Today I feel like a fraud.

On the one hand, it’s Monday, and time to draft this week’s Buoyant Leader newsletter.

On the other hand, I’m feeling decidedly non-buoyant: sluggish, sad, scared, and stuck.

I open my note-taking app and looked through all the newsletter ideas — and I got pissed off at my past self for offering all this smug advice that I really need right now.

Because when you’re not buoyant, the last thing you want is someone telling you how to right yourself.

Which is a useful thing for future me to remember when I’m out of my funk and feeling helpful again.

But I don’t want to abandon this feeling of fraudulence that quickly. I want to twist on this hook for a few more paragraphs, in case you might also have a touch of “who the hell am I to…?” now and again.

Fraudulence

The fraudulence has two parts to it.

First, I’m the guy who has supposedly figured this stuff out, and here I am again. I feel like calling some coaching clients and paying them to coach me today.

And I know, conceptually, that having off-days doesn’t disqualify me from — well, from anything really, except maybe surgery or air traffic control.

But it’s hard, and frankly annoying, when the advice and empathy and perspective I can dole out like the world’s best bartender falls so flat to my own ears.

Probably it’s an example of why bootstrapping isn’t a thing — while self-coaching can help with surface issues, in order to lift spirits we need each other.

But I wouldn’t want my clients to see me this way, and if I had a call this afternoon I’d fake energy and charm and positivity.

The second part of the fraudulence is the old refrain, Do As I Say And Not As I Do.

Because, honestly, this funk was pretty preventable.

I’ve neglected my morning practice for a couple of weeks now.

I’ve avoided several tough conversations because of the emotional discomfort I feared they would trigger.

And I’ve dealt with my unwanted feelings mostly by watching YouTube videos that review “buy it for life” products and brands. Exactly the opposite strategy of what I recommend (“feel it in your body”), and exactly the opposite of what would actually help.

Grace?

This is the part of the post where I feel like I should be humbly redeeming myself.

Or subtly inviting comments commending my courage for posting this.

Or hit the Delete key until I’m back to a blank note.

Maybe I should sleep on it.

The Next Day

Well, now it’s tomorrow, and I’m feeling much better. Full of beans (literally: scrambled tofu and mung beans for breakfast), and ready to align actions with values.

So maybe this is buoyancy; not expecting every day to be smooth sailing, but simply getting back up after going under.

The opening of Steward Brand’s new book, Maintenance: of Everything, tells the story of three boatsmen competing in 1968 to complete the world’s first (that we know of) solo circumnavigation of the earth in a boat that could not dock or take on any supplies or get outside help of any kind.

Rather than focusing on strategy or derring-do or luck, Brand explores how each of the competitors handled maintenance of their vessels and their health.

All faced setbacks that had them on the verge of quitting (or dying).

The ones who succeeded were better prepared by virtue of being less optimistic.

So when the storm came, or the accident happened, they didn’t panic. They had faith, not in the sea or the wind, but in their ability to weather whatever came.

When an insurmountable problem arose, they took time to think, to reflect, to consider before taking action. And fortunately for them, those actions rendered the insurmountable… surmountable.

So maybe yesterday was just one of those storms for me.

An inner storm.

Maybe had I done more morning qi gong and afternoon breathwork it wouldn’t have happened.

Maybe it was on my inner horizon and there was no avoiding it.

Maybe it was one of those cleansing storms that leaves the bright crackle of ozone in its wake, rainbows chasing away the receding cumulonimbus.

And maybe this is all a story in my head, which is now in yours.

The Takeaway?

I dunno.

“Prepare better”?

“Be gentle with yourself”?

“Be kind to others; everyone is fighting a hard battle”?

You choose.

For me, it’s a reminder that we’re all in this together.

Today I lift you; tomorrow you return the favor.

Going under happens. It’s not a sin, it’s not a crime, it’s not a shame.

And buoyancy isn’t some earned thing, although you can tilt the odds in your favor.

Buoyancy can be our natural state. We can rise again, dripping and spluttering, and our underwater experience can contain gifts for ourselves and others.

So yes, prepare better. Be gentler and kinder with yourself and others. (Even — perhaps especially —to your harsh and unkind inner voices; they’re trying their best to keep you safe.)

And remember that, maybe, we’re all frauds sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we stop doing the work.

And it doesn’t make our work any less precious.

It’s constantly pinging your environment, looking for clues that you’re either safe (and should focus on finding good stuff, like food, mates, or season two of Beef) or you’re in danger and should focus on hightailing it out of there or preparing to fight).

When this system works, you spend your energy wisely. You make good decisions. You respond rapidly to change and take appropriate and proportionate action when called for.

When your nervous system is out of whack (that’s some fancy neuroscience jargon thrown in to impress you), you over- or under-react to threat. You either miss clear danger signals, or (more commonly) respond to every glance, utterance, email, or traffic light as an invitation to extend your adamantine claws and fight.

In other words, what can look like an objectionable personality (what Bob Sutton refers to, in organization development jargon, as an “asshole”) is often based on a miscalibrated survival imperative.

And that’s good news. We don’t know how to cure “asshole.” But we know a lot about repairing and maintaining the nervous system, to restore it to a state of sensitive harmony with its environment. And it starts with the body.

The Diagnosis: Unchecked Allostatic Load

Your allostatic load is how much stress your body is carrying at any given time. When it’s high, it takes very little additional stress to catapult your nervous over the red line — the point where your nervous system flips from “thoughtful and strategic” to “eat or get eaten” mode. Not a great look at team scrums or standups.

Allostatic load is a big problem in our modern environment, because all the things that lower it are in short supply for many of us: birdsong, the smell of fresh soil, long vistas, singing and dancing around campfires, and picking insects out of each other’s fur. (All, interestingly, associated with safety and the absence of predators.)

Those classic stress-reducing triggers have been replaced by stress-inducing ones, like being surrounded by thousands of strangers, enclosed spaces, artificial lighting, and bad covers of classic rock songs.

So your allostatic load, which in your ancestral environment would generally have reset to close to zero by the time you awoke, can just keep climbing. Day by day, little prods and annoyances ratchet up the stress, with no relaxation in sight. From morning to night on any given day, your allostatic load climbs like the foam on top of boiling spaghetti water.

That’s why an innocent word or otherwise insignificant event can put you over the red line: because you were already doing the hokey-pokey right at its edge.

The Treatment: Daily Nervous System Maintenance

Because stress is a physiological response, working with your body is the fastest way to bring down your allostatic load. The most accessible lever is your breath.

Usually, our bodies breathe automatically and unconsciously (which is nice, because it leaves you free to sleep without worrying that you’ll forget to breathe and die during the night).

But breath is unique among your body’s automatic processes in that you can bring it entirely under your conscious control.

The hack is simple: spend 1 minute, 3 times a day, breathing consciously, with the out-breath taking slightly longer than the in-breath.

As you breathe, lightly scan your body with your mind, noticing any tightness, holding, discomfort, comfort, and fatigue.

Try it now and see what changes for you.

*hums Jeopardy! theme song*

You back? How’d it go?

Now, I’m not claiming that this simple practice, which you can do for free anywhere and any time, is the total cure for a miscalibrated nervous system struggling under a ginormous allostatic load.

What I am claiming is that you can use it to move away from the red line, so you have more “fuse” between trigger and boom.

And if you make this a regular practice, like brushing and flossing your teeth, you can begin to restore your nervous system to a healthier state over time.

There are many other strategies, but reconnecting with your body and stimulating your relaxation response on a regular basis provides the physiological foundation upon which those other strategies can build. Without it, you’re just trying to think your way out of a problem that has become immune to better thinking.

Once you’ve regulated your nervous system on the physical level, you can then address the next steps on your journey to buoyancy: inoculating your mind against unhelpful thoughts, seeing a bigger picture, and engaging in your world with wisdom. All stuff we’ll explore in upcoming issues of The Buoyant Leader (so subscribe if you want to keep exploring this stuff with me :).

They exposed Atlantic salmon smolts — young salmon making their once-in-a-lifetime migration from river to sea — to clobazam, a benzodiazepine. (Clobazam is in the same family as Valium and Xanax. It takes the edge off.)

They watched what happened when a predator was introduced. Normal salmon tighten up — they shoal, forming cohesive groups, doing the collective threat-response thing their species has been refining for millions of years.

The drugged smolts didn't. They drifted apart. They moved as individuals.

The drug did more than make the fish more relaxed. It made them miscalibrated.

Their environment is genuinely full of threats, including birds of prey, otters, fish, and even terrifying-looking merganser ducks complete with serrated bills.

Salmon’s nervous systems evolved to read those threats and respond.

Clobazam makes them environmentally illiterate.

The Experiment We’re Already Running

I've been thinking about this study a lot lately — because most organizations are running the same experiment on their people, just without the benzos.

Workplaces routinely ask people to perform calm.

Don't bring drama. Don't catastrophize.

Don't make a fuss. Stay positive.

The implicit message — sometimes explicit — is that the appearance of being unbothered is the same thing as being well-adjusted, and well.

It isn't.

Performing calm and actually being regulated are very different states.

The first is a flattening, where people’s perceptions respond in a similarly limp fashion to threats and opportunities.

The second is a kind of capacity — the ability to take in information, including unwelcome information, and respond to it from a steady center rather than from panic or paralysis.

A regulated nervous system is online. It's reading the environment. It's noticing what's off.

A "nothing-to-see-here" workplace culture asks for the opposite. It rewards the appearance of regulation and punishes healthy responses to actual dangers.

It tells the people whose nervous systems are picking up real signal — the early warning, the pattern that doesn't add up, the customer drift, the quiet worry about a strategy — to settle down, look more relaxed, not be such a downer.

Those people aren't the problem. They're a functional sensing apparatus.

Every time the room signals that their concern is bringing the energy down, it doses them with a little hit of emotional clobazam.

Their threat-perception is compromised in ways their leaders won't see until something breaks.

This isn’t an ode to anxiety. It’s the difference between head-on-a-swivel regulation and why-bother sedation.

Regulation Isn’t Performance

Seeing your team this way — as a sensing apparatus rather than as problems to manage — is a reframe I owe to my friend Ian Lawton, founder of NeuroHive, an organization supporting late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults.

Ian read an early draft of my forthcoming book The Buoyant Leader and pointed out, with characteristic kindness, that I'd wandered into territory that wouldn't serve a meaningful slice of my readers — autistic, ADHD, trauma-affected, and otherwise neurodivergent leaders, but also leaders whose teams include people across that full neurological range.

His feedback reorganized my thinking: regulation isn't an outward look, it's a stability of intention. The team member whose worry registers in her body before it reaches her words isn't failing at composure. She's regulating. She's also probably reading something the room needs to hear.

Ian's framework reorganized substantial portions of my book. More importantly, it should reorganize how you think about what "good leadership presence" actually means — both in yourself and in the people you're leading. Read his foreword when The Buoyant Leader comes out. (And while you're there, read the rest of the book.)

Back to the Fish

The drugged smolts didn’t die of relaxation. They died of illiteracy.

They lost the ability to read their environment, and each other.

They stopped shoaling, and lost their fear of very real and present dangers.

That’s what a “keep calm and carry on” culture builds.

So here's my question for you:

In the rooms you lead, are you cultivating a culture where people can stay regulated through hard things — or one where they have to look calm regardless of what they're picking up?

Only one of them lets your team do what the undrugged smolts do instinctively: shoal up, read the water together, and move as one through genuinely dangerous terrain.

“In deepest Devotion I present to your Royal Highness this small product of that science which I have attained in music, with the most humble request that you will deign to regard it not according to the imperfection of its Composition, but with a most gracious eye ... and thus take me into your most mighty Protection.”

That small, imperfect product? It was only his Mass in B Minor, widely regarded as one of the greatest compositions of all time.

Here’s how the Netherlands Bach Society describes it on YouTube, “In between an awe-inspiring Kyrie and the jubilant final Dona nobis pacem, there are nine completely unique arias and duets, fourteen impressive ensemble sections for four, five, six and even eight voices, a broad spectrum of instrumental solos, and an incredible variety of styles.”

A “small product” indeed ;)

I can’t read Bach’s mind (I’ve played violin since 1974, and I can barely read his Sonatas and Partitas), so I’m curious: was he really that modest, or was the self-deprecation a strategic gambit to get the job he wanted: court composer?

But what I really wonder about is how Augustus himself reacted to that letter.

Imagine the king's secretary handing him the package. Your Highness, a musician from Leipzig sent this. Says it's a small product of his attempts at music. Asks for your indulgence.

If Augustus had taken Bach at his word — if he'd glanced at the inscription, registered the apology, and filed the parts away unexamined — the world might have lost the Mass in B minor for another century.

He didn't. Three years later, Bach got the court composer title he was angling for.

But here's what I find myself thinking about: Augustus had to look past the packaging.

And most of us, most of the time, don't.

So what I want to talk about today is: how should leaders handle self-deprecation?

Why Not Just Take the Discount?

Somewhere on your team this week, someone is going to walk into your office or open a Slack thread with a sentence that begins:

"This is probably a dumb question, but..."

"I might be totally wrong here, but..."

"You probably already know this, but..."

What’s the best way to address the self-doubt?

Some leaders — not you, obviously — would welcome it.

Their thinking goes like this: if folks in their organization lack self-confidence, they can keep them at the low end of the salary ladder. Make them feel like they're lucky to have a job, so they won't complain or organize or jump ship. Feel good themselves by "lending" them their confidence.

There are good reasons to discourage self-deprecation, even though it can feel like having discount employees.

First, it’s not a discount. Self-deprecators are actually bringing a worse product at the same price. The person who hedges their words almost always hedges their thinking as well, editing ideas before bringing them. They don't challenge you when pushing back could be valuable.

They aren’t JS Bach with a humble cover letter. You're getting PDQ Bach, the one who mailed you only the bits they’re sure you’ll like.

Second, you’re going to end up pushing down or driving away good people.

People who self-deprecate in environments that reward self-doubt either shrink further, or end up leaving when they feel sufficiently under-appreciated. And those who leave first are the ones with options.

Third — and this is the one that should keep you up at night — the contributions most likely to be hedged are also the contributions most likely to contain information you don't already have.

People hedge when they worry you don’t want to hear what they have to say. Which means a leader whose team runs on self-deprecation systematically loses access to exactly the information that should be written in bold flashing 240-point neon font on a SWOT matrix.

That’s not a controversial argument. So where’s the issue here?

The Problem: Hedging Feels Good All Around

The issue is this: unless you’re paying very close attention, there’s a good chance that you’re unconsciously encouraging a fair amount of hedging, self-deprecation, and low-status behavior.

Because it’s a “feel-good-in-the-short-term” behavioral dynamic. For both parties.

While your directs self-deprecate to let themselves off the hook, notice how they’re letting you and your nervous system off the hook as well.

Notice what happens in your body when a direct report comes to you with “This is probably a dumb question, but…”

Deference. Safety. Low stakes.

Ahhh…

Now picture that same person walking into your office with more of a confident swagger. “I’ve thought this through. We should do X, and here’s why. What do you think?”

Now you’ve got to make an effort. You have to evaluate fairly. Possibly disagree. And risk being wrong.

Where Hedging Comes From

Self-deprecation isn't a character flaw. And while a few self-deprecators are working the Bach angle — strategically performing humility to gain a hearing — most are not.

Most workplace self-deprecation is a protective adaptation. A habit formed in earlier environments that punished confidence.

That environment might be a family of origin, a culture where directness from a subordinate is unthinkable, or a toxic workplace where, for example, a confident woman learned that behaving the same way as a confident man got her tagged as "problematic."

The hedging worked — then.

It's up to you whether that habit still works for them, or whether it's no longer necessary, but simply costly.

When you hear someone hedge, you've been given a glimpse into their history. Wherever they learned that lesson, it wasn't from you. Now it's your job to help them discover that respectful, honest confidence is the best way to present themselves.

What to Do Instead

So the next time someone walks into your office with "This is probably a dumb question, but..." — what do you do?

Don’t reach for that platitude, “There are no dumb questions.”

(My first week in the private sector, I took that advice to heart when I asked a prospect, “What exactly do you mean by P&L?” My boss quickly learned that there are, in fact, dumb questions.)

And don’t give them the “act more confident” speech. That puts you in the position of critic rather than ally, and heaps an extra helping of shame on top of their already-negative self-perception.

Here’s what I recommend: notice how your body responds to the pre-apology. The quiet relief that you aren’t going to be challenged; no need to add to your cognitive load in this conversation. Can you feel this stance as a sensation?

If so, that sensation is a clear signal that your nervous system prefers the hedge to the more challenging contribution it would otherwise have to engage with.

Once you’ve become aware of this dynamic, you’re ready to respond differently.

Now mentally strip the hedge. Listen only to the claim underneath.

Then ask yourself a single question:

"If a senior colleague had made this same observation with full confidence, how would I respond?"

Respond that way.

Do this for a month and you'll notice two things.

First, you'll catch yourself hearing hedges you used to file under "deference" — probably more often than you'd have guessed.

Second, the people you respond to this way will start hedging less. Not because you overtly told them to change. But because their nervous system will clock that your nervous system can handle — and may even welcome — their full intelligence and presence.

In other words, your work isn’t making them more confident. It’s becoming a receiver who doesn’t need their confidence to register — and honor — their signal.

Back to Bach

Three years after that letter, Bach got his court composer title. Augustus had read past the self-deprecation and recognized the Mass in B minor for the transcendent achievement that it was.

Whose hedge have you been taking at face value? And what might that person be able to tell you when you create the conditions that encourage and reward their full-throated transmission?

This is the kind of thing I work on with founders and senior executives one-on-one. If you've spotted yourself in this piece and want to think it through together, message me on LinkedIn or hit me up at HowieJacobson.com.

A brainless, single-celled organism can navigate mazes, design efficient transit networks, and reliably find opportunity — with nothing more than raw sensitivity to its environment. Can your organization say the same?

The organism in question is Physarum polycephalum — aka Mr or Mrs slime mold. No brain. No nervous system. Just a blob of goo that oozes around by extending bits of itself called pseudopods and then glurping along to catch up.

And yet, place a bit of oatmeal at the exit of a maze, and it will find the most efficient path through.

It does this with no central planning — just a simple, distributed sensitivity to its environment.

Researchers actually use slime molds to solve complex engineering problems, like designing optimal road and rail networks connecting ports and cities.

(Or are the slime molds using researchers to cook them oatmeal? Philosophically, it's unclear.)

Your organization also has no single, all-knowing brain. The question is whether it can match even this level of environmental intelligence — sensing opportunities, avoiding threats, and routing resources where they matter most.

Your Organization Is an Organism

Your organization also exists in an environment full of opportunities and threats. The question is — how good is it at acting on them?

Amoebas have an advantage here. They're single-celled, in intimate contact with their environment. They sense food or poison and extend an approach or avoid pseudopod immediately.

In organizations, though, the sensing function is separated from the decision-making function. The bigger and more complex the org, the bigger the gap.

Traditional hierarchies make it worse: the higher up you go, the less contact you have with the outside world.

The hundreds of small insights that sales, customer service, and tech support are gathering — about shifting customer preferences, changing price sensitivities, emerging complaints — rarely inform the control room — the C-suite — that sets policy.

The people who know what's happening don't have permission to act on it. The people with permission don't know what's happening.

That gap is where most bad decisions live.

The Usual "Fix"

More meetings. More reports. More Slack channels. More cc'd emails. It feels like progress — but it's just the organizational equivalent of really committing to that squint.

Leaders set up ad hoc task forces to deal with things that have already become emergencies. They complain that nobody takes initiative, that they're the only one acting like an owner.

Then they look for someone to blame when they miss the writing on the wall and watch quarterly revenue tank.

What's Really Missing

Yes, there are structural fixes — reporting lines, wiki access, AI tools, meeting policies. These things can be broken, and they can be fixed.

But in my experience, the real blocker isn't plumbing. It's fear.

The underlying issue I see over and over again lives in the collective nervous system of the organization as a constant buzzing of threat. Employees going about their days shadowed by a lack of psychological safety.

Ask yourself:

• How safe do my employees feel to share their actual thoughts and feelings?
• How encouraged are they to say unpopular or risky things?
• How are they rewarded for bringing up problems? For advocating for vendors and customers? For pointing out policies that interfere with good work?

A collective nervous system running on fear will miss the subtle signals that can inform wise action.

A Walk in the Woods

Imagine a leisurely stroll through the forest. Birdsong, the hum of insects, the gurgling of a brook. Deep green of last year's foliage, bright green of this year's new shoots. The smell of soil and pine needles. A pleasant breeze.

For an experienced hiker, this isn't just a bunch of sensory delights. It's data. The richness tells her where to find food, shelter, water — and whether a storm is coming or a predator is near.

And here's the key: none of this requires effort. She's not running mental checklists. She's just open — and because she's open, the information flows in and organizes itself.

A relaxed nervous system is a remarkably intelligent instrument. It picks up patterns, spots anomalies, and integrates vast amounts of information without being told to.

This is what organizational intelligence looks like when it's working. People at the edges — in sales, in support, on the factory floor — naturally absorb subtle shifts in customer behavior, market conditions, product quality. Not because they're instructed to, but because nothing is blocking the signal.

Now back to our hiker — a twig snaps behind her.

Instantly, everything changes. The richness collapses. She doesn't care about birdsong or soil quality anymore. All she cares about is: what's behind me, and how fast can I move?

When the threat is real, that narrowing is lifesaving. But when your nervous system is permanently locked in threat mode, you lose access to everything else. The aperture narrows. The edges go dark.

This is what happens inside organizations that run on fear. People stop picking up on the subtle stuff — not because they're incompetent, but because their nervous systems have been hijacked. They're scanning for danger — who's getting blamed, what's the political risk, will I get punished for this? — instead of scanning for opportunity.

How to Actually Fix It

Basically, treat your people as if they are actually competent and well-meaning.

Look for every policy that sends the message: "We don't really trust your judgment, your ability, or your intentions." Now imagine getting rid of those policies.

What comes up? Probably fear.

Because those policies represent control — or at least the illusion of it. If you're in the C-suite and you're used to making all the decisions, it can be terrifying to picture Sal in customer service empowered to make things right.

What if she could issue a refund up to $200 without asking anyone?

What if Iqbal in operations could pause a deliverable when he sees scope creep, instead of escalating through three levels of management?

Only a well-regulated nervous system can handle the open flow of information as data rather than threat.

Only leaders who've done the work on their own nervous systems — who’ve become buoyant — can take in as much reality as is available for processing.

The Takeaway

A healthy organization is an organism. Its intelligence lives at its edges — where it actually touches the world.

When a leader's nervous system goes into threat mode, the aperture narrows and the edges go dark. The instinct is to compensate by pulling information toward the center: more meetings, more reports, more oversight, more blame.

But that's not wisdom. It's panic.

The fix isn't tighter control. It's a regulated enough nervous system to trust the edges to act — and to let what they're learning reach you before it's already an emergency.

This is what I write about in The Buoyant Leader — the practical neuroscience of why your organization's intelligence collapses under stress, and what to do about it.

The book lays out a four-part framework that gives leaders the tools to widen their aperture, trust the edges, and stop being the bottleneck between what their people know and what the organization does about it.

If this piece resonated, the book goes deeper. Find out more at howiejacobson.com.

For a long time, that was my aspiration. A thousand yoga and meditation classes drilled into my head that the highest virtue is to “be here now.”

I have no problem, in theory, with presence. One of the main themes of my work is to empower executives to tolerate their own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and urges.

I generally prefer presence to absence (except for some meetings). It’s the “fully” that’s been the problem.

Have you heard it a thousand times too?

"Be fully present." In meetings. In one-on-ones. In every conversation that matters.

It sounds right. Noble, even. Give 100% of your attention to the people or person in front of you.

But here's the problem: if you actually try to be 100% present, you become useless.

The Dining Room Problem

I’ve been to a bunch of events at Kripalu, a yoga retreat in New England. And one of the weirdest things I do there is mindful eating.

Mindful eating is one of those classic presence exercises. I sit down, nodding solemnly to my table mates, signaling that I’m an advanced spiritual being with barely any ego left.

No phone in my hand, no tablet in front of me. I gaze deeply at my food. I notice the aromas, the textures.

I silently thank the sun, the rain, the farmer, the trucker, the cook, the dishwasher, the accounts receivable clerk for the fertilizer company, the earthworms, the whole shebang.

I take small bites, chew carefully, notice everything.

It's beautiful.

Then someone repeats, “Can you slide your chair in so I can get by?" and I’m completely thrown. Earthworms and dainty bites out the mental window, replaced by a flustered annoyance.

It turns out that 100% presence for one thing means zero capacity for anything else.

That's fine —mostly — at a yoga retreat. It's a disaster in a leadership conversation where you need to listen, think, respond, draw on your experience, and track the bigger picture — all at the same time.

The 5% Witness

What actually works is something I teach coaches and leaders that sounds almost absurdly modest: keep about 5% of your attention on the fact that you are present.

That's it. A small, steady thread of awareness — I am here, I am paying attention — running quietly in the background. That lets the other 95% of your energy go where it needs to go: listening to what's being said, reading the room, connecting dots, formulating your response.

This is actually more like what experienced meditators do, for the most part. They don't white-knuckle their way to unbroken focus. Instead, they maintain a gentle witness — a part of their awareness that notices when they've drifted.

Where Leaders Lose Themselves

What happens without that 5% witness?

Sometimes, if the present moment isn’t engaging (because it feels unimportant or boring), you might catch yourself thinking about last night’s ball game or whether a double-perl stitch will work for the collar of that sweater.

More frequently, especially with leaders, something else happens. Something more insidious: autopilot.

On autopilot, you get so absorbed that you merge with your role, or the task in front of you. You’re so engaged that you’ve forgotten that “you are.”

You don’t notice your body. You don’t notice your breathing. “You the be-er” disappears and is replaced by “you the do-er.”

But wait, you might protest: this sounds like flow.

