The fireworks from the Fourth have faded into the distance, though I can still hear a spare shell or two during my evening patio sits. You’re six months into 2026, either wondering what happened — has time always moved this fast? — or secretly wishing for a reset. Your Q1 and Q2 Targets vs. Actuals reports are ready for your quarterly EOS meetings that you’ve hopefully held by now.

You might even be calling any progress a win because you’re tired of not winning. Worst of all, maybe some of the anticipated friction is stronger than you thought, or reality is creeping in to remind you of the effort the rest of the year will require.

You want a do-over, and the good news is that you don’t have to earn one. You can simply take one.

You Don’t Need a Rock Bottom to Reset

Somewhere on the internet, the meme below was born.

It’s an unconfirmed photo of a boulder that looks unmistakably like a human backside, captioned “Well it’s official…I’ve finally found Rock Bottom.”

If you’re in on the internet’s modern art joke scene, you’ll instantly recognize the piece of art that this is. (Because it’s not art unless it has a butt!) Ridiculous, yes. Also the whole point of this post.

Intentionally create a mid-year reset (rock bottom moment) and make the rest of your year art-worthy.

You don’t need an actual rock bottom to get the clarity that a rock bottom experience gives you. In the words of Novus Global coach Janet Breitenbach, “Coaching can provide rock bottom experiences without actually hitting rock bottom.” Transformation happens when the cost of the pain of change becomes less than the cost of staying the same. You don’t have to crash entirely to disrupt the cost balance in favor of transformation.

The Summer Slog

Summer is an odd beat in the business calendar. School has a predictable rhythm: fall ramps everyone up into a routine; the holidays hand you a built-in reset based on the new year; then spring wraps up the routine before summer arrives and launches you into graduations, weddings, vacations, picnics, lake days, and sunburns. It’s hard to find a consistent summer ritual in the middle of everything else.

Turns out that’s not just a vibe. Researchers tracking attention and working memory across the calendar year found that both dip through the summer months and peak in the fall (Perspectives on Psychological Science). If you’re technically hitting your numbers but feel like you’re dragging a boat anchor to get there, it could be your brain running on its seasonal setting. Which means the friction you predicted back in January and are now feeling in July isn’t proof that your strategic plan has failed. It might just mean that you’re a human being in the middle of summer.

I see this same pattern with almost every leader I work with this time of year. People can be so convinced they’ve lost their edge when it’s really just the normal seasonal focus dip conflicting with the strategy they started in January. It’s a different season now with different needs and constraints, and possibly even new goals. And before the shame settles in that you started the wrong strategy, remind yourself that you did the best with what you knew in January…and know you know more.

The Summer Reset and Reflection

Behavioral researchers Katy Milkman, Hengchen Dai, and Jason Riis studied something they call the “fresh start effect” (Wharton): people commit to goals with noticeably more energy right after a landmark moment, and that moment doesn’t have to be January 1st. Any date that feels like a clean line between a “before” and an “after” works. You can pick your own.

The crazy, hectic summer can be one of those moments for you too. It’s far enough from January that you likely have better insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy in play. And it’s early enough that you still have a runway to make significant strategic improvements with time to see results before December. You are, right now, in one of the most underused reset moments on the entire calendar.

At the halfway point, are you happy with your progress?

Are you happy with how you showed up to get it?

Where’d you get in your own way most often this year?

If nothing changes between today and New Year’s Eve, will you be proud of how you spent the back half of 2026, or just relieved it’s finally over?

Maybe you’re hitting your targets and running on fumes to do it. Maybe the resistance you predicted has become the justification for refactored goals. Either way, you don’t have to grit your teeth through six more months of pain and frustration. Doubling down may feel like commitment, but it’s a stronger commitment to avoiding the pain of change than it is a commitment to your goals. In fact, a strong commitment to your goals shows up in your willingness to reinvent, your capacity for change, and your belief in what could be possible.

Reinventing your approach here at the midpoint isn’t giving up on the strategy. It could be the single most strategic change you can make right now.

Don’t wait for a fresh start moment to be thrust on you. Create your own.

Meta performance coaching exists to hold space for exactly this moment: pushing leaders and teams beyond high performance and into the transformation that doesn’t require an actual rock bottom, boulder-shaped or otherwise. Wanting more out of the remainder of the year is reason enough.

If you’re ready to make the second half of 2026 count for more than the first, I’d love to have that conversation with you.

Let’s talk about what your reset could be →

* * *

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For Further Reading

• Hohm, I., Wormley, A. S., Schaller, M., & Varnum, M. E. W. (2023). Homo Temporus: Seasonal Cycles as a Fundamental Source of Variation in Human Psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(1), 151–172.
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10790523/

• Knowledge at Wharton. (2014, January 6). Need a Fresh Start? Here’s How to Begin. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/need-fresh-start-heres-begin/

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years leading IT teams in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

Right before I hopped in the shower, my wife hollered an update from the other room. I need to water the plants outside; let me know when you’re done. Then I need to run the washer and dishwasher, but I can’t do that until you’re out of the shower and I’m done watering.

Puzzled, I agreed, not yet knowing exactly what impact this information had on my shower plan. I proceeded into the Best Place to Think™ and replayed the exchange we just had. I certainly don’t care how or when the plants are watered or when the washers run. Furthermore, our water supply is just fine.

Wait. That’s it. I pieced it together.

She grew up in the dry, rural Midwest with a private well. Private wells operate at low pressure and require a pressure tank to increase the water pressure to a usable level. The tank pressure fluctuates between the cut-in and cut-out points, the pressures at which the air compressor starts or stops to pressurize the tank. As faucets, fish tanks, ice makers, sprinklers, hot tubs, pools, and showers draw from the water system, the pressure in the tank is depleted down to the cut-in point and the pressurization process starts all over again. This takes time, so water pressure varies wildly within the pressure range. When combined with the time it takes a water heater to heat, the timing of water activities around the needed temperature and pressure becomes an exercise in dynamic prioritization and coordination, often with multiple people needing the water system at once. That was her default context for water consumption.

Here’s the thing: we’ve been married for fifteen years, living in a metropolitan area where the water system operates at a significantly higher pressure, requires no repressurization time in the house, and is always there when we need it. It’s an engineering marvel we mostly take for granted.

In other words, she was still running a rural pressure tank mental model in a city water grid reality. In fact, she didn’t see how deeply that mental model was ingrained into everyday life until she proofread this draft.

Leadership researchers see the same thing in organizations, teams, and boardrooms: CEOs who never examine or update their mental models struggle to lead planned transformational change effectively. They’re still running a “well and tank” model in a municipal system.

Here’s why this illustration matters for leaders, organizations, and teams:

Time and experience don’t automatically update the mental models that are holding you back from your best leadership.

In the water example, Sarah’s mental model classifies water, pressure, and temperature as scarce, and thus, she sequences tasks to fit within those constraints. In the country, that’s important. In the city, those constraints don’t exist and the same workflow requires more effort and energy to manage. In fact, our water heater capacity is the only real constraint we have, but during an extended power outage, we learned that we have about two days of hot water before being forced into the world of cold plunges. Aside from overall water conservation and wise usage, the activities and sequencing of the rural model don’t actually serve us in the city.

When the context changes, enablers in the past become constraints in the present and future.

Impact on Organizations

The same hidden logic that governs our showers governs our strategic decisions. Organizational change research supports that: leaders’ mental models determine what they notice, how they interpret it, and which options they see as available. If you don’t question those models, you limit your choices after the constraints change or disappear.

I think of the leaders who are taking on new projects, roles, or teams, or leading through the rapidly changing business, technology, and economic environment. Time and experience are highly valued by hiring managers and are used to justify a company’s decisions. Years in the role and years in the industry look impressive on a résumé and insightful on presentations. There’s one problem: the research doesn’t agree.

Chad Van Iddekinge and his colleagues reviewed more than 80 workplace studies spanning 60 years to see whether prior work experience predicts how someone will perform in a new job. It doesn’t. Across thousands of people, the correlation between pre-hire experience and job performance was weak; in many cases, there was almost no relationship at all. Another meta-analysis of prior work experience came to the same conclusion: “experience required” is one of the worst predictors of job success, even when the previous role looks similar on paper.

Track record is not a true indicator of future performance.

Track record is a truer indicator of how much we want to feel safe.

In fact, a track record is more effective at allaying your fears and insecurities as a hiring manager than it is an indicator of a candidate’s future success. We pretend we’re screening for capability and best fit, but mostly we’re screening for comfort. That doesn’t make you a bad leader. It makes you human, and it gives you a chance to lead differently.

This aligns with much of the deep work I do with leaders. Our own underlying mindsets and beliefs show up in nearly every aspect of our lives including the way we engage in business, make decisions, and lead. If you are unaware of the factors driving your life, you’ll lose effectiveness because you’ll drift toward decisions that support your unconscious needs. For example, I’m sure you have experienced the corporate cascade of pressure: a CEO mentions something in passing; the assistant relays it as urgent; the manager responds as if it’s an emergency; and the engineer scraps all other assignments to deliver that one request immediately, only to find out the CEO doesn’t need that report until next month. Because of the underlying need to be liked, feel safe, or to be seen as effective, everyone’s response was not actually about the request at hand; it was about their unconscious needs being met first. The negative impact of operating that way can be avoided if those unconscious needs are known.

At the executive level, outdated mental models show up as failed transformations, misaligned restructures, and “safe” hires who are only capable of replicating old playbooks. Boards and executive teams often double down on track record and tenure in moments of uncertainty, exactly when the research suggests they should be looking at learning agility and judgment instead. (Reminds me of the

Organizational change research calls this out too: when leaders don’t examine the mental models underneath their actions, they adopt strategies that feel familiar but fail to fit the new context. That’s what happens when we hire for “experience” in an environment that demands adaptability, self-awareness, and learning agility. Or when we run the “CEO requests supersede all other work” model that may have been developed in previous roles.

In contrast, if you lead and hire from a meta performance mindset, you will look for and unlock potential in your teams. You need to hire and lead for things that haven’t been accomplished yet and for things that don’t show up on a résumé. The meta-analysis on hiring suggests better predictors are things like cognitive ability, job knowledge, and work samples, signals of how people think and learn in new environments, not just where they’ve been.

For instance, SpaceX didn’t hire engineers who have built reusable boosters before. They created an environment where engineers could explore unknown territory and accomplish what was previously impossible. They hired for identity-level ability — problem solving, extreme curiosity, and a willingness to rethink constraints and work from first principles — not for “years of experience building rockets with reusable boosters.” That’s what meta performing leadership is about.

Question: Which constraint is your enterprise strategy still obeying that no longer exists?

Impact on Leaders

Leaders who have earned their seat with expertise face the risk of their previous mental models becoming so ingrained that they lose their metacognitive ability, sure that their expertise is their strongest asset. But when the context or external factors change, that’s the point where leaders feel uncertainty, stress, and burnout. If your brain’s main story is “I’m valuable because I know the right answers,” then every environmental variable feels like an indictment, not an invitation into curiosity.

The trend data should make this impossible to ignore: burnout is climbing. In one cross-dataset analysis of business and workplace trends, “burn-out” showed roughly 201,000 monthly searches with strong growth and negative sentiment, and that’s before you add related terms like “occupational burnout” and “mental exhaustion.” Leaders are not just burned out; they’re searching for answers late at night or on weekends.

But they’re often searching for what burnout feels like: decision fatigue, time anxiety, time famine, morning anxiety, cortisol detox. These aren’t just phrases from modern marketing keywords. They’re the actual terms leaders use to describe their days. Decision fatigue and time anxiety, in particular, are showing sharp growth and volume.

At the same time, leaders are desperately trying to fix all of this with new gear. Compression boots. Portable saunas and cold plunge tubs. Red-light therapy. Breathing devices. Journaling kits. Gut health and cortisol detox supplements. There’s a huge economic boom in recovery, nervous-system-regulation, and overall wellness products. Many leaders are trying to buy themselves a spa day for the symptoms, leaving the underlying mental models completely untouched.

Leaders who have earned their seat through expertise alone are at the highest risk of this pattern. The more your identity is built on “I can carry more,” the more likely you are to respond to decision fatigue with more decisions, time famine with more hours, and burnout with more personal grit. Leaders who openly examine and challenge their thinking have more options and choose more effective strategies during change. Those who don’t get trapped in misalignment, ineffective personal or organizational transformation, stress, and frustration.

Time spent in a new leadership seat doesn’t equate to identifying which mindsets are holding you back. In effect, in a new leadership seat or context, the demands on your “water system” increase, but your pressure tank mental model stays the same.

At some point, every leader hits the hot-water or pressure limit of your mind. You can keep running the rural pressure tank system, or you can acknowledge where you actually sit and serve now.

The good news is that the research is kind to leaders who are willing to step outside their own thinking. Studies of effective leaders find that metacognitive skills — questioning your own assumptions, analyzing your mental models, and comparing what you say you believe to what you actually do — open up more choices and better strategies. Metacognitive leaders build organizations that can update their collective mental models faster than the market changes. Leaders who don’t do that spend more time arguing with reality and less time making progress.

The first moment of radical awareness is the shower moment where you realize Hold on. The constraint I’m organizing my leadership around doesn’t exist anymore.

Then, radical honesty is admitting what that constraint has been providing for you: safety, certainty, identity, the feeling of being needed, etc.

Exercising radical agency is what you do next, the deliberate choice to adopt new mental models that fit your current reality, and a new way of hiring, leading, and living that doesn’t require you to be exhausted to feel valuable or effective.

Executive Reflection

• What constraint are you still organizing around that no longer exists?

• Identify a hiring decision or promotion where track record drove the choice; what comfort need did that serve and how has it worked out?

• Are you willing to upgrade your pressure tank model into something new?

If you’re noticing pressure‑tank patterns in your own leadership or your team, this is the work we can explore together.

Let’s talk about which water pressure system you’re operating →

* * *

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Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: your identity can grow as fast as your role, if you’re willing to look at the mental models underneath it. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

For Further Reading

On mental models and organizational change

• Lesley University dissertation: The Role and Impact of Leaders’ Mental Models in Effecting Planned Transformational Change – How CEOs’ unexamined mental models shape the success or failure of major change efforts.

  Link: https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/education_dissertations/95/

• TFZR paper: Mental Models for Leadership Effectiveness – Explores how flexible, explicit mental models correlate with more effective leadership in complex environments.

  Link: https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/2334-9638/2012/2334-96381202057M.pdf

• Springer chapter: Leading Organisations in Turbulent Times: Towards a Different Mental Model – Argues that agility requires leaders to adopt new cognitive frames that emphasize experimentation and systems thinking.

  Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-98884-9_4

• Walden University dissertation: The Effect of Mental Models on Creating Organizational Alignment Around a Change Vision – A case study of how misaligned mental models distort change communication and outcomes.

  Link: https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/693/

• IHRIM article: May the Force Be With You: Using Mental Models to Change Company Culture – A practical look at how shared stories and mental models create the “force field” of culture.

  Link: https://www.ihrim.org/2022/06/may-the-force-be-with-you-using-mental-models-to-change-company-culture/

On experience, hiring, and future performance

• HBR article: Experience Doesn’t Predict a New Hire’s Success – Summary of a large meta-analysis showing that pre-hire experience is a poor predictor of job performance and retention.

  Link: https://hbr.org/2019/09/experience-doesnt-predict-a-new-hires-success

• Florida State University / Clemson coverage: Work Experience Poor Predictor of Future Job Performance – News write-up of the same research, highlighting implications for common “experience required” practices.

