Last week, I joined Club Dad. A club, I learned, that only includes about 40% of men across all of human history (a somewhat surprising tidbit).

And my first impression is…. Wtf? Every expectation I had has been shattered. I read the baby books. I asked for advice and wisdom. I even took notes. And everything is still upside down. Things I thought would be hard have come easily. Things I didn’t even consider keep me up at night.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert popularized a human flaw called “affective forecasting.” It’s the idea that we humans are shit predictors of our future emotions. Fatherhood has placed this cognitive bias front and center. Becoming a dad has temporarily scrambled my hierarchy of what matters, what I believe about myself, what I think people are capable of, and how I see other people.

As much as a LinkedIn Template “Here’s what [life event] taught me about leadership” grosses me out, and none of us want that energy on Substack, I’m going to do it anyway.

Sort of.

Actually, not really. Because I have no clue what the lessons are.

But because of the work I do, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about and observing human behavior in everyday moments. I watch how a barista interacts with a customer to lift their mood. I think about how feelings of power lead to behaviors that will surely get your food spit in. I note down behaviors that can be observed and replicated. Yeah, I don’t have a thriving social life.

While in the hospital and for the first few weeks back home, I had some of these observations. Maybe they’re useful, maybe you find it LinkedIn-gross. I’m probably with you on both fronts. But maybe, if nothing else, they’re entertaining with a cup of coffee.

Some people are better than others.

We all have beliefs that should probably stay between our ears. But after our experience at the hospital, I’m now more convinced than ever of one of mine: some people are better than others. Yeah, yeah, we’re all flawed, deserving of love, have better angels of our nature, blah blah blah. But there really are better angels among us. For four days at the hospital, a variety of nurses attended to my wife, and each was more wonderful than the last.

The way they selflessly cared for my wife (and like, genuinely cared for her wellbeing) was unlike anything I’ve seen. They were both kind and empathetic, and competent and strong during a time we needed it most. Between the long hours, the bodily fluids, and the general morale of hospitals (not exactly places people are going to vacation), I’m convinced you have to be a better human being than most to pursue a career like this.

It’s a leadership belief I’ve been toying with for years…

To be an effective leader, it’s crucial that you become somebody worth following. You have to be more competent, disciplined, humble, and emotionally intelligent than your average bear. You have to build your character and bottom line: be a better human being. I guess if you’re looking for a scorecard of what qualifies as a “better human being,” ask a nurse.

Related: women are different.

I’ve never been prouder of, more impressed by, and more in love with an individual than my wife in the process of literally creating life. Kels, you’re amazing, baby.

Is it cruel?

My answer to the question, “Would you like to go back to a different time…” is a resounding no. No, I don’t want to go back to my childhood. I don’t want to go back to high school “knowing what I know now.” I don’t want to relive my college days.

Despite a life of good fortune and privilege, I much prefer the modern Danny to the past version and circumstances of myself. There’s a litany of items that I’d prefer never to relive.

And I think about how this little dude has to get the chicken pox and the flu. And I’m talking the flu you only get as a child, when you’re so sick that you hallucinate and start praying to some god, any god, that if you just feel better you’ll never disobey your parents again. He’s gotta get his heart broken, and show up for a crap job at 16, develop a taste for broccoli, question his existence, and whatever else hurts through the very fact of growing up as a human.

Suffering is a universal human feature. And at times I feel supremely guilty that I just sentenced him to the entire experience.

This isn’t really a thought on leadership, but damn.

You’re capable of more than you think

Probably the most predictable note here, but now on week three of being in a constantly sleep-deprived state, I’m shocked that I’ve been able to write a sentence, better yet, an article. I’m working relatively effectively. I’m not irritable all day, and I’m not having cheesecake for dinner. A month ago, I would’ve told you that I’d be useless without eight hours of sleep, my morning book time, and a workout.

But here I am. Eating vegetables and all.

It makes me think about how much of the productivity advice out there (including some of my own) is a bit overblown at best and performative at worst. The things we’ve been conditioned to “need” turn out just to be preferences. And some of the “habits” we’ve built are just creative ways to avoid the work we know we should be doing.

It also makes me think about the stories of limitation we tell ourselves. My sister Jill has this saying, “If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them.” You see this a lot in my work. People make rules and ceilings that don’t actually exist in order to justify some behaviors and the absence of others.

It turns out I’m no exception. I had all these stories about sleep and my morning reading time and deadlifts that have ceased to exist for the past three weeks. I don’t know if my current schedule is sustainable. It probably isn’t. But I do believe my limits are way beyond the made-up ceilings I had.

Be the person who celebrates good news

Kels comes from a family where she’s one of five. I come from a family where I’m one of four. We both have a wealth of friendships. And one of the coolest things throughout this process is the outpouring of joy and love from our people. They celebrated our news. They checked in on us. They fed us.

As much as I’m gutted about my guy having to suffer, I’m happy that he will have a lifetime of moments like this from these people – people who celebrate your good news with you. People who get more excited about your success than you do.

At times, we all get caught up in our own shit. We get jealous and insecure. We devour Ben & Jerry’s with all the lights off feeling sorry for ourselves. But to be able to get out of our heads and celebrate and cheer on the people we love is valued more than we know.

These past few weeks, it’s been a reminder to bring joy and energy to other people’s good news. It’s like compound interest for love. It matters.

F*ck a dad bod.

Since my wife got pregnant, I’ve been hyper-aware of the image of “dads” in American society. They’re often depicted as caricatures of stumbling and bumbling idiots. They’re absent-minded doofus sidekicks who consistently let the competent mother down. They can’t remember the pediatrician appointment; they need a to-do list when their wife goes out of town.

On Mother’s Day, it’s “She is beauty, she is grace. Thank you for giving me life, intelligence, empathy and strength. You’re my hero.”

On Father’s Day, it’s “Having a cold one for the Big Guy.”

Things branded with the dad moniker often suck. A dad bod is the equivalent of a grown man built like Squidward.

A dad joke notoriously lacks any humor.

A dad stance is a man with tube socks, a fanny pack, and a visor.

I’m on a mission to never be this dad caricature. Less Phil Dunphy and more Uncle Phil for me. I don’t want fatherhood to become permission to lower my standards for myself – in humor, athleticism, fashion, and beyond (although I may cop a pair of New Balances. But THAT’S IT.)

Some more seasoned parents might be thinking, “Cute aspirations, bud,” or “Wait until…”

And maybe they’re right. We’ll see. But I stand by my sentiment: F*ck a dad bod.

Nature has a certain order.

Something that wasn’t in the baby books was newborns like to play opossum. For a few days after they’re born, not yet awake to the world, they just lie there, eyes closed, looking adorable. It gives this idea, nay, a hope, that “This ain’t so bad. We can do this. I’ll still get my hours of Z’s and my deadlifts.”

Of course, that’s a façade. They awaken. Oh man, do they awaken. But it’s like nature gives you a second to catch your breath. Fresh off giving birth, my wife needed rest. Fresh off four nights of sleeping on a park bench surrounded by beeping hospital machines, I needed just a few hours of rest. And he gave it to us.

It reminds me of that quote attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

I asked ChatGPT to spell-check this article (a great AI use-case for a grown man who can’t spell) and it told me to ditch this part. I told it to stick to the spelling; it stays.

It very well may be too philosophical in a collection of otherwise goofy notes, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately as this little dude just… does stuff. I don’t have to teach him to eat or poop or breathe or grow. Nature takes the lead.

I won’t understate my level of incompetency in this realm, but in a world of forcing things, productivity hacking, and go-getting, there’s something to be said for letting the game come to you. To allow things to unfold naturally. Or as my father likes to say, “EWOP, man.”

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Was this a helpful listicle for aspirational leaders? Or even inspiring fathers? Doubtful. But it’s where the head goes when your world is flipped upside down, you feel every human emotion at the same time, and you’re coming off 6 hours of broken sleep.

In any case, welcome to the world, Cade Coleman 💚

Niyc Pidgeon is one of these professional crushes. A true positive psychologist who helps people understand happiness and optimism in ways that are actually useful (hint: it ain’t being happy all the time).

People think that positive psychology is just positive thinking. If you’re positive all the time, it’s called toxic positivity and it bypasses some of that gold that’s within the adversity for us. ~ Niyc Pidgeon

In this discussion we talked what real positive psychology is, how you wield it for yourself and others, and practical tools to became a better leader.

Go follow Niyc on Instagram. Sign up for her free trainings and get in touch with her there.

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For most of my life I’ve found myself in rooms I felt I didn’t belong in. I’m grateful that I’ve always had mentors who put me in places beyond my comfort zone, and I’m spiteful toward those same mentors for those same reasons.

I first became a manager at 26. I had never hired or trained anyone before, and certainly never “managed” a grown adult. At 28, I became a Director and was even more out of my depth. I didn’t know what KPIs were… or SOPs, OKRs, P&Ls, or any of your other favorite corporate acronyms. Most of my direct reports were nearly twice my age with ten times the experience.

Every morning was an audition of behaviors that signaled, “I have no idea what’s going on here.”

Psychologists call this feeling “imposter syndrome.” It’s the feeling that you’re not qualified to do your thing, or that you doubt your accomplishments, and that eventually, you’re going to be “found out.” Everyone will then point and laugh at you, put a giant Wanted poster on the wall with your photo that says “FRAUD,” and you’ll never be able to find work again, your spouse will leave you, your dog will die, and you’ll have to eat ramen for breakfast like it’s college again.

In short, it ain’t fun. You get anxious, your armpits sweat, and the self-doubt can affect your performance.

There’s an underlying message in the self-help world that you can, or should, feel good all of the time – confident, powerful, joyful, motivated – and if you don’t feel good, you’ve got to take a pill, say a mantra, or buy an app.

But that’s absurd. Self-development and growth are inherently painful.

If I felt confident and powerful going in as a first-time manager, that wouldn’t be inspirational, it would be delusional.

I was 26, unprepared, had minimal knowledge, and was so far out of my comfort zone. Sweaty armpits and anxiety were par for the course.

When you are stepping out of your comfort zone, and you care about your performance, you’re going to have some of these sensations. Having these emotions doesn’t mean you’re broken, and you’re certainly not alone.

The Two Syndromes

In theory, confidence and competence should go hand in hand. We should feel exactly as good as we are skilled. In reality, this rarely happens. The world is not a tidy little place that allows for this everyday-all-day balance. Adam Grant writes about this gap in his book Think Again, where he pairs imposter syndrome with its opposite, what he calls “armchair quarterback syndrome.” I just call it delusional.

Sometimes we’re in positions where we actually have more competence than confidence, resulting in imposter syndrome. We’re promoted or tasked with new projects because we have a healthy level of competence. People trust and believe in us, but we can lack confidence in ourselves that we’re ready.

And as uncomfortable as imposter syndrome can be, it’s the better of the two.

Some people suffer from delusional syndrome. This is when their confidence outweighs their competence.

Think of the dude who played high school football, sitting on the couch eating Fritos, crushing Modelos, screaming at his television that the professional quarterback sucks.

In one study, of managers rated as the worst listeners by their subordinates, 94% said they were good or very good listeners. Man, self-awareness is hard.

Delusional syndrome is the more dangerous of the two, and it’s a syndrome I’ve danced with before.

I remember working at a small marketing agency and feeling like I completely transformed the operations. I built an SOP library, new project management systems, and even ushered in a new team. By the time I left, I was certain they’d be lost without me.

Alas, they were just fine and continued to grow for years after I left.

Whereas those with imposter syndrome invest in growth and skills because they’re nervous they don’t have them, delusional people never do. Why would they? They’re already amazing 🙄

Delusional syndrome may free us from sweaty armpits, but it usually comes with external issues, like difficulties in relationships or limited opportunities at work.

Both syndromes are faulty self-assessments. But delusional syndrome keeps us stuck. The fact that you have doubt is precisely why you’ll grow out of it.

Last week, I connected with the team I first hired in my Director role, and somebody asked the question, “What’s a fond memory you have from our time together?” For me, it was more about what we became as a group than a moment in time. The core of that team has so much love and support for one another. We built something special together and we all grew.

I made a ton of mistakes as a leader, but nobody seemed to define me by these mistakes. The team allowed me to learn without humiliating me, and I got better. It was a lesson that people are both more generous than we think and aren’t judging us as harshly as we judge ourselves. This should give you the freedom to keep going, because there’s really only one way out of imposter syndrome: through it. The confidence and self-assurance we want live on the other side, and it’s the only way true self-esteem is built. Imposter syndrome is just a tax. Pay it.

My wedding was the best day of my life. There’s something that shifts you from the inside out when you make this sacred, public commitment to a person that you actively choose to call “family.” To make that commitment in front of every person who has ever loved you, who’s helped shape you, all in the same room at the same time, is a difficult feeling to describe. It’s like you can hear and see the love bouncing off the walls. The next time that happens, I’ll be dead.

From the outside looking in, it was a traditional American wedding with a ceremony, reception, speeches, and photographers. On the inside, we hollowed out the traditional American wedding like a Jack-o’-lantern. There was no wedding party. No first dance or parent dances. No cake-cutting, Cha Cha Slide, or seating chart. My wife decorated the room herself and curated her own plants instead of forking out $999,999 to a florist.

Something you learn about the American wedding is that every decision comes with other hidden decisions and consequences that take additional resources – money, time, energy, sanity.

It’s not just forking over the money for the florist, but it’s the time it takes to peruse the brochure, and meet with the florist, and the energy to manage the opinions of people who are not getting married that day.

Doing a first dance would have required paid lessons (I have two left feet), time spent practicing, perhaps an urgent care visit for my wife because I bruised and battered her feet.

A seating chart becomes a town square meeting of hurt feelings, disappointments, and hidden resentments that Aunt Becky has to sit next to co-worker Steve. All of a sudden, you need a PMP certification to get married.

I call this the “Russian Doll Effect of Decision Making” and it shows up everywhere, not just at weddings. Like a Russian doll, every decision, purchase, or action comes with hidden layers we fail to recognize or account for. And it costs us.

We’re All Poor Planners

On March 2nd, 1959, builders broke ground on a new, world-class music venue: the Sydney Opera House. Budgeted for $7 million, the Opera House was set to be finished in 1963. By 1965, they weren’t close. It was afflicted with technical issues, political infighting, and skyrocketing costs. In the middle of the project, they learned “the site was neither big enough nor strong enough to carry that structure that seemed on paper light enough to fly away.” The New South Wales Premier Joseph Cahill, who was all-in on the project, provided public support and resources. But when he fell ill, he was replaced by Robert Askin, who strongly opposed the project and placed it on the back burner, slowing down approvals and bureaucratic green lights.

