What a Really Bad Day Taught Me About Leadership

I once arrived at a client meeting with coffee in my lap.

I was running late, reached for my coffee while pulling out of the driveway, misjudged the lid, and poured a generous amount of very hot coffee directly onto myself. I didn’t have time to go back inside and change. I arrived flustered, damp, and not exactly radiating executive presence.

In the parking lot, sitting in my car collecting myself before going in, I noticed something interesting: how much worse I was making it.

The coffee was a fact. The spill happened. Nothing about my narrative in that parking lot was going to change it. But what I was telling myself about it — what it meant, what it said about the kind of day I was going to have, what the client would think, whether I could possibly recover — was a story. And it was a story I was choosing to tell, even if it didn’t feel like a choice.

The story underneath the event

This is something I work on with leaders constantly, because it applies to everything. Not just spilled coffee but failed launches, difficult conversations, critical feedback, restructures, disappointments, and the hundred small indignities of a demanding professional life.

Every experience has two layers. The first is what actually happened — the fact, the event, the words that were said. The second is the meaning we assign to it. And while we often can’t control the first layer, we have extraordinary influence over the second.

The problem is that most of us don’t realize we’re operating in the second layer. We experience our interpretation of events as if it were the events themselves. The story feels like reality. And when the story is “this is a disaster” or “I can’t recover from this” or “this always happens to me,” the story shapes everything that comes after it.

What I did instead

In the parking lot, once I noticed what was happening, I tried something different. I asked: what’s actually true here?

What was true: I was late. I had spilled coffee. I was late. The client was waiting.

What was a story: that this meant the meeting was ruined before it started. That I was incompetent. That today was destined to be a disaster.

When I separated the fact from the story, something shifted. Not magically — I was still a little rattled. But I walked into that meeting present enough to actually be useful. And as it turned out, the client barely noticed I was late. What they noticed was that I was fully there when it mattered.

The leadership application

You don’t have to spill coffee to use this. You can use it the moment you notice that your reaction to something feels bigger than the thing itself. That’s usually a sign the story is running.

Ask: What is actually, factually true here? What am I adding to it? And what would be available to me if I set the story down for a moment?

The leaders I’ve worked with who navigate difficulty with the most grace aren’t the ones who don’t get rattled. They’re the ones who notice when they’re rattled — and choose, intentionally, what they do next.

That’s not a talent. It’s a practice. And it starts in the parking lot.

 

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I wrote more on navigating the stories that run our leadership in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

How to Navigate Change Without Losing Yourself in the Process

 

Something I’ve noticed about the way most leaders navigate change: they try to power through it.

They treat uncertainty like an obstacle to overcome — something to be solved, managed, or outwaited. And the harder they push, the more exhausted and disoriented they become. Not because the change is too hard. But because they’re approaching it from the wrong place inside themselves.

There’s a version of you that can meet change, challenge, and uncertainty with something that looks a lot like courage and grace. I’ve seen it emerge in leaders who were convinced they didn’t have it. And I’ve watched the same leaders miss it entirely when they tried to force their way through.

The difference isn’t talent. It’s where they’re operating from.

Two ways of showing up

In my work with leaders, I talk about two distinct modes of operating. I call them the Puppet and the Genius.

The Puppet isn’t weak or lazy. In fact, it tends to show up most forcefully in the highest achievers — the ones with the most at stake, the most responsibility, the most pressure. The Puppet operates from fear, from the need to control outcomes, from the accumulated weight of every expectation and assumption about how things should go. When change hits, the Puppet tightens its grip. It defaults to what has always worked. It resists what it cannot predict.

The Genius is something different. It’s the part of you that can stay curious when everything is uncertain. That can ask “what is this situation asking of me?” instead of “how do I make this stop?” It’s the part that trusts your own capacity to navigate whatever comes — not because you have all the answers, but because you’ve stopped pretending you need them before you can move.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: the Genius doesn’t arrive when the change gets easier. It arrives when you stop fighting the change and start getting interested in it.

