Before a single point had landed, the room had already received a message. Not about the forecast, the strategy, or whatever was coming next – a message about how seriously to take what followed.

This is hedging, and most of us do it, far more than we realise. It comes from good instincts: a desire to leave space for other views, to be the kind of leader who doesn’t bulldoze people into agreement.

Those aren’t bad instincts, but the effect is often the opposite of the intention. Let’s explore.

The usual suspects

How many of these do you recognise? Better still: how many do you actually use?

I might be wrong but…
Just wondering…
This is probably a stupid question…
Sort of / kind of / maybe / possibly
I think / I feel like / it seems like
You might disagree, but…

They’re small and habitual, which is precisely why they’re so hard to spot. But what the room hears isn’t always what you mean. The translation can go something like this:

“I might be wrong but…” → I’m not confident in what I’m about to say.
“Just wondering…” → This probably isn’t worth your time.
“This is probably stupid, but…” → Please dismiss this.

Here’s the irony worth naming: nine times out of ten, when someone says “I might be wrong but…”, they are not wrong. They know exactly what they think; they’re almost daring you to disagree. The hedge has nothing to do with genuine uncertainty, it’s just the packaging. Yet the gap between what the speaker means and what the room actually hears and understands can be enormous.

Good intentions, bad outcomes

So why do we do it? The reasons run deeper than politeness.

For many of us, the fear underneath the hedge is about what happens if we get it wrong. Making a clear, declarative statement feels exposing – it makes you accountable in a way that a softer version doesn’t. The hedge offers an escape route: “Well, I did say I might be wrong”, so the softening feels like risk management.

There’s a related fear alongside it: the fear of coming across as arrogant or overconfident. Most leadership cultures pay at least lip service to being collaborative and inviting contribution; being seen as someone who always has the answers, who states rather than explores, who never asks for input, can carry real social cost. Hedging sends a signal that you’re not that person. It’s a way of taking up a little less space, of staying on the right side of likeable.

Much of this is learned long before anyone reaches positions of leadership. Many of us were taught – in school, at home, through early professional experiences – that being wrong was bad, or that sticking your neck out invited ridicule. When a declarative statement got shut down, when confidence was read as arrogance, we learned what to avoid.

But what has become a habit then outlasts its usefulness. We find ourselves in a leadership team meeting, in a conversation where clarity is exactly what’s needed; and we hedge anyway, because the pattern is so well worn we no longer notice we’re doing it.

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The cost of hedging

The habit isn’t neutral. It can have real and tangible costs:

• It signals uncertainty to the listener, even when you’re certain, because the room can’t distinguish genuine doubt from reflexive softening

• It trains others to treat your recommendations as provisional – a starting point for negotiation rather than a considered view (not always a bad thing, but not helpful if it happens all the time)

• It contributes over time to how people perceive you: “She never quite commits.” “He always hedges.” That kind of reputation, once formed, is hard to shift

• It can mean your perspective gets lost in decision-making: when a room needs to act, the person who sounds clear tends to get heard

For senior leaders, the stakes are higher still. What you model, others learn to mirror; if hedging is the norm in how you communicate, it will spread through your team. It also undermines your authority in a more immediate way. If people around you regularly hear you sound uncertain about things you’re not uncertain about, they begin to second-guess even the decisions you’re confident in.

The cost isn’t equal

Here’s where it gets more complicated, because the cost of hedging isn’t the same for everyone.

Women are socialised more heavily to soften, to not take up too much space, to be seen as collaborative rather than directive. The result is a catch 22 that is well documented and deeply frustrating: women who hedge are read as lacking confidence or authority; women who don’t hedge are often read as aggressive or abrasive. Men who hedge are typically read as thoughtful; men who don’t are read as confident. Same behaviour, different reception.

This asymmetry isn’t unique to gender – it applies across groups whose identity sits outside the dominant norm in a given environment, where directness gets read through a particular lens and where the social cost of being too certain is higher.

As Mary Ann Sieghart, author of The Authority Gap, said:

“Women are in this real double bind. If they’re not confident enough, they’re not going to be respected. They’re not going to be taken seriously, but if they are confident enough, they’re often going to be disliked and it’s terribly hard for women to navigate this very narrow path between the two.”

Leaders who understand this asymmetry can help to level it – by modelling clear language themselves, by listening to the substance of what people say rather than letting the packaging do the work of assessment, and by noticing whose clarity tends to get rewarded in the room.

The legitimate hedge

Let’s be clear, not all hedging is a problem. The goal isn’t to strip nuance from your communication, it’s to make sure your language is doing what you intend.

There are times when naming uncertainty is exactly right: when you genuinely don’t have all the information; when a decision is complex and you’re inviting collective input; when you’re testing an early-stage idea rather than presenting a conclusion. In those moments, language like “I’m not certain about this yet – here’s what I know and here’s what I’m less sure of” or “I want to test this thinking before we act on it” is precise and honest.

The distinction that matters is between intentional hedging – which accurately reflects your thinking and signals a genuine invitation to contribute – and habitual hedging, which is applied regardless of whether you’re actually uncertain. The two can look identical from the outside, which is part of what makes the habit so costly: if you hedge everything, the room has no reliable signal for when you’re genuinely inviting input and when you’re simply reporting a conclusion.

You need the contrast for either to work. If everything you say is declarative and directive, you close down thinking; if everything is softened and tentative, nothing lands as clear or actionable. The skill is developing enough awareness of your own patterns that you can choose deliberately.

Confident, not arrogant

I’ve worked with leaders who know this pattern well. A senior leader I coached was preparing to raise a concern with her leadership team; she had done the analysis, she knew the numbers, and she was certain of her recommendation. In the room, she opened with: “I might be wrong, but I think we should possibly consider whether the Q3 forecast needs a second look.”

Everyone nodded along, but nobody acted.

At the next meeting, he stripped out the hedges: “The Q3 forecast needs revising. Based on three data points, we’re on track to miss by 15%. My recommendation is that we adjust now rather than wait.” The room acted immediately.

Same person, same data, same room. Completely different reception. When we debriefed, her observation was simple: “I knew the answer both times. I just didn’t say it clearly the first time.”

If you have a tendency to hedge, here are three things that can help:

Notice first. Record yourself in one meeting – not to edit in real time, just to listen back. Count the hedges. Most people are genuinely surprised by the frequency.

State your thinking, then open the door. “Here’s what I think: [clear statement]. What am I missing?” That’s not arrogance; it’s clarity with a genuine invitation attached, and the two together are more powerful than either alone.

Replace the pre-emptive apology with a real question. Instead of “I might be wrong but…” before a statement you’re confident in, say the statement. Then, if you want input: “I’d welcome a challenge on that.” The difference is that the invitation comes after the thinking, not before.

Clarity rather than certainty

The deeper irony of hedging is that it usually comes from wanting to get it right – not wanting to seem arrogant, not wanting to close down the conversation, not wanting to expose yourself unnecessarily. Those are understandable instincts, and in the right context they serve you well. But when the habit runs on autopilot, the room doesn’t get the benefit of the valuable thinking you’ve done.

Your job as a leader isn’t to project certainty. It’s to be clear. Those are different things, and understanding and getting comfortable with that distinction is the basis of making intentional choices about how you speak.

Record yourself this week. Count the hedges. Notice the pattern.

Hit reply or leave a comment: what’s your most common hedge – and what do you think you’re telling the room when you use it?

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Restack

This week, some practical tips about how to speak more clearly. It’s short but worth a read.

Life & Brain OS

How to be well-spoken and articulate when you speak

Most people think being well-spoken is something you either have or you don’t…

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a month ago · 3459 likes · 44 comments · Sabrina | Life&Brain OS

Meme of the week

This week, some lovely (hedging) phrases from @‌Wankernomics to use when you have no idea what you’re doing…

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This was the phrase one of my clients used to describe someone considered and passed over – again – for promotion. My client was frustrated. “Why won’t she step up? She is so great at the technical stuff but doesn’t have the strategic view.”

My challenge back: “When did you last give her a real stretch assignment? And the support she needed to succeed at it?”

He fell silent.

And that’s how labels can stick. An assessment made once, which becomes a fact, reinforced over time because no one ever challenges it; whether through what they say, or the assignments they allocate, or the questions they ask. (We’ll leave aside any question of internalised misogyny – that’s a topic that would need a whole post of its own.)

A few weeks later, he asked her to lead a strategic client review, something he had previously considered her not ready for. She delivered – a sharp, well-structured piece of work that showed her ability was there, it had just never been tested.

Yet she left just a few months later. By then the damage was done: she’d been overlooked for too long and had lost confidence that anyone there would ever see her differently. The firm had spent years developing her, then lost her to a competitor who looked at her actual skills, not their perception of them.

Three words that cap a career: “That’s just how…” Once the label is there, you stop seeing the person. You see the label. Let’s explore.

From observation to obituary

Over time, labels become facts.

“She isn’t detail-oriented.”
“He’s not strategic.”
“She’s too junior.”

There’s a finality to these phrases, a permanence, that closes down any possibility of change. They don’t describe a moment, or even a pattern of behaviour. They describe a person, and once you’ve labelled the person, you stop looking at the behaviour.

Compare these two: “She’s not strategic” vs “In that presentation, she didn’t connect the proposal to the client’s longer-term objectives.” The first is a verdict, while the second is a specific observation, about a specific moment. One can be worked on, the other just is.

As leaders, the labels we apply don’t stay in our heads. They become visible and concrete in how we introduce people, what work we assign them, and how we talk about them in performance reviews. Power dynamics amplify them: once you’ve said it, the people around you are unlikely to push back. The label circulates, gets adopted, and slowly becomes fact.

Even positive labels carry a trap. The “spreadsheet guru” who’d love to develop a wider skill set but keeps getting landed with the same work, because that’s what the label says they’re good at, and therefore what they should be doing.

Congratulations. You were right. (You made sure of it.)

Once a label exists, our brains do something unhelpful: they stop looking for new information and start looking for confirmation of what they already believe. This is System 1 thinking at work – the fast, instinctive, pattern-matching mode our brains default to, as opposed to the slower, more deliberate thinking that genuinely weighs what’s in front of us.

In practice: anything that contradicts the label gets subconsciously dismissed, and anything that confirms it gets given unearned prominence.

There’s something else at play too. The better we know someone, the less carefully we actually listen to them. We anticipate their responses and we stop noticing what doesn’t fit. Behavioural psychologists call this the closeness communication bias – and it’s particularly corrosive when you’re also carrying a label about that person.

The labelled person feels all of this: in the assignments they get; in how they’re described; and in the feedback that always circles back to the same story. So they stop pushing for visibility and begin to perform to the mould you have created for them.

You observe this and think: I was right all along.

But you weren’t observing reality, you were creating it.

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The benefit of the doubt is not equally distributed

Another big problem is that labels usually aren’t applied consistently. Who gets labelled “difficult” after one challenging meeting and who gets called “direct”? Who is “not strategic” and who is “a big-picture thinker”? Familiarity, affinity, and who reminds you of yourself all quietly shape which story sticks and whose gets revised.

Psychologist Toni Schmader’s research on stereotype threat offers a useful perspective here. When people sense they might be viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype about their group, it creates a genuine cognitive load – a mental overhead that actively disrupts performance. The effort of managing that anxiety uses up working memory that would otherwise go into the work itself. Which means the label doesn’t just predict underperformance, it can produce it.

This isn’t about blaming anyone, or saying people are doing this deliberately. Most labels are applied in good faith by busy people making quick judgements, but sitting underneath them are biases that more often than not, disadvantage already disadvantaged groups. So the question is worth sitting with: whose labels do I apply most readily, and to whom? And who in my organisation might be carrying a cognitive overhead I’ve never had to carry myself? As leaders, we have to be responsible for our impact, not only our intent, which means understanding and actively working on our biases.

The drain on talent and potential

The most visible cost of labels is capped potential. People get managed for what the label says they are, not encouraged beyond and developed for what they could become. No stretch assignments, no stretch conversations, and no visible path forward.

Then your talented people leave. Because people feeling trapped in a box that doesn’t fit and yet won’t shift – no matter what they do – eventually find an organisation that sees them differently. The competitor who recognises her walks away with everything you invested. Your exit interview might tell you why, if you’re lucky, but by then, there’s little useful action you can take with that information.

There’s a more subtle cost too. When labels stick in a culture, people learn the environment isn’t safe for reinvention. They manage perception instead of building capability. The organisation loses something it can’t easily measure: the potential it never knew it had.

How to start peeling off the labels

The first step is noticing that you are using them. Try this: list your team members and next to each name write the first word or phrase that comes to mind. Then cross every one of them out. That’s a good place to start.

From there, there are three things you might practice:

Look for disconfirming evidence.
Actively seek moments that don’t fit the label. When you find them, take them seriously rather than writing them off as exceptions.

Ask “what am I expecting here?”
Before a conversation or a piece of work lands on someone’s desk, notice whether you’ve already decided how it will go. That awareness alone is useful.

Update out loud.
When your view of someone shifts, say so – to them and to others. Labels usually need dismantling visibly, not just privately. The people around you are carrying them too.

Notice who you default to.
Finally: when allocating stretch opportunities, notice who you’re defaulting to – and who you’re not even considering. Try replacing “she’s not ready” with “she hasn’t had the chance to show that yet.” One closes a door, the other opens it and invites someone to walk through.

My client didn’t set out to cap her career. But intention and impact are rarely the same thing.

The accumulation of micro-interactions that carried the label – the work she wasn’t given, the rooms she wasn’t invited into, the feedback that always circled back to the same story – built a ceiling she couldn’t see past and couldn’t get out from under.

Your job isn’t to be without bias. That’s not really possible, as it is so deeply ingrained in how we function as humans. Your job is to stay curious about yours, and to keep challenging, and keep updating.

What label are you carrying for someone right now? What evidence are you quietly filtering out? And if you stripped it away entirely – what might you be seeing for the first time?

Hit reply or leave a comment: tell me about a label you’ve had to shake off – about yourself or someone else. What finally shifted it?

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Restack

A fantastic article from Steve Magness on the role and power of belief, and what else you might need to reach your stretch goals. All told around the story of Sabastian Sawe’s incredible performance at the London Marathon last weekend.

Meme of the week

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

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Yet four one-to-ones are cancelled in the months that follow. You don’t mean to, but something more urgent keeps coming up. In a team meeting last month, a team member floated a new approach to a recurring problem. Your response: “Good point – we’ll think about that.” But you still haven’t followed up…

The result? Your team stopped listening to the words some time ago. They’re watching the patterns of your behaviour, and those patterns are telling a different story.

This isn’t about dishonesty: most leaders genuinely mean what they say. But your team is not reading your intentions, they are watching what you do. And if there’s a gap between the two, they will believe the behaviour pattern every single time. Let’s explore.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

The gap isn’t usually deliberate. A huge proportion of our behaviour is governed by what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking – automatic, habitual, instinctive. You’re not consciously deciding to cancel one-to-ones or let “we’ll think about that” disappear without follow-up. Instead, your subconscious is running the show, optimising for whatever feels most urgent in the moment.

However your team has no idea what’s going on in your subconscious. All they can see is the outcome of it.

You say “my door is always open” – but your calendar is back-to-back with no buffer. You say “work-life balance matters” – but you celebrated the person who worked through the weekend.