In October 1973, the Sydney Opera House did finally open, a mere 10 years too late and $95 million over budget.

We humans make these mistakes every day. We get excited about an idea, but ignore, miscalculate, and misallocate the additional resources required for that idea to become a reality.

A few years ago, I took on a project that I thought would take me a morning and two cups of coffee to complete. I charged $750 and signed the contract. In reality it took me weeks to finish. I wrote a 10,000-word manual and shot hours of video. I remember putting the final touches on the project while my wife and I were vacationing at Yosemite. Instead of spending vacation mornings lounging around, I was writing management trainings. And it was on me for not clearly defining the scope.

In 1979, the Israeli-American psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, coined the term, the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is the systematic underestimating of the time, cost, and effort our own plans will require (even when we have direct, personal experience of blowing past every estimate we’ve ever made).

Researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has collected a ton of data on just how true this is. It turns out, only 8.5% of projects are finished on time and on budget. And only 0.5% of projects deliver on time, on budget, and with the promised results. The Russian doll is always more layered than we anticipate.

In a study on graduate students, researchers asked students to estimate when they’d finish their thesis. On average, they said “Don’t sweat it, teach. I’ll have this done in 34 days.” The reality? It took about 55 (Buehler, Griffin & Ross 1994).

We are hysterically bad planners, but bless our hearts, we try anyway. We build our Monday.com boards and set our deadlines. We time block our calendars in 15-minute increments. We say “Yes, I can do that!” to every request.

The darkest part is that we continually make the same mistakes, and then feel like there’s something wrong with us for not being able to deliver in scope and on time.

Understanding that this is a general human thing, not a Danny-thing, is the first step to overcoming the Russian Doll Effect.

Think Slow, Act Fast

Our guy, Bent Flyvbjerg, has a solution to this. He says to “Think slow, act fast.”

This is old wisdom (“Measure twice, cut once.”) in a new package. But like most wisdom, we take it for granted.

The point is to pause and consider how many layers the Russian dolls could have before ever getting to work. We may never know for sure, but the think slow part ensures we won’t be writing management trainings at Yosemite National Park for $5.50 per hour.

In my previous job, I worked directly with the President of the company. Before we started anything new, he’d have me write a “Strategy Doc.” These were single-spaced, 6–10-page Word documents that tried to address every aspect of a decision before the decision was ever made.

What does the end result look like (in excruciating detail)? What’s the tech that would be required for 1,000 customers? 10,000 customers? 100,000 customers? What human resources would this require? What would the costs to build look like? To maintain? Legal considerations? Training considerations? Market considerations? What might go wrong? If this were to fail, what would make it fail?

Then I would turn it in and he’d take a red pen to every line on every page. Then I’d go back to work. This would take weeks, if not months. It was exhausting and time-consuming. I hated them. It was like my thinking never went deep enough and the color red began to make me nauseous.

But when the light finally turned green to get to work, we built and scaled a $1 million coaching program in about 14 months.

This is thinking slow in action. It’s understanding the constraints, boundaries, resources, and hidden obligations inside the Russian doll.

Of course, we can take “thinking slow” way too far. It can be a Russian doll of its own if we let it. I’ve seen my precious strategy docs never see reality. I’ve planned NYT bestselling books that were never written.

Planning can be the most socially acceptable form of procrastination there is because it looks like, and feels like, real work. But we do need to eventually get to work. Enter: act fast. We’ve got to make moves on executing that well-thought-out plan. And that still won’t guarantee we’ll avoid all obstacles, disappointments, and Yosemite work sessions. But we’re far more likely to avoid catastrophic mistakes. It’s knowing that everything cannot be accounted for by doing some accounting anyway. And only by exhausting all planning upfront do we go to work.

To think slow, act fast, is to understand why we’re making decisions in the first place. Is it because “it’s what we’ve always done” or what we “should be doing” because we saw it on TikTok? Do you really need to organize your books by color? Do you really need to start rucking?

It’s understanding that, on average, we should multiply our timelines by 1.5X to account for the unknown unknowns.

It’s to process through “If this project were to fail, what would have gone wrong to make it so?” before you ever break ground.

It’s to have the patience to test, deliberate, and consider, and the courage and humility to get to work without all the answers. To understand that the Russian doll always has more layers than the one we see, and that we’ll never truly get to the center is the balance we’re trying to strike.

Easy to Say, Hard to Do

The wedding was surely the best day of my life because it’s the greatest of human experiences shared with my favorite person in the world. But it also exposed me to the power of the Russian doll effect. Hollowing out the Jack-o’-lantern reduced our stress, cut our costs, and shortened our to-do list, and allowed us to enjoy the actual day. By counting the layers before we committed, we had so much more freedom on the day of to enjoy everyone around us and each other.

I should have taken those lessons into the $750 project (and many others). As Kahneman and Tversky point out, we fall for the planning fallacy even when we have previous experience.

Every ‘yes’ is not an isolated task, but a layered list. Eliminating things, saying no, evaluating the entire doll before committing are all ways we can build a moat between us and the planning fallacy. The goal isn’t to never slip up. A meaningful life will never be free of Russian dolls, but we can be more thoughtful in choosing which ones are worth opening. The goal is to have more “best decision I’ve ever made” and less “Contingency Theory in Yosemite.”

For the first time, all four Coleman siblings got together for a conversation—including the elusive #Connor, who has assured us this will be his first and last appearance on the internet.

We talk about why we’ve remained unusually close as adults, how sibling relationships have to evolve, and why staying connected requires more than showing up for Thanksgiving once a year.

Then we get into work, burnout, ambition, management, and leadership. #Connor delivers some hot takes. Brandon tells stories from the less glamorous years of building a career as a professional dancer. Jill shares what she has learned from 15 years of entrepreneurship. And all four of us reflect on the kind of people and leaders we’re trying to become.

There are meaningful lessons in here about self-leadership, relationships, resilience, and creating environments where people can be themselves.

There are also city Yelp reviews, stories about serving pizza to drunk Cubs fans at 3 a.m., and repeated confusion over whether J. Cole is our father or the rapper.

This is one of the most personal—and easily one of my favorite—conversations I’ve ever recorded.

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In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out with 27 other men for the first land crossing of Antarctica. When they were about a day away from the continent, the ship froze right into pack ice in the Weddell Sea.

Shackleton and the crew drifted with the ice for ten months (and you think you’re drifting in life?) until the ice cut through the ship, eventually crushing and swallowing it into the icy sea. Since the ice bath Instagram video wasn’t quite popular yet, they abandoned their ship to float on yet another patch of ice.

Five more months went by with temperatures below zero. The crew survived on seal and penguin.

Shackleton, being the true leader that he was, managed morale obsessively. He kept routines and rituals, assigned responsibilities, and attuned his communication to each individual crew member. He talked poetry with some, soccer with others. He understood how to work the individual egos. He gave their minds something to attend to aside from their approaching deaths.

Shackleton never allowed himself a bad moment in front of the crew. He relentlessly exuded calm and hope that one day they’d return home.

When their lazy river ice float started to break down, they ended up on Elephant Island. The good news was they finally felt land under their feet after 497 days. The bad news, Elephant Island was more lifeless and destitute than The Wall at Castle Black.

Shackleton knew they couldn’t survive there long with limited food and the lack of vacationers to the island. So, he boarded a 22-foot lifeboat with five of his men and set out 800 some miles across the Drake Passage — the most violent ocean on the planet — towards South Georgia Island.

A few miles from South Georgia Island, a storm threw them backwards and a bird kept hovering above his head. Shackleton finally lost it. For nearly 16 months, Ernest Shackleton was the rock of the group, always keeping his emotions in check... until now. He stood up and started swinging and cussing at the bird like a lunatic.1 He caught himself in the act, and immediately sat down, feeling embarrassed. He looked at his men staring back at him with blank faces, made a joke at his own expense, and swore to keep his head until the very end, no matter what.

Shackleton did eventually make it to a whaling station at South Georgia Island, and returned to Elephant Island for the remainder of his crew.

Whereas most of us lose it at the sound of our cubicle-mate chewing, Shackleton led the survival of 27 other men for nearly two years with an almost perfect attitude.

The Shackleton story is a master class in leadership. And although many of us will never be responsible for the literal survival of other human beings at work, we can learn a lot from him to keep calm and carry on.

Leaders Leak

Shackleton’s story is inspirational for a lot of reasons, but one of the more crucial takeaways is that leaders leak. A gross way to put it, but true enough.

Shackleton understood the assignment. He knew the leader infects the group with his attitude and mindset. Much of this occurs in the undercurrents: how leaders act, react, and interact in the small moments of the day.

Your actions, emotions, and attitude subtly and consistently extend out to the rest of the team. Humans are incredible social creatures who adopt and adapt to one another, and leaders have a disproportionate power to affect others.

Not only are we attuned, but we pick up so strongly on others’ emotions that we can experience that same emotion. One study showed that just being in the vicinity of somebody who is stressed can impact our own nervous and endocrine systems. About 26% of observers showed a significant cortisol increase just from watching others under stress, and it jumped to 40% when watching a romantic partner.2 My wife is currently pregnant and she’s been a rock. I’ve been having pregnancy symptoms like eating ice cream sandwiches at midnight and being moody all day.

Another study on nurses found that one nurse’s mood could be reliably predicted by the moods of the other nurses on the team.3

And it’s not just our emotions that are contagious, but our behaviors too. A Stanford study showed that you’re 30% more likely to make an in-flight purchase if your seat-mate does.4

Many leaders I’ve worked with understand this intellectually, so they take that to mean, “Be robot, don’t feel.” They try to suppress emotions or fake a positive attitude at all times. They tell themselves to “suck it up” or “do better.” They think it’s a discipline problem and try to generate more willpower.

But this isn’t what Shackleton did.

Research on emotions by Alicia Grandey found that “surface acting” – faking an emotion you don’t feel, predicts burnout and leaks out anyway.

Shackleton built tools and systems that allowed him to be human – fearful, anxious, and hangry – while holding it down for his team. He poured his fear and internal thoughts into his diary. It was an outlet where he didn’t have to surface act. He also voiced his doubts to his bestie, and second in command, Frank Wild. These outlets may have helped him do something closer to what Grandey called “deep acting” – shifting our internal state through processing and reframing before we enter a room. This makes emotional stability far more sustainable.

He built routines and structures around connection and a sense of normality: meals at fixed times, Saturday toasts, music, soccer matches. When we’re surrounded by chaos, rituals can ground us. They regulate the entire group so no individual (including the leader) has to do it all with willpower.

Shackleton was more equipped than most to handle a situation like this. He had plenty of experience as an explorer and by every account, he had a “natural cheery disposition.” Me? I’d be out after one night of penguin for dinner.

But he wasn’t superhuman. We can all take a lesson from the great explorer to keep our heads when our teams need it most. Which may just be a groggy Monday morning.

Stoicism is Not Roboticism

Most leaders understand the gravity of how they show up and how it affects their team, so they look for ways to keep their head right. I’ve noticed many leaders leaning into a methodology that is solid on the surface, but wrong in execution.

In recent years, an ancient modality has caught a new wave.

Stoicism goes all the way back to your high school years: 300 BCE. It’s a school of thought that provides a path to happiness and inner peace by mastering our emotions and focusing on the things we can control.

But Stoicism: Revised and Updated for 2026 has taken things just a bit too far. Built on practical ideas like courage, discernment, fairness, and self-restraint, the 2026 version has taken to be:

Don’t complain…

Don’t be affected by anything…

Don’t feel…

Don’t ask for help…

Lock it up…

These mindsets lead to emotional suppression, which always returns stronger and weirder. When we suppress all day, all the time, we end up losing our sh*t on a barista because he put 1.5 oz of half and half instead of 1 single oz of almond milk (and you better not misspell my name on that cup).

The Stoics talk about practicing these virtues, not programming them in like an algorithm. They understood the very humanness of our nature. The Stoics didn’t teach us to suppress or pretend like we’re not bothered that the dog dropped a deuce on the carpet, but with time and practice, we can transform emotions or redirect them into positive pursuits.

It’s not that I never get angry, but that when I do get angry, I go run sprints rather than send a passive-aggressive “per my last email” …. email.

So yes, your emotions matter and will infect those around you, but the solution isn’t to “just decide” or “try harder” or avoid icky feelings and distract yourself with ice cream sandwiches and reruns of The Office. Instead, it’s a practice.

It’s a practice of deciding who you want to be when the waters are calm. How do you want to show up when you’re sleep deprived and overwhelmed? How do you want to treat others when you’re “hangry”? Who is the person you want to be in the world, and how do they behave? Deciding how we want to show up before our ship locks into a block of ice. When you decide in a highly specific way who you want to be beforehand, you’re less likely to default to the tension of the moment.

It’s a practice to investigate your emotions and where they come from. Emotions have a Wizard of Oz effect in that they’re much smaller and less intimidating when we pull the curtain back. So next time you’re disproportionately angry, ask what the anger is actually about (note: it’s rarely about the almond milk).

It’s a practice to shape your environment in a way that makes you more resilient to stress, sleep, a vegetable or two, and closing your computer at 5pm.

It’s a practice to put yourself in others’ shoes and see the world through their lens.

When the Endurance finally went under, Frank Wild remembered, “Shackleton told me later that it was the saddest moment in his life, but none of that showed in his demeanour and to all appearance, he was his usual cheery self.” His men knew he was human, but also knew he was someone steady enough to hang their hope on. That’s the whole job of leadership: Your team doesn’t need you to feel nothing. They need to know that what you feel won’t sink the ship. What would your crew say about you?

• You know you need to give the feedback…

• You know you need to say what you actually think…

• You know pretending everything is fine won’t build trust….

And yet, your heart is racing, your jaw is clenched, and every instinct is telling you to soften the message, avoid the tension, or become whoever the room wants you to be.

That tension became the center of my conversation with Meleah Rose, a leadership and development coach who specializes in somatics and brings the psychology of leadership into her work.

We talked about performative leadership: showing up in the way you believe will earn approval, praise, or the ideal outcome, rather than showing up from what is actually true.

Maleah made an important distinction: performing a role isn’t inherently bad. Every professional environment asks something of us. The problem begins when we can no longer tell the difference between what the role requires and what we have abandoned in ourselves to succeed.

That kind of performance is exhausting.

It can also quietly break trust. People usually know when a leader is pretending to be calm, confident, and completely in control. A steadier response might be:

“I can feel that there’s a lot of stress here. I don’t have every answer yet, but I’m with you.”