  Links:

  https://wertheim.fsu.edu/article/work-experience-poor-predictor-future-job-performance

  https://news.clemson.edu/clemson-study-challenges-job-experience-in-hiring-decisions/

• LSE blog: Previous Work Experience Is Not a Good Predictor of How People Will Perform in a New Job – Accessible overview of why prior employment says little about future effectiveness.

  Link: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/previous-work-experience-is-not-a-good-predictor-of-how-people-will-perform-in-a-new-job/

• ScienceForWork article: Recruitment: Is an Experienced Hire a Better Hire? – Evidence-based summary of how experience compares to other predictors like cognitive ability and work samples.

  Link: https://scienceforwork.com/blog/recruitment-hiring-for-experience/

• LinkedIn summary of meta-analysis: Experience ≠ Performance – Brief breakdown of the effect sizes for experience vs. other selection methods.

  Link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arthurkhutau_experience-performance-a-large-meta-analysis-activity-7381404005412872192-gBSq

On cognitive models, change leadership, and mental models in practice

• Coaching Federation report: The Cognitive Models of Change Leaders – Describes the mental frameworks effective change leaders use (e.g., first principles thinking, second-order thinking).

  Link: https://researchportal.coachingfederation.org/Document/Pdf/2019.pdf

• Forbes article: 5 Time-Tested Mental Models To Help You Become A Better Change Leader – A practical tour of mental models relevant to leading change.

  Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sherzododilov/2024/06/26/5-time-tested-mental-models-to-help-you-become-a-better-change-leader/

• ScienceDirect article: Cognitive Shifts Within Leader and Follower Teams: Where Consensus Develops in Mental Models During an Organizational Crisis – Examines how shared mental models evolve in crisis situations.

  Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104898431630234X

A commute, for me, has always been one of my favorite parts of the day. Joining the hustle and bustle of everyone who’s heading somewhere with a purpose feeds my extroversion and energizes my day, and I enjoy feeling like I’m part of making the world go round with everyone else. For years, commute time was just scheduled podcast or audiobook time and I didn’t fully realize its contribution to my overall well-being.

Then 2020 killed it. Like everyone, I went from a full office schedule to fully remote in a matter of days and my productivity climbed at first because I could pour uninterrupted hours into my work. What I did not see for several months was the cost of increased focus: extended time working remotely had erased every transitional period I had before. My commute, walk to the lunch room, or the errands on the way home dissolved into continuous workdays that bled into evenings that extended into weekends. I was always working or thinking about work, and the cognitive load increased every week until work, life, and hobbies merged into one neverending to-do list.

That’s what I want to talk about, because many accomplished leaders feel this when too many things feel out of control at once.

Everyone Needs to Feel In Control…Somewhere

Leaders hold dozens of overlapping projects with varying influence over each one. Some weeks, several of them make demands of your time at the same time. A vendor goes silent, a hire falls through, extended leadership needs answers, and project milestones approach or march past. When this happens consistently, it’s easy to internalize an identity implication:

I’m not doing enough. I’m not good enough. I’m not effective enough.

The perceived loss of control over a few projects becomes a perceived loss of impact, then a loss of motivation, and then a gradual loss of the identity that you imagine can hold it all together successfully. Consistent overwhelm convinces you the problem is you, when the actual problem is the fact that you have no space to walk away from anything.

You cannot control what life, the economy, or the business environment hands you. But you can control your transitions between them. Your agency hasn’t disappeared, but it’s harder to see it and exercise in the midst of overwhelm. Leaders who intentionally choose their transitions are able to thrive under heavy workloads and experience joy and even delight in the process.

Reattach to Detachment

In a 2022 study published in Current Psychology, Arūnas Žiedelis and colleagues found that an employee’s ability to psychologically detach from work predicted later boundary permeability and work-home conflict, not the other way around. Many people treat detachment as a future benefit earned after focusing now, potentially blurring work-life boundaries in the short-term to earn a period of longer-term disconnection. I’d even go so far as to say that the default office work schedule of 8–5, Monday - Friday with earned time off incentivizes this type of behavior and performance. But what the study actually indicates is that detachment ability is the driver of healthier work-life boundaries, not the result. The ability to mentally leave work is a protective practice you build now, not a reward you receive once life finally slows down. Developing that practice now improves your future work-life boundaries.

Thus, the evening on the patio where you cannot stop thinking about the budget while finishing your burger is not a failure of willpower. It is a missing transition practice or lack of intentional detachment. The resulting brain fog and exhaustion carry into the next leadership team meeting as a hit to your strategic judgment and clear thinking.

In Support of Furthest Bathrooms

Developing intentional detachment practices can start small. It doesn’t need to be a vacation, sabbatical, or completely reinvented morning routine. It can be as simple as a walk to the furthest bathroom in the building.

Filed under “Things I Did Not Expect to Find in Professional Workplaces” is the fact that every working environment has an underground bathroom culture. Floor two is the least-used bathroom for when the coffee is too strong. So-and-So only visits this wing when they’re using the secret bathroom that nobody (meaning: everybody) knows about. Here was my pattern: the more I had on my mind or the more stressed I was, the further I would walk to find a restroom so that I could combine the stated task with physical movement, environmental variety, and potential conversations with other colleagues along the way. (Not in the bathroom, of course.) This isn’t a recommendation to simply take longer restroom breaks. It’s to be intentional with physical movement to get steps, engage your lungs, increase your heart rate and blood flow to the brain, and then return to your desk eager to tackle the next item.

It’s not just me. Patricia Albulescu and her colleagues ran a 2022 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE titled “Give me a break!” that pooled twenty-two studies on workplace micro-breaks of roughly ten minutes or less. They found these short breaks consistently increased vigor and reduced fatigue, with no measurable cost to productivity. Driven performers often assume (incorrectly) that breaks are wasted time when they are actually critical mental recovery time that the rest of the day depends on.

With that in mind, how often do you run to the closest water fountain, copy machine, break room, or restroom and miss out on the opportunity for a mental recharge?

Here’s a short list of ways that you can harness inconveniences into strategic mental breaks:

• Walk to the furthest bathroom or water fountain in the building, so a basic break becomes a deliberate one.

• Park a few blocks away and walk the last stretch to the office so physical movement bookends your day.

• Take the stairs anywhere you reasonably can. Race your colleagues using the escalator.

• Move random meetings to the patio, the balcony, the rarely-booked conference room, or even to a walking meeting to incorporate variety into busy calendars.

• Run one errand on the way home that forces your brain out of work mode before you arrive home.

• Have a non-serious podcast queued up for your commute to engage a different part of your brain or imagination.

These are small enough on their own that you can incorporate several into your weekly routines. As I experienced, these micro-choices are physical ways to demonstrate to your mind and your emotions that you still have agency and impact, even if everything around you is hectic. And by choosing to use your agency to improve yourself, you’ll find that your work improves and your presence stays energizing.

Eat Lunch for Strategy

I do not believe in work-life balance, and I have stopped pretending to. Balance implies an equilibrium and suggests that you can achieve it if you are disciplined enough. Based on just about every conversation ever, that is not how real life works. Reinforcing the balance concept pits anything that interrupts that balance as a villain against you, keeping you trapped in a continuous battle, positioned against anything that encroaches.

What I believe in is real-time work-life prioritization. Like breathing, work and life move between inhaling and exhaling: there are seasons where you rest (inhale) and seasons where you exert (exhale). If you think you can do them at the same time, here’s a quick self-assessment for you: inhale deeply, exhale completely, and then try to scream as loud as you can. That’s about how effective you’ll be trying to achieve work-life balance. Rather, knowing which side of the cycle you are on for a given day lets you set honest expectations and choose the right transition for the moment instead of fighting the season you are actually in.

This is why I learned to protect my lunchtime. On days shaped entirely by other people’s meeting invites, lunch is one of the few moments where you can choose intentionality over default. Treat it as a reminder of your own agency, not a luxury you earn after the inbox is clear. Ritualize it regardless of what your coworkers do. Skip lunch too many times and you’ll find yourself operating from a place of depletion and resentment toward the breaks you need but aren’t taking.

If others encroach on your lunchtime, and if the priority truly warrants a lunch meeting, bring your dish to the meeting and demonstrate grounded self-care. A habit I formed after lunch was the small closing act of washing my lunch dish in warm water afterward rather than bringing it home to the dishwasher, because it engaged my hands in a grounding activity and established a physical marker to signify the moment.

The Choice Lives in the In-Between

This is not about making work or life less busy, and it is not about working harder to do more until you burn out. Both of those approaches keep your attention on things you cannot control. The answer to staying sane is to find the places where you still have agency and to use it to amplify what you do.

I once moved from a job with a quick commute to a larger role that required a two and a half block walk between the parking facility and the staff entrance. I expected to resent the parking situation. Instead, it became my favorite forced transition of the day, and I finally had to admit what every fitness coach would have told me: movement is how the brain processes. In a later role without a difficult parking situation, I realized that the small habits mattered even more, which is why I curated the distant water fountain, the unused conference room, the stairs, and the furthest bathroom on purpose.

The simplest practice is also the most overlooked: verbalize each transition moment out loud to yourself. That meeting is over. Now I’m walking to lunch. Inserting a label closes the mental loop for you instead of dragging it into your next obligation.

You will not develop more agency by waiting for your calendar to relent, because it will not. You develop agency in the small moments you choose for yourself in the days you already have.

You are not powerless, but you might be out of practice. The number of things outside your control will not shrink through effort alone. It requires a mindset that knows where your agency still exists and knows how to intentionally transition and disconnect for your wellbeing. You can change whether you walk the long way to the water fountain, guard the thirty minutes at noon, and choose to transition well so that you show up well to the next thing.

* * *

Let’s talk about where your agency has been hiding →

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For Further Reading

• Žiedelis, A., Urbanavičiūtė, I., & Lazauskaitė-Zabielskė, J. (2022). “Family Boundary Permeability, Difficulties Detaching from Work, and Work-Home Conflict: What Comes First During the Lockdown?” Current Psychology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35967508/

• Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., & Tulbure, B. T. (2022). “’Give Me a Break!’ A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Efficacy of Micro-Breaks for Increasing Well-Being and Performance.” PLOS ONE, 17(8): e0272460. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0272460

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created, written in the gap between two meetings, on purpose.

I’m endlessly inspired by the question “What am I capable of?” and the people who respond to the question by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Exploring that question is why I launched this newsletter and why I continually advocate for people to explore untapped potential. I believe effective leadership, then, requires leaders who continually raise the ceiling and redefine the floor, creating new contexts in which people can expand and fill their potential.

You do not exist to survive. You do not exist solely for staying comfortable and unchallenged, or even to extract as much value as you can out of your industry and demonstrate it on your bottom line. I believe that you and I exist to create value by exploring untapped potential, and that this is what it means to be human.

This week, I want to tell you about someone who is answering this question in a uniquely challenging way.

At the time I’m writing this, 31-year-old Kelsey Pfendler is in the process of becoming the first American woman to solo row from California to Hawaii. She’s posting live updates on social media and tracking her progress on her website. Her journey has captured me the same way the Artemis II mission did, and I check her progress map every morning to celebrate every mile accomplished.

This kind of journey would seem impossible to most of us. For her, it’s the next logical thing. She crossed the Atlantic by sail in 2020. And then in 2024, she led the four-woman team, Hericane Rowing, on a successful team row across the Mid Pacific. Now, she’s attempting to solo row the Mid Pacific route.

The leadership principles in her story are endless, but let’s look at a few that stood out to me the most.

Have You Met Your Cool Friend?

If asked who you are, you might respond with a job title, brief family overview, and your drink or hobby of choice. It’s the great Professional Introduction Recipe™ served at the networking buffet every Tuesday morning. It works, in a pinch, and it’s entirely based on who you’ve been in the past.

What parts of you haven’t you met yet? Who might be waiting for you at the outer edge of what you’re willing to attempt?

Kelsey described what propelled her to seek this journey solo: “I wanted to do it alone. I wanted to see what I could do by myself and what I could make possible… And I love hard things… There’s a part of my person or a piece of me that I don’t really get to hang out with unless I’m doing really hard things. Because I do think I become someone I know is in there and who I want to be.”

Have you met that version of yourself, the cool friend? Do you enjoy hanging out with them? How often do you get to hang out with that person?

In business, your undiscovered leadership potential is your cool friend. Your vision is where you go to find them. If the vision feels accomplishable, it may simply be a plan and you may be the executor of the plan. If the vision is not requiring you to explore corners of your leadership that you haven’t developed yet, it’s not a vision. As you lean into unknown territory, you will eventually hit resistance. At each of these points, you’ll need to examine what story you’re telling yourself about the resistance, choose how you respond to it, and then decide how to bring your team through the same moment. Your teams are waiting to buy into the vision until they can sense that you believe it; the leader they will follow may still be out there in one of those unknown areas, waiting for you to come and inhabit it.

Know What You Can Control

In another of her recent social media updates, Kelsey describes why she loves the ocean so much while reflecting on a few emerging challenges. “When you’re out there, you’re not in control. I couldn’t change the weather. I couldn’t change the squalls. I couldn’t fix the fact that I slept in. But I know for a fact that when you aren’t in control of what’s happening, you are in control of you.”

There are few things less controllable than the sea. After all, when the sea meets land, the sea always wins. You’ll never hear of a sandbar splitting an ocean in two. Rather, the sea redistributes the sand when and where it pleases. Kelsey understands the supremacy of the sea and, more importantly, she understands the scope of her agency.

In response to how she felt navigating the challenges, she continues: “I wasn’t showing up the way I wanted to with how I was talking to myself and how I was working through the problems that the ocean decided to present to me. The way you respond to problems is so much more important than the problem itself. Now that I’ve stopped holding so tightly to trying to be in control of what was happening, I feel a lot better.”

She’s taking full ownership of every stroke, every navigational decision, and every tool at her disposal that lets her harness the difficulties of the situation to create forward progress. Her journey is not about overcoming the ocean or subduing the weather patterns. It’s about the growth of continually overcoming the way she responds to and interacts with each situation.

The motivational poster version of this is: control what you can control. This is a paraphrase of thoughts from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”

Many teams I’ve led exhibit the default human tendency to complain about situations, people, or problems. It’s often a silent cry for help or to be seen or heard. However, the most valuable leadership lessons I’ve learned about what truly transforms teams is that the most powerful way for someone to feel helped, seen, and heard is not to provide answers, fixes, or solutions. It’s to help them see the agency they already have and to create the impact they want to see. Nothing diffuses stress and frustration like owning what you can do about it.

As a leader, you can’t afford to get stuck on what you can’t control either. A team whose leader is stuck on what they can’t control will stop bringing problems to that leader.

Miracle of the Mundane

Finally, in stark contrast to Kelsey’s headline-creating, record-setting vision of becoming the first American woman to row the Mid Pacific is the reality of her everyday schedule.

Near the halfway point, she reflected on struggling with no wind, stalled momentum, and the increased physical effort in maintaining progress through gray, drizzly days. She acknowledged the dreary, wind-less days as simply part of the journey, necessary building blocks for an accomplishment like this.

This is another paradox of leadership for leaders to hold: record-setting achievements rarely emerge from single heroic acts. More often, they are the compound result of consistent, ordinary actions.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, tells the story of professional cyclist coach Dave Brailsford’s commitment to “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which is the philosophy of searching for tiny margins of improvement everywhere you can, and then improving them in incremental steps. The compounded benefit is greater than any single improvement could have produced.