You say “speak up with concerns” – but the first person who did got shut down. You say “development is a priority” – but your conversations circle endlessly around this quarter’s numbers.

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how many times you say something if your attitudes and behaviours don’t back it up. Maya Angelou put it simply:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Your team has applied that logic to you.

When trust goes, so does the truth

When there’s a persistent gap between your words and your micro-behaviours, trust erodes. Not overnight, but steadily, almost invisibly, until one day you notice the cynic at the back of the room during the next values initiative. “Here we go again.”

The research is unambiguous. Paul Zak’s work on organisational trust, published in Harvard Business Review, found that people in high-trust organisations report 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, and 76% more engagement than those in low-trust ones. Trust is not a culture metric, it is a performance metric.

And when trust breaks down, people don’t disappear – they adapt. They stop bringing you the full picture. They optimise for what you actually reward rather than what you say you value. They tell you what you want to hear. You become progressively more isolated from the reality of what is happening in your own organisation.

That is a real problem with a real cost.

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Your team has learned to translate

Here’s the translation your team is making, whether you’re aware of it or not.

You say: “Speak up with ideas.” Yet your response to the last three ideas was “Have you thought about [the obvious thing]?”
They learn: Don’t bring half-formed thinking.

You say: “I value your time.” However you arrive five minutes late to every meeting and take calls during their presentations.
They learn: Your time matters. Theirs doesn’t.

You say: “People are our priority.” Your calendar shows twenty-seven client meetings and zero development conversations.
They learn: Clients matter. People are a stated value.

You say: “Mistakes are learning opportunities.” But the first time someone admitted a mistake, your tone went sharp and you asked “How did this happen?”.
They learn: Hide mistakes until they’re unfixable.

You say: “I want honest feedback.” Yet the last person who gave it got a defensive reaction. They learn: Tell you what you want to hear.

I would guess that every leader reading this will recognise themselves in at least one of these. That recognition – however uncomfortable – is the beginning of something useful.

Closing the gap

You cannot talk your way out of this. You cannot write a better speech or run a better away-day. The work isn’t in the communication strategy, it’s in your micro-interactions, repeated consistently over time.

In the book I write about this through the lens of congruence and your Leadership Shadow – the alignment between what you say, how you act, what you prioritise, and how you measure. Most leaders have inconsistencies across at least some of these – and it is worth noting some of these inconsistencies can be baked into the systems and processes of the organisation. Unpicking these takes time, but is equally important.

For you personally, your calendar is one of the most honest indicators of what you actually prioritise. Not what you say you prioritise – what you actually do with your time.

Your tone in the first five seconds after someone brings bad news tells your team more about psychological safety than any training programme.

Who you publicly acknowledge – and who slips by unrecognised – tells your team exactly what gets rewarded here.

This isn’t about perfection. Incongruence is part of the process; noticing it is what matters. The goal is to close the gap – repeatedly, consciously, over time.

Start your audit now

Pick one thing you say is a priority. Just one. Then take a really honest look at the evidence from the last two weeks:

• What did your calendar actually show?

• What did you celebrate, or let pass unacknowledged?

• Who got your time and attention – and who got squeezed out?

• What happened the last time someone brought you bad news or a half-formed idea?

If there’s a gap between what you say and what you actually did, your team has probably already noticed, and they’ve already drawn their conclusions.

The question is: What are you going to do to close that gap?

Hit reply or leave a comment to share one thing you’ve noticed in your own words-versus-actions gap – and what you’re committing to do about it.

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Restack

A brief but useful read on why the mismatch between intention and action isn’t so much a character flaw, as a bad habit.

The Behaviour Brief

What they say and what they do

A great way to break someone’s trust is to say one thing and do something else…

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18 days ago · Elin K.F

Meme of the week

Too good not to share… (not even slightly work related, but 🤷‍♀️)

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

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Why we can’t just say it

The “right answer” reflex doesn’t come from nowhere. For most of us it was built early, and built well.

Growing up in a high-achieving family, I absorbed the message fast: knowing things was how you earned your place. School confirmed it: the system rewards the right answer, so I learned to perform certainty, and to treat not knowing as something to hide.

Fast forward to early leadership, and the filter was still running. I perceived it as genuinely unsafe to admit I didn’t know something. Which meant I spent hours working things out alone when asking would have taken minutes. I contorted myself to avoid questions that might expose a gap.

It was exhausting, and completely counterproductive.

Most leaders carry a version of this. At senior level the stakes feel even higher; you’re supposed to know, and people are watching, so when you don’t know, you reach for something that sounds like you do.

What happens when you always have an answer

Here’s the thing. Even when it works – even when the room buys it – it costs you.

First, it signals to the people around you that not knowing is not acceptable here.
Leaders train their teams constantly, whether they mean to or not. If you always have an answer, your team will conclude that they should too. So they stop admitting uncertainty, and they stop asking questions. They perform confidence they don’t have, just as you do.

Second, it closes down thinking. When the most senior person in the room has already landed somewhere, why would anyone explore further? You’ve inadvertently shut down the conversation before it really got started.

Third – and this one stings – it erodes trust. People can usually sense when someone is reaching. When you offer a considered answer on something you’ve genuinely thought through, they trust it. When you offer a confident-sounding answer on everything, it actually sows a seed of doubt rather than building confidence.

And underneath all of it: it takes real effort. Performing certainty you don’t feel requires constant emotional energy – scanning for questions you might not be able to answer, managing how you come across, keeping the performance consistent. It’s a drain that’s entirely unnecessary.

Three words that change the room

“I don’t know.”

Said calmly. Without apology. Without the nervous laugh or the immediate pivot to something you do know.

It’s remarkable how much changes.

It signals that intellectual honesty is valued here over performance. It models that gaps in knowledge are normal – because they are. It invites contribution: suddenly the room isn’t waiting for your verdict, it’s part of the conversation.

And crucially, it makes your certainty mean something. When you do know, when you do have a clear view, people believe it – because they’ve seen you say the alternative.

This isn’t a call for false modesty or performative humility, it’s simpler than that. It’s simply an invitation to say the true thing, when the true thing is that you don’t know.

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How to actually do it

Here are three practical places to start.

Notice the impulse first. Before you can change the habit, you need to catch it in the act. That instinctive flinch – the moment the fear of being exposed kicks in and you’re about to reach for something plausible – is the signal. Just noticing it is useful, even if you don’t yet feel able to change what comes next.

Have a few phrases ready. “I don’t know – what do others think?” “I want to sit with that before I answer.” “Good question. I genuinely don’t know yet.” These aren’t scripts, they’re just options. Having them ready makes it easier to reach for them in the moment rather than reaching for the usual alternative.

Follow up when you do know. This matters. “I don’t know” followed by silence is avoidance, and in some circumstances risks sowing unnecessary doubt. “I don’t know – and I’ll come back to you by Thursday” is leadership. It closes the loop and shows that the admission was genuine, not a deflection.

The smartest thing in the room

There’s a certain irony here. The leaders most compelled to always have an answer are often the ones who care most – the conscientious ones, the high achievers, the people who set high standards for themselves and their teams.

And those are exactly the leaders whose teams most need to see them say: “I don’t know.”

Not because it makes them look humble. Because it makes it safe for everyone else to be honest, too. And teams that can be honest – about what they don’t know, what isn’t working, what they need – are the ones that actually perform.

Three words. Enormous impact.

This week, notice once when you don’t know the answer – and try saying so.
Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know: when did you last say “I don’t know” out loud at work – and what happened when you did?

Leave a comment

Restack

This beautifully captures the inner struggle of feeing like we need to know when we don’t

The Place of Peace

The Total Glory of Not Knowing.

A friend sent me a message yesterday with the word ‘phonological’ in it. I had to look it up. I knew it must have something to do with sound but I did not know what. I discovered - and how lovely it is to discover, and to have the means of discovery at my fingertips - that phonology is ‘the science of speech sounds including especially the history and t…

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a month ago · 27 likes · 19 comments · Tania Kindersley

Meme of the week

Unrelated to the topic this week, but still spot on.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

And yet, I am here.

For anyone who knows me, that is progress. For a long time after I started my own business, I wouldn’t have been. I’d have found a reason to delay, or I’d have gone but kept one foot – and both eyes – at work. This year, I made a commitment to myself to go anyway, things undone and all.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Portugal, almost certainly eating my bodyweight in Pastéis de Nata and drinking port. Sorry not sorry.

But I’m writing this one for you as much as for me. Because if you’re anything like me, you’ll recognise the pattern I’m about to describe.

The finish line that moves

At some point, most of us absorbed a belief about rest: that we have to earn it. That downtime and relaxation is a reward for completed work, and that we get to stop when the work is done.

There’s a pretty obvious problem with that logic: the work is never done.

There will always be a project in progress, a deliverable due, a conversation that needs following up, or a piece of thinking that isn’t quite there yet. That is the nature of working at this level. But the inbox doesn’t reach zero (or at least never stays there). And the diary, left to its own devices, will fill back up within forty-eight hours of being cleared.

And so we wait. We push the holiday back by two weeks, we take the laptop, just in case (yes, I know, I brought mine, that’s where I’m writing this…). We tell ourselves we’ll properly switch off once this project is over, once things calm down.

But as we know, they don’t quieten down. The finish line moves, and so we don’t stop.

What it costs you – and everyone around you

Here’s what I know from working with senior leaders: depletion isn’t invisible. You cannot run on empty and expect it not to show.

When you are exhausted, your thinking suffers, your patience shortens and your presence in every conversation – every micro-interaction with your team – diminishes. You’re there, but you’re not really there. And the people around you feel it, even if no one says a word.

What we often forget is that emotions and energy are contagious. Your team subconsciously picks up on what you bring into the room – from your face, your tone, your energy – and they respond accordingly. A frazzled leader creates a frazzled team. Not through any single dramatic moment, but through the slow accumulation of small signals sent in dozens of interactions every day.

Refusing to rest is, in other words, not just a problem for you; it becomes a problem for everyone around you.

You’re also modelling to your team what is OK, and what isn’t. If you don’t take breaks, your team won’t feel they can either. Not because you’ve told them they can’t, but because you’ve shown them that rest isn’t really how things are done around here. You are always being watched, whether you intend it or not.

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“But what if everything falls apart?”

There’s one more thing we need to address around this. The little belief that often underlies all of this: the fear that if you genuinely switch off, things will fall apart.

Maybe they will. It’s unlikely – but let’s say, for the sake of argument, they do.

If that’s true, it is not a reason to never take a holiday. It is quite frankly a serious and urgent problem with how your team or your organisation is set up. An operation that can only function if one person never takes a break is not a resilient operation; it is a single point of failure, dressed up as dedication.

The more honest version of this fear is that it is often less about the organisation and more about our own identity. We want to be needed, we want to matter. Taking a step back can feel uncomfortably like discovering we are more replaceable than we thought. And that isn’t something our ego likes to contemplate.

That discomfort is worth sitting with. Because a team that can hold things together while you’re away is not a threat to your leadership, it is evidence that your leadership is working.

“But I shouldn’t need time off”

Spending time on yourself can feel self-indulgent. I’d argue it is anything but, because the time you invest in yourself has a direct impact on everyone around you.

Rest is a requirement for sustained performance. Done right, it is an act of leadership in itself – a visible signal that recovery matters, that your team has permission to be human, that showing up well is more important than showing up constantly.

Here are a few things worth doing before you go:

• Stop waiting for the work to be done. It won’t be. Book it anyway.

• Brief your team properly. Clarity before you leave is the gift that means they don’t need to reach you.

• Name someone to hold the fort. Not as a last resort – as a deliberate act of delegation.

• Set the out-of-office and mean it (yes, yes, I’ll go and do this now…)

• Accept that some things will be outstanding when you go. They were always going to be. They will still be there when you get back – or perhaps they won’t, as someone else will have handled them. Both outcomes are instructive.

And on switching off: the decision to not check in is its own small act of intentionality. Choose it, and choose it deliberately.

Before I go through the gate

As I close my laptop and head to the gate, some things remain unfinished, yet I’m pretty sure the world will continue to turn.

Here’s what I want to leave you with: the break you keep not taking isn’t optional.

The version of you that arrives back from it – restored, clear-headed, present – will show up differently in every single interaction. That matters more than whatever is sitting in your inbox right now.

Go. You need it. Even if you wish you didn’t.

Hit reply or leave a comment – what’s the thing you’re waiting to finish before you let yourself stop?

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Restack

A lovely one this week from Adekunle Adekunbi with a reminder that some of us might need to (re) learn how to rest.

Reflections & Revelations

Rest Is a Skill

I used to think rest was something you fell into…

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2 months ago · 48 likes · 11 comments · Adekunle Adekunbi

Meme of the week

As always, Liz and Mollie have it spot on.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

She was a senior consultant. Good at her job, and known for staying calm under pressure.

And she spent the entire weekend catastrophising.

Her manager had handed her a complex client project on Friday afternoon with six words and not much else. I need you to take this one. No context, no framing, and no indication of what this one actually meant.

Was it a test? Was the manager too stretched to run it properly? Was the client difficult and nobody wanted to say so? Was she being set up to fail – or handed something she wasn’t ready for?

She walked into Monday’s kick-off meeting tight and defensive. Her manager was baffled. The energy was off from the start, and neither of them could quite articulate why.

Later, with a subsequent project, the manager decided to try something different.

“I’m giving you this client because I trust your judgement and I want you to have experience at this level. My intention is to be available to support you, not to micromanage. Sound good?”

Same information, but a completely different experience for the recipient. The consultant asked clarifying questions, got stuck in, and delivered well.

One sentence was all it took. Let’s explore why many leaders don’t say it.

The gap nobody talks about

Here’s the thing about intentions: they feel obvious to the person who has them.

When a leader asks a pointed question, they know they’re curious. When they delegate a stretch project, they know it’s a vote of confidence. When they go quiet in a meeting, they know they’re thinking.

But the person on the receiving end? They have none of that context. What they have is a gap – and when we don’t fill it clearly, people fill it themselves.

In Do Sweat the Small Stuff, I describe this as the transparency trap: the tendency to assume understanding in others, to not take time to explain because it feels unnecessary, or because it will waste time. It’s a habit born of efficiency, but that efficiency is an illusion. You save thirty seconds of explanation and create three days of misunderstanding.

The gap isn’t neutral, because by nature, most people won’t fill it with the most generous interpretation. They fill it with the most familiar one – which, for most of us, means the most anxious one.

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When silence does the talking

Think about how this plays out in practice:

• Questions sound like interrogations.

• Feedback sounds like criticism.

• Delegation sounds like dumping.

• Directiveness sounds like dismissal.

• Silence sounds like disapproval.

None of that is what you meant, but it is hard for intention to travel without words.

There’s a reason this matters beyond individual relationships. Ambiguity generates anxiety, and anxiety closes down exactly the behaviours leaders need from their teams: honest conversation, creative thinking, appropriate risk-taking. You cannot build a psychologically safe environment on a foundation of unexplained actions.

And the human brain doesn’t help. Author and entrepreneur Isaac Lidsky articulates it well in his TED talk:

“Your fears distort your reality… Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous.”