That is honest without being destabilizing.

We also explored people-pleasing, not merely as a bad habit or mindset problem, but as a deeply reinforced pattern.

Both of us shared how being likable, agreeable, adaptable, and emotionally attuned had been rewarded throughout our lives.

Eventually, however, those strengths can become liabilities.

• You begin filtering your ideas through how everyone else might react…

• You write for the people who disagree with you…

• You soften feedback until it becomes unclear..

• You become so skilled at reading everyone else that you lose contact with what you actually think…

Maleah’s advice was before you practice speaking your truth, you may first need to discover what your truth is. Then you practice being honest, and build the capacity to tolerate the discomfort that honesty sometimes creates.

That idea connects directly to somatic work.

My favorite quote —> “A regulated nervous system does not mean you are permanently calm. It means you can remain present with stress, fear, anger, or uncertainty without allowing that emotion to take control of the car.”

Instead of immediately asking, “How do I fix this feeling?” the work begins with noticing:

Where is this showing up in my body?

Is my jaw tightening?

Is my heart racing?

Am I gripping my stomach?

Is my throat constricting?

You may never fully understand where the reaction originated. What matters is recognizing when it is “running the ship” and developing the ability to stay with it without being overrun by it.

That became one of my favorite ideas from the conversation.

We finished with a practical example for anyone avoiding a difficult conversation:

1. Lengthen your exhales.

2. Decide how you want the other person to feel when the conversation ends.

3. Then deliver the message clearly, without watering it down to protect yourself from their reaction.

This was a deep, practical conversation about performative leadership, vulnerability, people-pleasing, honesty, emotional capacity, and what it means to become a grounded human being under pressure.

Watch the full conversation below.

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Got to have my guy Dr. Jade Teta on the podcast today. We discussed:

👉 How to be both loved AND respected

👉 What we get wrong about personal change and leadership

👉 Jade’s rewrite, rewire, retrain model of personal transformation

👉 How to influence others (and reverse approach from what most take)

Get more from Danny Coleman in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I was talking with my sister Jill, who has been a digital entrepreneur for more than a decade. Jill helps trainers and coaches build online businesses from scratch, and we were talking about how difficult it can be for beginners to create content consistently online.

For instance, my first podcast took four hours to record. It took so much time and energy that all I could do was get horizontal on the couch and eat lasagna off my chest (just playin… sort of.. 😳).

That podcast is 16-minutes long, and it’s horrible. Nobody listened (not even my mom).

Being creative and churning out ideas is hard, so most people end up quitting. Jill was talking about this mental “switch” a lot of her successful clients go through, where they officially move from being a “consumer” to a “creator.” They go from spending most of their time scrolling for new appetizer recipes to creating their own buffalo chicken dip and sharing it with the world.

Jill told me, “At some point, you have to adopt the lifestyle and mindset of a creator. At this point, it’s harder for me to not post in a day than it is to create a post.”

But being a “creator” isn’t limited to those of us tinkering on LinkedIn. Being able to churn out ideas in any type of work is beneficial. Those who are more creative and come up with the most ideas at work are more innovative, collaborative, and resilient and typically enjoy their work more. It leaks into our personal lives, too. Being creative in my marriage gives me that Rico Suave spice. I’ll leave it at that. It’s a family-friendly newsletter.

And it isn’t limited to the chosen among us. In their book Creative Confidence, Tom and David Kelley write, “Creativity isn’t a rare talent that only a few possess; it’s a mindset that anyone can adopt.”

But how? How can we develop more and better ideas?

James Webb Young, an American advertiser, professor, and author of the bestselling book A Technique for Producing Ideas, believed that ideas could be churned out like a 1925 Ford Model T. He wrote, “… the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled.”

We can all learn to be more creative and develop more quality ideas. I’m happy to announce I can now record a 20-minute podcast in… 20 minutes!

We just need better systems and frameworks to curate ideas.

As Young wrote, “What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.”

So today, we’re discussing the four principles by which ideas are produced. Below are some ways to become more creative and avoid finding yourself staring up at the ceiling with a lasagna on your chest after delivering one measly idea.

Principle 1: Become a Storyteller

In one of the darkest days of a Los Angeles man’s life, he learned that his three-year-old grandson was going to die. His daughter’s boyfriend horrendously beat the small child, and his grandson was to be taken off of life support at 9pm.

The man wanted to fly to Denver to see his grandson one last time. As he rushed to the airport, his wife called Southwest Airlines in hopes of getting him a last-minute flight and explained the situation to the Southwest employee.

Unfortunately, traffic en route to LAX caused the man to be late. When he approached the gate 12 minutes after the scheduled departure, he found the pilot awaiting his arrival. The pilot looked at him and said, “They can’t go anywhere without me, and I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We’ll get you there. And again, I’m so sorry.”

That’s the power of story. Stories allow us to show what we stand for and how our ideas can help people rather than telling them how great we are. Southwest didn’t tell us they had excellent customer service or that they are a team of caring people. We connect those dots from the narrative.

Businesses and politicians use stories all the time to come up with marketing ideas and messages.

We can do this in our personal lives, too.

Stories inherently contain meaning. Therefore, if we can get better at noticing and capturing the stories in our lives, we’ll be able to communicate messages, connect seemingly unrelated things, and capture ideas through our daily activities.

Stories come up all the time in everyday life. My two most popular LinkedIn posts to date were about drinking champagne with my family and getting waxed by an older gentleman in chess. There were no insightful takeaways, no big ideas, just champagne and checkmate.

Capture the stories where you have a unique insight, stories of personal failures or mistakes, stories about connecting with other human beings. Your accomplishments, experiences, and observations are potential ideas to share in your social posts, PowerPoint slides, and brainstorming sessions.

People don’t want more facts and figures. They want to connect with you and your work; there is no more powerful way to do that than through a story.

Become a storyteller by noticing all the events that occur every day and sharing them with people. When we make it a practice to scan our environment for stories to share, our well of ideas will never run dry.

Principle 2: Capture & Connect Everything

“An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.” - James Webb Young

In 2008 (a decade before Instagram had 2 billion users and daily podcast listeners had 500,000+ shows to choose from), Americans consumed 10,845 trillion words.

Information is everywhere, yet coming up with great ideas is still a challenging task. Why?

It’s because ideas don’t come from information alone, but from building connections and relationships between different pieces of information.

Author and Entrepreneur James Clear has a brilliant definition of creativity. He defines the creative process as “the act of making new connections between old ideas or recognizing relationships between concepts. Creative thinking is not about generating something new from a blank slate, but rather about taking what is already present and combining those bits and pieces in a way that has not been done previously.”

Meaning, ideas can come from anywhere. When you can connect information you learn in one area to your business, health, and relationships, you’ll have an endless stream of ideas.

Here’s how:

1. Capture The Information

The first step is to ensure that you are capturing enriching information.

Of those trillions of words Americans consume, a majority comes from sources like the news or ESPN.

Begin separating yourself from the majority. Live in a curious way and become fascinated with a wide variety of topics. The more you learn, the wider your reservoir of ideas becomes.

Then capture that information. Write everything down. It doesn’t matter if you use a physical notebook or a digital system like Notion or Google Drive.

2. Connect The Information

Now that you’re capturing all these new and interesting things, it’s time to connect them back to your business and life.

When you learn something new, make it a practice of relating it to things you already know. Can you take lessons from NFL franchises to improve your brand loyalty? Are there lessons in how Harvard runs their classrooms to improve how you run your meetings?

Even better, how can you connect information to your audience’s world? Can you describe your product and service with a dating metaphor? Can you teach how the metabolism works similarly to a city?

When thinking in connections and relationships becomes a habit, you’ll be struck by new ideas on a daily basis. Anything you consume becomes a springboard for new content, and then all you have to do is share it.

3. Share it.

Share these lessons and insights with others. Share conventional wisdom in new ways. Take age-old industry concepts and flip them on their head. Your audience will find your novelty refreshing and your competitors will be seen as old school and dry.

The best part is that the more we share, the more feedback we get. By paying attention to your audience’s behavior, you can continue to refine and improve our ideas. What articles do they share with their friends? What comments do they leave on your posts? Which ideas do they consume? Which do they ignore?

For some, this step may be the most difficult. Sometimes in business and life, the problem isn’t the idea, it’s the execution. And for that, we need a process.

Principle 3: Create a Process

Author Stephen King has sold more than 350 million copies of his 50 plus novels. Is King a creative genius? For sure. However, we can all learn something from his creative process to help ourselves create content over the course of our careers too. King’s secret? Routine.

Around 8am every morning King is at his desk, with a glass of water, and his papers arranged in the exact same way. Just like a bedtime routine, King does the same thing every day to prepare his mind to create. He says, “The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.”

Business and life are busy. And creative work can take a big energy output at first (see: lasagna on chest). Even those of us with the best intentions can end up putting our creative work on the back burner. That’s why most websites haven’t been updated in years and are sitting out there collecting digital dust. Waiting to write an article until you have time or are feeling inspired is a plan for failure.

What your actual process consists of is less important than actually having one. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekly or daily process. It doesn’t matter if you have a cold glass of water like King or you’re wearing your favorite pair of socks. What does matter is:

• What will you do?

• When will you do it?

• Where will you be?

In one study, researchers asked three groups of people to exercise one time, for 20-minutes over the course of the next week.

The first group was only given the above instructions. They were told what to do, and about a third of these people complied.

The second group was given the same request, but were given some reasons why exercise is good for you, and about 35% of them exercised.

The third was given a specific day, time, and location to exercise, and 91% of them achieved the exercise goal.

As I write this, I sit in my favorite coffee shop in Austin (shoutout to Stouthouse) at 7am as I do with all my writing.

When we lay out what we’ll do, when and where we’ll do it, our chances for success skyrocket, and we separate ourselves from our competition with the most potent differentiator of all: consistency.

What is your process for coming up with creative ideas?

A sample week might look like this:

• Monday, 9-10am, desk: Research and outline this week’s ideas

• Tuesday, 7-8am, Stouthouse: Write

• Wednesday, 9-10am, desk: Edit and publish article

• Thursday, 9-9:30am, desk: Queue up article to go out on Friday

• Friday, 3:15pm, horizontal on couch: lasagna on chest

Write yours down, and practice sticking to it, and watch as creativity becomes as routine as brushing your teeth.

Principle 4: Be Helpful

As legend has it, at every meeting with the executive team at Amazon, led by CEO Jeff Bezos, sits an empty chair to represent the person that isn’t in the room: Amazon’s customer.

The empty chair is a reminder to filter all ideas through what is best for their customers. It’s a way to change the team’s paradigm. If they are not actively thinking about the customer, ideas may be centered around their ideas, wants, and needs, rather than the customers.

As humans, it’s natural to get bogged down in our own minds. We filter things through our own world. But from an idea creation standpoint, we too need to change our paradigm.

In work, your idea output isn’t necessarily for you, it’s for your audience or customers. When I’m really in my Rico Suave era, my date night ideas aren’t for me.. they’re for my lady.

When we shift our perspective from “What’s a good idea to me?” to “What is helpful for my people?” ideas come much easier.

If you listen carefully, people will help you never run out of ideas. What are their wants and needs? What are they struggling with? When, in conversation, do you hear people start a sentence with, “I wish…”? Pay attention to these moments. People love to tell you what they need help with.

And then your job is to simply ask yourself, “How can I help?”

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In today’s world, creativity isn’t just a nice-to-have like bringing a plus one to a wedding – it’s a must-have. Of the approximately 132 million full time workers, about 76% are “knowledge workers” — people who think for a living. Building our creativity muscle increases our motivation and engagement, allows us to play well with others, and makes us more adaptable in a fast-changing world.

Adopt these principles to flex that muscle. When you change your worldview to scan for stories, concepts to connect, and opportunities to help others, and put those ideas into action with a consistent process, you’ll never run out of ideas again. Or at the very least, you’ll be able to finish a 20-minute podcast in 20-minutes and keep a scorching hot lasagna off your chest.

Every family grows up with behaviors, rituals, and beliefs that are completely normal… until they’re not. Like the fish who spent his entire life surrounded by water, certain things don’t seem odd because they’re simply the way things have always been.

Then you get older, learn about other people’s lives and think, “What was that about?”

It’s such a constant that I’m not wondering if I’ll raise my son in some weird conditions, but what those conditions will be.

One of these conditions for my family was summers with Dad. My father was (and is) a vagabond. I’ve seen more exits and rest stops on the I-95 corridor than anybody I know. It wasn’t unusual for the five of us to pile into a Dodge Durango (affectionately called “The Dog”) on a Saturday morning and head out. Head out to nowhere in particular. Sometimes “nowhere” ended up being lunch at Applebee’s in Annapolis, other times, looking over the cliffs of Slieve League in County Donegal.

It was a life of equal parts wonder and frustration baked at 425 degrees for one hour.

But no matter where he was living, one constant was a summer visit to Maine where his family would congregate and rent cottages by the lake.

One year, we were planning on skipping the Maine visit ... until we weren’t. We made the last-minute decision to make the run up to Maine in Dad’s Dodge Durango to visit with the family. Unfortunately, because of the spur-of-the-moment decision, there was little room for us to sleep.

My brothers and I had to fold down the back seats of the Durango and lay side-by-side with a single sleeping bag draped over the three of us. My dad reclined in the front seat.

If you know anything about Maine, you know that the state bird is the mosquito. So we had two options: 1) Keep the windows up and sweat profusely from the body heat and circulating breath from four humans piled into a Durango in the middle of July, or 2) Roll down the windows to cool off and get eaten alive by mosquitos. Pick your poison.

My siblings and I had a lot of these “bonding” moments growing up. We spent hours wandering around Wake Forest University waiting for my dad to get off work. We’ve slept in a construction trailer, the kitchen floor of a New York City apartment, and apartments with no furniture at all.

And these moments were just as painful as they sound. Being stuffed into a car, with an unknown destination and an unknown duration. Being away from our mom and our friends for the summer. Crashing in a construction trailer and crushing gas station snacks (depending on the sibling, the distinct smell of yellow Gatorade or white cheddar popcorn can bring instant nausea to this day). Not exactly an environment for us to show up as our “best selves.”

There were a lot of tears and fights and extreme boredom over the years. But as much as there was pain, there was also a lot of laughing, singing, and conflict resolution skills being developed. These are now some of the times my siblings and I look back on with the most affection and gratitude.

It’s these conditions that made us so close in our adult years. It’s what makes all of us so adaptable and easygoing.

My wife and I have a saying that we love and perpetually repeat to one another in tough, weird, or uncertain times (or on moving days).

