The work,
all of it
Leaders under pressure need to guard what gets their attention, stay curious about what they don’t yet understand, and take care with the stories they tell their people and themselves. And what they need most is a group of people who will check them on all of it.
That’s the work. Everything else, the keynotes, the coaching, the book in progress, is some part of that paragraph.
One bureau lists me as a Leadership Accelerant. Another sells me as The Distraction Expert. A third has me down as a generations speaker, which I haven’t been since skinny jeans were news. None of them are wrong, exactly. But when the people whose whole job is describing you can’t agree on a description, the explaining falls to you. So here it is, all of it, in one place.
Attention
Attention is the center. It is what we see.
You can’t pay attention to everything, and unlike the machines, that limit is a feature, not a bug. What you give your attention to is your brain saying what matters right now, so the rest can pass by. Distraction is confusion about what matters.
The limit also means there is always a buy and a sell. If I ask you to join the meeting, you’re not doing something else.
I have ADHD. I wrote a book about attention anyway, which either disqualifies me or is the entire point.
Story
Story declares what it means.
Humans think in story. It’s the chain that tells us what we’re aiming toward, what caused what, what deserves our attention next. Jesus spoke in stories; he didn’t just give advice.
The only way to build anything hard is to have people who come alongside you because they buy into your story. And you have to be very careful guarding the stories you tell yourself, because they become the reality you live in and the reality your team creates. Under pressure, leaders start telling the most negative version of their own story, the version that makes the team the enemy. Nobody decides to. It arrives.
Whoever controls the narrative, people move toward it.
The part underneath
The piece under all three doesn’t have a name yet. On purpose. I’m saving the name for the book, partly for good reasons and partly because I don’t have one yet.
People close enough to say, “that’s not what’s happening.”
You need them because these three capacities fail quietly. Attention narrows without announcing it. Ego armors up one meeting at a time. The story goes dark a shade a week, and the person it’s happening to is the last to see it. The higher you rise, the less truth reaches you. People don’t lie to you. They filter. They edit. They read your mood and adjust. And your reaction to bad news teaches people what to bring you next time.
I have a group of friends I meet in Colorado once a year, on a river where the phones don’t work. They are the least impressed people in my life. I recommend acquiring some.
I don’t have a framework for this part. I just know the leaders who last have people who want nothing from them but them.
Mostly on stages. The flagship carries the whole argument, with the rocket company as the proof, and four more keynotes go deeper: attention, communication, change, and culture. Off the stage, I coach founders, executives, and athletes through the highest-stakes version of story work, which is usually somebody’s biggest speech. I help design experiences and leadership development that awaken curiosity. (Not curiosity workshops. Nobody needs a curiosity workshop.) And there’s the book.