What this looks like in practice

A client of mine — a VP navigating a significant organizational restructure — came to me exhausted and furious. Everything she had built was being dismantled. Her team was scattered. Her role was unclear. She had a dozen reasons to be angry, and she was right about all of them.

But the anger wasn’t helping her lead. It was keeping her locked in Puppet mode — reactive, contracted, focused on what she was losing rather than what was possible.

What shifted things wasn’t a new strategy. It was a question: “What if this disruption is happening for you, not to you?”

Not as a platitude. As a genuine inquiry. What might this change be making room for? What has the old structure been preventing? What could you do now that you couldn’t before?

She sat with that for a long moment. And then something in her face changed. Not relief exactly. More like recognition.

“I’ve been so focused on what I’m losing,” she said, “I haven’t once asked what I might gain.”

The practice

When you’re in the middle of change that feels threatening, try this: notice which part of you is in the driver’s seat.

Is it the part that is contracted, defensive, focused on risk and loss and what might go wrong? That’s the Puppet. It means well. It’s trying to protect you. But it cannot lead you through what it cannot see.

Or is there a quieter part available — one that is curious, grounded, willing to not know yet? That’s the Genius. It doesn’t need the change to be resolved before it can show up. It shows up precisely because the change is unresolved.

Navigating change well doesn’t mean being unaffected by it. It means choosing, again and again, which part of yourself gets to respond.

 

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If this resonates, I explore the Puppet and the Genius at length in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

Why Losing Your Passion at Work Is a Leadership Problem (Not a Personal One)

 

A third of your time on this planet is spent at work.

Let that land for a moment.

Not a third of your workday. A third of your life. Which means if your work feels like a grind – if you’re pushing through it, white-knuckling your way from one obligation to the next, surviving instead of thriving – that’s not just a professional inconvenience. That is the texture of a significant portion of your life.

I’m not going to pretend that work is always meant to feel blissful. Every meaningful endeavor has its hard days, its tedious stretches, its moments of doubt. That’s different from the slow erosion of passion that I see happening in so many high-achieving leaders.

And I want to make a case for why that erosion isn’t just a personal problem – a matter of attitude or perspective or self-care that you can fix with a long weekend. It is a leadership problem. And it has consequences that ripple far beyond you.

The cost you aren’t calculating

Here’s what most leaders don’t realize when they make peace with feeling depleted: the energy you bring to your work is not self-contained.

When you’re running on fumes, everyone around you feels it. Your direct reports feel it in how you show up in one-on-ones: the half-presence, the clipped responses, the sense that you’d rather be somewhere else. Your peers feel it in how you engage in meetings – whether you’re genuinely curious and generative, or just getting through the agenda. Your organization feels it in the quality of your thinking, your decisions, the kind of problems you’re willing to sit with.

Leadership is a transmission, not a transaction. What you carry inside yourself is what you transmit to the people around you. And a depleted leader, however accomplished and competent, transmits depletion.

I’ve seen this play out in organizations again and again. A team whose leader has lost their spark begins to lose theirs. The culture quietly dims. People start doing the minimum required to stay out of trouble rather than bringing their best. Nobody named it as a problem. Nobody pointed to the leader. But the source was there.

Why it happens to the best ones

Losing your passion at work doesn’t happen to lazy or uncommitted people. It happens to exactly the opposite kind of person.

It happens to the leaders who care deeply and have been pouring themselves out for so long that the well has run dry. The ones who made success their identity and then discovered that achieving it didn’t feel the way they expected. The ones who kept saying yes to things that didn’t align with who they really are, because they were so good at executing that the requests kept coming and they felt responsible for saying yes.

This is part of something I call the Curse of Competence. The better you are at something, the more of it you’re asked to do – whether or not it’s what lights you up.

Over time, you can find yourself at the top of a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall. Impressive by every external measure. Quietly lost on the inside.

