Marcus runs a 40-person engineering firm, and last quarter he made a call he had to reverse eleven days later. A key client threatened to...
A leader I worked with recently had sixteen browser tabs open before she even started her morning. Competitor analysis. Board deck comments. A market research...
I was a few pieces short of finishing a 4th of July Liberty puzzle when I gave up looking and went to make dinner. An...
The Problem on the Board In Vistage, we use a process called issue processing. A member puts a problem on the board, the group asks...
I was standing on a stage in San Diego watching something happen that I don’t think the panelists even realized they were doing. Four women...
I’ve been soliciting all of you to send me your own CHART stories. A few weeks ago, someone sent me one. I’m going to share...
Think about the person who changed the direction of your life. Maybe it was a teacher who said something offhand after class or a mentor...
We love to talk about transformation after it happens, whether it’s the bell ringing after the last chemo treatment, the boundary finally set after years...
There’s a version of transformation we expect in stories. Someone hits rock bottom, or as Joseph Campbell would call it, they face “the belly of...
Last week in my Vistage meetings, I passed a box around the room. I had placed an object in it and told the attendees that...
Nobody arrives resilient, at least not with a tiny emotional tool belt and a laminated certificate that says, “Congratulations, you are now ready for suffering.”...
There’s a story you’ve been telling to others, maybe for years. You know the one. It has a beginning, a middle, and a tidy lesson...
Here’s the thing about authenticity: the moment you start performing it, you’ve lost it. I’ve been sitting with this idea for a while, and it...
We often talk about hardship as though it were a chapter we had to survive before the real story could begin. We reference it as...
Hardship Is the Crossing Between Who We Were and Who We Become We are weirdly obsessed with the shiny ending and I think there are...
When we picture courage, our brains love a dramatic montage. Firefighters racing toward danger. A kid walking into a school where they are not wanted....
Most leaders already know story matters. It rallies a team, sells a vision, restores trust, and reminds people why the work is worth doing. The...
If you have ever tried to change someone’s mind with a spreadsheet, you already know the painful truth: data is useful, and while persuasive, it...
We love the romance of inspiration. The lightning bolt. The muse floating in at 2:00 a.m. with a silk robe and a perfect metaphor. And...
There’s a reason so many breakthroughs happen near water, under trees, or on a trail where nobody can see your “thinking face.” Nature has a...
The name self-forgetfulness does it absolutely no favors. When I’m rattling off the three pre-cursor states to inspiration – spaciousness, stillness and self-forgetfulness – the...
Most of us are trying to be inspired while also trying to look like we have our lives together. Which is… adorable. And also wildly...
Stillness can feel like a void, which is why we avoid it. In this post, I’ll cover what the “empty space” actually gives you, why...
The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a strange little hallway of time. The inbox slows. Meetings vanish. The world exhales. And even if...
