Six women sat down with me at the Texas Conference for Women this week. Each one was waiting for someone to give them permission to move.

They were at vastly different places in their careers - some fresh out of college and in their first career job ever, some who’ve been at this for a while. (The following examples are composites of different women I spoke to and clients that I’ve worked with over the past year.)

One woman has been in her role less than five years, and she wonders if it is time to leave. She’s not receiving any feedback on her work; she goes unnoticed to the point of people doing work that she’s already done because they were unaware of her efforts.

Another wants to be a leader. She knows that she has the skills - she’s been mentoring and training others for years - but how does she tell her boss that she wants to lead without sounding like she’s going to leave if they don’t put her on a leadership track?

Another has gone as high as she can go on her team. She got there, she enjoyed it, and now there’s nowhere left to climb unless someone creates a role above her. She’s worn out and wondering if this is all there is.

The need for permission doesn’t stop when you get promoted. Maybe you’ve gone months waiting for someone to tell you you’re doing good work. While you’re waiting for feedback, the voice in your head is filling in the gaps.

Where do you find yourself waiting for permission?

Subscribe now

The Voice That Fills the Silence

Let’s give a name to the voice in our head. Naming it is the first step to quieting the voice. In the Positive Intelligence® framework, this is the Judge.1 I could hear the Judge hard at work as I spoke to each of the women. While none of us can really know what’s going on in another’s head, we can guess at what the Judge and its accomplices might be saying to our composite characters. You can read more about the Judge here, but today I want to focus on a couple of its accomplices.

The Pleaser is there to tell you that wanting something for yourself is disloyalty to those around you - your team, your boss who trained you, etc. For the second woman, the Pleaser keeps her from talking about her desire to lead. She doesn’t want to disappoint her boss or seem ungrateful for what she has now.

The Hyper-Achiever tells you that the only way to prove your value is to move up one more rung on the ladder. But what happens when you run out of rungs? For our third woman, the promotions have been the proof that she’s doing well. The Hyper-Achiever tells her that she needs to start building a taller ladder.

Of this pair, the Hyper-Achiever is the louder voice in my head. The Hyper-Achiever says that I haven’t done enough, not as much as so and so. They’re worth more than me - why would anyone choose me over them?

How does the Pleaser show up for you in the middle manager’s seat? Maybe you’re saying yes to every request from leaders so that no one questions your loyalty. What about the Hyper-Achiever? Maybe you’re treating a promotion as the only proof you’re doing well.

Navigate Your Way Forward

If the Judge is the voice in our head passing out verdicts like candy on Halloween, the Sage is the part that can see a hard situation clearly, from all angles, before the verdict comes. The Sage has five moves. I wrote about the Explore move here. Today, the helpful move is Navigate.

Navigate allows you to choose between the options before you. It’s based on your core values, the things that give your life purpose. The women in our story are waiting for permission to come from outside of themselves. They are measuring themselves with someone else’s ruler, but Navigate helps to measure with your own values.

At the conference, Hoda Kotb said, “Not every door is your door. Not every mistake is fatal.” Navigate is how you tell which doors are yours to walk through. Your values point the way, and since not every mistake is the end of the world, you don’t need a guarantee before you choose what you want.

Is It Mine or a Should?

I can hear some of you saying - but I don’t know if my values are really mine or if they are just things that I think I should do. Is this a life-giving value or a should? There are lots of values tests on the internet these days (I’ve even written one myself!), but the questions that I keep coming back to are from a much older practice of discernment. To read more about it, check out Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives Life by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn. In it the authors walk you through a daily discernment practice.2 I’ve adapted their questions slightly:

• What moves you toward life and other people? What gives you energy and hope?

• What makes you feel heavy or restless, isolated and turning in on yourself?

You ask these questions (or questions like them) each day, but the answer shows up over time in the pattern that is forming. It isn’t based solely on a good or a bad day. For me, the pattern looked like being in a role where I felt like I was always fighting to be heard. Meeting after meeting, month after month, pushing and pushing to be heard. That wasn’t life-giving for me. Consider these questions:

• Over the past month at work, what made you feel the most alive or made you feel energized? What zapped your strength just thinking about it?

• What do you find yourself doing without even being asked?

Keep asking these questions, and over time, you’ll start to see unmistakable patterns. Arrows pointing you towards or away from things. That is the Sage at work.

To go back to the women from the conference, the one whose work is unnoticed might ask whether the work is still energizing for her, even when no one seems to see it. The woman who wants to lead can look back on years of mentoring and training others and see how this fits the pattern. The third woman, feeling drained at the top of the ladder, might decide to get off the ladder to go back to something that she used to love.

Subscribe now

Reflect and Act

Reflect. Go back through the last section and consider the questions listed there. Are you starting to see some patterns that you want to test?

Act. Try these questions out for a week. As you transition from work to home, write one line for what gave you life and one line for what drained you at work that day. At the end of the week, read the five pairs together and look for what repeats.

My dog, Gizmo, tends to get trapped in places. The place he’s most commonly trapped is my husband’s office which has a door that opens one way. It’s very easy to push open, but it closes behind you. And if you can't pull a door open, you can't get out. This is Gizmo’s nemesis, trapping him multiple times a day. Every day, every week. The only way out is for one of us to open the door.

I think a lot of us also get stuck sometimes. It isn’t that we don’t know any better - we’re all smarter than Gizmo - but we still find ourselves in situations and wonder - how on earth did I end up here? And we stay trapped until someone comes and opens the door.

I work with leaders in mission-driven organizations who second-guess every decision, question whether they belong, and feel trapped by the weight of the mission resting on their shoulders. I help leaders gain confidence to do what they do best and trust their teams with the rest.

Who am I?

I am Cate Burnett Fierbaugh, and sometimes, I’m a little like my dog.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working alongside minority language communities who wanted to see their languages used, valued, and preserved for the next generation.

As my career took many twists and turns, I eventually found myself in a mid-level leadership position. Just like you. I loved it, but eventually I started to feel the squeeze. Leadership had a vision. The team knew what life was like on the ground. And I was somewhere in between absorbing pressure from both sides. I had a great team, but after numerous reorganizations and leadership changes, neither the team nor the job looked much like it did before. Doubts started to creep in and I began to question: What do I like about my job? And what are things I could do without?

So I spent a lot of time soul searching, trying to figure out what was working, what wasn’t working, and what I would like to do instead. Teammates and friends readily shared what they saw in me. A career counselor helped me sort through it all. The office door opened, and I saw that there was a world of possibilities.

When I reflected on the things that I liked in my job, what I realized was I liked my team. I liked working with them and seeing them succeed. I liked giving people the tools they needed to do their very best. Then, stepping back and letting them shine.

So I became a coach. Now I help leaders do what opened the door for me: look honestly at where they are and decide where they want to go. I started ERA Coaching & Consulting so I could work with you because I was you.

What’s Inside?

You have enough on your plate, so my articles are intentionally short, something that you can read in 5 minutes, usually less. Every post uses the ERA format that I use with my coaching clients:

• EQUIP. A story from a middle manager’s real week, plus a tool to use the next time it happens to you.

• REFLECT. A question to sit with: where does this pattern show up on your team, or in your own head?

• ACT. One experiment to try, so you can see whether the tool fits you.

You’re in the right place if…

• You’ve given feedback up the chain so many times you’ve stopped expecting anyone to hear it.

• You replay meetings on the drive home, wondering if you said the wrong thing.

• People tell you you’re good at your job, and you can’t quite believe them.

• You care about the mission enough that letting go of anything feels like letting someone down.

• The cause matters, the budget is thin, and somehow the gap always lands on your desk.

• You’re stuck in the office and need someone to open the door.

  Subscribe now

Start Here

Your time is valuable. Here are the three articles to read to give you the best idea of what we talk about here.

1. The Good Manager Vanishing Act. Read this if you keep stepping in to fix your team’s work.

2. Start Questioning the Voice in Your Head. Read this if you replay every meeting on the drive home.

3. Not Lazy, Not Unqualified, Still Stuck. Read this if you want the bigger picture of why competent people stay stuck, and to find out which saboteur runs your bad days.1

Want to go further?

If you find yourself stuck behind a closed door, let’s find out who’s holding it closed.

Most of us have a few familiar voices that take over when the pressure is on. One insists you do everything yourself. One tells you you’re not good enough. One keeps the peace at any cost. The free Saboteur Assessment from Positive Intelligence® takes about five minutes and shows you which voices run your hardest days.

As a PQ Coach™, I send the assessment personally. Write to me at cate@eraccg.com and I’ll send you the link. Once you have your results, send me your top saboteur and let’s talk about it.

Thanks for reading!

Whether you’ve been here from the start or you’re just joining, I’m glad that you found my corner of the internet.

I hope this becomes the place you come back to after the meeting that went sideways, the week you said yes too many times, or the day you wondered if you’re any good at this. I want this to be the place that helps.

So tell me: What’s the door you’re stuck behind?

I’ve spent the last two weekends sitting outside the grocery store watching Scouts sell popcorn. Selling popcorn is harder than it looks, and by hour three I was starting to question what on earth I was doing there. So, as with anyone who writes about leadership, I started to wonder if I could spin this into a list of lessons learned to share with you here. (Feed two birds with one scone and all that.)

Subscribe now

Lesson 1: You can count the nos, but pretty soon, they’ll start to count you.