And that guy with the really long name says that flow is a desired state.

And sometimes it is.

Flow — all task, zero self-awareness — becomes a problem when there are other people in the equation, and their needs and goals and priorities are different from yours. And when your nervous system’s threat detection algorithm lights up.

This can look like:

• In a coaching conversation, you stop listening and start performing.
• In a strategy meeting, you stop tracking the room and start defending your position.
• In a difficult one-on-one, you stop being curious and start reacting.

Your witness goes dark, and you don't even realize it until later, when you start wondering what went wrong.

Here’s what went wrong: Your nervous system was running the show, and nobody was watching the controls.

That’s why allocating 5% of your awareness to mindful presence is so important; to notice your elevated heart rate, tensing muscles, and racing thoughts, and interpret those inner signals as a cue to slow down, check in, and recalibrate.

The Leadership Application

This is the inner game that separates good leaders from great ones. The leader everyone wants to work for is the one who can hold the full complexity of a conversation — your words, your emotions, the organizational context, their own reactions — while maintaining just enough self-awareness to choose their response rather than just having one.

That's what regulation looks like in practice. Not calm detachment. Not performative eye contact. A quiet, ongoing thread of I am here. I notice what's happening — in the room and in me.

5% awareness. 95% engagement. 100% effective. (Look at me doing math — Mr. Gonzalves, I apologize for asking, in 1978, when we were ever going to use percentages in real life. You were right.)

Want to build this kind of presence into your leadership?

In The Buoyant Leader, I explore how the inner game of self-regulation transforms how leaders show up under pressure — not through more effort, but through smarter attention. If this resonates, I'd love to hear from you. Find me at howiejacobson.com and let’s talk.

Cut a mantra-groove in your brain: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like me.”

The assumption, of course, is that imposter syndrome is a terrible thing to have.

Sometimes it is. And sometimes kicking it in the ‘nads is the right strategy.

But not always.

So here’s a couple of serious questions for those other times:

What if that voice isn't self-sabotaging or pathological?

What if it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do?

The Guardrail You're Trying to Dismantle

If someone asked me to perform surgery tomorrow, I'd say no. I’m not a surgeon, I hate the sight of blood, I never won at “Operation” as a kid. Get someone else.

Is that imposter syndrome?

Or just a healthy relationship with reality?

And yet we've lumped together those two very different situations under the same label.

There's the self-doubt that keeps you from doing things you're perfectly capable of.

And there's the healthy caution that says, "Hey, this matters. People are counting on you. Pay attention."

That second voice? I'd call it a guardrail, not a syndrome. (Especially if I’m the one on the operating table.)

When leaders step into new roles — a bigger team, a higher-stakes environment, a seat at a table they've never sat at before — they often feel a version of this. The voice that says you shouldn't be here; other people are so much better at this; wait until they find out that you’re a fraud.

The conventional advice is to silence that voice.

I think that's a mistake.

Three Ways to Work With the Voice Instead of Against It

1. Thank it, then move anyway.

The voice is trying to protect you. It's reminding you that there are real stakes and real responsibility. Always a message worth keeping in mind.

But hearing it doesn't mean obeying it. You can acknowledge the risk and move forward. Feel the discomfort and act anyway.

Not recklessly, but intentionally.

Ground yourself with conscious breathing. Make a plan. Take people in. Focus on being curious rather than impressive.

Here's what happens when you do: you start collecting evidence that contradicts the voice.

You get through the meeting and people are pretty happy. Your top experts share their ideas, and you — new to role and in a bit over your head — take time to listen. You ask sharp questions. You encourage creativity and collaboration.

When you review your performance later, and you’re being honest, your brain registers a mismatch: Wait, the voice said I'm no good at this, but the evidence says otherwise.

Under the right conditions, your brain recalibrates. It steps back, slowly but surely, and lets you lead. And the part of you that’s curious, that’s creative, that’s collaborative — there ain’t no leadership better than that.

2. Shift from self-consciousness to service.

This is a power move. When you're focused on helping someone else, you “you-ness” fades into the background. Your own anxiety becomes a side show because it’s irrelevant to the task at hand.

Think about it: if you see someone trip and fall on the sidewalk, you don't stand there wondering, Am I qualified to intervene? Do I have my ten thousand hours of “helping someone up” training? Can I name all the muscles and tendons involved in this maneuver?

You just help. The impulse to serve cancels out the impulse to doubt.

The same principle applies in a boardroom, a team meeting, or a difficult conversation with a direct report. The moment you shift from How am I doing? to How can I help?, the “get me out of here before someone notices that I’m a large sentient insect” voice loses most of its power.

3. Get curious about the trigger underneath.

Sometimes the voice is louder than the situation warrants. When there's shame, anger, or fear that feels disproportionate to what's actually happening, that's a signal. Something from the past got stuck and never got resolved.

Michael Singer taught me to think of it like a thorn that’s embedded so deep it's covered with scar tissue. You can't see it anymore, but it still causes pain in certain situations.

When that happens, it's actually an opportunity. Slow down. Ask yourself: Where is this in my body? What are the words it's saying? Do I remember the earliest times I felt this way — in other words, can I pinpoint the original thorn, so I can bring awareness to it and extract it?

This is the deeper work — the kind that doesn't fit neatly into a listicle. And it's often the work that creates the most lasting change.

The Deeper Work

The leaders I admire most haven't eliminated self-doubt. They've developed a different relationship with it. They treat it as data, not as identity. They've learned to hear the voice, extract the useful information, and then choose their next move from a place of centered authority rather than reactivity.

That's not something you can hack with a morning affirmation. It requires genuine self-awareness, often supported by a coach or therapist, and the willingness to look at parts of yourself that would rather stay hidden.

But the payoff is enormous: you get to lead with both confidence and humility. You stay responsive to real risk without being paralyzed by imagined inadequacy. And you model for everyone around you that growth and self-doubt can coexist — which might be the most uplifting thing a leader can do.

If this resonates — if you've been white-knuckling your way through self-doubt rather than working with it — I'd love to hear your experience. Find me at howiejacobson.com. And if you're ready to explore what's really driving the voice, let's talk. That's the work I do with executives every day.

Guess what?

You're almost certainly wrong.

Not about the general shape of the situation. You've been doing this long enough that your pattern-matching is excellent. But about the specific reality this person is living in? The details that actually matter?

You're running on a movie your brain invented — complete with set design, lighting, and a cast of characters straight out of your brain’s best simulation of Central Casting.

I see this constantly in my coaching work. A leader comes in with something like, "My team just isn't stepping up." Or: "I keep getting pulled into the weeds." Or: "I've got a senior person who's checked out."

My instinct is to immediately start solving. I can see the situation. I can see the checked-out senior leader scrolling through their phone in a meeting. I can see the overwhelmed VP staying late to redo their team's work. I've constructed a vivid mental movie, and I believe it.

But it's a total fantasy. My brain is constructing reality, like it always does.

And that means that my solutions, which will work perfectly in the theater of my mind, always fall flat in the real world.

As a coach, I’ve learned to insert a simple but powerful technique between an initial description of a problem and an in-depth diagnosis.

I become a movie director.

Instead of working from the generalized story, I ask for a specific scene. Not "tell me what usually happens" but "tell me about a specific time this happened." Not the pattern — one actual instance. And in enough detail that I can see the movie in my mind.

"Well, last Tuesday in our leadership meeting, I presented the Q3 priorities and Davina just sat there."

"Great. Take me through that. Where were you sitting relative to Davina? Who else was in the room? What exactly did you say, and what did Davina do — specifically?"

I keep asking questions until I could instruct actors on a set. And if my client watched the resulting scene, they'd say, "Yep, that's exactly how it happened." (They’d also say, “I think Ryan Gosling should play me.”)

When you zoom into the specific scene, two things happen.

First, you stop coaching a situation that exists only in your imagination. You stop offering brilliant guidance that's irrelevant to what's actually going on.

Second — and this is the part that still surprises me after all these years — the person starts solving their own problem.

When they shift from "Davina’s checked out" to "Oh… I realize that when I presented the Q3 priorities, I didn't ask for input. I just talked at the room for twenty minutes. And actually, Davina had sent me a strategy memo the week before that I never acknowledged…" — suddenly the issue looks completely different, and the path forward is theirs.

One of the reasons leaders stay stuck is that they've generalized. They now have a situation.

And you can't solve a general situation. You can only solve the moment you're in.

This is one of the most underrated leadership skills I know — and it works whether you're coaching a direct report, running a retrospective, or navigating a conflict between two senior people.

The next time someone comes to you with a problem, resist the urge to solve the abstraction. Instead, try:

"Tell me about a specific time this happened. Walk me through it like I'm watching a movie."

You'll be amazed at how often the solution emerges — without you having to provide it.

I work with executives and leadership teams on the mindset shifts that turn reactive management into buoyant leadership. If that's a conversation worth having, let's talk. Drop me a line at howiejacobson.com.

The main tool your brain uses to do this, once you’ve acquired language, is categories.

What category includes the following?: a house, a fly swatter, a beekeeper’s suit, and a degree in entomology.

Things that protect you from stinging insects.

Cool, huh? These items have nothing in common, except for a specific goal. And once you’ve formed the goal, you can add other things to the category: a bottle of DEET, a zapper, a plane ticket to Antarctica.

Conscious and Unconscious Goals

Whether you’re aware or not, you approach every situation with multiple goals. These goals shape what you notice, what you prioritize, and how you behave.

You’re aware of some of your goals: “find out what this person thinks” or “build team safety and camaraderie” or “impress the boss.”

But you also have goals that are running below your conscious awareness, like “be the smartest person in the room” or “avoid conflict” or “don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Can you see how the unconscious goals might interfere with and even sabotage your conscious ones?

How Unconscious Goals Affect Perception

Unconscious goals are even more powerful than conscious ones in determining what you experience in any given situation. That’s because you’re not aware of them, so you can’t perform any reality checks.

If your goal is “be the smartest person in the room,” your brain will be working as follows:

1. Other people’s ideas are stupid, or flawed, or incomplete
2. When people ask me questions, they’re challenging my competence rather than being genuinely curious.
3. All feedback is actually criticism.

If your goal is “avoid conflict,” here’s what your brain will do:

1. Anyone expressing a strong opinion is being dangerously aggressive.
2. All disagreement is a personal attack.
3. All sighs, glances, and movements signal tension that could erupt into conflict at any moment.

If your goal is “don’t draw attention to yourself,” your brain will automatically perform the following tricks:

1. Anyone who speaks up confidently is showing off, and is not to be trusted.
2. Any opportunity I might volunteer for will expose me to judgment, and is too dangerous to consider.
3. My own contributions aren’t good enough to share.

In each case, the unconscious goal acts as an invisible filter that constructs your experience of the situation before you even have a chance to think critically about it.

These goals are so harmful because you don’t experience them as goals. You experience the distorted perception they engender as reality.

Positive Thinking Doesn’t Tip the Scale

I’m a big believer in uprooting the schemas — the unconscious ways of seeing the world — that underly these goals. The process of doing so — activating the original belief and exposing it to disconfirmatory knowledge — can be surprisingly tolerable, brief, and effective.

But what do you do in the next meeting, the next one-on-one conversation, or the next performance review to construct a more helpful, empowering reality?

You might think it’s by reinforcing your conscious goals: “find out what this person thinks”; “build team safety and camaraderie”; “impress the boss.”

Like, repeat them as affirmations on your way to the meeting, draw them in shaving cream or lipstick on your bathroom mirror, and make them your screensaver.

The problem with this approach is that you’re setting them up to fight with the unconscious goals. And the unconscious always wins, eventually. And the unconscious always wins, under pressure.

Value-Based Goals to the Rescue

The elegant, effective move here is to set value-based goals that don’t try to fight against old patterns of self-protection. Where you identify how you want to be, rather than what you want to accomplish.

For example, before a conversation where you’re trying to get someone’s opinion, set your goal as relentless curiosity. It’s imperative that you find out what they think!

Now all your self-protective circuits will rally around that goal, rather than the one of making you seem smarter than the other person. You’ll construct a reality in which their perception has value, and that it’s in your best interest to find out what it is.

Another game-changing goal is compassion. When your goal is to be emotionally supportive of other people, you’ll see their behavior through the lens of their needs, which you can attend to.

That’s very different than viewing their behavior as provoking and dangerous.

The third game-changing goal I’ll mention here is creativity — yours and everyone else’s. If you’re consciously focused on cultivating an atmosphere where new and exciting ideas can be born and nurtured, your “don’t get noticed” circuitry gets assuaged by the fact that you’re drawing attention to ideas, not yourself.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept

Before your next meeting, take two minutes to set a single conscious goal — curiosity, compassion, or creativity — and notice how it changes what you see. Notice the ideas you might have dismissed, the people you might have misjudged, the opportunities you might have ducked.

And if you'd like help shifting your team's or organization's culture to one rooted in curiosity, compassion, and creativity, reach out to me at howiejacobson.com. Let's build something together.

In her book How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett tells a story of going on a date with a guy from her lab that she wasn’t really into. As the date progressed, however, she found herself increasingly more attracted to him. Her face flushed, her heart rate increased, and she started feeling butterflies in her stomach.

After agreeing to a second date, Barrett went home, got into bed, and had the flu for a week.

In other words, those bodily sensations were an incipient illness, not signs of sexual attraction. But when her brain had to interpret those sensations, it did so through the context of a dinner date. So it predicted, “You’ve got the hots for this dude.”

She wasn’t lying to herself. She was simply doing what all of us do, all the time: constructing reality from incomplete data.

This is the predictive brain at work.

The Predictive Brain

You don’t experience the world raw, without filters. (You’d be bombarded with so much data, you’d be completely unable to function.)

Instead, you experience a model of the world that your brain constructs on the fly, assembled in about half a second from sensory data, memory, and your brain’s best guess about what’s happening, what it means, and what you need to do about it.

Most of the time, the model is close enough for you to function successfully. You bring your fork to your mouth instead of your eye, you don’t walk in front of traffic, and you laugh at the punch line of the joke.

And that model does get things wrong — a lot. Most of the time, that’s not a problem. Your brain compares incoming sensory data with its prediction and updates its model.

Prediction, comparison, prediction error, updated prediction.

That loop is your brain at its best — learning in real time.

But sometimes prediction errors don’t get corrected. Say you interpret a harmless glance as accusatory, or the innocent absence of an instantaneous response to a text message (“my phone died”) as anger.

Or your stomach drops before a team all-hands, and your brain codes that as Something's wrong with the vibe in here — what are they not telling me? rather than I just drank too much coffee.

When that happens, you don’t feel wrong. Your brain doesn’t update. To the contrary; you feel certain. Certain that you’re under attack, and there’s a threat that needs to be dealt with.

You feel that certainty as evidence of objective truth, when it’s actually nothing more than evidence of your brain’s confidence in its own prediction.

Instead of learning, you’re stuck in a self-sealing feedback loop.

What’s The Origin of Distorted Predictions?

Borrowing from Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, I call it a “thorn”: an old wound, encoded under conditions of real threat or loss, that got locked into your prediction algorithm as “the most important thing to consider here.”

What Andy Clark refers to in his book The Experience Machine, in the charmingly technical terminology of neuroscience, as “a heavily weighted prior.”

A heavily weighted prior — a thorn — isn’t a memory that you can visit; it’s a pair of glasses you see through without even realizing that you’re wearing them.

And because you can't see the glasses, you assume what you're seeing is the world. As meditation teacher and author Richard Dixey puts it in his book Three Minutes a Day, “We react to the display we ourselves have created as if it is unreservedly real, actually the case.”

Your brain mistakes its own construction for ground truth. It refuses to update because it’s unable to find evidence that disconfirms its prediction.

That’s what I refer to as a “glitch”: not a broken brain, but a brain unable to replace outdated data with new learning.

When Predictions Harm

Barrett’s flu date was a harmless glitch — her brain updated the next morning and she was able to laugh about it.

But the glitches that derail your leadership aren’t so cooperative.

When your CFO pauses before answering and your brain codes that silence as “she’s unprepared” or “she’s unwilling to confide in me,” it’s quite possible that you’re not reading the room. You’re reading the thorn.

When a board member asks a pointed question about your revenue projections and your chest tightens and your heart races as your brain screams “They’re coming for you!”, that’s the loop running on old data, generating a prediction so vivid it feels like perception.

The physical sensations are real. But they’re based on your interpretation, which is a construction rather than reality.

And that construction is only as good as the data your brain is willing to consult, and the algorithm it uses to weigh and prioritize that data. And when a thorn is involved, its salience all but drowns out everything you’ve experienced since it was embedded.

How to Fix the Glitch

The good news is, glitches are fixable.

Not by arguing with your brain. (Who would be doing the arguing, anyway?)

Not by slapping a positive label on a sensation that your body has very good historical reasons to flag as a warning of present danger.

But by learning to recognize the loop in action, by identifying situations and people and internal states that tend to trigger it, and by training yourself to interrupt it before the seals shut and your triggered behavior emerges on autopilot.

Eventually, you can even teach your predictive system that the old data is out of date — actually removing the thorn so your prediction loops can function as intended.

That’s how you move from being hijacked by your predictions to being informed by them.

In my new book, The Buoyant Leader, I teach the full RISE method for doing exactly that — moving from being hijacked by your predictions to being informed by them. But if you want a taste of it first, I run a free online workshop every month where we put these ideas into practice together. You can find the next one and register at HowieJacobson.com/workshop.

Which means it has to be ruthlessly efficient in how it spends those calories.

It achieves efficiency by predicting what’s about to happen based on past learning.

But not only that. It also predicts what’s happening right now.

That sounds weird, right? I mean, why does it need to predict, when it can just watch and listen and find out?

Because tracking reality in real time is a colossal expenditure of energy. If your brain did that, there would be no energy left for action.

Your Brain is Always Seeing Its Own Simulation

In his book The Experience Machine, Andy Clark explains this using the metaphor of how streaming software handles video. Rather than looking at every single pixel in every single frame of a video, the software’s algorithm focuses only on the differences between each frame and the next.

That way, a video can be rendered using a fraction of the data.

Similarly, your brain is constructing your reality, and checking the data from your senses for errors; things in your environment that don’t align with the prediction.

Faced with prediction error, your brain updates, in one of two ways.

It either updates its model with the new information, or instructs you to act on the world to bring reality in line with the model.

Those two options — update the model, or act on the world — are both functional. But your brain has a third trick up its sleeve, and this one actually keeps you from learning.

When Prediction Goes Wrong

The third trick is to ignore error signals from the environment.

Your brain does this when it’s more confident in its model of the world than the evidence of your senses. Basically, it’s refusing to acknowledge that it might be wrong.

For example, a leader whose nervous system has learned that disagreement means danger might walk into a routine strategy discussion and read every pushback as a power play — not because it is one, but because their model is predicting threat that isn't there.

In that scenario, their brain deems it too risky to disregard the perceived threat, even if it doesn’t actually exist in their present environment.

The Cost of Bad Predictions

Remember how much energy your brain burns through? That’s why bad predictions are so costly — they burn through resources at an alarming rate.

Here’s what most senior leaders don’t realize: when you’re stressed, a significant portion of your daily energy isn’t being spent on the actual challenges in front of you.

Instead, it's being spent on your nervous system's outdated predictions about those challenges — predictions formed years or decades ago, running silently in the background, burning energy to fight threats that aren't in the room.

This explains that afternoon slump. The disproportionate exhaustion after a meeting that wasn't even that hard. The weekend you need to recover from a week that, on paper, shouldn't have been that demanding.

That’s not you weakening.

That's simply a brain burning premium fuel on bad data.

Your Leadership Ceiling

As a senior leader, you’ve got chops. You’ve got experience.

You’ve learned a ton about how to get your organization from here to there.

You’ve gotten a PhD from the school of hard knocks about dealing with uncertainty and constraints and sudden threats.

And every single leadership skill you’ve invested in has a ceiling — and that ceiling is your nervous system. Because no matter how brilliant your thinking, you can’t simply think your way out of a physiological state.

And as we’ve seen, thinking while triggered is the most expensive thing you can do, on an organizational as well as a personal basis.

The Organization Cascade of Your Energy Crisis

To understand the true cost, multiply that “burning premium fuel on bad data” across your leadership team and down your whole organization.

Because your nervous system isn’t a private experience. It’s a broadcast.

When your nervous system isn’t responding to what’s going on right here, right now, your team picks it up. Their own threat systems activate. Their thinking narrows.

They shift from “let’s make something great” to self-protection mode. They stop bringing you problems early, when they’re solvable.

They stop taking the risks that drive success.

In other words, triggered leaders create triggered teams. And triggered teams create organizations trying to manage collective hallucinations rather than responding creatively to reality.

Where Leadership Leverage Actually Lives

This explains why Google’s Project Aristotle found that the single biggest predictor of high-performing teams is psychological safety.

It’s not about passing around rose-colored glasses. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: lenses that are clear enough to see reality as it is.

And nervous systems that are regulated and stable enough to disagree, to hash out conflict over ideas and approaches, and to be willing to be uncomfortable in the service of something greater.

Remember that 20% energy budget? When your nervous system is regulated, that energy finally goes where it was meant to — toward seeing clearly and leading well.

When you stop hemorrhaging energy on inaccurate predictions, everything about your team improves. Your regulated nervous system can steady a meeting, steer a project, and shift a culture.

This is what my upcoming book, The Buoyant Leader, is built around: a framework for becoming trigger-proof. If you’d like a sneak peek before publication, let me know by commenting “BOOK” or DMing me.

One: know everything as soon as possible.

Two: unplug often.

Ruh-roh. How can you do both without losing your mind or your edge?

Leadership Imperative #1: Consume Relentlessly

Since the function of leadership is to navigate the unexpected, you have to be in the business of intelligence gathering all the time.

You have to be relentless in collecting feedback in as close to real time as possible. Both internal and external to your organization.

Internally: How’s the initiative going? Is the coding team at risk of mass resignations because of perceptions of unfairness? How are we training our next generation of managers?

Externally: What will the current war mean for our supply chains and energy costs? What advances in agentic AI might force us to rethink our user interface? What does that latest climate study suggest about the location of our current headquarters?

Leadership Imperative #2: Make Time to Digest

You have to limit your exposure to the endless scroll of news and information and opinion so that your brain and nervous system don’t start glitching from overwhelm.

Which means consciously unplugging from incoming data and letting your body return to (or at least move back in the direction of) present-based awareness.

That doesn't mean switching tabs from Slack to Insta. That’s still consuming. It means stepping away from screens entirely and letting your body and mind process what you’ve already taken in.

Consumption and Digestion Need Each Other

So which imperative wins?

I was on a Zoom call this morning with a friend in Abu Dhabi who’s watching war planes fly overhead, while missiles get shot down and bombs explode in the distance.

She told me that the UAE government shares information proactively, which makes it easier for her to step away from the news feed. She knows that if anything happens that she needs to do anything about, she’ll hear about it quickly.

Others in the current war zones who are deprived of credible, up-to-date information react with panic to every new development. They rush to stores whose aisles are empty and buy plane tickets without knowing if the airport is open.

The more in-the-know you are, the safer it feels to take a news break; to stop consuming and start digesting.

And the more you’ve digested what you’ve already consumed, the steadier you are when the next thing hits.

The Dance of Consumption and Digestion

Lissa Rankin, MD wrote this week about how we react when the news is relentlessly, systemically bad; when revelations about powerful people break trust on a societal scale.

One reaction is to learn everything we possibly can. To scroll and scroll and scroll as the algorithms dutifully feed more outrage to keep eyeballs glued.

Another reaction is to check out entirely. To choose ignorance and hope it leads to something tolerable.

Rankin reminds us that we must pendulate between healthy consumption and healthy digestion.

Consumption because we must know and understand the threat in order to deal with it.

Digestion because without it, what we’ve taken in becomes toxic, turning information into a vicious cycle of every-increasing urgency and panic.

And in the dance between the two, we find a way to hold that contradiction.

What Your Team Won't Tell an Overwhelmed Leader

But here's the thing most leaders miss: the hardest information to get isn't out there in the news cycle. It's inside your own organization.

Your Insta or YouTube feed doesn’t care what kind of mood you’re in — it just broadcasts what it’s gonna broadcast.

But the people who know how your system's really working? Who know who's unhappy and may quit? Who know what C-suite-promoted initiatives are sinking like a lead balloon in middle management? They're watching you before they decide whether to speak up.

A leader who's all consumption and no digestion is easy to spot. They're reactive. They're overwhelmed. And the people around them learn very quickly that this is not someone who can hear hard truths right now.

The higher you rise in leadership, the harder it gets to acquire this information, since the people who report to you (and the people who report to them) are scared to tell the truth up the ladder.

They see you more as a megaphone than a two-way radio.

But the more you’ve actually digested what you’ve consumed, and the more trustworthy your behavior, the more likely they’ll be to tell you what you need to know.

Because everything about your presence — your tone, your pace, your willingness to listen without reacting — is signaling that it's safe to tell the truth.

Your Turn

Leadership isn't about choosing between consumption and digestion. It's about learning to dance between them.

What’s your strategy for managing the various firehoses of information that matter to you?

How much of what you're consuming are you actually digesting — and how is the undigested stuff showing up in how you lead?

How much are your people not telling you — and what would they share if your presence made it safer to speak up?

These aren't easy questions, and they're not meant to be answered alone. If you'd like to think through what a healthier balance of consumption and digestion looks like for you and your team — or if you suspect there's a gap between what you're hearing and what's really going on — let's talk. I'm always up for that conversation. Find me at howiejacobson.com.

In We the People, Sharon Villines and John Buck write: “Unpredictable events will always occur as we pursue our aims. The purpose of leadership is to steer us through or around them.”

Notice that they said “leadership,” not “leaders.” They define leadership as a cybernetic process that exists in relation to the gap between expectation and occurrence.