What reigniting actually looks like

I want to be clear about what I’m not suggesting here. I’m not suggesting you quit your job, blow up your career, or make any dramatic external changes. In my experience, the most profound shifts happen from the inside out – in how you relate to what you’re doing before you change what you’re doing.

What I’ve seen work, again and again, is this: when leaders reconnect with why their work matters – not the metrics, not the deliverables, but the genuine human impact – something shifts. When they start bringing more of who they actually are to what they do, rather than the polished, managed version they’ve learned to present, something opens up.

There’s a part of every leader I’ve worked with that is wiser, more creative, and more energized than the version that shows up exhausted and going through the motions. And when that part gets activated – when you stop performing leadership and start being it – the effect on the people around you is immediate and unmistakable.

That’s not idealism. I’ve watched it happen in boardrooms, in hospitals, in classrooms, and in startup teams. It is available to you.

The question I’d ask you

If you set aside what you’re supposed to feel about your work – what you’ve decided is reasonable or realistic or acceptable for someone at your level – what is the honest answer to this question:

Does your work feed you? Or does it deplete you?

If the honest answer is the latter, that’s worth paying attention to. Not to spiral into crisis, but to get curious. Because the version of you that is genuinely energized, engaged, and lit up by what you do doesn’t just feel better – it leads better. It makes better decisions. It draws out the best in the people around it.

And the world needs that version of you more than it needs the depleted one.

 

If this landed for you, I explore the journey from depletion to what I call your Authentic Genius in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

And if you’re ready for a more structured journey, The Real Leader Academy offers programs specifically designed to help high-achieving leaders reconnect with what makes their leadership most powerful — and most sustainable. → RealLeaderAcademy.com

 

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The Surprising Secret to Overcoming Inertia (It Has Nothing to Do with Willpower)

 

I want to tell you about something I discovered one morning while doing yoga in my cold house.

I’d been putting off my practice for days — weeks, if I’m honest. Every morning I’d wake up with good intentions, feel the temperature in the room, and decide that I’d start tomorrow. The conditions weren’t right. I needed to feel ready.

One morning I forced myself to get on the mat anyway.

I did a few slow, stiff movements. Everything felt hard. My body was resistant. My mind was making a compelling case that this was pointless. But I kept going. And somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted. My muscles warmed up. My breath deepened. The things that had felt impossible five minutes earlier started happening on their own.

The room hadn’t changed. The temperature was the same. The conditions were exactly as uninviting as they’d been when I’d been talking myself out of it for weeks.

I had changed.

And I thought: isn’t this always how it goes?

The physics of getting unstuck

There’s a principle in physics that states an object at rest tends to stay at rest — and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. We usually think of inertia as the problem (the thing keeping us stuck on the couch), but the same principle that keeps us still is the one that keeps us moving once we start.

The mistake most people make when they’re trying to overcome inertia is waiting for the right conditions before they begin. They’re waiting for clarity, or motivation, or the perfect moment, or enough time, or the right mood. They think that feeling ready is the prerequisite for starting.

It isn’t.

Readiness is a result of beginning. Not a condition for it.

What this looks like in real leadership

I work with executives who have important projects sitting in a drawer — things they know matter, things they genuinely want to do — that have been waiting for the right moment for months. Sometimes years.

The reason is rarely laziness. It’s usually that the project feels big, and starting feels risky, and not starting feels safer than starting badly.

But here’s what I’ve observed: the leaders who make the most meaningful progress are rarely the ones who waited until everything was perfectly aligned. They’re the ones who took a small, imperfect action and let that action create the momentum for the next one.

They got warm.

The question worth asking

When I’m stuck on something — a conversation I’ve been avoiding, a piece of work I keep circling around, a decision I can’t seem to make — I’ve learned to ask myself a different question than “What should I do?”

Instead, I ask: What’s the smallest action I could take right now that would get me into motion?