Life and leadership must encompass the highs and lows, and everything in between. Healthy leaders hold space for both a powerful vision and the miracle of the mundane. Leaders become ineffective when they focus on one without the other.

Growing into a greater leadership identity requires venturing into unknown territory, meeting or developing new expressions of yourself, embracing the miracle of the mundane, and controlling what you can control: yourself. It’s letting the power of the vision propel you through each step and into transformation.

Eventually, you’ll arrive at a destination — a goal achieved or a vision realized. Will the leader who arrives be more developed, more expansive, and a fuller expression of you? Will the expression of you be invited into the next chapter to hang out with you?

When Kelsey rounds the corner toward Honolulu, she’ll be celebrating the three-ish months she got to hang out with the coolest version of herself. She may still appear solo on the rowing seat, but the version of her who likes doing hard things will be stronger and more capable than before, ready for the next adventure.

What Next?

Two questions to consider this week:

1. What parts of yourself have you not met yet?

For the business leader, the parts of you that you haven’t met yet exist in situations for which your expertise hasn’t prepared you; in hiring younger generations that don’t see things the same way as you; in leading strategically through technology advancement; and in leading the change management required to build the businesses and teams of tomorrow.

You have a choice to double down on who you are and what you know, or to open up and expand into who you could become in the emerging world.

2. What simple next step do you need to take for growth?

What got you here won’t get you there. What’s worked in your leadership before may need to be adapted to the new situations or people you’re leading today.

You have a choice to wait for forced change and adaptation — and at worst, irrelevance — or you can choose growth and embrace the discipline of compounding small improvements.

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Executive coaching can be a guide into the unknown parts of you that you have yet to meet, and it illuminates the best next step in becoming who you want to be.

Let’s find your next step →

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For Further Reading

Kelsey Pfendler, You Row Kelsey (yourowkelsey.com). Kelsey’s website tracks her progress in real time, including her route map, social updates, and the story behind the row. It’s worth checking if you want to follow the journey as it unfolds.

James Clear, Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018), Chapter 1: “The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits.” Clear tells the full story of Dave Brailsford and British Cycling’s aggregation of marginal gains philosophy. The chapter is also available in condensed form at jamesclear.com/marginal-gains.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays (Modern Library, 2002). The quote used in this article is a widely circulated paraphrase of Aurelius’s recurring argument throughout Books 2, 4, 6, and 8 that the only domain within our control is our own judgment and response. Hays’s translation is the most readable modern edition. The full text is also available at classics.mit.edu.

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

How often have you experienced the Coffee Productivity Paradox? “I drink coffee because I’m tired from working too much so I can work more.”

How about Schrödinger’s Email: “If I mark it unread, it still technically exists.”

Or does your team live the Meeting Productivity Paradox: “We scheduled a meeting to improve efficiency.”

While these examples might provide a little comic relief around the watercooler, paradoxes in leadership have the potential to trap you or free you. Let’s explore several paradoxes that are necessary for leaders to master in order to lead effectively.

The single most important leadership skill to develop is paradoxical thinking. As I reflect on my own leadership, many other areas of leadership often seem to be the most important: vision casting, strategy development, people management, or execution. Yet supporting each of those areas is the deeper skill of paradoxical thinking. Why? Because nearly every other leadership skill exists in or creates paradoxical scenarios. Therefore, navigating paradox and understanding how it affects both you and your teams is a key leadership skill.

When someone is great at paradoxical thinking, they exhibit a strong tolerance for ambiguity, cognitive flexibility, working memory, and wise or dialectical reasoning. Together, these skills enable a leader to hold paradoxes with calm curiosity and openness.

This isn’t natural for everyone, and our physiology often fights it. There is plenty of research to indicate our natural brain wiring responds to stress and conflict as a threat. Conflict and ambiguity heighten activity in your emotional circuits, which your brain interprets as danger, and danger must be resolved for your nervous system to return to equilibrium. At the physiological level, growing in paradoxical thinking is an exercise in rewriting your brain’s natural response to threat. Thanks to neuroplasticity, it’s entirely possible.

If you were attending a concert and during the intermission the conductor asked you to join the orchestra and sight-read the rest of the show, you might wish you had never come. Or at least you might wish you had worn yellow or brown pants. That’s exactly what happened to a student in Sydney last week. When the conductor made the unexpected request of the audience, the student was able to join the orchestra on stage and sight-read the remainder of the concert, and subsequently owned every news headline for the next few days. It’s not surprising that even the thought of being in a situation like this triggers anxiety for many people. Stage fright is deeply human; so is the magnificence of a performer fully owning the stage.

What made this possible? The student’s training had rewired his default response to stress and danger. A situation that seems impossible for many people seemed entirely plausible for him. Since he responded to the situation from a different place, he created a beautiful experience for the audience, and gave himself a cocktail story to tell for the rest of his life.

I think about developing paradoxical thinking the same way: you can train your brain’s default response to become what is needed in leadership. As a lifelong musician, I have experienced similar brain rewiring myself. Retraining my response to situations doesn’t eliminate the triggering event, but it lets me experience it fully and use it effectively.

Here are several paradoxes for leaders to study and practice.

Stockdale Paradox

In an interview with author and speaker Jim Collins, Jim Stockdale, a U.S. Navy vice admiral, aviator, stoic philosopher, and prisoner of war for over seven years in the Vietnam War, described his coping strategy for surviving. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Pure optimism proved as costly as pure despair. Survivors integrated both and created moments of micro-purpose that sustained them over time.

Brené Brown and Adam Grant discussed this paradox on their podcast recently, and she believes in its power so strongly that she codified it in her company values: Gritty Faith and Gritty Facts. She wants leaders on her team who hold both faith and facts. Leaders should not constrain themselves to simply being a faith person or a facts person, as if either bent is superior. Effective leaders, then, must develop whichever area is weaker in order to embody the paradox and employ its value.

The power of this paradox lies in learning to hold both facts and faith together long enough until something new emerges. When a person who understands that they have agency approaches harsh reality (facts) with a powerful vision (faith), a new generative future is created, one different from what either facts or faith alone would produce.

Leadership takeaway: Develop the ability to take a rigorous inventory of reality and maintain unwavering hope about what can be changed or what could be different.

The Einstellung Effect

When researchers Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet tracked the eye movements of expert chess players solving a problem that had both a familiar good solution and a hidden better move, the experts kept looking at the squares associated with the familiar move even while sincerely reporting that they were searching for something better.

The first move that came to mind for them biased their attention away from the superior option, and the bias operated below their awareness. When the familiar solution was removed from the board, the same expert players found the better move easily, proving that the optimal answer was never beyond them, but was only obscured by what they already knew. This is the difference between not having an answer and having a good answer that crowds out a great one.

The impact of this for leaders is significant. Many leaders are experts in their field, whether justified through a proven track record, domain experience, or organizational cultures that conflate hierarchy with expertise. The blind spot for an expert turned leader is that your expertise may be obscuring the best solutions to the situations you are leading. In fact, I recently had lunch with a leader who had moved industries and was no longer an expert in that business model. She said she was experiencing a new freedom and increased leadership effectiveness by not having the answers and by drawing them out of her teams instead.

Leadership takeaway: Actively invite perspectives outside your area of expertise, and get comfortable holding your expertise with an open hand and mind. In business, you’ll see that an overcommitment to strategy calcifies an organization and pushes it from Predictable Success onto the Treadmill, according to Les McKeown’s book Predictable Success.

The Peter Principle

In 1969, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull published their book, The Peter Principle, which presented the management concept that “People rise until they reach their level of incompetence.” In a multi-level organization, this looks like a person getting promoted until they reach the level where their incompetence shows up and prevents future promotion.

Further research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue in 2019 found that when companies systematically promoted their best salespeople into management, those star performers became measurably worse managers. The data suggested that each doubling of their pre-promotion sales metrics corresponded to a ten percent decline in the sales of their new direct reports. That inverse relationship widens the gap between the most successful salespeople and the most effective managers.

This finding was not a fluke. Firms in the study were rewarding current-role excellence at the expense of observable signals that actually predicted managerial quality, such as collaboration. This paradox should motivate any leader to thoroughly evaluate the attributes that make each position successful, and then hire and promote specifically for those traits, not simply for advancement.

Leadership takeaway: The journey from subject-matter expertise into leadership roles is a transition that mastery alone does not prepare you for. The higher you lead, the more specialized development you should seek outside of your subject-matter expertise.

The Bias Against Creativity

Jennifer Mueller, Shimul Melwani, and Jack Goncalo ran a study in 2012 that identified an unexpected kind of hypocrisy in how we treat creativity: people who explicitly say they value creativity nonetheless harbor an implicit bias against it, and that bias is more pronounced under uncertainty when novel ideas are the most necessary. Simply put: We want new, we reject new.

Using research techniques designed to identify biases that people will not admit to, the researchers found participants associating creativity with words like “vomit” and “agony.” They also found that the bias was strong enough to impair their ability to even recognize a creative idea as creative. This caused them to reject objectively novel, high-quality proposals in favor of tried-and-true solutions. The irony is that the uncertainty which drives the search for new or creative ideas is the same uncertainty that makes us unable to accept them.

For the leader who must lead in an unproven direction, or for the visionary whose whole proposition is making the not-yet-real real, this explains why the resistance is fiercest precisely when the stakes are the highest, and it reframes “selling the vision” as managing other people’s uncertainty rather than proving the idea’s merit. This can be tough for leaders to accept since they are often the most passionate about their vision and pour their efforts into galvanizing others to believe in it. The most effective use of leadership effort is to manage the certainty and uncertainty of the process.

Leadership takeaway: Develop the ability to recognize uncertainty and actively welcome creative solutions especially in uncertain moments. In business, this paradox shows up as innovation stalling precisely in the volatile markets where it’s needed the most.

Preparation Produces Flexibility

In my experience as a musician, I’ve learned to embody the paradox: preparation and planning produce flexibility. For example, the nature of improvisation is that it’s unplanned. Yet the reality of being a musician is that you are constantly building a repertoire of interesting sounds, styles, techniques, patterns, themes, and motifs so that you can draw on them spontaneously. It’s the preparation that enables effective improvisation.

Then when I’m planning and producing for a live event, I will produce and rehearse several variations of intros, outros, transitions, or other progressions so that when a moment requires spontaneity, we can respond spontaneously and follow the moment wherever it needs to go creatively.

Many people new to creativity or peripheral to the production process often see preparation as a non-creative effort and consider a plan a limit on freedom and expression. I see it the opposite way: maximum spontaneity comes from deep experience, preparation, and thoughtful planning.

Leadership takeaway: Develop a rigorous preparation and planning process to enable maximum flexibility when you need it the most.

I’ve also experienced this in business. In a particularly large software implementation project where the business wanted significant flexibility in the end and hadn’t done the level of planning necessary, I embarked on nearly two years redefining both the business and technical requirements. The resulting development work was the shortest bar on the Gantt chart, proof that the most important work had already happened: in planning.

What These Paradoxes Mean for You

These paradoxes highlight one truth: context changes how expertise behaves and how you relate to the paradox. Facts and faith must coexist at all times. Expertise and competency become blinders when the situations are the most critical. Promotion can be catastrophic to results. Creativity is the most necessary when we are the most resistant to it, and preparation produces flexibility.

As a leader, your ability to identify and hold these paradoxes is critical to your success and your team’s results.

Here’s the thing: you might not be able to see these paradoxes yourself. Solomon’s Paradox, described in a 2014 Psychological Science paper by Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross, presents the idea that people reason more wisely about other people’s problems than their own. For the study, “wise reasoning” was measured as recognizing the limits of your own knowledge, holding multiple viewpoints, and accepting compromise, which is, functionally, a checklist for paradoxical thinking.

The study’s most important finding is that self-distancing neutralizes the blind spot and lets people reason about themselves as wisely as they did about others.

Distanced self-talk is a known emotion regulation technique in which you refer to yourself in the second or third person instead of using “I” or “me.” This framing technique creates psychological distance, making it easier to view challenges or issues objectively and allowing you to approach solutions the same way you’d think about them for other people.

Leadership takeaway: Good leadership integrates wise reasoning for others and yourself. In business, the cost of a leadership team that can’t see their own blind spots is lack of growth and an eroding bottom line.

This is why I advocate so strongly for coaching at every position and stage. Coaching creates the space to see your own blind spots and sharpen decision quality, and to explore your own growth with compassion, curiosity, and empathy. Many times, coaching is simply holding space for a client — space they cannot hold for themselves — and providing a pathway to clearer decisions.

I invite you to explore these paradoxes in your leadership and to develop your ability to hold paradoxes with curiosity and to invite resources into them with you. The certainty the world needs now is not the certainty that comes from expertise, effort, or answers. Leaders who hold paradoxes long enough and steadily enough until something new emerges create certainty through growth.

Let’s talk about the paradoxes you’re navigating right now →

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For Further Research

Stockdale Paradox

• Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap… and others don’t. HarperBusiness.

• The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant. (2026, May 28). Why life’s biggest truths can contradict each other | The Curiosity Shop [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tVqjcbs3io

The Einstellung Effect

• Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2008). Inflexibility of experts — Reality or myth? Quantifying the Einstellung effect in chess masters. Cognitive Psychology, 56(2), 73–102. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17418112/

• Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2010). The mechanism of the Einstellung (set) effect: A pervasive source of cognitive bias. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(2), 111–115. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721410363571

• McKeown, L. (2010). Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track—and Keeping It There.

The Peter Principle

• Peter, L. J., & Hull, R. (1969). The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. William Morrow.

• Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085–2134. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz022 (open access: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24343)

The Bias Against Creativity

• Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. A. (2012). The bias against creativity: Why people desire but reject creative ideas. Psychological Science, 23(1), 13–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611421018 (open access: https://repository.upenn.edu/mgmt_papers/66/)

Solomon’s Paradox

• Grossmann, I., & Kross, E. (2014). Exploring Solomon’s paradox: Self-distancing eliminates the self–other asymmetry in wise reasoning about close relationships in younger and older adults. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571–1580. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535400

On the brain’s response to ambiguity and stress

• Hsu, M., Bhatt, M., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., & Camerer, C. F. (2005). Neural systems responding to degrees of uncertainty in human decision-making. Science, 310(5754), 1680–1683. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1115327

• Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

Authenticity is frequently discussed in business and leadership spaces, and often, the message being conveyed is one of balance. Many times the advice amounts to: be personal, but not too personal. Share enough negative or painful parts of a story to balance the positives. Always include how you’ve harnessed pain for growth, but only the kind of discomfort others can relate to. There’s no consensus on what it means to be real and to not be fake.

The result is that many leaders settle into a rhythm of false authenticity in an effort to be authentic. You see this in every meeting segue with ice breaker topics like: “It was a good weekend.” “My kids played sports in the rain.” and “Spent time with the family.” These are all normal and good things, but they’re not necessarily shared insights or experiences that demonstrate true authenticity in a way that builds team trust and connection.

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Authenticity requires the courage to feel fully, and the courage to speak from your values.

Averageville, USA

We can all agree that the need for authentic human connection is as true today as it ever has been, though I feel a change in the perceived value of human authenticity as the signal-to-noise ratio degrades in today’s AI-saturated environment. What I mean by that is that since AI is now commonplace, it’s becoming the default tool for leaders to create more content, post more frequently on LinkedIn, and to feel like they’re leading with authenticity. In business contexts, it’s common to employ AI tools to generate project plans, conduct risk assessments, create executive summaries, and draft email updates. It all comes out incredibly bland and balanced — too balanced, even. The near-perfect, comprehensive exploration of all perspectives contains useful information, yes, but it’s devoid of one thing: passion.