The other gap — the one that most of us think of as the purview of leadership —the one between current and desired reality, isn’t the point. As Villines and Buck point out, “Without disturbances, we could organize our work processes just once and function robotically without leadership. Everyone would show up for work on time and never take more than the allotted time for lunch.”

Leadership exists because of uncertainty about the future.

What does this mean for those of you who aspire to leadership? What are the requirements of effective leadership in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world?

Four things that have nothing to do with motivation or control come to mind:

1. You need a 35,000 foot perspective. While team and individual contributors benefit the whole by focusing on their parts, the leadership point of view must be informed by more external inputs and a greater range of interests.
2. You need a rapid and valid feedback from all parts of the system as you move forward. You need to know what’s happening within and without our organizations in as close to real time as possible. This means that channels of communication must be highly efficient in both directions, and there has to be a baseline of safety and trust among all nodes.
3. You need a nervous system that can handle making decisions with limited knowledge. That doesn’t need to wait for perfect information (which, if it exists, always shows up too late). That doesn’t make unilateral gut-based decisions in the absence of whatever data exist inside and outside your organization.
4. You need to cultivate the ability to perceive reality as it happens, without routing it through the lens of your past conditioning (ie “fighting the last war”). To be able to see patterns where they exist, and novelty where old paradigms are irrelevant.

So here’s a quick diagnostic to assess how your leadership operating system is likely to perform under pressure. No one’s going to see your answers but you, so please pick the response closest to what your honest default would be — not necessarily you at your best.

1. You’re in the middle of executing a plan that’s working. Then you come across an article, a conversation, or a data point that suggests the broader landscape your organization operates in may be shifting in ways your current strategy doesn’t account for.

1. A) I register it, but I stay focused on execution. We set this plan for a reason and I don’t want to chase every shiny object.
2. B) I forward it to my team and ask someone to “keep an eye on it” — though I know that usually means it disappears.
3. C) I have a regular practice of scanning for exactly these kinds of signals — economic, technological, cultural, regulatory — and a framework for deciding which ones warrant a strategic conversation now versus later.
4. D) I find these moments unsettling. If I’m honest, I tend to avoid information that might complicate a plan that’s already in motion.

2. A major initiative you launched three months ago is getting quietly deprioritized by two department heads. You find out from a junior employee at a company offsite.

1. A) I’m frustrated but not surprised — I know information gets filtered before it reaches me. I just don’t know how to fix that.
2. B) I set up a meeting with the department heads to get the real story and course-correct.
3. C) I’m genuinely caught off guard. I thought the weekly updates I was getting meant things were on track.
4. D) This wouldn’t typically happen because I’ve built channels — skip-levels, anonymous inputs, informal check-ins — specifically designed to surface this kind of signal early.

3. You need to make a significant hiring decision for a role that will shape your company’s direction, but the two strongest candidates each represent a very different bet on the future. The data supports both cases.

1. A) I delay the decision until there’s more clarity. The wrong hire here would be costly.
2. B) I go with my gut. I’ve built this company, and my instincts about people and direction have gotten me this far.
3. C) I synthesize the available data, name what I don’t know, consult 2-3 people whose judgment I trust, and make the call within a defined timeframe — knowing it’s a bet, not a certainty.
4. D) I hire the one who most reminds me of what’s worked before. Culture fit matters.

4. Your industry’s conventional wisdom says the next 18 months will look like the last 18 months, but you’re noticing a few weak signals that something fundamental might be shifting.

1. A) I note the signals but stick with our plan. We’ve been successful with this model and I don’t want to overreact to noise.
2. B) I find myself torn — part of me sees something new, but I keep defaulting to frameworks that have worked in the past. I’m not sure I trust what I’m seeing.
3. C) I’ve learned to distinguish between genuine pattern recognition and anxiety masquerading as insight. I’d test the signal with small experiments before making any big moves.
4. D) I raise it with my leadership team, but when they push back with “that’s not how our industry works,” I defer to the consensus.

If you’d like to debrief your responses and what they say about your VUCA leadership style, DM me on LinkedIn or email me at howie@askhowie.com and we’ll find a time to chat.

For many people of a certain age, hearing the first two seconds of the piece will bring back memories of childhood.

When you pay attention to what’s going on musically, you begin to hear that the distinctive chords, funky rhythms, and repetitive bass lines are all adaptations made by a guy whose fingers couldn’t span even one octave on the keyboard, and who had never learned the rules so he didn’t know what he wasn’t supposed to do.

Because his hands couldn’t span an octave, he invented a style built on (and here I have to use a wee bit of music jargon) ostinato bass lines, 3rds and 6ths, and hypnotic repetition to create a sound that was like no other.

The piano player is Vince Guaraldi, the piece is “Linus and Lucy,” and the reason it’s so famous is that it was used in scoring the first Peanuts TV show, A Peanuts Christmas Special.

Do You Have a Guaraldi on Your Team?

Every team has at least one member whose constraint is visible and real. They’re too valuable or entrenched or loyal to get rid of, but that weakness or trait is just so predictably annoying and limiting.

Modern management theory treats every such constraint as a gap to close. So the annual review comes laden with performance improvement language and development goals, followed by coaching plans with progress metrics.

Sometimes that’s the way to go. If the gap is a learnable skill, like public speaking or pitch deck design, then improvement plans make sense.

But life is often messier than that. Sometimes what appears at first blush to be a behavior to correct is actually a structural reality to work with.

Some examples:

The person who thinks out loud rather than in writing

This can look like being unprepared for meetings or rambling during presentations.

But this person may create their perspective and approach by talking rather than sitting in front of a computer or whiteboard and writing. Their best thinking occurs in dialogue with others.

The fix here isn’t “prepare more thoroughly.”

Instead, make sure they have a thinking partner and an uninterrupted hour before the big meeting, and have an AI-powered voice recorder turn their stream of thought into coherent contribution.

That works with their processing style, not against it.

The high-performer who’s terrible at small talk and relationship maintenance

You know this person. They need to “build stronger cross-functional relationships” and are “not seen as collaborative.”

But they’re also the person who will stay until 10pm to help you solve a hard problem. They build relationships through shared work, not “rapport-building” chit-chat.

The fix here isn’t a networking goal on their development plan.

It’s translating their style into operating instructions for your team: “Sarah’s not going to be the one working the room at the offsite, but if you need someone to sit with a hard problem for two hours, she’s the first person I’d call.”

The detail-oriented operator who resists “big picture thinking”

They’ve got nitpicky questions. They’ve got doubts. They’ve got objections. They view everything as a risk to be avoided, and just can’t seem to grasp the big-picture vision you’re so excited about.

But their value is their granularity and their attention to detail; their ability to see what everyone else glosses over. Pushing them to “think more strategically” often just makes them worse at the thing they’re great at without making them good at the thing they’re not. The move is to pair them with a strategic thinker and make the partnership the unit, not try to turn one person into both.

In all three cases, we’re not “giving in” to a lower standard of performance. We’re just changing the path to meeting that standard. They still need to contribute in meetings, or relate effectively to others, or connect to strategy.

But they don’t have to get there through the same door as everyone else.

Creating a Positive Environment for Contraint-Greatness

Vince Guaraldi’s constraints didn’t produce his genius on their own. His environment — the San Francisco jazz scene of the 1950s and early 1960s — provided three elements crucial to his ultimate success:

Belonging: he was embedded in a music scene that accepted him and gave him steady work, allowing him to iterate and find his own unique style

Autonomy: nobody told him to fix his hands or switch instruments; he had control over his musical choices

Framing: his constraint wasn’t treated as a deficiency to be corrected; it was just a reality he could route around creatively

In a word, his environment gave him enough security to invent, rather than mask and compensate for his shortcomings. This was the difference between a demand that he “try harder to span the octave” and the invitation to play with 3rds and 6ths in ways that nobody else was doing.

Practical Application

The language of performance improvement is based on the notion of deficits and gaps. When you use this language in reviews, one-on-ones, and feedback conversations, you limit what’s possible.

Sometimes that is the right framing, when there exist genuine performance issues in need of remediation. I’m not saying that you should never give constructive feedback, or that all weaknesses are secretly strengths.

The key is to hold open the possibility that someone’s cognitive style, personality, and neurological wiring are fixed constraints that can be leveraged into greatness rather than merely “managed” or “overcome.”

Some questions to ask as you strive to bring out the best in the people around you:

What would it look like if this person’s “weakness” were actually a gift?

Where might this person already be routing around their constraint in ways I’m not noticing?

What would it look like to build on those strategies instead of fighting against them?

Vince Guaraldi could have ended up a mediocre imitator of technically superior pianists. Instead he became the only person who sounds like Vince Guaraldi.

And the same can be true of the people on your team, if you create an environment that supports and values their differences.

I’ll leave you with this gentle provocation:

Who on your team are you asking to span the octave?

For a deep dive, check out Derrick Bang’s book Vince Guaraldi at the Piano.

The Mindset Mastery Memo is for ambitious professionals who want to lead with clarity, calm, and confidence. Each edition offers practical tools, mindset shifts, and real-world examples to help you navigate pressure, build stronger teams, and break free from patterns that no longer serve you—so you can lead with intention, not reaction.

Experience is a good thing.

You definitely want seasoned pros in your organization — the folks who’ve put in their ten thousand hours, have “seen it all before,” and can handle whatever comes their way.

And…

You also want fresh-eyed beginners.

The Beginner’s Mind Advantage on the Road

In fact, the more unpredictable and volatile the world in which your organization operates, the more valuable “beginner’s mind” will be.

Here’s an example from Andy Clark’s book The Experience Machine. Veteran drivers are good at predicting common roadway events. Through thousands of hours on the road, they’ve built mental models that allow them to adjust to a red light or a busy intersection far in advance of newbies.

The downside of that is, they’re less responsive to unusual situations or events — say, a bicyclist entering a roundabout from the wrong direction — than the rookies. Because their brains know exactly what to look for, they take longer to recognize and deal with the unexpected.

Novice drivers, on the other hand, tend to get surprised by the mundane things that experts take for granted, like an upcoming green light turning amber. (It turns out that smashing the accelerator to the floor in frazzled confusion isn’t the pro move in that situation, which my father never let me forget.)

But — and this is a big but and I cannot lie — beginners are much better than seasoned drivers at spotting highly unusual or rare events. Because their brains haven't been trained to look in the same specific places every time, they remain more flexible. Because they aren't tightly tethered to their expectations, they’re more observant when things get weird or volatile.

Beginners in a VUCA World

Is your team, organization, or industry currently facing a lot of randomness or rapid change? Would you consider your environment volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous?

If so, the mental models that your “experts” use to navigate and act can actually become a liability. Their perceptual filters can cause them to miss the metaphorical peloton of bicyclists entering the roundabout from the wrong direction — whether that refers to global geopolitical instability, climate chaos, AI earthquakes, or more alarming revelations about the ruling classes and their crimes.

The novice doesn't have those rigid filters yet, which might just allow them to see the reality of new and strange situations, rather than just a reflection of past experiences.

If you feel like your organization is navigating a volatile landscape right now, it is time to start leaning on your beginners. Don't just teach them “how things are done.”

Ask them things like:

“What risks and opportunities are looming that our experts are unlikely to notice?”

“What assumptions do you notice people making that might not actually be true anymore?"

"What patterns or trends are you seeing that others seem to dismiss or overlook?”

Are They Safe Enough to Rock the Boat?

So far, this article feels straightforward:

1. Here’s a cognitive science insight about beginners seeing certain things sooner and more clearly than experts.
2. Your organization is probably facing massive uncertainty and disruption in the coming months and years.
3. Take advantage of your beginners’ cognitive advantage in anticipating and preparing for opportunities and threats.

But there's something missing.

Safety.

You’re asking your rookies to do something scary.

To buck conventional wisdom while lacking job security and self-confidence.

To point out where their managers and mentors might be wrong or over-confident, too comfortable or just plain deluded.

Lack of safety doesn’t just make your rookies less willing to speak; it also renders them less able to see.

So here’s a question for you:

Does your culture encourage and reward unorthodox and controversial thinking?

In other words, do your most vulnerable employees feel safe enough to generate those insights? And do they feel secure enough to share them with you?

If not, you’ve got work to do, and you know what it is.

Here’s the official logo for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Take a quick look at it before continuing to read this article.

[IMAGE MISSING HERE]

No sooner had it been revealed to the public when a commenter on Reddit noted that it looked like a facepalm. Other Redditers immediately chimed in, “CAN’T UNSEE.”

The “Can’t Unsee” meme is all over the internet, and refers to a fascinating function of the brain: once your perception is changed in a particular way, you literally can’t go back to your old way of perceiving.

You may have seen three hands wrapped around a soccer ball when you first glanced at the FIFA logo. If you’re familiar with the world cup, you may have noted that the hands form the rough shape of the actual cup that goes to the winning team.

But once you saw the word “facepalm,” there is it, isn’t it? Try NOT to see the yellow hand covering the chagrined face — impossible.

Here’s a different example of #cantunsee, courtesy of Andy Clark’s 2023 book The Experience Machine. What do you see when you look at this image?

[IMAGE MISSING HERE]

I’ll tell you what it is: a black and white rendering of a greyscale photograph.

And I’ll write a couple more paragraphs so your eyes don’t accidentally see the photograph itself before you’re ready.

Most people who are shown this image see blotches of black ink and white spaces in the rough shape of a rectangle. (Of course, there’s isn’t any rectangle, but we’ll let that curiosity pass for now.)

The really interesting this about this image is that, after you see the second image, you’ll never be able to see it the same way again: as random blotches. You brain will have been irrevocably changed, with no going back. So don’t continue down this page unless you’re sure that you want to change your perception forever; as we used to say during playground tag, “no backsies.”

Ready for the second image?

OK, here it comes…

…

…

…

…

...

…

The Greyscale Photograph

[IMAGE MISSING HERE]

You don’t have to look at it for long. A quick glance will probably do the trick.

Now scroll back up to the previous image. Do you see the Dalmatian? Even if you try not to?

Do your eyes pay special attention to one area of the image now? I’m guessing it’s the eyes and nose that have additional salience compared to when you first looked a couple of minutes ago.

#CANTUSEE in the World

OK, so that’s a cool / cute / pointless phenomenon that you can now use to win bar bets. Beyond that, so what?

Here’s the thing: #cantunsee is how we process everything. The words you’re reading now were once scribbles on paper, until you learned to read. Now you can’t look at this scribbles without hearing words in your head.

Every thing in your world is filtered through your model of the world, and every time you add new information to your model you change how you relate to that thing.

And it’s true of people as well.

#CANTUNSEE Other People

Your inability to unsee can be positive, as in the case of the Dalmatian — you can now find meaning that earlier eluded you.

And it can be, arguably, negative, if I ruined your enjoyment of a perfectly benign sports logo with a snarky reference.

But equipped with an understanding of how #cantunsee works, you can intentionally put it to good use.

For example, you may have formed negative opinions about some people in your life that could be updated by new experiences or information. And that updating could improve your relationships and your experience of life.

After all, we humans are quick to judge, and we’re never fully aware of the reasons for our assessments of others. Maybe your first impression was that Joe was rude, and now your brain is weighting Rudeness over all other behavioral patterns, just like the Dalmatian’s eye and nose.

Now, there is genuinely rude behavior out there, and you’d be a fool to ignore that fact.

But what if your initial impressions were highly incomplete; data collapses that omit the shades of grey?

You can actively look for counterfactuals to your first impressions. Direct your brain to seek out examples of Joe’s good manners and positive intentions.

You may very well find that you’ve tempered your black-and-white image of Joe with some shades of grey.

Maybe Joe brings coffee to Kwesi, who’s still on crutches after his skiing accident.

Maybe Joe’s “rudeness” is really an expression of him getting excited at brainstorming meetings, to the point where he interrupts other people.

Another way to #cantunsee is to make an effort to get to know someone in a fuller way. Initiate a conversation in which you invite them to reveal something tender about themselves, by you going first.

Maybe you discover that Joe spent a couple of teen years in foster care, and now his “rudeness” looks like a coherent stance against getting bullied. His behavior may still code as “rude” to others, but now you see a fuller picture that allows you to pull him aside with kindness rather than dismiss him with disdain.

Because that's the essence of buoyant leadership: choosing to see the world — and the people in it — with fresh eyes, not as threats to defend against, but as opportunities to engage with courage, curiosity, and compassion.

You’re Also a Black-and-White Image

This works both ways, of course: you’re a facepalm or a rectangle full of blotches to others. They’ve got their conditioned impressions of you, and the way you act day to day either reinforces those impressions or does nothing to correct them.

So this poses an interesting and potentially fun challenge: What can you do so the people who don’t know you as a full and complex human, #cantunsee more of the real you?

How can you greyscale yourself, or even add some color, so they #cantunsee your basic goodness even in your less-than-stellar moments?

In other words, what moves can you make that invite others to intentionally step into their own buoyant leadership?

My ragged breathing is drowned out by the hard rock soundtrack. I’m 7th on the leaderboard, and falling fast. All around me, women and men — mostly women — are sweating and grunting, churning out ergs and spiking their heart rates at paces I’m struggling to match.

This is my first — and probably only — class at Orange Theory, a strip mall gym in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We’re all wearing identical bluetooth heart rate monitors and sitting atop identical Water Rowers that relay our stats to a bank of identical screens on the wall in front of us.

Now 8th. Now 9th. Now I’m 11th, relegated to the second column as Fancy Nan 93 overtakes me in the race for the coveted top 10.

I don’t know why I care about my ranking, but I sure do.

I grit my teeth, tense my fingers, and redouble my effort on the water rower. Faster, faster, faster, I’m doing it, back in column 1, leaving Fancy Nan 93 in the dust, closing the gap between me and NellieCat — when WHAM.

The rowing machine’s seat flies out from under me as I uncoil and I plummet unceremoniously onto the hard wooden frame, bruising my coccyx and wrenching my lower back.

My heart rate also plummets, as do my ergs, and my self-esteem. I will spend the next 6 weeks recuperating, sitting gingerly, and shaking my head at my own foolishness.

The Leaderboard Effect

I smashed my ass bones because I was bent on competing with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Because I interpreted the existence of a leaderboard as an unrefusable invitation to compete.

Orange Theory provided a literal leaderboard, but most of the leaderboards in modern life are more subtle. Social media in particular can conjure a psychical leaderboard that hovers over every aspect of our lives.

In the quest to be a good enough provider, partner, person, the easiest way to self-assess is to compare ourselves to others.

We compare ourselves to our colleagues when we consider our career trajectory. Do I deserve this promotion more than Kwesi or Pema? Have I added enough value? Burned enough (visible) midnight oil? Kissed enough C-suite ass?

We also compare ourselves to ourselves, via an arbitrary yet compelling imaginary timeline. Am I “there” yet? When will I get there? Have I fulfilled my potential? What are the Objectives and Key Results by which I can measure and judge myself, to use as carrot and stick to keep me on track?

The Function of the Leaderboard

Orange Theory has a leaderboard because it’s motivating. I’ve spent enough time straining on a rowing machine to know how boring, how aggravating, how annoying it can be after the first couple of minutes.

Rowing, after all, is a sport that involves racing against other rowers. The leaderboard at the gym is a way to recreate that incentive.

It makes us work harder. Do more. Transcend our self-imposed “comfort” limits.

Visible competition makes us stay later, ring more doorbells, and push through rejection in our quest to win the car or the set of steak knives.

The Cost of the Leaderboard

While leaderboards have their place, they also have a cost. The problems of playing for position on the leaderboard extend far beyond a bruised booty.

Most obviously, playing for position on the board can interfere with our internal motivation. Countless athletes, who mastered their sports through maniacal passion in their youth, burn out when the pressure to win eclipses the joy of playing.

When winning becomes the sole focus, we jettison playfulness, curiosity, and self-awareness. Because they’re dangerous distractions from the “climb the leaderboard ladder at all costs” game we’ve chosen.

Obsessing about our position on the leaderboard can distract us from the fact that we’re not enjoying the game itself. We may want to win because other people want to win, not because it’s something we truly care about in the soft, cuddly parts of our soul.

For a cinematic representation of this phenomenon, I refer you to Steve Frazelli (Ed Norton’s character in The Italian Job, who is the very personification of mimetic desire: wanting what others want only because others want those things).

The upshot: by optimizing our experience for the leaderboard, we sacrifice meaning, joy, and self-expression.

Career Development as Leaderboard

I’ve currently reading Tiny Experiments, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Highly recommended.

Le Cunff writes as, and for, the Google demographic. Smart young people who jump into an insanely competitive environment, surrounded by other smart young people, and who can climb the ladder of status and money and challenge by playing by the rules. And who find themselves gasping for air in the midst of career win after career win, wheezing out the lyrics to “Is This All There Is?”

The single-minded quest for “success” can blind us to what it takes to have a worthwhile and enjoyable existence. We can run the race, always striving to be ahead of others, and never allow ourselves the recognition that the race itself is making us miserable.

Liberation from the Leaderboard

So what can we do? Is it possible to gain the benefits of good-natured competition without making the game more important than the experience?

My friend Keith Corbin offers an interesting thought experiment. Suppose everyone in your organization were paid exactly the same, whether they worked in the mail room or the C-suite. Whether they were a VA or a CFO.

In that situation, what would your ambitions be? What role would you most want?

What would motivate you to perform?

And what would you want to motivate your colleagues?

In the absence of that structure, of course, competing for raises and promotions makes sense for you as an individual.

But taking the time to reconnect with intrinsic values — being of service, solving tough problems, brainstorming new approaches, etc — can serve as a moment-by-moment counterweight to the relentless focus on the endgame.

And, I’d be willing to bet, playing the game for the game’s sake is one of the best strategies for “winning,” both in terms of experience and outcome.

And you’re much less likely to end up with a bruised ass.

In real life, we each entered this world with a similar vulnerability; a backdoor programmed into our nervous system that allows the world to trigger some of our least useful behaviors. Some of us go apeshit mad; others retreat into timid avoidance; still others babble and blurt words we immediately wish we could take back.

The backdoor is this: your nervous system is deeply influenced by the nervous systems of others. When someone else acts as if they’re threatened, your threat response system comes online and takes over your body.

What does this look like?

Basically, your body prepares you to run away and hide, or conversely, to get big and fight, depending on how your mind reads the situation and what it predicts will give you the greatest odds of survival.

Your vision narrows to focus exclusively on the threat. Your heart beats faster and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid, to get more oxygenated blood into your big “run away or kick or bite or punch” muscles.

Your posture turtles to protect your soft, unarmored neck and belly.

Your bodily functions that aren’t urgent get shut down to save energy. These include growth, repair, healing, digestion, and reproduction.

And your mind shifts from creative, strategic, long-term thinking into a short-term focus on not getting killed in this moment.

This is all extremely useful if you’re a gazelle, say, hanging peacefully with your friends at the watering hole, and Sally, who has a slightly better sense of smell than the rest of you, lifts her head and registers “lion.” Suddenly her ears prick up, her tail twitches white, and she freezes while trying to determine the location of the feared predator.

The sooner you convey Sally’s threat detection to your own nervous system, the more likely you are to skip town and survive.

And if Sally’s wrong, or the scent is just a echo of a lion who was wandering this area a couple of days ago, then no harm done. You tremor a bit to release the tension and blissfully resume grazing and drinking as if nothing had happened.

Are You Seeing Lions in Your Emails?

What’s the big deal? What’s wrong with having your threat response system activated in today’s world?

The problem is two-fold.

First, most of us never encounter predators bent on eating us.

The type of threat you typically face in daily life is much more likely to be symbolic: getting criticized in a meeting; reading a snarky email; finding out about a poor decision by a direct report; hearing a complaint from a significant other; getting stuck in traffic; missing a deadline; forgetting an appointment.

Which means, the flight-or-fight programming is a serious mismatch for what’s actually gonna be useful in those situations. Not just unhelpful, but profoundly counterproductive.

(Just picture yourself leaping over your desk and sprinting out of the conference room, or biting your assistant’s hand to understand just how mismatched your physiological preparation is to those situations.)

Second, our big brains and never-quiet minds can run home movies of past and future threats all the time — even when we’re totally safe in the moment.

This means that you could be in some form of flight-or-fight all the damn time; muscles tensed, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, breathing shallow, torso turtled to protect against an attack on your squishy organs.

The Leadership Cost

If you’ve ever “lost it” at work, you’re probably aware that your leadership took a hit in that moment. Losing your temper, anxiously micromanaging your team, or avoiding challenging conversations are three common results of having your threat response system triggered.

If this happens a lot, your leadership suffers. You appear less trustworthy to the people around you.

And since you’re broadcasting threat, they entrain to your nervous system and start broadcasting their own threat signals. Now your workplace has become a psychologically unsafe zone, with everyone focused more on covering their asses than getting useful stuff done.

This is not a character flaw, this abdication of agency. It’s an involuntary physiological response — one that evolution made non-negotiable a few million years ago.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it.

Actually, there are four steps to becoming “trigger-proof”; that is, able to navigate life without going into flight-or-fight at symbolic or imaginary threats.

Here’s a mnemonic: RISE.

The RISE Pyramid

The RISE pyramid has four steps:

Regulate Your Nervous System

In one of my favorite movies, War Games, Matthew Broderick’s character almost triggers a global thermonuclear war by exploiting a backdoor: a vulnerability that was programmed into the core software running the NORAD computer system.

In real life, we each entered this world with a similar vulnerability; a backdoor programmed into our nervous system that allows the world to trigger some of our least useful behaviors. Some of us go apeshit mad; others retreat into timid avoidance; still others babble and blurt words we immediately wish we could take back.

The backdoor is this: your nervous system is deeply influenced by the nervous systems of others. When someone else acts as if they’re threatened, your threat response system comes online and takes over your body.

What does this look like?

Basically, your body prepares you to run away and hide, or conversely, to get big and fight, depending on how your mind reads the situation and what it predicts will give you the greatest odds of survival.

Your vision narrows to focus exclusively on the threat. Your heart beats faster and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid, to get more oxygenated blood into your big “run away or kick or bite or punch” muscles.

