.

Competence is reproducible. Someone else can learn what you know and do what you do. Genius is not. It’s the fingerprint. And it tends to disappear when you’re spending your best energy on things that, while valuable, are keeping you from what you’re actually here to do.

The leaders I’ve worked with who have made this shift — from operating primarily from competence to operating more from Genius — describe it as going from performing their job to inhabiting it. The work feels different. They feel different. And the people around them notice.

What gets in the way

The most common obstacle isn’t lack of clarity about what your Genius is. Most people, when they slow down enough to look, have a pretty good sense of when they’re in it and when they’re not.

The obstacle is permission.

Permission to prioritize the work that only you can do over the work that simply needs to get done. Permission to say “this isn’t the best use of what I bring” — even when you’re good at it. Permission to disappoint the expectations that have accumulated around your competence.

That permission is harder to give yourself than it sounds. But it’s the threshold between a career that is impressive and a career that is alive.

A question worth sitting with

If you set aside everything you’re capable of doing — everything you’ve proven you can deliver — and asked instead: what kind of work makes me feel most like myself? What am I doing when time disappears and the effort doesn’t feel like effort?

That answer is a compass. It won’t tell you to blow up your career or abandon your responsibilities. But it will point you toward the territory where your greatest contribution lives.

And finding ways to spend even a little more time there — and a little less time on what merely keeps you busy — is one of the most important things a leader can do.

 

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If this resonates, The Real Leader Academy is designed exactly for this exploration — helping high-achieving leaders reconnect with what makes their leadership most powerful. → RealLeaderAcademy.com

 

 

 

 

What Disneyland Reminded Me About Presence (And Why It Matters for Leaders)

My family spent two days at Disneyland. I spent most of it somewhere else entirely.

Not physically — I was there. I stood in the lines, rode the rides, ate the overpriced food. But mentally, I was somewhere between a client situation I hadn’t fully resolved and a project that was nagging at me. I was going through the motions of being present while my actual attention was somewhere back in Phoenix.

At some point — I think we were waiting for the parade — my youngest grabbed my hand and asked me to look at something. And I realized I had no idea what she had been talking about for the last ten minutes.

I had been nodding. But I hadn’t been there.

Presence isn’t a soft skill

I want to make a case for presence that goes beyond the personal — beyond being a better parent or spouse or friend, as important as those things are. I want to make the case that the ability to be fully present is one of the most powerful and underrated leadership capabilities there is.

When you’re genuinely present with someone — not planning your response, not half-monitoring your phone, not running the background process of everything else you need to do — people feel it. They feel that they matter. They think more clearly. They take more risks. They bring more of themselves to the work.

Conversely, when a leader is visibly absent — technically in the room but not really there — the effect on the people around them is immediate and measurable. Conversations stay shallow. Trust erodes slowly. People learn not to bring the important things.

Your presence, or lack of it, shapes the quality of every interaction you have. And interactions are where leadership actually happens.

What snapped me back

Standing there watching the parade, I made a deliberate decision. I put my phone in my pocket. I let the client situation be unresolved for a few hours. I looked at what my daughter was pointing at.

It was a float. A fairly ordinary float by Disneyland standards. But the way she described it — the specific details she had noticed, the joy she took in explaining it to me — was anything but ordinary.

I had been missing it. Not just the float. Her. The whole trip.

And the thing that I keep coming back to is this: I didn’t get those hours back. They happened with or without my attention. The only question was whether I was going to be in them.

The practice of returning

Full presence all the time isn’t realistic. Our minds are meaning-making machines. They wander. That’s not a flaw to fix — it’s just how minds work.

What is possible is noticing when you’ve gone elsewhere — and choosing to return. Not with self-judgment. Just with intention.

In the middle of your next important conversation, try this: notice where your attention actually is. Not where you think it should be. Where it is. And if it’s somewhere other than the person in front of you — gently, deliberately, bring it back.

That act of returning is presence. It’s available to you in every meeting, every one-on-one, every conversation that matters.

And it matters more than most of what we spend our leadership energy on.

 

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I explore presence and what it means to lead from your fullest self in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.