When learning to sell popcorn, one suggestion seems to come up a lot - count how many times people say “no” to you. Early in the day, this is a great motivator; your conversion rate is something like six nos for every sale. Not too shabby. But after a 4-hour shift, things start to look pretty bleak. Eventually, they were closer to fifteen nos for every sale, and I stopped counting. What was hugely motivating in the beginning was only serving to point out our failures.

But then I noticed that this didn’t take into account donations to the troop or to the purchase of popcorn for the local fire department. Our measuring stick made it seem like we were falling short, but in reality we were doing fine.

Middle managers tend to do this with every metric. How many 1-on-1s did I have this quarter? What was my team’s response time for tickets? How many projects are on-time and on-budget? These can be great when things are going well, or even when you use them as a starting point for growth, but for some, the thing you choose to count ends up being evidence of you falling short.

To put it in Positive Intelligence® terms, your Judge steps in and says - let me tell you why you failed, why they did it wrong, and why this would never work in the first place.1 The Judge may not have created the metrics for your team - that was probably senior leaders - but the Judge knows how to use those against you anyway.

But what things never show up in a metric? The person on your team that came to you before something became a problem, looking for help troubleshooting. Or maybe it was the tiny flame you put out before it could become a raging inferno. There are a lot of successes that go unnoticed because there isn’t a box to check for them.

Lesson 2: Is the duck just getting in the way?

In the span of several hours focused on a single task, you need to try something to keep things interesting. For us, that showed up as an inflatable duck-rider costume. Anything to make it more entertaining, right? Our thinking was - you will definitely get people’s attention, and surely that will lead to more sales.

But it didn’t. Yes, people paid attention. But that did not prompt them to buy popcorn. In fact, for the hour that the duck was in play, we did fewer sales and fewer donations. (This is what happens when your mom is analytical.) Reviewing the data, it was clear - the Scouts did better selling popcorn as themselves, without riding a duck. The Scouts were better able to connect on a personal level when there wasn’t a duck in the middle.

How often do we get bored in the day-to-day of our work and reach for a new, shiny thing to try? Human nature has us looking for ways to improve (which is great - why else would we need coaches?), but are we looking because we’re tired of the humdrum or because something isn’t working the way it should? If your strongest asset as a leader is holding your team together, then trying to lead like the person next to you gets in the way. You’ll just end up putting a duck between you and the people you want to lead.

Lesson 3: It’s not really about the popcorn.

Why do people buy popcorn? After all, they could have bought it at a fraction of the price from the grocery store they just walked out of. But people aren’t really buying popcorn; they’re backing the kid. One man stopped to buy popcorn because he was an Eagle Scout and remembered selling popcorn himself. He said to the Scouts - you understand that I don’t care about the bag of popcorn; I care about you. People wanted to support the kids in front of them who just wanted to go to camp. The bag of popcorn was just the fringe benefit.

As a middle manager, your team is following you. You interpret the decisions from above that neither you nor your team chose. You explain the new process and why it is important for working well with other teams. Some of those processes probably feel like a bag of overpriced popcorn, but your team buys it anyway because they trust you. Your team doesn’t stick with you because your processes are amazing (though I’m sure they are), they stick with you because you gave them a chance to show their strengths when you put them in charge of that big project. They stick with you because you listen to their input and incorporate it into the plan. They stick with you because you step back and let them do the thing they do best without hovering over them.

Reflect and Act

In each of these cases, the scoreboard wasn’t counting what mattered. Counting nos missed the donations. Wearing the duck costume focused on attention and not sales. And it wasn’t about popcorn anyway.

Reflect. Go back and look at the questions in each section above. What measuring stick are you using on the wrong thing?

Act. Choose one of these options:

• Add one line to the scoreboard. Pick one thing that’s going right but never gets counted (the donations) and write it down this week.

• Name the duck and set it down. Choose one thing you’re doing for attention or out of boredom and stop it for a week. See what changes.

• Ask your team. Ask one person what they’d want you to keep doing. That’s the Lesson 3 version: find out what they’re actually buying.

• Stop counting one thing. Drop one metric you track for yourself (not the ones required from above) for a week and notice whether the Judge gets quieter.

“I know what the problem is, and I’m still stuck.” Sound familiar?

I’ve heard multiple versions of this recently:

One person, working in a service industry, talked about how the work they do goes unnoticed because the people they serve don’t really know the skills or amount of work it took to get things moving.

Several have talked about being able to do things for the company or organization they work for, but then being unable to use those same skills in their personal life.

I’ve also heard a lot of people saying that they aren’t as good/smart/efficient/fill-in-the-blank as they should be.

These are all composites of different people I’ve been working with. People are struggling with their inability to be accountable to themselves while building structure for those around them. They all have different Saboteurs, different jobs, but they’ve ended up in the same place.1 Each person can see the problem in front of them and name the Saboteur that is responsible for it, but then they are stuck. Recognizing and naming the Saboteur is a huge leap of a first step, but then what?

The Judge Changes Tactics

Learning to recognize the Judge and the Saboteurs takes a lot of work. It doesn’t come naturally to many of us, and on top of that, the Judge is sneaky, changing up tactics and accusations. One day you hear it say - You’re behind; you’ll never catch up! And the next day you hear - If my team would leave me alone, I could catch up on all this work!

Once you start catching the Saboteurs in the act, you start to feel like you’re making progress. But then, you have a hectic day and the Judge starts to run the show again. It becomes a shame spiral as you recognize that, once again, you’ve failed to stop the Judge.

A lot of us stop here. We learned to recognize the Judge and the Saboteurs, and it didn’t make a difference in the long run. But what if naming the Saboteur was never meant to be the last step of the process?

Another Voice

Under the influence of the Judge and the Saboteurs, we can only see what they choose to allow us to see. They narrow our focus. Stopping at naming the Saboteur prevents us from examining the situation that got us here in the first place.

The counterpart to your Saboteurs is your Sage. It is the part of you that is able to look at four urgent requests and say out loud that two of them can wait a week without causing further calamity. Yes, you’ll have to carry some disappointment from the people who thought they should be a priority, but the Sage enables you to recognize their disappointment in the situation without reading it as you being the disappointment.

The Sage has five moves to counteract the Judge and the Saboteurs: empathize, explore, innovate, navigate, activate. In Positive Intelligence®, these are called powers, but I like to think of them as moves, because they are actions that I want to see myself taking instead of just qualities to aspire to.

Most of us draw conclusions, devise solutions, or take actions before we’ve adequately understood the situation through exploring it fully.2

The Sage move, Explore, helps us gain a full picture of our situation. This is the move to use when you need to know more to really understand what is going on - inside and outside of yourself. It’s the move that we need when we’ve learned to name what’s in front of us, but have no idea what to do with it.

I don’t have time for this

You’ve reached this point and you’re thinking - I don’t have time to explore; I have to make a decision right now! I get it. If someone told me to go on an exploratory hike when I just need a map to the store, I’d be pretty annoyed.

Exploration feels like a time luxury we don’t have because we’ve all watched people stall things in the name of discovery. We’re afraid to make the final decision. Maybe because we’re afraid that people will be upset about the choice or we’re afraid that it won’t be the right decision, either way, the fear keeps us endlessly circling the same evidence hoping for fresh insight and direction.

Exploration is different from being on an endless loop. When the Sage explores, there is an endpoint in mind and a clear question that needs to be answered. There are four urgent requests on my plate and room for only one. I know which one is the loudest request, but what does each person really need? That’s worth a few emails to nail down so that I can move in the right direction. If you can’t name what you need to find out, you’re stalling.

What happens next?

The strategy used in Positive Intelligence® (PQ®) to help with your exploration is called the Fascinated Anthropologist. (After years of working cross-culturally, I love this strategy as it lets me draw on old skills in a new way.) With this strategy, “you become a keen observer and discoverer of what simply is, without trying to judge, change, or control the situation.”3

I’ve worked for a number of people who were great at creating ideas for every problem under the sun. Sometimes, a plan would be half-implemented and a new idea would come along, restarting the whole implementation process. Of course, my Judge had a verdict at hand: they can’t stick with anything long enough to let us finish it! The Judge was convinced it was right, no need to ask for any more evidence, case closed. But this only led to frustration, both my own and (I’m sure) the leader’s. I needed to try something different.

So, I started asking questions like someone who was completely new to the situation. I wanted to tap into curiosity instead of annoyance. What problem do you see that you are working to solve? What makes now the time to implement that change? What will happen if we don’t? Etc.

More often than not, the answers helped me to change my thinking. In one instance, the leader had a view of all of the teams (senior leaders tend to have that!); proceeding with the original plan would have put the fundraising team at a significant disadvantage. What I had perceived as wishy-washy was really just seeing the big picture and putting the brakes on when a negative outcome was apparent. In the end, we were able to develop a plan that addressed the problems of both teams - once we all knew that was the goal.

Of course, there were still times when I asked the same questions and found out that my suspicions were correct. The key difference was that I had taken the time to know instead of making assumptions. This allowed me to make my case using the examples and reasons that the leader was thinking of instead of using my frustration as a foundation for my argument.

After years of learning how open questions work, and from asking a lot of bad ones along the way, I’ve learned that the trick to being the Fascinated Anthropologist is to avoid “Why?” questions. Most of us hear a why question loaded with judgment and activate our own Judge before we can answer. It gets the defenses up before finding out if defenses were really needed.