In other words, when we don’t know, we don’t stay neutral: we awfulise. We take the unknown and replace it with the awful. Your team is doing this in every interaction where your intention isn’t clear – not because they’re catastrophists, but because that’s what human brains are wired to do when they don’t have enough information.

The irony is that the time you save by not explaining is the time your team spends decoding, worrying, and second-guessing. That’s not efficiency, it’s a deferred cost, and not a small one.

The shift is smaller than you think

This isn’t about softening your leadership or over-explaining every decision. It’s about removing unnecessary noise from the signal.

One sentence up front can change the entire dynamic of what follows.

“I’m asking because I’m curious, not because I think you’re wrong.”

“I’m giving you this because I trust you, not because I’m overwhelmed.”

“I’m quiet because I’m thinking, not because I’m angry.”

That’s it. The listener is no longer trying to decode what you really mean – they’re just listening.

In the book, I describe clarity of intention as one of the four foundational pillars of effective leadership. It’s not enough simply to have good intentions; they need to be visible. When intention and impact are aligned, trust builds. When they’re not – even when the intention was fine – the gap does the damage.

Stating your intention out loud is how you close that gap before it opens.

When it matters most

This isn’t required in every conversation. But there are moments when the stakes of ambiguity are high enough to make it non-negotiable.

When you’re giving feedback. Name your intention before the difficult message. “I’m raising this because I want to support your development” changes how someone receives what comes next.

When you’re delegating stretch work. Say why you chose them and what your involvement will look like. Don’t make them guess whether this is a reward or a burden.

When you’re asking questions about someone’s work. The difference between “Tell me about your approach” as curiosity versus scrutiny is invisible – unless you say which one it is.

When you’re being directive. If a decision isn’t up for debate, say so, and say why. People expend significant energy trying to influence decisions that have already been made. That’s a waste for everyone.

When you go quiet. Silence is rarely interpreted as neutral. A simple “I’m thinking, give me a moment” stops the room filling in the blank.

The timing also matters: front-load the intention, don’t offer it as a retrospective explanation when the damage is already done. Say it before you say the thing – not after you’ve noticed the energy shift.

What they hear when you don’t say why

Most leadership misunderstandings don’t come from what leaders say, they come from what leaders assume they don’t need to say.

It’s not that your team doesn’t trust you, it’s that they’re filling a gap that you left open, with the only material available – their own fears and assumptions.

The fix is genuinely small. Before your next feedback conversation, delegation, or pointed question, complete this sentence out loud: “My intention here is…”

Notice what changes, in the room, and in you.

Hit reply or leave a comment to share: what’s one conversation coming up this week where stating your intention upfront might change the dynamic – and what would you say?

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Restack

An interesting read on the difference between focusing on process vs outcomes.

Admired Leadership Field Notes

Excellence Is Not a Performance Target

Leaders and performers have a critical choice to make…

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2 months ago · 153 likes · 9 comments · Admired Leadership

Meme of the week

Someone built a Google Translate tool for LinkedIn and it is 👌 The whole post is well worth a scroll through…

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

They’re not watching the mistake.

They’re watching you.

What happens in the next 60 seconds – your tone, your first question, your body language, where you direct the energy of the room – will teach everyone present more about psychological safety than any workshop you’ve ever run. More than your values poster. More than your town hall speech about creating a culture of openness.

This is culture being built. Right now, in real time.

Let’s explore.

The moment that sets the tone

Not every mistake gets this kind of attention: plenty are handled one-to-one, out of sight. Those matter too. But when a mistake surfaces in front of the group, when someone has the courage, or the bad luck, to bring a problem into the open, the dynamic shifts entirely.

This is especially true of first mistakes. When a team is new, when someone joins a new organisation, when a leader steps into a new role, everyone is watching with heightened attention. They’re asking a question they’d never say out loud: is it actually safe to be honest here?

But it’s not only firsts. Any mistake that surfaces visibly, in a meeting, in front of peers, in a room where people are paying attention, carries the same weight. These are the moments people talk about afterwards, that settle into the unwritten rules of how things work around here. One visible, public mistake handled well or badly will do more to set the tone than months of private, one-to-one conversations.

We’re always training people how to treat us

Here’s what’s really happening in that room. People aren’t only processing the mistake itself. They’re processing your response to it, and drawing conclusions about what to do the next time something goes wrong.

If your response has a sharp tone, an immediate “how did this happen?”, a visible flash of frustration, a pivot straight to blame before the problem’s even been understood? That sends a message.

And it doesn’t take many of those moments to teach people something very clearly: keep the next one to yourself until you’ve fixed it. Or until it’s too late to fix it.

We are always training people how to treat us. And in these moments, leaders are training their teams how to behave, usually without ever intending to.

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60 seconds is all it takes

Imagine this scenario: a new CFO, in their first leadership meeting. It becomes clear there’s a forecasting error that will affect quarterly reporting.

There’s a pause as everyone falls silent and looks at the CFO.

The default response in that moment often comes from a very human place – frustration. The realisation that there’s more work ahead. A flash of how did we let this happen? None of those feelings are wrong, in fact they’re entirely understandable. But acting on them in that room, in that moment, teaches the team something that will be very hard to undo.

Coming from a more intentional place looks different. It starts with a pause, and a deliberate shift from reacting to responding.

"Thank you for bringing this to us now rather than later. The question is, what do you need to fix it? Then later, we'll look at what we can learn."

Tone stays level. Body language stays open. The first question is forward-facing, not backward-pointing.

Two weeks later, a different team member flags a potential problem early, before it has the chance to become a crisis, because they’ve seen that it’s safe to do so. Months later, conversations about what’s not working are happening more openly, more honestly, with less of the usual hedging. The team is less likely to let things quietly fester.

One 60-second response, in one meeting, set all of that in motion.

Amy Edmondson, whose work on psychological safety underpins much of what we know about high-performing teams, identifies “responding productively” as one of the core leadership behaviours required to build it, which means expressing appreciation and not stigmatising failure. Not as a one-off gesture of magnanimity, but as a consistent pattern of micro-interactions that shows people it’s genuinely safe to be honest.

This is what that looks like in practice.

Micro-behaviours that move the needle

You don’t need to transform your personality, you simply need to pay attention to a handful of very specific moments within those 60 seconds:

Set the tone before you speak. Emotions are contagious, and they travel fast, particularly from people in positions of power. If you respond calmly, you give everyone else permission to be calm too. That starts with the pause. Take it: your nervous system needs it, and so does the room.

Choose your first words. Lead with acknowledgement before anything else. “Thank you for raising this” lands very differently to silence, or to an immediate interrogation.

Make your first question forward-facing. “What do you need to fix this?” is not the same question as “How did this happen?” One is problem-solving. The other is looking for someone to blame. Ask the second question later, when it’s genuinely useful. Not here, and not now.

Watch your body language. Stay open, and try to stay still. A sudden lean forward, crossed arms, or a visible change in expression will communicate far more than your words. That includes managing your facial expressions. If, like me, you find it hard to put a filter between your feelings and your face, take a deep breath. The long exhale allows your face to relax and helps you pause before speaking.

Separate the debrief. “What can we learn from this?” is a legitimate and important question, just not your first one in the room. Save it for later, or a separate conversation, once the immediate problem has been handled.

How you feel is not the point

You will feel something in those moments. Frustration, disappointment, the urge to understand exactly how this happened. That’s human and entirely normal.

The question isn’t whether you feel it. It’s what you do with it.

Your team doesn’t know what’s going on inside you. What they know, what they will remember, is what you said, and how you said it. That’s the micro-interaction that shapes their behaviour the next time something goes wrong. And there will be a next time.

Think back to the last mistake someone brought to you in front of others. What did your 60-second response teach everyone who was watching?

If you’re comfortable with the answer, well done. If you’re not – you know exactly where to start.

Hit reply or leave a comment: what’s the hardest part of holding your response in those first 60 seconds – and what’s one thing that helps you do it?

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Restack

A really interesting read this week on misconceptions between what is a team vs simply a working group, and how no amount of psychological safety will fix a poorly designed team. Don’t skip this one!

Super Cool & Hyper Critical

Psychological Safety Won’t Fix a Badly Designed Team

Every so often I read another leadership article explaining that teams fail to speak up, challenge assumptions, or innovate because they lack psychological safety. The argument usually follows a familiar path. If people simply felt safe enough to express their ideas or concerns, the team would become more creative, more collaborative, and ultimately m…

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2 months ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Super Cool & Hyper Critical

Meme of the week

A new solution to a long term problem…😂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Yet the person called out by their boss for “going above and beyond” hadn’t taken a full week’s holiday in about three years, and regularly replied to emails at midnight. They were visibly running on fumes – and visibly celebrated for it.

Nobody said anything, but nobody needed to. The team had already received the message loud and clear.

This is not a story about a poor wellbeing programme. It’s a story about the gap between what you say and what you do – and the message that gap sends louder than anything in your communications plan, your values statement, or your very well-intentioned intranet page.

Let’s look at what your recognition patterns are actually teaching your team.

Louder than anything you say

As a leader, you are always being watched. Not in a sinister way – in a very human way. Your team is constantly taking cues from your actions, particularly in moments that matter: who gets praised, who gets promoted, whose problematic behaviour goes unchallenged, just as long as they are delivering results.

It’s not just about the formal stuff, it’s also what you celebrate in passing. What you notice and name in a meeting, and what you let slide. What you highlight in an email. These small, often unremarkable moments add up to a very clear picture of what you actually value – and it may not match what’s on your values statement.

When there’s a mismatch, people follow the actions every time.

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The right intention, the wrong message

Most leaders don’t set out to reward the wrong thing. They set out to recognise great work, encourage high performance, celebrate results. The problem is that what gets celebrated is often what’s most visible – and what’s most visible isn’t always what matters most.

Early in my career, working in consulting, we had an annual awards scheme. The idea was sound: recognise outstanding client feedback, however the reality was more complicated.

The awards consistently went to teams on long-running, well-established accounts – relationships where goodwill had been built over years and a five-out-of-five was almost the default. Meanwhile, colleagues working on complex, demanding engagements – where four-and-a-half out of five represented genuinely exceptional work – never saw the award. The metric was clean, but the outcome was demoralising. People stopped seeing it as meaningful recognition and it became a source of resentment.

This is how it usually goes. Not through bad intent, but through:

• Rewarding overwork rather than effective work – because the person who worked the weekend is visible, and the person who delivered in normal hours isn’t;

• Promoting the person who hit their numbers, rather than the person who hit their numbers and built the capability around them;

• Failing to address the brilliant arsehole, because the short-term cost of doing so feels too high – and in doing so, communicating that the behaviour is fine, actually;

• Never quite getting around to acknowledging the quieter contributors, because they didn’t shout loudly about their results, or because their contribution was less obvious.

That last one deserves its own moment. The most tangible, high-profile achievements will always be easy to spot and easy to reward. The less visible work – the colleague who kept morale up through a challenging time, the manager who gave up their own time to develop someone else – takes effort and intention to notice. Not because it’s less valuable, but because it’s quieter and harder to measure.

The culture you didn’t mean to build

When recognition contradicts stated values, trust erodes. Not all at once, but it eats away over time.

People stop investing in what isn’t rewarded. They stop raising the difficult truth upward if the truth-tellers don’t advance. They stop prioritising team over self if individualism is what gets celebrated. And they stop believing the values are anything more than wall art.

Recognition isn’t only about promotions and bonuses. Every time you publicly praise a behaviour, you are setting a norm. Every time you stay silent about one, you are setting a different norm. The cumulative effect of those small moments is your culture – whether you intended it or not.

Shine a light deliberately

The good news is that this is not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity. Visible recognition is one of the most powerful cultural levers you have, yet many leaders underuse it.

The key is to recognise the behaviour, not just the result. Not just what was achieved, but how. Name it specifically and publicly: “I want to highlight what Jamie did here – not the outcome alone, but the way they brought the team through an incredibly difficult brief” lands very differently to “great job, Jamie.” One is a thank you. The other is a clear signpost to what good looks like within the culture, and to what you value.

It’s also important to go out of your way to notice the less obvious contributions. The people doing the quiet, enabling work that makes everyone else better are rarely the ones who have their name attached to the big shiny result at the end. But they should be.

A few questions to reflect on:

• When you next advocate for someone’s progression, can you articulate the how as clearly as the what?

• Are you actively looking for the behind-the-scenes contributors, or only the ones who land in your inbox?

• Is the person who enables the team’s success being recognised – or only the person who closed the deal?

A quick audit

Look back at your last ten recognition moments – formal or informal. Who did you recognise, and for what? What pattern do you see? Does it match what you say you value?

If not, you already know what to change.

Your values are not what’s written on the wall. They’re what gets celebrated, what gets rewarded, and – just as importantly – what gets tolerated. Your team has already worked out what the real values are. The question is whether those values are building the culture you intend.

Hit reply or leave a comment: what’s one behaviour you’ve seen consistently overlooked in your organisation – and what does that tell you about what the culture is actually rewarding?

Restack

This week, a nice breakdown of what really creates culture, and how we can influence it a lot more than we think.

The Profession

Changing Workplace Culture from the Inside Out

Photo by Walls.io on Unsplash…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Jennifer Smith

Meme of the week

In the week of International Women’s Day, this one landed…

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

(And yes, the eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed this is coming out on a Saturday rather than my usual Friday. I didn’t get the dates wrong, it’s simply that it has been quite a week…👀)

Not a quick glance. A real, proper look.

Count how many hours you spent in task, project, or delivery meetings. Now count how many hours you spent in genuine conversations with your people – about their development, their thinking, their wellbeing.

I was working with a Managing Partner at a professional services firm last year. At an all-hands meeting, he had stood in front of his team and said, with genuine conviction, “Our people are our greatest asset.” Yet staff engagement and satisfaction scores were declining, and he couldn’t understand why.

I asked to see his calendar.

Twenty-seven client and business meetings that month. Zero time blocked for team development. When team members tried to book 1-1s, they were moved three times, then eventually happened in a fifteen-minute gap between calls.

He was genuinely surprised. “My people do matter to me,” he said, and I believed him. But his calendar told a different story.

The truth is your calendar is the most honest document in your organisation. It doesn’t care what you intend; it only records what you actually do. Let’s explore.

What does your calendar say about you?

Most leaders, when they do this audit, find the same thing. Ninety per cent or more of their time is task-focused – delivery, project updates, client commitments, operational decisions. People conversations are expected to just sort of happen as part of the work, and development conversations and 1-1s are the first thing cancelled when a deadline looms.

This isn’t laziness, nor is it indifference. It’s the natural gravitational pull of urgency: delivery demands are visible, measurable, and immediate. People work feels softer, slower, harder to justify in a packed diary.

And so, week by week, month by month, the balance shifts – and often without leaders even noticing.

Meanwhile, your team notices everything, sometimes directly, more often in the way this makes them feel.

You say: “my door is always open”, but your calendar is back-to-back. You say: “I want to invest in your development”, but that conversation has been rescheduled four times. You say: “people are our priority”, but when there’s a conflict, the task wins every time.

This is the gap between intention and impact. And it’s where trust seeps away.

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It matters more than you think

In Do Sweat the Small Stuff, I talk about the Leadership Shadow framework as a way to reveal the influence – for better or worse – of a leader on their team. It comprises four aspects of leadership: what you say, how you act, what (and how) you measure, and the one most leaders overlook, what you prioritise.