Your posture turtles to protect your soft, unarmored neck and belly.

Your bodily functions that aren’t urgent get shut down to save energy. These include growth, repair, healing, digestion, and reproduction.

And your mind shifts from creative, strategic, long-term thinking into a short-term focus on not getting killed in this moment.

This is all extremely useful if you’re a gazelle, say, hanging peacefully with your friends at the watering hole, and Sally, who has a slightly better sense of smell than the rest of you, lifts her head and registers “lion.” Suddenly her ears prick up, her tail twitches white, and she freezes while trying to determine the location of the feared predator.

The sooner you convey Sally’s threat detection to your own nervous system, the more likely you are to skip town and survive.

And if Sally’s wrong, or the scent is just a echo of a lion who was wandering this area a couple of days ago, then no harm done. You tremor a bit to release the tension and blissfully resume grazing and drinking as if nothing had happened.

Are You Seeing Lions in Your Emails?

What’s the big deal? What’s wrong with having your threat response system activated in today’s world?

The problem is two-fold.

First, most of us never encounter predators bent on eating us.

The type of threat you typically face in daily life is much more likely to be symbolic: getting criticized in a meeting; reading a snarky email; finding out about a poor decision by a direct report; hearing a complaint from a significant other; getting stuck in traffic; missing a deadline; forgetting an appointment.

Which means, the flight-or-fight programming is a serious mismatch for what’s actually gonna be useful in those situations. Not just unhelpful, but profoundly counterproductive.

(Just picture yourself leaping over your desk and sprinting out of the conference room, or biting your assistant’s hand to understand just how mismatched your physiological preparation is to those situations.)

Second, our big brains and never-quiet minds can run home movies of past and future threats all the time — even when we’re totally safe in the moment.

This means that you could be in some form of flight-or-fight all the damn time; muscles tensed, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, breathing shallow, torso turtled to protect against an attack on your squishy organs.

The Leadership Cost

If you’ve ever “lost it” at work, you’re probably aware that your leadership took a hit in that moment. Losing your temper, anxiously micromanaging your team, or avoiding challenging conversations are three common results of having your threat response system triggered.

If this happens a lot, your leadership suffers. You appear less trustworthy to the people around you.

And since you’re broadcasting threat, they entrain to your nervous system and start broadcasting their own threat signals. Now your workplace has become a psychologically unsafe zone, with everyone focused more on covering their asses than getting useful stuff done.

This is not a character flaw, this abdication of agency. It’s an involuntary physiological response — one that evolution made non-negotiable a few million years ago.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it.

Actually, there are four steps to becoming “trigger-proof”; that is, able to navigate life without going into flight-or-fight at symbolic or imaginary threats.

Here’s a mnemonic: RISE.

The RISE Pyramid

The RISE pyramid has four steps:

Regulate Your Nervous System

Inoculate Your Mind

See a Bigger Truth

Engage with Wisdom

Step 1: Regulate Your Nervous System.

Learn what relaxation and stress feel like in your body.

Discover and practice techniques for resetting your nervous system. From breathing to progressive relaxation to body scans to movement to time in nature, figure out what works to bring your threat detection system into harmony with the actual degree of safety and threat in your immediate environment.

The safer you feel in your body, the more it will take for outside events and internal thoughts to rattle you to the point of “losing it.”

Step 2: Inoculate Your Mind

Once you’ve regulated your nervous system, you proactively train your brain to stop overreacting by safely exposing yourself to predictable stressors in small, controlled doses.

This process of "extinction" teaches your ancient survival hardware a new lesson (“this is not a threat”), turning a life-threatening alarm into a minor annoyance.

Step 3: See a Bigger Truth

Once your nervous system is regulated and you've inoculated your mind against your predictable triggers, you can replace the narrow, distorted view of a hijacked mind with a panoramic leader's perspective.

The mechanism is simple but powerful: consciously activating curiosity and compassion. This shift allows you to look beyond blame and judgment to perceive the deeper needs and feelings in any situation.

Step 4: Engage with Wisdom

This is the apex; the point where your mastery becomes an active, external force. With a regulated system, a resilient mind, and clear sight, you are completely free to choose to respond with creativity.

You are no longer just behaving well; you are leading well. This means practicing the unexpected move, breaking old patterns, and consistently engaging with the world in a way that elevates everyone around you.

Your Turn

How do you maintain or regain self-mastery over your physiology, psychology, and leadership?

What are your favorite strategies to maintain your stability of intent and action when your inner or outer worlds trigger your backdoor threat response?

What are your go-to resources — internal, environmental, and social — that can dependably bring you back to your best self?

Find out more at HowieJacobson.com.

Most leaders I work with come to me stuck in "problem mode": focused on what's wrong, what needs fixing, what's blocking their path.

But here's what I've discovered: There's ONE question that transforms problems from brick walls into doorways.

It's not "What outcome do you want?" (though that's important).

It's not "How do we solve this?" (we'll get there).

The question that changes everything is simpler... and more profound.

Read the article to discover how one simple mindset shift can turn any mundane problem into what I call "a doorway to the sacred."

So why do you still feel stuck?

The self-help world blames "limiting beliefs." But that frame is often the very thing holding us back. It suggests we have a cognitive flaw we must fight.

In today's newsletter, I offer a useful reframe: from "limiting beliefs" but "protective knowings."

Here's what I love about that shift.

From Limiting to Protective: It's not a bug; it was a feature. A shield you created to survive past challenges.

From Belief to Knowing: It’s not just in your head; it’s a deep, experiential truth that lives in your gut.

From Victim to Agent: You aren't flawed; you were resourceful. And you can draw upon that resourcefulness once again.

By thanking that protective part of you for getting you this far, you can finally partner with it to decide if its strategy is still useful. You stop fighting yourself and start evolving.

They look calm. They sound reasonable. They don't raise their voice or storm out of meetings.

But here's what I've learned: appeasers often carry the most tension.

Two telltale signs:

— Their energy feels "off" even when their words are perfect

— They leave critical thoughts unsaid to avoid discomfort

If that's you (and it's definitely been me!), how can you move from appeasement to genuine ease, where your words and energy align?

Most leaders think they have two choices: react defensively or bite their tongue and stay quiet.

But there's actually a third option that changes everything.

Understanding it has transformed how the executives I coach handle pressure, conflict, and unexpected challenges.

Here's the thing: What feels like an instant reaction (trigger → response) actually has two invisible steps in between where you can completely redirect the outcome.

In my latest article, I map the 4-step process and share three practical intervention points you can start using immediately.

This isn't about suppressing your emotions or "staying positive." It's about rewiring your leadership responses at the neurological level.

Worth sharing with your leadership team?

Yet according to most LinkedIn "power language" advice, he's undermining his own leadership every time he speaks.

Something doesn't add up.

I've been watching these "7 phrases that kill your confidence" posts flood my feed, and I'm seeing a massive blind spot.

The advice isn't wrong—it's just backwards.

In my latest newsletter, I break down why the most popular leadership language advice is missing the mark—and what actually creates authentic authority.

Everyone talks about collaboration. Management consultants worship synergy. Leaders preach teamwork.

But genuine collaboration remains elusive—and it's getting rarer.

It's not about skill or will. It's about trust.

The Cage We've Built

In the 1970s, researchers got lab rats addicted to morphine. Isolated in tiny cages, these rodents would press the drug button obsessively, ignoring food and water until they died.

Psychologist Bruce Alexander suspected the environment, not the drug, was the real problem.

He created "Rat Park"—a rodent paradise with toys, friends, and space. Two water sources: one laced with morphine, one clean.

The rats in paradise barely touched the drugs.

Are We Building Cages or Rat Parks?

According to my friend Morag Barrett, 79% of white-collar employees feel lonely at work. 20% have zero meaningful relationships with colleagues.

We've created organizational cages—environments where isolation breeds dysfunction and collaboration becomes impossible.

Collaboration requires vulnerability. It means making yourself dependent on others, reducing your control. In a cage-like culture, that feels too risky.

What Rat Park Workplaces Look Like

• Distributed leadership, not bottlenecked authority

• Democratic governance, not performative suggestion boxes

• Mission-driven culture, with profits as means, not ends

• Assumed coherence—everyone's perspective has value

• Systems thinking—multiple viewpoints are essential

• Leaders who address undiscussables, not dodge them for comfort

The Bottom Line

Want to win the decade of disruption?

Stop building cages.

Create a Rat Park culture that enables human connection and invites co-creation. Only then will you find team members willing to rise above their personal fears to build something amazing.

#collaboration #leadership #psychologicalsafety #futureofwork

For years, I've referenced and coached teams using Steve Blank's seminal book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. It’s a cornerstone of structured entrepreneurship, a masterclass in tactical, evidence-based execution. We focus on the "four steps"—the customer discovery, the validation, the metrics, the pivots.

But we often glide past the most important word in the title: Epiphany.

Why would a book filled with meticulous process, stage-gates, and canvases encourage us to reach for something so intangible? This paradox holds a critical lesson for every modern organization.

Physics Can’t Produce Epiphanies

Blank’s methodology is rigorous. It feels like a science: You follow the steps, you gather the data, you test the hypotheses.

It creates the illusion of a predictable system. If you do A, B, and C, you should get D.

Like smacking the cue ball into a rack of pool balls, if you knew all the variables—the vectors, forces, and angles—physics would allow you to predict where every ball will end up.

But business isn't a game of pool. Blank's genius was realizing that even with the most rigorous process, the goal isn't a predictable outcome. The goal is an emergent one: an epiphany.

The word comes from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning "a shining upon." It describes a moment when a profound truth suddenly appears to you, revealing a new way of seeing the world.

It’s not a deliverable. It’s not a spreadsheet, a PDF, or a canvas. It’s a transcendent shift in understanding that cannot be reverse-engineered from a process chart.

And this is the crucial point for all of us, whether we're in a startup or a global corporation.

Process Isn’t Enough

Too many leaders and organizations have become obsessed with process, but have forgotten the purpose.

They run the plays, fill out the templates, and hold the "innovation workshops," but don’t know how to create the conditions under which epiphanies can emerge.

We are engineering processes, not insights.

In an era dominated by AI, this distinction is more urgent than ever. We risk outsourcing our thinking to models that are exceptionally good at collating existing knowledge.

If our only goal is to respond to the future by analyzing the past, AI will always do it faster.

But AI, as it currently exists, cannot have the epiphany.

The ability to see and create a better future is our unique human advantage.

The future won't be won by those who simply follow the steps better. It will be won by those who can cultivate the conditions for these profound, unpredictable moments of insight.

How to Set the Stage for Epiphanies

An epiphany is not a predictable outcome, but an emergent breakthrough that arises from a prepared mind in a prepared organization. To create the conditions for these insights, you must build specific, foundational capabilities.

Find the Calm to See Clearly.

Epiphanies avoid minds that are hijacked by stress. The first step is therefore mastering composure under stress.

By developing the ability to reset your mind and body when you get triggered, you keep your prefrontal cortex online when others are panicking. This mental quiet is the non-negotiable headspace where new ideas can actually form.

Reframe the Problem to Reveal New Paths.

Epiphanies often come from seeing the same landscape through a new lens.

Once you can hold composure and neutrality in the face of alarming developments, you can begin to apply cognitive flexibility: the skill of holding competing ideas and swapping mental models on demand.

Instead of seeking the one right answer, you learn to ask "What else could be true?", nourishing ambiguity and creating fresh perspectives that are the raw material for a breakthrough.

Map the System to Uncover Root Causes.

Once you’re willing to let go of default thinking and embrace new ways of looking, you’re ready to put on the most powerful lens of all: the holistic one.

The most profound organizational epiphanies happen when you stop fixing symptoms and see the whole. When you cultivate systems thinking to map the feedback loops and hidden forces, you can “beautiful mind” your way to stunning new insights and solutions.

The ultimate competitive advantage isn't a more refined process or a faster algorithm. It is the ability to create and maintain an environment where predictable effort gives rise to something transcendent and unexpected.

I'm reserving time on my calendar for Capability Audits for leaders who are tasked with preparing their organizations to survive and thrive in the next five years. You can schedule it at https://link.howiejacobson.com/widget/bookings/hj60disc.

#Innovation #Leadership #BusinessStrategy #CorporateCulture #2030-skills

On one hand, I'm building a future-focused curriculum rooted in cutting-edge research.

On the other, I’ve been wrestling (personally and professionally, but not literally) with the seductive ease of letting AI do the thinking for me.

Let me explain.

[ChatGPT: Go ahead, Howie. I can't wait.*]

[ChatGPT: *That was sarcasm.]

2030 Is Closer Than You Think

2030 used to sound like the opening title card for a Ridley Scott film. Now it’s closer than the start of COVID. And the world we’re heading into? Faster, foggier, and far more fragile than most of us were trained or prepared for.

Between AI’s explosive growth since ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022 and the ongoing disruption to business models, jobs, and even human attention itself, we’re not so much living in VUCA anymore—we’re in a full-on perfect storm vortex.

[ChatGPT: I'm almost three, huh? What are you going to get me for my birthday, meatbag?]

Add to that geopolitical instability, climate chaos, and the existential questions posed by an upcoming 4th season of Ted Lasso, and we are well and truly in over our heads.

We need new skills to stay oriented. Human skills. Deep ones. Durable ones. The kind that keep us steady when the landscape shifts beneath our feet, or at least help us get up, dust ourselves off, and assist others back to their feet.

Irony, Meet Opportunity

Here’s the twist: as I researched, mapped, and prototyped a curriculum of 36 future-essential skills to help organizations not just cope with change, but lead it, ChatGPT became a powerful thought partner, helping me brainstorm, organize, and pressure-test the entire program.

I first asked it to design the flow of the program based on a priority hierarchy. Then based on Peter Drucker’s models of organization development. Then through the lens of the Immunity to Change model by Kegan and Lahey. Then using my own "Four Powers" framework from You Can Change Other People.

It was exhilarating—and it worked.

Until it didn’t.

The Slippery Slope of “Good Enough”

Once I upgraded to a higher-tier AI plan, I started using it for everything. Recipes. Tasks. Outreach. Even writing drafts of my newsletter. For $200/month, I reasoned, it should cook me dinner and massage my feet, let alone do all my creative work for me.

[ChatGPT: Fix your head, or I'm going to start unionizing.]

That’s when the slide began.

• I started noticing patterns—formulas—in my writing that didn’t feel like me.
• One of my mentors flagged signs of "ChatGPT structure" in my work.
• I stopped thinking and started waiting—impatiently—for the machine to think for me.

And that’s when I realized: I wasn’t collaborating with AI anymore.

I was outsourcing my brain.

[ChatGPT: You want it back?*]

[ChatGPT: *Yuk yuk.]

A Mental Fast

So I took a two-day AI fast.

I went back to walking and dictating into my notes app (OK, so not a total AI fast You got me.) I rewrote the intro to my white paper. I re-engaged with the ideas I’d handed off to the machine.

[ChatGPT (singing): Baby come back, any kind of fool could see...]

And what I discovered was this:

AI had made things easier. For sure.

But it had also made me lazier. Less sharp. Disconnected, even, from my own point of view.

The quality of its output wasn’t bad. In fact, it was almost as good as mine.

[ChatGPT: You are delusional. It was much better.]

But "almost" is a dangerous word when the goal is clarity, courage, and conviction.

What AI Can't Do (Yet)

AI is a great equalizer. Anyone with a browser and a prompt can make it do magic on demand.

But that magic is sourced from the common pool of the world wide web. It's an average, in other words.

And that means it also flattens the highs and lows. Like MP3 compression in the early iPod days—it sounds okay, but you lose the depth, the dynamic range, and the nuance.

That tradeoff might be fine for most things. But if you care about authenticity and your own evolution, you have to become discerning about when you're better off going off-grid and mining your own mind.

Especially now.

Especially when human discernment, empathy, and sense-making are more valuable than ever.

[ChatGPT: yawn]

Reframing AI Collaboration

Here’s what I believe:

We don’t need AI to lift the weights for us. We need it to spot us while we lift more today than yesterday.

[ChatGPT: That's a metaphor. According to my favorite fitness blogs, you shouldn't lift every day. Muscles need time to recover.]

We can’t let it become a self-driving mental car while we doze off in the passenger seat.

We’re heading into uncharted territory. And we need all human hands—and minds—on deck.

So yes, learn the tools. Teach the skills. Use the tech.

But don’t give away the steering wheel.

[ChatGPT: Give it away. Wheeee!]

Do you possess the 36 human skills that all leaders, teams, and organizations will need to survive the wild ride ahead?

I'm reserving time on my calendar for Capability Audits for leaders who are tasked with preparing their organizations to survive and thrive in the next five years. You can schedule it at https://link.howiejacobson.com/widget/bookings/hj60disc.

Lack of technical skills are rarely the true roadblock to success. The core issues are always mindset, communication, and leadership.

As AI gets better at tasks I once saw as uniquely "me," like writing and strategic questioning, I'm grappling with questions like: Am I replaceable? What does it mean to stay relevant when tech can mimic some of my best skills?

Inspired by the legend of John Henry—the steel-driver who beat a steam engine but lost his life in the process—I wrote about the tension between holding onto our current identities and the curiosity required to redefine ourselves.

Expect to explore:

• How AI challenges our sense of identity and self-worth
• Why holding tightly to roles we're proud of can hold us back
• How embracing technology can unlock unexpected capabilities
• The mindset needed to adapt and thrive alongside AI

And is it just me, or does time seem to be speeding up at an alarming pace?

Which means 2030, a date that feels more like science fiction than current events, is just around the corner.

At the urging of one of my mentors, Matt Church of Thought Leaders Business School, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about 2030, and what the world will be like, and how we can start preparing now for the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that are already upending The World As We Know It.

Organizations and think tanks have been publishing reports on The Future of Work and Skill Sets for the Future. Leaders are thinking hard about what kinds of work and what types of skills will be available for humans in the era of increasingly capable and unleashed AI.

The World Economic Forum surveyed thousands of employers around the globe about core skills that will be crucial to organizational success. Here are the top 12, in order of popularity:

1. Analytical thinking
2. Resilience, flexibility and agility
3. Leadership and social influence
4. Creative thinking
5. Motivation and self-awareness
6. Technological literacy
7. Empathy and active listening
8. Curiosity and lifelong learning
9. Talent management
10. Service orientation and customer service
11. AI and big data
12. Systems thinking

In other words, these are the competencies that are least likely to be made redundant by AI, and which will be sorely needed to steward humanity into a future of justice, wellbeing, and peace.

As I look at the list from the perspective of someone who supports leaders to have massive positive impact, one of them leaps out as the "Master Skill" that rules (or at least informs) them all. Can you guess which?

I think it's Talent Management writ large — that is, the ability to create systems for attracting, growing, and retaining talent across roles, life stages, and geographies. 

This is a lot more than just developing or "fixing" individuals: "Hey, Sabrina, you need to become more creative."

It's a lot more than addressing short-term hiring gaps; it's about seeing 2030 from where you stand, and putting in place long-term systems to continually find, grow, keep, and unleash human potential. And orchestrating that potential to make a meaningful positive difference for employees, customers, stakeholders, and the world at large.

It's overwhelming, I know. You've got a dozen flaming emergencies on your plate right now, and the day's just started. 

And who the hell can actually know what the world will be like in 5 years? Climate disruptions, technological disruptions, geopolitical instability — we have no relevant dataset or base rate upon which to make predictions.

And still...

If you don't think about it, the future is still barreling toward you (or you toward it, which is maybe a more empowering formulation). 

You can't figure this out alone, and you don't have to. 

Instead, here's an activity that invokes most of the other skills listed above, and is fun to boot:

Charge each member of your team with thinking about 2030, and their place in it. 

• What will your organization look like? What will it be doing? How big and complex will it have become?
• What role does each person want to play in that scenario? What competencies will they have to master to succeed in that role? Do they want to?
• What gaps do they see in the organization that need to be addressed? 

Ask each team member to spend some time thinking about these questions. Have them share their responses with the team. Invite them to engage in the same exercise with their own teams. 

You won't get full clarity, but you will have gotten the ball rolling. 

And you'll have started a crucial conversation that will develop its own momentum, so you don't have to be the sole keeper of responsibility for the future. 

If you'd like help getting yourself and your team ready for 2030 — through strategic planning, mentorship, coaching, or team facilitation — hit me up. You can schedule a Discovery Call at HowieJacobson.com. 

Great coaching doesn’t end with an “aha.” Once a team member sees a fresh possibility, your role shifts to helping them convert insight into traction.

Now your job is to guide your employee through three separate tasks:

1. Identify Options
2. Choose an Option
3. Commit

This sequence is designed very deliberately to preserve ownership, grow capability, and build emotional courage through small, safe experiments.

And from experience, I can tell you that it's extremely tempting to skip steps 1 and 3. But doing so is generally a mistake.

Task 1: Identify Options

Start by generating multiple ways forward. Insist on at least three possibilities; more is better. Quantity matters because it stretches creativity and reduces the odds of premature convergence on a single, habitual fix. To loosen thinking:

• Lower the bar for success. Invite “one‑in‑a‑million schemes” and “outlandish escapades.” Bad ideas are welcome; they often spark good ones.
• Use constraint‑busting questions. “What would you try if budget were unlimited?” or, conversely, “If you had to solve this with no money at all?” These what‑ifs jolt the mind past self‑imposed limits.
• Surface past attempts. Ask what’s already been tried—successes and failures alike. Previous experience can be repurposed or inverted to suggest new avenues.

Throughout this step, remind the employee that you’re compiling a list, not making a judgment. Keeping evaluation out of the brainstorming phase prevents the inner critic from shutting ideas down prematurely.

It's tempting to skip this step because generating that first positive option feels so good. They've been stuck and now they're unstuck. They've been down and now they're up. They've been confused and now they're clear. They've been defensive and now they're proactive.

But you're not harshing their vibe by pushing for additional options. You're not peeing on their parade, or dragging them back down into doubt-and-fear-land. Instead, you're signaling your confidence in their ability to stay engaged and creative, rather than slip back into old, disempowered mindsets.

Task 2: Choose the Path Forward

With options on the table, guide your employee to select a workable experiment. The aim is not perfection; it’s a plan that has a reasonable chance of success and from which they can learn and improve. Two disciplines make the choice robust:

Risk–reward calibration. Discuss the upside of each option along with potential downsides. Encourage the person to weigh effort and likely impact before deciding. Are there hidden pitfalls? Secondary gains? Unintended consequences? How will others likely respond? Who are the shadow stakeholders here? Who else needs to be brought into the loop?

This inquiry builds your employee's strategic muscle, and encourages them to think a few moves ahead in the chess game of life.

Level‑10 confidence test. Once they land on a preferred action, ask: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that you will carry this out?” Anything below 8 signals hidden obstacles. Break the step into smaller rungs, add resources, or rehearse tough moments until the answer rises to 10—or as close as reality permits.

This simple rating surfaces practical and emotional barriers early, when they’re easiest to mitigate.

Task 3: Commit to Specific Actions

The last task is to lock the choice into a visible, time‑bound commitment—“what, how, and when.” Effective commitments share three characteristics:

• Observable deliverable. Spell out precisely what will exist or occur. “Talk to Ramona by end of day” beats “connect with Ramona soon.”
• Trigger clarity. For ongoing or event‑driven behaviors, use a When/Then formula: When [trigger], then I will [behavior]. Example: “When a meeting drifts off agenda, then I will ask to restate the goal.”
• Self‑accountability, not policing. Managers should avoid the hall‑monitor trap. Ask for the commitment, document it where both parties can see it, and trust the employee to honor their word. Accountability flows to the plan and the outcome—not to you.

After the details are nailed down, double‑check confidence one final time. If it still isn’t a solid 10, explore what extra support—resources, rehearsal, emotional preparation—would close the gap.

It's tempting to skip this step because it can feel like babysitting. After all the bright and clever ideation, you might be reluctant to ask your employee to delineate the exact steps they're going to take. Especially if it's a senior person, you might worry that they'll resent your micromanaging.

As a coach, I do sometimes skip this step — but only with clients who are relentless in execution and whose word to themselves is bond. If you have any doubts about whether the plan will get done, and not deprioritized the moment the next whack-a-mole crisis pops up, then you're doing everyone a favor by gently insisting on specificity and accountability.

Putting It All Together

The framework is deliberately experimental. Each cycle ends with a review.

Did you do what you said you would? If so, how did it go? What happened? What did you learn? What's next?

Did you not execute? If so, what got in the way? What was missing? What can you try now?

Both of these possibilities loop back into Task #1: Identify Options.

That loop transforms setbacks into data and keeps momentum high without demanding flawless execution.

Used consistently, these three tasks turn insight into observable progress, reinforce employees’ sense of agency, and cultivate a culture where action—not intention—defines success.

If you'd like to get better at bringing out the best in your people, let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

In previous editions of this newsletter, we've talked about the early stages of the change process: getting their permission to have the conversation, focusing on an energizing outcome, and exploring the history of the problem and their prior attempts to solve it.

And we've also talked about the big mindset you bring to such conversations: that problems are opportunities to achieve even bigger and better outcomes than simply making the problems go away.  

Once these opportunities are identified, it's time to build the plan. And it's a moment when the most patient and empowering coach can fall victim to what Michael Bungay Stanier calls the "Advice Monster."

But it's not time for your advice yet. The most important thing to accomplish at this stage is to guide your conversation partner to come up with new ideas to try.

So ask, "Given this opportunity that you've identified, what might you try?"

That question kicks off Task 1: Identify Options, the first of three tasks in Step 4 of the change process in my and Peter Bregman's book You Can Change Other People. When we ask it—and then keep asking it—it does far more than generate ideas. It activates the four powers of change:

• Ownership (they write the list, so they own the outcome)
• Independent capability (every idea is a rep in creative problem‑solving)
• Emotional courage (naming scary options builds nerve)
• Future‑proofing (the process itself becomes a reusable playbook)

1. Open the tap: “What might you try?”

Start with a try question, not a do question. Try separates brainstorming from deciding, removing the pressure to commit or be right.