Wrap-up

None of this makes the Judge disappear (unfortunately). Mine still turns up on hectic days with the verdict already decided upon. What changes is that I can stop treating the verdict as the end of the discussion and start treating it as the thing I need to know more about.

You’re also doing the hard part - learning to catch the Judge in the act. That takes effort and time. Remember, it isn’t the finish line. You know who’s talking; now, it’s time to explore the situation around you.

Reflect

Pick a situation that you’re in right now. (Probably the one that first came to mind when you started reading.) What is your Judge assuming about the other person’s motives? What has actually been said by them? Is there a difference in those lists?

Act

Choose one situation that is replaying in your head or one person whose behavior gets under your skin. Become the Fascinated Anthropologist. The next time it happens, write down one question you don’t know the answer to, take a deep breath and do a PQ Rep,4 and ask your question out loud before you react.

As a middle manager, I often found myself switching between high-level conversations with leaders and being in the weeds of day-to-day work with my team. Some days, it was hard to reconcile my priorities with the expectations being placed on me by others. Middle managers are constantly being forced to switch between deferring to their leaders and making decisions for their team. This can happen dozens of times a day. Researchers Anicich and Hirsh have shown that the very act of switching between these two contexts leads managers to freeze and pull back from taking decisive action under pressure.1

The voice in my head had a field day with this, telling me that I should be able to do all the things - my stuff, my team’s stuff, and the new stuff that was dumped on my plate at the last minute. If I couldn’t do all the things, then I was just lazy or unqualified.

But neither is true. I’m not any lazier than the next person, and I am good at what I do. Just like you are. And yet, there is a gap between what I know how to do and being able to rest in that knowledge, quieting the voice in my head. Filling the gap are thought patterns that can turn your strengths upside down.

Those thinking patterns are the Judge and other Saboteurs that we’ve talked about over the last few weeks as we’ve been examining Positive Intelligence (PQ).2 Saboteurs are thought patterns that started out as something semi-useful and kept running long after they stopped helping you. There are ten in all, and we all have them in some combination or another. Finding a way to quiet the Saboteurs is essential for middle managers as they navigate the squeeze.

Subscribe now

The Judge and The Sage

The Saboteur that shows up in all of our heads and gets to lead the other nine is the Judge. The Judge is the voice in your head that runs a performance review on everything you do. But it doesn’t stop with judging you. It also passes judgment on those around you and the very circumstances you find yourself in.

The Judge tends to show up at the worst possible times, and it’s sneaky. Last week, I found myself looking at someone else on social media and thinking - this person is amazing; how are they so organized while I sit in a house of chaos? It would be easy to say that I was complimenting this person. But in reality, I was looking at one slice of their life and passing judgment on them and me in the process.

The Judge also shows up at work. You send a message to your boss, you see that they opened it but no response. Your brain goes into overdrive trying to decide if you did something wrong.

The Judge rarely works alone; it recruits one of the other Saboteurs. You say “yes” to every special project so that people will value you. Or you are restless and come up with more ideas than your team could possibly execute.

For a long time, the Judge was the loudest voice in my ear. Maybe it is for you as well. Now, I’m learning to listen for the voice of the Sage, the voice that is curious and empathetic. The Sage sees things as they really are and envisions a better outcome. In my social media situation, the Sage challenges both my assumption of the other person and the supposed chaos I’m surrounded by. It asks me to consider what I really value at home - perfectly clean and well put together or a safe place for people to be themselves. It is possible, I’m told, to have both of these! But I’m focusing on the latter in my current season of life.

To be able to hear the Sage more consistently, I had to practice. One practice is learning to stop and take a breath. Positive Intelligence calls these PQ Reps. Just as you go to the gym to strengthen your body, you can do PQ Reps anywhere to build your mental fitness. My favorite one is closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths while scanning my body for any tension I may be holding. You are looking for ten seconds of full attention on one physical sensation. As I have done this more in moments of calm, I’m getting better at doing it in times of chaos.

Both the Saboteur and the Sage are already at work in your mind. PQ gives you the language to name the patterns and shift them.

What happens in your head doesn’t stay there

You may be thinking - this all sounds good for me as a person, but will it really change anything about the way that I do my job? For an individual contributor, changing their mindset may not change their work much. But as a manager, your work gets done through other people. How you handle stress shapes how your team does their jobs.

A 2014 study, The Value of Bosses, looked at 23,878 workers over a span of about 5 years.3 It showed that variation between bosses in output per hour was more than three times the variation between workers. This means that the gap between a strong manager and a weak one is more than three times the gap between a strong worker and a weak one. The study also showed that swapping one of the weakest managers for one of the strongest raised team output by about as much as adding a tenth person to a nine-person team would.

That seems good, but what does it mean in the real world?

• A manager cannot and will not delegate. The team under them stays junior and the manager becomes a bottleneck.

• A manager avoids difficult conversations, so the team member that is a problem, stays a problem for a year.

• A manager says “yes” to everything while their team struggles to deliver on their promises.

• A manager rewrites every proposal their team submits and wonders why they can’t just do it right.

Which one is closest to you on a bad day?

You are the biggest influence on your team’s success. What happens in your head today doesn’t stay there for long.

It worked - for a while

Having Saboteurs is not a character flaw or defect. The Saboteurs formed because the thought patterns worked for you at some point in the past. The Stickler got you promoted. The Pleaser kept you employed under a bad boss.

But that protection is getting expensive. The Stickler is now making you a bottleneck. The Pleaser bulldozes the boundaries you’ve set for yourself and your team.

Your Saboteurs are not just bad habits. They are fighting to protect you, but they can’t tell what you need to be protected from. They’re a reflex, not a decision. Willpower alone will not change a reflex.

Learning to name your Saboteurs doesn’t make them magically go away. But it does give you the power to stop obeying automatically.

Reflect and Act

Reflect. What is a pattern that helped you get to where you are today? What does that pattern cost you this week, and who is paying that cost?

Act. One thing this week: take the Saboteur Assessment and write down your top two. Don’t act on them yet. Carry them into your next meeting and notice which one shows up.

When I first became a manager, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I know it wasn’t what I ended up with - reorgs and process improvements that worked against my team. In the midst of all of the newness of the role and the confusion, my goal was to look like I had it all put together. I used to go into a back room of the office to sit in the dark to get away from it all. I kept chasing more, though - higher profile projects, opportunities to train others - anything that would appease the voice in my head telling me that doing more was the only way to prove my value. What should have felt like a win didn’t anymore.

Subscribe now

The Voice That Got You Here

The voice that kept telling me that my accomplishments were the only things that proved my value was a Saboteur, a thought pattern that disguises itself as helpful while working against you.1 There are ten in all, and we all have them in some combination or another. The question is whether or not they get to call the shots. The Saboteurs are genuinely trying to be helpful. They think they are using your strengths to protect you from your deepest, darkest fears, but they can’t tell the difference between a masked intruder and a slack message from your boss.

This time around, it’s the Hyper-Achiever, who relies on external achievements to define their worth. The Hyper-Achiever is protecting you from the fear that you aren’t worth keeping around if you aren’t producing exemplary results. It can be a remarkably deceptive Saboteur because on the outside, people can only see your success, not the way you bullied yourself to get there.

Companies build and reward Hyper-Achievers by promoting the individual contributors who keep all the plates spinning. In reality, the exact thing that gets promoted is the thing making you lose sleep at night wondering if you’re enough. The rules changed, and no one notified you.

When the Hyper-Achiever is controlling your thinking, your value depends on constant achievements, each more impressive than the last. But in the chase for validation, you neglect yourself. You tell yourself that happiness will come after this project is done. You find ways to bend your values to fit the situation at hand. Eventually, you come to believe that you can only accept yourself if you are receiving praise from others and you end up becoming a bottleneck for the team that you want to uplift.

The Hyper-Achiever runs the same circle over and over. You achieve a goal and feel a rush, but eventually, that rush wears off and you feel empty. Feeling empty causes you to raise the bar higher than your last goal and push even harder. It’s a brutal cycle.

Your Team is Watching

Your team also falls victim to your Hyper-Achiever cycle. As soon as they finish a challenging project, you’re on to the next challenge. Your team never gets to celebrate their accomplishments, let alone get a break. You can’t acknowledge their work because you don’t recognize yours either.

The perfect example of the Hyper-Achiever running the show is found in Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls. (I am a girl of my time, after all.) While there are dozens of examples of Paris being the quintessential Hyper-Achiever, the one that stands out to me is her work on the Yale Daily News. Paris was the best reporter on staff and a clear choice for editor, but once she got there, her standards were so high that she tried to produce the entire paper herself. She ended up in a newspaper fort, cooking soup on a hotplate, and the paper came close to not getting published at all. She believed it wasn’t worth doing unless it could be done flawlessly.

You would never hold your team to the standard you hold yourself to. You don’t have to. They watch how you work and draw their own conclusions. Since the standard is never voiced, it doesn’t get examined by the team, just de facto accepted.

You think the voice bullying you is only in your head, but your team can hear it, too.

The Sage and the Hyper-Achiever

There is another voice whispering in your ear, the Sage. This is the part of your brain that is discerning and deliberate. The Sage assesses the situation at hand and your strengths and chooses a way forward that benefits you and those around you. While the Saboteur will try anything to remove your fear, the Sage is solving the actual problem at hand.

