This is a love letter to all the leaders we’ve supported (and the ones we haven’t) who are stepping out into this (often scary) world every day, taking care of others, and still trying to do their own inner-work.  

If you are one of those leaders, let’s face it: the deck is stacked against you.  And yet, so much of our effectiveness as leaders comes down to our inner-work.  

Transformative leadership requires incredible presence and self-management.  We have to be emotionally attuned with others if we want to know what’s really happening on our teams. We have to be attuned with ourselves if we’re going to be authentic.  But we have to be attuned with ourselves without making it about ourselves.  In other words, we have to be aware of our own ego - and actively keep it out of the driver’s seat. 

What do the words “emotional constancy” mean to you?  For most of the leaders we work with, those words are nearly synonymous with “unemotional.”  They tend to view emotional constancy as a desirable leadership skill:  the ability to put on a good emotional poker face. 

It’s understandable that leaders want to avoid being overly emotional.  No one wants to be seen as erratic or untrustworthy.  But many leaders striving for “emotional constancy” have actually internalized a different, more extreme idea: that emotions in general are bad.   Or, at least, “negative emotions” – like fear, anger, or sadness – are things to be avoided. 

And if we’re trying to lead people through difficult work while avoiding some of our most fundamental human emotions, then we’re just denying our basic circuitry.

On Sunday night I was watching Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance while I was anxiously waiting for a text from my brother that he and his family were back home safe.  My brother’s wife is from Colombia and - along with their two sons - they were traveling back from Colombia after visiting family and were expected home on Sunday evening.  There was absolutely no legally-justified reason for me to worry about them having any issues coming back into the U.S.  But I was.  And as minutes went by without hearing from them, my anxiety grew. 

When we work with teams and leaders on developing more psychological safety, we often find people confusing psychological safety with something more akin to emotional safety.  This is an understandable confusion because of how many leaders feel pressure to control the emotional environment of their teams, but the two concepts are not just different - they are contrary.

Psychological safety is defined by the degree to which people can share their true feelings, experiences, and opinions – without being punished for sharing something that someone else doesn’t want to hear.  It is a powerful distinguishing factor between low and high performing teams, as validated by an overwhelming amount of research across sectors. 

“Emotional safety,” as defined by social psychologist and NYU ethics professor Jonathan Haidt, is the belief that “I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did.  I have the right not to be ‘triggered’.”  

This is the time of year that we’re often encouraged to think about the “better version of us” in the new year.  And that invites questions about what new thing, philosophy, skill, habit, etc. we need to be the ideal “new you” in 2026.

But this introduces a slippery slope.  Especially if it gets us thinking that we need something “new” in order to be happier. 

One of the fundamental questions of Buddhism is: what if peace of mind is not “out there,” but within us.  What if there is nothing wrong with us and we have what we need?  What if there is a deep well of inner-peace that is available to us when we are able to slow down and be truly present to ourselves and others?  

The whole idea of a “flow state” is that when we’re performing at peak levels we have accessed a state of effortless action.  At a technical level, our bodies are operating in a zone where action and awareness have merged – and we’re moving in harmony with our environment.  In a more spiritual sense, we’re harnessing an energy that goes beyond us in some way; “flowing” with the universe instead of straining to force our own path despite whatever headwinds or currents are working against us.  

We know what it feels like to be in that state of flow – an incredibly productive yet almost effortless state of being.  But we also know what it feels like to be in that state of strain – when we’re giving tremendous energy but getting almost nowhere because we’re swimming against the current.

When people are being honest with each other, almost anything is possible.  When they’re not, almost nothing is.  

This is the basis of “psychological safety” – the extent that team members can freely share what they think and feel without fear of repercussions.  When teams don’t have that safety, they hold back.  They spend time and energy playing politics and navigating what is unspoken.  Critical information gets siloed and there will be guaranteed organizational blind spots.  

Wading through all of that and still trying to do good work is a perilous (and exhausting) task.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I had a really hard conversation.  In fact, “conversation” feels like the wrong word.  More like a “fight.”

It felt especially hard because it rarely happens.  Of course, we bump heads in various ways all the time.  But really “having it out” is very rare.  And when it happens, it’s unsettling.  

But after a night of going to bed angry and waking up feeling disconnected and disheartened, we were able to have a much less contentious and more real conversation.  And it became apparent that - ten years into our beautiful marriage - we’re still finding new ways to be more honest with ourselves and each other.  Still finding ways to better accept and deal with our shared reality, as versus rationalizing, sugar-coating, or distracting ourselves from the harder parts of our lives and relationship.  And it’s amazing how quickly the truth can heal.  Fifteen minutes of getting vulnerable with each other and I felt so much better.

Feeling emotions is good for us.  We know how to feel sadness.  Humans have this incredible mechanism that’s been fine-tuned over about 6 million years of evolution, in which our body can process sadness physically in a way that expels tension and reduces stress within our nervous system.  It’s called “crying.”  We have a similar built-in response for fear that involves rising cortisone levels, elevated heart-rate and increased adrenaline.  These processes can be physically taxing, but they’re also natural, normal, and innocent.  It’s what we’re designed to do as a way of processing emotional energy and moving it out of our bodies. 

What we’re NOT designed to do is resist those processes and trap that energy in our bodies.  We’re not designed to feel sad and try to ignore it and push through it.  We’re not designed to feel afraid and try to pretend like that fear doesn’t exist.  We’re not designed to feel angry and smile.  

I grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  And after a 35 year hiatus, I started watching again with my daughter.  I’m glad I did.  I’m occasionally blown away by the wisdom Fred Rogers offers about navigating life and leadership. 