“If you say your relationships are important to you, how much time did you spend with people last week? Last month?”

Sarah Langslow, Do Sweat the Small Stuff

This question can feel a bit ouchy. Because prioritisation is where stated values either become real or are exposed as wishful thinking. When what you say doesn’t align with what you prioritise, people don’t split the difference, they trust the actions.

The consequences of this misalignment are not abstract, because micro-interactions like this are never neutral. They are always doing one of three things within a relationship: growing it, killing it, or letting it die through neglect. When your people conversations keep getting cancelled or compressed, the relationship doesn’t stay static, it withers.

Your best people – the ones with options – start to feel unseen. They stop bringing you their real thinking. You become progressively more disconnected from what’s actually happening in your team. And when they eventually leave, you’ll be surprised. You shouldn’t be.

The opportunity in the audit

The gap between what you say and what you schedule is not evidence of bad leadership, it’s information. And this information, if you’re willing to look at it honestly, is the starting point for change.

When leaders make a consistent shift to protecting time for their people – not just fitting them in around everything else – the difference is felt quickly. Team members report feeling more seen and supported. Leaders find themselves better informed, less surprised, and making fewer costly assumptions about what’s happening on the ground.

People-first isn’t (only) a fluffy nice-to-have, to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside. It’s a strategic and commercial imperative.

Putting it into practice

None of this requires a calendar overhaul overnight. It requires a small number of deliberate choices, made consistently.

• Block 1-1s and treat them as non-negotiable.
  You wouldn’t cancel a client meeting twice in a row, so don’t cancel a 1-1 twice in a row. The message your team receives when you do is unmistakable.

• Build in buffer time.
  Back-to-back meetings don’t just affect your energy, they decimate your capacity to be present. Even a five-minute gap between meetings can make the difference between showing up distracted and showing up fully.

• Schedule development conversations at least quarterly.
  Not a performance review, but a genuine conversation about where someone is going, what they need, how they work, where they’re struggling, what they’re thinking about etc. Put it in the diary and give it proper time (hint: this is not a 30-mimute conversation…).

• Try a walk-and-talk.
  Some of the most useful conversations happen outside a meeting room. A twenty-minute walk creates a different quality of connection and conversation than a 30 minute Teams meeting ever can.

• Do a monthly ratio check.
  Once a month, look back at your calendar. What percentage of your time went on task versus people? You don’t need perfection. You need a direction of travel you’re comfortable with.

Do what you say you will do

Congruence – the alignment between what you say and what you do – is one of the most powerful signals you send as a leader. When it’s present, people trust you. When it’s absent, they stop.

Your calendar is a congruence check. It won’t lie to spare your feelings.

If you do the audit and don’t like what you see, there are two things that could change: what you say, or what you do. Only one of those options builds trust.

Start with next week: block one conversation that keeps getting moved. Protect it. Show up fully for it. See what happens.

It’s a small change, but it sends a powerful message.

Hit reply or leave a comment to share what your calendar audit revealed – and what one change you’re committing to make.

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Restack

Why do we stay in touch with people? An interesting take on why many professional relationships fade away…

Your Next Move

“We should definitely catch up”

The longer game…

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2 months ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Dr. Alice McGee

Meme of the week

Not sure this one needs any further explanation 😂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Spoken with a warm smile, genuine curiosity, and nowhere else to be, it’s an invitation. The start of a real conversation. Spoken with a shorter tone and a more piercing gaze? Suddenly it’s an audit, dressed up as small talk.

Same words. Completely different intent. And your team knows which one it is before you’ve asked your second question.

This week, we’re looking at one of the most common – and most consequential – micro-interactions in any leader’s day: the question. Specifically, what kind of questions you’re actually asking, and what your team is actually hearing when you ask them. Let’s explore.

It’s not what you’re asking – it’s what you’re really saying

There are two distinctions worth making here.

The first is the difference between questions that open and questions that close. Open questions create space – they invite thinking, signal trust, and leave room for the other person to go somewhere you haven’t anticipated. Closed questions narrow things down: they confirm, deny, or check boxes. Neither type is inherently wrong: sometimes you simply need to know whether something is done. But if the majority of your questions are closing things down rather than opening things up, you’re probably getting less from your conversations than you think.

The second distinction is more subtle, and arguably more important. It’s the gap between a genuine question and one with something else embedded within. An instruction disguised as an enquiry. An opinion dressed up as curiosity. A correction with a question mark tacked on the end to make it sound palatable.

You know the type:

• “Have you thought about doing it this way?”

• “Why did you approach it like that?”

• “Wouldn’t it make more sense to...?”

Technically, yes, those are questions. Structurally, they are not. They’re your opinion – your concern, your preference, your correction – wrapped in a question mark on the theory that it sounds more collaborative.

The problem is it doesn’t work. People see straight through it. What they actually hear is “I don’t think you’ve got this right”, and they start to respond accordingly.

You are never just asking

This is the part that many leaders fail to realise.

When you are the most senior person in a conversation, you are never just asking a question. Even when you genuinely think you are.

I once worked with a CEO who shared that at the end of an all-hands meeting, she asked what she considered an innocent question about a minor operational matter. Something like: “I’m curious whether we’ve ever explored X?” She wasn’t directing anyone, she was genuinely curious. The meeting moved on.

Two weeks later, she discovered that a team had quietly diverted significant time and resource into something close to a full project around that very question. Because several people in the room had drawn a simple conclusion: if the CEO is asking, it must be important.

This is positional power in action. Your questions carry weight that you may not feel, and often cannot see. What reads as passing curiosity to you can land as clear direction to the people sitting across the table. The gap between intention and impact is always present in leadership – and it is amplified enormously by the power dynamic. This doesn’t mean stop asking questions; it means be clear and intentional about the impact of asking them.

You’re always training people how to treat you

I’ve worked with leaders who describe themselves as hands-on, curious, close to the detail. Leaders who were genuinely surprised – sometimes hurt – when their teams described feeling micromanaged or second-guessed.

“But I just ask questions,” they’d say.

They did. That was precisely the problem.

Many of their questions were a correction or a concern in disguise. So the team had learned, quietly and without anyone ever saying so, to hear them as such.

Over time, the impact is felt. People stop deciding independently. They check before they act. They spend energy managing upwards rather than thinking clearly. This isn’t a character flaw in the team – it’s a rational adaptation to an environment where their judgement is consistently, if subtly, questioned.

And here’s the irony. The leader who asks these questions in the name of staying across the detail ends up with less accurate information, not more. Because once people learn what kind of answer you want to hear, that’s what you get. Not the full picture, just the version of it that feels safe.

From interrogation to ignition

Questions used well can ignite thinking.

When a leader asks from genuine curiosity, something shifts. Questions that invite thinking rather than confirm compliance start to build capability, ownership, and the enhanced creativity and ideas that turn a good team into a great one.

People who feel trusted bring more of themselves to their work. And crucially, they develop the judgement to make good decisions without you. For a C-suite leader, that is the real prize. Not a team that executes your instructions well, but a team that can think – and act – for themselves.

For leaders this means leaning towards discussion and coaching before instruction, trust over control, asking and understanding rather than assuming. These are not soft ideals, they are priorities. And the questions you ask every day are one of the clearest signals of where your priorities actually lie.

Asking better questions

Asking better questions is a skill, and a genuinely important one. Like any skill, it takes practice – and the first step is usually noticing what you’re currently doing, which can be uncomfortable.

Here are a few places you might start:

Pause before you ask. What are you actually trying to find out? Is this genuine curiosity, or are you checking up, seeking reassurance, or steering towards an answer you’ve already formed? If it’s the latter, ask yourself whether a question is even the right vehicle, or whether it might be clearer and kinder to just say what you think.

Name your intention. Think transparency over efficiency. One additional sentence can remove a lot of ambiguity: “I’m asking because I’m curious about your thinking, not because I think you’re doing it wrong.” It feels like a small thing, yet it lands as a significant one.

Shift the framing:

• “What’s the status?” → “What help do you need?”

• “Why did you do it that way?” → “Walk me through your thinking”

• “Have you thought about X?” → “What options did you consider?”

• “What’s the plan?” → “Where are you feeling confident, and where are you less sure?”

Notice what you do with the answer. If someone responds and your instinct is immediately to redirect, correct, or jump in with a solution – you were probably asking to control, not to coach. Try asking a follow-up question instead of offering a view. See what happens.

Try the one-day audit. For one day, track every question you ask: who you asked, what you asked, and what you did with the answer. Fair warning: it can be a bit of a reckoning. You’ll realise quite how many questions you ask in a single day. Which is also, of course, the point. If you’re asking that many, it really is worth thinking about what they’re doing.

The question behind the question

Your team is already reading your intent. They’re doing it right now, in every conversation, in real time. The question isn’t whether they can tell the difference between curiosity and interrogation.

(Spoiler alert: they can.)

The question is whether you’re willing to look honestly at which one you’re actually delivering.

This week, think of someone on your team who has become a little less forthcoming over time – less likely to offer an opinion, push back, or flag a problem early. Notice what questions you have been asking them. What might they have been hearing?

This isn’t about becoming a soft leader, or relinquishing oversight or accountability. It’s about choosing a more effective route to the outcomes you need – one that builds your team’s capability rather than quietly eroding it.

Hit reply or leave a comment to share one question you’re asking differently this week – and what difference you noticed.

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Restack

I enjoy a post with a good analogy… “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” This is a nice exploration of using questions to build clarity aroun problems'.

The Art of Asking Questions

The Questions That Turn Messy Problems into Clear Ones

If Medium is your go-to reading spot, you can catch this post there too! Just click here…

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6 months ago · 32 likes · 7 comments · Andrea Chiarelli

Meme of the week

After some sunshine this week (for those not in the UK, this has been a rarity in 2026!) this one made me laugh ☀️

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

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Thanks for reading. See you next week!

How many seconds before you jump in?

If you’re like most leaders I work with, you won’t reach five.

I worked with a senior partner a while ago – smart, experienced, genuinely collaborative in his own mind. He’d built his reputation on being the kind of leader people could bring things to. Open door, open ears. He believed it, and his team liked him. But something wasn’t adding up. Ideas weren’t flowing the way he expected. His one-to-ones felt productive on the surface, yet rarely surfaced anything he didn’t already know.

So we ran an experiment. I asked him to invite a trusted team member to sit in on a couple of his conversations and simply observe – paying particular attention to the listening. The feedback was uncomfortably specific. In a ten-minute conversation, he had interrupted seven times. Every single time, within five seconds of the other person pausing. The team member had stopped mid-sentence twice. He hadn’t noticed either time.

He was mortified.

But more than that, he was genuinely shocked. Even having asked someone else to listen in, he didn’t realise how often he interrupted.

This is the thing about interruption: it almost never feels like interruption from the inside. It feels like engagement. Enthusiasm. Moving things along. And yet the impact is something else entirely. Let’s explore.

You’re already talking

The gap between when someone pauses and when you respond is rarely something we track consciously. In my experience coaching senior leaders, that gap is often vanishingly small – a handful of seconds at most. We jump in before we’ve even registered that we’ve jumped in.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s our rapid, automated thinking doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Conversation is a familiar pattern; our automatic brain has run it thousands of times. It knows the rhythm. It fills the pause before our conscious mind has had a chance to decide whether or not it should.

But the impact lands regardless of the intention. When you fill the silence at second three, the message received – rarely consciously, but reliably – is: your thinking isn’t quite valuable enough for me to wait for.

The person on the receiving end may not be able to name it. But they feel it. And over time, they adjust.

Because our micro-interactions are never neutral. The silence you cut short is one of them.

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What you’re not hearing

Here’s what makes this particularly costly: the first thing someone says is rarely their best thinking. What comes after the pause – the second thought, the one that follows a moment of genuine reflection – is often where the real substance sits.

Nancy Kline, whose work on the Thinking Environment has shaped so much of how I think about listening in leadership, puts it plainly:

It isn’t the quality of your questions. It isn’t the quality of your response. It is the quality of your attention – and the space that attention either creates or destroys.

When you jump in at second three, you don’t just lose the rest of that sentence. You lose what would have come next. And over time, if people repeatedly experience that there is no space to finish a thought in front of you, they stop trying. They start editing before they speak. They give you the polished, pre-packaged version of their thinking rather than the real thing.

What you lose access to, quietly and invisibly, is:

• the idea that wasn’t quite ready yet

• the dissenting view that could save you from a bad decision

• the concern no one felt safe raising

• the pushback that might have been exactly what you needed

• the creative leap that needed one more second to form

You don’t notice any of this. Because the conversation carries on, and it feels fine. That’s what makes it so easy to miss.

The magic in the gap

The shift doesn’t require more of you, it requires less. Specifically, less talking.

When you give people space, magic happens. Often the thing someone says after a pause is what they really wanted to say – or it’s the culmination of their thinking because they’ve been given the room to work it through. That pause can only exist if you, as the listener, leave it there. And in doing so, you do something that goes beyond any single conversation: you signal that thinking is welcome here. That it’s worth finishing. That you’re genuinely interested in what comes next.

Over time, that signal compounds. People bring bigger ideas. They take more risks in what they share. Trust deepens, not because of any grand gesture, but because of the accumulated experience of being heard. That is the environment in which teams do their best work – and it is built, or dismantled, in micro-interactions.

Count to ten

Start with one simple rule: when someone stops speaking, count to ten before you respond.

Ten seconds will feel like an eternity. Good. That discomfort means you’ve moved out of autopilot and into intentional territory. Sit with it. Let it do its work.

While you’re sitting with it, ask yourself the question the WAIT acronym captures: Why Am I Talking?

Consider:

• Is your response genuinely additive?

• Or are you filling the silence because it’s uncomfortable?

• Are you in a hurry?

• Have you assumed they’re finished, when actually they’re still thinking?

• If it’s any of the latter: wait longer.

When the person picks their thought back up – and they often will – resist the urge to redirect. Try: “Keep going” or “Take your time. I want to hear where that goes.” In group settings, be proactive. If someone gets cut off, name it. “Hold on, I’m not sure Jamie had finished.” Then give the floor back.

One thing worth knowing: your team may initially be surprised by the space. They’re used to a particular rhythm with you, so when that rhythm changes, it can feel odd, even disconcerting. That isn’t a sign something has gone wrong.

Stay the course.

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…

The senior partner went back to his team and told them what he’d learned. He named it out loud: the interrupting, the five-second gap, what it had likely been costing them. And then he asked them to call him on it when it happened.

It wasn’t a comfortable conversation. But it was, by all accounts, a good one.

Most leaders who interrupt frequently don’t know they’re doing it. Most of the people on the receiving end don’t feel safe enough to say so. The 3-second tax gets collected quietly, invisibly, week after week, and nobody puts their hand up to tell you what it’s costing.

This week, in three conversations, count. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Notice where you land. And notice what happens differently when you don’t fill the silence.

The return on ten seconds is considerably larger than it sounds.

Hit reply or leave a comment – where do you tend to jump in fastest? In a one-to-one, in a meeting, under pressure to get through an agenda? And what do you think you’ve been missing?

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Restack

I want to make it really, really clear that interruption is not always bad. In fact it is sometimes necessary, helpful, even essential – this is a good read on when it is a good thing, and how to do it well.