It’s as if we’ve all awoken to find ourselves living smack dab in the middle of Averageville, USA.

Though AI is a useful tool, I am concerned that many leaders are losing sense of what authentic connection looks and feels like. I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to human-only work because I want to feel a connection with the creator. I want to feel the inspiration they felt. I want to experience the passion oozing through their creativity. I want my mind expanded through thought exercises inspired by their lines of inquiry. I don’t get the same feeling reading another AI-written article or skimming the emoji-driven status update, regardless of how business-accurate the content is.

Recently, tech journalist Joanna Stern left her traditional roles (The Wall Street Journal, Engadget, The Verge) and launched an independent YouTube channel. One of the things she highlighted in her platform announcement and content guidelines is the value of human creation. “We take pride in human writing, editing, illustration, design, music and more—and we pay real humans for all of those things.” She’s differentiating herself in the 2026 content creator landscape and building a community of like-minded followers. She’s not ignoring AI. In fact, she also has a published content standard for using AI as a workflow assistant and a requirement for working for her company. But she understands where there’s value in retaining human creativity and where there’s opportunity for AI enhancements or productivity.

In your leadership, your colleagues are constantly analyzing your leadership approach to determine whether you’re showing up as a person or a performance.

For leaders, it’s time to move out of Averageville, USA. Averageville is where authenticity goes to die, and the most impactful leaders going forward are the ones who recognize this quickly and act to maintain human connection.

But first, what’s keeping you there?

Emotional Authenticity

Somewhere along our maturity path, we learn to even out the peaks and valleys of this experience we call life. We consider it growth and maturity. We think we’re being ‘realistic’ with our wisdom and discernment when we’re actually distancing ourselves from fun, joy, and connection.

When was the last time you let yourself get fully immersed in something simply for the fun of it or intentionally prioritized a fun thing over a useful one? I’m not talking about the quarterly personal retreat, or the family vacation, or the monthly movie night.

No, I’m talking about the mad dash to your favorite ice cream shop in the middle of dinner because they just announced on Instagram two minutes ago that they have a new batch of a limited flavor for the evening; or the 90-minute drive at 10:30 PM to escape the urban skyglow and potentially see the aurora borealis in Nebraska because a geomagnetic storm just exceeded the Kp index required to see them at our latitude; or the impulse purchase of a $25 ticket and flight to New York City that granted you exclusive access to a private rooftop concert and soirée with some of the world’s leading TV and film composers and musicians.

I’m convinced those experiences stand out to me as just a few of the things that have sparked joy in our lives because they all had an element of unplanned passion. We couldn’t see them coming with enough time to plan for them. We didn’t analyze the potential risks or benefits before making a decision. They were, truly, spontaneous moments that have turned into highly memorable experiences and ignited other passions in our life.

In The Power of Fun, Catherine Price explores what it takes to have True Fun. When playfulness, connection, and flow occur together, you’ll experience True Fun, she says, which is good and necessary for your health and happiness. I’m convinced that somewhere along our professional paths, we’ve lost the ability to engage in fun and are missing out on the ways it enhances our lives and leadership. The Power of Fun reframes what many leaders have lost: the ability to freely engage in fun.

Similarly, in her podcast The Curiosity Shop with Adam Grant, Brené Brown says “Joy is incredibly vulnerable. It’s just in moments of joy, if we’re not practiced in [it], the people who can lean into joy, we found, had one thing in common. And that’s a very strong gratitude practice, that where they’re in joy, they can say ‘I’m really grateful for this moment.’” I want you to see what she identified: that allowing yourself to truly experience joy is an exercise in incredible vulnerability.

My first takeaway is that authenticity requires the vulnerability to fully experience the peaks and valleys of your life.

Brené Brown continues: “One of the things we found in our research is that some people choose to never get too high of an emotion or too low. And the reason why they don’t get too high an emotion is they don’t want to feel disappointment. So they choose to live disappointed rather than feel disappointed.”

This is what I described earlier as living in Averageville. In high-performers and leadership-oriented people, this tends to be a survival pattern that becomes permanent. The leaders I work with often didn’t consciously choose this neutral way of being. They may have been burned once — or a dozen times — by optimism that ended in disappointment or pain. At some point, they decided it was smarter to minimize their feelings to create a safer or more predictable existence.

Here’s a photo of thirteen-year-old me, completely enraptured with joy and excitement with my birthday gift: my very first digital keyboard. I remember the moment and the feeling that I couldn’t physically contain the amount of joy I was feeling. Now, over 25 years later, my reactions are calibrated differently. But I have to ask myself: do I still let myself experience that level of enthusiasm and joy that I once embodied, or have I slid into Averageville for the sake of public image?

When you lead from this constrained posture, you might struggle to generate motivation because you’ve lost the ability to feel enthusiasm. It becomes difficult to inspire or galvanize a team around a vision when you won’t let yourself emotionally invest in or commit to it. You can’t celebrate a big win with people who gave their best because you’ve already mentally discounted the win against everything that could still go wrong in the future.

True authenticity in leadership doesn’t level the peaks and fill the valleys to fit in with the average expected experience. True authenticity doesn’t hide behind the mask of professionalism. True authenticity creates space for the full spectrum of feelings each of our experiences contain.

Here’s what I want to encourage leaders: as you evaluate where you might be living in Averageville, USA, remember AI can’t create True Fun for you; AI can’t experience joy with you or participate in gratitude with you. Those things are your responsibility, and as a leader, your job is to steward the best humanity in yourself and your teams.

So take one step toward moving out of Averageville, USA, by learning to integrate joy, gratitude, and fun into your life and giving it space to show up in your sphere of influence. By choosing to embody fun and joy, you demonstrate inimitable emotional authenticity and expand the space around you for others to join you in authenticity.

Communication Authenticity

The second component to authenticity is ensuring that the things you say align with your values. This is the verbal component on top of the emotional layer we just discussed. Many people mistake authenticity for candid oversharing. Their approach to authenticity is often driven from a desire to use their voice and to express every idea or opinion without a strategic filter. Authenticity does involve honesty, but for honesty and candor to be seen as authentic, it must be aligned with your values.

Adam Grant posted on X: “Authenticity is not about expressing every opinion you hold. It’s about ensuring that what you voice reflects what you value.”

For leaders, this shows up in both the things you say and the things you don’t say. When you’re leading from a compressed emotional spectrum, your communication may collapse into the generalized statements that you share during meeting transitions. Or it may show up as excessive positivity or hype. When it comes to the things you say, the people around you can feel empty words and a lack of grounding in passion or values. On the other side, when you withhold feedback because you don’t want to coach someone else through the emotional valley it creates or when you don’t truly open up and share critical insights, they can feel that too.

Think of the last difficult conversation you left having said the professionally correct thing or the safe thing, but knowing that you didn’t say the true thing.

My second takeaway is that you can’t communicate from your values when you’ve obscured your access to your full range of emotional experiences.

True authenticity is a practice that’s always undergoing change. Leaders become trustworthy when they embody the full emotional experience and remain in touch with their values. When you’re in touch with your emotions and your values, you show up and communicate authentically.

Your team will feel it. You will feel it.

You’ll feel…real.

* * *

Let’s talk about the authenticity you’re demonstrating right now →

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Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

The clock turns 8:59 AM as you hastily hoist your laptop to the conference table, scattering the coasters as you try to keep your coffee out of range of your keyboard. You just completed your morning workout routine — that is, the coffee-laptop-briefcase-lunchbox dash up the stairs from the parking lot. You’re eager to be in your seat in the thirty seconds remaining before your weekly team meeting kicks off.

Everyone knows that the meeting segue gives you a beat to settle in, sign in, and get the AI assistant running. By the time you get to the substantive agenda items, you’re ready to deliver detailed answers and direction.

You’ve trained them well. Not consciously. Yet you’ve trained them, nonetheless, to orient their behavior around you, to expect answers from the expert, and to unconsciously tailor the meeting segue to your messy morning melee.

Humans are highly skilled at pattern recognition and building an unspoken dictionary of the things that make you you. Your team knows what kind of work to bring to your desk versus theirs. They know when you’re overwhelmed, even if you don’t say it, because things start slipping through the cracks. Even your spouse can differentiate between the fine you utter in response to “How was your day?” and the fine that follows a question they asked twice.

Acknowledging that the pattern recognition and normalization happens doesn’t mean there’s a flaw in your relationships or with you. It’s actually a sign of care and attention because people calibrate to people that matter. Then these unconscious dictionaries direct every office interaction going forward.

It works until it doesn’t.

Now, you’ve begun, or are considering, the internal work to level up your identity and leadership mindset. Your identity is expanding, which is exactly what happens to healthy, growing leaders. You start modifying the behaviors of your past in favor of trying new leadership approaches. You realize it’s no longer the right answer to have the answer, and you’re proud that you’re learning to live in the ambiguity of leadership. You’re no longer the first or the last to respond and you’ve even turned down a few requests to provide others an opportunity to learn. All these behaviors confirm that you’re finally stepping into deeper levels of leadership.

What you haven’t done is expressly verbalize to your team that you’re in a growth season — being coached, trying on new leadership styles, and working to elevate the team. Instead, they notice that you have stopped providing answers, distanced yourself from work and from them, and just aren’t your normal self…at least as far as the normal self they’ve created in their minds about you.

Making Sense of Sensemaking

As Karl Weick’s research on sensemaking explores, people develop an ongoing plausible image to rationalize what’s happening around them, including what their leader is doing and why. Sensemaking is both retrospective and ongoing, extracting cues from the context to build explanations to interpret current events. It’s an inherently human behavior and you’ve done it too.

It’s why we love Michael Scott in The Office. As he receives information and processes it through his model of the world — one that is wildly miscalibrated — he produces confident conclusions that are always just a degree off from reality. His sensemaking ability is there, but his filters are incorrect, producing hilarious results. We all laugh because our own sensemaking ability built a reasonable conclusion in contrast to Michael’s comedic conclusion. In one scene, we learn he keeps a George Foreman grill by his bed because: I enjoy having breakfast in bed; I like waking up to the smell of bacon; why not keep a griddle by the bed? He gets burned, and everyone around him ends up managing the aftermath.

As your team notices the changes in your behavior, their sensemaking abilities engage to assign meaning to it. The people around you aren’t passive observers of your growth, they’re often actively and unconsciously adjusting their own behavior to accommodate the version of you that they don’t yet fully recognize. As they experiment to see how to most effectively engage with you, they are also figuring out how to protect themselves and their interests. I know he has a lot on his plate, so now that he can’t think of an answer, he must have given up on us. Or she’s overwhelmed and seems checked out so she must be about to take another job. None of those reasons are true, but the change has to mean something to them, and it often means something about you, not them.

The leader who doesn’t publicly acknowledge an intentional growth period isolates themselves inside it. Which means by the time you finally have language to describe the change you’re experiencing, they’ve already been living under its effects for months.

What you’re experiencing as leadership growth, they’re experiencing as something else entirely. They feel like they got it wrong when they bring work to you and you redirect or delegate. They may feel unseen and unheard when you respond with coaching questions instead of the answers they’re looking for. In fact, this requires more energy from them to think deeper than they’ve been accustomed to. They may even be motivated to go around you to get quicker answers when they aren’t sure how you’ll engage with them today. Your ambitious team members might recognize the opening for taking increased ownership. Your risk-averse folks might feel uneasy about the workplace conventions changing in ways they haven’t learned to interpret yet.

You agree philosophically that leaders don’t drift toward better leadership, so you went looking for it. Even though you took initiative and brought on a coach to help you assimilate into your new leadership seat, you didn’t tell your team. In their limited context of your transformation, they fill the silence with their own narratives.

Trying to project stability, you created a gap for them between the boss they know and the leader you’re becoming.

The Invitation

Here’s where you have an option to amplify your progress: Invite others into your growth. By inviting your team into the process and the conversation, you contribute to the narratives and build trust through authenticity. When you acknowledge the effort required to navigate a growth period, you prevent unhealthy misrepresentations from forming about the change, and you open feedback loops for their own growth.

You don’t need to have it all figured out to lead effectively. In fact, leaders know there isn’t a point where you “have it all figured out” because growth doesn’t end. Some of the leaders I’ve respected the most are the leaders who painted a picture of the future and openly shared how they’re growing to support that future. To wait to engage others until it’s completed is to miss the point of growth.

The point of growth is that it’s in motion. It’s a process. Research by Amy Edmondson, Brené Brown, and Adam Grant converges on a shared finding: the most effective leaders and cultures cultivate vulnerability, admit mistakes openly, and practice flexible thinking. An organization’s or a relationship’s capacity for growth and honest exchange is always capped by the leader’s tolerance for being seen as incomplete.

Your team can only run as wide-open as the person at the top has the internal capacity to allow. That’s you. The good news is that you can control the openness of your teams by opening up yourself.

. . .

It’s 8:59 AM and the coasters are scattered again. Your coffee is steaming at the lip of the cup as you settle in from the familiar workout dash. The meeting energy is different this time, though.

A few weeks ago, you said that you were working with a coach and experimenting with how you lead and would be asking more questions, holding back answers to drive creative thinking, and delegating more work than your old habits would have done. You acknowledged that things might feel different for a while but that you didn’t want them guessing about what is happening. You framed it as an invitation to partner with you in growth. They can now interpret your new and changing behavior as opportunity.

As the segue unfolds, your senior analyst, who used to wait for approval on every recommendation, presents the results of a time-saving idea she implemented over the weekend for fun. What you’re observing as a leader is their response to giving them permission to grow with you.

They were waiting for permission to operate at a higher level. Your old leadership style trained them to suppress it. The unconscious dictionary that previously helped them adapt the meeting agenda to your constraints also kept them from seeking growth that would outshine you.

When you gave yourself permission to grow publicly, you also gave them permission to explore a new version of themselves, one that thinks independently, one that takes initiative and brings the question and the answer in the same conversation. By trading the performance of having it all figured out for the honesty of being in progress, you will find that they join you in the process, turning the old dictionary from a cage into a foundation for the model of who you’re becoming as a leader and what the team’s future holds.

The meeting is rolling and the coffee is still safely contained in the Yeti. Today, the agenda is moving faster, and the problem-solving discussion and questions are more finely tuned. Most importantly, the most powerful answers aren’t coming from you. You trained them well and trained them in something new. The new question is what you’ll train them to do next.

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If you’re in a growth season and haven’t found the words for it or the best way to bring others into the process, that’s exactly what a coaching conversation is for.

Let’s give it language together →

Further Reading

The ideas in this piece draw on a worthwhile body of research, even if you don’t have time to read each book.

On how people make meaning in ambiguous situations: Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations (1995) remains the foundational work on how people in groups construct shared understanding from incomplete information. His research underpins a generation of work on leadership communication and organizational change.

On psychological safety: Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization (2018) synthesizes two decades of research into the conditions under which teams can do their best work. The book that informed Google’s Project Aristotle and most modern leadership programs.

On the courage that growth requires: Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead (2018) makes the case that vulnerability is the foundation of trust, creativity, and resilience in leadership — and that performing certainty is what most often gets in the way.

On the cognitive skill of changing your mind: Adam Grant’s Think Again (2021) argues that rethinking and unlearning are among the most undervalued capacities in professional life, and that the leaders who do it best are the ones who treat being wrong as new information rather than as defeat.