“What’s most unreasonable is the most memorable.”

It’s an idea from one of my favorite books, The Power of Moments by Chip & Dan Heath. The Heath brothers write about the moments in life that are the most meaningful, memorable, and transformative.

These are the moments we remember and appreciate. They’re the ones that bring us closer together. They’re the tales we tell at barbecues and reunions.

Typically, the memories we cherish are the ones that challenge and frustrate us in real time. It’s the moments when we suffered through something, overcame it, and usually did so with the help of others.

When you listen to military vets or retired athletes, what they miss the most isn’t the battlefield or the playing field, but the shared, unreasonable moments with their teammates.

Some of my most distinct memories are of times I’d never want to return to, but I have a unique appreciation for:

• Moving across the country for “some girl” (who ended up becoming my wife ;-))

• High school basketball conditioning drills

• Dropping out of college… then re-enrolling in college in my mid-twenties.

• Running a half marathon

• Asking for a 25% raise

• Walking around without a front tooth for 9 months

• Taking a car trip from Maine to Texas with my father listening to nothing but “Irish rebel songs”

The Heath brothers have a great line in their book: “Speed bumps are reasonable. Mount Everest is not.”

As we become adults, we start to become “reasonable.” Of course it’s a net positive to pay your taxes, pick your kid up from practice on time, and learn to cook.

But nobody is on their deathbed telling the tale of their 2015 tax returns.

With reasonability, life loses a bit of flavor. Psychologists have identified a period of time in our lives called the “reminiscence bump” – an idea that most of our most memorable experiences occur between the ages of 15 and 30. This time in our life contains a ton of novelty – we attend new schools, make new friends, start new jobs, move to new cities, get married, etc. – which tends to slow down our perception of time, capturing the experience in our memory bank. Once we hit 30, we’re drastically less likely to make new friends, try new things, or sleep in a car with your siblings.

Reasonable, efficient, or comfortable shouldn’t be the goal. A life without problems is a mythical one, and a life without challenges is a boring one.

To be clear, I don’t coach people to “go actively seek discomfort.” That daily cold plunge is for the birds. I find that life puts you in the Durango of Discomfort plenty enough. The people I work with are already in discomfort – they have to have tough conversations, let people go, deal with controlling bosses, and deal with the rest of life’s demands.

Instead, I try to help them reframe the unreasonable. I help them engage with, accept, and move through the discomfort. Because when we understand that the unreasonable often becomes memorable, we can find the motivation to move through the discomfort and see what lies on the other side. Typically, these moments become the ones we’re proud of, laugh about, and earn trust and respect from others. It just doesn’t always feel like that when we’re in it.

Only with the benefit of time do you realize the Durango wasn’t a detour, but the mechanism for growth and meaning.

If nothing else, years will pass, and no matter how tough of a Tuesday you’re having, you’ll think, “At least I can crash in a bed and not the Durango.”

When my wife and I lived in Salt Lake City, we hosted a friend for a long weekend. Our friend, never having been to Utah before, wanted to check out Park City, a little mountain town east of Salt Lake.

Kels and I had been to Park City a half a dozen times and were familiar with the route. As I flicked on my blinker to take the final left toward downtown Park City, I heard a “Wrong turn. Keep straight.” from the back seat. She spoke with such conviction that I followed her advice and continued on straight for some reason. I was pretty sure she had no idea what she was talking about, but I listened anyway.

After a few miles, sensing we were getting deeper into nowhere, my wife pulled up a map. “Yeah, we needed to take a left about 5 miles ago.”

I was annoyed that we went out of our way, but I was more annoyed with myself. I was pretty sure I knew where I was headed, but defaulted to the back seat driver anyway. Why?

The Trust Recession

A “Trust Recession” is the term for what many of us are feeling. A widespread, collective decline in the confidence of businesses, institutions, media, and each other.

Last week, a technician from Xfinity came to our house to install the WiFi. For some reason, he had to extend the wires into the neighbor’s yard. These bulky orange cables were strung out all through their backyard into ours (my neighbor didn’t like it). The technician told me not to worry about it. “Somebody will come by tomorrow and bury the cable underground,” he said. No harm, no foul.

Tomorrow came and went, and the cord was still strung out everywhere. I texted the technician. He responded, “You are on the appointment list, they will fix that soon, I don’t have power to get them faster.”

I know he probably doesn’t have the power to move things along any faster, and my neighbor will live. But I no longer believe anything he says. It’s a small infraction illustrative of a larger issue. It’s hard to believe what anyone says. And when society feels like their government, their businesses, or their neighbor can’t be trusted, everything gets worse.

Sociologists who study trust find that high-trust societies are highly correlated with economic growth, lower corruption, higher engagement in entrepreneurship, more civic engagement, and a generous welfare state. It affects everything from GDP to the wellbeing of a population. When trust disappears, so does engagement.

We see trust deteriorating on an individual level too. Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Marissa King, has found that only about ⅓ of people think strangers can be trusted (something that’s been on the decline since the 1970s). She also found that less than half of full-time employees have a high level of trust in their employer. Managers seem to trust their teams even less.

Research shows that high-trust environments and relationships lead to fewer sick days, less burnout, and more satisfaction in our lives. Low trust relationships make everything less efficient and more costly.

A post-9/11 airport experience is far slower and more inefficient than it was before. Now, it requires three full-time TSA agents and a $200,000 X-ray to identify and dispose of my mouthwash.

At work, having to “trust but verify” (whatever that oxymoron means) takes twice the time and twice the oversight. Having to hold onto team members’ projects in your head is mentally taxing and distracting from your own work. Not having people deliver on their timelines ensures we’ll be slow on delivery and overbudget.

The trust recession isn’t about being all kumbaya. There’s a real cost.

The Trust Gap is Being Filled with the Wrong Voices

The trust gap creates a lot of uncertainty. Who should I trust? What if I get burned? Is there anybody I can count on? Will the orange cables always be in my neighbors yard?

Dr. David Rock, the Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, says that certainty is one of the five needs of our brain. When one of these needs is threatened, we get weird. We ignore our instincts, question our decisions, and drive right past the road we know leads to Park City.

The brain’s need for certainty is about sensing patterns and predicting the next steps. In a predictive environment, things run far more smoothly and efficiently.

When certainty is missing, we become unable to predict what comes next, and the brain has to burn even more resources, pulling in the energy-intensive prefrontal cortex just to process moment-to-moment experience. Uncertainty causes the same neural circuitry to fire in the brain as a physical threat would.

Worse yet, the void left by uncertainty is filled by the wrong voices. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that when people answer questions quickly and confidently, we see them as more trustworthy and intelligent. The problem? They’re wrong more often.

Their speed and conviction fill the hole of uncertainty in our brain. How could they possibly answer so quickly and confidently if they weren’t absolutely sure?

The answer to that is another article. But these people provide us with a much-needed sense of certainty.

It reminds me of… me.. when I was in my early twenties. I knew everything. I mean everything. I spoke quickly and passionately, and had the “right” answer to all of life’s questions. I had an opinion on things that I didn’t have an opinion on. It was good to be king.

I now think of that person with so much embarrassment. He knew nothing. As with most people who know nothing, he spoke quickly and with conviction. These are the behaviors of the child, not a leader.

The voices we need to hear aren’t the loudest or most passionate. They aren’t the ones who express their beliefs with the most conviction.

They are the most credible.

Real Leaders are the Most Certain in the Room

A mentor of mine always goes on about integrity. But not the primary definition of integrity where you’re honest, have moral principles, blah, blah, blah. But the second, lesser known definition.

in·teg·ri·ty (noun) the state of being whole and undivided; the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction.

By this definition, to have integrity is to do the things you say you’re going to do. It’s being imperturbable in highly stressful, chaotic situations. Like a bridge that has integrity, our trust becomes so strong that it conflates with certainty. I trust the bridge so much that I don’t question crossing it. It will hold.

That same mentor always says, “A leader needs to be the most certain in the room.” She’s speaking to that very human need of certainty. But to be certain isn’t to be right all of the time; it’s not to never make a mistake; it’s not about saying something the loudest from the back seat.

It’s about being trustworthy and credible. It’s about being somebody whose word carries weight.

So the leader formula is this: Credibility = (Integrity + Competence) x Time

Competence matters. We do need to have the basic knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to perform a specific role. But the primary practice is building integrity. It’s building a pattern of evidence for following through and coming through. Over time, people take note and begin to default to your judgment. They begin to trust you because you have a history of following through over time.

The other voice is loud and confident, but trust me, that voice in the back seat will direct you right past the turn you know you’re supposed to take.

Be an antidote to the Trust Recession by following through on your word. Be the antidote to false conviction by making room for those who are thoughtful and nuanced. Be wary of the quick answer (even those that are your own). And be a voice that has earned the right to be trusted.

My wife and I are about six weeks away from welcoming our first child into the world. Last week, we purchased our first home. And a few weeks before that, we got a Costco membership. #adulting.

Everyone has been congratulating us for all of our perceived adulting. And if you Google “how to be an adult,” these will be the recurring themes. You’ll get all sorts of info about getting your finances in order, installing a ceiling fan, interviewing well, making a killer lasagna from scratch or whatever.

But in my work, you quickly learn that’s a short-sighted definition for “adult.” There are a lot of folks who meet the adult criteria materialistically (house, baby, lasagna recipe), but come up short emotionally. The houses, the titles, and the dinner parties leave much to be desired from a leadership perspective. These aren’t the things that inspire or move others. Yet they’re the very things we celebrate and place people upon a pedestal for.

Developmental psychology, the study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt throughout our lives, provides a useful lens that goes beyond how well people know AI or which tax loopholes they take advantage of. And it provides a framework for what real leadership looks like.

In his book, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, author Mark Manson frames it like this:

Phase 1: The Child

We all start here, obviously. The child operates from a paradigm of pleasure and pain. If he wants a cookie, he’ll eat the cookies. He doesn’t consider other people’s thoughts and feelings. He doesn’t think about the consequences of eating cookies before dinner, or whether mom will get upset, or if those calories are going to hit his waistline later. He crushes the cookies because they’re delicious. That’s it. He doesn’t share his toys because he doesn’t wanna, and that’s a good enough reason.

The child doesn’t feel a ton of empathy and has a hard time putting himself in other people’s shoes.

Through this definition, I’m sure we all know children with beards. They struggle with sharing credit, have a hard time seeing the world through other people’s eyes, and find “I don’t wanna” to be a perfectly justified reason for not doing something.

Fortunately, most (but not all) of us grow out of childhood from an emotional development standpoint.

Phase 2: Adolescence

The adolescent paradigm is that of the trade-off. We begin to understand consequences and cause and effect. We now think, I won’t eat the cookie because it makes Mom mad.

Adolescence is absolutely a developmental improvement. It’s more abstract and forward-thinking. He can see how his actions and choices affect those around him. He can give up the cookie today to get two cookies tomorrow. He understands that throwing food at the dinner table is a bad look.

The problem with the adolescent is that his worldview eventually becomes manipulative and ineffective. He sees everything as a means to some other end. He avoids the cookie so Mom doesn’t get mad. A more crass example: a man who buys a woman dinner and expects sex. The dinner is a means to some other manipulative end.

Many people work to earn money (duh) but when we only work as a means to the end of money, work becomes shallow and unfulfilling, and we end up with an epidemic of burnout.

The perfect illustration of the adolescent at work is that of the people pleaser. The people pleaser does certain things in order to be liked. He does things to gain respect, affection, or status. He says what he thinks people want to hear. And as every people pleaser knows, this is as exhausting as it is ineffective.

The problem with the adolescent is that he doesn’t stand for anything in and of itself. Everything he does is in pursuit of something else. So he never actually stands for anything, and he never gets off the treadmill.

Phase 3: The Adult

The adult paradigm is that of the principle. The adult does something simply for its own sake, because it’s the right thing to do.

For example, the adult is honest not to get something, but because he believes honesty is the right thing. He does it even when it’s hard, even when it can hurt somebody he cares about, even when it puts his job at risk.

This is the highest level of development, and the foundation of leadership. Being an adult stands on its own two feet. Self-worth and self-esteem become intrinsic and independent. When the adolescent bargains – I won’t eat the cookie so Mom doesn’t get mad — his self-worth becomes dependent on somebody else’s mood and evaluation of him. It’s a life of bargaining.

Bargaining can get us far in the material world (see: Costco membership) but it doesn’t help us emotionally, and it doesn’t fuel leadership. Being the adult in the room works because, according to author Mark Manson, “The most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining.”

Respect, love, appreciation, fulfillment, influence, and award-winning lasagna all require forgoing the bargaining of the adolescent.

And we need more adults in the room.

Stress Reveals Our Real Character

A mentor and friend of mine likes to say, “It’s easy to be all good when everything is all good.”

It’s easy for me to sit in my office, with a fresh cup of coffee and eight hours of sleep, and wax poetically about how we need more adults in the room. How we need more leaders who aren’t dependent on the pleasure and pain of the moment, or bargaining and manipulating their way through the world.

It’s easy to preach being honest, courageous, and kind when the moment doesn’t call for it.

I once had a boss who told me, “Danny, we love mistakes here. They’re learning opportunities. I want everybody to make mistakes!” Then, three days later, he proceeded to rip a team member a new one when he made a mistake.

Stress tears us all down. It reveals our true character and insecurities. It breaks down our discipline and causes us to rationalize, defend, and justify eating the cookie.

When my “adulting” comes back to haunt me — the roof starts to leak, and my baby doesn’t sleep for nine straight days — it’s much more challenging to hold the line. I acknowledge that.

And that’s when it’s revealed who we truly are. The bad news is that stress and suffering are inevitable. None of us will escape it.

Author Bruce Feiler has a concept he calls “lifequakes” — a massive burst of change that shatters a person’s routine and forces them to rebuild. He says the average person goes through about three to five large lifequakes in their lifetime. Things like tragedy, loss, severe diagnosis, and financial ruin. Things that take years to recover from.

Nobody escapes these lifequakes. We all have to face them, and they’ll reveal what we’re made of.

The good news is that stress is the emotional training ground for our character; where leaders are sculpted and formed and adults are made.

When things are thrown off course, do we gossip, judge, and complain? Or do we take responsibility for how we want to show up for others? Do we play the victim, acting as if we’re a tumbleweed in the wind of our emotions and circumstances, or do we own our attitudes and actions? Do we let fear guide us? Do we follow through on our word?

These are the things that make for adults in the room. These are the leaders that we follow.

Leadership has a character-demand. People follow those whom they respect. Those who inspire and transcend the natural human experience of stress and suffering in order to help others. Those who do the right thing despite their emotions or the consequences.