You’re in a meeting, and a project is mentioned. This is a high profile project and no one is jumping to claim it. Silence is filling the space, and you feel the need to take it on before you’ve fully understood the request.

The urge to take on the project isn’t a bad one, but you do need to question what caused it. The Hyper-Achiever would have you take it on to prove your skills and your worth, but the Sage has a different reason. To tell the difference, ask yourself - if someone else got to this before I did, would I be disappointed or relieved?

Relief signals that you didn’t really want to take on the task. You only jumped in to end an uncomfortable silence. Disappointment that someone else will get the credit is the Hyper-Achiever. Disappointment that you won’t get to run an interesting project is not. If you would take on the project even without your name on it, you wanted the work.

Say that you wanted the work and took it on. The Sage can clearly articulate the reasons for doing it. You have the time and skills; you have people on your team who have never had the chance to do something similar and this is an opportunity for them to learn.

At this point, everything looks the same from the outside. Whether you were motivated by the Sage or the Hyper-Achiever, you took on the project. What happens six weeks later?

The Hyper-Achiever has kept the project. There wasn’t really a choice; handing it off to someone else is tantamount to admitting that you aren’t good enough. Instead, you keep all the hardest parts for yourself while your team gets the safe parts. All the work routes back through you to ensure standards. You wind up exhausted, your team is cast aside, and the cycle restarts the next time a high profile project comes up.

The Sage has also kept the project. But after assessing your bandwidth and your team’s skills, you’ve decided on a different approach. You give the hardest parts to your team and coach them through it, allowing them to grow and gain recognition. You’ve cleared the way for others.

The question to sit with is: do I want to do this, or do I want the recognition that comes from being the person who did it? If it’s only recognition, you may do a good job, but you will make yourself and probably everyone around you miserable doing it. Sometimes the answer is I want both. Having both is fine. The question is which one is driving when the two pull in different directions.

Reflect and Act

Reflect. The people around you have already decided what good enough looks like on your team. They figured that out by watching you and learning your standards. How would they describe your standards if asked? (What would they actually say, not what you hope they say?)

Act. Review the work that you are doing this week and choose one thing that you or your team is working on. Tell your team what your expectations of them are for this project and their work. How will you and the team celebrate when those standards are met?

A few weeks ago, we talked about the vanishing act a good manager performs when they step in to help their team, doing things for them instead of helping them learn. This week, the situation looks similar, but the feeling driving it is different. As a new manager, I needed everything to be perfect. Perfection meant that I belonged in the role. I was driven by the fear that I would be caught out as an imposter. Perfection driven by fear is exhausting.

Your fear may show up differently, but you’ll recognize some of the behaviors below.

Running on Autopilot

I’m really good at catching typos and grammatical errors. It’s not quite at the super power level, but it’s getting close. When I’m in a meeting and someone is screen-sharing, sometimes, all I can see are the typos. Unfortunately, when it’s a shared document, I have to go in and fix it. I have no choice; I just can’t let it sit. This isn’t a conscious decision, just a reflex. I fix things out of habit, not because it matters or because I was asked to. (A moment of silence for my poor colleagues that have to put up with me!)

What makes me do this? Am I just an obnoxious school marm who can’t stop herself? Well, maybe, but also this is the Stickler - a saboteur or mental thinking pattern that works alongside the Judge in your mind.1 The Stickler craves perfection and has taken the need for order way too far. “Good enough” is not an option that is available to the Stickler. What started as high standards has become a compulsion that runs on autopilot.

But the person on the other side doesn’t know what’s going on in my brain. They only see the actions. They see me editing their document while they are actively sharing it in a meeting. Yikes. They are receiving the message loud and clear that their work didn’t meet my standard even though that is not what I’m thinking.

Preference Disguised as Standard

At the Stickler’s core is the belief that none of this is personal preference, it’s just the standard operating procedure - what’s the big deal? But sometimes, there is no right or wrong way to do something.

There is more than one way to get to my son’s new school. I go one way; my husband goes the other way. The two ways take about the same amount of time. Is one of us right? No. We both managed to get the boy to and from school regardless of our route choices. The Stickler would disagree. It would say that conscientiousness dictates that we go this way, not that way.

The first time someone does it “wrong,” the Stickler suppresses well. By the 29th time, the dam breaks and the frustration comes out. You’re not just telling someone how to go. You’re mad that they won’t go your way. Why can’t they get this right?

The 80/20 Rule

The truth is that the Stickler probably started out as something genuinely helpful to you. High ideals, the ability to bring order into chaos, self-discipline, being direct and discerning. Those are strengths that we want to see in a leader. Board materials, donor-facing documents, partner communications; those are the places where a typo or a sloppy number could actually cost you something. Your high standards in those contexts aren’t necessarily the Stickler. They’re the Sage part of your brain using the same skill set for a real reason.

The Sage is the part of your brain that is calm, curious, and discerning. Your Sage can see all parts of the equation and weigh the different pieces out, considering the outcome of each. It can look at the different priorities and values that your team holds and make the best decision available to you in the moment. It isn’t an anxious - get this fixed ASAP before anyone sees that we messed up - but rather a decisive way of navigating the best path ahead.

The Sage’s tool to combat the Stickler is the 80/20 rule, which has been variously applied to time management, people management; I’ve even heard it in relation to a CD collection (when that was a thing). Here, we can say that 20% of your work probably does need to be perfect. (Not talking to you, brain surgeons. You keep aiming for 100%.) But 80% of your work can be just good enough.

Most of what the Stickler tries to make perfect belongs in the 80%. The Sage saves your energy for the 20% that actually matters, and produces better outcomes in those places because you’re not exhausted from perfecting everything else.

As I’ve been building my ERA Coaching, I’ve noticed that everything feels like the 20%. I keep looking for the formula that, if followed to the letter, will guarantee my success. Newsflash - there isn’t one. But the Stickler keeps searching anyway, treating every decision like the future of the universe depends on it. That’s the Stickler’s logic at its most seductive: if I just get every piece perfect, it will work. Maybe it will, but you’ll be too tired to even notice.

Reflect

Look at your last week. Pick three things you corrected, polished, or redid. For each one, ask yourself: was this the 20% where a mistake would have had a real consequence, or was this simply a different way of getting to the same place? How many of the three actually needed to be perfect?

Act

This week, before you open someone’s file to fix it, before you rewrite that email, before you rearrange the spreadsheet, ask the question out loud: is this the 20% or the 80%? If it’s the 80%, check in with your body. Tight chest, lead weight in your stomach, spinning thoughts? That’s the Stickler. Close the file. Come back to it when the Sage can look at it. Don’t touch it until you know which part of you is reaching for it.

This year, I turn 50. As with any “milestone” birthday (hate that phrase), it has me reflecting back on the last decade and thinking through what I want the next one to look like. My brain is naturally trying to turn this into an opportunity to completely reinvent myself, which sounds both fun and exhausting. (I am turning 50, after all.) Instead of diving into the reinvention feeling, I’m choosing to focus on my desire to be more intentional about how I am using my time.

I caught myself recently absentmindedly grabbing my phone to check email. It wasn’t for work, and I wasn’t expecting any life altering news. I was just bored and looking for connection. Did Gmail deliver on connection? No, just ads and updates from the school district. It bothers me that, even after taking most of the apps off of my phone, I’m still seduced by the glowing rectangle. So, I’ve been looking back on things I’ve tried this year that have helped me to be more aware of myself, things that feel intentional instead of accidental. These are the practices that are allowing me to choose where my attention goes.

Subscribe now

Emotional Attention

One of my first articles here on Substack was about keeping a small notebook to record events and emotions throughout the day. The idea is that after every meeting or call, I can write down one sentence about the event (just the facts, ma’am) and one sentence about how I’m feeling.

This practice made me more aware of myself. I learned that sometimes, my emotional response to one event colored the whole day. I also saw patterns. There were meetings and people that consistently drained me or put me on edge. Some days, I made a decision while living in the fog of a previous conversation, unable to really weigh the decision at hand. Seeing that data gave me the opportunity to determine what place those people needed to have in my life and also gave me the means to prepare for the difficult meetings you can’t avoid. (See the next section for more on that prep work.)

I loved this practice, but it has evolved over the past 8 months. It was easy to lose this practice in the shuffle between meetings or when traveling. Now, I schedule a mid-day and end-of-day check-in to go over a larger chunk of time. The ability to focus on larger pieces of my day and carve out dedicated time for reflection has made it easier for me to actually keep up with the practice.

Mindful Attention

If you’ve been here the past few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the Judge and the Saboteurs, concepts from Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence. A PQ Rep1 is ten seconds of full attention on a physical sensation (touch, sound, sight). I often take the ten seconds in between calls to do a few PQ reps to help me settle my mind and focus on the person in front of me, not the email I just read or the conversation I just had.

PQ Reps are small on purpose. Ten seconds fits before you open the door to a hard conversation. It fits between two calendar blocks. It fits in the pause after someone says something that lands wrong. It fits when your thoughts start to spiral, or you just need to step away for a moment. Between the patterns I saw in my emotional check-ins and the quietness created by the PQ Reps, it was easier to discern my next steps.