Not the perfect action. Not the complete action. Just the one that would move the needle from “still” to “in motion.”

Sometimes it’s writing one paragraph. Sometimes it’s making one phone call. Sometimes it’s simply opening the document and reading what’s there.

The moment you take that action, the game changes. Because now you’re in motion. And motion has its own momentum.

One small thing

Think about something you’ve been wanting to move forward on — a project, a conversation, a change you’ve been contemplating. You know the one.

Now ask yourself: what’s the smallest action I could take on it today? Not to finish it. Not to get it right. Just to get warm.

Then take that action. Before you read another article or have another meeting or check your phone again.

The environment won’t change. But you will.

 

I explore this idea, and the deeper patterns that keep high-achieving leaders stuck, in my book: The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

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Why Running on Autopilot Is Costing You More Than You Know

 

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how many hours you’ve worked.

It’s the exhaustion of going through the motions. Of making it through your day – back-to-back meetings, decisions, emails, conversations – and arriving at the end of it feeling like you somehow weren’t really there for any of it.

If you’ve ever driven home and couldn’t remember a single thing about the drive, you know what I mean. Your body showed up. Your autopilot showed up. But you, the thoughtful, intentional, alive version of you, had checked out somewhere around 2 p.m.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because I keep hearing some version of the same thing from leaders I work with:

“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing. So why does it feel like I’m disappearing?”

That question deserves a real answer.

What autopilot actually costs you

We tend to talk about autopilot as a productivity problem…  you’re not getting things done, you’re procrastinating, you’re distracted. And sure, those things show up. But what I’ve observed, both in my own life and in working with executives for over thirty years, is that autopilot is really an identity problem.

When you’re running on autopilot, you’re not actually leading. You’re reacting. You’re executing. You’re managing the inbox of your life. But the deeper, more purposeful part of you – the part that has vision, that asks “why does this matter,” that can read a room and feel what’s really needed – that part goes quiet.

And here’s what makes it so insidious: it happens gradually enough that you don’t notice it happening. One day you look up and realize the last six months were a blur. That you can’t remember the last time you felt genuinely excited about a project. That your best ideas stopped coming.

That’s not a scheduling problem. That’s a signal.

The three signs your leadership is on autopilot

1) You’re doing more, but feeling less. You’re technically more productive than ever – more efficient, more organized, more responsive. But something feels flat. You finish things and feel relief instead of satisfaction. The work has stopped feeding you.

2) You’ve stopped asking the question underneath the question. Leaders operating from their fullest capacity are always curious. They’re asking not just what needs to get done, but why it matters, who is affected, and what’s really going on beneath the surface. When you’re on autopilot, you stop going below the surface. You take things at face value because you’re moving too fast to look deeper.

3) Your relationships feel transactional. Not because you don’t care – you do. But when you’re in autopilot mode, interactions become things to get through rather than opportunities to genuinely connect. People can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.

What I know to be true

There’s a part of you that is wiser, more creative, and more capable than the version of you that shows up on autopilot. I call it your Genius. It’s not some idealized fantasy of who you could be under perfect conditions. It’s actually more available to you than your autopilot self – it just requires that you show up for it.

The good news is that breaking out of autopilot doesn’t require a sabbatical or a personality transplant. It usually begins with something much simpler: noticing that you’re on it.

That noticing is the first act of real leadership.

Something to sit with this week

What is one thing you keep meaning to get to, one piece of work that feels genuinely important to you, that has been getting pushed to tomorrow for longer than you’d like to admit?

Don’t answer that question in your head. Write it down. And notice how it feels to let it land.

That feeling is information. It’s your Genius, signaling.

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If this resonates and you want to go deeper, I wrote an entire book about the journey from autopilot to authentic leadership: The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader

 

How To Become a More Strategic Leader

 

 

One of the major challenges executives struggle to overcome is sacrificing the strategic for the operational. If you are falling into this trap, understanding and working through your resistance is the first step to freedom.

