When we started working together, the company was growing wildly. When we picked back up, it wasn’t. The circumstances couldn’t have been more different, but the work was largely the same. Whether a company is scaling fast or making the hard decision to sell for less than you dreamed, there’s identity work to be done either way.

Every startup has two growth stories unfolding simultaneously. The company's growth story is visible and trackable, made up of revenue curves, headcount, and runway, reported in board meetings and investor updates.

And the founder’s growth story is internal, often invisible, and almost never talked about. Who you are becoming in the process of building. What you are learning about yourself that no business school, accelerator, or investor could have taught you.

Joseph Campbell, who spent his life studying the world’s great myths and stories, identified a universal pattern he called the Hero’s Journey — the arc of departure, transformation, and return that shows up across every culture and every era.

The founder’s journey is 100% a Hero’s Journey — following the arc of who you are becoming through the experience of building and leading a company.

Both growth stories make up that journey. They are distinct but not separate. The inner journey shapes the quality of everything built on the outside. And the outer journey — losing a customer, missing a target, losing a crucial team member — accelerates the inner one. This is why I often say that building and running a company is as much a vehicle for personal growth as it is a business endeavor.

The cautionary tale is this: many founders become so consumed by the external work of company-building that the inner work quietly gets deprioritized. They keep asking “how do I grow my company?” without asking “how do I grow myself, so I can grow the company?” And when the company story becomes the only story and when your entire sense of self gets absorbed into what your building, you lose sight of your own journey and, ultimately, your own identity.

When the Pursuit Becomes the Prison

Not long ago, a founder I coach looked at me with a sad, confused expression and said, “We just closed our Series B… and I feel empty.” On paper, everything was going right, and yet instead of feeling celebratory, he felt flat, anxious, and, in his words “oddly hollow.”

This isn’t a one-off scenario. I’ve heard some version of this from founders at every stage — after a seed round, a Series B, and even an exit. The underlying story is always the same. Once we raise, I’ll be happy. I’ll get out of the weeds. I’ll finally work less. The day rarely comes for any of this because the arrival fallacy runs deeper than a milestone — it’s baked into the identity itself. Until the inner work happens, the goalpost just moves.

Over time what ends up happening for many founders is that the pursuit becomes the prison. You start building something because you’re passionate, curious, or you see a better path. Along the way, the company shapes you in the same way your schooling and relationships shape you.

But somewhere along the founder journey, something shifts. Your ego begins protecting your self-image, and the building becomes about proving. Proving you’re not an imposter. Proving you’re worthy. Proving you’re not falling behind. Proving your investors right. That’s the tell: when your mood rises and falls with the company’s, when every setback becomes a threat not just to the company, but to who you are.

I call this identity fusion — when your sense of self becomes so intertwined with your company that the two are indistinguishable. Your title, your outcomes, your worth — all of it starts running through the same wire. The business becomes the answer to feelings of not-enoughness. Its wins feel like personal validation. Its losses feel like personal failure. And the more your sense of self gets fused with the success of your company, the less freedom you actually have.

Identity fusion is one of the Inside Game dynamics I explore in Scaling from the Inside Out, where it surfaces as a driver of some of the most common ways founders become their own biggest obstacle. This piece goes deeper into identity fusion specifically: why it forms and what it truly takes to loosen the grip.

Here's what makes this topic so complicated: in the early days, this level of identification, near-total, all-consuming, isn't just understandable, it's often necessary. The founder who bleeds the company’s colors, who takes every win and loss personally, who is all in with every fiber — that intensity is frequently what gets a company off the ground. VCs actively look for it. They refer to it as conviction, obsession with a problem, skin in the game at the deepest level. The system rewards identity fusion because, early on, it works.

The problem isn’t the fusion itself. It’s that nobody tells founders when and how to begin loosening the grip. The assumption, often unstated, is that hiring a seasoned executive team will naturally create the separation. Bring in the COO, the CRO, the VP of Engineering, and the founder will elevate. But identity fusion doesn’t resolve itself through an org chart change. A founder who has tied their self-worth to the company’s outcomes will still micromanage, still struggle to truly delegate, still experience every setback as a personal verdict, regardless of who’s been hired. The inner work has to happen alongside the organizational work. Not instead of it.

It’s worth naming something else here, something the venture ecosystem rarely acknowledges. The founder profile that has historically been rewarded — all in, identity fully fused with the mission, no apparent life outside the company — is not a neutral archetype. And it makes it much harder for women and mothers to get funded. The same distributed identity that reads as lack of commitment in a pitch room is, ironically, closer to the psychological health this piece is arguing for. A founder with a robust sense of self beyond the company is more grounded and resilient, not less committed. The system has this backwards.

For many founders, busyness itself becomes an escape hatch — a way of staying fused without having to feel what the fusion is costing them. And underneath all of it, for most of the founders I work with, is the same root: a fear of not being enough and the shame that follows when the company’s struggles feel like a verdict on your worth.

Identity fusion is one of the most common dynamics I work with in founder coaching. Loosening that grip requires dedicated inner work. It is also among the most practical investments a founder can make because the reality is this: most companies won’t reach the outcome their founders once envisioned. Not because they are failures, but because that’s simply startup math.

The cage George Lucas describes isn’t the company itself. It’s the founders relationship to the company. It’s the identity fusion. The door has always been open. Most founders don’t see it, either because the self-awareness isn’t there yet, or because the work keeps getting deprioritized. Usually it’s a bit of both.

Reflect:

• Who are you if this company doesn’t reach the outcome you dreamed of?

• When the company has a bad week, what happens to your sense of self?

• Where are you making decisions from fear of what failure would say about you rather than from clarity about what’s right?

• If you weren’t gripping the outcome, how would you show up differently as a leader?

• Who are you if there is no problem to solve? (Jim Dethmer, Conscious Leadership Group)

The Season You’re In

Most leaders don’t plateau because of strategy. They plateau because they stop becoming.

Warren Bennis wrote that “becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself”. It’s an ongoing process, not a finished state. Many founders build a self once, early, under pressure, and then stop. That’s when the plateau starts.

Here's what I see again and again in my coaching work: founders who build their companies by being scrappy, relentless, hands-on, and in control eventually hit a wall. It's rarely the market. It's rarely a talent gap. It's identity.

The same traits that created early momentum start creating friction. The scrappiness becomes micromanagement. The relentlessness becomes burnout. The hands-on intensity becomes a decision bottleneck. The control becomes a limit — on the team, on the culture, and on the company’s ability to scale beyond what one person can hold.

Under pressure, most of us revert to our first successful self. The version of us that worked before. The one that got us here.

Richard Rohr, James Hollis, and David Brooks have each written — from different disciplines and traditions — about two distinct halves of life. The first half is about building: constructing an identity, proving yourself, accumulating the credentials and achievements and roles that tell you and the world who you are. That work is necessary. You have to build a self before you can loosen your grip on it.

It’s not hard to see the parallel to building a company. The first half of a founder’s life inside their company looks a lot like the first half of life itself — proving, building, accumulating, becoming someone through what you make. The second half asks something different of you, whether you’re ready or not.

The second half is about leading from what you’ve built, not being owned by it. Loosening the ego’s grip. Expanding into new roles and identities — from doer to leader, from what you can personally produce to how you serve others and help them produce. Discovering, often through loss or disruption or the quiet disillusionment of a Series B that didn’t feel the way it should, that who you are is larger than any one company.

Most founders encounter this transition whether they’re ready for it or not. The ones who navigate it consciously, by doing the inner work alongside the organizational work, become more fully themselves in the process — and their companies feel the difference.

The work is never finished. It’s a question you keep asking, time and again: is this version of me still serving this company and this season?

Identity Expansion

If identity fusion is the prison, identity expansion is the door George Lucas says has always been open.

Identity expansion has many layers. It means building a robust “I AM” — roles, relationships, and a life that exists independent of the company. It means intentionally growing as a leader alongside the business, season after season. And it means integrating all parts of yourself, including the shadowy ones, so you can loosen the grip of not-enoughness at the root.

Of course, expansion isn’t only additive. It also includes examining the things that confine and constrict you, attachments, avoidances, and acquired personality traits. And the stories you’ve been running on: I am a leader who never shows weakness. I am a leader who has to have the answer. These are not facts about who you are. You inherited some. Some were built out of necessity in an earlier season. Most founders never go back to check whether they still hold up or whether they’ve simply outlived their usefulness and are no longer serving you.

I tell clients all the time: the identity that got you here won’t get you there. The founder who gets a company to Series A and the founder who leads it past that point are not the same person. Expansion means being willing to let the first version go, even the parts of it you’re proud of. It also means intentionally creating a robust identity to serve you, at work and in life, for whatever comes next.

To grow, you must be willing to update, expand, and edit your identity. In many ways, growth is unlearning.

Reflect:

• What parts of yourself have gotten buried under the pressure of building? How might you reclaim them?

• What traits built your early success that may now be limiting your growth (and the company’s)?

• What version of you does this next chapter of the company require? What do you need to release to become it?

• What would it look like to measure your worth by what you make possible in others, rather than what you produce yourself?

The Work

Loosening identity fusion and expanding your identity requires honest self-inquiry, healing work, and intentional practice — over time, with support, and with the willingness to stay curious when everything in you wants to grip tighter.

At the heart of this work, for most of the high-achieving and perfectionist founders I coach, is a shift from an external scorecard to an internal one. Warren Buffett described this distinction better than anyone: “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard.” Most founders are running almost entirely on an external one — metrics set by investors, boards, markets, and comparisons to other founders. It measures worth through outcomes. And it is, by definition, outside your control and never fully satisfied.

Figuring out your internal scorecard starts with self-awareness. The internal scorecard asks a different set of questions. Am I living by my values? What matters most to me? Am I showing up as the leader (and the human) I want to be? Do I feel worthy and enough (not because of what I’ve produced, but because of who I am?) Am I fulfilled?

This last one, by the way, requires re-examining your definitions of success and happiness. Not the definitions you inherited from your parents, your investors, or the startup ecosystem. Yours. Revisiting these definitions honestly and regularly, as you grow, is some of the most important work a founder can do.

As noted earlier, growth and expansion call for intention. Here are some questions worth sitting with at the start of each year and each new season of the company:

• What kind of human do I want to be?

• What kind of leader do I want to be?

• What do I want more of — in the company and in my life?

• What do I want less of — in the company and in my life?

• What are my growth goals this year?

Running on an internal scorecard, when you’ve been driven by an external one most of your life, is no easy shift. It requires going underneath the behavior to the parts of you actually driving it. These “parts” are simply the inner voices, emotions, and patterns we all carry. Understanding what yours are protecting, and building enough trust with them that they loosen their grip, is some of the deepest work a leader can do. And because they often show up in the body before they show up as a thought — a tightness, a bracing, a familiar knot — developing somatic intelligence to notice those signals is core to this work.

For me personally, nothing has been more transformative than parts work. My Hyper-Achiever and Perfectionist parts, the ones that spent decades chasing external validation, haven’t disappeared. What has changed is my relationship to them. As I operate more from Self and less from those parts, the grip loosens. Not just on the old patterns, but on the company itself.

Alongside all this work, of course, lies the work of intentionally building your life outside of your business. Having a robust identity can be quite the antidote to having a brittle one.

Part of loosening identity fusion is finding joy in the ordinary, not just the milestone. When your sense of self is tied to outcomes, joy gets deferred until the round closes (like we explored above). Or the number hits, the deal closes, etc, etc. A founder who can find real joy on an ordinary Tuesday is practicing something important — proof that who they are and how fulfilled they are doesn’t depend on what the company did or didn’t do.

Lastly, the data suggests one practice deserves priority: leaving room for wonder and awe. Psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of Awe: The New Science of Wonder, has spent decades studying awe. Even brief experiences — a piece of music that stops you cold, a breath-taking view, a conversation that makes you feel the scale of something larger than yourself — measurably quiet the brain’s self-referential center and expand our sense of connection and perspective. In plain terms, it’s what happens when the ego steps back and something larger steps in and pulls you out of proving and protecting, and back into presence and purpose.