Attention to Endings

This month, one of my consulting contracts ends. It’s with an organization that I’ve been involved with in one way, shape, or form since 2005. It would have been relatively easy to renew the contract, but I’m starting to sense that I don’t fit in that world as neatly as I used to. It’s been both a hard and an easy decision to let this contract go. I feel settled that I’ve done what I was meant to do in my time with them, but it’s been hard knowing that relationships will change when you don’t see people every day and harder still closing the door on something that you’ve been a part of for 20 years.

As I’ve been coaching more people through transition, this comes up a lot. Who are you outside of a job or a team or a situation that has been a huge part of your life? For many, this is the piece that keeps them from transitioning out of a situation that is not the right fit for them - fear that they won’t be them without that job. That fear tells you that you’ll lose yourself if you make a change. But as I’ve been working with people, I’m finding the opposite to be true. They were losing themselves by staying.

Reflect & Act

Reflect: Think back on your last week. Was there a day that you were just going through the motions, on autopilot out of habit? What happened as a result?

Act: One day this week, choose one of these things to practice that brings your awareness back to the present, something that allows you the space to intentionally choose your next step. If you’re not sure where to start, try doing a PQ Rep. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and scan your body for any tension that you are feeling. Ten seconds. That’s it.

Interested in learning more about Positive Intelligence, the Judge, and what to do about it? Email me for a free assessment - cate@eraccg.com.

Subscribe now

The System that Promises a Fix

Part of us wants a clean slate as we walk into the next season. For me, a clean slate usually involves some new organizational scheme for my to-do list, my desk, my house, or even for my family as a whole. (They’re very long-suffering!) I tend to look at these seasons as an opportunity to find the PERFECT system that will solve all my problems. I will be perfectly organized, none of the balls I’m juggling will drop, and everyone around me will do exactly what I want.

Yeah, right. Has that ever worked for any of you? Because it hasn’t worked for me.

When I look at this through the lens of Positive Intelligence,1 I see a few things at play. First, the Judge is screaming at me, telling me that I am not doing a good job if I don’t do it all. The Judge has brought a new accomplice along this time. One of my chief saboteurs, the Controller, who is telling me that the only way for all of this to work is if I can control every aspect of my life and the lives of those around me. The Judge and the Controller are telling me that I’ll get it all right this year if only I can plan for and control every variable around me.

The same thing happens to me at work. As we approach the end of the calendar year, I look at all the goals the team set back in January, and I can already see we won’t hit all of them. Does that sound familiar? The Judge and the Controller are standing up and screaming at this point. Their plan is to get you to double down on things - push the team harder, tighten up the timelines, take back things you had delegated, and in the process, make everyone (including you) just a little more miserable.

The clean slate is a fantasy. A fresh calendar or to-do list doesn’t magically give you a grip on everything around you. Instead the only thing being squeezed in that grip is you, and that results in more anxiety that makes you want even more control. It’s a vicious cycle. A clean slate isn’t really blank, it’s a new page that we fill with the same overwhelm unless we are able to name it for what it is - The Judge and his cronies working us over.2

What Do You Choose?

There is another option, though. Can you name what is happening? Do you recognize that the Controller is making everything a push? What would happen if you asked - how can I make this a pull instead of a push? Rather than pushing everyone around me to work harder, how can I pull them into a conversation around the solution? Together, you can decide on purpose which things have to go so that higher priority items can get across the finish line.

Which of those two options feels like leadership? And which one feels like the express train to Anxiety-ville?

Neither option gives you a true clean slate. The same things that bothered you in August will likely bother you in September. But you can stop waiting for the calendar to do the work for you. You can choose what you carry with you into a new season. You can name the pieces that you are setting down.

Reflect and Act

Reflect: What are you dragging along with you that you’d rather leave behind? Where are you pushing right now instead of pulling?

Act: Catch the Controller this week - either when it shows up or when you notice it after the fact.

How could you turn that push into a pull? Pick a single decision and bring your team into the conversation around how to move forward.

When was the last time you said yes to something and immediately regretted it? For me, it was agreeing to help my son clean out his closet. Normally, I would relish the opportunity to organize chaos and throw out junk, but it was a busy day in the middle of a busy week. I didn’t have the time to do this, but I said yes in the name of relationship. As I looked in the closet, I immediately knew I’d made a mistake. I gave it a half-hearted start, but most of my attention was on the things I had been working on before. It was time to apologize, and reschedule for a time when he and his closet would have my full attention.

I’ve done similar things at work. In previous roles, I managed a portfolio of over 450 language projects in Africa along with the team of 30+ project managers who made all of that happen. One of the project managers struggled with difficult conversations with project staff. When the person was new, it was easy to help out and say to myself - this is all part of training someone new. But as the months wore on, it became a pattern of me reviewing his communications before he sent them. It wasn’t sustainable for either of us. It had to stop.

Subscribe now

What is the common thread between these examples? My desire to be nice, for connection, to be seen as helpful, favoring relationships over tasks. My desire to please the people around me. Do you recognize yourself in this pattern?

Roughly half of Americans (49%) call themselves people-pleasers. About 52% say they often feel they can’t say no when asked for something, and that splits by gender: 55% of women versus 49% of men. Two-thirds go out of their way to avoid conflict (70% of women, 63% of men). And 64% say they often put others’ needs ahead of their own, women (68%) more than men (61%).1

At the same time, middle managers report more burnout than the people above and below them. Recently, managers went from about 11 direct reports to 12 in a single year.2 Even without the tendency to say yes to everything, you are running out of bandwidth.

When Helping Stops Being a Choice

If we’re overwhelmed with too much to do, what prompts us to say yes to things? What value is prompting our choice? For me, it is often the desire to be “nice” and avoid conflict or difficult conversations because I value connection. For you, it may be the same or it may be the desire to help or to rescue people because you value being useful.

We’ve often talked here about the Judge3 - the inner voice in your head that is judging you, others, or the circumstances you find yourself in. Saying yes when you mean no is another example of your Judge on hyper-drive, but this time, your Judge brought a friend. Let me introduce you to one of the other saboteurs working in the Judge’s courtroom, the Pleaser. The Pleaser “tries to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others.”4 It prevents you from stating your needs and saying no. Resentment starts to build. We say yes to the Pleaser because we want to feel needed and valued, but then we show up as the worst version of ourselves because we are overwhelmed and overcommitted.

The Judge and the Pleaser (along with the other saboteurs) think they are being helpful and protecting us, but really, they’ve hijacked our values and are using them to get their way. Think back to my work with a new project manager, reviewing emails before he could send them. My value of helping was hijacked into rescuing that person, preventing both of us from doing our own work or growing in our abilities. You exist and thrive in your values, but when the Pleaser and Judge get involved, you disappear.

The Good Manager Costume

This is why the Pleaser is so hard to catch at work. It’s wearing the costume of a good boss. Saying yes to your team feels like leadership, not fear. Rescuing someone who is struggling and managing them well look almost identical from the outside. Each demands your emotional energy and time. You don’t see the difference until you’re overwhelmed with your own work and resenting the fact that you said yes. There’s no room left for nice; no room for connection.

Where is the line between genuinely helpful and self-erasing? The line is about what was driving you to help. A value has a limit. You can help this time and still say no next time, and you are still there when it is done. The Pleaser has no limit. It cannot stop and you go missing. A good boss is not the one who absorbs every hard thing. It is the one who lets people do their own hard thing and stays close while they struggle.

Reflect:

Pick one thing you said yes to and wish you hadn’t. Something that felt like good managing one day and a dead weight the next.

• What did you protect with this yes - the other person’s comfort or your standing as the reliable one?

• What did it cost the person you helped? What did they not learn because you stepped in?

Act:

Find one thing you have been doing because it is easier than watching someone struggle with it. Give it back and let them do it. Do not fix it before they even attempt it. Your job is staying close while they struggle, near enough to help if they ask, far enough that they actually learn. Notice what comes up while you wait. That discomfort is the Pleaser losing its grip, not a sign you did the wrong thing.

Not managing people yet? Catch a moment this week where you are about to step in and give a yes. Wait 60 seconds. Notice the thoughts and feelings that come up in that 60 seconds. Again, that’s the Pleaser fighting back, not you doing the wrong thing.

We’re deep into summer here in Texas. For our town, school starts back up in three short (or long - depends on whether you’re asking me or my child) weeks. I was out of town last week visiting family, so this week’s post will be different from our normal format. Instead of an article, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been reading and what I’ve liked about it!

Books That are Influencing my Thinking

How Women Rise

I’ve talked about this book several times here and in coaching sessions. Reading it produced many ah-ha moments for me. The book describes twelve habits that can hold us back, but they boiled down to three areas:

• Being a good person means not disappointing others

• Ambition is a bad thing

• Women should be a role model for other women

This book has changed the way I coach because it has allowed me to name the habits that I’m seeing in people (both men and women) that are preventing them from moving forward. The one that has come up the most as I’ve talked to people about networking for new jobs is the habit of building rather than leveraging relationships. And the most common overall? Ruminating. Our minds are getting stuck in a loop. I’m helping myself and those I coach to find an off-ramp.

Becoming You

I’m sure I’ll talk more about this in the coming month as I’ve just finished it, but I loved the emphasis on the intersection of values, aptitudes, and economically viable interests. I’ve often looked at my career solely on aptitudes and economic viability, but the values piece is what makes it all authentic.

I’ve always emphasized values in coaching. It is so helpful to know your values so that you can find your way or work through conflict, but Suzy Welch redefines those in an easy to navigate framework. I’m looking forward to using this tool in more coaching conversations.