Work Fame

The dark arts of interrupting someone

“May I ask you a question…

Read more

a year ago · 22 likes · 17 comments · Leanne Hughes

Meme of the week

Within a lot of glorious Winter Olympics content this week, I regret to announce that this is the one that hit hardest…😂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

They’d started to dread hearing from their boss.

Not because their boss was cruel or incompetent. But because contact had become a pattern: silence… silence… silence… then a sudden ping or a calendar invite that might as well have said “we need to talk” (cue ominous tone).

In between, there were occasional touchpoints, but they were brief and transactional. Their one-to-ones – when they happened at all – were almost entirely problem-focused. If something wasn’t on fire, there wasn’t much to say.

Over time, this leader stopped sharing the early, messy thinking. They didn’t ask for flexibility when they needed it. They didn’t flag risks until they were unavoidable. Because it didn’t feel like their boss had much appetite for anything that wasn’t a task, a target, or a trouble spot.

They weren’t dealing with a “bad relationship”. They were dealing with relationship debt.

Bank accounts can be a great metaphor for relationships.

• Deposits are the small moments of attention, care, acknowledgement, follow-through.

• Withdrawals are the asks, the escalations, the pressure, the performance conversations, the “I need this by close of play” messages.

• An overdraft is the result when the only time you show up is to take something out.

And the thing about overdrafts is that they’re survivable… right up until they’re not. Let’s explore.

Steady state is not “nothing to do”

At senior levels, it’s easy to treat “steady state” as a kind of holding pattern. If the work is moving, nobody is kicking off, and the numbers are ticking along nicely, you can tell yourself you’re being efficient by staying out of the way.

It feels disciplined. Yet it also quietly empties the relationship bank account.

Because the gaps aren’t neutral: you experience them as “everything’s fine”, but others often experience them as distance.

When you only connect around problems, your presence starts to mean something, and not in a good way. It becomes a signal that something is wrong, someone is in trouble, or a difficult conversation is incoming. So people start to manage you, or worse, avoid you.

One of the more subtle ways this builds is what I think of as tone debt. You’re busy, under pressure and moving fast. As a result, your messages get sharper, your attention thinner, and in any conversation you’re only half-listening because you’re mentally in the next meeting already.

You barely notice, but those around you feel the impact.

Power makes micro-interactions louder. A rushed tone from a peer can be annoying, but a rushed tone from the boss can feel dismissive.

Deposits aren’t a perk

Some leaders hear this and think, “Are we doing feelings now?” Or: “I don’t have time for more relationship stuff.” I get it. Yet deposits aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re what build team and organisational resilience.

Deposits create the conditions you want (and need) when it matters:

• People tell you things earlier – not when they’re unavoidable.

• They bring in-progress thinking, not polished slides designed to survive cross-examination.

• They challenge you when you’re wrong, instead of nodding and doing the thing you asked for, even if it’s a bad idea.

• When you do need to move quickly, you get less resistance and less performative compliance.

In other words: deposits buy you speed in a crisis.

Signs you’re overdrawn

Relationship debt rarely announces itself loudly until things are too far gone for repair – usually the point at which someone leaves. The skill to build as a leader is to sense the small small signals that show up much earlier.

Here are a few worth noticing:

• Responses are slower, shorter, more formal.

• People stop raising risks early. Surprises arrive late and labelled “urgent”.

• You get agreement, but not energy.

• Fewer people volunteer ideas – meetings become status updates and safe comments.

• You feel a slight increase in “covering” behaviour – more documentation, more CCs, more cautious language.

• One-to-ones become purely transactional. You could replace half of them with an email and no one would complain.

A quick self-check: How many non-urgent touches have you had this month with the people you rely on most? Not updates. Not asks. Just moments that count as deposits.

If you can’t think of any, that’s useful data.

Small deposits, made often

The answer isn’t to suddenly become the leader who wants a 90-minute coffee with everyone “to connect”. That’s a whole different kind of organisational threat.

This is about low-effort, high-impact deposits, woven into how you already work.

A few options from the deposit menu:

• Close the loop you said you’d close. “I said I’d come back to you on X – here’s where it’s landed.”

• Acknowledge effort, not just outcomes. “I saw the work behind that. Thank you.”

• Offer micro-presence. Phone down. One question, one real listen. Then move on.

• Make a “no agenda” check-in genuinely no agenda. “How are you doing, really?” (Then don’t immediately pivot to the project.)

• Remember context – carefully. “How did that appointment go?” (please only do this if you can hold the answer with respect, and not treat it like trivia).

• Invite early drafts and make time to discuss. “Bring it to me when it’s 30% formed, not 90%.”

• Name tone when it slips. “I was sharper than I intended earlier – sorry. The urgency was real; the tone wasn’t fair.”

That last one isn’t about making a song and dance of repair, it’s about normalising it. A quick reset is often the most efficient thing and effective you can do.

A useful distinction here: checking in versus checking on.

Checking on feels like surveillance. It makes people tidy things up before they show you. Checking in feels like partnership. It makes people tell you the truth sooner.

And on cadence, keep it simple: ten minutes, a voice note, a one-line message that acknowledges something specific, a “how did that land?” after a tense meeting. The goal isn’t more contact, it’s more deposits.

Manage your bank accounts

If the only time you’re visible is when you need something, every request feels like a withdrawal. People become guarded. Everything gets transactional. And sooner or later, the account runs dry.

If you’re not sure where to start, start small.

Pick one relationship where you’ve been showing up mainly to withdraw. Make one deposit in the next 24 hours with no ask attached.

Not because you’re trying to be nice. Because you’re trying to lead like you’ll need the relationship later.

Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know what deposits you’re planning to make in your key relationships this week.

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Restack

A related perspective making the case – which I agree with – that relationships are core to everything we do at work.

We Go From—Here

We are in relationship, at work.

Some people like to think of work as a set of tasks…

Read more

4 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · We Go From—Here

Meme of the week

For all those who sometimes find work relationships hard (*waves"* at the introverts) this one is for you…

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

You get to two or three minutes before the end and everyone knows you’re not quite done. The actions aren’t clear. The loose ends are still loose.

Then someone announces, “I’ve got to jump…” because they’ve got another meeting to get to. Someone else is determined to finally say their piece because they haven’t had a chance. And as you hit the end of the time slot, everything starts to accelerate. People speak faster. Sentences get shorter. Someone starts wrapping up while someone else is still talking.

If you’re lucky, there’s an “Any questions?” from whoever is leading the meeting even as they are already halfway out of the door – a pretty clear micro-signal that they don’t have time, nor do they particularly wish to answer any.

Everyone leaves without clarity.

That meeting didn’t end – it was ended.

And it’s not just ineffective, it sends signals, lots of them. About what matters, about whose time matters, about whether raising concerns is welcome, and about whether you’ll be listened to if you’re not quick, loud, or senior enough.

It’s a tiny moment, yet because so many of us live in back-to-back meetings, it repeats all day. Which is why it’s worth paying attention to.

In this week’s Substack I want to explore this micro-moment – how we can do it better, and more importantly, how we can avoid ending up there in the first place.

So what’s the issue, really?

The obvious answer is “we ran out of time”. But that’s rarely the full story.

How do you actually know a meeting has ended? Is it when the diary slot finishes, or when actions have been agreed and owned? Is it when everyone got what they came for, or simply when the first person announces they need to get to their next call? And if you’re honest, in many rooms the meeting is effectively over the moment the most senior person starts to close their laptop.

Most leaders treat the ending as a logistical event. We’ve used up all our time, so we’re done. But teams experience the ending as a meaning-making event. It’s the moment where behaviours and beliefs get reinforced – and where power gets reinforced too, whether that’s deliberate or not.

Because the ending quietly (and often unintentionally) answers questions people don’t usually ask out loud.

• Was it safe to speak honestly here?

• Did my contribution matter?

• Are we leaving with clarity, or with confusion dressed up as momentum?

And when the close is rushed, abrupt, or performative – the classic “Any questions?” delivered while packing up – people learn what the meeting is really designed for. Not understanding, not alignment, but throughput.

No-one sets out to create that message. But micro-signals don’t wait for your intentions; they teach people how to behave next time anyway.

Does it really matter? (Yes – and here’s why)

It can feel petty to focus on the last minute or two. Yet this is one of those tiny leadership moments that creates disproportionate effects – because it shapes what people believe is rewarded.

When meetings regularly end like this:

• People don’t raise issues in the room – they move them to side chats.

• They come less prepared next time because they’re not confident it will be worth it.

• Follow-up becomes messier and slower, with more misunderstanding and more politics.

• Different people walk away with different interpretations of what was agreed.

• Expectations get set without clarity on what “good” looks like, or what trade-offs were accepted.

• You get compliance agreement rather than real commitment.

• And some people simply feel shut down – not because of what you said, but because of what you signalled.

This is the hidden cost: endings teach people whether they are valued.

The power dynamic you can’t opt out of

There’s another layer to this: power. Because the more senior you are, the less neutral your exit becomes.

If you leave fast, people won’t chase you down. They’ll decide their question or contribution isn’t welcome.

If you shut down questions with your body language – standing up, closing the laptop, half-turning towards the door, or even just obviously stopping paying attention – you’re not just ending a meeting, you’re setting the rules of access. And those rules affect execution. People end up withholding concerns because the cost of raising them feels higher than the benefit.

So the issue isn’t only the end of the meeting.

The issue starts earlier: how you relate to endings at all. Whether you treat the close as a rushed administrative act – or as a deliberate space where what’s unfinished is allowed to be named, even if it can’t be resolved in the room.

That’s the standard: not “wrap it up fast” – but “make it possible to be honest right up to the end”.

Effective endings are made, not met

If you want meetings to finish with clarity and confidence, you have to design the ending – not hope it magically creates itself in the final minute. Try these approaches in your next meeting:

Call the landing early. At the midpoint: “We’ll use the last five minutes to lock decisions, owners and risks.” Then protect that time, as in, guard it with your life!

Keep a visible parking lot. Capture important off-track points as you go, so they don’t burst out at the end.

Check clarity before you summarise. Ask “What’s still unclear?” before you list actions – it stops last-minute rewrites, and creates space to hear from a wider range of voices as you go through.

Be realistic about what you can achieve. If a topic really needs discussion, give it space to breathe. When we are unrealistic about how much we get done, everything feels rushed, and your team have no space to contribute. Allow time to really hear from people.

Leave space for real support. Rather than “Everyone OK with this?” which takes real courage for anyone to say “no” to, try: “What support do you need from me?” and pause long enough for an honest answer.

How you end determines what happens next

A meeting ending isn’t a formality; it’s a micro-interaction that teaches people what you value: clarity or speed, contribution or compliance. If you consistently rush the close, people don’t just lose the actions – they stop offering you the thinking.

Try this: for your next three meetings, protect the last five minutes. Slow down, stay present, and ask one question you genuinely want answered – and don’t flinch at what you hear.

Because the ending doesn’t just finish the meeting: it shapes what happens next.

Hit reply or leave a comment to share what you’ll try differently in your meetings this week.

Leave a comment

Restack

A thought provoking read this week from Steve Magness, exploring how and why seemingly normal people start to do immoral things, or ignore that behaviour in others.

Meme of the week

This one felt painfully accurate 😂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

This was early in my coaching business, heading to a conference, booking late enough that every option felt slightly ridiculous. I opened seventeen tabs (a conservative estimate), cross-referenced cost against flight time, number of connections, airmiles, airline reputation, arrival times, baggage rules, and the vague-but-powerful category of ‘will I hate myself if I choose this one?’.

Eventually, I picked flights I felt confident about. I’d done the work to reduce the risk, I’d optimised.

And I’d also spent a whole afternoon doing it. Which meant the saving I’d secured was, at best, questionable. At worst, I’d simply moved the cost from money to attention.

It was a small moment, but it pointed to a bigger pattern: our obsession with optimisation and why that’s not always helpful. Let’s explore.

Optimisation usually feels sensible

Optimisation is not the villain. It’s the part of us that wants to be competent, to make good choices, to avoid waste. In leadership, it can look like rigour. In life, it can look like responsibility.

The problem is that we often don’t know when to stop optimising. It pulls us into a constant search for better, without acknowledging when might be enough.

There are two common places it shows up.

One is decision-making – the endless comparison, the desire to land on the ‘right’ answer, the urge to eliminate uncertainty before we move. The other is time – calendars so tightly packed there isn’t even time for lunch, or coffee, or a loo break. We optimise our days for throughput, then wonder why our thinking feels thin and our patience feels shorter than it used to.

When every spare moment becomes a slot to fill, we don’t just lose rest, we lose the mental space where ideas form.

The forces that keep us speeding up

If you feel pulled towards optimisation, you’re not imagining it. Our world tends to reward speed and responsiveness. It rewards the appearance of being on top of things.

There’s also a more personal driver: the discomfort of not knowing. For high performers, uncertainty can feel like a gap that must be closed immediately. Optimisation becomes a way to manage that discomfort. “If I can find the best option, I can relax.”

Technology also doesn’t help. We’re offered limitless choice, which sounds like freedom until you realise it also creates limitless comparison. There is always a slightly better flight, a slightly better hire, a slightly better phrasing of the email. The ‘best’ becomes a moving target.

And leadership adds its own pressure. When people look to you for clarity, the temptation is to treat every decision as if it must be both fast and flawless. That’s a heavy standard. It quietly pushes us towards over-processing, over-scheduling, over-controlling.

What we lose when we optimise everything

Optimisation has a cost, and it’s not always visible on a spreadsheet.

It can steal time in tiny, respectable increments. Five extra minutes here, fifteen there, another hour ‘just to be sure’. The return on that extra effort drops quickly, but our nervous system doesn’t always get the memo.

It also narrows our field of vision. When you optimise, you focus on what you can measure and compare. That tends to prioritise the immediate and the tangible, so we become efficient at the short term, yet lose a richness of thinking over the long term.

Then there’s the fatigue factor. A day full of micro-decisions, constant switching, and back-to-back meetings doesn’t just make you tired – it makes your thinking more rigid. You reach for familiar answers, the safe option. You become less curious, not because you don’t care, but because you’re depleted.

You can end up missing the very thing you were trying to protect: good judgement. Because good judgement doesn’t only come from analysis. It also comes from synthesis – the ability to connect dots that don’t look connected until you give your brain some space.

Your brain needs a bit of wandering time

You’ve probably experienced this yourself: you sit down to solve a thorny problem and get nowhere, then the answer appears when you’re walking to work, in the shower, or making dinner.

That’s not magic. It’s your brain doing what it does when you stop trying to force it to think.

Mind-wandering is often painted as a lack of discipline, but it’s also a form of processing. It supports creativity and insight because it allows ideas to bump into each other without being directed. It gives you distance from the problem, which can be exactly what the problem needs.

This is where the nuance matters. Mind-wandering is not a permanent lifestyle choice, nor is it an excuse to avoid decisions. Some things genuinely benefit from tight optimisation: compliance, safety, or situations where speed is part of the job.

But some things do not. And the trick is learning to tell the difference.

A simple rule of thumb: if the problem is ambiguous, human, strategic, or emotionally loaded, optimisation alone isn’t the answer. You might need exploration, to let the question sit, rather than forcing an answer on demand.

In other words, mind-wandering is not the opposite of performance. It can be part of it – if you use it deliberately.