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

The most incredible days of your life or career may be just ahead of you.

But you will never find out if you don’t ask this question today:

“What are you capable of?”

Here’s what happened when I asked myself this question:

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The Journey

Over my 19 years in IT leadership, I’ve had seasons of success and seasons of stuck. Some of those times, I’ve hired coaches to move beyond striving and into thriving. But overall, I was content climbing the IT career ladder.

Then I read Beyond High Performance in late 2023. It introduced the concept of Meta Performance — going beyond High Performance: where you ask yourself “How can I be the best?” to Meta Performance: where you ask yourself “What am I capable of?”

Cue the record scratch. This single question altered my thinking, my leadership, and my life trajectory in irreversible ways. First, it catalyzed my leadership and infused new purpose into every team project, company quarterly/annual planning exercise, and every one-on-one with my team.

Second, it removed the invisible ceiling created by my experience and expertise, allowing me to explore “What could I be capable of?” beyond the boundaries of my IT leadership seats. Curiosity replaced contentment and I wanted more as the trajectory of my life shifted by a few degrees.

I spent 2024 becoming equipped to coach individuals and teams through the Seven Primal Questions framework for personal and professional growth, integrating these concepts into several contexts, transforming every team and relationship it touched.

Relationships built in that cohort connected me to the Meta Performance Institute’s one-day training in Chicago in August 2025 where I experienced another recalibration of my life’s direction, developed new relationships, and intensified my curiosity.

In January this year, I officially joined the Meta Performance Institute’s coaching cohort because every interaction I have with them kindles a passion in my bone marrow to see people dream bigger and overcome the invisible hurdles between them and the life they dream about.

With that, I launched my own full-time coaching practice.

The disruption of asking myself the question “What are you capable of?” has fundamentally changed the way I relate to my own vision. It’s no longer a weekend side hustle or a someday project. My vision is no longer something I can escape. The question also altered the way I related to my IT career seats; I can no longer stay in roles that can’t support growth. Asking that question has taken me on a thrilling adventure beyond horizons and into territories I would not have considered before. And I’m nowhere near the end of that discovery. Armed with the power of that question, any situation is now an invitation to greater potential.

My Vision

I’ve long known that my personal purpose is to maximize potential: catalyzing people and projects toward what they’re actually capable of, creating beauty, value, and impact in the world. This thread has been present since as early as I can remember and continues to this day, influencing nearly every aspect of my life.

For the last few months, I have been writing on Substack to explore these ideas, but I haven’t directly shared where all this is leading.

Here’s my larger vision.

As a full-time meta performance coach, my vision is to see leaders taking ownership of creating unique impact in the world. I’m on a mission to share this transformative experience with others through coaching that helps visionaries steward and release powerful visions, and challenges experts to become leaders, living unconstrained.

I want to coach you into the person you need to be to accomplish the dreams and visions that only you contain. I believe in people with vision, and I believe in the power of sharing that vision with the world.

In Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He’s speaking to the gap felt by people who are living under social or societal expectations they never consciously chose, versus people who intentionally choose to live on purpose, outside of the social architecture of the Modern Life Machine that produces unconscious despair.

It’s 2026 and the world continues changing rapidly, opening opportunities for despair that many people didn’t anticipate. I’m disappointed when I pick up strains of despair woven through watercooler conversations, or see the responses to news headlines, or hear complaints about how AI is revamping org structures or job markets.

But I’m more encouraged and hopeful in each of these situations. Each scenario is an opportunity for anyone to ask: “What am I capable of?” Choosing hope takes effort, and the willingness to exert effort comes from having a clear and powerful vision that moves you out of the peanut gallery and onto the stage.

Your Invitation

You’ve been answering “what am I capable of“ with the same answer for years. In fact, the answer lives in your daily decisions, your ceiling for ambition, and the roles you consider and the ones you don’t.

What if your answer is out of date?

What if your answer is more familiar than it is true?

The antidote to toxic cultures or burned out organizations is a healthy, growing person: you. Healthy, growing people create stronger families, friendships, communities, and organizations.

Whether you’re peering over the last rung on the corporate ladder, or whether you can’t sustain the pace playing in society’s race, the next chapter doesn’t have to be exhaustion, complacency, or burnout. The answer can simply be changing the question for your life.

You’re invited…into your future. The conversation I’m inviting you into isn’t a sales pitch; it’s the conversation in which this question stops being rhetorical for you.

I’m Aaron Ott, a meta performance coach, and I would love for you to experience the transformation and energy created by asking and exploring the question for yourself:

What are you capable of?

Let’s talk. Schedule a vision call and let’s find out together.

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Here’s how you can connect with me:

• Subscribe on Substack: https://aaronott.substack.com

• Schedule a Vision Call: https://calendly.com/aaronott/vision

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronmott

• Website: https://www.aaronottcoaching.com

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Previous Articles

• 969 Stairs to the Acropolis

• My Deeds With the Weeds

• There is no Reality

• What the Artemis II Crew Knows About Leadership That Most Leaders Don’t

• The Day I Realized My Vision Was Too Small to Move Anything

• Your Greatest Strength is Working Quietly Against You

• The Expert in You is Sabotaging the Leader You’re Becoming

• You’re Not an Imposter. You’re in Transition.

• 4,000 People Just Lost Their Jobs to AI. The Question Nobody’s Asking is the One That Matters Most.

Leaders often try to think their way into the next version of themselves. My experience says the contrary, and a foot tour through Athens is the best way I know to show you why.

After scrawling a few landmarks and directional turns on a scrap of paper, it was time. Up until now, we were simply following the plan. Our group consisted of five high-level operations, IT, military, and project leaders, so the plan’s level of detail was impeccable. This adventure, though, was guided only with a handwritten list of landmarks — if you can call them that — our water bottles, and a spirit of adventurous hubris.

We set out into the Plaka, the old district below the Acropolis, and quickly realized that “turn left mid-restaurant,” or “go right at the bottom of the stairs, and then immediately right to enter the hidden alley behind the souvenir shop” feel nothing like they read on paper. Nevertheless, we pressed on past mid-day diners in the open-air restaurants and a street musician who stopped performing the moment anyone pulled out a camera or phone. We backtracked, doubled back, reread our scant instructions, and tried the next whitewashed staircase.

The passageways progressed upward past doorsteps and vine-covered dwellings before narrowing to several single-file flights of stairs. Rounding yet another blind corner, we beheld several impressive street art installations. By what felt like the 969th stair, we turned to see all of Athens below us, and the towering Acropolis above us. What a view.

Why Reflection Alone Cannot Take You There

Both the journey and the destination were distinct experiences. Yet, the context of the journey amplified the destination’s reveal in a way that a precise plan wouldn’t.

I’m reminded of the idea: Explore your potential as going on vacation to a new thing. It’s one thing to imagine what it’s like or not like, but it’s different to experience it.

It’s true that thinking — namely reflection — produces insight. But diving headfirst into new experiences or trying on new actions or behaviors produces something different. Herminia Ibarra, who has spent two decades researching how leaders actually change, calls this outsight: the fresh, external perspective you can only get when you plunge into new projects, interact with different people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done, and then watch what happens. Outsight is what you cannot get from self-reflection alone, because reflection trains your attention on your past, and your past is exactly what you are trying to outgrow.

The adventure through the Plaka was not just a pin at the final destination. It was the sum of every micro-adventure along the way, of every moment we drew on situational awareness to determine our next step, and of every unplanned thing we experienced on the path. It would have been impossible to take an Uber or ride a bike along a prescribed route and arrive at the destination. The journey only existed because we were willing to go on foot, with scant directions, and immerse ourselves in the thrill of discovery.

What if exploring your potential or becoming a better leader wasn’t about fixing problems or deficiencies in your leadership? What if it was about the outsight created by willingly going beyond your comfort zone?

Your Default Future Versus the One You Have to Become

Here’s what this looks like for a leader. Consider the default future you’re moving toward. Your default future is the accumulation of all your past decisions, like getting and holding a job, committing to this quarter’s team project or stretch goals, or having a kid and signing them up for after-school sports. Your default future requires no extra effort, and is likely to occur if you don’t take any new, radical steps toward something different. In your default future, your steps are planned and predictable.

Now picture your vision, the dream that you want to see someday. Maybe it’s the CxO title you’re anticipating a few promotion cycles from now; maybe it’s reaching a certain savings benchmark so you can take six months off and travel with your family.

Either way, there’s likely tension between your default future and your vision. Likewise, there is a difference between who you need to be to accomplish your default future and who you need to be to accomplish your vision.

One strategy would be to self-reflect on your past, creating valuable insight. This can be useful, but only to a point. I firmly support processing your past to the extent that you understand your unconscious motivations and how they affect you. But spending too much time there crosses the line into becoming an invisible ceiling on your potential. Insight alone tells you who you have been; it does not tell you who you could become.

The second strategy would be to immerse yourself in new experiences and situations beyond your comfort zone, creating valuable outsight on how you lead and how others experience you. The value created by outsight is novel, and when paired with insight, helps you expand and grow.

Experience the Plan While You Execute the Plan

No doubt you’ve seen the plan vs. reality illustrations, where the plan is a positive slope and reality is a meandering, squiggly line.

Henry Mintzberg’s research on how strategy actually unfolds found that only ten to thirty percent of any deliberately planned strategy is realized as intended. The rest emerges. If that’s true for the multi-billion-dollar plans of Fortune 500 companies, what makes you think your personal growth plan will fare any better?

As many leaders learned in the ‘unprecedented times’ of 2020, or in the rapid application of AI to long-held business conventions we’re seeing now, plotting the twists and turns of reality is impossible. But what is possible is developing flexibility and resilience by continuously interrogating yourself at every step along the way. Or as I often ask with clients, how are you getting in your own way toward growth or to the vision you care about?

You can’t plan your future. You can only develop a vision and plan your immediate next step in its direction.

You need to experience the plan while you execute the plan.

The Cost of Staying and the Cost of Going

You have a choice. You can keep building toward your default future — the one that runs on the predictable accumulation of decisions you’ve already made, that earns continued external validation, and that asks nothing new of you.

Your default future has a cost too: you will arrive in five years and see the same version of yourself in the mirror, because nothing about the journey required you to become someone different, someone new.

The other path costs differently. It exposes you to the experience of not knowing what comes next. It puts you in conversations and decisions where your expertise is not the asset it used to be. It may, at points, feel like you are wandering, because the squiggly line of reality cannot be planned. What it offers in return is the only thing that grows a leader who has already maxed out on what got them here: the experience of becoming someone they could not have planned themselves into being.

When we took our exploratory adventure, we moved past the popular views, ignored the perfect order of steps, and accepted the fact that it was useless to try to chart it on a maps app. We had to experience it and evaluate at every corner. And as we did, we grew our curiosity, sharpened our navigational abilities, and experienced more local culture than if we had stuck to a “proven plan” to get us to the destination marker.

What would you attempt this month if you accepted that you cannot think your way into the answer? The only way to find out is to take a step, watch what happens, and let the next step reveal itself.

It is one thing to imagine what you might be capable of. It is different to experience it.

Let’s talk about the step you have not yet taken →

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References

• Ibarra, Herminia. 2015. “Leading with Outsight.” Herminia Ibarra, May 29. https://herminiaibarra.com/leading-with-outsight/

• Mintzberg, Henry, and James A. Waters. 1985. “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent.” Strategic Management Journal 6(3): 257–272. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2486186.

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created, was written without a multi-step plan, and no squiggly lines were harmed in the making of this piece.

I despised it with the kind of intensity only a twelve-year-old can sustain.

The dread of being asked drove me to keep myself busy with just about anything else to avoid having to do it. I eagerly studied over 1400 pages of the HTML 4.0 developer specification; I practiced Hanon and Czerny piano exercises until I broke a piano string while playing; I produced an album with an early version of Cakewalk Studio on Windows 2000 and my Yamaha PSR 500 keyboard.

I was going all in to avoid weeding the garden.

The excuse was tight. Pulling weeds created risk for my fingers: dirt under my fingernails, smelling like weird plants for days, or the scratch and irritation from prickly invaders (stinging nettles, anyone?). Finger risk was real for a developing musician, and I hid from anything that jeopardized my ability to practice.

Despite the resistance and distraction techniques, I did manage to learn the key tenet of weeding: get the root. If you don’t get the root, it could grow back stronger.

Years later, I purchased a dandelion field, which happened to be my first lawn. Pets and weeds had left the yard in rough shape, demanding heavy work. But I didn’t even want to tackle it until the soil was just right to use a sharp digger to get the whole weed including the root. Those perfect conditions were elusive, so sometimes my wife and I brute-forced weeding sessions; other times we avoided it. Were we successful? Well, we tried, and so did our neighbors’ pappuses.

We finally hired a professional company to begin a yard treatment routine. They couldn’t promise quick results, but we knew that. We did, however, understand that we needed to start a process of continuous improvement sooner, rather than later, to have an enjoyable yard.

A healthy lawn strategy requires a strong foundation and consistent, yet adaptive, techniques. You build a strong foundation by aerating, dethatching, and overseeding to improve the conditions for growth. Then winter dormancy provides a reset window where weeds die. In the spring, a regular cadence of pre-emergents prevents the weeds from even getting started, and strategic fertilizer applications maximize the grass’s potential.

You know what’s easier than weeding an entire yard of dandelions? Removing a small handful of ambitious stragglers that survived the first round of treatments. The next spring, we had significantly fewer weeds to pull, and over the next three to four years, the weeds disappeared altogether.

Finally, a lawn worth a look.

Lawncare in Leadership

Your leadership is like a lawn. You tend to the wellbeing of your identity the same way, and the results of the investment you make in yourself are evident in how you show up for your company, team, family, and community. Well-tended leadership creates space for both you and others to enjoy.

First, if you’re an expert taking on greater leadership responsibility and feeling the tension — both positive and stressful — of new situations, larger teams, or ambitious goals, you don’t have a skill deficiency. But your root system (identity) might still be delivering individual contributions that undermine your leadership potential. Every time you default to an old pattern or behavior, you are letting the weed of individual contribution grow back. The leadership key is: you need to identify the roots in your identity that are actually holding you back.

Then you need to create space for the desirable things to flourish. As you identify where your root tendencies exist, you need to create space and give yourself grace to experiment with new or different leadership approaches. This feels unsettling at first because it demands that you expand beyond your expertise and develop new leadership behaviors. I’ve written that feeling imposter syndrome is a sign that you are growing and moving in the right direction. Feel the stretch, but let something new grow and develop. The leadership key is: you must create intentional space for growth.

Most importantly, you can’t do this alone. My lawn is luscious and green now, but despite the beauty it provides, the grass cannot remove its own weeds. No matter how lush the bluegrass, it does not have the power to overcome intruding roots without outside intervention. Continuous weed abatement is possible because my lawncare company has a large crew with specialized products and equipment, and a consistent cadence to root out the imposters and to strategically apply both inhibitory measures and growth catalysts. The leadership key is: you can’t grow alone.

You don’t just do the work once, either. We moved from that first house into a dream mid-century ranch whose yard was in a similar state as before. This time, we were armed with a strategy, knew when to implement it, and trusted the process to lead to transformation and enjoyment. This year is year four of consistent care, and as you can see below, my lawn outshines the sports field across the street, which looks exactly like my lawn did when we started.

Your Leadership Choice

You may be thriving and enjoying life. I ask you: what might be possible if you took a lawncare look at your leadership? What might you be capable of that you haven’t realized yet? How could you show up for your teams in ways that powerfully develop their potential? Who do you need to become to lead better today? Tomorrow? This quarter? Next quarter? Next year?