Your job title, Rolex, bitchin’ lasagna don’t inspire people. It’s how you show up when conditions are less than ideal.

These people are the rare among us. These are the leaders among us. These are the adults in the room.

As I write this, I’m in the heart of Denver in a coffee shop that I could only describe as… exactly what you’d expect a Denver coffee shop to be. It’s a warehouse closet with one wall covered in grassy moss and another that is an entire pane of glass revealing vintage coffee equipment.

The barista, wearing a thick flannel, asked me if I preferred a coffee from Honduras or another coffee from Honduras. My palate isn’t that advanced.

My brother, Connor, is locked in on work across the table from me, but I’m distracted. It’s my favorite morning of the year: the first Thursday of March Madness.

I’m a basketball fanatic. I played growing up, and I have a lot of childhood memories of attending tournament games with my family. The NCAA tournament has a different juice to it. It’s a David vs. Goliath-like feel. All of a sudden, you’re actively rooting for a school that you don’t even know the location of. The urgency of win or go home. It’s cutthroat. It’s thrilling.

Connor and I are heading over to watch a few games today.

In this moment, I couldn’t be happier. Which has me thinking about happiness.

In my early 20s, I was obsessed with the study of happiness and the emerging field of positive psychology. I spent an inordinate amount of time reading the works of Shawn Achor, Tal Ben-Shahar, Martin Seligman, and Barbara Fredrickson. I fell asleep listening to the recorded tapes of Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, John Maxwell, and Jim Rohn.

Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of dating going on back then.

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot wrong about happiness. Happiness does fuel higher performance and well-being, but it can’t be pursued. It has to ensue. The more we make happiness the goal, the more it eludes us.

Happiness is a byproduct of three things. It’s the result of having something to do, someone to love, and someone to be.

Something to do

In the psychotherapist Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes about a transformational story in his childhood. He had to drop out of school because he kept randomly fainting. Apparently, this intellectual titan was paralyzed by fear of mathematics.

“I was free,” he wrote. “I dreamt for hours... [and I’d] be anywhere I liked.” But after about six months, he had this nagging sense life was passing him by. He didn’t feel engaged or fulfilled. His father was concerned, too, about what he’d become in life if he couldn’t be cured.

One day, after overhearing his father’s concerns, he remembered being “thunderstruck” and immediately feeling this sense of responsibility to reengage with the world. He thought, “Why, then, I must get to work!” He attacked his studies with vigor. The fainting occurred occasionally, but he continued on anyway.

This defining moment led Jung to a career of profound discoveries and accolades.

Psychologists talk a lot about our need to have things to do. As nice as a margarita-fueled beach life sounds, chances are we’d start to feel that same sense of nagging Jung felt.

Humans don’t do well with stress and chaos, but we also don’t do too well with idle time.

One of the most fascinating insights I’ve come across is that, oftentimes, Americans find it more difficult to find enjoyment on our weekends than during our work week because work requires us to engage our minds, pursue our goals, and have a sense of structure.

In other words, we need things to do. It’s a fundamental need to seek out novelty and new challenges. Whether toiling with our hands or stretching our minds, we do best when in motion; when engaging in activities that are active, not passive.

Do something. Anything. Explore your interests. Start with imperfect action. Positive emotions are sure to follow.

As Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner says, “You’re more likely to act yourself into feeling than you are to feel yourself into action.”

Somebody to love

We know that one of the most fundamental needs of humans is to be loved. We need to be hugged and kissed and cared for. We need to be seen, understood, and valued. Children who don’t receive proper care and love have long-lasting, detrimental effects on their psychology.

As adults, when a little TLC is lacking from our lives, we feel it, too. We’ll quit our jobs or send texts at three in the morning.

Our culture doubles down on this need-to-be-loved messaging. We’re told our happiness is dependent on receiving attention, respect, and care from others, so we make checklists of our “perfect partner.” We are quick to identify “red flags” in others. We question whether others are taking care of our needs.

But the other half of the formula is equally important. It’s a fundamental need to love and care for others.

The psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, George Vaillant, writes, “successful human development involves, first, absorbing love, next reciprocally sharing love, and finally giving love unselfishly away.”

I know a woman who emits love to others. She makes everyone feel like they’re the most important person in the world. Whereas others walk into a room and say, “Here I am!” she walks in and says, “There YOU are.” She brings joy to everyone she meets. She’s also one of the happiest people I’ve ever known.

Giving away our attention, resources, and time to others is actually a powerful way to have love flow back to us. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom finds in his practice that “A problem of not-being-loved is more often than not a problem of not loving.”

To notice others, to take care of them, to step outside of ourselves isn’t just good for others’ happiness, but for our own.

Somebody to be

Lastly, we need somebody to be. Our identity is a complex topic. Who we are is constantly changing and being shaped by both our inner and outer worlds, but we do have a say. We can curate a healthy sense of self by choosing and displaying “good values.”

The author Mark Manson defines “good values” as those that are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable.

For example, feeling positive all of the time is probably not a great thing to value. It’s unrealistic. But being kind even when you’re hangry is because it’s controllable and socially constructive.

Values like honesty, kindness, courage, self-respect, creativity, humility, service, gratitude, and integrity tend to fuel the good life. Whereas pursuits like power, status, money, or pleasure tend to hurt our sense of well-being over the long run.

When we actively choose our values and find opportunities every day to display those values, we start to develop a sense of self we’re proud of. Pioneers of modern motivational theory Edward Deci and Richard Ryan find that “True self-esteem develops when one’s actions are congruent with one’s inner core values and beliefs rather than externally or internally imposed demands.”

Just as we watch and judge other people based on their behavior, we watch and judge ourselves. Every action is a vote for the person we wish to become.

The Paradox of Happiness

The power of these three elements is that they cause us to forget about happiness entirely. We become so engaged in life that we forget to stop and ask whether we’re happy. The great psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, “The actualized person… seldom stops to assess his happiness.”

In some sense, it’s a paradox because these pursuits don’t necessarily feel good in the short term. Exploration and engaging in new challenges can spark frustration. Focusing on others can make us feel vulnerable (“But who will take care of me?”). Becoming a newer, stronger version of ourselves can be clunky and cause some disturbance in our current environment.

But over time, these are the pursuits that make life worth living. All three remove us from focusing on how we feel all of the time. They become bigger-than-self pursuits.

And that’s precisely the point. Only by focusing on other things, things that transcend the self, will we find happiness.

We all need something to do, somebody to love, and somebody to be.

When I was 10, my mom caught wind that I was writing a break-up email to my “girlfriend” (whatever a girlfriend is to a 10-year-old). She was so disappointed and told me that if I was going to do it, I had to do it to her face. She then invited my girlfriend’s family over for dinner. My girlfriend walked through the door, I walked directly over to her and said, “I don’t want to be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore. I just want to be friends.” And immediately turned and walked away.

Not a masterclass in communication, but it took more courage than an email.

In high school, it played out again. I wanted to quit the football team and focus on basketball. I was destined for the NBA, after all. My master plan was to hide from the gruff and tough football coach for the next two years. He’d get the hint when I just didn’t show up next season. My mom wasn’t having that either. I had to go in, look the man in the eye, and tell him I didn’t want to play next season. That dude looked through my soul and told me I was making the wrong decision. I again turned around and walked away.

Life has continued to be a series of “I don’t wanna,” and then attempting the conversation anyway. Tim Ferriss once said, “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”

I’m not sure if it’s true of success in life, but it’s certainly true in leadership. I once read a memoir by a U.S. President where he was talking about how, at that level, the only conversations you have are of the highest stakes. So, Mr. President, would you like children to starve or take away healthcare from millions? Let’s discuss bailing out megalomaniacs in order to keep the economy from collapsing.

In a study of over 2,200 projects and programs, at hundreds of organizations, across the world, researchers found they could predict which projects will fail months or years in advance with 90 percent accuracy. The key factor wasn’t talent, budget, or strategy, but whether people were willing to speak up at crucial moments.

These “crucial moments” can be defined eloquently and scientifically as “I don’t wanna.” These “I don’t wanna” events occur every day – holding a high performer accountable, leading upwards towards our manager, telling the server, “Actually, sir, I ordered the salad, not the burger,” after the wrong order slides in front of you.

These conversations are hard, and I’ve blundered plenty and avoided plenty more. No sane person enjoys conflict, and no truthful person is naturally good at it. But life and work always become better on the other end of these moments.

When I was a kid, we’d go to the Jersey Shore every year for family vacation. And towards the end of the week, we’d go to the beach at night with my grandfather and Uncle Rich. The family ritual was to go out into the darkness of the ocean, past where you could stand.

Dangerous? Yes. Bonding and thrilling? Absolutely. We’d strip down to our skivvies (my grandfather would wear tighty-whities – a bold choice) and slowly venture out into the darkness.

The first hurdle was the temperature. The Atlantic Ocean would be freezing at night without the warmth of the sun. But we were young and impressionable, so you did as Uncle Rich did: sprint as fast as you can and ungracefully swan dive into the waves. Then, the terror. You swam out to where you could no longer feel the sand beneath your feet. We’d doggy paddle out there, wondering if a shark would come by for an evening snack, or the ocean would sweep you away.

After a few minutes, we’d swim back to shore, feeling so…. alive. On the other side of fear, we found joy and connection that seldom finds me in my day job.

I view difficult conversations like this. At first, you dread it, then you dive into the conversation, and the water is as cold and as shocking as you feared it would be. Then you doggy paddle for a few minutes, sitting in the discomfort and fear. But then you swim back, get to shore, and you’re exhilarated. You feel more confident and connected in the aftermath.

My job of coaching leaders mostly centers around the conversations that are being avoided or mishandled. 80% of their “challenges” would go away if they could have the conversations. So how do we have them?

How to Have Difficult Conversations

Typically, people fall into two camps: 1) Team Honesty and 2) Team Empathy. Unfortunately, both teams lose, but researchers did find that one is worse than the other.

Researchers Dr. Taya Cohen and Dr. Emma Levine examined difficult conversations and how people approached them in their daily lives (Levine & Cohen, 2018). They asked some participants to be kind in all of their conversations for three days. They asked others to be completely honest. And a third group to be “mindful” of their communication.

The honesty group was anxious and thought they would damage relationships. But at the end of the three days, this was the group that actually had more connection and meaning. Their peers and friends appreciated the honesty, even when it hurt in the short term, because it led to more trust and more growth. As the baseball manager Joe Maddon once said, “If I tell you the truth, you may not like me for a week. If I lie to you, you’ll hate me forever.”

Wharton professor Adam Grant makes a distinction between politeness, withholding feedback so that somebody will feel good today, and kindness, being candid about how they can get better tomorrow.

The core reason people avoid difficult conversations is fear. Fear of how the person will react. Fear that we’re going to hurt their feelings or ruin the relationship. But this often isn’t the case. Levine & Cohen call this an affective-forecasting error: we believe honesty will be far less connecting and more relationally damaging than it actually turns out to be.

But this doesn’t mean there’s no place for empathy. Honesty gets us into the ocean; empathy is needed while we’re doggy paddling in the deep end.

The great basketball coach Gregg Popovich was supposedly a master at this. When he had to cut a player, he made sure he was the one to do it. He wouldn’t send his assistants or write an email, he’d walk down the hall and tell the player he was cut, why he was cut, and that he truly cared about the human being.

Longtime Spurs assistant coach Chip Engelland once said, “A lot of coaches can yell or be nice, but what Pop does is different. He delivers two things over and over: he’ll tell you the truth, with no BS, and then he’ll love you to death.”

Most leaders I work with have the heart. They care about people and hate hurting them. It was often said that Popovich would get deeply emotional in these conversations. His eyes would well up in the same breath he was delivering a tough truth. This is inherently a good thing. And it’s why these conversations are so hard. The cost of honesty is concrete, immediate, and visceral (you’ll watch their face fall, today, and you’ll feel awful doing it). The benefit is abstract and delayed (they’ll grow, the relationship will deepen, eventually, maybe, invisibly). Your brain is wired to overweight the near concrete pain and underweight the distant abstract gain.

But we need to overcome this. We need to ungracefully swan dive into the ocean knowing that there’s something wonderful on the other side.

People think they need to have the right words or say the right thing at the right time, so they delay. They put it off until tomorrow or next week, but by then it’s too late. It’s a sneaky way the brain talks us out of things: put it off until “well, it’s too late now.”

In reality, the formula is simple:

1. Swan Dive In: Jump right in with direct honesty. Tell them exactly what you want to say without sugarcoating it (“I want to talk about the decrease in your performance.”)

2. Swim Out to Where You Can’t Stand: Focus on the objective and observable. Too often, leaders use generic language here. (”You said you’d have it by Thursday but never delivered.”)

3. Doggy Paddle in the Deep End: Hold empathy and respect (“I know you have a ton on your plate right now…. I got your back.”)

4. Return to Shore: Establish expectations and agreements moving forward (“From now on, can we agree on…”)

These conversations can be messy. They can look like a grown man swan diving or an older man in tighty-whities. It ain’t pretty, but we can’t let these be reasons to avoid the experience. Having and navigating these conversations is some of the most important work we can do as leaders. And it never ends…

Dr. John Gottman’s work is some of the most important on the planet. He studies romantic relationships, but his ideas always translate into other relationships.

His research reveals that 69% of relationship conflicts are perpetual. Meaning, the majority of arguments are never truly “solved” because they stem from “fundamental, unchangeable differences in personality, core values, or lifestyle needs.”

Instead of instructing people to “fix” these problems, he teaches us how to manage them with dialogue, humor, and mutual respect.

In leadership, difficult conversations will never end. In fact, the higher position of leadership you obtain, the more difficult they become. So the objective isn’t to eliminate, but to improve. Like a muscle, we can get better at being honest and direct. We get better at shortening the distance between problem and conversation. We get better at navigating to dark waters where we can’t stand and finding the balance between honesty and empathy.

And in the grand scheme of life, engaging in the things that scare us ends up being some of the most rewarding experiences. And then they become traditions that you embrace.

So go ahead, let’s see that swan dive.

In 2019, the walls were shaking at the Ritz Carlton in Charlotte. John Wall, an NBA player for the Washington Wizards, was tearing through his hotel room – smashing the television, shattering mirrors, punching walls, tossing lamps.

It had been an extremely difficult year for Wall. An Achilleas injury took him away from the game he loved, and infections from surgery nearly led to getting his foot amputated. Wall was already near a breaking point when he received a call from his sister that their mother passed away from complications with breast cancer.