As I always say when it comes to this work: it’s not linear. Founders are trained to think in hockey sticks — flat, then a straight line up. Real growth, the human kind, looks more like a J curve. Things often get harder, messier, or slower before they get better. And even after the curve turns upward, there are moments of real backward movement — a return to old patterns under stress, a step you thought you’d already taken. That’s not failure. That’s simply the shape of the work.

Leaders Unlocking Potential: A Story of Real Transformation

This is where I return to the founder I mentioned at the start. When we first worked together, she was in full momentum, solving the problem, growing the company, and leading her team.

When the growth slowed, the deal on the table was a single, not the homerun she, her investors, and her team had once imagined. She grappled with what that valuation said about her — to others, and more importantly, to herself. With each story that surfaced, we examined how true it actually was. As she worked through the deal, she also worked through the harder question underneath it: who am I if I sell now? It was hard at first, but it got easier as we worked through it over time.

We mapped her roles and responsibilities beyond the founder role: partner, friend, creative person, someone with a life that predated the company and would outlast it. We did eulogy work, which may seem morbid at first but it is a powerful and clarifying exercise. What did she want her life to be about? What did she want to be remembered for? Almost none of what came up had anything to do with the exit number.

We also did real work with the parts of her that were fighting the decision hardest — her Hyper-Achiever, who equated selling with failure, and her Inner Critic, who had plenty to say about what walking away “for less” would mean about her. As she got more grounded in Self, she became aware of these parts without being driven by them. She was able to hear the Hyper-Achiever’s fear and the Inner Critic’s judgment without letting either one make the call.

We recapped nine years of real wins — not just the metrics, but the human ones. The relationships built. The customers whose lives the product genuinely improved. The person she had become through the building. And then we spent time on something she hadn’t let herself think about in years: what was she excited about now? After nine years of singular focus on one company and one problem, the question was surprisingly hard to answer. And then, slowly, it wasn’t.

From there, we started building something new: a vision for who she wanted to be next both professionally and personally. It’s a theme I return to often in my work — the importance of having a vision for yourself, not just your company.

The Bigger Picture

A founder’s hero’s journey is never really finished. At every stage, the work returns: releasing identity fusion, staying conscious enough not to re-fuse, and intentionally expanding into the leader the next season requires.

The leader who does this work shows up differently. More authentic. More grounded. With a nervous system that isn’t constantly bracing for the next threat. Because your regulation (or dysregulation) doesn’t stay contained to just you, it becomes the nervous system of the team, the culture, the company itself.

Decisions get made faster because they no longer bottleneck through one person’s need for control. People grow because they feel genuinely empowered rather than quietly monitored. Innovation increases because there is enough psychological safety to take risks, speak honestly, and bring real thinking to the table. And you, the founder, for perhaps the first time in years, can exhale. Because you are no longer running the company from a cage.

Roughly two-thirds of businesses don’t survive a decade. That’s not two-thirds failure. For every founder who did the inner work alongside the outer work — who expanded their identity as they grew the company — the real outcome was never just the exit, or even the survival of the business. It was who they became along the way.

The founder I opened with is still in the process of selling. The company’s outer journey is winding down. Her inner journey, her growth, her self-knowledge, her clarity about who she is and what she wants next, is just beginning a new, fresh chapter. That’s not consolation. That’s life.

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Most of the high-performers I work with have a very loud Inner Critic, whether they admit to it or not. This is something I, myself, have worked with and will continue to work on every day.

It’s easy to get caught in the trance of unworthiness without even realizing it — convinced that the relentless drive to be better, do more, and prove ourselves is simply what makes us successful. And we’re not wrong that it’s driven results. But Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion tells a different story about what actually sustains high performance over time. Self-criticism (aka “dirty fuel”) increases anxiety, fear of failure, and the kind of rigid thinking that makes real growth harder. Self-compassion (aka “clean fuel”), by contrast, creates the psychological safety to take honest stock of yourself, try new things, and recover from setbacks.

What we resist persists. As Pema Chödrön reminds us, the parts, stories, and patterns we hide from or judge ourselves for don’t disappear, they just go underground and keep running the show.

The invitation here isn’t to fix what you find. It’s to meet it with curiosity and compassion, and to appreciate that what you discover emerged for a reason. It was doing a job. Understanding that is not weakness. It’s the precondition for lasting change.

Which brings me to a framework I find particularly useful for approaching this work. David Daniels, a psychiatrist and one of the foremost Enneagram scholars, describes transformation as moving through five stages he calls the 5 A’s: Awareness, Acceptance, Appreciation, Action, and Adherence. This piece — Parts I and II combined — is really focused on the first three.

The Work

"I am out with lanterns, looking for myself." – Emily Dickinson

This is the invitation of the work ahead. And it begins with an important distinction: real self-awareness doesn’t live only in your thoughts. It lives in your emotions: what you feel, what you avoid feeling, what gets triggered and why. And it lives in your body: the tension that arrives before you consciously register a threat, the shallow breath in a difficult conversation, the gut sense that something is off before your mind can name it.

Most of the inner work leaders do, like I did for years, stays above the neck. The prompts, the journaling, the reflection are all valuable. But as you move through the exercises and reflections ahead, whether you’re looking back at your past or examining who you are today, notice what you’re feeling and sensing, not just what you’re thinking and doing. What emotion arises when you sit with a particular memory? Where do you feel it in your body? What happens in your chest, your jaw, your breath when you get close to something true? That data is not peripheral. It’s often the most honest signal in the room.

Lasting change doesn’t happen from the neck up. As I’ve explored at length in my essay on somatic intelligence, the body keeps score — and it also holds the key. If accessing your emotions and felt sensations feels difficult or unfamiliar (it did for me, for a long time) somatic modalities like Somatic Experiencing and Hakomi can be genuinely transformative.

Self-Observation and Reflection

Self-observation is the foundational skill of this work and it operates at two levels.

In the moment, it’s the practice of noticing what’s happening inside you as it’s happening. The ruminating thoughts. The tightening in the chest before a board call. The flash of defensiveness when someone challenges your idea. The subtle pull toward your phone when a difficult emotion arises. This is the capacity to catch yourself in real time — before the reaction, before the autopilot kicks in — and ask: what is this actually about? Where do I feel it in my body? What part of me just got activated?

Reflectively, it’s the slower practice of sitting with the deeper questions — the ones that require time, journaling, and honest inquiry to answer. The prompts embedded throughout Part I — about your attachments and avoidances, your natural and acquired personality, your self-image, and your ego — are all forms of reflective self-observation. Return to them often. Your answers will deepen over time.

“The truth is in our roots, but our past is not our anchor.”– Unknown

Your past is also essential territory. So much of who we are and how we show up — the attachments we carry, the personality we acquired, the self-image we constructed — was shaped long before we ever led a company. Two exercises I find particularly impactful with clients:

The first is Peaks and Valleys — mapping the defining moments of your life, high and low, and noticing what they reveal about what you’ve come to need, fear, and believe about yourself.

The second is a Roles and Responsibilities mapping — charting the roles each member of your immediate family (or whoever was most present in your childhood) played in the family system. Who was the achiever? The peacekeeper? The invisible one? The one who held it all together? And, most critically, which role/s did you play? As I often say to clients. “The roles we learned in our families of origin don’t disappear when we step into a boardroom. They just wear different clothes.”

Examining your stories is also crucial part of this work. The stories we carry about who we are, about other people, and about how the world works quietly shape every decision we make, every relationship we navigate, and every moment we lead. Most of them were written a long time ago. And most of them have never been examined. We’ll be going much deeper on stories, limiting beliefs, and hidden truths in an upcoming piece.

Good News! We’ve created a companion workbook for this essay that includes the prompts offered in Part 1, along with the following exercises: peaks and valleys, and roles and responsibilities, clarifying your core values, writing your eulogy, and more.

Going Underneath the Patterns

The practices above help you see yourself more clearly. What follows takes that seeing further — into working directly with what you find.

This is where parts work and shadow work come in — not as techniques for fixing yourself, but as practices for befriending what you find. In IFS, this often looks like sitting with a part, getting curious about it, and thanking it for the job it’s been doing. This is not a metaphor. It’s a literal practice of turning toward the parts of yourself that have been working overtime — your Hyper-Achiever, your Inner Critic, your Perfectionist — and acknowledging: I see you. I know you’ve been trying to protect me. Thank you.

This ties directly back to Appreciation, the third A in Daniels’ framework. You cannot integrate what you haven’t first appreciated. And you cannot heal what you’re still at war with.

Of all the assessment tools I use with clients, the Enneagram holds a unique place — and it belongs here, in the deeper work, for a reason. Unlike tools that describe what you do, the Enneagram goes underneath — to the core fears and motivations driving your behavior. It reveals the specific flavor of your ego’s strategy: what you believe you need to be, what you’re most afraid of losing, and the pattern that runs on autopilot when you’re under pressure. In that sense, it’s not a personality profile. It’s a map of the ego as well as a path back toward Self.

Leaders Doing the Work: Real Stories of Transformation

A founder once came to me at his board’s request. On paper, it looked like a scaling problem: he couldn’t delegate, was buried in details that belonged to his team, and was pulling all-nighters that left him running on fumes. But the deeper we went, the clearer it became: he already knew how to delegate. He’d taught other people how to do it. The white-knuckled grip on every decision wasn’t a skills gap. It was identity. He was, in classic form, a Hyper-Achiever — and parts of him had spent decades protecting him from an old, unspoken fear of being unworthy. This is what was keeping him attached to output, control, and being needed as proof that he mattered.

So we didn’t start with his calendar and how he was spending his time. We started with his core values and examined whether he was truly living and leading by them. Then we looked at his roles and relationships outside the company: partner, friend, person with a life that predated the business. And how little space any of them had actually been given. From there, I had him write his own eulogy. What did he want said about him, and how much of that had anything to do with revenue or valuation?

Alongside that, we spent real time with the parts driving him — not fighting them or trying to silence them, but building an actual relationship with them, understanding what they’d been protecting him from and what they needed in order to trust him enough to loosen their grip. Slowly, he spent less time being run by those parts and more time in Self.

He stopped white-knuckling. He still landed in the weeds sometimes, but it became a choice, not a compulsion. Overall, he began to lead from something steadier, which made the team and the company steadier.

This next story is one I’ve told in different forms across many conversations because it’s not one client, it’s many. In a startup ecosystem where only a fraction of companies exit the way their founders dreamed, this pattern is one of the most common and most quietly painful things I witness.

Another founder came to me in a much harder market. Software biz, non-AI, frantically trying to shift to having a compelling AI story. This company would have raised money easily just a handful of years ago and was now fighting for every term sheet. The founder built toward one outcome in his head for years. He had envisioned a specific valuation, a specific kind of exit, a specific story he’d tell about what it all added up to. The market had other plans.

His identity had quietly fused with the company. And he was attached to valuation number that no longer reflected reality. Letting go of that number didn’t just mean adjusting a forecast. It meant facing what it would say about him if the company exited for less, or not at all.

We spent time with what that original outcome had actually represented to him — not the cash, but what the cash was supposed to prove. Success. Recognition. A kind of validation he’d been chasing long before this company existed. His ego had quietly attached itself to a single future, and that future was no longer available.

The work was in separating the two: the real grief of a dream not panning out the way he’d pictured it, and the deeper, older attachment to needing the outcome to mean something about his worth. One was worth honoring. The other was worth examining.

Slowly, he began to let go of the version of success he’d been gripping and started defining it on his own terms. He’s still building. The company looks different than he imagined. So does he.

The Bigger Picture

When founders and executives first reach out to work with me, most want to talk about what’s happening out there — the team dynamics, the board pressure, the market headwinds, the organizational friction. And I tell them: “We can work with all of that. But we’ll be doing so mostly through the lens of you. Your job is to grow yourself alongside your business, and you gotta know yourself to grow yourself.”