I previously wrote about my first foray into coaching, an engagement that came from a place of situational desperation. Since then, I’ve maintained a consistent coaching engagement, continually expanding my leadership alongside it. I’m proud of the work I’ve done and fully accept that the lawn of my leadership requires constant care and tending so that my vision can thrive and my strategy can drive toward success.

Data from management consulting firm FMI found that 87% of respondents reported high return on investment (ROI) from executive coaching, with returns measured at 10 to 49 times the cost of a coach. A 2023 meta-analysis found significant positive effects from executive coaching, including self-efficacy, psychological capital, and resilience. I have experienced a 16.7x ROI on my coaching investments, which drives my passion for seeing other leaders invest in becoming the leader their role requires and increase both their organizational impact and personal satisfaction.

I write about leadership because I believe in creating and contributing to a stronger world. I coach because I’ve been transformed, and because every leader deserves a fierce advocate for their growth and the future they’re capable of building.

So let me ask: Who are you willing to become for what you believe in creating?

You may already find yourself acquiring new skills (AI, anyone?) or bracing for changes to your industry or to organizational structures. Learning new skills is not the same as expanding your identity and leadership for future success. In fact, if you’re learning new skills to avoid looking at the root system like I was doing at age twelve…just book a call. Let’s talk through it.

If this resonates, book a complimentary coaching call →

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

Happy Tuesday.

Oh, and there is no such thing as reality.

...

Pause. Engage some caffeinated Morning Metacognition^TM.

Before you dismiss this as philosophy, stick with me. This idea dramatically changed how I lead, and I wish the same for you.

What emotions, feelings, or thoughts arose in you in response to that statement? Do you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with it? Let’s unpack it further because there’s so much more to discuss.

I just returned from Atlanta, Georgia for training and business planning, and I’m actively engaging with this idea of reality in both positive and painful ways. I’ve told myself that I want my business plan and strategies to be grounded in reality to build a large, sustainable coaching practice that supports my current and future life. I’m a realist and have always been so; facts and figures provide powerful substantiation; track records become trajectories.

But I’m learning that the longer I try to anchor into this grounding, the more it dissolves.

Here’s why:

There is no such thing as reality. There is only our perception of reality.

Arguing With Reality

As I’ve written about before, The Work of Byron Katie teaches that all stress, discomfort, and frustration is caused by arguing with reality. This thought exercise has had a profound effect on me since I now investigate every feeling of frustration to understand what’s driving it and whether it’s helping or hurting me. There is power in conducting thought experiments like this with a great coach who can help you notice these patterns in your own thoughts.

But let’s reduce reality to only a set of facts — a dataset. There is no inherent meaning in a dataset until your perception — your synthesized biases, past experiences, preferences, and current or future desires — is formed and applied to the facts, creating a narrative about how the dataset is meaningful to you. Your brain is so skilled at quickly creating this narrative that you rarely stop to consider whether it’s true or how it’s helpful to you. It just feels right. Because as soon as it’s created, the perception has already fulfilled its purpose of supplying you with meaning and you often will not develop or investigate your perception further.

Therefore, an updated thought exercise is that:

All1 stress, discomfort, and frustration is caused by arguing with your perception of reality.

This idea is supported by research from Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan that resulted in their book The Three Laws of Performance. The first law of performance states: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.

This specific language — how situations occur to them — is what I mean with the statement that there is no such thing as reality; only your perception of reality. As they discuss in their research, the effects of this law are always present whether or not the law is acknowledged. Just like gravity.

Let’s consider a situation that you might experience every day in Omaha: you’re in traffic and someone cuts in front of you. The facts might be that your car is in the turning lane; there is a non-zero distance between you and the car in front of you; a car is beside you; the person in the car visually observes a gap in front of your; the person maneuvers their car into the gap. Dataset complete.

My perception might be: this person selfishly cut in front of me. I won’t make it through the light in time and will spend more time than I wanted to pick up dinner rolls from the bakery. This person is rude and I’m annoyed.

Their potential perception: Oh look! There’s a large-enough gap to squeeze into. The other driver hasn’t closed the gap, therefore they must be intending to allow me in. They are so nice and considerate to let me in this far into the turning lane, and I’m grateful to them for letting me merge so I can make it to the hospital on time for our appointment.

What’s reality?

The dataset here doesn’t matter. What’s important to notice is that my perception created negative energy for me, and their perception created positive energy for them. They will never know my negativity and I will not know their gratefulness. In this situation, I have simply allowed the negative perception to persist and cloud my errand even though I’m still able to accomplish my vision of obtaining fresh rolls for dinner with little to no meaningful impact.

Once I’ve allowed my Negative Perception Engine^TM to run, it gets easier and easier to replicate similar energy in response to other situations. And thus, one can find themselves arguing with reality on autopilot.

When you realize the power of what perception does for you, it now feels silly to devote any time, attention, energy, or emotion to a frustrated perception of a grocery errand. Imagine if none of your errands created negative energy; or imagine if all your errands created positive energy. All of that is in your control. You can just choose to not argue with your perception of reality.

Arguing With Vision

But let’s increase the stakes. I’m going to assume that, like me, you have business and personal visions because you’re smart and want to make a difference in the world. (If you’re smart but don’t have a noble vision clearly defined yet, let’s talk about that later.) Those visions don’t exist right now because, well, vision = a powerful desired future state.

But just like how reality doesn’t exist, vision doesn’t exist either. As there is only our perception of reality, there is also only our perception of vision. Our perception of reality creates positive or negative experiences for us. Our perception of vision — our beliefs about its possibility, impossibility, ease, or difficulty — also triggers corresponding actions.

Somehow, I find that incredibly freeing in contrast to my past realist grounding. Because in the same way that arguing with our perception of reality creates frustration, arguing with our perception of vision creates inaction.

For example, you may have an Icelandic vacation on your personal vision bucket list to accomplish in 10 years, or five, or by the end of this year. If you perceive your vacation to be far away, you aren’t driven to start packing yet. But if your vision is to take this vacation by the end of this year, your perception changes and the actions you choose to do today will certainly need to be different.

Professionally, you cascade targets and metrics across your organization designed to contribute toward your 1-, 3-, or 10-year visions. You strategize and execute based on what you think is possible. If your vision is perceived to be accomplishable, you will act accordingly. Conversely, if your vision is perceived as impossible or improbable, you will also act accordingly, most likely by not taking sufficient action.

This has a profound effect on teams as well. Performance measured across teams will directly reflect the perceptions in play and whether or not those perceptions are creating powerful alignment and engagement.

This is where your leadership matters. It’s important for you, both personally and professionally, to notice how your perceptions cause frustration or inaction in your own life. If positive and helpful perceptions of reality contribute toward an engaging experience of life, and if appropriate action depends a positive perception of vision, then it’s important to notice and manage your perceptions in order to create the energy needed to accomplish your vision. If you can’t do this for yourself, you won’t be able to facilitate this for those you lead.

In your leadership, this doesn’t mean that you live in the world of perception management to get results. In fact, you can’t change someone’s perception directly. You can, however, employ future-based, generative language in ways that allow people to upgrade or create their own powerful perceptions, enabling stronger buy-in and alignment toward the vision and driving their necessary actions. When someone possesses a powerful perception, there’s hardly anything they can’t do. We could read thousands of articles together of all the things that were impossible until they weren’t, but we’ll save that for another time.

What Reality Will You Create?

You will make choices about what to do today and how to show up to that work based on your perception of the vision. You will choose to generate leads, make sales, lead projects, research opportunities, or develop people to the level that you think the vision is possible.

You will show up with emotions that influence how you feel, how you behave, and how you interact with people, all based on your perception of reality.

Others will have perceptions of you. You’ll have perceptions of yourself and others. Each one of those perceptions will be either empowering or disempowering, just like the traffic example earlier. How you respond to those perceptions is what I want you to consider this week.

1. How will you choose to perceive vision and reality this week?

2. How will you choose to act based on your perceptions?

Regardless of what happens, you either kill or create agency and opportunity through your perceptions. Imagine what would happen if you applied positive perceptions to the supercharged visions that you have?

There is no such thing as reality.

There is no such thing as possible or impossible visions.

There are only perceptions that drive actions.

What reality will you create this week?

As a coach, I get to have powerful conversations about perceptions. If your perceptions need an upgrade, schedule a vision call. It’s free. No pitch. I really believe in the power of vision and perception to create impact in the world.

Schedule here: https://calendly.com/aaronott/complimentary-coaching-call

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece. All Terrible Trademarks^TM are inspired by Zarna Garg.

Today, we celebrate the safe and precise splashdown of the Artemis II crew and Orion capsule Integrity after a successful mission flying around the moon. Mondays have always been my favorite day and I’m coasting into this week powered by Moon Joy, the collective and curious term that became a catchphrase on the capsule communication channels over the last ten days as we watched our four favorite astronauts.

I’ve been thinking specifically about the incredible opportunity it’s been to listen to the livestreams, experience the unique moments, and share in the collective joy of everyone tuning in to the NASA livestreams worldwide. People have posited that we’re not just riding on a high of scientific exploration and discovery, but that we observers are transfixed with the sheer competency on display from everyone involved. Competency that feels rare and, for a generation that grew up after the Apollo era, genuinely new.

But would you believe me if I told you that that experience could be every Monday? Or Tuesday? Or every week?

No doubt you’re already familiar with the term “integrity,” but we each apply different ethical or moral filters to its definition. Removing the ethical or moral bias, integrity is simply the positive workability of a thing. A thing works to deliver its function or it doesn’t. When a thing works, it builds trust; when it doesn’t work, it erodes trust.

In a Harvard Business Review interview, Michael C. Jensen shared that integrity is “honoring your word” to create workability. What we observed with the Artemis II crew and support teams was a public demonstration of incredibly high integrity built on a foundation of high trust.

Think about it: the crew in the capsule had to trust that a listening ear in Houston was always ready to respond with critical information. Operations teams on the ground had to trust that the crew was executing specific checklists and procedures as trained.

Extremely high levels of trust existed in both directions. Why? Because the preparation and training first created something on which to agree. Then each of the crew members in space or on the ground made commitments to guide how they interacted with the training, checklists, and each other. Because everyone delivered on those commitments, the workability of the plan was high, and we saw the incredible integrity on display for the whole world to admire.

Building this trust and developing this level of integrity began years ago as each person committed to developing their unique abilities and pursuing interesting, diverse experiences. It continued through every research project, crew application, training program, and test exercise. They were, clearly, people who kept their word at every point along the way. We saw what years of operating with high integrity actually produces: a demonstration of what humans are capable of when they honor their commitments consistently.

In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey argues that one of the fastest ways to restore trust is to make and keep commitments—even very small commitments—to ourselves and to others. Trust creates an invitation forward; the lack of trust encourages distance. When things need to move forward, you need to have built prior trust.

How would your leadership survive a 24/7 livestream of all your activities and communications? Would the world be as inspired by what you’re committed to and how well you keep your word? Would your integrity on display motivate your team toward the vision you’re asking them to believe in?

Here’s the truth: your team, your boss, and your coworkers already have a front-row seat to how well you keep your word. Every time you walk into the conference room 3 minutes late or every email you send at 5:08 PM to technically meet a deadline is a demonstration of your integrity level.

In fact, I propose that the most dangerous landmine to your integrity is hiding behind a friendly face: office camaraderie. I can tell you this from personal experience. I’m wired to create connections everywhere, and I’m also extremely present wherever I am. This is a minefield for integrity because it’s super easy for me to make a commitment like “yeah, I’ll send that when I get back to my desk,” or “sure, I’ll make that warm connection for you,” only to hop back into the present conversation. By the time I get back to my desk, I’ve long forgotten and it doesn’t surface in my brain until 11:49 PM three days later. Which means that every hallway conversation is a trust transaction you didn’t know you were making. How does that reframe how you view watercooler talk? This is exactly the kind of invisible pattern I wrote about in “Your Greatest Strength Is Quietly Working Against You.”

Once I became aware of this, I added a note widget to my iPhone screen so that I can quickly capture anything that arises in conversation. People feel the commitment differently when they watch me write it down. I’ve built trust even before delivering because they saw my word become an action item, increasing both my accountability and their belief that I’ll deliver on my word.

If you cringe at the thought of living your life on display for the world to see like NASA, I have good news. You control your level of integrity. You can improve it by increasing the level to which you keep your word. If you’re like most people — human — we can assume that you don’t keep your word 100% of the time. This means there’s always capacity for growth. Think about it: if you make ten commitments to someone and deliver nine of them, can they trust that you deliver all your commitments? What happens when you make ten commitments and keep all ten? They trust you. They don’t articulate it as workability, but they feel it, and they act on it. By rigorously keeping your word, your perceived and real integrity grows, your trust account balance increases, and you create more forward momentum toward your goals.

What we didn’t see on the NASA livestream were last-minute decisions to enter high-performance just for this project. What we saw was a lifetime of small commitments compounding into something extraordinary.

Here’s a quick way for you to improve your integrity this week: find one commitment you haven’t honored. Honor it this week — late, with an explanation, and without excuses. That’s where integrity and trust rebuild.

By dialing your integrity level up, you accomplish more than you thought possible, sooner than you expected, and find it more fulfilling than you anticipated.

Every Monday can feel like that. You can live every day and every week with the same level of integrity as our new Favorite Four™ and experience all the Moon Joy you can handle.

The trust and integrity you build now, before your next role, team, or high-stakes moment, is the trust you’ll have available when you need it most.

The leaders who build this kind of trust before they need it are the ones doing the harder work of leading from who they are, not just what they know.

Let’s talk about the trust you’re building right now →

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Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re not stuck and you’re not a fraud — you’re in the most important career transition nobody prepared you for. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

As I write this, the Artemis II crew has launched and is over two-thirds of the way to their planned research orbit around the moon. Based on my wide array of interests, my social algorithms have curated a delightful space-inspired feed: incredible footage from independent photographers and videographers covering a launch for the first time; reporters from around the world moved to tears from the impact of seeing, hearing, and feeling the intensity of the liftoff; project teams hugging and celebrating after witnessing the results of their years of hard work. And I, livestreaming from the Midwest, somehow feel connected to them and the shared passion, emotion, and inspiration that fuels each one of them.

This incredible shared moment of humanity would be impossible without a vision larger than the sum of these people.

Vision activates growth, purpose, connection, camaraderie, agency, and movement.

But let’s rewind several years because it wasn’t always that way for me.

Reclining on a sunlounger beside a pool in July is not the place you would expect to feel like you’re drowning. I might as well have been reclining under a waterboarding spigot based on how I felt. As I attempted to chill, waving flies away from my burger, my brain continued to spin out of control. Looking back, I had been mentally stuck between freeze and flight mode for months with no clear way forward. Even at a relaxing pool party, I was unsure how to swim against the undertow in my mind. I knew I couldn’t continue much longer.

Another guest happened to be an executive coach. Though we were acquaintances, we hadn’t visited in depth. As the afternoon unfolded, I remember feeling like the questions they asked and the things they talked about seemed to come from a completely different reality, one that seemed grounded, intentional, and positive. Internally, I did not feel grounded, intentional, or positive. I also remember thinking “It sounds too good to be true. Surely it can’t really be that way?” as they described their life and work. Considering my mental state at the time, I really don’t remember many specifics from the rest of that day, except that as I carried coolers to the car, I also contained even more cognitive dissonance than I had walked in with.