When Wall reflects on that night, he always mentions his teammate, Bradley Beal. “When I got the phone call, the first person that came down to my hotel room to hang out with me was Brad.” Wall said. In a Players Tribune article, Wall wrote, “That’s actually when I got really close to Brad. I think he knew there was nothing even to say, so he came down to my room and just sat with me.”

After the game in Charlotte, Beal didn’t get on the team plane. He drove up to Raleigh, Wall’s hometown, and spent a few days with him.

When asked about what he said to Wall the night of his mother’s passing and the days that followed, Beal told the media, “Just be there to support him, lift him up, pray for him, and just be there for him. ... I didn’t say anything, there was nothing to say. Being there to hold him, being there to comfort him... I’m blessed that I can call John my brother.”

Just be there to support him. That’s it. Beal didn’t share some trite quote he saw on Instagram. He didn’t try to make it about himself. He wasn’t mentally somewhere else. He was right there by Wall’s side for days, and it made all the difference.

I love this story because it highlights what real human connection looks like. We think connection and support come in these big, sweeping gestures. In reality, connection forms in the mundane, repeated action of showing up – checking in, listening without trying to fix the problem or interrupting, sharing in the discomfort. These are the things that make-or-break relationships, and these are the things that are becoming more scarce.

The Paradox of Connection

My most popular Substack note ever read, “In hundreds of coaching hours, I’ve noticed a pattern: most people feel completely alone. Like they’re the only one in the history of this floating rock to ever experience something. We can all take solace in knowing we’re not alone. Often what is most personal is most general.”

It struck a chord with a lot of people because in these very human moments where we fail, come up short, when we’re struggling, we all feel entirely alone despite how common these experiences are. Over the past 20 years, there’s been a gradual deterioration in trust and connection. We sense that the people in our lives are either unwilling or unable to hold it down for us. In 1985, Americans commonly said that they had three close friends they could confide in. By 2004 that number dropped to zero.

Author Shawn Achor calls this “The Great Drift”: the slow erosion of shared sources of meaning and belief systems that used to anchor people, defined by an increase in burnout, anxiety, loneliness, and depression.

Although it’s complex and convoluted, I suspect feeling untethered from others is a major contributor to the Great Drift. In the moments we need others the most, they’re nowhere to be found.

Dr. Suzan Song calls it the paradox of connection: everyone craves more connection, but few know how to create it. Song says, “Too often people’s idea of connection ends with talking. They assume they’re building a bond when they’re really just talking about themselves, filling air with words and transforming the listener into a wall.”

Unlike Beal, we squirm in the presence of others’ suffering. We do whatever we can to escape the moment of discomfort. We start talking about ourselves, we offer fortune-cookie advice, or tell people how they’ll be better off for their pain.

Aside from a missed opportunity for connection, this almost always makes the person in pain feel worse. Instead, the real antidote is exactly what Beal did for John Wall: be fully present, listen intently, and signal that you’re there for them. As Dr. Song says, “Listening well isn’t just summarizing or paraphrasing. It’s bearing witness to someone’s suffering to know they’re not alone.”

Listening to somebody, truly listening to them, is a tonic for the soul. It’s a signal or respect and care that we all crave. It’s so powerful that when people feel truly listened to, anxiety and defensiveness decrease, while openness to new ideas, trust, and connection all increase. In the famous, Framingham Heart Study, one of the many amazing findings was those who had people who listened to them, had slower cognitive aging and slowed symptoms of dementia. Those with “low listener availability” were cognitively aging four years ahead of those with a support system.

Dr. Song points out that these fundamental human skills can atrophy without use (just like our physical muscles). More and more we’re consumed with our own thoughts and emotions, and much to-dos about nothing leaves little energy and time left over to help others feel like they matter.

Like Bradley Beal, we need more people who possess and develop these skills. Skills to be present. Skills to sustain focus and paying attention to others. Skills to sit in the suffering, even when we’re unsure what to say.

Showing Up in the Dark Moments

Back in February, in a hotel room of my own, I felt the walls closing in around me. The room literally felt like it was shrinking. My breath became shallow. It was like oxygen was being sucked out of the room. I started sweating, and the well finally burst. I started crying for the first time in probably a decade (or more?). I was hyperventilating. I was dying. Or so I thought.

Turns out, I experienced my first ever panic attack.

It was horrible, and I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for those who’ve experienced them frequently and consistently throughout their lives.

It was a culmination of weeks of travel, huge work events, personal changes, shifts in my identity all crashing down at once. It was terrifying and paralyzing. Sprinkle in some shame that I am supposed to be above this (or at least that’s what my ego told me). I read all the books, I coach others for a living, I write and teach methods to maintain emotional regulation and control. And yet, here I was, crumbling in real time.

Naturally, I reached out to people in my life, and it was really interesting what helped and hurt in those moments.

Some people went into coach mode, spouting advice they saw on Instagram. Talking about silver linings and how I’ll be thankful one day.

• “It’s a part of life, enjoy the ride.”

• “You’re going to be thankful for this one day.”

• “Just control what you can control.”

All well-meaning, all useful advice at times, but all utterly useless in that moment. As a friend once eloquently put it, “Silver linings are bullshit when you’re covered in feces.”

The last thing somebody going through the muck wants to, or is capable of doing, is finding a silver lining or being “grateful” for the experience.

Others were uncomfortable by my suffering and tried to quickly move the conversation along.

Still others, made me feel human and whole. They let me speak. They listened. My brothers came out to visit with me and spend time. My mom came out and spent a long weekend with me. Other friends and family checked in periodically. In hindsight, I feel grateful that I have far more than three people to confide in.

I share this not to gain sympathy, but to illustrate something we all know to be true. People don’t want advice in those moments. They don’t want your solutions or a psychology study. Even ChatGPT starts its feedback with “I’m sorry you’re going through that Danny.”

Psychologists have a term called existential mattering. It’s the feeling that our lives have value and significance to the world at large. And we typically derive that from other people. Unfortunately, existential mattering is on the decline because we’re all folding deeper into our own world.

Paradoxically, by being a rock in the rough ocean of life for others, we fuel our own existential mattering. We demonstrate to the world that we’re the type of person who shows up. We’re the type of person others can count on. We’re the type of person who can withstand the discomfort of others’ suffering, listen deeply, and keep our silver lining advice to ourselves.

And when we inevitably crumble in a hotel room of our own, we look up to find other rocks propping us up. As John Wall talks about all the time, because of those dark nights when Bradley Beal showed up for him, he’ll do the same for Brad, whenever he finds himself in need of a friend.

It’s a reminder for all of us that people need presence more than advice.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was shoot hoops with my parents. Both of them were great basketball players, and I used to love stories about them going to college campuses in the Boston area and waxing college students who were 10+ years younger than them in games of 2-on-2. At eleven years old, despite being the best basketball player in my neighborhood, I was the only kid still losing to his mom in a game of one-on-one. If I have childhood trauma, that’s it.

Both of my parents had tendencies on the basketball court that would make you do a double-take if you were walking by. My mom’s favorite move would be to back you down until she was feet from the basket, and with her back to the basket, she would toss the ball backwards over her head and swish it through the net. If she really wanted to crush your soul, she’d close her eyes before tossing it up (and still swish it through).

My dad’s quirk was a bit more jarring. If he’d miss an open 17-footer, he’d shout, “C’mon, Jim! You’re better than that!” If I were a stranger walking by, I’d be seriously concerned. But as a 10-year-old, I just imitated my pops. “C’mon, Dan! You can shoot better than that!”

My friends thought it was weird to refer to yourself in the third person. I agree, it is weird. But it’s something that stuck with me, and I continued to use it throughout sports, school, and my career. I’d coach myself up by talking in the third person. I chalked it up to one of those weird quirks you get from your family, like walling around barefoot or loving bologna sandwiches. And for whatever reason, it seemed to help. I’d feel myself calm down and I’d see solutions to problems that I’d previous missed.

Then, in July of 2010, I saw another basketball player who referred to himself in the third person.

I remember watching Lebron James on television to announce his now infamous decision to leave Cleveland and “take his talents to South Beach” to play for the Miami Heat. I was in living in California, glued to the TV like 9 million other Americans.

People lost their collective minds. This notorious moment in television now lives on by a single name: The Decision.

As if “The Decision” wasn’t enough for the mob, the post-decision interview with ESPN’s Michael Wilbon really caused people to get their panties in a wad. In the interview, LeBron said, “I wanted to do what was best, you know, for LeBron James, what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy.”

People thought he was narcissistic, arrogant, and whatever other adjective they could come up with for people they hated. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote, “It’s always a bad sign when people begin talking about themselves in the third person”.

Lebron is far from the first person to refer to himself in the third person (see: my dad on the basketball court).

Author and psychologist Ethan Kross highlighted a few others in his book, Chatter:

Actress Jennifer Lawrence had to pause during an emotional interview with the New York Times and said, “Okay, get ahold of yourself, Jennifer.”

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai recounted the experience of being put on the Taliban’s assassination list and how she handled it emotionally. She said, “I asked myself, ‘What would you do, Malala [if you came face to face with the Taliban]?’”

Julius Caesar wrote about himself using his own name and the pronoun “he” when referring to himself instead of “I.”

And, of course, my dad would yell, “Dammit, Jim! C’mon!” when missing an easy look at the hoop at public parks across the country.

Are all these people raging narcissists? Arrogant beyond belief? Emotionally tormented? On the contrary, they may actually be less arrogant, more emotionally intelligent, and more thoughtful and caring for others.

To Maureen Dowd’s dismay, research shows that it’s more of a bad sign when people use more first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, mine, my, and myself). These people tend to be more self-absorbed, experience more negative emotions (like anxiety and depression), and are generally less concerned about other humans.

Referring to yourself in the third person, like Lebron did in his ESPN interview, especially during stressful times, can actually be quite healthy. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy and mental health OG, called this “distancing” – a process by which we separate ourselves from the thoughts or emotions of the moment.

When stressed out, our vision narrows, and we turn inwards toward our thoughts or emotions. Our body’s stress response kicks in, releasing adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, narrowing our vision, increasing our heart rate, and flooding us with negative emotions. This is a great state to be in if you’re entering the UFC octagon or running from a cheetah (as one does). But it’s not great for making decisions, dispensing words of wisdom, or biting your tongue when somebody is wearing their nasty ass shoes on your living room carpet.

In short, we psychologically zoom in on our world and lose perspective. We get stuck inside our own heads.

Therefore, distancing can be an effective way to regain our composure and make better decisions, think more rationally, and experience less intense and less persistent negative emotions.

The best way to distance is to get physical space from the situation.

My mentor and friend Jade Teta always advised me to take 24 hours and workout before making major decisions. It’s advice that has saved me a lot of heartache over the years. It creates the physical space and time I need to overcome the emotions of the moment and make better decisions.

It reminds me of the advice by the writer Robert A. Heinlein to “avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry.”

Taking the time and space to allow the emotions to fade is always wise.

My wife and I move a lot. So we created what we’ve come to call the “Moving Pact,” in which we come together on the morning of a move and agree that no matter what frustration we feel, we’ll not say anything mean to each other, take anything personally, or break up in the heat of the moment (it’s sort of a joke… but not really). We move a lot, and it’s always stressful, so this distancing technique has saved a lot of hurt feelings over the years.

Ideally, we’d always be able to get the physical distance from problem (i.e. take 24-hours and a workout), but getting a physical distance is not always possible, so a good substitute is to take a page out of the Lebron James Playbook and refer to ourselves in the third person.

This creates a psychological distance from our thoughts and emotions of the moment, allowing us to ruminate less, think rationally, and make better decisions.

In experiments, when participants are prompted to use this distancing technique, they experience less shame and embarrassment, make better first impressions, perform better on stressful problem-solving tasks, make stronger moral decisions, and even see improvements in cardiovascular function.

Now, you don’t have to do this out loud like my dad or Lebron. If we can learn something from them, it’s that disrupting social norms can cause a few raised eyebrows (or a complete uprising in the case of LBJ). But the strategy remains effective. Anything you can do to remove yourself from the center of your own universe will allow you to be more effective in your work and relationships.

This practice I picked up from my dad all those years ago has always served me. I just didn’t have the research to back it up. I just knew it worked for me.

Distancing is all about creating space between impulse and action. Utilizing the third person when talking to ourselves is a useful tool to feel and perform better.

Give it a try. Best case scenario, you experience less anxiety and make better decisions. Worst case, your hometown will revolt, burn your jersey, and call you a traitor and narcissist. It’s a toss-up, but the research is on your side.

Mohini was a White Tiger at The Washington DC National Zoo. She lived in a 12-by-12-foot cage with iron bars and a cement floor for years. She spent her days pacing back and forth in that box while 7-year-olds flicked boogers and smushed their greasy faces against the glass in the lion house. Eventually, zookeepers were as heartbroken as you feel right now and decided to build her an entire habitat. She’d have acres of space with hills, trees, a pond, and plenty of space from flying boogers. She’d be able to roam and get some much-needed vitamin D.

In the weeks before the grand opening, there was a buzz in the air. The zoo spent a ton on marketing and promotional materials. People were excited to see Mohini roam around and take afternoon an dip in the pool.

On the day the habitat opened, people gathered all around, awaiting what Mohini would do.

After a brief look around, Mohini ended up finding a spot, deep in the corner of the compound, where she lived for the rest of her life. At the end of her life, all she left behind was a 12-by-12-foot patch of worn, barren grass. *

Mindset is one of these terms that gets thrown around so much that softens the meaning. Influencers and guys with a Substack scream from the mountaintops to “change your mindset.” But it’s a real area of study by serious people.

According to the mindset GOAT, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, a “mindset” is the perception people hold about themselves. And like our sweet Mohini, it can have tangible impacts on our behaviors and, therefore, our lives. It’s a catalyst for our motivation, a determinant of how stress affects us, and it impacts our health, happiness, and work performance and ultimately shapes our reality.

Alia Crum, out of Stanford University, recruited housekeepers at seven hotels across the United States to talk about physical fitness.

Housekeepers burn 3-5x more calories than I do sitting here typing these cute little words. It’s strenuous work. But when Crum asked these folks about their exercise habits, most said they did none.

Crum put up a poster that described how housekeeping qualified as exercise, shifting how the housekeepers viewed their work. Four weeks later, the hotels with the posters had very different housekeepers. They lost weight, lost body fat, and had lower blood pressure readings. They hadn’t made any changes in their behavior outside of work. The mere perception of their work as exercise had changed their physical reality. That’s the power of a mindset shift.