Operational is clean. It has defined edges and finite solutions. You can check the boxes and feel a sense of closure and control with an operational approach.

Strategic on the other hand is often messy. It involves stepping into uncertainty. There is usually no one right answer. It pushes you out of your comfort zone. And it requires that you slow down instead of speeding up, something that flies in the face of what we’ve been conditioned to do.

To avoid this discomfort, many executives prefer being busy to being strategic. It provides the illusion of being productive and a burst of adrenaline that is a nice (yet ultimately unsatisfying and addictive) placebo for real progress.

But busyness isn’t going to help you hit the target necessary to advance your business. Because until you slow down long enough to assess your environment and allow your intuitive mind to partner with your rational mind, you may not even realize what your true target is, let alone how to get there.

Malcolm Gladwell echoed the wisdom of Albert Einstein his iconic book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. He wrote, “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

Knowledge is the product of absorbing information. Understanding is the product of insight. And insight comes from the integration of information with experience, from slowing down long enough to practice reflection and discernment. That’s an important key to successfully navigating the changing landscape of “business as usual”.

We live in an age of information. You can find an abundance of resources – articles, books, dissertations, webinars, workshops, best practices, etc. on any given topic. This information tends to be descriptive of what worked in the past to address challenges faced by people and organizations whose situations are rarely identical to our emerging challenges and opportunities.

Acting on information without discernment is like taking someone else’s prescription given for a diagnosis that you aren’t entirely certain matches your own.

Yet all too often we move full speed ahead with seeming solutions that don’t really address the underlying problems (and could make the problem worse). Ask yourself how many times you’ve overlooked or disregarded inklings that told you something is just not right.

To keep this pattern from hijacking your effectiveness, recognize and honor the importance of slowing down when you feel compelled to speed up. Take some time to check in with yourself and reflect on the changing nature of your environment. When you zoom out to see more of the big picture with an inquiry into what’s most important, you will likely recognize things you would have otherwise missed – and receive the insight necessary to know what needs to happen next.

To strategically blaze a trail into the future you must be willing to break away from the constraints of your past (including those you have unwittingly placed on yourself).

How to Get Yourself Out of a Funk – and Strengthen Your Leadership in the Process

 

We’ve all had one of those days where you wake up and just aren’t feeling it. Sometimes it’s harder to find your groove than others. This week’s video will give you three simple steps for moving through a funk with ease and grace – and in a way that will strengthen your leadership in the process.

Begin Again – How New Starts Supercharge Your Performance, Relationships, and Results

 

What if we leveraged the wisdom of “begin again” to the things we do every day? The projects we work so feverishly on? The relationships we nurture? The visions we create? The ideas we cling to long after we’ve realized they’ve outlived their relevance?

Nature shows us there is much to be gained by releasing what has come before to make way for what has yet to emerge. Each season gives way to the next. The brightness of each day is punctuated by darkness of the night, which in turn is dispelled by the light of the morning sun. We have periods of wakefulness followed by periods of sleep.

Each day is an invitation to begin again.

“Begin again” means knowing when it’s time to stop and put something down. Or to create a pattern interrupt – perhaps a point to assess our progress, to push pause, and go do something else for a while.

And then we return with new eyes that see from a wider perspective, and a refreshed mind that has been opened to a wider aperture. We find that we can see things differently as a result of seeing different things.

“Begin again” is about giving yourself credit for showing up and taking a stab at something. It’s refusing to satisfy the perfectionist’s mandate to have everything figured out and perfectly planned and executed and instead to just start moving in a direction (any direction), and see what happens.

Momentum is created and you begin to move. And if you realize you aren’t moving in the right direction, you can use that energy to simply turn and go a different way. “Begin again” is about picking up where you’ve left off with revitalized energy and a renewed focus – one that can take in things you previously screened out or just didn’t originally consider.