But I also walked away with an intense desire to see if something — anything — could be different.

Does my current reality have to continue to be my reality?
What does it take to enter that reality?
Is it even possible for someone like me?

Within a few days, I began a coaching engagement. I had no idea how I would pay for it or what the journey entailed, but I knew I needed to do something, and this was something. Anything felt hopeful at the time.

The first meeting started with a question: “What’s your vision?”

I DON’T KNOW. I need to fix these problems instead.

“Ok, what does fixing these problems move you closer toward?”

I don’t care, because I’m stuck in these problems.

“Well, what do you dream about for your future?”

Dude. It doesn’t matter because I’m stuck here and I can’t seem to move.

In my frustration, but in my quest to be The Perfect Client™, I reluctantly filled out the vision worksheet. It was difficult to go on a vision quest given my reality at the time, but a personal dream that seemed far outside the realm of possibility was owning a Tesla Model Y. So of course, that made my list of dreams.

The next exercise involved acquiring a small reminder of my vision to keep it part of my daily routine. I found a desk-sized phone charger shaped like a Tesla Supercharger.

Lest you think coaching is all about defining dreams and wishes and learning to manifest them, it’s not. The rest of my coaching journey challenged my mindset and beliefs, resulting in an expansion and deepening of my identity. I learned to explore what could be possible outside the constraints of anything that had been possible in the past.

I learned to build systems around me to support focused growth. As Adam Grant writes in Hidden Potential, “Scaffolding unleashes hidden potential by helping us forge paths we couldn’t otherwise see. It enables us to find motivation in the daily grind, gain momentum in the face of stagnation, and turn difficulties and doubts into sources of strength.” The scaffolding of consistent coaching unlocked countless opportunities for me to learn, dream, and grow, over and over.

Exactly one year later to the month, I opened my phone and pressed the Confirm button on my order. I now had a date to pick up my new Tesla Model Y.

One year prior, I would have told you it was 99.999% impossible that that dream could become reality so soon. I knew this to be true because it had always been true.

Except that “truth” was not a truth per se. It was entirely a figment of my imagination, powered by my mindset and beliefs at the time.

As I drove away from the delivery appointment, I had a new problem to solve: my vision was too small. If I had accomplished something impossible in a year, what could I do over the next year or two or ten?

Vision establishes direction and creates the tension necessary to move toward it.

As I’ve written about the self-imposed limits that learned expertise create for you, a powerful vision enables you to see and plan beyond everything you once thought possible.

You can start with any vision, but you gain to grow so much more by expanding your vision beyond what you can accomplish on your own. This is why watching the response to the Artemis II mission is so inspiring. The mission is simply not possible with a single person. Not even the combined crew of four highly-trained and expertly-skilled astronauts could accomplish it on their own. The vision requires full engagement from thousands of people who believe in linking arms and asking: What am I capable of? What are we capable of?

My questions for you:

1. Is your vision large enough to create movement?

2. Who do you need to become to explore all you could be capable of?

I believe that businesses, communities, and societies are better when empowered leaders take action in the things that are important to them. This is what I call Radical Agency: having the audacity to create a vision you believe in AND TAKING THE STEPS to move toward it.

As an executive coach, I help high-performing experts become the leader their vision requires.

Your vision is either creating movement or it isn’t. If it isn’t, that’s worth a conversation.

Let’s chat about your big vision →

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re not stuck and you’re not a fraud — you’re in the most important career transition nobody prepared you for. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. All terrible trademarks are relics of my past expert-based identity. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.

There’s a strange moment in leadership that nobody warns you about. It’s the moment you realize the thing that built your reputation is the same thing that’s creating your ceiling, and that you built that ceiling with your own two hands. Gasp.

This moment manifests as cumulative friction over time. Projects slow down for reasons you can’t identify. Talented, engaged people become more closed. Feedback starts becoming less helpful and more stressful: delegate more, be more strategic, step back, communicate more. You hear it and nod, but internally you’re thinking: I’m already strategic. I just also happen to know the details better than anyone in the room.

If you’re like me, that internal logic feels airtight. However, it’s your shadow talking: the dark side of the very strength that got you here. Until you learn to see it, it quietly runs the way you approach everything.

In my last article, I wrote about how the expert in you is sabotaging the leader you’re becoming. Here, I want to name what happens when the expertise itself becomes the blind spot.

By the end of this post, I want you to see a pattern you might be living inside of, and to consider whether your greatest gift is costing you more than you realize.

I say this with full authority because I’ve become intimately acquainted with my shadow. I’m predisposed to selflessly prioritize others over myself. I am truly thrilled to play second fiddle for someone else. To anticipate what they need and provide it in a meaningful way. After all, every Frodo needs his Sam, and every EOS Visionary needs her Integrator. For years, I lived in the success of providing assistance. In fact, the nickname I earned was “Ottbot.”

That strategy worked for years until a high-stakes meeting in which a leader bluntly told me: “You know, Aaron, not everyone wants to be helped.”

Shock. Horror. Denial. They must not truly know me.

Turns out I didn’t truly know me.

What followed involved much floundering, frustration, and feelings as I began to explore if there was any truth to that statement. How could someone be resistant to help? Why does that statement hurt like nothing else? What am I truly hoping to achieve through helping someone? What do I need to be true about myself in order to feel okay? And the one I didn’t want to ask: am I helping others, or am I helping myself?

Eager to erase those feelings of failure, I took a deep dive into self-discovery. My life and career were built on pattern recognition and precision, so why not use those same skills on myself. I could see how systems should work, reverse-engineer the path, and execute at a level that consistently earned trust. I could anticipate what people needed, deliver it for them in a helpful way, and make their progress easier, right? That was the way I was wired and it was rewarded with positive relationships until it wasn’t.

Applying the same methodology to myself felt quite different, though. In that one conversation, my greatest skill got reframed as a destructive habit. The same intuition and eye for detail that built my reputation started strangling me through over-involvement in projects or with people. What I once thought was my superpower now felt like a villain. Was I losing myself?

One of the most useful things I ever learned is that personality frameworks don’t just describe your strengths; they can help predict your blind spots. The same wiring that made me an extraordinary helper also contributed toward being someone who confused being needed with being valued. The only thing that had changed was that a blind spot had been illuminated for me.

Here’s how blind spots work in leadership:

A blind spot isn’t necessarily a weakness, but that’s an easy trap to fall into. If it were a weakness, you would have noticed it, people would have given you feedback already, and you’d have a plan to fix it. Blind spots are different. They hide inside your strengths. They are the dark side of the thing you’re the best at. They only become visible when your context changes and your strength starts working against you.

Consider these common patterns among leaders:

Detail orientation becomes micromanagement. You call it “quality” or “high standards.” Your team calls it “suffocation.” The same ability to spot errors that made you the best engineer on the floor now means your team waits for your sign-off on decisions they should be making themselves.

Problem-solving instinct becomes over-functioning. Someone brings you a challenge and you solve it before they finish the sentence. You feel useful. They feel dismissed. Over time, your team learns not to think and to bring you the problem and let you run.

High standards become impossible standards. You redline everything. You rewrite the email before it goes out. You redo the slide deck at 10pm because it wasn’t quite right. You tell yourself this is leadership setting an example but it’s a version of control dressed up as craft.

Loyalty becomes over-staying. You pour yourself into an organization. You stay through misalignment, broken trust, and through environments that stopped serving you years ago. You acknowledge that you’re trying to be committed, faithful, and all-in. Leaving feels like failure and you don’t do failure.

Each of these patterns started as a genuine strength. Each pattern, left uninvestigated, becomes the ceiling you can’t see because you built it with your own hands.

What makes this especially hard is that the people around you usually can’t name it either. Or they won’t. They don’t know the soundtrack playing in your mind as you do those things. They don’t know the labels you identify with that are hurtful or helpful. Your boss sees your output and assumes you’ve got it handled. Your peers see someone carrying a lot of responsibility and stay out of the way.

Your direct reports, however, often experience your shadow side daily but won’t bring it up because — let’s be honest — nobody wants to be the one who tells their boss that their excellence has a dark side.

This is when the feedback becomes vague. “Gain stronger alignment.” “Delegate and elevate.” “Listen more.” You hear it and you nod, but internally you’re thinking: Alignment with what? Delegate to my already-overloaded team and elevate to what?

The internal resistance you feel is the blind spot talking. It sounds like logic to you, but it’s actually your identity protecting itself from the terrifying possibility that you might need to lead from something other than competence.

Now, as the World’s Best Almost-Stoic™, I can confidently say: the invitation here isn’t to fix yourself. The invitation is to see yourself — maybe for the first time — from the outside and to acknowledge that your strengths have a shadow worth investigating.

Take the quality you’re most known for. The one that shows up in every performance review, every compliment, every reason someone trusts you with a project. Now ask: Where does this strength show up uninvited? Where does it overstay its welcome? How are you benefiting from continuing to lean on this strength?

Who do you need to become to be free from the pull to only lean on that strength?

That’s the question people rarely ask. Once you sit with it, it will help you truly see into your shadow.

Once you can see the shadow side of your strength, you get a choice. Not to abandon its strength, but to wield it intentionally. To know when it’s serving you and when it’s running you. To recognize the moments when your gift crosses the line from asset to obstacle.

Developing this awareness of the shadow doesn’t happen alone. It happens when someone holds up a mirror you didn’t know you needed and says, “Look. This is what’s actually happening.”

Your strongest skill isn’t the problem. Your instinct to lead with your best skill isn’t the problem either. The problem is that in the absence of awareness of what’s lurking in your shadow, you keep running the same strategy in new environments, hoping that it produces the same results.

The leaders I work with don’t need to learn new skills. They need to see the skills they already have from a completely different angle. When they do, the micromanagement loosens, the over-functioning slows down, and the defensiveness toward situations softens, all because they finally understood what they were actually doing and why.

That’s what radical awareness looks like: Seeing more, not learning more.

If you’re a leader who’s been praised for the same strengths your entire career and you have a nagging suspicion that it’s starting to work against you, trust that suspicion. It’s probably right.

Let’s find the thing you can’t see →

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re not stuck and you’re not a fraud — you’re in the most important transition nobody prepared you for. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. All terrible trademarks are inspired by Zarna Garg.

What is your superpower? What’s something that’s easy for you that not everyone can do? What’s the thing people always want to pick your brain for (usually badly disguised as a coffee invitation)?

Now take a moment and celebrate that thing. Celebrate everything that makes you you. Folks around you look to you as the expert in something. You may even have awards and certifications that prove your expertise to the world and substantiate the seat you’re in. Your 10, 15, or 20 years of experience earned it and you have every right to be proud.

So, why are there still times when it feels like you’re drowning in the very role your talent was supposed to prepare you for? As you count the egg rolls in your Friday night take-out order on your way home, why is it that you’re also counting down the days to your next vacation?

Here’s the truth: the skill set that made you exceptional as an expert is the same skill set that’s exhausting you as a leader.

I lived this lackluster limbo before I could fully see it, name it, and do something about it. I kept running the same play that had always worked for me: see a gap, own the solution, deliver at a level nobody could question. It worked time and time again. Until it didn’t.

I remember the first time I noticed resentment creeping in, not toward the job, but toward myself for letting expertise become my whole identity. I knew my internal operating system was breaking when the things that previously brought fulfillment now brought frustration instead. Those feelings didn’t mean I lacked skills and ability, but it meant that I was shifting from do the thing to lead the people who do the thing, which is a completely different ability. Nobody teaches you that in Expert School. I kept doubling down on my old approach, convinced that working harder was the answer, setting an implicit example for others to follow, and then hoping others would be inspired to rise to the occasion around me.

News flash! That wasn’t the answer. I had to stop doing long enough to notice that I was solving the wrong problem.

If you’re like most people, you might resonate with this picture:

You get promoted or land a new seat, and the first six months are chaos, exciting chaos. You’re learning, building, and earning trust. Most importantly, your boss is happy because you’re delivering.

Then, slowly, something shifts. You start doing more and leading less. You’re involved in every project, reviewing every deliverable. You’re answering Slack messages that your team should be handling in the interest of maintaining timely communication. You’re staying an extra hour or two because “it’s just easier if I do it.” You tell yourself you’re being a good leader, setting the standard, protecting quality, and having your team’s back.

But what you’re really doing is recreating the expert role inside a leadership title.

Why? Because the expert role feels safe and familiar. You already know how to succeed and win there. The leadership role — the one that asks you to trust other people’s work, tolerate imperfection, sit in strategic ambiguity, and influence without controlling — feels like walking blindfolded into Parisian roundabout traffic. So you default back to doing.

This pattern has catastrophic consequences for you and for everyone under your leadership.

When you hold work too close, your team stops growing. They learn that you’ll always catch it, fix it, or redo it. So they stop stretching themselves or even trying. The best ones start burning out or leaving because they’re on your team to lead, not to be micro-managed.

When you over-function like this, you become the bottleneck. When every decision, approval, or judgment call runs through you, your team and the organization start to believe that’s how it has to work because you’ve trained them to depend on you.

And personally, when you collapse your value into your output, you burn out. The slow, grinding kind of burnout where you wake up after a Sunday afternoon nap with a knot in your stomach and think, I can’t keep doing this, but you do it anyway — because you don’t know who you are if you’re not the one delivering, and you’re nothing if not a person of your word.

This is where many leaders get stuck. It’s not because they lack talent, skill, or ability, it’s because they use too much of the wrong kind of talent for the role they’re in now. It’s hard to let go of it because letting go feels a bit like dying or letting yourself down.

Against our natural wiring, here’s what this moment requires:

You have to be radically honest with reality. This isn’t about what should be happening or what you wish were true. You need to be radically honest with what is actually, observably, happening right now. In her book Loving What Is, Byron Katie states that “The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is.” When I first read this quote, I let the book drop into my lap, stared into the middle distance, and replayed a mental reel of all the situations where I was arguing with what is. All my stress was wrapped up in thoughts like: “My team should step up…” “They should ask more questions…” “It doesn’t feel like So-And-So gets it…”

Yep. My team didn’t step up. They didn’t ask more questions. So-And-So doesn’t get it.

Until you stop arguing with that reality, nothing is going to change. Once you acknowledge what is, you get to choose how to move forward.

In that moment of honesty, I felt my agency return.

If you do this work, you might honestly see that you’re over-functioning, not delegating, not trusting your team. By refusing to acknowledge this reality, you’re continuing to reinforce your identity on being the doer. But now, the role needs you to be the leader. Your team needs you to create strategic pathways for their growth. Your stakeholders need clear communication. No amount of time management tips, delegation frameworks, or leadership books will fix this for you because the issue isn’t behavioral. It’s identity.

The question underneath the surface symptoms is this: Who am I if I’m not the one doing the work?

How does that question land for you? Does it ring truer than you’d like? Does it hurt? It’s not a question you can answer with a strategy. It’s a question that requires you to sit with the uncomfortable, hard facts about what is. It invites you to examine what’s been driving you. Not just what you’ve been doing, but why you can’t stop doing it. It challenges you to look at the hidden driver underneath your hustle and ask whether it’s serving you or consuming you.

The expertise that got you here is real. Your years of effort, mastery, and reputation are yours to celebrate. You earned them. But now, your identity needs to expand beyond your expertise.

Let me say it again: the thing that got you here becomes the thing that keeps you stuck. What got you here is external. What gets you there is internal. The next chapter of your leadership requires a different version of you, one who can lead without producing. One who can trust without controlling. One who measures their value not by what they deliver, but by what they develop in others.