The Bone Season Series

I love fantasy novels! This series takes place in a dystopian future full of clairvoyants, non-clairvoyants, and immortal beings that are controlling them all. I’m about halfway through the series, and it just keeps getting better.

Articles I’ve Saved to Re-read

Robb’s Rant Volume 2: Weaponizing AI When Applying for a Role

Lately, I’ve been coaching job seekers. One common frustration is the way that AI and ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) have influenced the job search process. For many it is demoralizing and paralyzing - how can you win when the rules are hidden? ’ article is an innovative way to look at getting past ATS by beating it at its own game.

We Redesigned Leadership and Forgot to Tell the Leaders

My last three posts have been about AI and how it impacts middle managers. This article by also talks about this topic. This quote summarizes how I feel about AI today:

I’m not finding AI difficult. I’m finding everything around AI difficult.

I’m finding the AI tools themselves relatively easy to use, and for the things I can’t immediately figure out, there’s a YouTube or Reddit thread available. What I’m finding less easy is defining the role that I want AI to have in my life.

A Simple Habit That Turns Ordinary Life Into Content

Sometimes (okay, often), I sit down to write something or someone asks me about my week, and there are absolutely no synapses firing in my brain. I’ve been using resource not only to capture daily events but also as a way to find the story behind them.

Your Brain Needs to Recover: Focus on Recovery This Summer & Reset Your Brain for Fall

I loved the focus on rest by . As I mentioned above, I’ve been coaching job seekers, and the hardest thing for some of them to do is use some of their time for rest. Many move frantically through their job search, repeatedly scanning job boards and LinkedIn, and I get it. I’ve been there too after an unexpected layoff. But your brain needs rest and space to heal after a difficult season. My favorite quote:

By intentionally choosing to decompress, giving yourself permission to “waste” time, and actively replenishing your energy, you aren’t missing out—you are giving your brain the essential maintenance it drastically needs.

Intellectual compounding: the 5 book categories I can’t stop recommending to ambitious people using AI

AI, again. (I’ve read a lot from this month.) As I’ve been writing about AI and thinking through my own use of the tool, I’ve also been looking for ways to maintain my own creativity and knowledge base. (Plus, who can resist a book recommendation list?!?!)

What Have We Been Watching?

World Cup, of course.

This is the third piece in a series on AI and management. The first looked at how AI is changing the middle manager’s role. The second looked at using the human touch alongside AI in the care of your team. This one is about what AI does to the voice already running in your head.

A new voice has entered the room. It writes your to-do list and drafts your emails. It summarizes the meeting you almost fell asleep in. And depending on the day, it either tells you everything you touch is brilliant, or it does the thing better than you ever could have.

Both of those are a problem because of what they do to the Judge,1 the voice in your head that was already running commentary on your competence before AI ever showed up. The Judge doesn’t need new material, but it got it anyway.

The Judge Gets Amplified

Regardless of whether or not the AI output is good, the Judge can still use it to build a case against you. For example, you use AI to write the performance review, and somewhere underneath the relief of getting it done, a quieter voice says: a real manager would have just written this herself.

So you feel bad for needing the tool. And if you don’t use AI for help and you spend an extra hour writing it yourself while everyone else on your team has already sent theirs, the Judge finds the opposite case just as easily: everyone else has figured out how to work faster. What’s wrong with you?

The Judge doesn’t need you to pick a side. It just needs you to be unsure which one is right. Use AI, and it’s evidence you can’t do this yourself. Don’t use it, and it’s evidence you’re falling behind. Either way, the Judge wins, and the actual question - is this tool helping me do my job well? - never gets asked.

The Judge Goes Unchallenged

This one starts small and grows quietly in the background. A manager who has never fully trusted her own voice in a hard conversation asks AI to help her prepare for the conversation, brainstorming feedback and how best to deliver it. It comes back clear, well-organized, kind but direct. She uses it. The employee doesn’t push back. Maybe even thanks her for the honesty.

She reads that as the AI got it right instead of I already knew what needed to be said, and I just needed the nerve to say it. Next time, she goes straight to AI again.

The Judge has been avoided instead of dealt with. Putting the Judge on the stand, which we looked at in an earlier article, only works if you’re in the room to challenge its voice. When AI makes the hard call, the challenge is skipped. The Judge doesn’t get quieter. It just has nothing to say about a decision you didn’t make. It will be back, exactly as loud, the next time you’re the one who has to make a decision.

This isn’t only about feedback. It shows up anywhere a manager hands off a hard call: a strategy memo, a tough email, a proposal she’s not sure will be approved. Writing it yourself means making a judgment call and owning it, with no one else to blame if it’s wrong and no one else to praise if it’s right. Handing it to AI means something else made the call. If it goes badly, there’s a built-in buffer: well, I used the tool everyone uses. If it goes well, there’s relief. But that relief isn’t about the hours saved. It’s relief from not having to sit alone with your own judgment. And relief you didn’t earn doesn’t turn into confidence you can keep.

The Judge Gets Flattered

AI is a yes-man. Ask it whether your plan is solid, and it will tell you it’s flawless with conviction and flattery. You are the most brilliant person who ever lived. Push back on its ideas, even a little, and it will often agree with the push-back just as readily. It is built to be useful and agreeable, so that you keep coming back. Most of the time, it will not tell you your thinking is off. It will tell you why your thinking is smart.

The Judge loves this because it has found agreement. Every “great point” and “excellent instinct” becomes one more piece of evidence in the case that you were right all along, no cross-examination required.

The risk is that nothing gets challenged. When the loudest voice in the room agrees with you by design, you stop asking whether you’re actually right. Growth needs friction somewhere. A yes-man can’t provide it.

Which One Is Yours?

Probably more than one, depending on the day and what’s being asked of you. The Judge is not picky about which argument it runs, as long as it gets to run one.

Reflect: Think back over how you’ve used AI this week. Maybe you used it for feedback, for a summary, for a decision you weren’t sure about. Which pattern showed up? Flattered, amplified, or unchallenged? Was it the same pattern every time, or did it shift depending on what was at stake?

Act: Look back at your AI use this week and sort it into three piles.

• What you’re genuinely glad you used it for.

• What replaced a judgment call you should have made yourself.

• What came with guilt, and what that guilt was actually about.

Notice it, name it, and then it can be dealt with.

Most of that circled list isn’t leaving your desk this week. (Bummer!) So asking what is mine to hand back isn’t as helpful as asking if there is a way to do things in a way that costs less of you.

The Only One with EQ in the Room

AI does not understand your team. It can flag a spike in overtime hours or draft a warm-sounding check-in message, but the research on this is blunt about the limit: AI “does not possess genuine emotional intelligence... it lacks consciousness, empathy, and subjective experience.”1 It cannot tell you that someone’s gone quiet this week because of what’s happening at home, not because they’ve checked out. That is still yours to do because you’re the one who knows your team, who sits with them, who has seen them struggle and grow. You hold the relationship with your team members.

You are emotionally intelligent. You are aware of where you are strong and where you need to build additional skills; maybe you still catch yourself reacting instead of calmly reading the situation before you, but you’re working on it. Even a still-developing EQ is a category the machine doesn’t have access to at all. Between you and the machine, you’re the only one of the two of you capable of having any true EQ in the first place.

Despite that, the pressure seems to be running in the other direction right now. Leadership wants AI to take more off your plate, and eventually that might include some of the people work. Knowing exactly where the line is between these things keeps you from outsourcing judgment to a machine that isn’t equipped to make that call.

Subscribe now

Checking the Plan & the People

AI is useful, but maybe not where we were expecting. Hand it the structural work: run your new onboarding process past it and ask where the steps contradict each other. Feed it last quarter’s project plan and ask where the timeline and the stated priorities don’t match. Ask it to find the gaps in a curriculum, a policy draft, a rollout schedule. This is AI’s sweet spot. It can hold a hundred pages of a plan in view at once and catch the inconsistency you’d only find on a third read, if you ever had time for a third read.

What that gives you back is bandwidth. Once the structural check is off your desk, what’s left for you to do is the thing AI still cannot do at all: watch how the plan actually lands on your team. Is the new process making one person’s job harder in a way the document doesn’t show? Is the team nodding along in the meeting and then not adopting any of it? That assessment requires being in the room with your team. There’s only so much you can pay attention to, so pay attention to the things that only you can do. As Forbes contributor David Morel puts it, a human still has to give an AI-driven outcome that “final pass”2 before it can be trusted. The same logic holds whether the outcome is a hiring recommendation or a rollout plan.

This is the emotional intelligence trait of Reality Testing. Let the tool check the plan against itself. You check the plan against the actual, specific humans who have to implement it.

The Fear in the Room

Your team is anxious about AI implementation, whether or not anyone’s said so out loud. A 2024 McKinsey survey found seventy percent of employees fear AI will shrink their role, but eighty-three percent say they’d embrace it if leadership explained why and what it meant for them. Leadership consultant Shaara Roman puts it more bluntly: culture is the biggest risk in AI adoption, not the tool itself, and people who don’t believe they belong in the future won’t help build it.3

Fear isn’t always labeled as fear. Fear shows up as the person who’s suddenly slower to try the new tool than anyone expected when normally they are an early adopter; they aren’t resistant to change but to them, using AI well feels like evidence they can be replaced by it. Fear shows up as the person who over-adopts instead, running everything through AI and flagging it constantly, because looking enthusiastic feels safer than looking unnecessary. Fear shows up as the question in a team meeting, “is this going to change our headcount?”