Letting go, on purpose

If you want to make space without turning this into yet another optimisation project (yes, I’m aware the irony is real), try a small experiment. Think of these as gentle provocations rather than a new regimen.

• Time-box the low-stakes decisions. Give yourself a firm limit for choices that do not deserve an afternoon. Set a timer, decide, move on. Save your depth for what actually matters.

• Put a blank block in the diary and defend it. Like REALLY defend it. Not as a ‘catch-up slot’. Not as ‘admin’. Just space. If you’re allergic to empty time, label it something that feels legitimate, like ‘thinking’ or ‘walk and reflect’.

• Use a walk as a thinking tool. Try a walk with no podcast, no calls, no mentally running through your to-do list. Let your mind roam. Bring one question with you, then stop trying to answer it. Often your brain will do the rest. Note, if you struggle with the blank block in your diary and getting sucked into other things, a walk can help.

• Create an incubation step for complex problems. Write down the question you’re trying to solve, then step away on purpose. Come back later and notice what has shifted. You’re training yourself to use two modes – focused effort and spacious processing.

• Choose one meeting a week to leave five minutes early. Not to squeeze in another task. Simply to create a buffer as a place where perspective lives.

The slow route might be the smart route

The point isn’t to reject efficiency; it’s to stop treating efficiency as the only virtue.

Sometimes the best leaders I work with look almost inefficient from the outside. They take a walk before they decide, they let something breathe overnight, or they leave gaps in their week that other people would rush to fill. And because of that, when they speak, make decisions and lead, they’re clearer and more human.

If you want to play with this over the coming week, try holding these two questions lightly as you move through your days:

• What am I optimising for – and what am I sacrificing?

• Where could I build in space without losing performance?

You don’t need a radical overhaul. You just need a few places where you stop chasing the perfect route, and allow your brain to take the scenic one.

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Restack

Taking it a step further, this Restack shares some (unexpected?) research findings around when it’s good to trust your gut.

The Brainlift

💡 In Support of Trusting Your Gut

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4 months ago · 15 likes · Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

Meme of the week

On a theme that is very definitely not related… 🙂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Thanks for reading. See you next week!

A client told me recently about trying to get a small pay rise for one of their team. It was already in the budget, the business case was clear, and everyone agreed it was the right thing to do. Yet it still took more than three months to get a final decision.

They spent that time chasing the request through the system, constantly following up and asking what the status was. The person waiting for the pay rise spent it wondering what on earth was going on, and questioning whether their work was really valued.

This is one example, but it’s not that much of an outlier. In organisations, it’s rarely the content of decisions that exhausts people – it’s the pace of them. Whether making hiring choices, amending policies, greenlighting a pilot or experimenting with a new initiative; when these decisions drag, they kill momentum, energy, and trust.

So what is going on here?

It’s not just “the system”. It starts with how we think about decisions as humans – what our brains are trying to protect us from – and how that plays out when we lead.

Let’s explore.

Often it’s not indecision, it’s self-protection

There are some deep-seated reasons why, as humans and as leaders, we resist making a decision – especially when others are watching.

First, there is the fear of being wrong. Behavioural science confirms that we feel the pain of a loss more intensely than the pleasure of a gain. So the prospect of making a call that later turns out to be “wrong” looms larger in our minds than the potential upside of getting it right.

However, leaders often underestimate the cost of not deciding at all. We tell ourselves we’re being thorough, when in truth we’re just trying to avoid the emotional discomfort of: “That was my call, and it didn’t work.”

Then there is accountability and blame: if I decide, I own it, if we delay, I can blame “the process” or “the organisation” instead.

This leads to decision by committee, endless rounds of consultation rounds, and decisions kicked upstairs, sideways…anywhere but here. Leaders spread the risk around because it feels safer to be one of many contributors than the person who ultimately said “yes” or “no”.

Perfectionism plays a big role too, usually disguised as diligence: that desire for just one more conversation. We chase the fantasy of a decision that is so universally supported and flawlessly evidenced that no-one could possibly criticise it later.

Underneath it all sits a question of trust:

• Do I trust my own judgement?

• Do I trust the people bringing me the recommendation?

• Do I trust this process enough to back it publicly?

If the answer to any of those is shaky, delay will always feel safer than action.

Historic bad decisions also leave scar tissue. If an organisation has had some painful failures in the past, the lesson many people take is: “Next time: be more careful, slow down, make sure.”

So, we end up with leaders who are not weak or indecisive, but self-protecting. And the easiest form of self-protection is to resist deciding.

The hidden cost of delay

The trouble with slow decisions is that the damage they cause is often invisible – or at least, it doesn’t show up on a dashboard.

There are the obvious, tangible costs: work stalls, teams hold back on plans because they can’t assume a yes or a no. Or sometimes people do “shadow planning” for multiple scenarios, doubling the effort for the same outcome.

Meanwhile, opportunities drift by. Someone else launches the product, hires the candidate, reaches the customer. The organisation tells itself it is being careful and considered, but from the outside, it just looks slow.

Then there are the intangible costs, which are often worse.

Ambiguity is tiring. When a decision lingers, people can’t fully commit in either direction. They start every week wondering, “Will we, won’t we, is this still happening?” That low-level uncertainty eats into focus and creativity.

Frustration builds. A slow “no” is nearly always worse than a fast “no”. At least with a clear no, people can redirect their energy. With a slow no, they feel strung along, as if their time and effort were disposable.

Over time, disengagement creeps in: “If we can’t even make a decision on this, what are we doing here?”. People stop suggesting ideas, and stop asking for decisions. They start minimising their own ambition to match what the system seems able to handle.

The flip side is that faster, transparent decisions carry real benefits.

Even when the answer isn’t the one people hoped for, clarity is a relief. A clear decision says: “We’ve heard you, we’ve taken this seriously. Here’s the call, and here’s why.”

Trust grows when there is visible consistency between what leaders say (“We’re agile, we believe in learning”) and what they actually do (decide, act, learn, adjust).

And crucially, learning speeds up: you learn more, and you learn more accurately, from trying something in the real world than from debating it endlessly in theory. Faster decisions shorten the feedback loop.

One key point that I want to be clear on: I’m not trying to say that fast is always good.

Some decisions absolutely deserve time, care, and interrogation. Hurried thinking can create messes that take years to clean up.

However for most organisations, the average decision is too slow for the level of risk actually involved – and the cumulative drag of that slowness is far greater than we admit.

Not every decision is like getting a tattoo

Not every decision should be treated the same way. But in practice, we often do exactly that.

A simple way to think about it is this:

“Is this decision a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo?”
James Clear

Hat decisions

Hat decisions are quick, reversible, low-stakes decisions.

You can spot a hat decision because:

• it’s easily undone or changed

• the cost of being wrong is relatively low

• the impact is local or short-term

Some examples:

• Trying a different agenda or format for a recurring meeting for the next month.

• Piloting a new template for reports with one team.

• Testing a slightly different customer message in one campaign.

If a decision is a hat decision, decide quickly.

Make a choice, treat it explicitly as an experiment, and, if it helps, put a time limit on it: “We’ll run this for four weeks, then review.”

Don’t sit on it. You learn nothing new in the waiting.

Haircut decisions

Haircut decisions are more noticeable. If you get them wrong, it is a bit painful and awkward for a while – but it’s not permanent. Things grow out, adjustments can be made.

You can spot a haircut decision because:

• people will feel the impact

• there is some cost and friction to undo it, but it is undoable

• the impact lasts months, not years

Examples might include:

• Reorganising a team or shifting reporting lines.

• Changing a policy that affects a function or region.

• Choosing a new supplier for a medium-term contract.

With haircut decisions, you want more diligence than with hats – and ideally more voices in the room – but you still need a clear timeframe.

Ask: who actually needs to be involved, and by when will we decide? If you don’t set a boundary, haircut decisions tend to expand to fill all the available time and attention.

Tattoo decisions

Tattoo decisions are the big ones. They are long-term and hard, sometimes impossible, to reverse.

You can spot a tattoo decision because:

• it sets or shifts strategic direction

• the financial, reputational or cultural cost of getting it wrong is high

• it locks in constraints for years, not months

Examples include:

• Entering or exiting a major market.

• Selecting a core technology platform that everything else will rely on.

• Mergers, acquisitions, or major site closures.

Tattoo decisions should be slower. They deserve stress-testing.

This is where you want to deliberately seek out dissenting views, interrogate the assumptions, and be explicit about risks and trade-offs. The key is that the slower pace is intentional and explained, rather than just an unspoken default.

Some of you may have come across a similar distinction in the “one-way door / two-way door” language used at Amazon. If a decision is a one-way door – hard to reverse once you’ve stepped through – it deserves more time and care. If it’s a two-way door – you can step back out again – you will often learn more, and maintain more momentum, by going through the door and adjusting than by hovering in the doorway endlessly.

The real drag on your organisation is not that tattoo decisions are handled carefully. It’s that hat and haircut decisions are processed as if they were tattoos.

Training your “hat-first” muscle

You can shift this, both for yourself and for your team, by deliberately training what we might call your “hat-first” muscle.

Here are five practical ways to do that:

1. Name the type of decision up front
   In meetings, get into the habit of asking:
   “Before we go any further, is this a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo?”
   Just naming it creates a shared expectation about the level of analysis, the number of people involved, and the speed required.

2. Set default timeframes
   Create simple rules of thumb, for example:
   Hat → decide in the meeting, or within 24–48 hours at most.
   Haircut → agree the decision-maker and a clear deadline (“We’ll decide by next Friday”).
   Tattoo → be explicit that this will take longer, and explain why, so people don’t assume everything moves at that speed.

3. Make experiments the default for hats

   For hat decisions, frame them overtly as experiments:
   “We’ll try X for four weeks; success looks like Y; then we’ll review.”
   This reduces fear because the decision isn’t a permanent judgement , it’s a learning step.

4. Shift what you’re optimising for

   Consciously move from optimising for “not being wrong” to optimising for “learning quickly”.
   This doesn’t mean being cavalier. It means asking:
   “What’s the smallest version of this we can try that will give us real information?”
   And from “pleasing everyone” to “being clear, fair, and transparent” – even when not everyone agrees.

5. Treat the communication as part of the decision
   The decision itself is only half the story. How you communicate it is the micro-interaction people remember.

   A clear “no, and here’s why.”

   A “yes, as an experiment, and here’s how we’ll review it.”

   A “not yet, and here’s what would need to change.”

   These tiny phrases can build trust over time. Silence, on the other hand, nearly always erodes it.

Over time, your team learns that their work won’t disappear into a decision-making void. And you learn that many of the decisions you were excessively anxious about are, in reality, just hats.

Count your hats

Let’s make this practical.

For one week, keep a simple running list of decisions that are currently waiting on you – at work or beyond it. Nothing fancy, just a note on your phone or a scrap of paper.

Next to each one, label it: hat, haircut, or tattoo.

Then, commit to clearing the hats by the end of the week. Decide, communicate, move. Even if the answer is “no” or “not now”, make it clear.

Afterwards, notice what changed:

• What shifted in your own energy and/or your team’s when fewer things were left hanging?

• Where did you realise you’d been treating a hat like a tattoo?

If you try the experiment, I’d love to hear what you notice. Hit reply or leave a comment and let me know where you found a hat you’d been wearing like a tattoo.

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Restack

In this week’s Restack, a helpful reminder that far fewer decisions are Tattoos than we might think…

thinkfuture: imagine it. create it. live it.

Most Decisions Are Reversible

One of the quiet anxieties of modern life is the fear of making the wrong decision. We hesitate, overanalyze, delay, and second-guess because we believe a single choice can permanently damage our reputation, our career, or our future. This belief is widespread, deeply ingrained, and mostly wrong…

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4 months ago · 1 like · chris kalaboukis

Meme of the week

Unrelated to this week’s theme, but entirely accurate 🙂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Even though I’ve got an unbroken six-year streak.

For a long time, it did exactly what I wanted – it kept my French fresh, added vocabulary, and gave me an easy way to practise every day.

But at some point that changed, although the shift was so imperceptible I didn’t notice at the time.

I’ve essentially finished the course and I’m just on revision. And the app has become so gamified, and so AI-ified (see also, a bit shit), that it has become more about maintaining my nearly 2200 day streak than actually maintaining, let alone improving, my French. That objective remains, but the mechanism is no longer any good.

So I’m quitting Duolingo, and I’m going to find something else that actually serves the goal.

Now I realise this isn’t the most earth-shattering news to share, however it got me thinking. Last Friday was “Quitter’s Day” – the day most people are predicted to give up on their New Year’s resolutions. We usually talk about it with a bit of judgement and an accompanying eye-roll: “Look at all the people who couldn’t even stick at stuff for two weeks.”

But what if quitting isn’t automatically a bad thing? What if quitting is sometimes not only a good thing, but actually essential?

Let’s explore.

The stories we tell ourselves about quitting

Many of us will have heard – and probably internalised – some version of:

“Winners never quit and quitters never win.”

Vince Lombardi

It sounds like it makes sense, and even sounds rather noble. It also suggests that:

• stopping = failing

• persisting = morally superior, regardless of the cost

When you translate that into work and leadership you get a powerful pressure to see things through long after the usefulness has expired. Projects continue on because “we’ve already invested too much” or “we’re committed now”. Initiatives limp on because no one is willing to ask “what’s the point of this?”.

We rarely say: “Is this still the right thing?”

We more often say: “We’ve come this far; we can’t stop now.”

There’s a difference between perseverance and stubbornness. One is about staying committed to the purpose. The other is about refusing to change course, even when the purpose has evaporated.

A few years ago, I decided that if I really wasn’t enjoying a book, I didn’t have to finish it. This took me an embarrassingly long time to get my head around. I had a whole internal script about it being “good for me”, about having started so I should finish. And yet, it doesn’t mean anything about me if I don’t finish a book. It just means that book is not for me.

The same is true for more than books. Choosing to stop is not automatically weakness; it can be a very necessary and valuable act of course correction.

When habit takes over

Sometimes we carry on doing things even though we can’t remember why.

Or we vaguely remember why we started – it made sense at the time – but that reason is no longer relevant. The habit stayed; the usefulness left. Think of:

• The recurring meeting in your calendar that no one really prepares for, but no one cancels.

• The monthly report that takes hours, where you have a nagging suspicion no one actually reads it.

• The process that provokes eye-rolling, but the explanation for it begins and ends with “we’ve always done it this way”.

And yes, the apps we keep tapping on just to avoid breaking a streak.

Habits can be incredibly helpful to build consistency and embed good practices. But they can just as easily become something that drains our time and energy without any meaningful purpose.

You can’t endlessly do more

There’s also a more basic problem: we can’t endlessly do more.

Our time, energy, focus and attention are finite. That’s not a moral failing; it’s just how humans work. Yet within organisations, we’re remarkably good at layering new things on top of the old:

• New strategic priorities (without formally ending the old ones).

• New responsibilities (without removing or redistributing anything).

• New habits and goals in our personal lives (without questioning what they’re displacing).

Over time this becomes overwhelming and exhausting, leaving us feeling as if we’re constantly trying to catch up, to get on top of things, while falling even further behind.

The willingness to quit is essential. It is how we create the space to do fewer things better, instead of more things badly.

