Opening the next room
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· 8 min read
💜 I've come to believe something pretty central that emerged from my coaching experience. The people who make the deepest, most lasting changes are rarely the ones with a spotless self-image and only superficial knowledge of themselves. They're the ones who have actually gone looking for the wiring underneath, including the parts that don't flatter them, and made some kind of peace with what they found there.
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· 2 min read
In my coaching conversations, leaders who have worked through their struggles with delegation, whether it’s the belief that it’s faster to do things themselves, the fear of being seen as replaceable, or an experience where things went wrong, often tell me that the hardest part came after they handed something over.
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· 3 min read
I've coached and worked alongside a lot of managers. Here's a pattern I noticed long before I had a name for it: the people teams actually rallied behind were rarely the ones who got promoted because they'd been there the longest, or because moving up was simply the next logical rung on the ladder. They were the ones, regardless of title, who made the people around them think more clearly, take more risks, and do their best work. Often, that person wasn't even the one with the most technical experience in the room. There's a neuroscience framework that explains exactly why, and it's one every manager should know.
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· 5 min read
Somewhere right now, there's a version of you standing at the edge of a forest, looking at a door you haven't opened yet. Maybe it's a career change. A relationship you know needs honesty. A dream you've been quietly feeding for years while telling everyone, including yourself, that it's "just an idea for later." Here's the uncomfortable truth: later rarely comes on its own. Someone, or something, has to knock.
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· 1 min read
We can run the exact same mental script for over 40 years and never once ask who wrote it.
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· 2 min read
Once a caterpillar seals itself into its chrysalis, its body doesn't gently remodel. It dissolves. Nearly all its tissue breaks down into a kind of living soup, cell by cell, until almost nothing recognizable as "caterpillar" remains. A small cluster of cells, called imaginal discs, survives that dissolution. They were there all along, dormant, waiting. And from that raw material, using those cells as a blueprint, an entirely different creature assembles itself. If you've ever gone through a real transformation, a divorce, a loss of a close one, a move to a new country or city that reshaped who you are, a burnout recovery, a career reinvention, grief that changed your relationship to...
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· 5 min read
Picture two versions of the same person. In the first room, their voice tightens before they even speak. They edit themselves mid-sentence, brace for the comment that will dismiss what they just said, and quietly learn which parts of themselves are safer left at the door. In the second room, something loosens. They finish a sentence without flinching. They say the true thing instead of the careful thing, and nobody makes them pay for it. Same person. Same life. Two entirely different bodies.
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· 3 min read
Think of the person in your life who never causes trouble. Always available. Always accommodating. The one who says "it's fine, really" so often that nobody's actually checked in a decade to see if it is. We were taught to admire that person. Physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté would ask us to look closer.
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· 5 min read
As I promised in my previous post about emotional burnout caused by my overly responsible nature, today I’m going to talk, although not at such length, about another critical contributor to burnout and depressive states: veering away from your life path and the intrinsic core values of your personality. At the end, you’ll be able to grab a valuable tool you can use whenever you feel like you need a check-up on how closely your lived life reflects your values, or perhaps your anti-values.
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· 9 min read
If you are a person with a short attention span, I’ve got you. I won’t drag you through a lengthy reflection of mine. I’ll just quickly give away a practical tool I came up with at the very beginning of my journey as a coaching client, and I hope it might help you as much as it did me. I called this technique, or rather this small but effective framework, the HYPER-RESPONSIBILITY MODERATOR by Sana Yara. And no, for me, the answer isn’t simply learning to say, “No.” I’ve gotten much better at that over the last decade. The real challenge was learning what to say yes to, and why. Scroll down to the post photo, and you’ll be able to get the gist of it.
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· 3 min read
There's a word that floats around nearly every coaching call, every psychology podcast, every dog-eared self-help book on someone's nightstand. Self-actualization. It sits at the very peak of Maslow's pyramid like a flag on a mountain nobody's quite sure how to climb. It hides inside the "growth" slice of the Wheel of Life. Carl Rogers spent a career circling it too, calling it something closer to a current than a destination, always moving, never arriving...
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· 6 min read
In almost every coaching session I hold, I ask my clients some version of the same question: "What are you feeling right now?" And in 85% of those cases, people start describing thoughts instead, conceptualizing and rationalizing rather than looking inward at the emotional level, under the waterline. If I come back to the same question again, "Thank you for sharing these thoughts with me. And what happens to you internally on the emotional level?", I often get one of five or six words back. Stressed. Fine. Frustrated. Anxious. Good. Overwhelmed. That's it.
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· 10 min read
I always thought I was reasonably self-aware. Then I looked straight into the eyes of my inner Saboteurs... Some time ago, I took the free Positive Intelligence Saboteur Assessment, and I wasn't particularly surprised by the patterns it identified in me, or by how much space each of them had claimed on my little internal Saboteur Council. Most of them felt almost embarrassingly familiar. What did surprise me, though, was the number. My result suggested that, within the Positive Intelligence model, my mind was operating from Saboteur patterns about 62% of the time!!! 🤯
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