When you truly know yourself — your values, your motivations, your triggers, the stories you’ve been carrying — you make better decisions, build stronger teams, and lead with greater clarity and intention. Self-awareness is the foundation beneath all of it.

It is also the first and most foundational pillar of Emotional Intelligence. Daniel Goleman’s research shows it accounts for nearly 90% of what distinguishes exceptional leaders from everyone else at senior levels. You cannot regulate your emotions, build real trust, or lead with clarity without first knowing yourself.

Leaders who know themselves also hire differently. They’re less likely to surround themselves with people who simply reflect their own strengths back at them, and more likely to build teams that are genuinely complementary. They’re clearer about what they need and more honest about what they’re not.

And the people around them feel it. Leaders who operate from greater self-awareness bring more authenticity, more presence, and more psychological safety to every room they enter. Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the single most important factor in high-performing teams. And psychological safety isn’t a policy you implement. It’s a felt sense that emerges when the person at the top of the room is regulated, grounded, and genuinely themselves.

This is what Richard Schwartz points to with IFS’ 8 C’s of Self-leadership. Beneath our different identities, histories, and defenses, every person has access to the same Self. And leaders who operate from that place — more often, more consistently — respond with curiosity instead of certainty, compassion instead of judgment, presence instead of reactivity. They create less fear and more connection wherever they go.

This is why my focus is the Inside Game — and why I often remind my clients: you cannot be a good leader of others until you become a good leader of Self. Exceptional leadership is not simply about external results. It’s about an internal state of being. It’s about being authentically you, which requires presence and deep self-awareness.

The leaders who do this work don’t just build better companies. They become what I believe this moment most needs: pioneers, bridge-builders, and consciousness accelerators. People whose inner work ripples outward — through their teams, their organizations, and the communities they touch.

If you missed Part I: Leaders, How Well Do You Know Yourself, make sure to read to gain a deeper understanding of what is shaping you and how you lead. Upgrade to a paid subscriber to access all the workbooks, frameworks and tactical guidance I share with my founder and executive clients like the Self Awareness Workbook below.

But how well do you truly know yourself? Be honest!

The way you respond under pressure, the patterns you repeat, the things you avoid, the self-image your ego is quietly working to protect: all of it shows up in every decision you make, every conversation you have, and every culture you create. And most of it was shaped long b…

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“Know Thyself” – Socrates

Over the past near-decade as an executive coach, I’ve run countless leadership development workshops. At some point during most sessions, I’ll pause and say something like:

“Raise your hand if you consider yourself self-aware.”

Every time, in a room full of accomplished founders and executives, 90 to 95% of hands go up. Zero hesitation. Just hands, confident and high.

I would have been right there with them. During my operating days, my hand would have shot up before the sentence was finished.

It wasn’t until I did years of deep inner work — work that eventually led me to coaching other leaders — that I realized how surface-level my self-awareness actually was. Like most executives, I had a decent handle on my strengths and where I struggled. I even had some insight into what set me off. And I worked on myself. Just not nearly as much as I focused on getting the promotion, signing the deal, closing the round, or driving the team to results.

That kind of work — improving skills, hitting milestones, climbing the ladder — is real and valuable. I’m not dismissing it. But it’s a different kind of work than what I’m talking about here. You can get very far optimizing for the outer game: sharpening your communication, building strategic muscle, hitting your numbers. Many leaders do.

But at some point, you hit a ceiling. Or you’re faced with a challenge you can’t think your way out of. And you begin to realize, quietly and uncomfortably, that you might be in your own way. You just don’t know why.

Some leaders never develop the awareness to even see this. But those who do — those who begin to recognize themselves as their own biggest obstacle — often begin a journey of deeper self-discovery. If this resonates, this essay is for you.

Here’s the thing about all those hands that go up in my workshops: the research says most of them are wrong. Studies show that while most people believe they’re self-aware, only 10–15% actually are. 10-15%!

And it matters far more than most leaders realize. A study by organizational consulting firm Green Peak Partners and Cornell University found that a high self-awareness score was the strongest predictor of overall success — stronger than IQ, technical skills, or experience. Daniel Goleman, the godfather of Emotional Intelligence, would not be surprised. Self-awareness is the cornerstone of EQ, and his research shows EQ to be the strongest predictor of leadership effectiveness at the highest levels.

Real self-awareness, however, isn’t simply knowing your strengths, some of your blindspots, and which personality type you are according to any number of popular corporate assessments. Truly knowing yourself requires something deeper — examining your patterns, your motivations, the unconscious forces shaping your decisions and behaviors. And developing the ability to see yourself clearly even in the moments that challenge you most.

This is what I mean when I say leadership is first and foremost an inside game. It isn’t just about what you do. It’s about who you are.

Why So Few Leaders Are Self-Aware

If self-awareness is so critical to leadership, why do so few executives actually have it?

Part of the challenge is that most leaders genuinely believe they do. This is partly due to the internal biases we all carry that make it difficult to see ourselves clearly. As organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant puts it: "When it comes to yourself, you're the most biased judge of all."

The other part is that many leaders do have some degree of self-awareness — it's just fairly surface-level. They haven't gone deeper. In my experience, there are three main reasons why.

Success Is a Blinder

The paradox of leadership is that the more successful you are, the less likely you are to question yourself. If what you’ve been doing has worked — if you’ve built a thriving career, led a high-performing team, and hit your goals — why stop and interrogate what’s driving you?

And the higher you climb, the less likely you are to receive honest feedback. The rooms get bigger, the stakes get higher, and the people around you get more careful. What you’re left with is a carefully curated version of reality and no real mirror.

The Constant Pull of Doing Over Being

Most leaders spend their days focused on what needs to get done. The next meeting. The next quarter. The next big move. There’s always something more urgent than looking inward. And when a rare quiet moment does arrive, the pull of notifications and responsibilities makes it easier to stay externally focused.

Real self-awareness isn’t something you squeeze into the margins. It requires presence, intention, and commitment.

Fear of What We’ll Find

This is the one nobody talks about. Self-discovery is uncomfortable. It asks us to look at parts of ourselves we’d rather not see — patterns we’ve outgrown, stories we tell ourselves that aren’t true, ways we’ve been leading that don’t serve our teams as well as we thought.

And then there’s the deeper layer: the parts of ourselves we’ve actively hidden. Carl Jung called this the Shadow — the aspects of who we are that we’ve repressed or buried because at some point they didn’t feel safe to express. These parts don’t disappear. They show up sideways in overreaction, resentment, or self-sabotage.

Reaching your full potential as a leader is an ongoing journey toward self-mastery. And that starts with the willingness to slow down, get curious, and get uncomfortable.

Discovering Who You Really Are (and Are Not)

Over the course of our lives, each of us develops an internal operating system. Some parts of it reflect who we naturally are. Other parts were built over years of adapting to our families, schools, workplaces, relationships, successes, disappointments, and the countless experiences that shaped us. Much of it happens so gradually and automatically that we mistake these adaptations for our identity.

We become attached to certain ways of being and avoid others. We construct an image of who we believe we are and also who we believe we need to be. We begin operating from an ego whose primary job is to protect that identity. Over time, these patterns become so familiar that they no longer feel like strategies. They simply feel like “me.”

The work of self-awareness is learning to see that operating system clearly. Not to judge it or dismantle it, but to understand how it was formed, what it is trying to protect, and whether it is still serving us.

The concepts that follow offer different windows into the same essential question: who am I? The more clearly we can answer that, the more freedom we have to lead, relate, and live from a place that is conscious and authentic rather than conditioned and performative.

Those layers are:

• Attachments and Avoidances

• Natural and Acquired Personality

• Self-Image, Ego and Self

Attachments and Avoidances

We like to think we’re making decisions and taking actions based on logic and free will. But much of the time, we’re bouncing between what we’re drawn toward and what we’re running from. And we don’t even realize it.

Attachments and avoidances don’t just shape what we do — they shape what we notice, what we ignore, how we interpret events, and the stories we tell ourselves. They quietly organize our entire inner world, influencing the decisions we make, the actions we take, our relationships, and our capacity to be present.

Underneath every attachment is something we believe we need in order to feel okay. For instance, a leader isn’t simply attached to achievement. They may believe, often unconsciously, that their worth depends on it — that without the next win, the next round, the next milestone, they are somehow less. The Buddha identified this 2,500 years ago in what he called the Second Noble Truth: suffering arises from clinging — specifically from needing external things to satisfy an internal hunger for worthiness, safety, or love.

Underneath every avoidance is an emotion we’re unwilling to experience, a fear we’re not ready to face, or a truth we’re not yet ready to see. Suppressing and avoiding emotions is the root of a great deal of our dysfunction. Avoidances often show up as what I call Escape Hatches — the automatic behaviors we reach for when discomfort arises. Things like overworking and over-preparing, which on the surface look like productivity, but often are quietly doing a different job: keeping an uncomfortable feeling at bay.

Reflect:

• What do you feel you must have in order to feel secure or successful?

• What are you avoiding, and how might facing it help you?

• Where might your attachments or avoidances be quietly running your leadership?

Natural and Acquired Personality

This layer asks a deceptively simple question: which parts of you are actually you?

Your natural personality is who you were before the world had opinions about it. The way you responded to life before you learned what was acceptable, rewarded, or safe. Some people are naturally expressive. Others deeply internal. Some are wired for risk. Others for precision. None of this is good or bad — it’s simply your original wiring.

But from early childhood, we begin adapting. We scan our environment for signals about which parts of us are welcome and which aren’t. The sensitive kid who learns to toughen up. The creative one who learns to stay in line. The natural leader who learns to shrink so others feel comfortable.

This is your acquired personality — not who you are, but who you learned to be. Your attachments and avoidances are deeply intertwined with this process — shaping which adaptations took hold and which parts of you got buried along the way.

This is where Jung’s Shadow comes in, as parts of both our natural and acquired selves get pushed into the shadows. These parts live outside our awareness and tend to run the show, surfacing as overreaction, projection, or a quiet sense that something is off but we can’t quite name it.

When your natural personality flows freely, you are operating from Self (more below). This does not mean that your acquired layer or your shadow disappear altogether, but it does mean you are no longer unconsciously enslaved to them.

Reflect:

• What parts of your personality feel most natural, like they’ve always been there?

• Who did you have to be to get love and attention as a kid?

• What parts feel more like a role you play to fit in, earn approval, or stay safe?

• Are there aspects of yourself you’ve hidden or suppressed that you are ready to acknowledge and examine?

• Are you leading in a way that feels true to you?

Self-Image, Ego, and Self

All of this — your attachments, your acquired adaptations, the parts you’ve hidden — eventually crystallizes into a self-image: the story you hold about who you are.

I’m the one with all the answers. I’m the responsible one. I’m successful. I’m independent. I’m the helper. I’m the one who never fails.

Take a moment with this:

What you just wrote (or thought) is your self-image.

Your ego is the system that works tirelessly to maintain, defend, and reinforce your self-image. Most of us don’t experience it as a system, though. We experience it as reality. As just... the way things are.

The ego is the voice that constantly asks: Am I enough? Am I doing this right? What do people think of me? That relentless questioning has a name. Tara Brach calls it the “trance of unworthiness”: a constant, often unconscious sense that who you are, as you are, falls short. The ego then hops it to answer its own incessant questioning via an endless cycle of proving, performing, and protecting.

Underneath all the layers we've explored sits something that cannot be constructed or conditioned: your true Self. Across traditions and cultures, it goes by many names: the witness, the observer, the noticer, Essence, Spirit. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems — a therapy and coaching modality I've found wildly impactful for myself and my clients — characterizes Self by what he calls the 8 C's: Curiosity, Calm, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Connectedness, Creativity, and Courage.

When the ego is activated (when your self-image is challenged, when someone questions your competence, when the company struggles) your anxiety spikes and parts of you mobilize to protect it. You get defensive. You overwork. You withdraw. You perform.