But here’s the thing: mindset shifts have to 1) be true (the housekeepers were doing a lot of physical activity in a day) and 2) be internalized. People have to choose to believe them. We can’t force their hand.

The other tricky thing about mindsets is that two people can receive the same information and come away with two very different realities. For instance, look at this picture. Do you see an older woman or a younger woman?

Look closely because both exist.

Because our mindsets are shaped by our experiences, culture, relationships, and past stories, we can all walk away feeling very differently about a situation. Here’s a great illustration of how a different story applied to the same reality creates a very different experience.

This is what makes mindsets fascinating: the power, the nuance, the uniquely human element.

In my work, I share five mindset shifts for leaders to try on. They’re easy to internalize, but also easy to reject. But I like them because if accepted and internalized, they will make us much more effective leaders and better people.

The 5 Leadership Mindsets

Mindset Shift #1: Nobody Cares About You (and that’s a good thing)

There’s a psychological phenomenon known as the Spotlight Effect. It’s the tendency to overestimate the extent to which our behavior or appearance is noticed and judged by others. We think everybody is noticing and judging the stain on our shirt or the mistake in our presentation.

In reality, nobody is paying attention to you because, well, they’re so busy paying attention to themselves. We’re all at the center of our own universe. This matters because other people’s thoughts are a massive barrier to action in our lives. So many people withhold their genius from the world because of what others think.

The businesses never started.

The music that was never made.

The books that were never written.

The dates that were never pursued.

When people are on their deathbeds, most of their regrets are about limiting themselves because of what other people think. The #1 regret of the dying, according to hospice nurse Bronnie Ware, is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I’m not saying, “Don’t care what others think!” I’m saying that others don’t care to think about you (at least not as much as you may believe).

And this should be freeing! Even if you say something stupid, drop mustard on your shirt, or blow the sale, people don’t really notice. And even when they do, they move on quickly.

It’s innately human to care about what others think. That’s normal. But letting their thoughts dictate our actions is not, especially when they’re not thinking about you at all.

Mindset Shift #2: A leader’s behaviors and emotions are highly contagious

Sound like a contradiction to mindset shift number one? Here’s a bonus mindset: great leaders can hold two opposing truths in their heads at once. Hard work and rest are essential to performance. Self-acceptance and self-improvement are necessary. It’s important to spend time with people and alone in solitude.

But here’s the nuance: the Spotlight Effect is about the fallacy that people remember specific events or situations and actively judge us for it.

Emotional contagion, the core of this second mindset shift, is a term psychologists use to describe how we mimic one another. There are these little receptors in our brains called mirror neurons that cause us to unconsciously mimic the actions of people around us. For example, when Paul yawns in my workshop, the same areas of the brain light up in Sally, causing her to yawn.

This effect is even more pronounced when it’s somebody we care about or there’s an authority dynamic (e.g., leadership). The lesson is that people will follow the messenger before they follow the message. Human beings are experiences, and how you show up for your people will inevitably cause ripple effects. Being inconsistent, emotionally volatile, lacking integrity, or changing direction like the wind will cause the same emotions and behaviors around you.

The lesson is that brilliant, beautiful Maya Angelou” quote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Mindset Shift #3: Leaders Lose the Benefit of the Doubt

Early in my career, I worked for a small organization where I made a whopping $23,000 per year. I proved my value for the company and asked for a raise: can I get a cool $30,000 per year?

My boss gave me a hard time about the raise. You know the drill—things are tight right now; nobody else sees this kind of raise percentage-wise, yadda yadda. She folded (a bit) and agreed on $27,500. A few months later, she bought a Tesla.

Did I rationalize that she deserves it? That it’s her company, and there would be no job for me without her? Did I recognize all the late nights, all the risk, and all the pressure on her?

Hell nah. I quit.

Right or wrong, leaders lose any benefit of the doubt. It’s not fair, but that’s leadership. The quarterback will get all the blame even though he doesn’t play defense, but he’ll also get all the glory and a 10-year, $375 million TV deal.

The leader must commit to eliminating as many gaps in communication as possible. Any void for others’ imagination to fill will not get a positive twist.

Mindset Shift #4: Leaders need to be the most certain in the room

Neuroscience has revealed that one of the core needs of the human brain is certainty – we need to feel like we can predict what’s going to happen. Our brains are wired to be prediction machines.

But reality reveals that certainty is a myth. It’s that old saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” Life is inherently chaotic and uncertain.

So, how do we square that circle?

People look to leaders for certainty and predictability. If you can be this for your people, you’ll be an extremely influential and impactful leader. But how?

A mentor of mine once told me, “Leaders need to be the most certain in the room, but being certain doesn’t mean being the loudest or speaking with the most conviction.” Creating certainty doesn’t mean being immune to mistakes or being wrong. It’s about credibility.

Credibility is built on the back of competence (being good at what we do), and integrity (doing what we say we’re going to do). A definition of integrity I like is “the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction.”

Great leaders have this sort of integrity with their word and with their behaviors. They regulate their emotions, embody strength and consistency when the tides change, and lead from the front. This creates certainty. This creates the trust needed amongst teams to work efficiently and effectively.

Mindset Shift #5: Leadership Starts with YOU

I’ve never been a fan of the saying “it starts at the top” because it’s usually people who aren’t at the top who say it. Not because it isn’t true (see mindsets above), but because it’s disempowering. One of the most powerful quotes I’ve ever come across is, “Power follows the finger of blame,” where power is the ability to influence people or events. When we point upwards, we’re saying it’s on those above us to influence our lives. This belief plummets our motivation, dampens our moods, and hurts our ability to be effective.

So, we must lead ourselves first. We must do what we can with what we have, and it doesn’t take much. One incredible study gave participants the tiniest amount of control in an environment where people often have little of it: nursing homes.

In a nursing home, residents have everything planned out and controlled for them: Thursday night meatloaf, pill number thirteen at 3pm, arts and crafts are provided on Sundays, and all the rooms are the same.

These researchers gave residents house plants to care for. They got to decide how to care for them, where to place them, when to re-pot them, etc. According to the study, “not only did their levels of happiness improve, but their mortality rate actually dropped in half.”

We’ll remain stuck as long as we look for somebody else to move the needle in our lives. Nobody is going to give you permission. You’ve got to give yourself permission. You’ve got to choose you first. You have to lead yourself first.

*Adapted from Tara Branch’s book, Radical Acceptance

I spend my days thinking and talking about what moves people. My father likes to say, “Everyone is motivated; they may just not be motivated to do the things you want them to do.” You can’t get Ralph to go above and beyond on those spreadsheets, but he spends 9 hours on a Saturday fixing up his old Buick or whatever. Seems like motivation to me.

I’ve studied methodologies like Motivational Interviewing and Self-Determination Theory, which shed a lot of light on what sparks human ingenuity and what makes people tick.

The problem is that many of our motivational frameworks are out of date at best, a YouTube video of a lion stalking his prey or something at worst.

We need to change the way we think about motivation in the first place.

Motivational Models: The Light Switch & Michelangelo

Most coaches and leaders I work with operate from what I call The Light Switch Model. This is what I’d call “motivation classic.” It’s the belief most of us have to motivate others. If say the right thing in the right way, at the right time, or check we’ll hit some neurological switch that turns on the motivation centers in the brain.

This model is inherently flawed. Nothing we can say, do, or show other people will flip the switch for sustained motivation—at least not in a cause-and-effect kind of way. Humans hate being forced, coerced, controlled, or manipulated. If we smell even the tiniest toot that somebody is trying to push us, research shows we’ll act against our own interests just to avoid being influenced.

The more we buy into this model, the more frustrated we’ll become. We’ll put too much pressure on ourselves and become frustrated when the flip doesn’t switch. That frustration can further deflate motivation and even fracture the relationship, ultimately leading to more turnover, burnout, and a crisis of confidence.

By accepting that the light switch model is ineffective, we can open ourselves to a different, more indirect model.

And that new model is what I refer to as The Michelangelo Model. When the great Italian sculptor and painter was asked how he created his masterpiece, The Statue of David, he said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there; I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

This is how motivation actually works. Like a Michelangelo masterpiece, human beings already contain inherent motivation, creativity, potential, curiosity, a joy for learning, and a tendency toward growth and improvement.

Our job as leaders is to clear away the excess. Chisel away the superfluous. Over time, behavior change occurs naturally and sustainably. And we can do this by tweaking what I call The Motivational Dials.

The Four Motivational Dials

No area of behavior change is black and white, and there aren’t any one-size-fits-all solutions. There’s no light switch 👀. Instead, I prefer to think about it like dials on a stovetop. Dials can be “tuned” up or down, allowing for the nuance of behavior change. In theory, if we calibrate the dials correctly, we create an environment ripe for motivation.

A good illustration of this is food. Sometimes, during football season, I find myself planted on the couch for seven hours watching RedZone while crushing my homemade buffalo chicken dip (which is fantastic, by the way). I personify the “couch potato.” After those seven hours, I feel lethargic, uninspired, apathetic, and exhausted. You could say my food “dial” is too high.

On the other end, think about the stereotypical “dieter.” They turn their food dial all the way down. If you’ve ever dieted, I’d imagine you weren’t a joy to be around. You likely felt irritable, gassy, and exhausted.

It’s the same thing in motivation; we’ll have to evaluate and tweak each dial to chisel away at all the excess marble.

Dial 1: Information Dial

In the 1930s, cigarettes were “doctor-recommended.” Some ads suggested that smoking could “aid digestion and even act as a weight-loss aid.”

In the 1990s, we thought Cheerios were “heart healthy” and a wonderful source of fiber, so I’d crush seven bowls of cereal before school. By 9 a.m., I was starving, and by the time basketball practice came around, I had no energy, and my legs would give out on me.

This first Motivational Dial, The Information Dial, is the degree to which we have the information we need to perform.

Heart-healthy Cheerios and cigarettes are examples of the information dial being turned down too low. If people don’t have the information to succeed, they will chain-smoke Lucky Strikes and swallow up Lucky Charms. People who don’t know how to lift weights aren’t motivated to go to the gym. New employees who don’t understand the 76 acronyms per second you use aren’t productive.

Conversely, people won’t be inspired to act if the information dial is too high. Too much information can overwhelm us and make us indecisive. One of the studies the “jam study” (Sheena Iyengar, Lepper 2000). Psychologists set up a lovely little table at a grocery store for people to try and buy jams. When the table had six different kinds of jams, 40% of people stopped by.

When they laid out a cornucopia of twenty-four jams, 60% stopped by. The plot twist was that when there were only six to consider, 31% of people bought. But when we had 24 jams, only 3% went home with a nice strawberry (or grape, whatever).

Often times, we don’t need more information. In their book Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout write, “Today, communication is the problem. We have become the world’s first over-communicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less.”

We can turn the information dial up for beginners and provide information and education, but once people start becoming distracted, inconsistent, or get shiny object syndrome, we need to dial it back. Focus on the fundamentals. Focus on doing less, but better.

Dial 2: The Safety Dial

As humans, there is no more foundational need than safety. We come into this world as completely helpless creatures who are reliant on others for survival. British psychologist John Bowlby spent his life studying how we attach to our parents. When we feel secure and supported, we’re more willing to put ourselves out there and engage in the world. When we don’t feel secure and supported, we will turn inward, try to rely on ourselves, and act in strange ways.

Bowlby discovered that these “attachment styles” leak into adulthood, affecting our relationships, work habits, and propensity to collect Pokémon cards as grown ups. He called it “attachment theory.”

Which brings us to dial #2.

The safety dial is the degree to which we feel safe from judgment, blame, or ridicule and feel connected to the human experience at large.

The worst type of work environment is one where people feel dispensable and uncertain. If we don’t know if our job will be here tomorrow, or if I’ll get humiliated by my boss for sharing an idea, we’ll delve into survival mode. Dog-eat-dog world and such. And that’s no place for motivation to blossom.

Leaders can turn the safety dial up by validating, appreciating, and encouraging people. The best leaders judge ideas, but never people. They model behaviors and emotions that signal calm and certainty. They make others feel normal and human, rather than dumb and alone.

But this dial can be turned up too high too. When we hold no standard of excellence, commiserate and complain with others, and hold nobody accountable, we’re cookin’ with gas. Too much gas. People get complacent and bored, and the dial needs to be turned down.

Dial 3: The Autonomy Dial

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with a mentor and friend of mine. I had dropped out of college two years prior and was getting pestered by family and friends to go back. They were all trying to “motivate me.” I was focused on my first business and would, no doubt, sell it for billions soon.

I asked my friend what he thought. He didn’t tell me what to do. He validated that I could make the business work, and then he said, “But there’s no doubt in my mind that you can build this business while you’re in school. And who knows, you might one day want to further your education, and it would be a pain in the ass to have to go back and get an undergrad degree to focus on what you really want to focus on. But you know I support you regardless.”

The following week, I was back applying to school.

Dr. Edward Deci is the psychologist behind Self-Determination Theory (SDT), my favorite model of human motivation. One of the core elements of SDT is that humans are wired to be self-determining. We need to feel like the authors of our own story. Autonomy is living life with a full sense of willingness, volition, and choice.

The Autonomy Dial is the degree to which people feel they have control over their work and environment.

My friend toed the autonomy line beautifully. He empowered me by reinforcing the idea that I would figure it out no matter what I did. He painted a picture based on how he thought I might feel if I did vs. didn’t go back in the future. He reinforced it was my decision. He reinforced that he’d support me regardless. It was a motivational masterclass.

When the autonomy dial is too low, it’s one of the most detrimental things to the human spirit. In an extreme example, dictatorships with very little individual freedom are the most dismal form of the human life. Creativity plummets, hope disappears, engagement and energy die. Life becomes very gray.

When people feel managed, watched, and mistrusted, they stop taking initiative. They stop being proactive. They stop being creative. So we need to turn up the dial by giving them choice.

On the other end, when the autonomy dial is too high, people feel like they’re floating in a vast ocean. Freedom without any structure or constraints is actually anxiety-producing. The person who’s given complete latitude but no direction often spins their wheels, second-guesses themselves, or avoids the work entirely.

Dial 4: Connection (you here still?)

The connection dial is the degree to which people feel they belong or generally feel close to other people. It’s feeling loved, cared for, and valued.

In Self-Determination Theory, they call this core component of motivation “relatedness.” Connection in leadership is the hill I’ll die on.

People’s deep need to feel understood and related to is the single greatest driver of influence. If your people feel like you know them, like you truly care about them as human beings, they will run through a wall for you and for themselves.