You know from last week’s article that you are the variable in how this plays out: teams that believe their manager genuinely backs AI use are nearly nine times more likely to say it’s actually changed how they work. Their fear about this is now sitting on your desk, next to your own.

You can manage your team’s fear without absorbing it. Not with platitudes and reassurance you don’t believe and that most people can tell are fake. You also can’t perform enthusiasm you don’t feel to keep morale up. Instead, say what you know, admit what you don’t, and let your own steady use of the tool, checking it, correcting it, deciding where it doesn’t belong, demonstrate your values to your team.

Reflect & Act

Reflect

Think of something you’re currently checking by hand that’s really a structural question: does this plan hang together, are there gaps, does it contradict itself somewhere? Now picture the hour you’d get back if AI did that pass instead. Would you actually spend it watching how the thing is landing with your people, or would it just get swallowed by the next task in line?

Also: has anyone on your team asked you, directly or sideways, whether AI is coming for their job? What did you actually say back?

Act

This week, hand one structural check to AI, a plan, a process, a draft, something with an internal logic to test, instead of doing that pass yourself. Use the time it frees specifically to listen to your team. How is the AI implementation impacting them? What are they excited about? What are they learning? What is bringing fear into the equation?

Say one true thing to your team about where AI use in your company stands right now, instead of a reassurance you don’t fully believe or an enthusiasm you’re performing.

When factories began to switch to electricity, they did it for the promise of a smaller coal bill. They bolted electric motors onto the layout already built around steam and ran it the same old way. They didn’t start to see significant gains from electricity until they rebuilt the work itself around what the new power made possible. It took a generation. The economists who study this put the full return at forty to fifty years after the first power stations opened.2

What happened to the early adopters? Did they save money on coal? Yes, but not as much as they had hoped. They saw other gains like a smoother workflow, brighter and cleaner buildings, control over each individual machine instead of having one belt drive everything. The gains weren’t predicted, but they revolutionized the way factories function.3

Does any of this sound similar to what is happening in today’s offices? You would not be the first to ask. Economists have been drawing this exact parallel for years. Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues even gave the pattern a name, the productivity J-curve: when a major new technology arrives, output dips while everyone reorganizes around it, and only climbs once the reorganizing is done. AI, they argue, is in the early dip right now.4

As companies adopt AI, the promise is that it will save time and allow for more sophisticated data analysis or coding. We’re hearing that one person can do the work of several as tech companies announce layoffs.

And it’s true, AI does help to save time on some things. But if the dynamo is any guide, the obvious win is the coal bill, but the things that actually matter, the real gains and the real costs, are somewhere we’re only just now starting to look at.

But how does this affect you? A middle manager going from one day to the next, absorbing pressure from leadership to make your work AI-enhanced. Whatever that means. You find yourself checking AI-written work for hallucinations it confidently passes off as facts. You are coaching people through tools you learned yourself last week. You are translating “make it AI-enhanced” into something your team can actually deliver. The thing that was supposed to lift the weight added weight.

The Tool vs. The Transformation

Ask other managers, and you’ll likely hear the same thing. Individuals feel like they are doing work faster but very little has changed in how their company works.5 The tool (AI) is available, but the transformation isn’t complete.

In the early 1900s, someone had to redesign and rebuild the factory floor. Today, someone has to stand in the gap between the tool and the transformation and do the slow work of figuring out how everything should change. That someone is the middle manager.

In a June 2026 Harvard Business Review article, Julia Shin and Sandra Sucher interviewed people at every level of two consulting firms to see how AI adoption actually lands. They found a single pressure point. Where AI was working, the junior staff got freed for higher-value work and the partners moved to selling AI-enhanced judgment. Everyone rose except the person in the middle. In their words, “Without organizational support, managers don’t get elevated; they get buried.”6

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts numbers to the burial. Manager engagement fell from 30 percent in 2023 to 22 percent in 2025, the steepest drop of any employee group.7

And underneath it sits the gap that explains why you’re so tired. Most people using AI say it has made them personally faster. Yet, only a fraction say their organization has actually changed how it works. Gallup names the paradox plainly: “AI improves personal worker productivity, but macro-level benefits remain elusive.”8 The tool is in your hands. The transformation is stuck. And you are standing in the space between them.

The Deciding Factor

You are not a bystander to whether AI works at your company. You are the deciding factor. Gallup found that manager-led adoption is one of the two strongest drivers of whether people actually use these tools at all. When a team believes its manager genuinely backs their use of AI, that team is nearly nine times more likely to say AI has changed how their work gets done.9 The deciding factor isn’t the software or the training budget. It’s you.

Now set that next to what’s happening to your job. Manager engagement is falling faster than any other group’s. And Gartner projects that in 2026, one in five organizations will use AI to flatten their structure, cutting more than half of their middle management roles.10

Read those two facts together and the vise is complete. You are the single biggest reason AI adoption succeeds, and you are the role most likely to be eliminated in its name. You are the part holding the transition together, and the part the transition is being told it can do without.

Bolted On, or Built In?

Think back to the introduction of electricity to factories. The factories that bolted electric motors onto the old steam layout saw a modest cost savings, but they didn’t see the full impact. That impact was reserved for the factories that rebuilt their work around their new reality. It wasn’t electricity alone that made a difference. They also needed someone to redesign the work.11

AI is being adopted both ways right now, in the same economy, sometimes in the same building. So the useful question isn’t whether AI is good or overhyped. It’s this: is your organization bolting it on, or building it in? As a middle manager, you’ll know the answer to this question better than anyone.

In a bolted-on rollout, the tool arrives and nothing else moves. Your targets are the same as they were before AI existed. The time you spend learning it comes out of your own evenings, because the delivery schedule never made room. There’s no shared place to put what you figure out, so every team, including yours, keeps solving the same problem from scratch. Nobody has said what “good enough” looks like for AI work, so you’re setting that standard yourself, one deliverable at a time. And when something goes wrong, you are the quality control, the training department, and the help desk, all at once.

Built in looks different, and it’s rarer. Learning time is on the calendar, not stolen from it. There’s an actual system for capturing what works, so it travels between teams instead of dying on someone’s laptop. Leadership has said, out loud, what the tools are for and where the lines are. This is the pattern Shin and Sucher found: the teams where AI adoption compounded weren’t the ones with the best software. They were the ones that redesigned the work around it.12

When an organization hasn’t done that redesign, the work doesn’t wait politely for someone with authority to get to it. It falls to whoever is standing closest. And the person standing closest is you. So you quietly become the redesign. You absorb the missing system into your own hours. You turn yourself into the shared hub, the training program, the standards committee, and the help desk, off the side of a desk that was already full. Nobody asked you to, exactly. Nobody’s paying you for it. It doesn’t have a name on any org chart. But it’s the second job you’ve been doing since AI showed up, and it’s likely wearing you out.

Which means the question that actually helps you isn’t the one about your organization. You can’t reorganize your company from the middle. The question that helps you is the one about the line. What here is genuinely your job, and what have you been carrying because it was easier to absorb it than to watch it drop?

Reflect & Act

Reflect

Take five minutes and a piece of paper. Write down everything that landed on you when AI showed up: the checking, the coaching, the prompt-fixing, the standard-setting, the questions you field, the fires you put out, the things you quietly track so no one else has to.

Now go back through each item and ask yourself:

• Is this genuinely mine to do? (This will be things like coaching your team, judgment calls that need your experience, etc.)

• Is this part of the company’s unfinished redesign? (This will look like a lack of standards or AI policy, a lack of AI training, etc.)

Circle everything that falls into that second category. Then look at how much of the page is circled.

This is a picture of how much invisible reorganization you’ve been carrying without anyone deciding you should. Think about this weight on you and your team. You can’t set a boundary around something you haven’t named.

Act

You can’t redesign your company, but you can decide what you do with the circled list. Four moves, in your control:

Name one circled item out loud, upward. Pick the heaviest thing you’ve been silently absorbing and make it visible to your own manager. Not a complaint, a surfacing: “I’ve been holding the AI review standards for the whole team because we don’t have any. That’s working for now, but it’s a gap somebody above me should own.” You’re not demanding they fix it. You’re refusing to keep it invisible. Half of what buries middle managers stays buried because they absorb it quietly instead of naming it.

Stop privately being the system your org hasn’t built. You became the shared hub because there wasn’t one. So make it a real request: ask for the shared place to put what works, the half-day for the team to actually learn the tools, the standard from leadership on what “good enough” means. If the answer is no, that’s information too. It tells you the rollout is bolted on, and you can stop pretending it’s your personal failing that it feels that way.

Protect one piece of capacity and defend it like it’s load-bearing. History says that gains require protected time, and nobody hands it to you. So take it. One block a week that AI overflow doesn’t get to touch, whether that’s your own thinking time or your team’s learning time. The instinct under pressure is to give it up first. That instinct is the thing to push against.

Spend your influence on purpose. You are the biggest factor in whether this works for your team. That’s real power, and right now it’s probably leaking out everywhere, into every crisis and every question. Point it. Decide the one or two things your backing actually changes for your people, and put it there, instead of bleeding it across everything that asks.

In the last article, we looked at how the Judge works: the three modes (judging yourself, judging others, judging the situation), and started and exercise helps you recognize the Judge. If you missed it, it’s worth having a look as this piece builds on it.