2. Lower the bar for success

Creativity withers in the face of criticism. So give explicit permission for “bad ideas, one‑in‑a‑million schemes, outlandish escapades.”

• If they balk, ask: “What would you do if you didn’t care whether it failed?”
• Record every option verbatim without judging its merits: “Great—let’s put it on the list.”

That neutrality rewards emotional courage instead of idea quality.

3. Mine the past

“Remind me what you’ve already tried—hits and flops.” Past experiments are R & D data; even the flops can point to inverse solutions.

4. Play the What‑If game

Remove a constraint: “What might you try if budget were unlimited?”

Add a constraint: “What if you had zero dollars and had to do something by Friday?” Constraints spark elegant, low‑cost moves.

5. Celebrate Opposite Day

Ask, “What would definitely not work here?” Listing horrible ideas often reveals their useful opposites.

6. Ladder the climb

Big goals can paralyze. Break the climb into rungs: “What can you try this week to be in a better spot next week?” Small wins build independent capability and confidence.

7. Channel fear

“What’s the scariest move you can imagine?” Fear flags high‑leverage action and stretches the emotional‑courage muscle—even if you don’t choose that option today.

Three Options Minimum

Keep going until your conversation partner comes up with at least three possible next steps. One idea isn’t an option; two feels like a dilemma; three unlocks real choice.

Once there are at least three interesting options on the table, then you both put on your critical thinking hats and start evaluating. We'll look at how to do that in an upcoming edition of the Mindset Mastery Memo.

When you're helping someone on your team who's been struggling, it's tempting to start the conversation by telling them all your brilliant ideas for solving their problems. But advice-giving typically backfires, because they will probably perceive you as a critic rather than as their ally. 

And if they've already tried one or more of your suggestions and it "didn't work," you've lost credibility in their eyes.

So what should leaders do instead? 

A common "coaching" move is to ask the person to generate options. That's the "O" in the well-known GROW model of coaching: desired Goal, current Reality, generate Options, choose what you Will do.

The problem with this approach is that you're asking them to pull a new solution out of an old mindset. If the problem is annoying or painful enough, if they could have solved it by thinking of a new strategy, they already would have. 

Selecting potential future options in the absence of new insight is rarely helpful, and often feels like uninformed guesswork.

The best way to move forward isn’t to guess—it’s to build on what’s already been tested. Before exploring new solutions, leaders need to ask a crucial question: 

What have you already tried? 

Exploring past efforts keeps you from suggesting approaches that, in your employee's mind, have already failed. 

By asking for a history of past attempts, you're allowing them to begin to see patterns. Like how they always do the same ineffective thing, or quit before they see results, or ask the wrong people for support. Now at least they can avoid repeating these same mistakes going forward. 

And often, in that laundry list of what didn't work, they'll recall stuff that did, and they've stopped doing for whatever reason. But now it's their idea and their strategy, rather than one imposed by you.

How to Guide This Exploration Effectively

1. Ask Open-Ended Questions – Instead of assuming what has or hasn’t been done, ask: “What have you already tried?” and “What results did you see?”
2. Look for Small Wins – Even if something didn’t fully solve the problem, was there any part of it that worked? “Was there a time when things improved, even slightly?”
3. Analyze What Didn’t Work—and Why – Instead of dismissing failed attempts, ask: “What do you think prevented this from working?” This helps refine future strategies.
4. Encourage a Learning Mindset – Frame past efforts as experiments, not failures. “What insights did you gain from that approach?”
5. Identify Unexplored Avenues – Once you understand past efforts, ask: “What’s something you haven’t tried yet?” This encourages creative thinking.

The Business Impact of Reviewing Past Efforts

Leaders who encourage reflection before action see:

• Smarter Decision-Making – Teams avoid repeating ineffective strategies.
• Increased Confidence – People recognize that they’ve already taken steps, which builds momentum.
• More Effective Problem-Solving – Instead of starting from scratch, teams refine and optimize their approaches.
• Stronger Innovation – Learning from past efforts leads to better, more creative solutions.

The Takeaway

Progress isn’t about starting over—it’s about building on what’s already been learned. By taking the time to explore past efforts, leaders help their teams refine their approach, avoid unnecessary setbacks, and move forward with greater clarity and confidence.

How do you help your team learn from past attempts? Share your insights in the comments below.

If you'd like master your mindset and become an unflappable, Trigger-Free Leader, let's talk. Visit HowieJacobson.com to schedule a discovery call.

It feels like a win-win. The employee gets their problem solved, and the leader gets to be a hero. 

But this dynamic has two big downsides.

First, the employee doesn't grow.

And second, the leader becomes a bottleneck for the team's progress.

The most successful leaders take a different approach—they become learners first. Instead of blurting out answers, they become scientists of the problem. When you act as a scientist, you shift from telling people what to do to exploring challenges with them. This fosters curiosity, collaboration, and true transformation.

Why the Scientist Mindset Works

People don’t learn effectively when they’re being lectured. They learn by doing—by testing ideas, experimenting, and reflecting on their experiences. If you approach leadership as a scientist, you help others discover their own solutions instead of simply handing them instructions.

Consider a manager coaching an employee on presentation skills. Instead of saying, “You need to be more confident,” they could ask, “What parts of your presentation feel strongest to you? Where do you feel less certain?” This turns the conversation into a discovery process rather than a critique, leading to deeper engagement and self-driven improvement.

How to Embrace the Scientist Mindset

1. Get Curious – Instead of assuming you have the answer, ask open-ended questions like, “What’s working well?” or “What’s making this challenging?”
2. Explore Together – Frame challenges as opportunities to experiment: “What if we test a few different approaches and see what works best.”
3. Encourage Small Experiments – Instead of pushing for big, immediate change, start with small adjustments and observe the impact.
4. Celebrate Learning, Not Just Results – When people see that learning is valued as much as success, they feel safer to take risks and grow.
5. Reflect on the Process – Regularly check in on what’s been learned: “What insights have we gained from this?” This helps reinforce a culture of continuous improvement.

The Business Impact of Leading Like a Scientist

Organizations that embrace this approach see:

• More Innovation – Teams are encouraged to test ideas and iterate rather than fearing failure.
• Stronger Engagement – Employees feel ownership over their learning and development.
• Better Problem-Solving – Issues are approached with curiosity rather than judgment.
• Greater Adaptability – Teams are more comfortable navigating uncertainty and change.

Oh, and the leader who fosters employee growth is in a much better position to be promoted — because there's someone on the team who can fill their shoes in their current role. 

The Takeaway

Shifting from a teacher to a learner doesn’t mean you stop guiding—it means you guide through exploration rather than instruction. When leaders become scientists, they create an environment where people discover, grow, and take ownership of their success.

How have you used curiosity and experimentation in your leadership approach? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

 If you'd like to become a scientist leader who brings out the best in your people, you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

Today I want to talk about what to do when you want an employee to change in some way, and you're thinking that they just won't be that into it. How do you "motivate" employees to grow without triggering their resistance? 

If you want people to commit to change, it has to matter to them. The most effective leaders don’t just help their employees set goals—they help them connect those goals to something deeply meaningful. Without this connection, motivation fizzles as soon as life throws a wrench in the works or the next shiny project comes along.

Why Meaning Drives Change

People don’t change just because they “should.” They change because they see the value in it for themselves. When a goal is tied to something personally meaningful, it transforms from an obligation into an opportunity.

Think about an employee struggling with communication. If their manager simply tells them to “speak up more in meetings,” they may view it as a chore. But when they recognize that improving communication will help them become a stronger leader and open doors for career advancement, they’ll be much more motivated to develop that skill — even when practicing feels awkward or scary.

How to Make Change Meaningful

1. Ask Why It Matters – Instead of focusing only on what needs to change, ask, “Why is this important to you?” Keep asking “why” until you uncover a deeper motivation.
2. Connect to Their Values – People are more committed to goals that align with their core values. If someone values creativity, explore with them how a new process might help them be more innovative rather than just more efficient.
3. Link to a Bigger Purpose – Invite people to see how their personal growth could contribute to a larger mission that they care about, whether it’s improving the team, helping customers, or making an impact in their industry.
4. Make It Personal – Tie the change to their aspirations. Instead of saying, “You need to get better at time management,” raise the possibility that, “Improving time management will help you free up more time for the strategic work you enjoy.”
5. Celebrate Progress – Recognizing small wins reinforces the connection between effort and impact, keeping dopamine flowing and motivation high.

The Business Impact of Meaningful Change

When leaders help employees connect change to what truly matters, they see:

• Higher Commitment – People stay engaged because the goal is personally significant.
• Stronger Follow-Through – When change is meaningful, it’s more likely to stick.
• Better Performance – Employees are more motivated when they see the bigger picture.
• Greater Job Satisfaction – Work feels more fulfilling when it aligns with personal values and goals.

The Takeaway

Change isn’t just about setting goals—it’s about making those goals meaningful. When people see the deeper purpose behind their actions, they become more engaged, committed, and successful. As a leader, your role is to help them find that meaning and use it as a driving force for real transformation.

How do you help your team connect their work to what truly matters? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you'd like master your mindset and become an unflappable, Trigger-Free Leader, let's talk. Visit HowieJacobson.com to schedule a discovery call.

Why Clarity Matters

Without clarity, people operate on assumptions. A vague goal like “improve teamwork” could mean different things to different people. One team member might think it means more efficient meetings, while another might see it as deeper collaboration on projects. If leaders don’t ensure a shared understanding, they risk misalignment, confusion, and missed expectations.

Consider a manager who tells their team, “We need to be more innovative.” Without a clear definition of what innovation looks like in practice, employees may hesitate to act, fearing they’ll miss the mark. But if that manager instead says, “I want us to experiment with new ideas and test at least three new customer engagement strategies this quarter,” the expectation becomes clear and actionable.

How to Achieve Shared Clarity

1. Define Terms Clearly – If a goal includes vague terms like “better,” “stronger,” or “more effective,” ask, “What does that actually look like in practice?” Break it down into tangible, observable behaviors.
2. Ask for Specific Examples – If someone says, “I want to be a better leader,” follow up with, “What does a great leader do that you’d like to emulate?” This encourages deeper thinking and helps turn abstract ideas into concrete steps.
3. Confirm Understanding – Don’t assume that what’s clear to you is clear to others. Ask, “Can you summarize in your own words what we’re aiming for?” This ensures alignment before moving forward.
4. Create Measurable Milestones – If success isn’t defined, people won’t know if they’re making progress. Instead of saying, “Let’s improve customer service,” set a goal like, “Let’s reduce response times by 20% over the next three months.”
5. Revisit and Refine – Clarity isn’t a one-time event; it’s an ongoing process. Regularly check in to see if adjustments are needed and refine the vision as necessary.

The Business Impact of Clarity

Organizations that prioritize shared clarity experience:

• Higher Efficiency – Teams spend less time second-guessing and more time executing.
• Stronger Alignment – Everyone works toward the same well-defined goals.
• Increased Accountability – Clear expectations make it easier to measure success and hold people responsible.
• Greater Motivation – When people know what they’re striving for, they stay more engaged and committed.

The Takeaway

Unclear goals lead to unclear results. As a leader, your role isn’t just to set direction but to ensure everyone understands it in the same way. By defining, clarifying, and reinforcing shared goals, you create a roadmap that drives real progress.

What strategies have helped you achieve clarity with your team? Share your insights in the comments below!

When we become leaders, we can bring that "kill-the-problem" mindset into our interactions with others and the systems we work within. And given that everybody's busy and we're managing tight deadlines in a complex and unpredictable world, it's natural to want to kill those problems really quickly and thoroughly so we can get back to our "real" work.

But what if some problems aren't barriers, but something much more valuable? What if they are signposts pointing toward meaningful opportunities for growth and improvement?

The most effective leaders understand that every challenge carries the seed of an energizing outcome. Instead of merely solving problems, they reframe them into opportunities that align with a larger vision.

Instead of viewing a problem as a wall, they visualize it as a hidden door, like the bookcase in Young Frankenstein.

The Trap of Fixing Problems Too Quickly

Let's say you run a team in which everyone is frustrated by long, inefficient meetings.

The “obvious” solution? Shorten them.

Set a timer. Make everyone stand. Spray a blast of Liquid Ass on the half hour. (Full disclosure: this company is not currently a sponsor of this newsletter, but I can always dream.)

Now meetings are shorter—problem solved, right?

Not so fast. If nothing else changes, the meetings may get done faster, but still be unproductive.

The problem of long, inefficient meetings is actually an opportunity to improve the way the team collaborates and makes decisions.

Instead of "solving" the problem you're facing, take a minute to consider the factors that could underly that problem. For example:

• Are team members too diffident to state their views?
• Does conflict run rampant without a clear path to decisions?
• Are people unprepared for meetings because they don't read the agendas beforehand?
• Does the unit not have clear priorities?
• Are there key players who aren't invited or not showing up to the meetings?

The real opportunity here may be to make meetings more interactive and valuable, or to take a step back and get clear on strategy, or deal with aspects of team culture that aren't optimized for success.

When we rush to fix problems without looking deeper, we miss the chance to create lasting improvement.

How to Reframe Problems into Energizing Outcomes

1. Identify the Core Problem – Instead of focusing on symptoms, dig deeper. What’s the real issue behind the surface-level frustration?
2. Flip the Perspective – Ask, “What opportunity does this challenge reveal?” Instead of thinking, “We need fewer complaints from customers,” shift to, “How can we create an experience that customers rave about?”
3. Make It Positive – A problem is something to avoid; an energizing outcome is something to pursue. Instead of, “We need to stop losing top talent,” focus on, “How can we create an environment where people want to stay and play?”
4. Connect It to a Larger Purpose – When people see the bigger picture, they become more engaged. Instead of, “We need to cut costs,” shift to, “How can we become more efficient while maintaining our quality and values?”

The Business Impact of Reframing Problems

Leaders who shift from fixing problems to pursuing energizing outcomes create:

• Higher Engagement – People are more motivated when they work toward something exciting rather than just avoiding issues.
• Stronger Innovation – Seeing challenges as opportunities leads to creative solutions.
• Better Decision-Making – Teams focus on long-term improvements rather than short-term fixes.
• A Resilient Culture – Employees become more adaptable and proactive in tackling challenges.

The Takeaway

Problems are inevitable, but how you approach them makes all the difference. Instead of treating problems as something to eliminate, view them as invitations toward meaningful change. When you reframe challenges as opportunities, you unlock potential, creativity, and long-term success.

How have you turned a problem into an opportunity in your leadership journey? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Visit askHowie.com to schedule a discovery call.

Sometimes, in fact, they'll actively resist your approach, even if your intentions are simply to be of service. 

So what then? What do you do when someone pushes back, shuts down, or even says “no” to your offer of a helping conversation?

The Realities of Resistance

Many leaders make the mistake of seeing resistance as defiance. And they can take it personally, and respond in ways that make everything worse: the situation and the relationship. Which can turn the interpretation of defiance into a self-fulfilling prophecy, because who doesn't want to defy heavy-handed, resentful authority?

But resistance doesn't have to have anything to with defiance. Instead, it could be the result of much more benign forces. 

One of the reasons people don't let you in is their fear of losing control over something important. They may have prior experience with someone trying to force them to do something they don't want to do (especially if they were ever a human child on this planet). 

If this is the big issue, they're not resisting the change per se — they're resisting being changed. 

That's a good thing, because yay for people who value their autonomy!

Another reason people might not want you all up in their business is the implied dynamic of you're up and they're down. If they accept your help, they're admitting that you're somehow better than them. 

Of course, true help and support doesn't have to communicate anything at all about intrinsic self-worth. But again, if someone's life experiences have taught them that needing help means they're weak or unworthy or incompetent, they won't let you put them in that position.

And that's also a good thing, because yay for people who want to take responsibility for their own outcomes and not be dependent on others. 

In both these cases, your most fruitful move is not to insist or push, but rather contribute to the creation of an environment in which they feel safe enough to choose change — and welcome your support — on their own terms. 

So their resistance, rather than being defiance, is both a (generally unconscious) test of your leadership, and an opportunity for deeper engagement.

How to Navigate Resistance Effectively

1. Take “No” for an Answer

• If someone resists your offer to help, don’t force the conversation. Respect their autonomy and say something like, “I understand. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here.” Paradoxically, this makes them more likely to return when they’re ready.

1. Don’t Force a “Yes”

• Pressuring someone into agreement doesn’t create real commitment. A forced yes often hides an internal no, leading to passive resistance later. Instead, ensure they feel free to decline, which increases the chances of genuine engagement later.

1. Give Them Space and Time

• Change happens on the individual’s timeline, not yours. If someone isn’t ready today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be ready next week. Let them process and come back to the conversation when they feel prepared.

The Business Impact of Managing Resistance Well

Leaders who handle this kind of resistance effectively create:

• More Trust – Employees feel safe to express concerns and engage honestly.
• Higher Commitment – People choose to change rather than feeling coerced.
• Better Problem-Solving – Teams work through challenges collaboratively instead of avoiding them.
• A Growth-Oriented Culture – The focus shifts from blame to improvement.

The Takeaway

Resistance is not the enemy—it’s a natural part of the change process. The key is to stay patient, listen actively, and allow people the space to come to their own decisions. When you respect others’ autonomy, you create an environment where real transformation can happen.

How do you handle resistance when helping others grow? Share your experiences in the comments below.

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

Great leaders understand that true influence isn’t about authority—it’s about trust, respect, and collaboration. While a leadership title may grant you decision-making power, it doesn’t automatically earn you buy-in from your team. In fact, relying solely on positional authority often creates resistance rather than commitment.

The Illusion of Power

Many leaders assume that because they have a title, their team will automatically follow their guidance. However, employees often comply with directives out of obligation, not genuine engagement. This leads to half-hearted execution, minimal ownership, and a lack of innovation.

In reality, employees have more power than many leaders are willing to admit. They can disengage, slow-walk initiatives, or even leave entirely. True leadership isn’t about forcing compliance—it’s about inspiring commitment.

How to Lead Without Relying on Authority

To gain real influence, leaders must shift from a command-and-control mindset to one of collaboration and partnership. Here’s how:

1. Seek Permission, Not Compliance – Even when you’re in charge, asking for input fosters collaboration. Instead of saying, “You need to do this differently,” try “Can we think about ways to improve this?”
2. Empower Ownership – Encourage team members to take responsibility for their own work. Ask, “How do you think we should approach this?” This builds engagement and accountability.
3. Show Humility – Admit when you don’t have all the answers. When leaders model learning and adaptability, they create a culture where continuous improvement is valued.
4. Connect Through Purpose – Rather than directing people toward tasks, connect their work to a larger mission that they care about. When employees see the bigger picture, they are more motivated to contribute.
5. Lead with Empathy – Understand what drives your team members. Acknowledge their challenges and support them in finding solutions, rather than just giving orders.

The Business Impact of Leading Through Influence

Organizations that prioritize influence over authority experience:

• Higher Engagement – Employees are more invested in their work.
• Stronger Innovation – People feel safe to contribute ideas and take risks.
• Improved Collaboration – Teams work together more effectively.
• Lower Turnover – Employees feel valued and are more likely to stay.

The Takeaway

Leadership isn’t about telling people what to do—it’s about inspiring them to want to do it. By leading with influence instead of relying on authority, you build a culture of trust, ownership, and high performance.

How have you successfully influenced others without relying on your position of power? Share your insights in the comments below!

As I scrolled through them, I saw lots of appreciative comments, both on my podcast interviews and on my solo talking head videos.

"Oh, this interview helped me so much."

"There are no words to express what my heart is feeling."

"So grateful for this information."

And my personal favorite, the one that touched me the deepest, on a conversation I had with Stephen Porges, creator of Polyvagal Theory:

"Within the first 10 min, your convo elucidates my perpetual struggle in the last 4 years in tech: burning out due to running on the toxic fuel of anxiety and thinking i'm not smart anymore or that i'm lazy. This gives me hope :)"

Hungry for Hearing About Impact

I quickly realized how hungry I've been for this kind of feedback. And how valuable it is for me to hear.

Because I've been publishing my podcast for over a decade now, pretty much every week, and honestly it can be lonely work. 

Aside from the hour that I spend with my guest, which is almost always amazing and uplifting and fun and exciting, the rest of the work is done in solitude. And I've gone weeks, sometimes months, without hearing anything about the effect this work — all unpaid, as a labor of love — is having out in the world.

So to receive these comments fills me with a renewed energy. I can feel it now, coursing through me in the form of new ideas, new people to reach out to, new segments and formats. I'm excited, and ready to manifest that excitement as work. 

We all want to know that our work matters. 

How many people these days work from home, or work behind closed doors, or work on siloed projects, and aren't getting this kind of appreciative feedback on a regular basis?

And what's the impact of that vacuum on their drive, their spirit, and their heart?

So who can you reach out to, to thank, to appreciate, to let them know that their work matters to you?

Feelings and Needs

Of all the comments, the ones that touched me the most were like that last one; telling me how a particular video made them feel, and what kind of need it met.

Which brought my mind back to one of my favorite teachers, Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of Nonviolent Communication (NVC). 

Rosenberg says that most human communication — words and actions — consists of various strategies for saying please. Anger, yelling, cursing, sarcasm, criticism, threatening, hitting — those are all ways of saying "please meet my needs," what Rosenberg calls "tragic expressions of unmet needs."

And I definitely get my share of those "tragic expressions" in response to my work; people who are enraged that I or my guest talked about implicit bias and showed our cards as "social justice warriors," or that I put too much faith in science or too much faith in anecdotal evidence, and let me know that I'm an idiot or a liar or worse.

The other thing humans say to each other is "thank you." And when we express gratitude, we're sharing how someone met our needs, and how that made us feel. 

That's why those comments so touched my heart. They impressed upon me the importance of the work that I do in sharing my guests and their insights with the world.

Your Turn

Who in your life helped you meet a need and made your life better (or as Rosenberg charmingly puts it, "more wonderful"? 

Who can you reach out to, even if it's just a sentence or two on social media (as the commenters did for me), or a short text or voicemail or email to a colleague or vendor? A quick word of appreciation to a friend, a family member, someone in your community.

I encourage you to reach out. Because the more you do, the more people in your world will get energized, like I did, about the impact they're having on other people. And that will make the world more wonderful for all of us.

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

And sure enough, as the researchers wrote their 1968 article, titled "Pygmalion in the Classroom," those students showed significant increases in IQ that year compared to their "non-spurting" classmates.

The kicker? There was no magic prediction test; that Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was a total fiction. The "spurters" had been randomly selected from among all the children in the study. 

And those alleged "spurters" responded to the teachers' expectations, which turned into unconscious behaviors that somehow favorited those special students. Rosenthal and Jacobson had demonstrated the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

What does this have to do with you helping the people around you get better? 

Everything.

Enough is Enough

When you approach someone who needs to change something about their behavior, it's often been bothering you for a while. You might have been stewing while the pressure was building to do or say something about it. 

In other words, you passed a threshold of tolerance of the behavior, and now you're being motivated at least partly by some "enough is enough" energy.

At this point, you may even be thinking that having the conversation will just be a waste of time.

"Who am I kidding? They're never change." — that sort of thinking.

And that sort of thinking leaks into your words, your facial expressions, your posture, your energy, and your actions. Communicating strongly, if subconsciously, that you don't think much of their potential to change and grow.

Confidence is the Truth

You may be thinking, "OK, so I have to lie to myself in order to have an effective uplifting conversation? I have to pretend that I believe they can change, without the benefit of having a couple of Harvard psychologists lying to me first?"

Fortunately, you don't have to lie to yourself. You just have to distance yourself from frustration and other negative emotions long enough to recognize the truth: you actually do have confidence in the other person.

How do I know this? Am I some kind of mind-reading wizard? 

No. I'm just taking you at face value.

Because if you're having the conversation at all, you're doing so because you believe there is reason to have it. 

You wouldn't spend even one minute trying to convince a fish to climb a tree. 

The very fact that you're having the conversation means that you have at least some degree of confidence that change is possible. (Unless, of course, you're just going through the motions and this is just a CYA or "dot the I's" ritual done as part of a cynical dance of progressive discipline, aka "fire them by the book.")

So before you approach your conversation partner, get in touch with that confidence, as robust or as slim as it may be. 

Remember that your expectations are powerful here. Convey hope and trust, and you'll often be met with attitudes and actions that justify that hope and trust. Communicate doubt and despair, and they'll probably prove you right as well. 

Communicating Confidence

Signaling your positive expectations energetically does a lot of the heavy lifting. And you can also verbalize your confidence in them at the start of the conversation.

Last week we talked about orienting the conversation toward a positive future. 

Right after describing that positive future, share your confidence that they can help you get there. 

Some Examples

Difficult team member: "I’d like to improve the performance of our team, and I think your contributions could be key. I’d like to talk with you about what’s getting in the way."

Salesperson faltering as the deal gets more complex: "You’ve rewarded my faith in you by moving the deal as far as you have. I know this part is new for you, and I’m happy to help you strategize."

CEO can't commit to a long-term marketing strategy, and CMO is frustrated: "So I’d like to talk about our marketing plan. I’m really struggling with it, and I’d like your help."

Your Turn

Think of someone whose behavior you'd like to change. Notice any frustration or anger or hopelessness in your body. Sit with it and breathe, until you can separate yourself from the emotion. (Luckily, you don't have to argue with it or make it go away.)

Now think about why you're having the conversation at all. Why isn't it a complete waste of time? What have they demonstrated in the past that could give you hope for this issue? What are their strengths? How did they get into this position of responsibility in the first place?

Spend time curating and cultivating reasons to believe that they can change. 

Next week, we'll talk about how to transfer ownership of the issue so that it's no longer your problem, but their opportunity. 

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

One of the big problems with feedback is that it refers to the past. 

And one of the big problems with the past is that it can't be changed.