As leaders, what we stop doing is as instructive to others as what we start. Cancelling an unproductive meeting, ending a pointless process, or formally closing a project sends a clear signal: time and attention matter here.

Knowing what to quit (and how to test it safely)

Knowing what to quit starts with a deceptively simple question:

Do we know why we’re doing this?

Not why we did it once upon a time. Why we’re doing it now.

What’s the purpose of this meeting, this report, this process, this app, this commitment? Does it still serve us? If it vanished for a month, would anything truly important break?

If we don’t know how and why we’re spending our time, it’s very difficult to spend it intentionally.

Once you start asking “why this?” you’ll usually find a few good candidates for quitting or redesign. From there, you can experiment rather than make grand, dramatic exits.

A few practical ways to do that:

• Do a simple time and energy audit
  For a week or two, notice where your time goes and how you feel afterwards. What genuinely moves the dial? What just exists? Pay attention to the things you dread or that regularly overrun. They’re often prime candidates for pruning.

• Run quitting experiments
  Rather than declaring permanent change, try quitting something for 30 days and look at the impact. Pause a meeting, skip a report, simplify a process. At the end, ask: what, if anything, actually got worse?

• Talk before you chop
  That report might feel completely pointless to you, but have you had a conversation with the person who receives it? What’s their real need? Is there a different way they could receive the data that’s more efficient – a shorter summary, different frequency, a dashboard instead?

• Start with low-risk quits
  That might be the book you’re not enjoying, the app you’re only opening to keep a streak alive, or the internal update no one can properly explain. These are low-stakes ways to retrain your brain that quitting is allowed.

None of this is about becoming flaky. It’s about aligning your time and energy with things that actually deliver value (to you and the organisation) and make sense.

Rethinking Quitter’s Day

Sometimes you just have to quit.

It might feel a bit Machiavellian or rebellious to just stop doing something. It can trigger all sorts of discomfort – Am I letting people down? Does this say something bad about me?

And yet, with the things that genuinely no longer serve us, it’s not uncommon that a week later we’ve almost forgotten we were even doing them. There’s no real loss of benefit, but what we notice instead is the extra headspace, the slightly less frantic calendar, the marginally better mood.

So rather than treating Quitter’s Day as a collective failure, we could treat it as a prompt:

• Which resolutions, habits or commitments honestly don’t deserve your time anymore?

• Where have you outgrown the mechanism, even though the objective still matters?

I’m quitting Duolingo not because the goal no longer matters, but precisely because it does. The objective stays: to maintain and improve my French. The mechanism is (long) overdue for a change.

Quitting can be:

• a strategic leadership act;

• a kindness to yourself and your team; and

• a way to protect your finite time, energy and attention.

So, over to you. Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know what you’re willing to quit to shake up your time and energy.

Leave a comment

Restack

Some more nice practical tips in this Substack on strategic quitting, and some of the traps we fall into doing it. If you’ve recently done some planning for 2026, this might help you pass a critical eye over those plans to check you’re not trying to do too much…

QuestionClass

How do you decide what not to work on when planning your year?

Read more

4 months ago

Meme of the week

On the theme of quitting, this one made me smile 🙂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Not the genuinely complex, never-been-done-before pieces of work – more the sort of tasks that should be challenging in a good way, but not feel like wading through treacle.

I have a familiar story that goes something like: “I’m a bit inefficient. I faff. I overthink. I should be quicker.”

Over Christmas, with a bit time to reflect, I realised I’d forgotten something important: for any task that feels hard or heavy, there are two parts to the experience.

There is the task itself, which does take time and attention, especially for anything meaningful. And then there is the fear, worry and doubt that silently attach themselves to the task.

That second part – the emotional overhead – can easily take as much time and energy as the task itself, if not more.

We talk about “pressure at work” as if it’s a purely external thing. But two people can sit in the same meeting with the same targets and one feels mildly stretched while the other feels crushed. The difference is the pressure we put on ourselves. Let’s explore.

What do we really mean by “pressure”?

Pressure isn’t just one single thing, even if it is often talked about that way. One useful way to understand it is by distinguishing:

• Load – what is actually on your plate. The number of projects, the size of the team, the complexity of the challenge, the volume of decisions.

• Stress – your body’s physiological response to that load. The racing thoughts, shallow breathing, disrupted sleep.

• Pressure – the meaning you add on top. The standards, stories and expectations that say what it will mean if you succeed or fail.

To a large extent, the external load – the set of responsibilities and constraints that come with the role – may be non-negotiable. It’s not quite that simple, but it’s also not the focus of this piece!

But the internal layer – the way we interpret that load, and the pressure we create around it – is often far more negotiable than it feels.

We can’t always change the facts. We can almost always change the story we’re telling ourselves about the facts. And that story has a huge impact on how much pressure we experience.

External pressure is real

Before we dive into the inner world, it’s worth being clear: external pressure is real, and I am not suggesting you’re imagining it.

Sources might include:

• Organisational targets and growth expectations.

• Cost pressures and “do more with less” messages.

• Regulatory or legal deadlines that genuinely cannot move.

• Customers or stakeholders with urgent needs.

• Senior leaders with a low tolerance for delay or ambiguity.

It also shows up in more everyday ways:

• The calendar that is back-to-back by default.

• “Quick questions” that are never quick.

• Colleagues who have a habit of dropping last-minute emergencies into your day.

• Poorly prioritised projects where everything is “top priority”.

Sometimes the pressure is simply the consequence of other people’s disorganisation landing in your lap – and the reality of life and leadership means that sometimes you just have to deal with that.

External pressure can lead to very real experiences of time pressure, decision fatigue and cognitive (over)load. So I’m not trying to say this is all “mindset” and that you should be able to breathe your way out of a fundamentally unsustainable situation.

Instead it is an invitation to notice where the hidden, optional layer starts to creep in, so that we can start to do something about it.

Fear, worry and doubt

One simple way to look at the internal layer of pressure is through three lenses: fear, worry and doubt.

Fear

Fear is about threat – real or perceived. In a work context, it might sound like:

• “If this goes wrong, there will be serious consequences.”

• “If I push back, it will damage the relationship.”

Some fears may be grounded in reality. Others are amplified by past experiences, organisational culture, or the stories we tell ourselves about what is and isn’t allowed.

Fear can drive behaviours such as:

• Over-preparing for every meeting, just in case you’re asked about something, even if it’s unlikely.

• Re-writing your team’s work late at night because the idea of “missing something” feels intolerable.

• Avoiding difficult conversations, then working twice as hard to compensate for what you’re not saying.

The task itself might only need two hours. The fear around it quietly adds another two – or more.

Worry

Worry is the mental rehearsal of what might go wrong and how you might be seen.

It sounds like:

• “What if I drop this ball and it has a knock-on effect for everyone else?”

• “What will they think if this is not up to my usual standard?”

• “If I say no to this request, will I be seen as unhelpful or not committed?”

There is often a concern for others woven into worry: not wanting to let people down, wanting to be seen as supportive, wanting to keep the peace.

Worry can lead to:

• Saying yes to additional work when you are already at capacity, because it feels easier than facing the discomfort of saying no.

• Checking and re-checking things you’ve already done, just to be sure.

• Carrying mental to-do lists around in your head, rehearsing conversations or scenarios on a loop.

Notice that none of these behaviours actually reduce the external load. They just make carrying it feel heavier.

Doubt

Doubt lives in the questions we ask about ourselves:

• “Am I really capable of this?”

• “Do I actually know what I’m doing?”

• “What if I’m out of my depth and this is the moment everyone realises?”

Doubt is very common in transitions – new roles, bigger teams, higher stakes – but it can hang around long after you’ve demonstrated competence.

Doubt often leads to:

• Over-reliance on others’ opinions because your own judgement doesn’t feel trustworthy.

• Over-working as a way to prove (to yourself or others) that you deserve to be in the room.

• Hesitating on decisions, slowing things down while you seek yet another piece of information or reassurance.

Again, the actual task might be well within your capability. The doubt about your capability adds pressure that makes it feel much harder than it is.

A note of self-compassion

Before we try and do anything about the fear, worry and doubt, it’s important to say: a lot of this is understandable.

Many leaders have been rewarded throughout their careers for going the extra mile, rescuing failing projects and being constantly available. Many organisations still run on myths like “we do our best work under pressure” or “if you can’t handle the heat, you’re not ready for this level”.

And for some of us, putting pressure on ourselves was – and maybe still is – a way of staying safe or in control. So there’s nothing “wrong” with you if you recognise yourself here. In some contexts, these patterns will have helped you.

The question now is whether the same patterns are still serving you – or whether they’re quietly undermining the quality of your thinking, your wellbeing and your leadership.

So what can we do differently?

There’s a lot that could be said here, but let’s keep it simple. Here are four practical shifts you can start experimenting with straight away.

One. Notice, name – and gently challenge – the pressure

Next time you feel that familiar tightening around a task, pause and ask: What is the actual load here? What am I afraid of? What am I worrying about? What am I doubting about myself?

Write it down, if you can. Seeing it in black and white helps separate the task from the story. Then add one more question:

Is this thought helping me do better work – or just making it feel harder?

You don’t need to argue with every thought. Just notice which ones are useful and which are simply habit.

Two. Watch your language

The way you describe things, even in your own head, can either dial the pressure up or down. Try these small shifts:

• From “I have to…” to “I’m choosing to…” or “I’m being asked to…”

  • “I have to get this done tonight” becomes “I’m choosing to get this done tonight because…”

• Soften the absolutes:

  • Notice words like “must”, “always”, “never”, “can’t possibly”.

  • Experiment with “I’d prefer”, “often”, “I’d find it uncomfortable, but…”.

This isn’t about pretending everything is optional. It’s about making your choices visible to yourself, rather than living under a blanket of unexamined “have tos”.

Three. Renegotiate instead of silently absorbing

A lot of internal pressure rests on untested assumptions such as: “This deadline is fixed.” “I can’t say no.” “If I ask to reprioritise, they’ll think I’m not up to it.”

Instead of taking those as facts, try one small renegotiation step:

• Ask simple clarifying questions:

  • “What’s driving this timeline?”

  • “What happens if this lands Monday instead of Friday?”

• Put the trade-offs on the table:

  • “If we keep this deadline, here’s what I won’t be able to do – are we comfortable with that?”

  • “I can do A by Friday or B by Friday, not both. Which matters more?”

• Use micro-boundaries:

  • “I’ve got 20 minutes now and then I need to prep for tomorrow’s session.”

  • “I can look at this first thing and get back to you by 10.”

You won’t always get the answer you want. But even asking begins to rebalance responsibility, and it stops you automatically converting every request into unquestioned, non-negotiable pressure on yourself.

Four. Deliberately lower the bar (in the right places)

This is the one many high-achieving leaders resist, often because of a belief that “if I don’t put pressure on myself, I’ll let things slide.”

But not everything needs to be done to the same standard – yes, really. Try intentionally choosing where “good enough” is genuinely enough.

For example:

• Send a solid, clear slide deck that is not perfectly polished – and notice what actually happens.

• Don’t re-write your colleague or team member’s document; give feedback and send it as is.

• Leave a non-critical email until tomorrow instead of clearing the deck at 11pm.

You can make this an explicit experiment:

“This week, I will deliberately lower the bar on one task that doesn’t need to be perfect – and I will pay attention to the outcome.”

You may discover that your “default pressure level” has been set much higher than reality requires.

The price of pressure

You may well believe that pressure is the price of doing important work. That without it, you’ll lose your edge.

I’d offer a different possibility:

You don’t do your best work despite feeling constant pressure.

You do your best work when your load is clear, your stress is manageable, and the pressure you put on yourself is proportionate and intentional, not automatic.

You can’t always choose the external pressure. But you can always influence how much extra you add on top. So this week, try asking yourself once a day:

“What pressure am I carrying right now that I don’t actually need to?”

And then take one small action – a conversation, a boundary, a slightly-less-than-perfect deliverable – to put down a tiny piece of it. Bit by bit, that’s how the work starts to feel lighter again, even when the load hasn’t changed.

Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know what you’ll be practising this week to relieve some pressure.

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Restack

A short but on point restack this week on how pressure shows up in our decision-making.

Meme of the week

This just seemed apt, on many levels 😂

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

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Thanks for reading. See you next week!

For many of us, the start of a New Year brings the sense of renewal, of reinvigoration and a fresh start. On the one hand its significance is arbitrary, turning over to a new number as we count the years going by.

Yet it can also feel oddly loaded. For many there’s a pressure that we should use the moment well, that January represents an opportunity we’d be foolish to waste. That tension – between possibility and pressure – is where many of us start the year.

I don’t want to write about doing New Year “right”. Mostly because there’s no such thing. What I’d like to reflect on instead is what this moment offers, and how to avoid some very common pitfalls. Let’s explore.

Why fresh starts have such a pull

There’s a reason the turn of the year feels different. Psychologically, fresh starts matter. They create a natural pause, a line in the sand that helps us step back and ask a few reflective questions about how things are going, and what we might want to change or improve.

For leaders especially, this can be a useful moment. Planning cycles reset and diaries feel marginally less full. There’s a collective sense of just a little bit of space “before we get properly going again…”.

Used well, a fresh start can create energy and clarity. But so often it all goes wrong.

The thin line between momentum and overload

The trouble isn’t the fresh start itself, it’s what we do with it.

At one end of the spectrum, there’s the temptation to go too big, too fast. Sweeping goals and grand declarations mean January can become intense, demanding and frankly intimidating. Short-term effort spikes, but consistency rarely follows. The change doesn’t bed in because it was far too ambitious to live in the reality of everyday life.

At the other end sits cynicism: a dismissal of the whole thing. “It’s just another day”.

Sometimes that’s wisdom speaking, but sometimes it’s avoidance, or an unwillingness to get out of our familiar and comfortable – albeit suboptimal – groove. And if we ignore the moment entirely, we miss a genuine opportunity to pause and recalibrate.

Neither extreme is particularly helpful.

Somewhere in the middle – Goldilocks style: not too hot, not too cold – is a more workable option. A way to acknowledge the fresh start without turning it into a test of your stamina or your competence.

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Evolution beats revolution (most of the time)

This is where a more balanced stance comes in.

January doesn’t have to be about transformation, it’s better suited to adjustment. To small, deliberate improvements that build on who you already are, rather than attempts to reinvent yourself or your leadership.

You might think of it as evolution rather than revolution – a favourite quote of mine relating to the way change happens in a centuries old rowing institution. Sustainable change comes from thoughtful, manageable, repeated actions, not dramatic resets.

This is where the thinking from Do Sweat the Small Stuff comes into play. Effective shifts in leadership presence and impact are usually the result of tiny moments handled differently, again and again. Tone, timing, attention, follow-through. These are the places where real change takes root, and the consistency is what allows others to trust and believe the change will stick.

How this lands in the day-to-day of leadership

When you approach the year with measured intention, rather than trying to change everything at once, something subtle but important happens.

You signal to your team that development doesn’t require drama. That growth is normal, human, and ongoing. That it’s acceptable to work on things without first labelling yourself – or anyone else – as deficient.

January is already a pressured month for many teams. A leader who models steadiness rather than frenzy lowers the emotional temperature. That, in itself, is a meaningful intervention.