In today’s society, trust is deteriorating. One-third of people think strangers can be trusted, and this has been steadily declining since the ’70s. Surveys show that less than half of full-time employees have a high level of trust in their employer. It can also take a lot of time for people to trust somebody at work (~3 years).

High trust and connection lead to less stress, fewer sick days, less burnout, and more satisfaction in life. The other side of the trust coin is the increased levels of loneliness. The emotional Cheerios to our health. Loneliness is associated with inflammation, accelerated aging, and cardiovascular health risks.

As leaders, taking the time to connect with people matters more than anything else.

If your dial is low, you might forget names and key details of somebody’s life, ask minimal questions about what they think and feel, be a poor listener, or assume you know what’s best despite not taking the time to understand the individual.

On the other hand, we can turn it up too high, and our work environment turns into a sorority event, where you just chit-chat with your bestie but aren’t effective in getting results. If this is the case, you’ll need to set boundaries and structures to be effective, disclose just a little bit less about yourself, and strategically interrupt and redirect conversations.

—

Motivation flourished when all four dials — information, safety, autonomy, and connection — are properly tuned.

It’s hard work, tedious at times, but if we can clear the block and chip away at the superfluous material, you’ll make a lasting impact in people’s lives. And frankly, it’s the only way motivation works.

Long before cold plunges and meditation techniques filled our timelines, I had the perfect morning routine. Throughout my adolescence, I’d wake up at 6:14 a.m. on the dot, stumble my way downstairs, and deliberately move through the kitchen. I’d head into the pantry first, grab a box of cereal, then a bowl, then a spoon, and finally the gallon of milk—in that order, every time. I’d sit alone at our kitchen table, crack open my Sports Illustrated, and pound about seven bowls of Fruity Pebbles. For 44 minutes, I’d cherish that bowl of sugar, the silence, and the literature of the day. When my 44 minutes were up, I’d shower, get dressed, and be in the family minivan, ready to leave for school at exactly 7:19 a.m.

This was my routine for years, and it was sacred time. If there was ever any disruption to the routine, my entire day would be thrown off. This may all sound a bit bizarre at best, anal-retentive at worst. But young Danny was far more tapped into the science of high performance than you’re giving him credit for.

Jim Loehr, a sports psychologist, spent six years looking at elite tennis players. He found that those who performed these small, sequential rituals between each point—two steps left, three bounces of the ball, one-second pause, toss and serve—performed better.

Loehr told The New York Times that “the between-point time was a very fertile opportunity to get completely distracted and off course. The more time you have that you’re not doing something constructive, the more time you have to do things that absolutely allow you to drift, and what the better players do is learn how to fill that time with things that sequentially help them deal.”

If a few seconds between a tennis serve is “fertile ground for distraction,” he should investigate a modern Tuesday—filled with emails, meetings, and small talk about Memorial Day weekend plans. That’s a cesspool of distraction.

Further research found that these little tennis rituals led to heart rate recovery patterns, which allowed them to play from a place of calm confidence.

We see these rituals all the time in sports: the way a golfer approaches a shot, a basketball player conducts a free-throw routine, or a pregame warm-up. But this is another area where performance psychology doesn’t make its way into the homes of those of us who can’t dunk or hit a backhand.

Loehr’s research led to his book, coauthored with Tony Schwartz, called The Power of Full Engagement. The central premise of the book is that energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of performance.

And one of the best ways to optimize energy? You guessed it: seven bowls of Fruity Pebbles.

I kid. It’s rituals.

Rituals are routines fueled by meaning. They’re a sequence of repeated, intentional behaviors that help you create meaning, shift your emotional state, or mark a moment. And they’re crucial to high performance.

Rituals help us both conserve and enhance our energy. If you’ve ever played the video game Mario Kart (a game you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody worse than me in), you’re familiar with the “boost pads” that pepper the racetrack. When you run over a boost pad, your goofy little character gets a huge boost of speed. You can take your foot off the gas and simultaneously be launched forward. Once we establish a ritual, our brain goes on autopilot, conserving energy for other, more demanding tasks while also giving us a much-needed boost.

Rituals also help give a chaotic and complex world structure and predictability. In a culture where there’s always more to do, rituals give our day guardrails and end caps. These natural boundaries give our brain some much-needed certainty, thereby reducing anxiety.

And most of all, rituals are inherently human, but they’re a piece of humanity that’s getting left behind.

In June of 2025, President Trump posted about holidays in the U.S. He wrote, “Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every working day of the year. It must change if we are going to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

This is the ethos of “more” that causes burnout, meaninglessness, and exhaustion: work harder, push more, have three whiskeys and a cigarette. If you don’t, you’re lazy. No days off, punk!

Holidays aren’t just an excuse to make your famous buffalo chicken dip; they’re cultural rituals that are deeply human. They’re time markers that cue reflection and appreciation and fuel the recovery we need to perform at a high level. Research shows that cultural rituals like holidays, weddings, and rites of passage cultivate a “bonding and buffering effect.” They both strengthen social ties (one of the most powerful contributors to well-being) and provide resilience against stress.

The Ancient Egyptians celebrated 61 holidays a year. In Ancient Greece, they pushed it to 120. And in the Middle Ages, you could enjoy 90 days of PTO.

In America, we have 11 federal holidays.

Long before we spent our time in Slack channels and playing Xbox, humans spent their lives in ritual—marking the seasons, honoring the dead, preparing for the hunt with ceremony instead of slide decks. Rituals are one of humanity’s oldest operating systems. Every known civilization, no matter how isolated, developed them independently, which tells us this isn’t learned behavior passed between cultures but something wired deep into us. Rituals provide structure to life’s transitions, meaning to life’s monotony, and a sense of order when the world becomes too chaotic for our little monkey brains. They are how we create meaning, recovery, and connection (with both ourselves and others).

Rituals require space and time to form. The space in the margins of life is what allows us to show up with more energy, presence, and resilience. To make America great is to make humans great, and humans require rituals.

Even when life’s demands don’t allow us to take time and space with our people, we can still benefit from personal rituals. I encourage all of my clients to develop rituals of their own: both small and large, individual and collective, and daily, weekly, monthly, and annually.

• Every Friday, my wife and I cook dinner and sit at our kitchen table—the only time we sit at the kitchen table (small, weekly, collective)

• Every Saturday, my lady and I go on a local hike and then enjoy a beer and a burger #bestpart (medium, weekly, collective)

• Every Christmas, my family hosts what we call the “Appetizer Games” (large, annually, collective)

• Every New Year’s Day, I conduct a two-hour annual review and planning session (large, annual, individual)

• Every morning, I still sit with my literature and my treats for an hour before starting the day (small, daily, individual)

On and on they go.

In a world that is infinite and chaotic, personal rituals can provide some boundaries and solace. We probably can’t get Congress aligned for 90 federal holidays. We can’t control the amount of PTO we get. We can’t always get the entire family together for a shared ritual.

So we’re burdened to create our own— our own free-throw routine or set of sequential steps between points. These practices not only conserve our energy and help our performance, but they center and ground us. They create natural boundaries in a world where you can always be working on something.

The important thing about rituals isn’t the specific behaviors or steps. It’s that they’re intentional and composed of elements that have a degree of purpose or meaning to you.

Rituals are personal. Nothing about my childhood ritual would be recommended by your neighborhood fitness influencer. There wasn’t a cold plunge or journal in sight. I made poor nutritional choices and weirder time choices (no idea why 6:14 a.m.). But it was mine—a routine created by and for Danny Coleman. And that’s where the power lies.

As I got older, I stopped eating children’s cereal and started making eggs like a grown man. I started meditation in the morning (and then I stopped meditating in the morning). I moved from Sports Illustrated to books on psychology.

Rituals sprinkle my life and improve my well-being and performance. They conserve my energy, give me structure, and connect me to the people that matter.

And that’s what matters.

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I’m curious, what’s a ritual that you have that might give a fitness influencer a panic attack? Let me know in the comments.

In the 1840s, a Hungarian physician working in Vienna noticed a disturbing trend. Doctors at Vienna General Hospital were going right from fondling cadavers to delivering babies… without washing their hands.

Ignaz Semmelweis observed that the maternity ward run by doctors had a drastically higher death rate from puerperal fever than the ward run by midwives.

In 1847, he introduced mandatory handwashing with a chlorinated lime solution. The death rate in his ward dropped from around 18% to under 2%. What’s basic hygiene to us now left Semmelweis ostracized by the medical establishment. His findings were universally rejected.

In 1865, he was committed to a mental asylum for his stupid idea. He died two weeks later at 47 years old, likely from an infection that could’ve been prevented by… washing his hands.

To stand alone in your convictions; to be ostracized by your peers; to lose your life takes a tremendous amount of courage. Courage that’s hard for me to grasp—I have a hard time mustering up the courage to send back an incorrect order at a restaurant.

People Pleasers and Cheerleaders

The most common theme in my coaching is that of the “people pleaser.” At their core, people pleasers prioritize others’ needs, feelings, and approval over their own, often due to a fear of rejection, conflict, or low self-esteem.

They talk about imposter syndrome—feeling like they’re not good enough, and it’s only a matter of time before people find out that they’re underqualified and underwhelming. They hate conflict and avoid it like a 19th-century Vienna doctor washing his hands. They take pride in being liked and making others feel good. They constantly worry about upsetting people.

I’m not throwing stones from a glass house. Most of my life, I took pride in being a “likable guy” and saw myself as a people pleaser. In high school, I didn’t win Prom King or Most Likely to Succeed. Nope, I got the award for Mr. Congeniality. My mom was very proud.

The problem with living this way is that, ironically, we actually lose respect and trust from others. Our personal boundaries dissolve, we become ill-equipped to handle basic conflict, and fear of judgment becomes our primary operating system. That’s a terrible place to be.

The Courage to Be Disliked

There’s a book called The Courage to Be Disliked, from which I stole the title for this article. The book looks at the beliefs of the often-overlooked Austrian psychologist, Alfred Adler—the ugly stepchild of the twentieth-century psychology world. In a scene run by Freud and Jung, Adler was often left behind screaming, “Pick me! Pick me!” Adler spent a lot of time arguing that we should care less about what other people think. Ironically, Adler was a power-hungry person who desperately cared about what others thought.

Although well-meaning, I think the often-prescribed advice to “not care about what others think” is terrible advice for the people pleasers of the world. It’s a difficult task that borders on the impossible.

Psychologist Daniel Wegner introduced what he called Ironic Process Theory, which essentially says the harder we resist certain thoughts and emotions, the more intense they become.

Telling somebody to “not care about what others think” is the equivalent of the weight loss advice, “Just eat less.” Yes, that would be lovely. But I’m starving, stressed, and staring at 20 Chick-fil-A nuggets.

It’s less about not caring about what others think. You’re human. You’re going to care about what others think. It goes back to our ancestors. We’re wired to care about what others think because if you didn’t get along with the tribe, the tribe kicked you out—and it’s an ugly, brutal world out there for a one-man band.

Instead, it’s about finding something to care about more than being liked. The word “courage” is originally derived from the Latin word cor, which means heart. Identifying the things in life that fill up our heart often gives us the courage we need to overcome smaller fears. It’s why becoming a parent, or building a business, or having Olympic dreams is so powerful—they’re pursuits and experiences that reorient our values. Little Suzy’s well-being becomes more important than being Mr. Congeniality.

The Practice of Clunky Conflict

Where I’m more in line with Adler is in his belief that we can change. He argued people are not merely products of their environments or histories but are “capable of interpreting, reframing, and reacting to these factors in a way that allows personal growth and change.”

One of the core traits in the Big 5 Personality assessment is agreeableness—an individual’s propensity for prosocial behavior, such as kindness, cooperation, trust, and empathy. It describes people’s desire for social harmony. People pleasers score very high here. Obviously.

But this can change with effort and time.

Finding the things you care more about than being liked can take time and cultivation. And that whole courage = heart thing sounds great on a fortune cookie. But what are the practices of the people pleaser? How can we start building the courage today?

The most powerful way we can begin to change our people pleaser identity is through the practice of moving toward clunky conflict.

In his book No More Mr. Nice Guy, Robert Glover distinguishes between being nice and being kind.

Being nice is avoiding conflict, withholding feedback to protect somebody’s feelings today while leaving them worse off in the long term, and withholding your true thoughts and feelings. Glover says this behavior is manipulative because it functions as an indirect strategy to control outcomes and people, rather than being a genuine expression of kindness. It also usually leads to passive aggressiveness and resentment.

In contrast, being kind is being honest, even when it’s hard. It’s giving people feedback that may hurt today but will make them better tomorrow. It’s interwoven with our core values, and it’s unconditional in doing the right thing despite the blowback.

Consider this entire article a kindness.

I always advise people pleasers to develop a practice of moving toward clunky conflict. I say clunky because that’s exactly what it will be. You’ll overcorrect. You may come off aggressive. You may lose a friend. But the important part is the engagement. Your willingness to move toward the difficult conversation; to set boundaries that will rub some the wrong way; to stop contorting your entire personality to the needs of others—these are the practices that transform us from the outside in.

You won’t say the perfect thing every time. Your boundaries may continue to be permeable at first. It’s clunky. But over time, if you continue the practice, you’ll get better. You’ll feel a swell of respect from yourself, followed by respect from others. You’ll start to feel the power of progress.

A Process of Pain and Progress

A short time after Ignaz Semmelweis’ death, Louis Pasteur and others developed germ theory, showing that microorganisms cause fermentation and disease. It explained why the doctor’s dirty ass hands killed people.

Semmelweis was vindicated posthumously, and he’s now considered a founding figure of infection control.

He was disliked. He was blackballed. He was shamed. And he died because of it.

To get away from people-pleasing, albeit easier than dying alone in a mental hospital, still isn’t easy or fun. There are real-world consequences to changing our people pleasing ways. Your friendships might transform. People will tell you to “calm down” when you’re already calm. You’ll have to tolerate that pit in your stomach when you learn somebody doesn’t like these new changes.

I’ve been working through my own people-pleasing ways for the past few years. It’s clunky. It’s embarrassing at times. It’s difficult. I’ve experienced feelings and sensations I’ve never had before. I’ve experienced some confrontations with my identity. I’ve had relationships transform in big and small ways. I’ve been in wickedly uncomfortable situations. I’ve lost sleep, had some cold sweats, and have dealt with this evolution in ways that have been clunky and embarrassing.

But I do believe my life has become richer because of it. Passive aggressiveness has softened. I have a deeper, calmer sense of confidence. I have a clearer sense of self-awareness. And I’m proud of that.

There’s a bigger life on the other side of others’ thoughts about you. It’s just a clunky, painful process to get there. In the meantime, please wash your hands.