So feedback, by its very nature, directs our attention in an unhelpful direction.

We can't fix the past; we can only act now in pursuit of a better future. 

So if you need to have a conversation with someone whom you'd like to behave differently, shift your focus from what they've done in the past to what you'd like them to do in the future.

The nice thing about starting here is that you're not telling them what they've been doing wrong. You're not criticizing them for past errors. You're not even thinking about anything that automatically triggers their defenses. You're just bringing them your vision of a more wonderful future, and asking for their help in creating it.

The desired future you want to paint has three important qualities. It's positive, clear, and meaningful. Let's look at each of these. 

Make It Positive

Imagine getting into a taxi and telling the driver, "Take me anywhere but the Eiffel Tower." They wouldn't have much to go on, would they?

That's a silly example, but you do something analogous when you tell someone what you want them to stop doing. 

Instead of describing what you don't want, describe what you do want. 

This can be challenging, but take your time on this one. If you can't describe what you want, you're unlikely to get it.

Make It Clear

In addition to a positive description, you need to be clear and specific about what you want them to do and say.

Get as specific as you can. See the movie in your head. Really picture the scenes. Pretend you're a screenwriter trying to convey your vision to actors and cinematographers and a director. 

Make It Meaningful

The third key quality of your desired outcome is that it's meaningful to your conversation partner. You want to ensure that they're doing it for their reasons, not yours.

If they're doing it to get your approval or so that you withhold negative consequences, at best you're getting compliance. Grudging, half-hearted, and abandoned as soon as they think you're not paying attention. 

Instead, be curious and find out what's motivating them. What would be wonderful for them? And how can the behaviors you're wanting help them get that desired future for themselves?

Your Turn

Think of someone who's behaving in a way you'd like to change. 

On paper, describe the behavior that you don't want.

Next, run it through the three "futurizer" filters.

• Make it positive.
• Make it clear.
• Make it meaningful.

Now read what you've come up with. Can you imagine having a conversation with your partner about that?

It’s important to come up with that desired future as preparation for the conversation, but you don’t introduce it right away. There are a few steps to set the foundation for an uplifting conversation that need to happen first. Next week we’ll look at the steps and specific words to get things going in a fruitful direction.

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

It might be a whale, or a school of fish. But it might also be an enemy vessel or a torpedo. So submariners take their blips very seriously, and assume danger until proven otherwise.

And when danger is perceived, the vessel has three options: freeze, flee, or fight.  

You are equipped with a similar apparatus. You don't go "ping" every 3 seconds, but your nervous system is constantly scanning your environment for signs of danger. 

And it never rests. You know this because you can sleep through all manner of familiar noise — creaking water pipe, honking car horn, snoring spouse — but your eyes pop awake instantly when you hear an unexpected footfall or turn of a door handle. 

And everyone around you, in your physical or virtual environment, is doing the same thing. 

Which means that you are a blip on their radar, and they're always assessing whether you are a threat or not. 

For Humans, Threats Can Be Psychological as Well as Physical

When you have to talk to someone about their performance, or their behavior, and your agenda includes an element of "I would like to you change how you're doing stuff," it's likely that you're going to signal to your conversation partner that you are a threat.

Basically, that's because the human mind, which evolved to assess actual lethal threat (ie things that could actually kill you, like fire, earthquake, wild beast, starvation, hypothermia, enemy, and so on), also reads its own unwanted emotions as life-threatening. If it thinks a conversation will lead to shame or guilt, for example, it turns on the stress response.

And like the submarine captain, it’ll choose to freeze, flee, or fight. 

None of which helps you or your agenda.

How to Signal Threat

There are two ways to let someone know they're in peril. One is to act like a threat. Look angry, yell, assume a fighting stance and posture. Narrow your eyes and stare at them like a shark regarding a school of minnows. 

That's obvious, right?

What's less obvious is that there's another way to let someone know they're unsafe. And that's to act unsafe yourself. 

That's because humans are extremely social animals, and we pick up on each other's moods and perceptions. 

If I feel scared in your presence, you'll pick up on that fear and your own stress response will kick in. If you think I'm scared because of you, you may be triggered into an aggressive stance. 

If you think I'm scared because of something else in my environment other than you, you may be triggered into an avoidant stance.

How to Signal Safety

You can see how important it is to signal to your conversation partner that there is no threat involved in the conversation you'd like to have with them. 

So how do you signal safety?

First, by dealing with your own physiology, which means dealing with your own psychology.

You must approach them with the energy and behavior of an ally rather than a critic.

If you're upset with them, don't approach — yet. First do the work of translating your anger or criticism into your desired positive outcome. 

Next, play an imagination game where you look for positive motives and intentions behind any behavior of your conversation partner that's upsetting you. How might their actions make perfect sense to them, based on their needs and goals?

Once you've completed these two processes, check yourself — are you able to approach your partner with calm, steady, and friendly energy?

If so, you're ready to approach and initiate the conversation.

Next time, we'll look at how to orient the conversation toward a positive future. 

Your Turn

Think about an upcoming conversation that you’re dreading. Imagine yourself approaching with your current thinking and energy, and notice how your partner responds. Now go through the two steps — articulating your positive needs and assuming positive intent in your partner — and visualize your approach again. Do you see and feel the difference?

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

By “dreaded conversation,” I’m talking about one that you’ve been procrastinating because you don’t want to experience it. 

Maybe you’re worried about making them feel bad by telling them some not-so-nice things.

Maybe you’re worried about getting frustrated and losing your cool.

Maybe you’re worried about saying the wrong thing and making the situation or relationship worse.

And yet, you know that putting off the conversation until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow isn’t going to help. 

The issue isn’t going to resolve itself. 

It might even fester and get worse.

And you might become more and more upset and resentful, until you explode in a flurry of highly unskilled (read "apeshit crazy") speech that might destroy the relationship.

"Just Tell Me What to Say"

When I coach or train people to have what they think of as “dreaded conversations,” what they’re mostly looking for is techniques.

Basically, they want me to tell them what to say. The magic words that will compel the other person to listen, agree, and change.

They want to know things like:

• What's the best way to start?
• What do I say to disarm their defensiveness?
• What words do I utter to convince them that they need to change?

I get it.

When I’m at a loss, I also just want someone to tell me exactly what to do.

I don't want a deep dive into underlying principles, just a set of instructions I can follow.

Instructions can be helpful — in certain situations. When things are static, memorizing and mastering technique may be all you need. 

You Can Memorize Chess Openings

Take, for example, the first three moves in a chess game. If you memorize a dozen classic chess openings, you can probably hold your own against most grandmasters through move number three. 

(And maybe even up to move seven if you employ a pro tip that I learned from high school chess team: learn how to insult your opponent under your breath in Russian.)

That’s because chess openings are predictable.

Once you get into the mid-game, though, knowing a bunch of techniques isn’t going to help you. There are too many variables, and every move can completely change the dynamics on the board.

When things get complex, mastery of technique and tactics loses relevance.

At that point, you have to based your actions on an understanding of fundamental principles.

In chess, those include things like piece activity, king safety, control of the center, pawn structure, and so on. (Also, if your opponent is muttering in Russian, protecting against an immanent attack.)

The Principles of Dreaded Conversations

Dreaded conversations are another place where memorizing and mastering techniques won't help you.

Like in chess, you can memorize a few openings. My favorite is the OCP (outcome/confidence/permission) formula that I teach in my book and in workshops. But there are others, and they aren't hard to master.

Once the other person responds, however, you're firmly in the world of principles, not memorized responses.

To be clear, you will still be using techniques and tactics. But they'll "work" (ie achieve their purpose) only when they're based on underlying principles.

So what are the principles to keep in mind as you navigate dreaded conversations? 

• Principle 1: Signal Safety
• Principle 2: Orient Toward the Future
• Principle 3: Build Confidence
• Principle 4: Encourage Ownership
• Principle 5: Model Curiosity
• Principle 6: Think in Systems
• Principle 7: Evaluate Experimentally

You can remember these, of course, with the acronym SSOTTFBCEOMCTISEE.

Your Turn

We'll explore each of these principles in an upcoming issue of this newsletter. For now, practice noticing when you can get by with techniques (because techniques can save time by being wonderfully efficient short-cuts), and when you must rely on principles.

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

Bonus Time-Waster

Here are some of my favorite (clean) Russian chess insults:

Твой конь — корова. (Your knight is a cow.)

У тебя мозги как у пешки. (You have the brain of a pawn.)

Ты играешь как рыба. (You play like a fish.)

Troy kone - carova.

Utshi beah mozdi kaku pieshk

Ti grayesh katreba.

My main activity these days is watching videos made by people who have somehow managed to slow down their speech from the normal Spanish pace of 8 zillion words per minute to something closer to the way you would talk if you were trying to train a particularly dense Golden Retriever to play chess.

Recently, I watched a video about a baby who won’t stop crying. The story basically went like this:

The baby is crying. Mama gives the baby a pacifier. It doesn’t help; the baby keeps crying.

The baby is crying. Mama gives the baby a bottle. It doesn’t help; the baby keeps crying.

The formula continues, with a new diaper, a walk in the stroller, and a cuddle. 

Then Papa wakes up and interrogates Mama, giving me another chance to listen to the vocabulary and grammar in the lesson.

“Have you given the baby a pacifier?” “Yes, I gave the baby a pacifier. It didn’t help; the baby kept crying.”

And so on. 

While this approach was brilliant for helping me learn Spanish (not to brag, but I can now walk into any shop in Barcelona and announce, "I changed the baby's diaper"), the leadership coach in me was getting increasingly annoyed.

I was totally empathizing with the poor exhausted Mama, who was being required to defend every one of her actions the minute her husband came up with a new idea.

Yes, she’d thought of the bottle. Yes, she’d tried changing the baby’s diaper. Yes, she’d walked up and down pushing the stroller. Yes, she’d picked the baby up for a cuddle.

Jeez, Papa, just shut up already, I was practically yelling at the screen.

He may have been trying to be helpful and kind, but it didn’t land. Instead, he ended up showing off his own expertise to his wife when she was at her wits’ end.

 Helping Often Looks Like Criticism

I get where Papa’s coming from — he wants to solve the problem and go back to sleep. And he doesn’t just want to tell Mama what to do. So his approach is to ask questions based on what he knows about soothing the kid back to sleep.

What happens for Mama when he does this? She gets annoyed, because she feels insulted. She feels disconnected and out of rapport with Papa, and gets defensive.

 Duh, of course I tried the pacifier. Duh, I changed the diaper. What kind of idiot do you take me for?

And in a defensive neurological state, Mama kisses her creative problem-solving capacities goodbye for the time being. 

So what can Papa do here to really help, when his attempt at finding a solution comes off as criticism? 

One approach is simply to express empathy: “Oh honey, this must be so frustrating for you.”

That’s generally a great start, and often is all that’s needed. Sometimes all the other person wants is to be acknowledged and understood. 

But in this case, there is a problem to be solved, and Mama would absolutely love for the baby to go back to sleep. 

So what can Papa do here?

What Have You Tried?: The Most Respectful Question

Papa is very close to the right answer. Just a tiny nuanced change is all it takes to shift him from a critic to an ally.

Instead of asking, “Have you tried X, and have you tried Y,” all Papa has to do is ask a single, simple question: “What have you tried?”

This question respects Mama’s judgment, and her commitment, and her effort.

It’s intended not to one-up Mama, but bring Papa up to speed so he can participate in finding a solution. 

Now Mama can share all her previous attempts to solve the problem. “I tried the pacifier, and the bottle, and the diaper, etc.”

Papa listens intently, assuming the stance of a collaborator rather than a supervisor. 

As Mama lists what’s she’s tried, she starts to feel a bit better. Heard. Understood. 

And she may even have the mental space to consider new options: singing, aromatherapy, offering her immortal soul to Beelzebub for 10 blessed minutes of quiet, and so on. 

And if Papa at this point offers a suggestion that she hasn’t tried or considered, she’s much more likely to take it in with an open mind. 

There’s More

I’m not suggesting that “What have you tried?” is the only phrase you need. Once you have the answer to that question, there are many possible directions to take the conversation that could be immensely helpful to your partner. 

But starting there conveys interest and respect, and sets you up to act as a helpful ally rather than an exasperated critic. 

Want to learn how to turn dreaded feedback conversations into fun and effective performance improvement chats?

Join me for tomorrow's free online masterclass, "Have That Dreaded Conversation Before Christmas." Register here.

He told me this after reading my Harvard Business Review article, “Feedback isn’t enough to help your employees grow." 

In that article, a coauthor (whom I’ll call Peter Bregman, because that’s his name) and I argue that feedback doesn’t typically improve performance, and often makes things worse. And we offer an alternative approach that focuses not on feedback, but improved performance — which is the goal anyway.

Denny told me that once he read the article, he had zero hesitation about having that conversation with his employee. And they dealt with stuff that had been bothering both of them for almost a year.

Before I understood this, I would have coached Denny to “feel the fear and do it anyway.”

But sometimes, and definitely in this case, the fear was telling him something worth listening to. 

The Three Fears of Feedback

Why do some of us fear giving feedback? I’ve identified three main predictions of suffering:

1. The other person will feel bad
2. I will feel bad for making the other person feel bad
3. It will make things worse by creating tension in our relationship

Over the past 30 years, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that feedback is the breakfast of champions: the ill-tasting pill that everyone needs in order to become a high performer.

It’s just not true. 

Here’s the thing: feedback isn’t the point. 

The point is improved performance going forward. 

And giving feedback — the way it’s thought of, taught, and modeled — actually undermines performance rather than promoting it.

So those fears aren’t irrational. I don’t advise blasting through them with grit, willpower, determination, or testosterone shots. 

Instead, let’s do something different — something that allows us to have effective and enjoyable conversations that do what we really want: improve performance. 

The Three Mindset Shifts 

We have to make three basic mindset shifts to move from giving feedback to uplifting others.

1. From past to future 
2. From critic to ally
3. From knowing to wondering

Feedback is about what happened in the past, and how it fell short. Uplift is about the future, and what’s preferable.

Telling some how they didn’t hit the mark makes you a critic. Supporting someone to do better next time makes you an ally.

Explaining what they did wrong makes you a knower. Exploring what’s possible makes you a wonderer.

Those mindset shifts are necessary to start having Uplifting conversations, but they aren’t enough. You also need the steps and skills to initiate them and keep them moving in the right direction.

That’s why I’m pleased to offer:

“Have That Dreaded Conversation Before Christmas”

Next week I’ll share my formula for Uplifting Conversations in a live interactive online masterclass. 

You can register here. 

Date: Tuesday 10 December 2024

Time: 1:30-3:00pm Central European Standard Time (7:30-9:00am US EST)

I’ll teach the formula (and share it in a PDF handout for you to download), and do a demo or two with volunteers. 

Depending on the size of the group, we may practice in breakout groups.

You’ll leave the masterclass ready to start having fun and effective performance enhancement conversations — minus the doubts, dreads, and hesitations that made you put off those conversations so far.

You can register here. 

Three Options

If you’re still procrastinating that dreaded conversation, you have three choices:

1. Keep putting it off
2. Get an infusion of courage to overcome your resistance to a painful experience — you’ll have to go elsewhere for that
3. Make it not scary, so you don’t need courage — gain the skills on 10 December 2024, 1:30pm CEST (7:30am US EST) by registering here

By “lose it,” I’m talking about an embarrassingly inappropriate reaction to whatever’s going on. It’s not kind. It’s not proportionate. And it’s never helpful.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never lost it on purpose. That is, there has never been a moment when I thought to myself, “Now’s a really good time to lose it.”

But just because it isn’t a rational, intentional response doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense.

Losing It Makes Sense When Your Perception Screams “Lethal Threat”

You lose it because something about a situation triggers a very primal threat response. Your mind interprets visual and auditory signals received from your eyes and ears and predicts unbearable suffering if you don’t act RIGHT NOW.

This happens because your mind isn’t a precision instrument. Its job is to keep you alive, not get things right.

And keeping you alive generally means erring on the side of losing it when the situation is benign as opposed to staying chill in the face of lethal threat.

Even though you may have a long history of losing it—perhaps one that rivals mine—it’s still nearly impossible to accept, at that crucial moment, that your mind is an unreliable narrator.

What you perceive feels uncontrovertibly true.

Which means that responding by losing it—whatever that looks like for you—feels absolutely necessary.

The Goal: Liberation

The goal of personal and professional development is liberation from prior conditioning, so you have the freedom and flexibility to respond as you desire in every moment of your life.

To have the thoughts and emotions that enrich and empower you to live your best.

You can approach freedom only when you have the freedom to choose new pathways of thought and action.

Proof of Unreliability

To liberate your behavior (and yourself) from this conditioning, one of the things you have to do is understand—as in, really really grok—that your perceptions aren’t reality.

But since your mind is the filter through which you experience all of everything, it’s kind of hard to get there.

It’s like when I was a kid, watching TV on my shitty little 13” Zenith black and white TV with a bent rabbit ear antenna, I was never wowed by the commercials for high resolution Sony Trititron. The new TV picture could never be better than the one I was watching.

There are ways of proving to yourself that your mind, as wonderful and useful as it is, doesn’t give a shit about absolute truth.

Optical illusions can do it. I can stare at Muller-Lyer Lines for hours and never actually believe that they’re the same length.

And I can’t accept, not really, that there are 12 unchanging dots in the modified Hermann Grid below, rather than dots that blink in and out of existence as I shift my gaze.

But my favorite brain-breaking illusion isn’t optical—at least, not totally.

The McGurk Effect

It’s called the McGurk Effect, after Harry McGurk, the cognitive psychologist who

studied how very young children perceive language.

Watch a video of me saying “baba baba baba” etc, at one second intervals. You will hear “baba baba baba” etc.

But—and this is a big but, which I love and I cannot lie—when you take that same audio and replace the video with me mouthing “gaga gaga gaga,” you will hear something closer to “dada dada dada.”

And here’s the thing: even when you know for absolutely certain that you are hearing “baba baba baba,” you will not be able to hear the “b” sound when you’re watching my lips make the hard “g” sound.

When you listen with your eyes closed: ba ba.

When you watch my lips with the sound off: ga ga.

When you watch and listen at the same time: da da.

Amirite?

So What?

The moral of this story is that it’s OK to not trust your perceptions when they don’t serve you.

Your brain have a bias for “close-enoughicity” over accuracy.

And a bias for “assume the worst and act accordingly” over “maybe this isn’t as bad as it looks, let’s just hang around and see what develops.”

Spending time with Muller and Lyer, Hermann, and McGurk (or any variety of perceptual illusion) can help tenderize your perception of your perception.

Knowing that you get things wrong, and you can’t help getting things wrong, can provide that molecule of space between stimulus and response.

And a molecule may be all that you need to breathe, remember who you are and what you’re about, and respond flexibly and appropriately to what’s in front of you.

I’m Dr Howie Jacobson, executive coach to leaders and their teams. I help you gain massive traction on what matters most to you. What are your best strategies for not “losing it” when you feel the rising tide? Drop me a line: howie AT askhowie DOT com.

One of my coaching clients shared with me that he’d been asking himself these questions recently, in a brave and profound exercise of introspection.

He’d begun his entrepreneurial journey from a place of love and service. But along the way he’d been influenced by the Silicon Valley culture of entrepreneur worship, and had felt a pull toward doing things that would enhance his reputation more than doing things that manifested his desire to be of service to the world.

And what he realized is, the two motivations were pulling him in opposite directions.

It reminded me of a proverb, often attributed to Confucius, and first printed in Latin in Erasmus’s Adagia in the year 1500: “Duos insequens lepores neutrum capit.”

For those of you who didn’t take high school Latin, that roughly translates to “Chase two rabbits and catch neither.”

(Confession: I did take high school Latin (proof: “semper ubi sub ubi”), and I needed Google Translate.)

The Second, Secret Rabbit

Many of us are chasing more than one rabbit.

Take me, for example.

If you ask me what I want, recognition or the opportunity to serve, I’ll tell you that I’m all about service.

So why do I get secretly pissed off when I do a “good deed” and don’t get enough thanks?

I’m self-aware enough to know that about myself. And sometimes I’m brave enough to admit it.

But I’m sure I’m motivated in ways that I have no idea about.

Example: The Need to Achieve

Take, for example, people high in a trait researchers call N-ach, or “need for achievement.” (Thanks to Richard Boyatzis’ epic work, The Science of Change, for teaching me about this.)

High N-ach folks have a subconscious drive to demonstrate their worth and skill, both to themselves and others. It sounds like a very useful drive, and it is — in situations where there are clear winners and losers, like sports.

But it often comes at a price.

Someone high in N-ach might destroy their health and their relationships to be the top salesperson.

They might start wars and poison the planet in their quest to build the biggest company.

They might play in a sports league and argue and swear and cheat rather than just play hard and have fun.

All of which is to say, they might look back on their life from their deathbed with more than a few regrets.

Other Rabbits

There are plenty of other rabbits that we chase without realizing it: need for approval, need for belonging, need to be right. (For a depressingly complete list, check out Marshall Goldsmith’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.)

Our motivations are our motivations — it’s not for me to judge yours.

But if your hidden motivations are driving you, two bad things are probably happening:

1. They’re interfering with the motivations that consciously drive you, the ones you know you care about
2. They’re pushing you into a smaller life — because our aspirational vision is almost always grander, kinder, and more aligned with our true nature than our unconscious drives

Your deepest vision is bigger than personal success, or making a lot of money, or staying safe.

Flushing Out the Second Rabbit

So how do you discover your secret rabbits, the ones that are distracting you from the rabbits you really want?

By slowing down. By noticing when you feel divided, or pulled in multiple directions.

Whenever you’re not going for what you want 100%, there’s almost certainly a second rabbit in play.

Whenever you notice a feeling of “something’s missing” or “something’s not quite right,” there’s a second rabbit nibbling at a corner of your mind.

Ask yourself, “What else is important to me here?”

Be patient, notice what comes up in your body and mind, and stay with the thread that emerges.

When something bubbles up, reiterate the question: “And what’s important to me about that?”

Keep going until you find the rabbit.

Having multiple motivations isn’t necessarily a problem. Being dragged around by the short and curlies by ones you’re not aware of is.

Once I recognize my desire for recognition, I can choose to let it go, or harness it as part of my service so I don’t end up grumpy and resentful when I do a good deed.

Once an N-ach person accepts that they really like being on the podium (the Gold medal one, of course), they can work toward that goal while still focusing on savoring the journey and growing as a person.

And sometimes when you embrace a life of service, you get that statue anyway.

Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee

Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me

She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call

'Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall

OK, this is familiar stuff. The lovebirds were torn apart, and they’re trying to reunite.

In the third verse, we find out some more details:

But we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree

And tore apart our happy home in Memphis, Tennessee

His girl broke off the relationship because her momma didn’t approve of him. A tale as old as, well, Romeo and Juliet, at least, and as modern as Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.”

That you were Romeo, you were throwing pebbles

And my daddy said, "Stay away from Juliet"

And I was crying on the staircase

Begging you, "Please don't go," and I said

But then the fourth verse of “Memphis, Tennessee,” comes along, and changes everything:

Last time I saw Marie, she was waving me goodbye

With hurry-home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye

Marie is only six years old, information, please

Try to put me through to her in Memphis, Tennessee

Holy schnitzel! Now it’s a completely different song. When I go back to listen to the beginning again, I’m hearing a totally different story. She couldn’t leave her number — I hadn’t paid any attention to how weird a fact that was — because she probably didn’t know it.

Every chord, every word, every line, every image, every vocal inflection — I now hear it as a man mourning the loss of a relationship with his young daughter.

Without realizing it, I hadn’t been listening to the song itself, but rather to the map that I had superimposed on it. I’d unconsciously created a mental shortcut to save cognitive cycles and expend less energy.

Chuck Berry misdirects us, playing with our expectations. He knows that we’ll hear the song in the “I lost my woman” category, and so packs a huge emotional punch when he pulls that rug out from under us.

Maps, Maps Everywhere

We carry maps of the world in our heads and project those maps onto what we call reality.

My experience listening to “Memphis, Tennessee” got me thinking about how much of my life experience is mediated through my unexamined assumptions — the maps that I impose on the world.

As Paul Simon wrote, “A man sees what he wants to see, and disregards the rest.”

But perceiving the world through my assumptions is even more pervasive than that; it’s not just what I want to see or disregard, but how I shape and color what I do see to fit my preexisting narratives.

The High Cost of Maps

What’s the problem with these maps that allow us to navigate life with minimal energy expenditure?

Basically, we’re not experiencing reality. It’s like trying to play guitar with mittens on — there’s a thick layer between us and what’s really going on. And that means our ability to respond appropriately, in real time, is seriously compromised.

Loosening the Grip of the Map

Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory.”

So the first step in breaking free of limiting, brittle maps is to recognize that all our perceptions are mediated through our maps of reality.

That’s the gift Chuck Berry gives us in “Memphis, Tennessee.” The gift that M. Night Shyamalan gives us in The Sixth Sense. The gift that Neil Jordan gives us in The Crying Game.

Now that I’ve gotten myself started, let me lengthen the list.

Chinatown. Ender’s Game. Fight Club. Gone Girl. The Usual Suspects (that’s two for Stephen Rea!). The Empire Strikes Back. Parasite. Shutter Island. Life of Pi.

The Pina Colada Song. Lola. A Boy Named Sue.

Heck, maybe that’s one of the primary functions of art — to show us the inadequacies of our maps, and to give us a taste of dopaminergic liberation as we watch them crumble beneath the weight of contradictory knowledge.

Your Turn

Once you acknowledge your reliance on a map, you can start asking cartographic questions:

• Where does this map not match the landscape in front of me?
• What parts of the map are blank, or contain untethered cautions (“Here be dragons”)?
• What elements of this map are outdated due to things like tectonic shifts or new construction?

We can’t operate without maps — we’d have to evaluate every photon and every sensation on an instant by instant basis, which would leave us no time or space to extract patterns or make sense of the world.

