COURAGE

In my last article, I wrote about AI as a consensus machine. About how the race to adopt, integrate, and optimize for AI might be producing the opposite of what we're hoping for — smoothing away the rough edges of original thinking, replacing instinct with output, and delivering the most agreeable answer when what we actually need is the most honest one. The response surprised me. Not because people disagreed. But because of how many people wrote back and said some version of

I once worked with a senior leader who told me he did his best thinking in the car. Not in strategy sessions. Not in offsites. Not in the back-to-back leadership meetings that filled his calendar from 8am to 6pm. In the car. Alone. On the drive home. That thirty-minute window — no agenda, no notifications, no one needing anything from him — was where things clicked. Where the tangled problem from Tuesday's meeting suddenly had an answer. Where he'd realize what he actua

A reader wrote to me after the last edition of this newsletter. She said she'd tried it. The Courage Challenge — one hour of complete presence with someone she loved. No phone. No half-attention. Just her, fully there. And she said it was harder than she expected. Not because she was distracted. But because when the distractions fell away, something else surfaced. A restlessness she couldn't quite name. An urge to fill the silence. A strange discomfort with just... being ther

I lost someone recently. It was sudden. There was no warning. No time to prepare. No final conversation I knew would be final. One day they were here. The next — without explanation, without transition, without any of the things we tell ourselves we'll say when the time is right — they were gone. And that's the thing about sudden loss that nobody warns you about. It doesn't just take the person. It takes every future moment you had assumed was still available to you. The coff

“It’s lonely at the top.” I was reminded of just how true—and how heavy—that can feel in a conversation last week with a senior leader I’ve been coaching. Our work often centers around solving real, tangible challenges—decisions, team dynamics, competing priorities. But just as importantly, I serve as something else: a sounding board, a mirror, a thinking partner. A space where he doesn’t have to perform leadership—he can simply be . This time, he paused mid-conversation and

I almost didn’t go. It had been one of those days – back-to-back calls, brain slightly fried. Low energy. The couch was calling. It had just started raining outside. And the event felt optional…at best. I stood in front of my closet longer than necessary. Changed once. Changed again. Checked the time. Considered texting an excuse. You can skip it, I told myself. You’ve already been productive today. No one will notice. And deep inside of me, a familiar debate was playing

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that shows up for most of us, at one point in life. Not the dramatic, storm-the-castle kind of urge for reinvention— but a quieter, nagging pressure under the ribs. I know this feeling intimately. Many years ago, when I was still an executive recruiter—seemingly at the height of my career—I started to sense a subtle shift inside me. To the observer on the outside, I had a dream career. But on the inside, something started feeling, we

We’re often told that confidence is the key to career success. “Believe in yourself,” they say. “Fake it ’til you make it.” Confidence is celebrated in interviews, in performance reviews, in leadership programs. We admire people who speak effortlessly, present confidently, take up space, and appear self-assured. But here’s the inconvenient truth: Confidence alone rarely changes careers. Confidence is a feeling—fleeting, inconsistent, and heavily influenced by circumstances

This weekend, I found myself watching back some of the recorded sessions from the UN General Assembly in New York. And one thought kept coming up again and again: Courage is missing at the top. And I don’t just mean politics. I mean CEOs, business leaders, and anyone who holds influence and power. We live in a world where power is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group of people—people with visibility, access, and a platform. And yet, too often, we see that pow