The opportunity for growth lies in the shift from being ego-driven to Self-led, which is more of a practice than a destination. And it begins with two things the ego resists most: presence and non-judgmental curiosity.

Reflect:

• What situations tend to trigger your ego to take over?

• What behaviors does your ego reach for most often when it feels threatened?

• Where are you leading from a place of enoughness? not enoughness?

• What percentage of your day do feel you are in Self (feeling the 8 C’s)?

• When do you feel most grounded and at ease (not trying to prove anything)?

Together, these layers (attachments and avoidances, natural and acquired personality, self-image, ego and Self) form a map of your inner world. The more roads you discover and explore, the clearer the full terrain becomes.

You begin to see what has served you, and also what no longer does. What parts of you have been in the driver’s seat instead of your true Self. Where the ego’s grip has been tighter than you realized. Where you’ve been performing a version of yourself rather than inhabiting one.

This is what true self-awareness actually is. An honest and accepting relationship with all of yourself.

And once you truly know yourself, you can begin the real work of growing yourself — intentionally, from the inside out. Of upgrading your internal operating system from 2 or 3G to 5G so that you lead with greater clarity, intention, authenticity, and wholeness.

From Buddha to Einstein

I want to leave you with a story I believe gets to the truth of all of this more directly and powerfully than any framework can.

Ages ago in Thailand, there was a temple with a magnificent Golden Buddha. When word came that an invading army was approaching, the monks did something remarkable. They covered the statue entirely — layering it with mud and concrete until it looked like nothing more than an ordinary stone Buddha. Unremarkable. Unworthy of plunder.

The army came. And passed right by.

But the army stayed for years. And slowly, gradually, something quietly tragic happened: the monks who remained forgot. Forgot what was underneath. Forgot that the stone Buddha had ever been anything else. An entire generation grew up knowing only the clay.

Until one day, a young monk meditating at the base of the statue noticed something. A small chip on the surface. And through that chip, a glint. Something shining from underneath.

He called the others. They began, carefully, to chip away. And what emerged, layer by layer, was what had always been there.

Pure gold.

You are the gold. The mud is everything you layered on top — to survive, to belong, to prove, to protect. It served its purpose. But it was never who you are.

If ancient temples and chipped-away clay haven’t fully landed for you yet — and I say this with love, because I’ve coached enough engineers, scientist-turned-founders, and card-carrying skeptics to know that some of you are sitting there thinking very nice story, Robyn — let me offer you a second way in.

Albert Einstein. Not exactly known for his woo.

In his personal essays, collected in Mein Weltbild, Einstein wrote: “The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.” Even the man who spent his life staring into the indifferent math of the universe arrived at the same place the monks did. The “little s” self he’s talking about isn’t you — it’s the voice in your head defending its own importance, keeping score, needing to be seen a certain way. You’re the one who notices it, via the practice of self-observation.

Same gold. Different mud.

Remember those hands that go up in my workshops whenever I inquire about self-awareness? This is what it actually takes to earn that raise.

The chipping away — the liberation — is the work of a lifetime. It comes with its own dark nights and messy middles. All part of becoming who you are and who you are meant to be. In Part II, we’ll get into some of the actual work that helps you get to know yourself, truly and deeply.

📉 Statistic of the Week

Matthew Leiberman, a UCLA psychologist, discovered that naming an emotion, which is called affect labeling, calms the amygdala and engages the pre-frontal cortex. Various studies report this reduces the intensity of the feeling by 30-50%.

🔨 Tool of the Week

If you’re like me when I started this work (and like most people), you can probably identify a handful of emotions, tops. I printed out Dr. Gloria Wilcox’ Feelings Wheel and journaled about at least 5 feelings I felt over the course of each day. I did this every night for a month, naming what I actually felt instead of defaulting to “fine” or “busy.” I have clients do the same, begrudgingly at first, and then they come back with real shifts in emotional granularity and regulation.

Sidenote: A giant printout of the Feelings Wheel was posted on the door of my son’s Kindergarten class. The fact that our kids are learning these tools early means that there will soon be a generation of leaders far more emotionally intelligent than we are.

🪞Reflections of the Week

• If you had to describe what you’re feeling right now without using “good,” “bad,” “fine,” “stressed”, or “busy”, what would you say?

• What emotion do you most try to avoid?

• When you are triggered at work, what emotion is usually underneath it?

• How often do you check-in with how you are feeling? How often do you check in with how your team members are feeling?

Indeed, perfectionism has played a role in their success. But most of what we actually work through in coaching is its shadow side: the feeling of not-enoughness. The loud Inner Critic. The anxiety, depression, and/or burnout that so often ride along with it.

I’m from the generation that used to answer “What’s a weakness of yours?” in a job interview with “I can be a bit of a perfectionist” — a humble-brag, dressed up as vulnerability.

My hope was that we were moving past that. That fewer people would reach for perfectionism as a badge of honor. That more people will have understood its downsides (perhaps having read one of my favorite books, Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection?).

So when I came across the below stat this week, it broke my heart. Perfectionism is not trending down. It’s trending up — for an entire generation.

% Stat of the Week:

A meta-analysis of 307 studies and more than 82,000 college students across the U.S., U.K., and Canada, tracked from 1989 to 2024, found that perfectionism has been steadily rising for 35 years straight.

💡 Concept of the Week:

The research, from Thomas Curran, the world’s foremost expert on perfectionism and author of The Perfection Trap, actually breaks perfectionism into three parts, which I find very useful. There’s the standard you set for yourself. The standard you set for others. And the standard you believe others are setting for you.

All three have been climbing, but that third one, the sense that everyone around you expects you to be flawless, is climbing the fastest by a wide margin. Interestingly, the data points to external factors, such as inequality and economic pressure (even more so than social media), as core drivers.

As a leadership coach, I’m most concerned with the following question: if the people entering our workplaces are arriving more afraid of failure than any generation before them, what does that actually ask of us as leaders?

That matters because it changes where the problem actually lives. This isn’t primarily about people holding themselves to impossible standards, though that’s real too. It’s about people walking into your org already convinced there is no margin for error and that the room is judging them.

This makes psychological safety as important as ever. And it also makes talking about growth mindset and risk tolerance just as key, since innovation stalls the moment people are afraid to take risks and try new things. Importantly, this goes beyond talk. It’s conveyed by the behaviors people actually see, like how you, as their leader, handle your own mistakes or respond when setbacks hit.

🪞 Reflection Questions of the Week:

• Think of the last time you made a visible mistake at work. Did you name it out loud?

• What does your team actually see you do when something goes wrong?

• Where are you still rewarding the appearance of having it together more than the honesty of not?

• If someone on your team is more afraid of judgment than of failing, what would you need to change about how you respond to them?

Quick note: if your company isn’t squarely “tech”: stay with me. Many of the findings travel well past technology, and I pulled the three takeaways that felt most relevant across company size and sector.

1. The workforce is splitting in two.

Tech workers now fall into two camps: amplified by AI (more capable, more confident, more excited than at any point in their career) or shaken by it (less sure of their value and whether there’s still a place for them). Which side someone lands on predicts how they feel about their entire career more than their title, tenure, or company size combined. This is exactly what I’m hearing from the founders I invest in, the executives I advise, and the leaders I coach. The divide isn’t really about who’s “keeping up with AI.” It’s about identity

2. Burnout is up. Optimism is down. And it’s not the story we were told.

I’ve unfortunately written about burnout more than almost anything else in this newsletter. What’s striking here is that AI was supposed to hand us back time by offloading the draining admin work, freeing us up for the stuff that actually creates flow. Instead, significant burnout jumped from 44.7% to 55.7% of respondents in a single year, while career optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%. It seems as thought the tools got smarter, byt the relief never showed up. That gap — between what AI promised and what it’s actually doing to our nervous systems — is worth sitting with.

3. Managers are still the biggest lever for happiness.

This is the reason FounderForward has offered management training since day one. Manager effectiveness is the single strongest predictor of burnout in the entire dataset. Bigger than role, company size, or even someone’s AI sentiment. Workers with a highly effective manager report roughly 65% higher job enjoyment. And yet only about 25% of tech workers rate their manager as highly effective. The most powerful lever in the building is also the most under-invested one.

You can read all the findings here.

🪞Reflections:

• Where do you fall right now? Are you amplified by AI or shaken by it?

• Are you feeling more or less burned out than last year? If more, what changed?

• How often do you ask your team how they’re feeling about AI?

• When did you last check in on your team’s burnout?

• How do you know if your managers are helping people thrive? When did you last run a skip-level to find out?

The Work

Becoming more connected to, and in tune with, your body isn’t about adding more to your plate. It’s about developing a new relationship with what’s already happening inside you.

The Foundation

If you have a mindfulness or meditation practice, you have a starting point. Mix in breathwork, movement, and/or music (I personally use solfeggio sounds to help regulate my nervous system) and you have the essential ground floor of this work. These practices build the basic capacity to slow down and inhabit your body rather than simply living above it. For specific practices and resources, check out my Practicing Presence Guide.

Part of this foundational layer is learning to turn the lens inward with genuine curiosity. This is what I’ve written about as self-observation — the capacity to notice your inner world: thoughts, emotions, and felt sensations. In IFS, Richard Schwartz calls this the U-turn. And notably, the first questions he asks about a part are physical: where do you feel it in your body? What does it feel like?

What I’ve learned from my own experience, and from working with hundreds of leaders, is that if you’ve spent most of your life in your head, those questions can be quite hard to answer. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because you haven’t yet built the access to the body that makes them answerable. This is why somatic work is so important.

Nervous System Regulation: The Superpower

“A relaxed body is the most powerful body that we have.” – Richard Strozzi-Heckler

Here is something I wish someone had told me earlier in my leadership journey: the ability to regulate your nervous system is not a personality trait. It is not something you either have or don’t have. It is a skillset. And like any skillset, it must be learned, practiced, and developed over time.

The goal of nervous system regulation isn’t to eliminate stress or manufacture calm. It’s to develop enough awareness and enough tools that you can recognize when your system has been activated, and consciously work with it rather than be run by it.

As someone who has lived this work firsthand and sat with hundreds of leaders doing the same, I believe nervous system regulation is one of the most under-leveraged skills in leadership today. Research shows that a dysregulated leader doesn’t just affect their own performance, their nervous system state directly shapes the experience of everyone around them. As I often say to clients: the nervous system of the leader becomes the nervous system of the organization. Which means that every investment you make in your own regulation ripples outward in ways that are impossible to fully measure.

So where do you start?

The Tentpoles

My somatic experiencing therapist introduced me to what she calls the tentpoles — four anchors you can return to whenever you feel your system activating.

Choice. Under pressure, it’s easy to feel trapped by the situation, the timeline, or the expectations of others. That feeling of being cornered is one of the fastest routes to reactivity. Reminding yourself that you always have options, however small, interrupts that pattern. You can ask for more time. You can change your approach. You can choose your next word carefully. Even naming one choice returns a sense of agency, and agency is calming to the nervous system.

Space. Dysregulation contracts. It narrows your vision, tightens your body, and closes your thinking. Space is the antidote. Find it physically by stepping outside, widening your gaze, feeling the room around you. Find it psychologically by resisting the urge to respond immediately. The nervous system that has space can think. The one that doesn’t, reacts.

Time. Fight, flight, fawn or freeze want to act now. They create a false sense of urgency that hijacks clear thinking and measured response. Buying yourself even thirty seconds — a pause, a breath, a moment before you speak — interrupts that urgency and creates the possibility of choosing your response rather than being driven by it.

Connection. We are wired to regulate in relationships. A genuine moment of human connection, with a colleague, a friend, a partner, a pet, even a brief exchange with a stranger, can shift a nervous system state in ways that no solo practice can replicate. This is why my therapist also taught me that trauma happens when there is no empathetic witness. We don’t heal in isolation. We heal in connection.

