Articles

A library of reflections on leadership, consciousness, and the work of awakening to a more aligned way of being. 

These essays are for leaders navigating the frontier between inner stillness and outer impact.

Categories
Coaching Philosophy

The B.S. of Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

There was a pilot who was once terrified of the clouds. They appeared huge, seemingly weightless and at times dark and fearsome. The pilot did everything he could to evade them on his flights.He sought help to get rid of them, but no amount of work he could do would solve this problem he had to deal with everyday.Until one day, by accident, he crashed into a cloud, and much to his horror, nothing happened.

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Leadership

Awakened Leadership and the Myth of ‘Artificial’ Intelligence

As the role of Artificial Intelligence is increasing in everything, I’ve been wondering: If we, as human beings, are a part of nature, how can anything we create be artificial? We see a beaver's dam or a spider's web as natural. Yet we see a skyscraper or a silicon chip as artificial. But are they? Or are they all just different expressions of the same, singular life force, building structures from the raw materials of

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Coaching Philosophy

Being as Noun vs Being as Verb

There’s a paradox at the heart of our existence.I’ve spent most of my life living by the ocean. At a distance, the ocean just is. And at the same time, it is endlessly wave-ing.We, too, live in these two states at once.There is Being as a Noun. This is our foundation. It’s your “is-ness,” your existence, the simple, unchanging fact that "you are." This is the deep, silent, and stable part of you that exists

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Coaching Personal Philosophy

The Paradox of Mastery

I received some news this week. I’ve been recognized as a Master Certified Coach (MCC) by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). It’s a milestone that has me thinking about the path of mastery, particularly through the lens of a concept from Zen and Japanese martial arts: kata. A kata is a form, a series of prescribed movements practiced with discipline until they become second nature. The student practices the kata relentlessly, not for its own

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Coaching Leadership

On Leading Without Losing Yourself

Leadership sometimes feels like a constant act of shapeshifting. In a single day, you are a mentor for your team, a peer to your colleagues, a subordinate to your bosses.  You are called to be a strategist who knows the right path forward, a diplomat navigating politics with astuteness, a taskmaster who gets his team members to deliver, and sometimes even a friend trying to preserve relationships while pushing back on ideas or giving feedback.

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Coaching Leadership Philosophy

A New Relationship with Your Mind

There is likely a voice in your head. If you've achieved a degree of material success, that voice is probably loud. Sometimes it fills you with ambition, infuses you with willpower, and pushes you forward beyond your limitations. Sometimes it replays mistakes on a loop, fuels the feeling of being an imposter, and second-guesses your decisions. It tells you that you’re not moving fast enough, not doing enough, not being enough. It could be the

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Leadership Philosophy

Integrity as a Force of Nature

My attempt here is to create a new possibility for you. You might be thinking of integrity as a moral act - keeping your word, being honest, acting ethically. These are all vital. But I've come to see that this is only a shadow of a much deeper reality. So I want to offer to you the possibility of a different kind of integrity: structural integrity or ontological integrity. It is the state of our inner

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Leadership

When The Plan Is The Problem

I spoke with an IT leader in his late 40’s this week. Amidst the news of industry-wide layoffs and economic shifts, we discussed the precariousness of the future. "The problem," he said, "is that our plans are becoming obsolete." He was talking about the five-year plans, the career ladders, the retirement timelines, the structured narratives we build to make sense of the world. But then he added a crucial insight that gets to the heart

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Leadership Philosophy

Navigating Infinite Complexity

After sitting in confidential conversations with leaders for a few thousand hours, I’ve come to fully appreciate that the unseen work of leadership is not in finding simple answers, but in developing our capacity to navigate complexity. Complexity isn’t just about having many moving parts. It’s a state where those parts are interconnected and unpredictable, where cause and effect are unclear, and where contradictory forces are often at play simultaneously. Basically, it is our reality. Reality

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