Rather than setting out to change everything, consider choosing one or two small shifts that genuinely matter. Not because you’re doing them “wrong”, but because they would make your working life – and the lives of those around you – a little better.

Here are two ways you could approach that:

First, try a micro-review of last year; not a forensic post-mortem, just a moment of noticing.

• Which small behaviours or habits had a disproportionate positive impact?

• Where did your everyday interactions repeatedly drain energy or connection?

• What’s one thing you could do slightly more of, and one thing slightly less?

Second, look at your goals through a self-respect lens before committing to anything new.

• If you assumed you didn’t need fixing, what would you still choose to work on?

• Which ambitions feel grounded and sustainable, rather than performative?

• What might one month of consistent attention achieve, without adding pressure?

Neither of these requires a reinvention. They ask only for honesty and restraint.

Start gently, but do start

Perhaps the most useful way to hold January is this: you don’t need to be new – and you also don’t need to stay exactly the same.

A fresh start can be an invitation, not a demand. A chance to choose one small, grounded shift that shapes how you show up in the moments that actually matter.

Beginning again, without starting over.

Let me know how you do New Year, and how you might do it differently now, by leaving a comment or hitting reply. I’d love to hear from you.

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Restack

I enjoyed this reflection on the year from Steve Magness, synthesising 25 lessons on peak performance. Pithy, and very much on point.

Meme of the week

Some beautiful words to kick off the year from Donna Ashworth.

And for a little bonus extra, I enjoyed this Philosophy Minis video from introducing the Buddhist idea of Dāna – giving without expectation of anything in return – as a practice to take into 2026.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

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End of Year Review 🎅

Employee Name: Father Christmas
Review Period: January – December 2025
Reviewer: North Pole Leadership Council
Peer Feedback: Elves (Production, Logistics), Mrs Claus, Reindeer Operations, select children (demographic 4-7 years)
Line Manager: [Vacant]

1. Executive Summary

Father Christmas continues to demonstrate exemplary commitment to the global gift distribution strategy. Brand recognition remains strong, operational consistency is unmatched, and customer loyalty is frankly exceptional.

That said, as we approach the end of another high-pressure Q4, themes have emerged around leadership style, communication practices, and reindeer-related delegation, which provide opportunities for improvement.

2. Performance Against Objectives

3. Key points from 360 feedback

Leadership and team dynamics

“He means well. But I’ve been told to sort Lego bricks by ‘vibe’. What does that mean?” – Elf, Toy Categorisation Unit
“The reindeer hierarchy is outdated. There’s been no rotation in flight lead for years.” – Dasher
“He’s kind. But let’s just say, if I stopped baking, the North Pole would collapse by Boxing Day.” – Mrs Claus

Communication & Feedback

“I wrote a four-page letter. Nothing. Not even a WhatsApp.” – Emma, age 7
“The workshop suggestion box is full. No one knows where it goes.” – Elf, HR

Operational Model

“One night. Every year. It’s either genius or burnout waiting to happen.” – Head of Risk, Gift Ops
“I’ve offered to map alternate routes with lower air resistance. He laughed.” – Comet, R&D Liaison

4. Key Strengths

• Consistency – Annual delivery metrics are superb.

• Clarity of Purpose – Strong alignment to ‘delivering joy’ mission statement.

• Customer Insight – Reads global wish lists without fail. A little too personal? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

• Brand Presence – Maintains iconic look year-round. Beard maintenance: exceptional.

• Behavioural Framework – Simple naughty/nice binary, but it does keep things straightforward.

• Employment Generation – Only major North Pole employer; generous snack allowance, abundant time off outside Q4.

5. Development Areas

• Delegation – Has been known to re-wrap presents already wrapped by elves. In bubble wrap.

• Feedback Culture – No known process for receiving or acting on elf concerns. “Festive Listening Sessions” cancelled three years running.

• Recognition – Refers to reindeer as “the team” in public statements. Has only ever consistently name-checked Rudolph in public statements.

• Transport Innovation – No meaningful upgrades to sleigh since 1823. Fuelled entirely by carrots, sherry and Christmas spirit.

• Time Management – Leaves all global logistics to a c.12-18 hour window once a year. Resistance to trial phased delivery model.

• Data Protection – Maintains a list of children’s behaviours. No opt-out: potential GDPR incident pending.

6. 2026 Development Plan

7. Reviewer Comments

Father Christmas remains a much-loved and central figure in our global operations. His ability to lift spirits, reward kindness, wear red velvet and rock an amazing beard with confidence continues to inspire. As we look ahead to 2026, we encourage greater collaboration with internal stakeholders, a more open approach to feedback, and fewer last-minute logistical miracles.

And please – for the love of all that is festive – consider the electric sleigh.

Next Review Date:

January 2026 (pending recovery nap)

Footnote to Readers

If you’ve just completed your own end-of-year feedback or PDP process – remember, even Santa gets things wrong. (And he’s been doing this since before performance ratings were a thing.)

Wishing you a peaceful, joyful, and fully delegated festive season.

A Christmas Story

Rather than a Restack, this week I’d like to share a rather delightful story I came across this week.

Here’s the story of how an advertising mistake created the famous Santa Tracker.

In December 1955 the Cold War was in full swing and tensions with the Soviet Union were at an all time high. The red phone at the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) only rang for one reason: potential nuclear attack. When Colonel Harry Shoup answered, he expected a four star general on the other end.

Instead, he heard a tiny voice ask “”Is this Santa Claus?”

Shoup was furious because he thought it was a prank from his staff. But when he yelled into the phone asking who was calling, the voice on the other end started crying.

“Is this one of Santa’s elves, then?” the little kid asked.

That’s when Shoup realized this wasn’t a joke. It was an actual kid who somehow got ahold of one of the most classified phone numbers in America. Shoup asked to speak to the child’s mum who was just as confused as he was. Then she asked him if he had seen the newspaper. She told him there was an advert to call Santa with his phone number on it.

Shoup grabbed the local paper and flipped to the ad where he saw a big picture of Santa telling kids to “Call me on my private phone” with the number ME 2-6681. Sears, the American retailer who had printed the original ad, had made a pretty big mistake. It even said “Be sure and dial the correct number.” But they had printed the wrong number. One digit was off and that one digit connected directly to America’s nuclear defense hotline instead of the Sears Santa line. Kids across Colorado Springs were now flooding a top secret military command centre with calls asking for Santa Claus.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Instead of shutting the whole thing down, Colonel Shoup did something nobody expected from a strict military commander. He ordered his staff to answer every single call and pretend to be Santa. Then he got AT&T on the phone to set up a new secure line to Washington and told them to give Sears his old number.

On Christmas Eve, Shoup walked into the command center to have dinner with his troops and noticed something on the giant glass board they used to track aircraft. Someone had drawn a sleigh with eight reindeer flying over the North Pole. His staff apologized and offered to take it down, but he had another idea entirely. He picked up the phone and called the local radio station.

“This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center” Shoup told the radio station.

“We have an unidentified flying object. It looks like a sleigh.”

The radio stations loved it and started calling back every hour asking “Where’s Santa now?”

The staff would check the radar and give updates on Santa’s position as he made his way around the world. A famous tradition was born completely by accident. NORAD took over from CONAD in 1958 and kept the tradition going. Today, 70 years later, it’s still running strong. Over 100,000 children call the Santa hotline every Christmas Eve. The website gets nearly 20 million visitors from over 200 countries. More than 1,500 volunteers staff the phones including Michelle Obama who answered calls from 2009 to 2016.

Source: Maxwell Finn

Meme of the week

To continue the theme, this is both a nice joke and a lovely poke at what LinkedIn has become…

Thanks for reading, and a big thank you for all your support this year – this is my final Substack of 2025. May I wish you and your loved ones the very best for the holiday season and a happy new year.

See you in 2026!

Why not spread a little Christmas joy (and make me extra happy too) by sharing this with a friend or three who you think would enjoy it!

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Almost every conversation recently has had some version of: “We just need to get this done before the holidays”. Diaries are jam-packed, and everything is a priority. There’s a collective acceleration, as if we can somehow win the race against time and arrive at the festive break having cleared our entire backlog of life and work.

Except, of course, we will not.

Most of the deadlines we’re treating as non-negotiable are, at best, partially true. Yes, people go on holiday. Yes, projects pause. But the idea that everything must be wrapped up and resolved by a particular date in the calendar is a story we tell ourselves – and then act out at significant cost.

Because it’s less about how much time we actually have left in 2025, and more about our relationship with time.

While we stay locked in this race, we hold on to the belief that it’s just about being more efficient, or finding the right productivity hack, or simply working a little bit harder before this deadline. Yet the reality is that it’s a race we cannot win.

The myth of finally catching up

Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks (you can read a summary in a previous Substack here), reminds us that even in the rosiest scenario we have a startlingly small number of weeks on this planet. No productivity system changes that basic arithmetic. Yet many of us behave as if, with the right combination of hacks, apps and habits, we will one day stand on the summit of “everything done”.

You see it acutely in senior leaders. Time starts to feel like an opponent – something you’re constantly trying to get ahead of. You can hear it in the way people talk:

Not enough hours in the day.
I just need to get through this period.
Once this project is over, then it will calm down.

In that framing, time is the enemy. The job is to outrun it, stretch it, squeeze more into it. Any moment that isn’t obviously productive feels like a failure. Rest becomes something you “earn” by clearing the decks, rather than a basic condition for being able to think clearly and lead well.

There is another way to see it.

Instead of time as something to defeat, we can see it as the medium we live in; finite, non-negotiable, unfazed by our attempts to beat it or control it.

From that perspective, the question shifts from “How do I get everything done?” to “Given that I cannot get everything done, what deserves my attention and energy?”

That’s a very different relationship: less heroic, less glamorous, and much more honest.

Renegotiating the relationship

This year has forced me to renegotiate my own relationship with managing time.

My work used to have a remarkably predictable structure. A lot of coaching, clear blocks in the calendar, a rhythm I knew well and, if I’m honest, found comforting.

Now it looks different, as in May I took on a part-time Associate Director role. I’m still coaching, although a little less and I’m starting to build my speaking business in a more intentional way. The content of my work has shifted and the shape of my weeks has shifted with it.

So, my old model doesn’t quite fit anymore – and I’ve found that challenging. Part of me still craves the old routine, even though I’m enjoying the stretch and stimulation of the new work. The problem is that my calendar has become the site of that tug of war.

I’m noticing the impact in the things that slip and the mental load of context switching. In all honesty I still haven’t figured out how to fit it all together smoothly. (My belief that that’s possible might be the issue there…).

For senior leaders, instead of a portfolio shift this can look like, “Now I have a bigger team”, “Now I sit on the executive committee”, “Now I’m expected to think more strategically”. The role changes, the expectations change, and as a result, the scope and priorities change.

But their relationship with time – the way they hold their days, the assumptions about what they “should” still be doing – often stays much the same.

They try to do the new job with the old calendar.

When good intentions meet the messy reality of life

It’s one thing to sit down with a notebook and declare, “Next year I want a different relationship with time.” It’s quite another to follow through on that intention when it meets other people’s priorities, an overflowing inbox and a stream of “Have you got five minutes?” requests. And that’s even before we get to our commitments to our family and in our personal life.

The old military quote: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” applies uncomfortably well here.

For me, even as I’ve been thinking more consciously about how I spend my time, I’ve found myself pulled into the urgent. I can feel the cost of that; not always in immediate consequences, but in the background anxiety that comes from knowing I’m not tending to what really matters.

For many leaders, reality shows up as a week full of meetings, instant responses and firefighting, while the genuinely important work – developing people, thinking deeply about strategy, building relationships that matter – waits in the wings.

The uncomfortable truth is that if your calendar is full of urgent things, it’s not a sign that you’re critical to the business. It’s a sign that you’re under-investing in the work only you can do.

Every “yes” to an urgent request is, quietly, a “no” to something else. We rarely see the “no” in the moment, because it’s invisible. But over time, those invisible “no”s shape our leadership far more than we realise.

The smallest habits tell the truth

Our relationship with time isn’t only revealed in big strategic choices. It’s actually most visible in our smallest habits – how we spend each moment of time through our day.

For me, one of the most confronting mirrors has been my phone. I spend a truly alarming amount of time on it. Not all of that time is “wasted” – some of it is reading, some of it is connecting with people I care about – but plenty of it absolutely is.

Recently, I put a screen time widget right on the home page. Now, every time I unlock my phone, I’m greeted with a stark number: how many hours I’ve spent on it today. That tiny change is already shifting my behaviour, simply because I can no longer pretend I don’t know.

The phone is just one example, though.

For some the equivalent is an excessive meeting culture. The calendar is full, which makes them feel indispensable, needed, valued. For others, it’s a determination to hit inbox zero at all costs, or an inability to leave a to-do list unfinished at the end of the week. These habits are rarely neutral. They’re often a little bit addictive. There’s a hit of satisfaction, or importance, or control.

If we’re serious about changing our relationship with time, we have to do two things.

First, notice – properly – where our time is actually going.

That might be phone data. It might be an honest look at a month of calendars. It might be observing how you behave in the 10 minutes between meetings, or the hour before bed.

Second, we have to be willing to intervene in our own habits.

Not with grand declarations, but with specific, sometimes slightly uncomfortable experiments. Fewer meetings. A different approach to email. Phone out of the bedroom. Whatever actually fits the pattern you’ve noticed.

These are small shifts. But they’re where the truth of our relationship with time lives.

Choosing a different race

The end of the year is, in many ways, arbitrary. The work does not stop and the demands do not magically vanish just because the calendar flips to a new year.

And yet, this point in the year can still be useful. Not as a finish line, but as a moment to step out of the race long enough to ask whether you actually want to keep running it in the same way.

What if, instead of trying to “win” against time, you stepped out of the race altogether? Made a choice that your goal isn’t to get everything done, but to get the right things done. Accepted that some things will be left unfinished – and you choose, as consciously as you can, what those things are.

As you look towards the rest of this year and into next, try using the questions below as prompts for honest reflection.

1. If I looked at your diary this month, would I see someone owning their time – or someone focused on meeting everyone else’s deadlines?

2. If your calendar reflected the role you are employed to do now (rather than the habits of any previous role), what would disappear?

3. If your calendar is full of urgent things, what important work – the work only you can do – is being crowded out?

4. What are you willing to actively stop doing, or leave undone, to focus on what’s really important?

5. Looking at your calendar for the rest of December and into January, where might you be confusing a fast response with good leadership?

6. What is one small, concrete experiment you’re willing to try in January to change how you interact with time – not a whole new system, just a single habit?

We may never feel as if we have “enough” time. But we do have agency over the relationship we build with it. And you get to (re)shape that relationship, moment by moment, in the way you fill tomorrow’s calendar and the way you reach for your phone this evening.

Want some extra accountability? Or to share how you’d like to shift your relationship to time? Hit reply or leave a comment and let me know.

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Restack

Not quite a restack this week, because I wanted to share something from Oliver Burkeman and in his own words, his “Substack isn’t on Substack” 🤣

So here’s a link to one of his posts called You don’t need to fight time, which explores how the Pomodoro technique can help reclaim your focus on what matters.

Meme of the week

This felt apt 😀 And, spoiler alert, only part of it has anything to do with the choice of career…

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

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Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week for my final Substack of 2025, which will - once again - be me using that as an excuse to have a little fun 😀