To my therapist’s four tentpoles, I’d add a fifth:

Perspective. When stress hits, our nervous systems can get overwhelmed. Two simple shifts can help. Zoom in by asking: what is the single next best step? That’s all you need right now. Or zoom out by reconnecting with your why — reminding yourself what you’re building and why it matters. You can also zoom out by asking: will this matter next quarter? Next year? Both moves interrupt the urgency spiral and return you to what actually matters. For more perspective shifts you can use in real time, read my piece on Perspective Pivots.

When you feel activated, run through the tentpoles. Not as a checklist, but as a genuine inquiry. Do I have a sense of choice right now? Can I find some space? Can I give myself more time? Is there a moment of connection available to me? Can I shift my perspective?

Energy Release Methods

Stress and activation aren’t just psychological, they’re physiological. Energy builds up in the body and needs somewhere to go. When it doesn’t get released, it accumulates, and over time, that accumulation shapes how we hold ourselves, how we respond, and how much capacity we have available for the work of leading.

There are five primary ways to move stuck energy through the body: breathwork, tapping, stretching, shaking, and massaging. None of these require special equipment, a gym, or a block of time you don’t have. They require only the willingness to work with your body rather than ignore it.

Breathwork, particularly extended exhales or more activating techniques like breath of fire, can move and discharge energy as effectively as movement. Tapping, rhythmically tapping different areas of the body, activates the nervous system’s calming response and helps discharge accumulated tension. Stretching creates space in the body that stress has contracted. Shaking, which may feel strange at first, is one of the most direct ways to release held energy. Animals do it instinctively after a threat passes. Humans have largely forgotten how. Massaging, even self-massage of the hands, neck, or shoulders, stimulates the vagus nerve and signals safety to the nervous system.

Build at least one of these into your daily routine. And keep them in your back pocket for the moments when you feel your system starting to activate. Sometimes thirty seconds of shaking or tapping is the fastest reset available to you.

My Personal Toolkit

Beyond the tentpoles and energy release methods, my somatic experiencing therapist introduced me to several specific practices that I’ve found genuinely useful in real time — in the middle of a stressful day, before a hard conversation, or when I notice my system starting to activate.

Orientation. Simply find something beautiful to look at. A plant, the sky, a piece of art, light moving through a window. Let your eyes soften and rest on it for a moment. The act of orienting toward beauty signals to the nervous system that the environment is safe.It also opens the door to something more: wonder, awe, and gratitude — three of the most powerful antidotes to stress we have access to.

Humming and pulling on the ears. Humming activates the vagus nerve directly, shifting the nervous system toward a calmer state. Gently pulling on the earlobes stimulates vagal pathways in a similar way. Thirty seconds of this can produce a noticeable shift.

Rubbing your fingers together. Bringing attention to the fingertips through gentle rubbing activates sensory awareness and anchors you in the present moment. It’s subtle, invisible in a meeting, and surprisingly effective as a real-time grounding tool.

One hand on the forehead, one on the back of the neck. This hold activates the body’s natural calming response. It’s a practice borrowed from somatic work that many people find deeply settling, particularly at the end of a long or difficult day.

For a wider range of Polyvagal-informed practices, I highly recommend Deb Dana’s Polyvagal Practices: Anchoring the Self in Safety.

On Self-Regulation and Co-Regulation

All of the practices above you can use on your own, in the flow of daily life. And they matter enormously. Building a self-regulation toolkit is foundational work that will serve you in every domain of leadership and life.

But self-regulation isn’t the whole picture. We are also wired for co-regulation — the process of two nervous systems coming into contact and influencing each other. This is how we first learned to regulate as infants, in the presence of a calm, attuned caregiver. And for many of us, that early experience of co-regulation was inconsistent, absent, or disrupted. This means our nervous systems learned patterns of activation or shutdown that self-regulation alone may not fully reach.

This was true for me. If it is true for you, co-regulation with a skilled practitioner is not the advanced work but the necessary foundation. There is no hierarchy here. There is only what your nervous system needs, given your particular history.

Working with a somatic experiencing therapist, as I have, is one powerful path. Other body-based modalities worth exploring include Hakomi, structural integration, and somatic bodywork. What they share is a practitioner who works with your nervous system directly, not just your thoughts and stories, and whose own regulated presence becomes part of the medicine.

If you’ve done years of inner work and something still feels stuck, this may be why. And this may be the door.

Leaders Doing the Work: A Real Story of Transformation

When this executive first came to me, he had every reason to be stressed. A CTO at a fast-scaling tech company, he was navigating market headwinds, painful RIFs, and a Board demanding aggressive AI-driven cost cuts. As is often the case with my clients, I could feel his tension — and we were on Zoom.

As we were wrapping up our first conversation, he mentioned almost in passing that he’d been dealing with chronic back pain.

Under pressure, his default was control. He became directive, micromanaging, and short with his CEO and Board. He had a reputation for being calm until, suddenly, he wasn’t. He had no idea what the trigger was because he had never learned to read his internal weather before the storm arrived.

When I asked him what he was feeling, he told me what he was thinking. Every time.

We started with mindfulness and body scans to build basic awareness where there had been none. Then a simple but consistent practice: can you sense what’s happening in your body before you get activated? It took time. But slowly he began to feel it: the chest tightening before a board call, the shallow breath when a conversation went sideways, the warmth in his cheeks when a team member made a mistake.

Once he could feel it, we could work with it.

We built a regulation toolkit personal to him. It included a grounding practice, box breathing (which landed considerably better when I mentioned Navy SEALs swear by it), and U-turns throughout the day to check in with body sensations in real time rather than waiting until he was already reactive.

The shift was gradual and then undeniable. He became steadier, grounded in a way that didn’t depend on the external environment cooperating. The grip on his team loosened. He was less reactive and more equanimous. He described feeling lighter and more resilient overall. His team noticed. His CEO noticed. And, as is so often the case, so did his family.

And then, about six months in, he mentioned almost offhandedly that his back pain had mostly subsided. His body had been keeping score all along. He had finally learned to listen.

The Bigger Picture

Everything we’ve covered in this essay — the somatic awareness, the inward turn, the regulation toolkit, the willingness to feel what’s happening in your body before it hijacks your leadership — all of it is ultimately in service of something larger than stress management or personal and professional optimization.

It’s in service of becoming the kind of leader this moment actually requires.

For the individual leader, the fruits of this work are profound. Presence — the ability to be fully here, fully resourced, fully yourself in any moment — becomes less aspirational and more accessible. Not something you perform in good conditions but something you can find your way back to even when conditions are hard. Equanimity — that quality of steadiness that doesn’t depend on the external environment cooperating — becomes your default rather than your exception. And resilience — not the toxic push-through version that so many leaders mistake for strength, but the real kind, the biological kind, the kind that knows how to recover and return to center — becomes something you actively cultivate rather than desperately hope you have enough of. (If you want to go deeper on what real resilience looks like, I explored it fully here.)

But this work doesn’t stop with you. It can’t.

We know from neuroscience that emotions and nervous systems are contagious. Your internal state — regulated or dysregulated, contracted or spacious, reactive or grounded — is being read and absorbed by everyone around you, constantly, mostly below conscious awareness. As I stated earlier, the nervous system of the leader becomes the nervous system of the organization. This isn’t metaphor. It’s biology.

Which means that every investment you make in your own embodiment and regulation is simultaneously an investment in your team. A regulated leader creates the conditions for psychological safety — the felt sense that it’s safe to speak up, take risks, make mistakes, and be honest. A grounded leader holds steady when the team is spinning, providing the co-regulatory presence that helps others find their own footing. An embodied leader makes decisions from clarity rather than reactivity, models the inward turn rather than the outward scramble, and shows their team — by example — what it looks like to lead from wholeness rather than strain.

Teams led this way become more adaptive under pressure. Cultures built this way rely less on urgency and control and more on trust and shared ownership. Organizations shaped this way move from operating on brute force and constant effort to something more like 5G leadership — capable of handling far more complexity with far less friction.

And zoom out further still.

We are living through a moment of profound disruption and collective anxiety. The external pressures are real — economic, political, technological — and they are not going away. In this environment, the most successful leaders won’t be the ones with the best strategy or the most sophisticated AI stack. They will be the ones who have done the inner work. Who have learned to turn inward before turning outward. Who can stay grounded when everything around them is moving fast. Who know how to regulate themselves, and in doing so, help regulate the systems and people around them.

Presence breeds presence. Embodiment breeds embodiment. Regulation breeds regulation.

It starts with one leader at a time.

And it starts in the body.

If you missed Part I of this article, make sure you read it here.

“It’s not about the situation, it’s about how you show up to it.”

And when it comes to your company, “It’s often not about the business. It’s about how you lead it.”

I’ve been saying versions of this to clients for years. It’s the premise underneath everything I teach, write, and believe about leadership. And yet, even for those of us who intellectually embrace it, there’s a gap between knowing it and actually being able to live it — especially when the pressure is on.

Right now, the pressure is very much on.

Founding and leading a company has always been one of the most demanding things a human being can take on. But something about this particular moment feels different. The economic volatility is real. The political noise is relentless. The market speed is breakneck. And then there’s AI, which a client very aptly described to me as a bullet train that arrived while most of us were still reading the schedule.

In times like these, the instinct is to look outward. Fix the strategy. Control the narrative. Change what’s happening around you. That instinct is understandable… and also it is mostly useless. The variable that actually determines how you navigate this moment isn’t what’s happening out there. It’s what’s happening in here.

Specifically — it’s what’s happening in your body.

Which brings me to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. A form of intelligence that most leaders have never been taught and rarely develop intentionally. Yet, once they discover it, they describe it as one of the most transformative things they’ve ever worked on.

It’s called somatic intelligence. Together with nervous system regulation, it represents the leadership edge of our time.

The Buzz and What’s Behind It

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve probably noticed these terms showing up more — in wellness articles, leadership podcasts, and therapy circles. Somatic this. Nervous system that. If you’re like many of the executives I work with, your first reaction might have been something between mild curiosity and mild eye-roll.

I get it. When a concept starts trending, it’s easy to dismiss it as the latest self-help flavor of the month. We did the same thing with mindfulness for a while. And before that emotional intelligence.

Which is actually exactly the point.

Not long ago, emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions and attune to others’, was considered soft. A nice-to-have for people-pleasers, not a must-have for serious executives. Today, EQ is table stakes. It shows up in hiring criteria, performance reviews, and leadership development programs across every major industry. The science caught up. The results spoke. And the leaders who had been quietly doing that inner work were already operating at a different level.

Somatic intelligence is at the same inflection point. The science isn’t emerging — it’s here. The results aren’t anecdotal — they’re documented. And the leaders who get ahead of this curve won’t be the ones who waited for it to become consensus.

The Problem: Heads on Sticks

“Mr. Duffy lives a short distance from his body.” –  James Joyce, The Dublineer

Let’s start with an honest assessment of where most leaders actually are.

You are smart. Driven. Probably more self-aware than most people in your orbit. You may meditate occasionally, see a therapist or coach, and have read enough psychology to know your patterns — at least intellectually. And yet, when the pressure spikes — when the board meeting goes sideways, when a key leader quits, when the market shifts overnight — something else takes over. You get sharper, more controlling, more reactive. Or you go quiet and withdraw. Either way, you’re no longer choosing your response. Your nervous system is choosing it for you.

This is the gap nobody talks about enough. Not the gap between knowing and doing. Leaders are familiar with that one. This is the gap between knowing and feeling. Between understanding something in your mind and having it actually land in your body.

Most high-performers are extraordinarily attuned to external dynamics. What’s happening in the market, on the team, in the room. They are quick to fix, control, or change anything out there. Far fewer have developed that same acuity inward. And of those who have, most are observing from the neck up — tracking thoughts, stories, mental patterns.

Indeed, most of us are walking around like heads on sticks.

What somatic intelligence adds is the next layer: learning to extend that observation into the body. What is actually happening inside you right now? What are you feeling? What does your body know that your mind is too busy to register?

What Somatic Intelligence Actually Is

Let’s define our terms — because somatic intelligence is one of those concepts that sounds esoteric until you understand what it actually means, and then it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world.

Somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning body. Somatic intelligence is simply the capacity to tune into the body’s signals — sensations, tension, ease, contraction, expansion, gut feelings — and use that information consciously. It’s the ability to read and work with what your body is telling you, in real time, rather than overriding it or ignoring it entirely.

Which, if you’re honest, is probably what you’ve been doing most of your career (and life).

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a cultural one. Western culture, and the tech and startup ecosystem in particular, has long placed cognitive intelligence on the highest pedestal. We grew up in systems that rewarded analytical thinking, logical reasoning, and intellectual output. We bought into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and built entire leadership models on top of it. Emotional intelligence was a later addition — and as we just established, it took decades to be taken seriously. Somatic intelligence hasn’t even entered most leadership conversations yet.

And yet the science has been here for a while.

Here’s a fact that stops most of my clients cold: we tend to assume that our brains send information down into our bodies — that the mind is in charge and the body follows orders. But according to Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, the reverse is actually true. Up to 80% of the information in our nervous system flows from the body to the brain. Our bodies are not passengers. They are primary. They are constantly processing data, sending signals, and shaping our perceptions and responses, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Doctor and author Bessel van der Kolk took this further in his landmark work The Body Keeps the Score. His decades of research showed that stress, unprocessed emotions, and past experiences don’t just live in our minds, they are wired into the body itself. Stored in our tissues, our posture, our breath patterns, and our chronic tensions. As van der Kolk writes, physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler, one of the pioneers of somatic leadership development, spent decades bringing this understanding directly into the domain of leadership and human performance. His work established something that is now central to how I coach: the body is not separate from leadership. It is leadership. How you inhabit your body, how you hold tension or ease, how you breathe under pressure — these aren’t peripheral details. They are your leadership, expressed physically.

And then there’s the phrase I come back to again and again, borrowed from somatic work: our issues are in our tissues. The stress you’ve been carrying since the last fundraise. The grief you didn’t process when a co-founder left. The fear that spikes every time revenue dips. It doesn’t just live in your thoughts. It lives in your jaw, your shoulders, your chest, your gut. And it shapes how you show up — in the boardroom, in difficult conversations, with your team — whether you know it or not.

This is why developing somatic intelligence isn’t a wellness project. It’s a leadership project. When you learn to read your body’s signals, you gain access to layers of data that most leaders are completely blind to. You start catching the tension before it becomes reactivity. You notice the contraction before it becomes a closed-minded decision. You feel the dysregulation before it becomes a conversation you’ll regret.

You go from being run by your body to being informed by it.

Over time, with practice, with patience, and with the kind of work we’ll get into later in this essay, something deeper becomes possible. You stop relating to your body as a vehicle you occasionally check in with and start inhabiting it fully. Present. Grounded. Integrated. This is what it means to become embodied and it is, I’d argue, one of the most profound shifts a leader can make.

The path to embodiment works similar to the path of growth and change. You cannot think your way into it. As scholar and author Father Richard Rohr puts it, “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living; we have to live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

Too often, leaders try to change from the neck up — intellectualizing their way into transformation. Reading the books. Understanding the frameworks. Building the self-awareness. All of it is valuable, but none of it is sufficient on its own. Because our bodies have been conditioned to respond in certain ways, and lasting change requires both un-conditioning those old patterns and reconditioning new ones. That means engaging the body directly. Not just thinking about it.

I know this not just from working with hundreds of leaders. I know it from my own journey.

What It Took to Get Out of My Head

I am someone who has been genuinely committed to my own inner work for a long time. Years of therapy. Coaching. Internal Family Systems. The Enneagram. Positive Intelligence. I have read the books, sat with the frameworks, and built real self-awareness around my patterns, my parts, my stories. And as an Executive coach of nearly a decade, that personal commitment has shaped everything about how I show up for the leaders I work with.

But for a long time, most of it was happening from the neck up.

I could describe my Hyper-Achiever part with precision. I could trace its origins — the childhood wiring that learned early that achievement earned love and that doing more meant being more. I understood it intellectually. What I couldn’t fully do was feel it. More accurately, I couldn’t yet access what was underneath it. The emotions and energy that had been stored in my body for decades while I stayed busy, stayed achieving, stayed safely in my head.

Talk therapy helped with awareness. It fell short on shifts.

This is not a criticism of therapy. It is one of the most important tools we have, and I recommend it without hesitation. But for those of us who are wired to live in our minds (and if you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a good chance you are) talk-based approaches have a ceiling. Because the parts that keep us in our heads are often the very same parts keeping us out of our bodies. My Hyper-Achiever and my Perfectionist had been doing their jobs since childhood. They were not going to stand down just because I could name them.

It wasn’t until I read The Body Keeps the Score and Hillary McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body that something cracked open — not emotionally, but intellectually first. I finally understood why the body had to be part of the work. Why awareness alone wasn’t enough. Why I could know something completely and still feel unchanged by it. The insight that landed hardest: you cannot think your way out of what the body is holding.

Excited by the prospect of tapping into my body and making a shift from awareness to actual change, I sought out a somatic experiencing therapist. And that’s when things actually started to move.

Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, is a body-oriented approach to healing that works directly with the nervous system, gently helping it process and release what it has been holding.

What I learned early on is that this work has two dimensions: self-regulation and co-regulation. Self-regulation is the practice of using your own body and breath to shift your nervous system state — techniques you can use alone, in the middle of a meeting, before a hard conversation, at the end of a long day. My therapist has taught me many of these, and we’ll get into them later in this essay.

But for me, the most powerful work has happened in co-regulation, which means another nervous system is present with yours. There is something that occurs in the relational field between two people, when one is a skilled, attuned practitioner, that simply cannot be replicated alone. Science supports this: we are wired for co-regulation from birth. Our nervous systems learned safety, or the absence of it, in relationships. And they can relearn it there too.

In practice, this looks nothing like what most people imagine when they think of therapy. I lie on a table. My therapist places her hands gently underneath different areas of my body — my abdomen, my shoulders, the base of my skull. And we wait. We might talk about something that’s been present for me. Or we might simply be quiet. And then something shifts. A release of tension so physical you can feel it happening. A warmth that spreads. A breath that goes deeper than it has in weeks.

The first time I experienced this, I wasn’t prepared for what happened. I’d been on the table for maybe twenty minutes. And then, out of nowhere, I started crying. It was like something that had been waiting a very long time had finally found a door.

I felt lighter when I left. Genuinely, physically lighter.

I’ve since learned that my stomach growling during sessions is actually a literal, audible signal that my parasympathetic nervous system has taken over from my sympathetic. Rest and digest, overriding fight or flight. My body announcing, in its own language, that it feels safe enough to let go.

What I’ve also discovered is that these modalities — talk therapy and body work — don’t compete. They compound. The deeper I drop into my body, the more I can access my emotions and felt senses. And the more I can access those, the richer and more impactful my talk therapy, which is rooted in Parts work becomes. The somatic work creates an opening, a kind of internal spaciousnes, that allows everything else to go further than it could before.

They feed and fuel each other. And together, they have brought me to a place that feels more embodied, more integrated, and more whole than anything I accessed working from the neck up alone.

I share all of this not because my journey is the template, but because I spent years assuming that understanding something was the same as integrating it. It is not. And I work with too many brilliant, self-aware, deeply intelligent leaders who are making the same assumption — doing extraordinary cognitive and emotional work, and wondering why certain things still feel stuck.

This work is not finished for me. It never will be. The nervous system doesn’t have a finish line — it has a practice. What I can tell you is that the shifts I’ve experienced through somatic work have been qualitatively different from anything I accessed through insight alone. More embodied. More lasting. More real.

And that’s what I want for the leaders I work with.

Reflection

These questions aren’t meant to be answered quickly. Slow down, grab a journal if you have one, and notice what arises.

1. When you’re under pressure, where does it show up in your body? Tight chest, clenched jaw, shallow breath, tension in your back or shoulders? If you struggle to answer, that itself is worth noting.

2. When did you last feel genuinely at ease in your body — not just mentally calm, but physically settled and grounded? How often does that happen?

3. Where are you trying to change from the neck up? What might it look like to bring your body into that work?

4. How might your team experience you differently if you were more present and embodied?

5. What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been too busy (or too afraid) to hear?

So let’s talk about Cape Verde and The World Cup.

Cape Verde is a nation of roughly 530,000 people, ranked 67th in the world, playing in their first-ever World Cup. They held Spain, the reigning European champions and a favorite to win the whole tournament, to a scoreless draw. Their 40-year-old goalkeeper, Vozinha, made seven saves and became the oldest goalkeeper ever to keep a clean sheet in a nation’s World Cup debut. It’s been called the shock of the tournament so far.

Their coach, known as “Bubista”, said something before the tournament even started that I haven’t stopped thinking about:

“We’re a small country, but it’s only small on the map.”

He’s not denying the size gap. He’s just refusing to let it be the whole story.

📺 Watch of the Week

The Cape Verde–Spain highlights are worth five minutes of your time, especially the closing stretch where the whole bench is on its feet.

❝ Quote of the Week

“We have shown organisation and braveness, and this is proof of what our country is about: resilience and trying to overcome hardships.” — Bubista, post-match

📚 Book of the Week:

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Per Malcolm Gladwell, underdogs who win usually don’t win by getting stronger. They win by refusing to play the game on the favorite’s terms. David didn’t train to out-muscle Goliath in close combat; he changed the terms of engagement entirely, with a sling, from a distance, on his own footing.

Cape Verde isn’t out-talenting Spain. They’re out-organizing them, out-uniting them, and refusing to be intimidated by a roster sheet. That’s a different game than the one Spain is used to playing.

For founders going up against bigger players, this is the actual lever. You will not out-resource Goliath. You can out-organize, out-unify, and out-believe him. It’s a different axis of competition entirely, and it’s one you can actually control.

🪞 Reflections of the Week

• Where am I trying to beat a competitor at their own game, on their own terms, with resources I don’t have?

• What’s my version of “small on the map” — the story about my size or stage that I’ve let become the whole story?

• Is my team and culture organized and unified enough to compete above our resource level?

• Where do I need a little more of Bubista’s brand of belief along with his refusal to let the gap be the whole story?

I sat there, teary-eyed, watching a room full of five and six-year-olds in tiny caps and oversized smiles. Then I came home and actually read through a packet of materials I found in his backpack. They were sent home from the facilitator of a program my son participated in called Share and Care.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Something about sharing toys, maybe. Or taking turns. What I found instead was something else entirely.

A Feelings Wheel. A handout called 6 Ways to Manage Big Feelings featuring journaling, breathwork, and movement. And a third page on noticing what’s happening in your body, feeling your emotions, and naming them.

I giggled a bit, as these are several of the concepts and tools I work on with executives. Founders, CEOs, C-suite leaders who are brilliant, accomplished, and often completely disconnected from what’s happening inside them. Leaders who can run a P&L but struggle to name what they’re feeling in a high-stakes moment. Leaders whose nervous systems are quietly running the show while their minds are busy pretending everything’s fine.

This content hasn’t always been taught in schools. But something is shifting. Educators, informed by decades of research in psychology and neuroscience, are starting to build this foundation early. And what’s beautiful — something I witness regularly in my coaching work — is the ripple effect. Parents learning alongside their kids. Adults doing now what no one knew to teach us then.

Dr. Becky Kennedy, whose work I’ve referenced before, believes the number one skill we can build in children is resilience. It’s also, not coincidentally, one of the most important capacities I work with leaders to develop.

Leadership development still has a long way to go. Emotional and Somatic Intelligence is still undervalued in too many boardrooms. Too many leaders are still leading from their heads while their bodies keep the score.

But I’m feeling something I don’t always feel when I look around at the leaders of today: genuine hope.

We are raising a generation of children who know what a Feelings Wheel is. Who have been taught to breathe before they react. Who are learning, at six, that their emotions have names and their bodies have wisdom.

I feel like this is a welcome signal for more conscious leaders and companies ahead, and I am absolutely here for it!