“Begin again” means giving yourself another chance, investing in what you could create. It means doing things for the experience itself and learning something in the process. It means approaching something knowing that the outcome you originally envisioned may not be the destination at all – it may just be the thing that got you in the car and willing to start something – anything.

“Begin again” is taking the lump of clay and seeing what it wants to become – giving it form and not getting too attached to what it’s supposed to look like. Realizing that at any point, you can mold it into something new.

“Begin again” is freedom from the tyranny we create when we lock ourselves into a process or a goal or a pursuit that just doesn’t seem to be working or moving forward.

Sometimes the obstacles we face – the hurdles that continue appearing, the walls we keep slamming into, the unforeseen events that interrupt our progress are there for a purpose. They are invitations to stop, do something else, allow insight and wisdom to land, give us new direction, new ideas, new energy – and to simply begin again.

Life is meant for more than checking boxes…

 

Can you remember the last time you were so excited about something that you could feel the hair on your arms or the back of your neck stand up? Or the giddiness of a five-year-old at the prospect of visiting an amusement park?

Maybe it got you out of bed in the morning or put a little spring in your step.

When the promise of a future state brings a smile to your face or makes your heart beat a little faster, lean in. Give yourself to the dream – and the dream will give itself to you, taking on a life of its own in ways that will surprise and delight you.

Author, philosopher, and civil rights activist Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Over the last couple years, I’ve been working on a passion project of my own – a career’s worth of seemingly disjointed but synchronistically connected experiences that have come together in delightful ways. You can check it out here.

What is calling to you right now? And how can you make the space necessary for it to reveal itself to you in all its grandeur?

Here’s to pouring some life into your passion projects!

 

Why Preconceived Goals and Plans May Not Get You Where You Really Want to Go – and What to Do Instead.

 

Have you ever noticed that even your best laid plans can fail to get you where you really want to go?

The reason SMART goals and the plans we create to achieve them often don’t match our desired future is that they are constructed based on an understanding of the present and the past.

Goal setting is a linear way of operating in a nonlinear world.

When you sit down and determine what you want to accomplish, how you’ll measure it and when you will have achieved it, you’re operating on a very simplistic and theoretical understanding of the way things work. You’re likely to assume the road you are traveling will be straight and smooth and that all you need to do is drive a certain speed and a certain course and you will get where you want to go.

But real life isn’t like that.

There are twists and turns. Roads dead end and turn into overgrown brush with no defined trails. What you thought would get you where you wanted to go may turn out to be incredibly inadequate.

If you stick to your preconceived idea of how everything will be when you embark on your journey, you may well end up stuck at a dead end. If you lean on the gas when you’re going around a sharp curve so you can meet your desired timeframe, you may end up flying off a precipice and landing in a ditch.

To succeed, you must abandon the past and immerse yourself in the present.

Navigating complexity requires that you transcend your preconceived idea of how you thought things would be when you started and adjust to the environment you find yourself in. Where you thought there would be one road, there may be five or ten. And a SMART goal won’t give you the insight you need to know which of them to take.

On the contrary, letting go of a misaligned goal or plan allows you to find new paths and blaze trails where none existed. It not only allows you to adjust to your environment, but it also allows you to adjust to your own growth.

Perpetual planning (and trail blazing) is more important than a plan of action because you cannot anticipate the future based on what you know from the past.

By definition, a plan is designed in advance of carrying it out. While you can take your best guess at how things will unfold and what the most fitting course of action is, you will not really know whether it is adequate until you have begun to act.

To harness the power of perpetual planning, get moving and build some momentum. As you begin taking action, you’ll get insight into what needs to happen next. Build regular time into your calendar to assess your progress and your plan, identify next steps and make necessary course corrections.

And when your map isn’t getting you where you most want to go, you’ll be much better off blazing a new trail.

The above contains excerpts from my special report, “Why Real Leaders Don’t Set Goals (and what they do instead)”