“What’s your breath doing?” “What’s happening in your belly right now?” “What’s going on with your face?” If you’ve been a client of mine, I guarantee you I’ve asked you questions like these hundreds of times. New clients of mine are often puzzled by this. After all, they’re not paying…

Let’s get real: If you want to be doing substantial work as a leader, you’re going to be uncomfortable all the time. Not mildly-spicy, challenging-in-a-fun-way uncomfortable, either. I’m talking deep, existential, I’m-in-the-deep-end-and-I-don’t-know-how-to-swim uncomfortable. Why is this the case? As a leader, it’s your job to solve problems that other people…

Companies at all sizes are afflicted by a paradox of measurement. The more data we have, the better decisions we make. In support of that, we want to measure everything and measure it precisely: clicks, opens, command-line invocations and website visits. …

“Can we talk about Black Lives Matter?” This was the second time that week a white executive coaching client of mine had asked the same question. Like most of my clients, he wanted to participate in the movement. He wanted to leverage the resources of the company he had founded…

I was first introduced to demon feeding at Spirit Rock, that oh-so-California Buddhist-ish institute nestled in the hills of Marin. …

A client of mine — call her Rebecca — left her job recently. I suggested that before we start strategizing about her next job, we spend some time figuring out what she wants her life between jobs to look like. …

I’ll never forget the day I learned about status in my college improv class. It felt like I had received a small dose of enlightenment: all of a sudden, conflicts that used to befuddle me made sense. The mysterious behavior of the people around me became a little less mysterious. …

How to foster excellence without bringing people down — This is an essay about how to coach your team. It’s also an essay about how to plant your own seeds of self-improvement without getting stuck in the dirt. Let’s say you have a young, enthusiastic designer on your team — call him Jerome. Jerome is great at spinning up…

I spend a lot of my time talking to my clients about in-person communication. Interviews. Pitches. Conference talks. When I ask clients to design their ideal version of upcoming communications, they have a tendency to get stuck on content and ignore all the surrounding factors. Case in point: a client…