🪞 Reflections of the Week

• What would your leadership look like if you’d had this toolkit at six?

• What work are you willing to commit to now to build and/or bolster these skills?

I started, as I always do, with what I’ve actually observed — not what sounds good on a slide, but what I’ve watched play out across nearly three decades of working alongside entrepreneurs at every stage of growth.

Most founders are externally obsessed. I was too. And honestly? It makes complete sense. You’re building a product, chasing customers, pitching investors, and trying to outrun your competition — all at the same time. The external demands are relentless and measurable. The internal work feels abstract and optional.

So it gets crowded out. You don’t invest enough time defining the workplace you want to build — or creating clarity around your company’s purpose, vision, values, and culture.

And clarity alone isn’t enough. The real work is in the operationalizing — making purpose, vision, and values real in how you hire, how you lead, and how you show up when things get hard.

And eventually, that gap catches up with you.

The strongest companies I’ve worked with don’t just focus on winning in the marketplace. They invest just as intentionally in building the workplace that makes sustainable success in the marketplace possible.

This piece is about two inside games every founder must play. The Inside Game of your company — the purpose, vision, and values that become your culture’s operating system. Not just written. Lived, modeled, and built into how you hire, decide, and lead. And the Inside Game of yourself — the clarity, self-awareness, and intentional growth that makes you the kind of leader your company actually needs. It’s not separate work. It’s the same work, approached from two directions.

The Inside Game of Your Company

Every company has an inside game, whether it tends to it or not. It shows up in how decisions get made, how people treat each other, how conflict gets handled, and whether your best people stay or quietly start looking elsewhere. The question isn’t whether your company has a culture. It’s whether you’re building it intentionally.

That work starts with why.

Simon Sinek popularized this concept in his book Start With Why, but the underlying idea has existed for centuries. The book that most shaped my own thinking on purpose is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl observed that humans are meaning-making creatures — that our deepest drive isn’t pleasure or power, but the pursuit of meaning. That insight translates directly into how we build organizations.

Purpose and meaning are powerful drivers of human behavior. Knowing and clearly articulating your company’s purpose creates alignment, connection, and direction. A few questions to help you uncover your why:

• Why does my organization exist?

• What cause are we serving?

• What underlying belief drives our work?

We are naturally drawn to leaders and organizations that communicate what they believe. They help us feel connected. They create a sense of belonging and shared purpose. This isn’t just important for employees, it’s important for customers, partners, and job candidates. Investors look for it as well, as they have seen the research that organizations with a clear sense of purpose often create stronger engagement, alignment, and long-term performance.

A few examples of strong purpose statements:

Fenty: We believe beauty should be inclusive.
Patagonia: We’re in business to save our home planet.
Ritual: We believe in transparency in what you put in your body.

Once you have clarity around your purpose, you can begin defining your mission and vision.

Mission: What you do now, for whom, and why. Your mission guides day-to-day operations, priorities, and decision-making.

Example: “To build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” Patagonia

Vision: The future your purpose and mission are helping to create. Your vision paints a compelling picture of the future and creates an emotional connection to what you’re building.

Example: “To create a world where environmental destruction is reversed and businesses actively protect the planet.” Patagonia

Don’t get overly hung up on whether you’ve labeled something “purpose,” “mission,” or “vision” perfectly. These terms are often used interchangeably and sometimes incorrectly. What matters most is clarity.

Your purpose is your why — the deeper reason your company exists. That tends to remain relatively stable over time. Your mission and vision are expressions of that purpose in motion. They often evolve as your strategy sharpens, your market changes, and your ambition expands.

Which brings us to values.

Core values are the foundation of culture. They guide behavior, shape decision-making, and communicate what matters most inside the organization.

I’ve facilitated more core values sessions than I can count, and there are almost always a few participants who admit they rolled their eyes when the invite hit their inbox. They’ve worked at companies where values looked great on the website and meant nothing in practice.

That cynicism is earned. And it’s exactly the problem.

When values are clear and operationalized — built into how you hire, how you evaluate performance, how you promote, and how leaders behave on their worst days — they become one of the most powerful tools you have. They accelerate decision-making. They create alignment. They help people know how to act when you’re not in the room.

When they’re not? The gaps become cracks. And cracks have a way of widening exactly when you can least afford it.

Case Study:

A client I’ll call Maya was the founder and CEO of a consumer brand that had grown exponentially for 5 straight years. Strong brand, loyal customers, impressive revenue numbers. The culture looked good on the surface — perks, fun off-sites, a team that genuinely liked each other (until it didn’t).

Almost all of the focus and energy had gone into winning in the marketplace. Little was left for the workplace. When revenue started plateauing, the cracks appeared fast. Deadlines missed. Toxic dynamics that had been quietly simmering suddenly had nowhere to hide. Good people started leaving.

We’re still in it. But the team has revisited their values — not just the words, but the behaviors associated with them. The vision has been revised and is communicated often and with intention. Collaboration is stronger, communication is clearer, and execution has improved. The culture that was quietly fracturing is starting to find its footing again.

The Inside Game of the Founder

As important as this work is for the company, it is even more important for you, its founder. This is work that will serve you across every stage of your company’s growth — and every stage of your life. It matters at every point in the journey, but never more than in the early days, when you are the north star. And you are the culture.

How you think, communicate, make decisions, handle stress, and treat people quickly becomes the blueprint for everyone around you. The inner work you have done — or not done — and the clarity you have — or don’t have — will have a significant impact on your ability to build a successful and sustainable company.

The best place to kick off your inner work is with your core values—if you haven’t done so already. If you have, kudos! I guestimate that 80+% of all coaching engagements begin with core values work. Understanding the handful of values that actually guide your decisions, shape your priorities, and influence your behavior creates a powerful foundation for self-awareness and growth.

Next, get clear on your purpose. And not just your professional purpose. Many founders arrive in my coaching practice exhausted and disconnected, wondering why building the company no longer feels the way they imagined it would. Often, they haven’t lost passion for the business. They’ve lost connection to themselves. When your identity becomes too intertwined with the company, every up and down of the business becomes personal. A clear sense of personal purpose creates a larger container for your identity, helping you stay healthy and grounded through the inevitable turbulence of building.

Vision matters here, too. If the company’s vision is the future state the business is working toward, the founder’s vision is about how you want to live, lead, and contribute. And this vision needs to evolve. I see many founders become lost as their companies grow because they achieve the vision they originally had for themselves and the business, but haven’t taken the time to create a new one.

A few questions worth sitting with:

• Why does this problem matter to me personally?

• What kind of leader do I want to become?

• How do I best serve my company today — and how might that need to evolve?

Answering these questions requires doing something that is genuinely hard for most founders: slowing down and going inside. You’re building a business, leading a team, and also taking care of a partner, kids, and sometimes aging parents. Believe me, I get it. But also believe me — your success as an entrepreneur demands this work.

This is the work Maya and I have been doing alongside the organizational work. After years spent deep in the weeds of building, she is finally getting clear on a new vision for herself and her role, one that reflects the kind of leader she wants to become at this next stage, not just what the business needs her to do. That clarity is already changing how she shows up for her team.

The founder’s inside game doesn’t stop at values, purpose, and vision. Who you are is how you lead. And to become the leader your company needs, you have to understand who you are today. As I often say, you have to know yourself to grow yourself. This means honestly assessing your strengths and superpowers (zone of genius) as well as your blind spots and gaps. Download the accompanying workbook to guide you through this work.

The Work That Changes Everything

Purpose, values, and vision may not feel as urgent as fundraising, marketing, or sales. But they often determine how effectively you navigate all of those efforts. They are the foundation beneath everything else you’re building.

And here’s what I know after nearly three decades in this work: the founders who invest in both inside games — the company’s and their own — build something different. Not just more successful companies, but more resilient ones. Companies that can weather a plateau, a pivot, or a crisis without coming apart at the seams. Employees and teams that stay engaged and motivated through the inevitable hard seasons, rather than burning out or quietly checking out. Leaders who can grow alongside the companies they’re building rather than becoming the ceiling that limits them.

The outer game matters. Strategy, execution, growth — all of it matters. But the founders and companies that sustain that success are the ones who understood early that the inner game drives the outer one. That the workplace shapes the marketplace. That who you are as a leader shapes everything your company becomes.

That’s the inside game. And it’s the most important game you’ll ever play.

This workbook is designed to help you do the inside work that makes everything else possible. It guides founde…

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Partly because it comes up constantly in my coaching work. Partly because of the state of the world. And partly because, as a parent, I spend a lot of time thinking about what skills will matter most for my 6 year-old as he grows up.

Just about every founder and executive I work with would characterize themselves as highly resilient. In many ways, they are. They have survived setbacks, navigated uncertainty, and continued moving forward when others might have quit.

But as I explored in my Deep Dive on resilience, many of us have gotten resilience wrong.

We may appear resilient on the outside while internally punishing ourselves for mistakes, failures, or not knowing. We may pride ourselves on staying calm under pressure, yet become more controlling, closed-minded, or reactive when stress rises.

The good news is that resilience is not simply something you have or don’t have. It’s a skill. A practice. A muscle that can be strengthened.

This is one of the reasons I’ve appreciated the work of parenting expert Dr. Becky. For years, she has challenged parents to stop making happiness the goal and instead focus on helping children build resilience.

More recently, she’s been talking about what she calls The Learning Space: the uncomfortable territory between not knowing and knowing.

It’s a place filled with frustration, uncertainty, mistakes, vulnerability, and growth. It’s the place where resilience is built.

📺 Watch of the Week:

🗞️ Article of the Week:

The Learning Space is The Key to Building Resilience (written for parents to teach children, similar applies for leaders teaches teams)

🪞 Reflections of the Week

1. Where in your life or leadership are you currently in the space between not knowing and knowing?

2. How do you typically respond when you don’t have the answer? Do you become curious, controlling, impatient, avoidant, or something else?

3. What story do you tell yourself when you make a mistake, fail, or struggle to figure something out?

4. Where might you be mistaking endurance, achievement, or pushing through for true resilience?

5. What would it look like to spend a little more time in the Learning Space rather than rushing to certainty?

In it, I shared some of my struggles as an Enneagram 3 — The Achiever (though I often call this part of me the “Hyper-Achiever”). I got a lot of messages about that piece. Some from fellow Type 3s, of course. But mostly from people who recognized the feeling underneath it. They might not call themselves Hyper-Achievers, but they know what it feels like to always be pushing, striving, and proving - all while quietly wondering if there is another way to work (and live).

A lot of people told me some version of the same thing: I’m just really tired.

Tired of hustling. Tired of always feeling behind. Tired of getting to the milestone only to move the goalpost again. They still want to achieve. They just want to enjoy their actual lives a bit more along the way.

That was certainly true for me.

Many of the questions I got were about what to do. Which is exactly where Type 3 / Hyper-Achievers go: Give me the tactical plan or framework so I can optimize my way out of this.

Unfortunately, deep work doesn’t quite work like this. And believe me, I went into doing mode for years before I understood that much of the work was actually about being.

For me, that meant slowing down enough to understand what was actually driving me — the patterns, beliefs, and stories underneath the constant striving. Coaching, therapy, Parts work, Somatic Experiencing (to get me out of my head and into my body), and, of course The Enneagram, all played roles in my journey.

And while no book changes you, there are a few that have genuinely helped me on this journey and that I wanted to pass along to you.

📚 Books of the Week

Radical Acceptance
I recommend this one often. It masterfully addresses feelings of “not enoughness” and our tendency to constantly prove our value.

Never Enough
Especially resonant for anyone thinking about achievement, pressure, and the messages we absorb about worth.

The Gifts of Imperfection
A thoughtful companion for anyone trying to loosen the grip of perfectionism, proving, and performance.

4000 Weeks
A good reminder that life is not something waiting for us on the other side of productivity.

🪞 Reflections of the Week

• Where in your life have you moved the goalpost so many times that you no longer let yourself enjoy what you’ve already built?