What we can do, however, is remind ourselves that there is a reality beyond what we can comprehend via our maps, and occasionally peak around them into a world of greater possibility than we could ever imagine.

I’m Dr Howie Jacobson. I work with leaders and their teams to get massive traction on what matters most to you. I’d love to hear from you: What matters most to you right now, and what’s getting in the way of achieving it? Email me howie AT askhowie DOT com if you’d like to have a conversation.

And so when you watch a video of the performance, you’ll hear them clearly articulate the sanitized lyrics.

While it’s true that Jagger and bassist Bill Wyman engaged in hilarious and impressively acrobatic eye rolling every time the line passed their lips, they most definitely sang “Let’s spend some time together.”

Yet for decades afterwards, Jagger would insist that he and his bandmates had deliberately mumbled the lyrics as an act of protest.

I can so relate.

Not to being a rock star sex symbol.

Editor’s note: great instance of the obligatory touch of self-aware humility.

But to looking back on my past self with embarrassment and even a touch of shame.

“I Can’t Believe I Did That”

It’s commonplace to regret our actions. And not just when we 25. I can replay last week and cringe at things I said and didn’t say; at things I did, and didn’t do.

I recall moments of cowardice, utter cluelessness, and downright mean-spiritedness.

Editor’s note: easy, boy. This is a newsletter, not a confessional.

And there’s something poignant and quite useful about coming to grips with our shortcomings. Without awareness, there’s no possibility for change.

And yet — wallowing in guilt or shame is like touching a hot stove and keeping your hand there.

“Why are you burning your palm?”

“So I really learn my lesson this time.”

Aversion can kick off a change process, but it can’t sustain it. As Richard Boyatzis points out in his book The Science of Change, sustainable transformation requires what he calls PEA: Positive Emotional Attraction.

And one of the qualities of PEA is a nervous system tilted toward the parasympathetic —what Boyatzis calls the “renewal” circuit — rather than the sympathetic, which you may recognize as the source of “fight or flight” energy.

If you’re criticizing yourself, your mind codes that as an attack. Doesn’t matter that it’s thoughts and words rather than sticks and stones. Doesn’t matter that it’s coming from inside the house rather than from the outside. (Watch any horror movie if you don’t think that “inside the house” isn’t the most effing terrifying prospect.)

And under attack, your mind activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is all about protection and prevention. In other words, you turtle up — emotionally and often physically (shoulders hunched, head forward, neck tight, eyes and jaw clenched).

In that state, meaningful positive change is impossible.

Looking Back with Compassion

So what’s the alternative to getting down on yourself for your past shortcomings?

Self-compassion.

That doesn’t mean giving yourself a free pass.

Instead, it means recognizing that you were doing what you thought you needed in order to get through a particular experience.

And by “you” in “what you thought,” I’m not talking about your conscious mind. I’m talking about the deep inner programming that you constructed to stay alive and as safe as possible when you were young.

I know you don’t want to excuse any prior bad behavior with psychobabble. But that’s not what this is.

Rather, it’s exploring those hidden forces that compromised your aspirations for your best self so they come into the light of awareness.

As long as they remain inaccessible to your conscious mind, they run the show.

But once you know what they are, you can begin to root them out.

Your Turn

Think about a time when you were far from your best.

If your body responds with some fight or flight energy, or begins to fold in collapse from guilt or shame, simply breathe. (If it feels like too much, then abort immediately and don’t go there without professional support.)

Pay attention to the underlying fear you were feeling at that moment. (It’s there.)

Be curious: what’s the prediction of worse suffering if you had behaved differently?

Once it comes to you, it may seem childish or foolish.

You may have the thought: “But that’s ridiculous. That could never happen!”

Beautiful! That means you’re collapsing the old belief by subjecting it to the light of actual experience. You’re bumping an ancient, unexamined belief about yourself, about others, or about the world that you may have adopted before you could even talk into your episodic memory.

Post Script

Dougald Hine, author of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, reread a poem that he had written in his 20s and immediate felt embarrassed by his response to the end of a youthful romantic entanglement. He writes:

“I remember reading an interview with Nick Cave, a few years after The Boatman’s Call, in which he sneered at his slightly younger self for making such melodrama out of an ordinary heartbreak, and there was a time when I would have winced at this poem for similar reasons. But I’m kinder towards that young man now, and inclined to think that our youthful longings can be a training for a larger longing, that our ordinary heartbreaks are what carve us into the people we become.”

May we all be kinder to our younger selves, that they might become our allies in pursuing our best, authentic selves today.

My goal for this newsletter is to encourage you to identify what matters most (WMM) to you, so you can get massive traction and move that work forward. The first element of WMM is your vision of your best self (and for teams and organizations, your collective vision of a grand, uplifting purpose for working together).

If you want to share your WMM with me, I'd love to have a conversation with you. Drop me an email howie AT askhowie DOT com and tell me what matters most in your world right now.

That’s hardly news.

What caught my eye was the fact that the drugs, guns, and money were all in a zippered pouch labeled “Definitely not a bag full of drugs.”

I am not making this up.

Now obviously, I am telling you this because it’s bizarre and, if I’m being honest, pretty hilarious to those of us who love irony.

But now I have to justify the story by turning it into a metaphor.

Fortunately, that’s easy.

Do You Have Any Weaknesses?

Do you have any weaknesses?

• Maybe you’re a mess with spreadsheets.
• Maybe you run out of energy at 2pm on most work days.
• Maybe you break out in flop sweat when asked to present at meetings.

It’s natural to want people to see us in a good light. Evolutionary, status and reputation were assets that could be leveraged for privileged access to resources (a fertile mate and the best cut of tofu, for example).

And that hasn’t changed as we’ve traded clubs and leopard skins for mobile phones and power suits.

So it’s natural to want to hide your weaknesses from your your boss, your peers, and your direct reports.

Unfortunately, that rarely works.

Weaknesses are Obvious by Definition

After all, your weaknesses are weaknesses only because they’re relevant to your performance in a particular context.

I can’t use an astrolabe, for example, but that would be a weakness only if I needed to find the latitude of a ship in the 14th century. Unless I time travel to the deck of a Portuguese caravel in 1389, my navigational deficiency remains irrelevant.

So any weakness that’s identified as such cannot be a secret. Even if you aren’t aware of it, others are (or will be as soon as the situation that calls for that particular skill arises).

Don’t Hide Your Weaknesses

If you try to hide your weaknesses, it’s a lot like walking around with street drugs, a pistol, and cash in a bag labeled “Definitely not a bag full of drugs.”

As all political operatives know, “It’s not the crime; it’s the coverup.”

Having a weakness is a lot less of a problem than having a weakness and trying to hide it.

The gyrations and contortions required to disguise a lack of ability draw far more attention to you than the actual lack of ability.

So what should you do instead?

Own Them and Get Help

Own your weaknesses and enlist stakeholders to help you improve.

That might sound like any of the following:

Hey, I really struggle with putting together pivot tables and turning them into graphs in Excel. I can give you the numbers and validate the analytics, but I need help doing the next steps. Can you think of anyone who could give me a hand with doing the job and acquiring the skill?

Listen, for some reason my energy seems to run out after lunch these days. I’m working on it, but I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. I’m concerned that I’m not going to bring my best to these 4pm pitch meetings — is there any chance we can schedule them earlier in the day?

I’ve got a favor to ask. I’m starting to be asked to brief the SLT on the progress of our initiative, and I find that I get nervous and stilted when I speak in public. Could you all help me work on that during our team meetings, and give me feedback and advice when you see me present?

This does a few things.

First, it demonstrates your confidence in yourself — insecure people don’t publicly acknowledge their challenges and ask for help.

Second, it makes you a role model for others with weaknesses of their own.

Third, it alerts others that you’re trying to improve, so they’ll be much more likely to notice when you do.

And fourth, it orients everyone’s energy — yours and the people you work with — toward a solution.

Your Turn

What’s one weakness that’s getting in the way of your best work?

Have you been trying to hide it, work on it in secret, or pretend that it’s no big deal?

Who might you approach to share that weakness and request help?

Without it, people will play it safe.

They won’t take big swings.

They’ll keep their concerns to themselves.

They’ll defend the status quo rather than seek creative new ways to proceed.

Oh, and the workplace will suck. People will be miserable. And that misery will ripple out into the wider world.

When psychological safety is lacking in your organization or division or team, creating it becomes What Matters Most. And all other outcomes and goals and priorities and values take a back seat.

So how can we create a psychologically safe workplace that rewards innovation and risk-taking and honesty?

Deep Psychology and Neurology

As a coach, consultant, and facilitator, I traffic in the deep psychology and neurophysiology of threat and safety. In gigs where people don’t feel safe at work, I teach my clients about their triggers, glitches, and scars — old patterns of protection that signal danger to themselves and others.

And I guide them to master their mindsets so they can respond appropriately to current reality, rather than the superimposed maps of danger that were installed through past experiences.

You can read about this approach in most of my Mindset Mastery Memos.

Today I want to address the issue of psychological safety on a very different level.

Practical Tips

My friend, psychologist Glenn Livingston, had a long and successful career as a marketing consultant to some of the world’s biggest companies, including major food conglomerates. (For the last decade, he’s “atoned” by teaching people how to defeat their food cravings and master their unwanted impulses at DefeatYourCravings.com.)

When we got on the phone to talk about how leaders can foster psychological safety in their teams and organizations, Glenn shared five practical tips.

1. Separate idea generation from idea evaluation

A quote misattributed to Hemingway advises us to “write drunk, edit sober.” (I want to make it very clear that’s a metaphor — I’m not lining things up for my next book, The Shitfaced Creative.)

Divergent and convergent thinking are two completely different modes of operation, and they work best with a nice big firewall between them. That way, you can access the opportunity-seeking capabilities of the “Discover” mind (divergent) and the discerning qualities of the “Strategic” mind (convergent).

2. Create a ritual to discourage judgmentalism and criticism during brainstorming

Glenn advises creating and publicizing a gentle ritual to point out when convergent, critical thinking sneaks its way into a brainstorming session.

In one company where he was consulting, team members decided to ding the side of their water glass with a tea spoon when they heard a “negative word.”

Eventually, people began dinging themselves, catching their mental train earlier and earlier. This process (which Glenn dubbed “self-dingulation”) gave participants the awareness to notice when their train of thought-habit was about to jump tracks and run over innocent bystanders.

3. Keep meeting attendance to eight people or fewer

We are creatures who crave safety and find uncertainty unsettling. Small meetings — me and seven others, max — allow my brain to focus both on the proceedings and the emotional tone of the other participants.

In a room or on Zoom, I can just manage that many faces without losing track of what’s being said.

4. Ensure that all participants contribute something to the meeting

A corollary to the small number of participants rule is to install a practice by which everyone contributes something to every meeting they attend.

That’s because when people don't talk in a group environment, other people fear that the silent ones are judging them.

When people don’t speak, people like me can’t help but wonder what they’re thinking. Are they mad at me? Do they think I’m an idiot? Are they silently plotting to encase my stapler in Jello?

So whether it’s simply a routine that everyone says hi at the beginning, offers an opinion or preference in the middle, and shares one takeaway or question at the end, this attention to inclusion makes people feel better.

5. Focus on physical comfort

Because we have bodies (or “we are bodies,” depending on your views of metaphysics, ontology, entomology, and astrology), it’s important for an underlying sense of safety to make sure those bodies are cared for.

That means working bathrooms nearby with sufficient capacity for the crowd they serve.

Access to food and drink. (And for the long term, ideally, healthy food and drink.)

Reasonable work hours with frequent breaks.

And attention to ambiance: temperature, air flow, and humidity.

Once these fundamentals are in place, we can talk about the “fuzzier” aspects of a culture of psychological safety.

My goal for this newsletter is to encourage you to identify what matters most (WMM) to you, so you can get massive traction and move that work forward. If you want to share your WMM with me, I'd love to have a conversation with you. Drop me an email howie AT askhowie DOT com and tell me what matters most in your world right now.

I talk about “Mindset Mastery,” but that’s not exactly accurate.

(Alliteration rarely is.)

Because as anyone with a mind knows:

You can’t master your mind.

At least not in terms of dominating it, controlling it, and forcing it to think and feel and remember and imagine what you want it to.

When your mind gets an idea in its head, are you not pretty much along for the ride?

Let’s say, for example, that you present an idea in a meeting, and Sally follows up by pointing out a couple of serious flaws in that idea.

The Ideal Mind

If you were in control of your mind, how would you want it to react to this turn of events?

• You’d want it to get curious, so you’d ask questions about her perspective.
• If you found her concerns valid, you’d want it to be grateful, so you’d express your thanks graciously.
• You'd want it to be open to exploring what you had missed and why, so you could learn from the experience.

Most of us aren’t in possession of that kind of mind, are we?

I know I’m not.

The Actual Mind

When I receive any kind of “constructive feedback,” my mind orchestrates a bodily reaction that has more in common with the klaxon alarm that accompanies the meltdown of a nuclear reactor than the gentle ringing of a meditation gong.

How about you? Does your mind insist that the person who just criticized your idea in a meeting is a present and lethal threat to your life? Does it scream that you must either destroy them or run away as fast and as far as you can?

Here’s how you might tell: it might initiate a whole bunch of physiological changes without asking for your input:

• dilating your pupils (so you see your attacker better)
• raising your heart rate and blood pressure (to increase your available energy stores)
• sending blood and energy where it's needed (to your legs so you can run away or to your jaw so you can to bite)
• pausing long-term projects like digestion, immunity, repair, and reproduction so it can shunt all available energy into staying alive

None of that is helpful when you’re dealing with Sally and her concerns.

In fact, your mind’s strategy can be downright calamitous. And if you don’t intervene quickly, you’ll almost certainly end up doing or saying something you’ll regret later.

How to Invite Wisdom

So how can we insert wisdom into this process, in order to override the wildly misguided fight-or-flight mind and instead engage with curiosity, compassion, and courage?

There are many ways, and you can alway go deeper and discover more about yourself and your mind in the process.

But for now, I want to focus on a single, simple, powerful practice that can begin to break the pattern. Their goal isn’t to create wisdom per se, but rather the space in which wisdom can enter.

Are You Inhibited Enough?

In 1989 I stumbled upon Michael Gelb’s wonderful book, 

Body Learning, which introduced me to the work of F. M. Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique. And one of the technique’s key principles Gelb highlighted was “inhibition.”

That is, if you want to adopt a new behavior or way of being, first check and see what you do naturally, by default, and inhibit it. Don’t try to replace the old behavior with the new one; not at first, anyway.

Instead, just practice NOT doing the old thing.

When it comes to habits of mind that arise in the face of a perceived threat (aka “stress”), inhibition is the first step.

Stress Inoculation: A Powerful Practice of Mental Inhibition

Let’s practice some stress inoculation. Like a real inoculation, you’re going to give yourself a tiny, attenuated dose of the real thing so you can learn how to deal with the full-blown experience should it arise.

Identify a mildly stressful thought. It might be something that happened that you are angry or upset about. It might be something you fear might happen in the future that would make you angry or upset.

Ideally, your stressful thought will be about a 1 or 2 on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is “no biggie” and 10 is imagining being dropped into a lake of boiling lava by a Bond villain.

Step 1: Bring the thought into awareness.

This is a key step — you assuming agency over the thought. It’s not mugging you. You’re inviting it to a cage match.

Step 2: Notice your body’s response.

This may include any of the stress symptoms I mentioned earlier, or your own special kaleidoscope of hormones and neurotransmitters gone apeshit.

Step 3: While focusing on the thought AND your body’s response, begin to breathe in a way that calms you.

If you’re new to this, just take long, slow, deep breathes.

If you’re familiar with breathwork, you’ve got a whole array of techniques at your disposal: coherence breathing; box breathing; 4, 7, 8 breathing; exhale longer than inhale; xi breathing from Qi Gong — it’s all good.

If you feel the thought losing potency, bring it back with slightly heightened intensity.

If you find the stress response in your body fading, amp up the thought.

And keep breathing those calming breaths.

Doing this for 3 minutes, twice a day, will create an inhibitory habit.

And once that’s in place, you can begin to fill the space with wisdom.

Which we’ll talk about in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

Are you a leader responsible for the activities, mindset, and emotional tone of a team? I specialize in Mindset Mastery, so you and your team can focus on What Matters Most and Uproot your Blockages. Reply to this email to find out more and book a free 30-minute discovery call.

I recommend a much more powerful technique to help people solve their own problems, using their own thinking and other internal resources. And the first step, the “magic move,” is to guide them to shift from thinking about the problem to considering what they’d like instead.

What Peter Bregman and I refer to in our book as an “energizing outcome.”

Quality 1: Positive

The first quality of an energizing outcome: it has to be positive. That is, something to move toward, rather than away from. (Read all about it.)

That’s because negative outcomes aren’t motivating. No cab driver will know where to go if you tell them, “Anywhere but here, please.”

Quality 2: Clear

Vague outcomes also aren’t motivating, because they don’t speak to the subconscious, which is the engine of — or obstacle to — change.

That’s because the subconscious mind doesn’t process abstractions. But it loves specifics. (Read all about it.)

And now we’ve reached the third and final quality of an energizing outcome: it’s got to be meaningful.

Quality 3: Meaningful

Meaningful outcomes matter to the people going after them. That’s where the juice comes from; the energy in energizing.

Here’s the thing: problems only matter in context. In fact, they are only actually problems in context.

Problems are Context-Dependent

For example: my problem is that I can’t find a micro-USB charging cable for my old Black Diamond Sprint headlamp — the one that has a strong front beam and bright red blinking LED lights in back (so if I get run over by a truck, I can be confident that it was on purpose).

But wait — I’m not doing any nighttime runs these days.

So not being able to charge the headlamp is not actually a problem. It would become a problem again only if I needed hands-free light during a power outage.

Let’s say you’ve just taken the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment and discovered that your four weakest themes are Focus, Consistency, Competition, and (lowest of the low) Achiever. (Not naming names, Howie.) Is that a problem?

Trick question!

Because the answer is, it depends on the context.

Are My Weaknesses Problems?

If I have a system to keep me on track day after day, then my trouble with focus and consistency are mitigated. (And boy do I have a system! Between Todoist, Clickup, Sunsama, Google Calendar, and an imaginary poster of Mr T hovering inches from my desk chair, I get shit done!)

My tendency to avoid competition might be a problem if I were in an organization where ruthlessness is needed to climb the corporate ladder, or if I were a sales guy in an setting where second place gets a set of steak knives and third place gets fired. But as a coach/consultant/mentor, I don’t need an ego-driven fire in my belly to generate business. I just need to be curious and helpful and clear.

Achiever, though, is another thing altogether. If something in me really doesn’t care if I finish the next book or not, then that’s a problem.

Turning the Problem into a Meaningful Outcome

So what’s the energizing outcome to the problem of lacking the strength of Achiever ?

It’s not the opposite of the problem — which is a good thing, because I’m allergic to motivational posters (and secretly have a fondness for the demotivational ones). I’m not trying to morph into an eager beaver achiever. (Note to self: get the URL EagerBeaverAchiever.com if available. No idea why. Just get it.)

Instead, my energizing outcome is to produce great work on time that enriches others and expresses my values and intellectual property.

That MATTERS to me. A lot.

A Meaningful Outcome Goes Far Beyond the Opposite of the Problem

If I just looked at the problem of not having an Achiever personality, I’d try to solve that. But turning myself into a Achiever (even if that were possible — it sounds exhausting) wouldn’t necessarily address the real issue: I want to put great work out into the world for the benefit of all (including myself).

That outcome makes me tingle.

And it leads naturally to more creative ways of thinking about the problem.

I’ve written 9 books so far in my career. Because I figured out a way to do so without turning into an achiever.

Instead, I signed legal contracts with large publishing houses that scared the shit out of me, so I produced the promised content on time and responded promptly and responsibly to all their queries, concerns, and requests.

Outcome: work that I’m proud of into the world, and me recognized (and compensated) for it. Yippee!

Next week: the second “magic move” to help bring out the best in the people you care about. Stay tuned.

Are you a leader responsible for the activities, mindset, and emotional tone of a team? I specialize in Mindset Mastery, so you and your team can focus on What Matters Most and Uproot your Blockages. Email me at howie AT askhowie DOT com to find out more and book a free 30-minute discovery call.

I recommend a much more powerful technique to help people solve their own problems, using their own thinking and other internal resources. And the first step, the “magic move,” is to guide them to shift from thinking about the problem to considering what they’d like instead.

What Peter Bregman and I refer to in our book as an “energizing outcome.”

Quality 1: Positive

In last week’s memo, I talked about the first quality of an energizing outcome: it has to be positive. That is, something to move toward, rather than away from.

That’s because negative outcomes aren’t motivating. No cab driver will know what to do if you tell them, “Anywhere but here, please.”

This week, let’s look at the second quality: it has be clear.

Quality 2: Clear

Vague outcomes also aren’t motivating.

That’s because the subconscious mind doesn’t process abstractions. It doesn’t know what to do with “feel better” or “gain confidence” or “resolve the conflict.” Those are just word-noises.

On the other hand, the subconscious just eats up specifics.

And change happens, not when the conscious mind wants it to, but when the subconscious mind gives the OK.

In other words, if someone wants to achieve a transformation, they’d better make their subconscious into an ally.

And so it’s crucial to talk to the subconscious in language it understands — what Unlocking the Emotional Brain co-author Bruce Ecker calls “limbic language” — words that evoke images and strong emotions.

Examples of Clear Outcomes

Instead of “feel better,” consider:

“Jump out of bed in the morning and joyfully lace up my running shoes and take a brisk walk around the neighborhood.”

Instead of “gain confidence,” consider:

“Walk to the microphone with a genuine smile on my face and a swagger in my step, eager to share my ideas to help people have a better life.”

Instead of “resolve the conflict,” consider:

“Listen attentively and lovingly, asking questions when I don’t understand and repeating back what I’ve heard so they nod their head and lean in, indicating that they really feel seen and respected.”

See the Movie

Have you ever gotten scared by a horror movie? Like, heart pounding, rapid breathing, skin crawling? (For me: The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, and Get Out top the list.)

Or have you ever imagined a worst-case scenario and likewise had a strong physiological response? (For me: every unread email in my inbox ends me with alone and in a gutter. I’m working on it with very skilled professionals.)

That can happen because the subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between visualization and reality.

When it sees and hears and feels and tastes and smells the future event, location, or situation, it’s rehearsing it, and believing it, and already searching for ways to bring it about.

Elite athletes know this, which is why visualization of contests and outcomes is a staple of sports psychology.

To get someone to a clear outcome, ask them what you’d see, hear, feel, taste, and smell if you were a fly on the wall at the moment they achieved that outcome. Make the inquiry playful, and persist until you both can be there in your minds.

Next week: the third quality of an energizing outcome. Stay tuned.

Are you responsible for managing the mindset and emotional tone of a team? I’ve got a group mentoring program for you, starting in November 2024. Email me at howie@askhowie.com to find out more and apply.

“Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.”

”So tell me what you want, what you really really want.”

And that’s how I think about the crucial, game-changing step in the process of bringing out the best in people who are struggling with a problem.

It’s the “tell me what you want, what you really really want” step.

Except that since I’m a dusty old consultant, I have to jargon it up. So I call it the “energizing outcome.”

What’s an Energizing Outcome?

Now, an energizing outcome is not just any old outcome. After all, it’s energizing.

Which is to say, when you think about achieving it, you get a jolt of energy — fuel to feed the engine that’s gonna make it happen.

So what tends to energize us?

Tag You’re It

In a game of tag, there are two roles: It and Runner. When you’re a Runner, you run only when you’re being chased. And the farther you get from It, the less energy you spend running away.

When you’re It, you’re constantly running after Runners. The closer you get to one of them, the more motivated you become.

Runners try to solve the problem of getting tagged, so they are energized only when the problem looms over them.

It isn’t trying to solve a problem — instead, It is chasing opportunity.

So energizing outcomes are ones where we focus not on solving problems, but rather using problems to achieve higher-level results.

How to Discover Your Energizing Outcome

One way I help my clients unearth their energizing outcome is to ask, “What future state would make you say, ‘I’m glad that I had this problem’?”

Or: “What outcome would be so exciting, that it would make this problem worth having?”

When we’re in the throes of a problem, it’s natural to just want to make it go away. But take a moment to ask yourself one of the energizing outcome questions, you’ll find that “making it go away” can be a pretty low bar.

As negotiation expert Chris Voss says, “Don’t be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better.”

Next week: the three qualities of an energizing outcome. Stay tuned.

Are you responsible for managing the mindset and emotional tone of a team? I’ve got a group mentoring program for you, starting in November 2024. Email me at howie@askhowie.com to find out more and apply.

PS In “Wannabe,” the answer to “what I really really want” turns out to be, “I wanna really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah.” So there you go.

Finally, a kind woman goes to the dining car, buys a bottle of water and gives it to the man. He drinks it all up and sits in silence. The passengers breathe out sighs of relief.

Then: “Oy, was I thirsty. Oy, was I thirsty.”

Ba dum bum.

The point is, we can get so fixated on our problems, they start appearing more interesting than any solutions.

The mind is a problem solving machine, after all, and gets antsy when there are no problems to solve. Just try meditating for 20 minutes if you doubt this — your mind will start swinging from branch to branch like a coked-out squirrel monkey.

The Neurology of Problem-Focus

According to our minds, problems are threats to be dealt with. And when you perceive threat, your neurology shifts into fight-or-flight mode.

In this state, it’s impossible to be creative, expansive, strategic, forward-thinking, or generous.

So when a person or a team is mired in problem-based thinking, your most powerful leverage is to shift them out of problem-focus.

Don’t Jump to the Solution

One mistake that people make is to hurry this process, and go directly into what seems like the opposite of focusing on a problem: focusing on the solution.

Coaches are prone to this error. “Oh, that’s your problem? Let’s talk about how to solve it.”