“What’s mentionable is manageable,” was a reminder that Fred loved to give to children and adults who were having a hard time sharing something that felt honest but scary to say out loud.

Have you been thinking about how to help your team perform better next year?   

The research strongly suggests that psychological safety is the most important factor to the performance of a team and we’ve shared our own explanation for WHY it’s so impactful.  It plays out at every level:  teams with psychological safety have incredibly high-impact collaboration, fewer blind spots, and less stress overall.  

Given all that, you’d think it’d be the primary focus of coaching and leadership development.  But most leaders have never gotten any development on the specific craft of creating psychological safety.  Let alone effective development.  And there is a core truth about psychological safety that is often misunderstood…

If you’re reading this email right now, there is probably at least one thing about your team or organization that you want to change, but the thought of making that change is scary.   Maybe it’s a staffing decision or someone’s behavior that doesn’t feel right.   In your gut, or in your heart of hearts, you know what you need to do.  

But you haven’t done anything yet.  Perhaps because acting on that feeling could mean making scary decisions or having hard conversations where feelings might get hurt.  

One of the most natural things we can do as leaders is to take those feelings of fear and then go to our heads where we strategize a way forward that helps us get what we want while avoiding painful decisions and scary conversations.

Yesterday, I received a very distressing text from my uncle.  He shared that his husband - who is also very dear to me and has been battling cancer for over a decade - might be reaching the final stage of that battle.  “Not up for talking now, but maybe later this week,” he wrote. 

I felt a shock wave of emotion, but then - almost instantly - that was replaced with a flood of thoughts.  What does this mean, exactly, and how do I respond?  My wife and I are supposed to get on a trip on Saturday for our 10th anniversary.  “We’ll probably cancel,” I thought.  We can go down to New York to be with them.  But what would they need, and for how long?  What exactly did this update mean and when would I be able to get more information?  My head started swirling with “what-ifs” as I frantically tried to wrap my head around a semblance of a plan for how to react.  

Then I stopped myself.  I sat down and closed my eyes and tried to get in touch with my heart.

About four weeks ago, my back pain returned for real.  With an incredibly busy work schedule, I did everything I could to push through it.  It got worse. Then two weeks ago I spent 36 hours unable to get out of bed because of excruciating back spasms that were triggered by the slightest movement.  It had gotten so bad that I needed my wife’s help to simply turn over in bed.  

Laying there in bed, largely immobile, I did something I should have done many years ago.  I listened to Dr. John Sarno’s bestselling book, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection.  

The mind-body connection is a pillar of eastern medicine but until recently has been starkly absent from western medicine.  When Dr. Sarno – an NYU medical school professor and chronic pain specialist – hypothesized decades ago that most back pain has psychological origins, he was largely ostracized from the medical establishment, although now his ideas are becoming much more widely accepted.  

When I asked someone on our team how they were doing last week, she said, “January has been a long year.”  

It resonated. 

I’ve been struggling recently.  Dealing with threats both real and imagined to people I care about.  I feel myself bracing and moving into a defensive crouch.

For many of us, things feel under attack.  Some of the leaders we support are not just in an urgent / reactive mode, but carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.  And in that state, the temptation may be to gloss over our own feelings and focus on what we need to do - and who we need to be - for the people we lead or care about.  

But we ARE one of the people that we need to care about.

As leaders, we’re often conditioned to believe the fallacy that we are in control.  “I’m the leader, so all these things that are happening are because of me.” “I can control how other people feel and what they do.”  These are blatant distortions of reality that leaders are frequently invited to embrace.  We’re told that great leaders take responsibility for everything and everyone … they decide what’s going to happen and then make it happen.  Essentially, we’re told - though never in so many words - that great leaders play god.  And for most of my career, I was all too ready to hear it.  That’s often what my ego wanted to believe anyways.  

But abundant research shows that the most effective leaders don’t operate that way. 

Think about what’s going to happen during the rest of your day.  What are you going to do?  Who are the people that you’re going to be with?  What are things you might say to them? 

Now I’m going to invite you to entertain a startling thought.   Imagine that it might be the last conversation you’re going to ever have with those people.  What would you say to them if you knew you may never speak again?  How present would you be in that conversation?  How honest would you be? 

This last week I’ve looked for some outside voices that can balance out some of my challenging inner ones.  I’ve come back to a voice that has given me a lot of guidance and comfort over the last few years. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk and peace activist who was exiled from his native Vietnam in 1966 for refusing to take sides in his country’s brutal civil war.  As I’ve found myself full of emotion and energy to resist in some way, he reminds me that there IS a way to rebel that doesn’t involve more judgment, hate, and polarization.  He saw a radical way to “resist” that is life-affirming and compassionate.  And he saw harder times than these.  

I wanted to share some of his words with you this week…

I’ve been waiting for this election day (and waiting for it to be over) for months.  In my worst stretches, I found myself compulsively checking for new headlines – reflexively getting out my phone to look at the newest “election updates” in almost every spare moment.  My daughter would walk into the room and I’d put my phone away, but my head now was in Michigan or Arizona, or wherever the rally was taking place that constituted some form of “news.”  About two weeks ago I realized what was really happening: I was constantly looking for some small piece of evidence that I could use to deepen my hope that everything was going to turn out okay.  I was trying to alleviate my anxiety, and in doing so, I was adding to it significantly.  

For a few months now I’ve had the nagging feeling that someone I care about has been upset with me.  I care about her a lot, but we’re not that close.  So I was finding it extra hard to bring it up and just ask her about it.  I tried to put it out of my mind but it kept popping back up.  And the more time I spent with my feelings, the more clear it was to me that I should talk with her.  And the more certain I got about what I needed to do, the more terrified I got about actually doing it.  

What was I so afraid of?