• What is your drive giving you right now? What might it quietly be costing you — at work, at home, or internally?

• Where are you chasing something because you deeply want it versus because an old story says you should?

• If achievement became one part of your identity rather than the whole thing, what else might have room to emerge?

• What would “success” look like if it included enjoying the actual day-to-day — not just reaching the next milestone?

We’re also exploring what role leaders should play in being good stewards of this technology and advocates for thoughtful guardrails and policy.

Anthropic is one of the companies in the space that speaks openly about balancing innovation with safety and long-term societal impact. Co-founders Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei recently joined Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, and their conversation is my Watch of the Week: The Anthropic Co-Founders on Oprah’s Podcast

I found the conversation compelling for two reasons:

1. They share how they think about what they call “the light and the shade” of AI. Their perspective may spark ideas for your own leadership conversations, company decision-making, and thinking around responsible innovation.

2. They quietly model a master class in leadership throughout the conversation, including:

• Building a company and making decisions grounded in clear values and principles

• Creating an environment where employees feel safe pushing back and challenging ideas

• Holding paradox and complexity rather than rushing to simplistic answers

• Expanding who is included in the conversation and considered in the design of technology

• Remaining well-rounded as founders rather than becoming consumed solely by the business

More than anything, the conversation felt like a reminder that leadership is not just about what you build, but how you build it and who you become in the process.

🪞Reflections of the Week:

• How are you balancing speed, innovation, and thoughtful decision-making inside your company?

• What values or principles do you want guiding your leadership and decision-making?

• Are you creating an environment where people feel safe questioning assumptions and pushing back?

• Where are you being asked to balance competing truths as you scale?

• As your company grows, how are you making sure your identity doesn’t become completely fused with the business?

A fellow coach-in-training looked at me and said, “You must be an Enneagram 3.” I smiled, slightly embarrassed that I had no idea what an “Enneablahblahblah” even was. But my curiosity was piqued, and that moment quietly kicked off what has now been a nearly decade-long journey of studying the Enneagram, integrating its wisdom, and using it as a lens to better understand myself and how I show up as a mom, partner, friend, and leader.

She was right, by the way. I am a 3. And interestingly, so are a large percentage of the founders and executives I work with.

Over the last few years, I’ve had a number of people from earlier chapters of my career tell me that they experience me differently now. They say my energy feels different. What’s most notable is not just the observation, but my reaction to it.

There was a time when a comment like that might have landed as subtle criticism. I might have immediately wondered what they meant, whether I had somehow lost an edge or softened in a way that made me less effective. It would have hooked something in me.

But that wasn’t my response. Instead, I felt a quiet sense of recognition. Because they’re right. I am different than when most of them knew me.

Of course, part of that is life stage. Becoming a mom changes you in ways that are both profound and hard to fully articulate. But what I believe they’re really picking up on is something deeper. For a little over a decade now, I’ve been deeply committed to the work of understanding myself, healing old patterns, and getting to know who I actually am beneath all the doing. Said differently, I’ve been focused on my Inside Game—the work that sits beneath how we show up, decide, and lead.

Coaching and therapy have both played meaningful roles in my process. Alongside them, the Enneagram has served as a powerful gateway to growth, which is why I wanted to share my perspective on it here, along with an Enneagram for Beginners workbook I’ve created.

Before going further, it’s worth naming something I hear often, especially from founders and executives. For some, the Enneagram can feel a bit… woo woo. Or like just another personality assessment in an already crowded field.

I get that reaction.

There’s no shortage of tools that attempt to categorize people. Many of them stay at the surface level, describing behaviors without getting to what’s actually driving them. What I’ve found, and what has made the Enneagram stick for me over time, is that it operates at a different level. It’s less focused on what you do and more focused on why you do it.

That’s also why it can be more confronting, and ultimately more useful. In my experience, it is a much deeper and richer tool for self-awareness.

I have yet to meet a leader who doesn’t want to reach their full potential. But that doesn’t start with doing more or pushing harder. It starts with understanding ourselves more fully.

This is where the Enneagram comes in. It helps us recognize our underlying motivations, our fears, and our desires. The moments we get activated and why. The patterns we repeat, often without realizing it. And ultimately, the ways we may be unintentionally holding ourselves back in our leadership and in our lives.

The Enneagram describes 9 Types, each with a way of organizing life around core ideas about self and life that feel true and necessary. Understanding our Primary Type reveals, often with uncomfortable clarity, the difference between who we truly are (our nature, Self, or essence) and who we think we need to be (the ego).

It helps us see the identity we’ve constructed in response to our experiences and our attempts to feel safe, understood, valued, or successful. It also helps us recognize the patterns that have been running us, so we can gradually loosen their grip and allow more grounded, present, and whole versions of ourselves to emerge.

While we each have a Primary Type, all nine exist within each of us. As you begin to learn the full system, you start to see the world through multiple lenses. You begin to understand that what appears to be stubbornness in one person might be a deep need for integrity. What looks like intensity in another might be a way of creating safety. What looks like detachment might be a strategy for managing overwhelm.

In understanding all nine Types, you begin to see both the gifts and the suffering embedded in each. The Enneagram becomes a powerful tool for appreciation and empathy, ultimately showing up as more effective communication, clearer feedback, stronger collaboration, and better leadership.

Before doing this work, I was what the Enneagram would describe as an “unhealthy 3”. I was highly driven, achievement-oriented, and almost always in motion. My default pace was fast, and my orientation was forward, focused on what was next and what more I could do.

On the surface, it looked like ambition, discipline, and success. And to be fair, those qualities served me in many ways. They helped me build, achieve, and create opportunities I am deeply grateful for.

But underneath it all was a dynamic I couldn’t see at the time.

My identity was deeply tied to my work. It was where I felt most confident and most validated. It mirrored how I grew up, where achievement through grades and sports was rewarded and reinforced. Without realizing it, I had internalized a belief that my worth was connected to what I could do and accomplish.

And so I kept going.

I spent a lot of time competing and comparing. I was constantly measuring myself against others and against some future version of myself I thought I needed to become. There was very little space to simply be who and where I was.

Feedback, in that context, was particularly charged. Even when it was well-intended, it often landed as a threat, not just to my performance, but to my identity. If I wasn’t doing something well, what did that say about me?

So I reacted. I got defensive. I worked harder. I tried to close the gap as quickly as possible. From the outside, it likely looked like high standards and drive. From the inside, it often felt like immense pressure and attachment.

The Enneagram helped me see not just these behaviors, but the underlying motivations and fears driving them. It gave language to patterns I had normalized and showed me how much of my life was organized around being seen a certain way, and how exhausting that actually was.

It also helped me understand my relationship with emotions, particularly shame (Type 3’s Predominant Emotion). I didn’t relate to it at first. I didn’t see myself as someone driven by shame, nor did I identify with being in the Heart Center. But it started to make sense when I learned that this disconnect is common for 3s. Busyness can be a very effective way to avoid feeling our emotions.

The Enneagram made the cost of my patterns clear. Not just to me, but to the people around me. I was often unavailable, so focused on the next fundraise or strategic partnership. My pace created subtle pressure for others. And at times, I unintentionally prioritized outcomes over connection, even when relationships mattered deeply to me.

That level of awareness can feel destabilizing… and it is also liberating.

Over time, I began to shift. I didn’t become a different person. The core wiring of a 3 is still very much there, but the way it’s expressed has changed. I am operating at a higher level of consciousness and, in Enneagram speak, I am now a “healthy 3”.

Today, I show up with less performing and more being. I focus less on how things look from the outside and give far more attention to how they feel from the inside. My drive toward potential is still present, but it comes from a more grounded place, one oriented around realization rather than proving.

I am more present, more patient, and more connected to the moment I’m actually in. I’m better able to find joy in the ordinary and less attached to the extraordinary. There is more self-compassion and less internal criticism. Perhaps most importantly, there is less attachment to achievement as a source of worth.

The patterns still arise, and the ego still shows up, but I can see them more clearly. In that awareness, I have more space to choose how I respond. Some days I do better than others.

Overall, the more time I spend with the Enneagram, the more time I spend with my true Self. And that, in itself, has been a profound gift.

Where to Start

If you’re curious about using the Enneagram to facilitate your growth, you are probably wondering where to begin.

This may be controversial, but I am not a big believer in starting with an Enneagram test. I have seen too many people mistype, often because we tend to answer based on who we think we are or want to be (damn ego!) rather than what is actually driving us beneath the surface.

In my experience, the most reliable way to understand your Type is through study, reflection, and honest self-observation over time. Reading about the Types, noticing what resonates, and paying attention to your patterns in real life will get you much closer than a single test result. Working with a coach who understands the system can also be incredibly helpful.

If you do want to begin with an assessment, I generally recommend the RHETI, developed by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, who have played a significant role in bringing the Enneagram into broader awareness and have written some of the most respected books on the subject.

Their work is excellent, though often dense and time-intensive. Part of why I created my Enneagram for Beginners workbook was to offer a more accessible entry point. Something that helps you understand the Types, reflect on your own patterns, and begin engaging with this work in a practical way.

I also suggest listening to The Upbuild Enneagram Library podcast. I have studied with Upbuild, and their Enneagram content is fantastic. They also offer an Enneagram Circle, which I’ve participated in and found incredibly valuable. There’s something powerful about exploring this work in community with others.

As you embark upon your own Enneagram journey, remember that, like any Inside Game work, there aren’t shortcuts, only a path you engage with over time. The work is gradual, layered, and ongoing, but it can also be profoundly rewarding… deepening your understanding of yourself, your relationships, and your leadership.

I designed this workbook as resource I wish I’d had when I started this work nearly a decade ago. It give you a break down of the system, Types, core emotional patterns and fixations that I find helpful for identification — and gives you the contemplation prompts and in-the-moment inquiries to begin seeing your own patterns more clearly.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. Because most leaders already have a reasonable picture of their behaviors. What they’re missing is the layer underneath — the fears, the fixations, the patterns of attention that have been quietly running the show for decades.

That’…

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A large-scale study of 23,000 employees across 250 organizations found a clear pattern: high-performing women are far more likely to receive critical feedback than their male counterparts.

Women are more often told they are “too aggressive,” “not collaborative enough,” or “hard to work with,” while men are more often given feedback tied to specific skills, outcomes, and ways to advance. Importantly, men are far less likely to receive critical feedback on “how they show up.”

This is where it gets nuanced. How someone shows up absolutely matters. Presence, tone, and how we work with others are critical to leadership effectiveness. The issue isn’t giving that feedback—it’s how it’s delivered, and whether it’s being delivered consistently across people.

When feedback is vague, personality-based, or untethered from specific behaviors and impact, it’s hard to act on. It creates ambiguity instead of clarity. And over time, that ambiguity leads to second-guessing, self-editing, and energy spent managing perception rather than improving performance. It also contributes to women and other underrepresented groups disengaging—or leaving altogether.

When feedback is specific and grounded (this behavior, in this moment, had this impact), it becomes useful. It creates a path forward.

Zoom out, and this is about fairness AND performance. If some people are getting clearer, more actionable feedback, you’re not developing talent evenly. You’re shaping who grows, who advances, and ultimately what your leadership team looks like.

Which leads me to another data point that I like to share: Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are significantly more likely to outperform their peers on profitability.

If your feedback systems aren’t developing women at the same rate as men, you’re not just creating inequity—you’re leaving performance on the table.

Reflections of the Week

1. If you looked across your team’s recent feedback, what patterns would you see in who is receiving critical feedback—and what kind?

2. Where might feedback on “how someone shows up” be more subjective than behavior-based? How could you make it more specific and tied to impact?

3. Are there people on your team who are getting primarily developmental, forward-looking feedback? And others who are getting more personality-based feedback? What might be driving that difference?

4. What would it look like to audit feedback across your team (with HR or your leadership team) to ensure it is both equitable and actionable?

ICYMI, I wrote a Deep Dive called the Feedback Disconnect that discusses the most common feedback hangups I see in leaders and executives. Read it here.