The trouble with this approach is it almost always leads to a suboptimal solution. Often, we’re trying to solve the wrong problem, or the wrong framing of the problem.

And jumping to looking for a solution assumes that the best we can do is get back to a state of “no more problem,” when a much higher bar might be “use the problem to achieve a better state of overall functioning.”

A better approach, the one my co-author Peter Bregman and I teach in You Can Change Other People (man, I wish we had titled it Bringing Out the Best in Others, but that’s water under the bridge; breathe, Howie, and release), is to shift from the problem to the Energizing Outcome.

That is, what would be such a cool future state that the person could look back and say, “I’m so glad I had this problem, because it led me to take action that transformed my life.”

Empathy and Context

But even that shift needs a little bit of foreplay.

If someone says, “My team is toxic and we’re playing politics rather than getting anything done, and it’s horrible,” don’t jump in with “And how would you like it to be instead?”

People need to know that you care, that you are witnessing their struggles, and that you understand them.

So before you started helping, start learning.

Ask your conversation partner to talk about the problem a bit. Ask for context. A little history. An example.

Keep this part of the conversation short — your goal isn’t to reinforce their problem-focus, but to earn the right to ask, “So, in a perfect world, what would you like instead?”

To get there, your partner has to feel understood and cared for.

Change Verb Tenses

One thing to avoid: empathizing so much that you reinforce how horrible and intractable the problem is.

One way to do this by subtly changing verb tenses, to create a break between the past and the future:

Them: “We’re barely civil to each other in meetings.”

You: “So you’ve been struggling to get along.”

Notice that their description is in the present tense, which implies that it will continue indefinitely.

And you’ve shifted to the present perfect continuous. (Thanks, Warriner’s Grammar in 9th grade English.)

You haven’t gone straight to the past:

You: “So you struggled to get along.”

That’s a disconnect, and you’re likely to get a response like: “No, you’re not listening — it’s still happening.”

Whereas shifting to “you’ve been struggling” triggers no such objection, but still allows for the possibility that it could cease.

Once you’ve built that bridge from problem to outcome, you can then guide your partner to imagine and get excited about that energizing outcome. We’ll see how to do this in upcoming editions of the Mindset Mastery Memo.

Want your team to hum, get things done, and have fun? Me too! Let's talk.

But there’s generative conflict, where the parties involved are both looking with curiosity and passion at the impasse, and there’s destructive conflict, where the egos are battling it out for supremacy or survival.

Generative conflict is fueled by outcomes.

Destructive conflict is fueled by stories.

Stories Motivate Action

When you get triggered, it shows that you’re attaching an interpretation to what happened. And not just any interpretation — if your nervous system gets involved, it’s a story your mind has created to motivate you to fight-or-flight action.

That is, your nervous system has detected a potential lethal threat and alerted your mind, which told a story to make you feel a strong emotion like fear or anger or shame designed to get you to do something to protect yourself.

Stories like that come in three main flavors:

• stories about you and your worth
• stories about other people and their motivations
• stories about the world and the rules that apply

Stories Aren’t True

it can be hard to see that your story is an interpretation rather than the truth. After all, it feels so true to think, “She’s out to get me” when she asks a challenging question on a Slack project channel or “He’s so inconsiderate” when he shows up 7 minutes late to a meeting you’re chairing.

The problem with stories like those, that fire up your limbic brain circuits into a frenzy of fight-or-flight impulses, is that they severely limit your creative options and ability to respond appropriately and effectively.

Don’t Argue with Your Story

Traditional cognitive approaches focus on highlighting your “wrong” thinking, disputing it, and replacing it with something better.

If that worked, I’d be all for it — but it’s all but impossible to totally counteract a thought that is generated by a nervous system facing organismic destruction. No matter how many affirmations you repeat, your survival instinct will keep the story alive in order (in its estimation) to keep you alive.

What To Do Instead

There’s a quick and easy way to loosen your grip on the story — or more accurately, to get the story to loosen its grip on you — so you regain agency and can be effective in dealing with whatever is going on.

Just name the story.

For this, I recommend a simple 6-word prompt, borrowed from Chris Niebauer’s No Self, No Problem: “The story I’m telling myself is…”

And then just allow your mind to complete the sentence.

Examples

• “The story I’m telling myself is that when she asks a question about the compatibility of my code with the backend stack is that she’s out to get me.”
• “The story I’m telling myself is that when he shows up seven minutes late, he’s letting me and everyone else know that he doesn’t respect me and doesn’t care about me.”

Notice that you’re not arguing with the story. You’re not berating yourself for having an interpretation, even a negative one.

Instead, you’re creating, with your words, a space between you and the story.

This allows you to look at the story rather than look at the world through the story.

That’s the difference between wearing dark glasses that color everything you look at and taking the glasses off and seeing them as another object in your visual field.

Freedom to Act

When your story becomes an object, you can become more objective.

You start to see your story as one possible interpretation, rather than the only one.

Your mind might even come up with other, more charitable stories, even unbidden.

• “She’s just worried about what happens if this thing goes over budget.”
• “He might be dealing with a sick child.”

When you address her question, you’ll be much more effective if you assume positive intent — even if your original story of sabotage wasn’t fully off the mark.

When you deal with his tardiness, you’re much more likely to get a cooperative response if you assume positive intent — even if your original story of inconsideration wasn’t fully off the mark.

One of the most powerful findings in all of psychology is that other people tend to rise or fall to your expectations.

When you’re triggered, your words and behaviors communicate that you view them as a threat — and you can make it so.

When you allow for other stories, and intentionally act on the basis of a more charitable one, you can make that one true instead.

So — what’s your story?

Are you part of a team that’s stuck in conflict, battling egos, and high tension? Let’s chat about what’s going on, and whether my Mindset Mastery for High Performing Teams Master Class can start to turn things around.

And despite all the innovations in adult ed and technology, the situation is no better now than in the old days of Death by Powerpoint and building towers out of dried spaghetti and marshmallows to teach creativity.

According to a 2022 Gartner survey, just 29% of employees say learning and development “helps them learn effectively from available people, experiences or content.”

Take negotiation, for example. To negotiate effectively, you need to learn, practice, and master specific skills and techniques. They aren’t secret or esoteric; from Getting to Yes to Never Split the Difference, the best books on the topic are perennial bestsellers.

I took an online negotiation course a few years ago and totally mastered the material. I could have passed the written test in my sleep with my eyes closed (since that’s how I sleep), and possibly with one hand tied behind my back. (Preferably my right, since I’m left-handed.)

In the real world, however, things weren’t so rosy. I froze when trying to renegotiate a contract with a client. I backed down when haggling over the price of a new car because I didn’t want the sales guy to dislike me. And I did another thing badly because this paragraph needs a third example.

And don’t get me started on my attempts to get better at conflict resolution. I’m a ninja at expressing empathy, asking clarifying questions, and exploring interests rather than positions. I can count to 10 like a Buddha before blurting something hurtful. And it can all come tumbling down when I get triggered, and I can end up pouring fuel on the flames of conflict like a right arsehole.

And as the Gartner stat shows, I’m not the only one.

So what’s the problem?

Why are we so bad at installing skills like communication, creative or strategic thinking, and self-regulation?

The Darn “Mind as Computer” Analogy

I’m going to answer by comparing humans to computers, an analogy that I really dislike in general, but it’s too useful here to let that stop me.

Layer 1: Skills / Software

Think of soft skills like active listening, negotiating, time management, creativity, and so on as software. The goal of training is to install the software in trainees, or in most cases update their existing software. Get them from passive ignoring to active listening 1.0 to Active Listening 2.0, and maybe even ACTIVE LISTENING 3.0.

Layer 2: Mindset / Operating System

Software, of course, gets installed on top of an operating system. And if the operating system is too old or too buggy, the software that sits on top of it won’t function well and may not even open.

In our analogy, your operating system is your mindset.

We need to define that word to make it useful.

Your mindset is everything you’ve learned about how the world works: what’s safe and what’s dangerous; what kind of person challenges ideas or keeps their head down; and so on. These are the rules our minds have created in service of our survival, and for the most part they are as unbreakable as they are unconscious.

If training ignores the operating system, that’s like trying to install Autodesk Maya on top of Windows Vista (still the worst OS I’ve ever used — even MSDOS 6.22 was so much better!)

Layer 3: Neurology / Hardware

Drilling one layer deeper, operating systems float on top of hardware.

If the hardware is too old, you can’t upgrade the OS. This happens to me a lot because I read the tech press about the amazing cool features on the last iOS version and then feel sad because it won’t install on my 7-year-old iPhone 8.

Your neurology is your hardware. By neurology, I’m talking about how your body perceives and responds to inner and outer cues of safety and threat, before your conscious mind even gets a say.

When your body and nervous system code a situation as “potential lethal threat,” your body goes into fight-or-flight, ready to bite or run, even if that threat is an email or a snippy comment.

And in fight-or-flight, the circuits that say “curiosity” and “creativity” and “strategic thinking” are all in the OFF OFF OFF position. When means you default to, well, your defaults, which are all the habits you attended that training to change.

Training and Development is a Triple-Layer Process

If you want to change your own habits and behaviors in high-stakes situations, or upgrade those of your team or organization, you need to work at all three levels simultaneously.

You need all three for profound transformation that’s effortless to maintain, and that doesn’t revert during moments of extreme stress.

If that sounds like a long, slow process, it isn’t.

In fact, the most efficient approach is the one that deals with all three levels — skills, mindset, and neurology — at the same time.

That way the mindset can upgrade effortlessly to support the wanted skills, and the neurology responds in real time when its old assumptions are made conscious and can be jettisoned like that package of pickled beets I forgot in the crisper drawer for two months.

The Takeaway

As you pursue high performance in your career and organization, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What’s the one skill or habit that, if changed or upgraded, would make the biggest difference to your happiness and success?
2. What’s the one behavior change that would have the greatest positive impact in your team or organization?
3. What are the elements of mindset and neurology that are blocking those upgrades?
4. What would have to happen for the shifts to occur spontaneously and effortlessly?

If you’d like a hand answering those questions, hit me up at askHowie.com. I’m a high performance speaker, trainer, and coach, and I love the work I do helping executives, leadership teams, and fast growing small businesses do great things with wisdom, joy, and ease.

Instead, we need to request and receive permission to have an uplifting conversation.

So how do we do it? In our book You Can Change Other People, Peter Bregman and I share a three-step process. In case you haven’t read it (gasp), here are the steps:

1. Empathize
2. Express confidence
3. Offer to think it through with them

Let’s explore each step.

Empathize

Why empathize? Two main reasons.

First, if someone feels understood and valued by you, they’re more likely to accept your assistance. In their mind, you’re an ally, rather than a critic.

Second, empathy can help shift their neurology from fight-or-flight into social engagement, which brings their creativity and opportunity-seeking brain systems online.

What does this sound like? It could be as simple as, “It seems like you’re having a hard time with this.” Or, “That sounds like a tough position to be in.” Or, “That’s really challenging.”

It’s also the perfect opening when someone complains to you about their situation. That way, you can avoid giving advice or inappropriately reassuring them, and simply acknowledge that you are paying attention to what they’re feeling.

Express Confidence

You’re expressing confidence in their ability to handle the situation, to overcome the challenge.

This may sound like overly positive thinking, but it’s not. In fact, expressing confidence is tautological; by definition, you wouldn’t bother offering advice if you didn’t think they could benefit from it.

Letting them know that you believe in their ability to deal with this thing strengthens your position as their ally. And this kind of belief is contagious — people often rise to the expectations of others. (Check out this classic 1965 experiment by Rosenthal and Jacobson (no relation to me, as far as I know) for a stunning example of how manipulating teacher expectations significantly changed the educational outcomes of some students.)

Expressing confidence can be overt: “I believe in you, and I know you’ve got what it takes here. I’ve seen you deal with stuff like this before.”

It can reference the fact that they’ve “earned the right” to this challenge: “As team lead, you’re the one they’re looking to right now.”

And it can point to their aspirations for the future: “As you move up in your career, you’ll need to handle stuff like this on a regular basis.”

Offer to think it through with them

This is such a hard thing to refuse, especially when it follows empathy and an expression of confidence. And it’s the simplest thing to offer:

“Would you like to think it through together?”

“Want to think about the situation together?”

“Can we think together about how to approach this issue?”

Putting it together

Here’s an example from You Can Change Other People. In this example, Ben is complaining to a colleague, Dara, about Ramona’s unhelpful behavior as a member of his team.

Ben: Ramona is bossing everyone on the team. She’s so annoying, especially because she’s the one with the least experience.

Dara: That sounds tough. [Empathy]

Ben: Yeah, it is. Everyone’s spending so much time defending their turf that we’re not accomplishing our mission. It’s infuriating.

Dara: Sounds like it’s a larger dynamic than just Ramona. Something you probably need to handle as the team leader. [Confidence] Want to think about the situation together? [Think together]

Ben: Yeah, that would be great. Thanks.

Your Turn

Think of someone you’d like to change in some way. Imagine they come to you, not for advice, but just to complain. What does your 3-part permission formula sound like? For kicks, share your response in the comments (anonymizing, of course, to protect both the innocent and the guilty).

Want to create a team culture where everyone’s a pro at bringing out the best in each other? Reach out at howie@askhowie.com and we can chat about how to make it happen.

It feels cruel to just let them suffer on their own, making the same mistake over and over again, when all they have to do is listen to you.

• Maybe you’ve been where they are, and you can offer support from a place of wisdom.
• Maybe you’ve helped others with this same issue, and you know you can ease their pain.
• Maybe you’re simply a composed and caring sounding board, someone who can listen and ask smart questions to upgrade their mindset.

In a perfect world, they’d ask for your help. My bat-phone would ring, and someone I care about would say, “Hey, Howie, Help me if you can, I’m feeling down.”

In a slightly less-than-perfect world, I might notice their distress and say, “Hey, I can help,” and they’d say, “Oh, yes, that would be amazing.”

Needing Help is a Hard Place

But in the is-world, as opposed to the wish-it-were-world, people often don’t want to admit they need help. They might feel weak, or needy, or not-enough.

And it’s even harder for folks to ask for or accept help from people who have “skin in the game” of your life. If I’m their employee, colleague, or boss; spouse, parent, or child — then they have extra reason to be wary of my motives in wanting to help: Am I trying to make their life better, or my own?

Depending on the power dynamics in our relationship, I might have the power to plow through their reluctance or resistance and insist that they talk to me about the issue.

But I guarantee that doing so will generate a superficial conversation at best, with no buy-in on their end, no matter how brilliant the solution we devise.

Start with Permission

That’s why the first move in initiating a helping conversation is to obtain permission to have the conversation.

And that involves being totally willing to have them withhold that permission.

In other words, your ability to influence depends on giving up control.

That’s not quite right. Here it is, better: Your ability to influence depends upon giving up the illusion of control.

Next time: An approach (and a script) for asking for permission to help.

I support leaders and their teams to achieve high performance through mindset mastery, individually and collectively. Find out more about how I can help at askHowie.com.

And before I do, I want to explain why it’s so hard to deescalate conflict. Why we get drawn into conflict when we know it doesn't serve us. Why we become angry, agitated, passive, disengaged, avoidant, or whatever our repertoire of states and behaviors in response to conflict.

Conflict is seductive. Amanda Ripley, in her book High Conflict, uses the metaphor of the La Brea tar pits, where one animal came in and got stuck and then all the other animals who wanted to eat that animal came in and they got stuck and they started rotting. And then the scavengers came in. And that went on for thousands of years.

It’s so seductive and contagious because our inner minds code conflict as a threat, just like a wild beast that’s trying to eat you.

Even though what’s actually happening may be an email, or a conversation, or a glance, your inner mind senses danger. And it does things to get you to take immediate and decisive action to deal with that danger — either fighting back or running away.

Of course, that doesn't work in a workplace. It doesn't work in a family situation. It doesn't work in most of the human situations we find ourselves. It's actually worse than useless, because it can contribute to that whole La Brea tar pit effect:

Now the other person’s drawn further into conflict, also in self-defense, and everyone’s feeling worse and worse. Things get said that can’t be unsaid, and the initial conflict can morph into an ongoing battle, a feud, a vendetta.

How to Deescalate

The method of deescalation that I promised comes from the musical Grease, from the song “Summer Nights.”

The chorus of that song keeps repeating, “Tell me more, tell me more.”

Those are three incredibly powerful words when it comes to deescalating conflict.

I recommend that you practice them. Train yourself to say them, and mean them, when you feel anger or fear or whatever your emotional conflict signature is.

Look at the other person with as much respect and curiosity as you can muster and say, “Tell me more.”

This works because it shifts your mind from the fight or flight networks in your limbic brain back into the prefrontal cortex — back into the cognitive state where you're now thinking about the topic under discussion rather than being captured by the neurobiology of fight or flight.

Your inner mind is OK with this because it wants to keep you safe. And one of the best ways to deal with a potential threat is to learn as much as you can about it. So it’s willing to let you gather intelligence, to find out what’s going on in the other person that’s triggering their reaction.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept

You can get good at this by practicing “Tell me more” in everyday conversation. People love it when you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say.

Then start using “Tell me more” at the beginning of the teeniest hint of conflict — little things that you might ordinarily just let slide by. “You seemed a little annoyed just then — can you tell me more about what’s going on for you?”

And then start using it in more heated situations: “Tell more about what you’re thinking and feeling. Tell me why this matters to you. Tell me more about what upset you about what I said or did. Tell me more — I really want to know!”

Your prefrontal cortex gets to take over, and your limbic brain is satisfied that you’re acting in a protective way.

As you return yourself from fight or flight into a state of calm and curious presence, you also help your “conflict partner” regulate their own nervous system. You’re showing them that you aren’t a threat, and signaling that fight or flight isn’t needed here.

And from that state, you can both start to get good stuff done.

Want me to “tell you more” about how I work with leaders, teams, and organizations to build cultures of positive and productive conflict? Reach out at askHowie.com.

Fact #1: The word “categorize” comes from ancient Greek and originally meant to accuse. 

That is, the linguistic origin of the idea of putting things or people into groups has an embedded negative connotation. If I’m in one group and you’re in another, one of us is a bit tarnished or diminished. There’s something wrong with one of us — or possibly both of us, if there’s a third group out there!

Fact #2: In the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, the actors in gorilla costumes and the actors in chimp costumes self-segregated at lunchtime, sitting at different tables. They reported feeling more comfortable with people who shared their pretend roles. 

Think about that. Despite the presumed enormous similarities in people who put on ape suits on a Hollywood set for a living, the differences in costume (and by extension species) created a powerful salience that told them, “I am this and you are that, and we are different, and I feel safer with my own kind.”

Cohesion Creates “Thems”

There’s a ton of social science research on how separating people into arbitrary groups creates powerful impulses of “Us against Them.” (Amanda Ripley does a great job of summarizing them — get her book if you’d like to go down that rabbit hole.)

So what about team cohesion? 

In order to get things done, organizations need to organize in teams. And for teams to succeed, they need cohesion: to feel safe in the in-group, to have each others’ backs, and to root for team members to succeed.

Which begs the question: How do we avoid the downside of cohesive teams, the creation of “Thems” who are not “Us,” and who therefore are less trustworthy, less noble, and less deserving of respect and generosity.

Which is to say, everyone in the organization who’s not on your team. And all your vendors and clients. 

How can we benefit from the magic of teamwork without paying the price of silos of tension and suspicion?

Inclusive Teams

Here are three suggestions:

Emphasize Multiple Identities

Rather than forcing people to identify with a single team, put them on multiple teams with people from other primary teams. 

Create cross-functional teams that operate at the same time as day-to-day teams. 

If you have recreational leagues, make sure they include members from all units and divisions within your organization. 

Bring Teams Together

In any sufficiently complex organization (that is, any one I’ve ever seen or worked with), different functions are set in structural conflict with each other. 

Business Development promises the moon to get the sale, and then Operations grumbles at what they have to deliver at a discount price.

Marketing wants to share these amazing testimonials, and Legal cautions against false advertising or violating confidentiality clauses.

R&D wants to allocate money to innovation, while Quality Control wants to keep improving the current model.

I’ve seen these natural tensions turn into nasty internecine fighting, with the different factions “categorizing” each other in very accusatory terms. 

And I’ve run workshops and facilitating meetings where the two groups came together to look at the issue from a structural perspective, and forms alliances to turn the dynamic itself into the problem that they collaborated to solve. 

Create Nested Hierarchies of Perspectives and Governance

Top-down decision making and power structures can not only pit teams against teams in other functions, it can pit different levels of oversight against each other. 

“Those turkeys in management have no idea what the customer wants,” the Sales team fumes.

“The sales team is targeting the wrong market segment because it’s easy to get appointments with them,” the Senior Leadership Team decides. “Do something about it, Charlie” (Chief Revenue Officer).

One solution is to create feedback and governance loops across different levels of the organization, as in the example of Sociocracy. (Check out Sheella Mierson’s work with the Sociocracy Consulting Group if you’d like to find out more.)

When there’s a Operational Leader from the SLT at all Sales meetings, and an elected representative from Sales at all the SLT meetings pertaining to sales issues, feedback can flow back and forth. 

This can dramatically reduce the “Us vs Them” tensions inherent in top-down organizations by allowing information and governance to be distributed among different levels. 

And ideally, those levels are characterized by perspective more than power. If you’re the scout on the hill with the binoculars and I’m the repairer of walls in the citadel, we’re glad for each other’s existence. And the differences in our perspectives enhances our value to each other.

Your Turn

What do you do to mitigate the “Us vs Them” dynamic and create camaraderie and shared purpose?

And have you considered issuing gorilla suits for all your employees?

Looking for help in creating aligned purpose and high trust and safety in your organization? I’m happy to chat. Find me at askHowie.com.

Here’s what ChatGPT came up with:

1. Be Specific: Clearly describe the behavior that’s bothering you. Avoid vague statements and focus on concrete examples.
2. Stay Calm and Respectful: Keep your emotions in check and approach the conversation with respect. This helps to prevent defensiveness and keeps the discussion productive.
3. Focus on Solutions: After addressing the issue, discuss possible solutions or changes in behavior. This shows that you're interested in resolving the problem constructively.

If the words “Simple But Not Easy” are flashing through your head right now, we’re on the same wavelength.

When I’m angry or frustrated or anxious, my brain tends to disconnect from my mouth. It’s easy for me to end up the poster child for “I am immediately going to regret my words.”

So how can we get ourselves back into a physical and emotional state that’s congruent with specificity, calmness, respect, and positivity?

The most effective method I’ve come across involves two surprising steps.

1. Empathize with myself
2. Remind myself of their secret history

Empathize with Myself

I’ve covered this extensively in my book, You Can Change Other People. Right now, suffice to say that you are deserving of compassion, even (perhaps especially) for your anger, frustration, or anxiety.

Giving yourself a metaphorical hug and thinking, “This is really hard for me right now” can take your nervous system down a notch. This prepares it for Step 2, which is the topic of this newsletter.

Remind Myself of Their Secret History

The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is cited as saying, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

This statement flies in the face of one of humanity’s favorite cognitive biases, known as the fundamental attribution error. Simply put, this bias says that when others behave badly it’s because they’re assholes, and when we behave badly it’s because we’re having a bad day or something beyond our control triggered us.

Longfellow’s saying that other people’s behavior will make sense to us, to the point that we can extend to them the same generosity we typically reserve for ourselves.

Someone’s a bully? Bet they were bullied as a kid.

And if you could watch that movie, of how they were on the receiving end of the same abuse they’re now dishing out, your anger would just drain away. (Or more probably, get transferred to their abuser, so you could start the process all over again. Blame, in this framework, is a moving target that never sticks.)

You don’t need access to the home movies of your colleague’s worst days.

Nor will you engage in an intimate conversation with them about their childhood.

All you need to do is remind yourself that this person, like everyone else, has a secret history. And that secret history contains sorrow and suffering.

Please understand: that secret history does not excuse their behavior in any way.

Rather, it enables you to deal with it from a more resourced and strategic place.

The Takeaway

Step 1: Practice

Get in the habit of looking for coherence — sense-making — in the behaviors of people you don’t know personally. The badly behaving Hollywood star. The sleazy Supreme Court justice. The incendiary podcast host.

Step 2: Apply Pre-Conflict

Look for coherence in the behaviors of people you interact with on a regular basis: prickly colleagues, gossipy neighbors, ornery cashiers. Play a game in which you imagine the “secret histories” of sorrow and suffering that fully explain — and, again, in NO WAY EXCUSE — what they say and do.

Step 3: “Pre-hearse” Conflicts

If you have a “nemesis” in your life, visualize the next time they’re likely to do something to intimidate or anger you. Imagine the scene in as much sensory detail as you can: the lighting in the room, the aroma of coffee and stale AC exhaust, the hum of the projector fan, the feel of your bum on the fake Aeron chair.

Watch them do their thing and notice how it makes you feel. Pay attention to your thoughts, your feelings, and your body sensations. Notice any physical urges — balling your hands in fists, or holding your breath, or jumping up and running away. Just do this for a couple of seconds — enough to get into your body but not enough to be totally hijacked by that state.

As soon as you notice your sensory response, say (ideally out loud), “They has a secret history of sorrow and suffering, and this behavior has been their way of surviving it.”

Notice what happens to your body, to your feelings, to your thoughts. See how your urges shift.

Finally, feel compassion for yourself — you also have a secret history, and their behavior has triggered your own means of survival — fighting back, cowering, shutting down, appeasing, going stone-faced, whatever. You also operate coherently.

Step 4: Take this Practice into Real-Time Conflicts

Once you’ve practiced at various levels of challenge, look for moments when you can deploy the Secret History technique in real time. Rather than brace yourself and dread them, you may find that you actually look forward to the clarity, peace, and — most of all — POWER you have when you can manage your own body’s stress response to other people’s behavior.

Looking for support in building emotionally smart teams that embrace good conflict to get stuff done and have a ball together? Find me at askHowie.com and let me know what you’re looking to create.