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.

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.

 

 

 

The real root of overwhelm (it isn’t what you think)

 

What if you didn’t need to change your circumstances to get rid of your stress?

When something is bothering you, you likely seek out the cause and try to address it.  But when you focus your energy on something that isn’t really the root of the problem, you’re wasting your time (and likely increasing your stress).

This week I’m sharing a very short excerpt from a webinar that will explain how to avoid that trap and get to the root of your stress, frustration, overwhelm or anxiety so you the effort, time and energy you spend addressing it actually pays off.

If you’d like more support on overcoming overwhelm, overwork and burnout, visit UnleashtheExtraordinary.com.

Here’s to your success!

Diane

How to outwit overwhelm (even on the verge of burnout)

 

How do you keep yourself from getting overwhelmed, overworked, and completely burned out?  While there is no easy answer, this week’s video will help you reach a turning point and begin creating a new trajectory that is much more likely to get you where you really want to go.

For more support, check out UnleashtheExtraordinary.com.

Here’s to your success!

Diane

Ever have one of those days?

 

You know those days… when nothing seems to be going your way. I filmed this video on one of them – to remind myself as much as you, what to do to get things back on track.

Here’s to your success!

Diane

P.S. If you’d like more on how to bring out your best (even when things are at their worst), visit UnleashtheExtraordinary.com.

One of The Most Important Decisions You’ll Ever Make

 

Have you ever noticed that pressure, volatility, and uncertainty lead people to revert to primitive behavior? In the grip of it, they prioritize their own needs over those of others, let fear and anxiety call the shots, and short circuit their ability to think clearly (or at all).

It happens to all of us.

The more it holds your attention, the more likely you are to continue falling down that rabbit hole. Your focus shifts to…

…what you’re afraid of (or want to avoid)

…what’s out of your control

…what brings you down

…what you lack

…doubt and skepticism

…worry, anxiety, and preoccupations

…judgement and set stories about how things are

That mindset becomes a prevailing force that’ll keep you stuck because in that state you’ll cut yourself off from the stronger, wiser part of yourself – what I call your Genius.

But with conscious intention and commitment, you can interrupt that process and become the leader that helps others escape from and avoid that trap.

It all starts by shifting your focus…

…from what you want to minimize or move away from to what you want to move toward

…from getting something (for yourself) to giving something (to others)

…from doubt to confidence (in yourself, others, and life itself)

…from what’s beyond your control to what you can influence

…from worry, anxiety, and preoccupation to the present moment and trust in the process

…from what brings you down (irritation) to what amps you up (appreciation), and

…from judgement and stories about how things are to curiosity, learning, and growth

When you move from the concerns of your ego to access your Genius (higher nature), you’ll have a very different experience too.

You’ll enjoy:

• The energy and vitality to perform at your highest level without getting beaten down by stress, pressure, and overwhelm,
• A renewed passion and sense of meaning that gives you the strength to overcome obstacles and resilience to bounce back from setbacks,
• Heightened creativity and ingenuity to find answers to problems that previously stumped you – and to navigate change, challenge, and uncertainty with courage, confidence, and ease, and
• The ability to create strong connections with people that inspire trust and increase your ability to influence and truly lead.

It all begins with conscious awareness of where you are and where you want to be and a willingness to intentionally shift your focus in ways that allow you to bridge that gap.

We all have the ability to lead ourselves and others above circumstances that would otherwise keep us down, and there is never a better time to start than now.

What if Time is On Your Side?

Do you ever find yourself in a place where, despite your best efforts, nothing seems to be working out the way you want it to? 

Maybe you have an amazing idea that you just can’t seem to get off the ground. Perhaps you’ve made progress toward a goal and suddenly feel stymied or unable to gain the resources or support you need to move forward. You might be navigating some kind of transition that has you wondering whether that next thing for you is ever going to materialize.

When obstacles seem to be coming from all directions and you keep running into walls, it’s easy to lose hope and become consumed with frustration.

Sometimes it seems the only options are to throw in the towel or buckle down and try harder. We are conditioned as a society to do the latter, and sometimes that is what it takes to bust through the barriers that confront us. But when you continue to run into setback after setback, it may serve you better to stop for a while and survey the territory before proceeding — as what you thought was a frustrating delay is actually integral to getting you where we want to go.

There is a part of you that knows exactly what you need to do to succeed in any given area – a part of you that has knowledge of a bigger picture and all the moving parts necessary to bring your grandest goals and visions to fruition.

This wiser part of you knows exactly what you need to do (or not do) to yield the best results. It communicates in nonlinear ways — through feelings and flashes of insight that leave your logical mind wanting more details. And it rises above the noise in your head when you are consciously present.

To tap your sager self, you must learn to become attuned to what’s going on in this moment, trusting that amid frustrating delays and setbacks something advantageous may be happening. Tuning into it could allow you to move beyond resistance and frustration and gain clarity on what needs to happen next.

When I was writing The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader, I hit a wall and forced myself to write despite my lack of inspiration. Before long I realized that I simply couldn’t continue and took a break. I ended up throwing away everything I made myself write under my own duress, as it was flat, mechanical and uninspired. I replaced it with stories about the previous months’ experiences, which turned out to be quite relevant. As I wrote, the words seemed to fly onto the page, and I was back in my flow again.

You too may need to experience something that is integral to the next phase of your greatest vision, goal or project. So, when you feel frustration, look beyond what appears to be limitation to perceive the gifts it is bringing you. It could be the very springboard you need to get you back in your game.