Leadership Ready Room

You can be doing everything right and still feel restless. Successful by every measure other people can see, good at what you do, trusted with more of it. And underneath that, something feels off. The learning and the challenge that used to pull you in just aren’t there the same way. The tricky part is…

In the places where I watched people really keep growing, learning wasn’t a separate thing they left the job to go do. It was built into the work itself. That’s the difference I keep coming back to. We tend to treat learning like an errand. Go take the course. Get the certification. Step away for…

You’ve already made the call. You just haven’t said it out loud yet. Not because you’re still deciding. You know the course. It’s because you know what saying it will set in motion. Once it’s out, the changes start. The people you’re responsible for get uncomfortable. They have to be brought along, motivated, helped to…

The bigger the decision, the less certain you feel making it. That caught me off guard the higher I moved in leadership. You keep waiting to feel sure. To have all the consequences resolved before you commit. On the decisions that carry the most weight, that feeling doesn’t really come. So the real edge becomes…

Out walking yesterday, listening to a podcast. When we hit something hard, most of us treat it as a problem to solve. Get through it, get back to normal. COVID was the version most of us lived. When will this be over? When do things go back to the way they were? But what if…

Have you ever caught yourself doing this on a call? I have. I’m with someone, supposed to be all there for them, and my head is still back on whatever I was chewing on before I got on. The strategy, the money, some problem I couldn’t shake. So I’m only kind of there. The more…

An opportunity showed up last week. Pretty aligned with me. My purpose, my skill set. Stuff I’ve actually trained to do. And almost in the same breath, this voice in the back of my head went, “who are you to do that?” Dude. 26 years of leading. Training as a coach. And that voice still…

When the old arena goes away, it can feel like your purpose went with it. The title is gone. The uniform is gone. The mission, team, structure, and rhythm that helped make sense of who you were, all of that changes. For me, that old arena was the Navy. That was the container where a…

For a while, I was equating purpose with income. If this is my purpose, then this must be where the money comes from. I did not realize how much weight I was putting on that one equation. Because once those two things get fused together, the mission can start to feel like something you have…

Yesterday I was journaling about a process I went through five and a half years ago. The same process I now help leaders go through in my coaching practice. I was not trying to create content. I was trying to understand why I am still so passionate about it. When I hired my Blueprint coach,…

If you’re using this Friday to look at next week, this might be worth trying. Open your calendar and look two weeks out. Flag the things you already feel yourself resisting. Not to delete them right away. Just to notice them. Highlight them. Change the color. Circle them if you’re looking at a printed calendar.…

When things get uncertain around you, it helps to know what is steady inside you. Not in some abstract way. I mean, actually knowing the inventory. The things you’re good at. The work that gives you energy. The values that keep showing up. The parts of your purpose that keep pulling on you. When the…