This transition feels disorienting. It means you’re growing past the identity that’s been running your life and leadership.

The leaders I work with often arrive at the same realization: the stuckness they felt wasn’t a sign that they were failing. It was a sign that they’d outgrown their previous strategy. Once a leader really sees it, things begin to shift — not because they worked harder, but because they stopped arguing with reality about who they needed to become.

If you have always been the expert and you’re starting to wonder if there’s a ceiling above you that no amount of effort can break through, the hard truth is: yes, there is a ceiling and performance alone won’t break it.

It’s an identity issue that can only be solved through identity expansion.

This is exactly the transition I coach leaders through. You don’t have to figure it out alone.

Let’s talk →

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re not stuck and you’re not a fraud — you’re in the most important career transition nobody prepared you for. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. All emdashes are chosen to serve a purpose.

Congratulations! You earned it. The sun streams in the window and illuminates the engraved nameplate on the edge of your walnut desk, the backlight exposing a few plastic shavings still clinging to the edge of the nameplate. You’ll tidy that later. Your years of hard work and dedication have finally paid off; you outlearned the role before anyone expected it and delivered more than you’d promised. People trusted you with bigger problems because you never dropped the ball.

Now, as you unpack your office accoutrements and style your artwork, you can’t help wondering why you still feel like a fraud.

It was only earlier this morning that you were in an executive meeting, and instead of contributing, you were calculating how long until someone realizes you don’t belong there, never mind your professional track record has clearly earned you a seat at that table. You’re still re-hashing a decision you made six hours ago for the fourteenth time. Your to-do list tells on you: you’re still doing work you should have handed off, because at least then you know it’s done right.

People around you see a capable, accomplished leader. You see someone who’s about to be found out. And thus, the story you’re telling yourself colors how you see yourself, and by extension, how you lead.

Here’s what I want you to consider: that feeling isn’t evidence that you’re a fraud. It’s evidence that you’re growing past the identity that got you here.

You’re not an imposter. You’re in transition.

Throughout my career, I have navigated this exact moment many times and from every possible angle. Most commonly, I’ve been the youngest person around; like when I was so young that people couldn’t see me over the grand piano lid as I played public performances, or from being the youngest in a boardroom of wealth management officers, suppressing the intimidation of being surrounded by collective decades of expertise. I’ve been praised in public for high-impact, community-facing projects while my thoughts spiraled internally about all the other things still in progress. I’ve received public recognition and accolades from one group, only to receive feedback I didn’t know how to hear the next day from another group. I’ve sat in roles that demanded things that weren’t clearly articulated to me in the first place.

The thing that finally cracked it open for me wasn’t a promotion, a new job, or a better strategy. It was actually more pain. As my external accomplishments grew, my internal pain intensified.

I knew logically I wasn’t crazy, but I had to figure out why I felt crazy.

I started exploring the questions that came from the mindsets of people who appeared to have it together. Looking intently beyond behavioral assessments, personality profiles, and performance reviews, I discovered there are even deeper questions I’d never thought to ask, like: What’s actually driving me underneath all this performing? What’s my biggest fear? What is my strongest emotional need that I don’t know how to voice?

Those questions changed everything by leading to even deeper identity work, and I believe it can change things for you, too.

Here’s what most people get wrong about imposter syndrome: they treat it like a flaw in their identity. Something to fix or something to overcome. After all, leaders grit their teeth, fake it till they make it, and eventually the feeling goes away, right?

No. It won’t. At least not that way.

In fact, imposter syndrome isn’t a malfunction. It’s a signal. I love the way Adam Grant frames imposter syndrome in his book Hidden Potential. He says that the paradox of imposter syndrome should give you reason for pause. If others believe in you, but you don’t believe in yourself, why do you believe in your faulty self-assessment instead of them?1

Reframing imposter syndrome as a signal lets you turn that feeling into an opportunity. It’s a sign of hidden potential. It’s your psyche’s way of telling you that the expert version of yourself that succeeded in the past needs to expand to support your leadership future. The playbook that made you the expert you are today doesn’t work in a role that requires leadership presence, delegation, and strategic complexity.

You became a leader because you were great at A Thing. You could see how systems should work. You could solve problems others couldn’t name. You built a reputation on delivery and mastery. Then someone handed you a title and said, “Now, lead people.” Or “Now, make strategic business decisions.” Nobody told you that leading people or business is a fundamentally different skill than being great at The Thing. It requires a fundamentally different identity and approach to those skills. The fact that you feel imposter syndrome should be an exciting indicator that your identity is already bending in a new direction.

Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill also spent fifteen years studying this exact transition and concluded that new leaders consistently underestimate the degree to which the role demands a fundamental psychological shift, not just new competencies.2

This is where the tension lives. The habits that built your career — the relentless work ethic, the obsessive attention to detail, the inability to let subpar work go out the door — aren’t liabilities. They’re strengths, for sure. But they become liabilities when they’re the only tools you have. If they’re the only tools you are comfortable wielding, then attention to detail becomes micromanagement; work ethic becomes over-functioning; “I’ll just do it myself“ becomes an over-working identity. Ultimately, your value as a leader collapses into your output as a producer.

Marshall Goldsmith calls this the success trap3, and it’s exactly where most leaders get stuck. If you’ve started believing what imposter syndrome is screaming at you, that’s why you feel like a fraud. Part of you already knows that producing more isn’t the answer. But the other part of you that built a career on production doesn’t know what else to do.

And so, you’re caught between two versions of yourself: the expert you’ve been, and the leader you’re becoming. That space in between is disorienting and exhausting. It’s a space where leaders are no longer who they were but not yet who they will become.

And yes, it feels exactly like being an imposter. But it’s not.

Leaving this liminal space requires something from you, and it’s not what you’d expect.

It requires you to do something most high performers have never been taught: stop and look inward, probably for the first time, with real honesty. This isn’t something you can power through. You can’t read just one more book, attend another conference, or grind one more quarter’s worth of tactical execution and resolve the gap. The shift that needs to happen isn’t behavioral. It’s not about doing more, doing less, or even doing better.

It’s about seeing more. Specifically, developing the ability to see what’s been running your show for years, without your knowledge or consent, and being honest about how it’s shaping the leader you’re presenting to the world. It’s about changing your lenses so you can see yourself in a new light. It’s about developing what I call Radical Awareness: the ability to finally see what’s been running you.

Harvard researchers call these unconscious patterns that keep even the most motivated leaders stuck ‘hidden competing commitments.4’ Some coaches map these patterns through emotional needs. Others through personality architecture. The language varies, but what’s true is that every leader I work with has an invisible operating system, typically built through childhood and reinforced in early professional days, that still dictates how they lead, react, and protect themselves as adults. It shows up on the high side as high-performing expertise, skill, and reputation, while presenting on the shadow side as over-functioning, defensiveness, stress, and frustration. It creates the tension between being an expert and being a leader.

The good news? Once you learn to see it in yourself, you cannot unsee it. You’ll never lead the same way again. This is the type of discovery I coach clients through.

I’ve learned that the feeling of being an imposter isn’t something to crush. It’s something to listen to. It’s gently telling you that you’re outgrowing an old identity. It’s whispering that the version of you that earned this seat has done real, meaningful work, but now it’s time for a new version: a version that doesn’t need to prove anything. A version that leads from who you are, not just what you know.

You’re not an imposter. You’re in transition.

You’re not broken. You’re becoming.

You’re not stuck. You’re in between.

If this landed somewhere true for you, I write about the expert-to-leader transition every week on Substack — the identity shifts, the hidden patterns, and the moments leaders rarely talk about out loud. You can subscribe below.

If you’re ready for more than a newsletter, I’d love to talk. It will be a conversation between someone who’s been where you are and someone who’s ready to stop performing and to start leading.

Your invitation into the future is now.

Book a Leadership Clarity Call →

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition across consulting, performing arts, and construction technology. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re not a fraud — you’re in the most important career transition nobody prepared you for. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit leader, author, and writing coach.

Further Reading

The ideas in this article aren’t just experiential. They’re supported by a body of research on leadership transitions and identity psychology.

On why smart, successful people resist change: Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential (2023) reframes imposter syndrome as evidence of growth rather than inadequacy, and Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change (2009) provides the psychological framework for why these patterns persist even when leaders desperately want to shift.

On the surprising upside of imposter syndrome: Basima Tewfik’s award-nominated research at MIT Sloan (”The Impostor Phenomenon Revisited,” Academy of Management Journal, 2022) found that employees with more frequent impostor thoughts were rated by supervisors as more interpersonally effective, not less.

On what leaders get wrong about their first transition: Linda Hill’s landmark study of new managers, published in Harvard Business Review as “Becoming the Boss” (2007), remains one of the most comprehensive examinations of why technical experts struggle to lead and what the transition actually demands.

On the identity gap between expert and leader: Herminia Ibarra’s work on “provisional selves” (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999) explores how professionals navigate the disorienting space between identities during career transitions.

Yesterday, Jack Dorsey posted on X that Block is cutting over 4,000 people. Nearly half the company, gone. (It’s ok if you had to search to see what apps were in Block’s portfolio to realize the scope of the announcement. I did too: they’re the company behind Square, Cash App, Afterpay, Tidal, and more.)

In Dorsey’s own words, the business isn’t failing: the business is strong. Gross profit is growing. Profitability is improving. The reason? AI has changed what it means to build and run a company. A smaller team, paired with intelligence tools, can do more and do it better.

Dorsey then said something that should stop every leader in their tracks: he believes most companies will reach the same conclusion within the next year. He’s not predicting it as a possibility. He’s treating it as an inevitability.

This isn’t a tech story. It’s a human story. The question nobody’s asking in the headlines — the one that will matter most to the 4,000 people clearing out their desks this week and the millions who will follow them — isn’t “how do I stay relevant?”

It’s “Who am I when the thing I’ve always been valued for no longer belongs to me?”

I spent 19 years building a career on expertise, being the person who could see how something should work, reverse-engineer the path, and execute at a level that earned trust and titles. My ability to do and know and deliver was the foundation of my professional identity.

I can tell you with certainty: if I were starting my career today, AI would be able to do most of what made me valuable in year one by the end of the first week.

That’s not a complaint. It’s a fact, and every leader who built their career on technical mastery, domain expertise, or operational execution needs to sit with it, not argue with it.

The world is shifting underneath us whether we acknowledge it or not.

Here’s the shift that I believe is actually happening, and it’s bigger than AI capability and layoffs.

For decades, the professional world has valued humans for three things: what we know, what we produce, and how fast we can do it. Expertise, output, and execution are the currencies that bought careers, promotions, and identities.

AI is systematically devaluing all three.

Now, the tasks that used to require a team of ten can increasingly be handled by two people and a well-orchestrated AI stack. That’s Dorsey’s exact framing, and he’s not wrong. The tools are compounding and it’s shifting the value landscape.

If your value as a leader has been built on being the person who knows the most, produces the best work, or executes the fastest, what happens when a tool can do all of that, cheaper, at scale, and without the additional cost of a human employee?

This is the question that’s keeping leaders awake at 2am, even if they haven’t named it yet. And the real answer isn’t “learn to use AI better than the next person.” That’s a temporary advantage at best. AI literacy is table stakes. It’s the new baseline in the workplace, not the differentiator.

The real differentiator, the thing AI cannot replicate, automate, or replace, is who you are.

The leaders who will thrive in the emerging landscape aren’t the ones who race to learn the newest AI tools. They’re the ones who know who they are without the tools, titles, and output that has always defined them.

Your ability to synthesize lived experience into judgment is something that no model can approximate. Your capacity for relationship, trust, and human presence is what moves people in ways no interface ever will. Your willingness to sit with ambiguity, hold tension, and make meaning out of chaos is uniquely human. Your identity, the grounded, self-aware, fully human version of you that exists apart from any deliverable or job title is at risk of being lost in the AI hustle.

It’s not what you know. It’s not what you produce. It’s who you are. This is where I believe that human value is migrating, and most leaders are completely unprepared for the migration.

This new value landscape will be disorienting for many people. It might even be disorienting for you.

When you’ve spent your entire career being valued for what you produce, and the market suddenly stops rewarding production the same way, you don’t just lose a job function. You lose an identity. And identity loss is not something you can solve with a LinkedIn Learning course or an upskilling bootcamp. You can’t out-learn or out-perform an identity deficiency.

Think about the 4,000 people leaving Block this week. They are talented, accomplished professionals who earned their seats through years of expertise. And the message, even when delivered with severance and grace, is clear: the thing you were hired to do can now be done with fewer people and smarter tools.

That message doesn’t just affect the people who get the email. It radiates. It hits the director who’s been quietly wondering whether her technical depth still matters. The VP who’s been hearing “be more strategic” for two years and is suddenly terrified that strategic might mean “useful for six more months.” The manager who’s been the team’s best individual contributor and just realized that contribution is becoming commodity.

Each of those people is about to face the same reckoning: If I’m not the expert, who am I? If I’m not the one doing the work, what’s my value? If AI can produce what I produce, but faster, better, at scale, then why am I here?

Those aren’t career questions. They’re identity questions that are coming for everyone, whether the layoff hits your company this quarter or next year.

You have two options, and the window between them is closing faster than most people want to admit.

Option one: wait. You can keep doing what you’ve been doing. Keep building your value on output and expertise. Hope that the AI wave takes longer than predicted, or that your specific skill set is harder to automate than you think, or that you can catch the AI wave yourself. And when the shift does arrive, when the restructuring hits your team, or when the role you’ve held for years gets folded into a smaller, flatter org, you can scramble to reinvent yourself in crisis mode.

Option two: start the deep work now.

Ask the questions that matter before they;re forced on you:

• Who am I apart from what I produce?

• What is my actual value as a human leader; not my technical value, not my output value, but my human value?

• What hidden drivers have been running my identity, and what happens when the external rewards they’ve been chasing start to disappear?

This isn’t soft work. This is the most strategic thing you can do right now.

The leaders who will retain their agency through this wave of change aren’t the ones who learn to prompt better than their peers. They’re the ones who’ve done the internal work to know who they are without the title, output, and the approval of an organization that might restructure them out of existence next quarter.

They’re the leaders who have separated their identity from their expertise. Who have learned to lead from who they are, not what they know, and who have built a foundation of self-awareness deep enough that when the ground shifts, they don’t collapse. They iterate and adapt.

Dorsey may be right that change is coming for most companies, and it’s coming faster than most of us have been telling ourselves.

But here’s what Dorsey didn’t say:

The human crisis underneath the economic one is going to be enormous. Millions of accomplished, capable professionals are about to face an identity reckoning they never anticipated. Not because they failed, but because the game changed. Nobody prepared them for a world where their deepest professional skill is no longer their most valuable asset.

If you’re a leader reading this and feel a knot in your stomach, good. That knot is a glimmer of hope that your identity is waiting for you to recognize it. It’s the signal that you’re awake to something most people are still ignoring.

Don’t ignore it.

The AI shift is not primarily a technology problem. It’s an identity problem. The leaders who do the deep, uncomfortable work of understanding who they are beyond their output will be the ones who navigate it with clarity, agency, and something that no algorithm can generate: a grounded sense of self.

You’re in the biggest transition of your career, whether you acknowledge it or not. The best time to start the deep work was last year. The second-best time is right now.

Let’s talk about what’s next for you →

Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise navigate the identity shift that comes when expertise alone is no longer enough. After 19 years as an IT leader, he knows what it feels like when the ground moves underneath you, and he helps other leaders find their footing before the next wave hits.