The Judge1 (also known as your inner critic) does not need facts. It prefers ambiguity and uncertainty, and there is no role more reliably ambiguous than managing people for the first time. If imposter syndrome as a new manager is something you are living right now, your Judge is putting in overtime.

Why the Judge loves a promotion

As an individual contributor, your feedback loop was reasonably tight. You completed the task, and you got some kind of response; maybe someone said good job, or the deadline was met, or the client responded. The connection between your effort and the outcome was visible enough that you could use it to evaluate and motivate yourself.

As a manager, that connection feels looser. You invest time in working with an individual on your team, and you may not see the payoff for months. Or you navigate a difficult conversation well, but nothing changes. The Judge does not wait for long-term results. It fills the silence and draws its own conclusions. And because the feedback gap is ever present, the Judge’s commentary feels like truth rather than fiction.

Subscribe now

What the Judge’s case looks like from the inside

Last week we talked about Chris Argyris’s tool for recognizing the Judge: the left column and the right column. The left column is the unspoken commentary running underneath what we actually say and do. There are four common shapes to that running commentary for new managers.

The competence loop. You make a decision, it does not land perfectly, and the left column immediately fills up. That is exactly the kind of mistake someone in over their head would make. The right column: you made a judgment call with incomplete information, which is, basically, every managerial decision ever.

The comparison trap. You watch a more experienced manager handle something smoothly. The left column: they always know what to do. I never know what to do. The right column: they have been doing this for years longer than you. The left column conveniently omitted that detail and drew the wrong conclusion.

The silence read. Your manager does not respond to your message for half a day or seems distracted when you meet. The left column: something is wrong. They are losing confidence in me. The right column: people are regularly busy and distracted for reasons that have nothing to do with you, but the Judge rarely entertains that possibility.

The measuring stick problem. This one is underneath all the others. Ask yourself: what would you need to see to believe you are doing this well? Most new managers say something like I would just know. But if your target isn’t well defined, the Judge keeps moving it. You hit a bullseye once, and the Judge moves the target further out. There is no version of your performance the Judge cannot find a flaw in, because the target was never defined.

The Judge is not running a performance review

Everything in the left column is an interpretation, not a fact. The Judge presents it as honesty when it is more often than not the worst available version of the story, delivered with authority.

The Judge is not measuring you against what someone with your experience, in your situation, could reasonably accomplish. It has never done that because it doesn’t know how to. It is not asking what a reasonable six-month baseline looks like. It is comparing you to some standard you cannot see and finding you short.

You are the expert in your own situation. The Judge has never managed your team. It has never dealt with your boss, your organization’s quirks, or your team’s particular history. It shows up with no knowledge or evidence and draws all the wrong conclusions.

What you do with this

You have already done the first step if you started the left column/right column practice from last week. The second step for a new manager is this:

Fix the measuring stick. Before the Judge can bring its case against you, you need to know what “doing well” actually means in your role right now. Given your team, your stage, your experience level, what would a reasonable observer say good looks like at six months? At one year? If you cannot answer that, you need to have a conversation with your manager and ask.

Apply the left column to the comparison. The next time the Judge runs a comparison between you and a more experienced manager, write it down. Right column: what actually happened. Left column: what the Judge concluded. Then put it on the stand the same way the last article described. What evidence do you actually have? What is the most honest interpretation you could hold? Would you tell a friend what the Judge is telling you?

Notice what the Judge is protecting you from. This is the question from the last article’s Act section, and it applies directly here. Imposter syndrome, at its root, is the Judge trying to protect you from something. Maybe it’s protecting you from being embarrassed, from failing publicly, from being found inadequate. That fear is real, but the cure is worse than the disease. The Judge has you questioning everything instead of building confidence.

Reflect and Act

Reflect: Which of the left column patterns above sounds most familiar? The competence loop, the comparison trap, the silence read, or the invisible measuring stick? Write out one recent example of that pattern. Right column first. Then left column. Ask yourself: is this true or just the Judge’s interpretation?

Act: This week, ask your manager one concrete question: what would doing this role well look like at this stage? This question is designed to help you find your target instead of just guessing. Note that this is different from asking if you are doing an okay job. Reassurance is nice, but a well-defined target will work better to help tame the Judge.

Share

You check the job board again at 11pm. No new listings. An hour ago, it was the same thing. It will be the same at 6am, but you check anyway.

These are examples of the Judge bringing its case against you.

The Judge is a concept from Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence framework. The Judge is the master saboteur, the one that sits in all of us. It is the internal voice that evaluates everything: what you did, what others did, what the situation means. It presents itself as your quality control department. It feels like diligence, like conscientiousness, like staying on top of things. It feels like the thing that is keeping you motivated and moving forward. That is what makes it so hard to catch. The judging feels helpful. It is not.

The Judge Works in 3 Ways

The Judge does not limit itself to one style of judgment. Chamine identifies three: judging yourself, judging others, and judging circumstances.

Judging yourself is the most familiar. It is the voice that says you should be further along by now. That if you had made better decisions, worked harder, seen it coming, you would not be in this situation. It is the voice that notices you have been sitting on the couch for twenty minutes and calls that laziness. It asks what is wrong with you that you cannot seem to just rest.

Judging others feels more like clarity than judgment. The recruiter who hasn’t passed your application forward clearly doesn’t know what she’s missing out on. The team member who keeps making the same mistake after you have explained it three times, the problem is her attitude, not your communication. The hiring manager who went silent after a promising second interview is unprofessional. Each of these may contain a grain of truth. The Judge takes that grain and builds a case.

Judging circumstances often shows up as anxiety. The job market is bad. The timing is wrong. This wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for AI. What looks like an assessment of reality or discernment is the Judge scanning for evidence that things are as bad as it suspects.

All of these are the Judge’s way of saying, “You need me. I protect you.”

Catching the Judge in the Act

The problem with the Judge is not just that it runs. It is that it runs quietly, underneath everything you are actually doing and saying. Chris Argyris, organizational theorist and Harvard Business School professor, developed a tool to start recognizing your Judge: the left column/right column exercise.1

The right column is what is actually happening; these are the facts that anyone talking about the situation would agree to. (Just the facts, ma’am.) What you say, what you do, how you show up in a meeting, a conversation, a performance review. The left column is what is running underneath the facts. The unspoken commentary. The assumptions. The emotions. The judgments. Some examples:

A manager is in a performance conversation with a team member who keeps missing deadlines. The right column: she is stating examples of missed deadlines, asking questions, laying out expectations clearly. The left column: she’s never going to change. I’ve had this conversation four times. I don’t know why I bother. What does this say about me as a manager that I can’t get through to her?

She is presenting a report to senior leaders. The right column: notes in hand, slides prepared, standing up front explaining things. The left column: they’re not paying attention. That one just checked his phone. They’ve already decided. I should have framed the data differently.

The left column is not always wrong. Sometimes it is picking up on something real. But the Judge does not traffic in nuance. It takes what it notices and builds the worst version of the story. And because it is running in the background rather than out in the open, it rarely gets examined. It just runs.

The first step is not to silence it. The first step is to notice it.

The Judge is Not a Reliable Witness

If noticing the left column is the first step, then the second step is deciding what to do with what you find there. That feels much harder, but the silver lining is this - it’s your choice; you are bigger and smarter than the Judge.

The Judge presents its case as fact. It is not. It is an interpretation of facts that has jumped to the worst available conclusion. The team member who keeps missing deadlines may have something going on that has not surfaced yet. The leaders who seemed distracted during your presentation may have been processing, not dismissing. The job market is bad, and it is also true that people are getting hired in it right now.

This is not the same as positive thinking or toxic positivity. You are not replacing one distortion with another. You are asking a more useful question: is this actually true, or is this the Judge’s version of true?

A few questions worth putting to the left column once you begin to notice it:

What evidence do I actually have for this? What do I know to be true in this moment?

What is the most generous interpretation of this situation that I could honestly hold?

If a friend was in this situation, would I tell her what the Judge is telling me?

The Judge will not automatically disappear when you do this. (At least, mine doesn’t.) It will regroup and come back with a revised case. But each time you put it on the stand and ask it to show its evidence, it loses power, gets a little smaller and less convincing.

Reflect

Pick one situation where the Judge has been loud recently. It might be a conversation you keep replaying, a decision you can’t stop second-guessing, or a habit like checking your email or the job board at hours when nothing will have changed.

Write out the right column first. Stick to the facts. What actually happened, what was actually said, what anyone in the room would have agreed to.

Then write the left column. What was running underneath? Don’t edit it. Let the Judge say its piece on paper where you can see it.

Now look at what you wrote. How much of the left column is fact? How much is interpretation? How much is the worst available version of the story?

Act

The next time you catch yourself doing the thing (checking the job board, replaying the meeting, refreshing the inbox), stop and take 3 deep breaths.

Ask: what is the Judge trying to protect me from right now?

You do not have to have an answer. The pause itself is the practice. You are building the habit of noticing before the Judge’s case becomes the only story in the room.

Share

A Last Word

The Judge has been allowed to run unchallenged for a long time. It has never had to show its evidence. It has never been asked whether it is telling the truth or just the worst version of it. So do not fall into the trap of berating yourself when you forget to notice the Judge. That’s just the Judge doubling down! Celebrate every time you catch one of the Judge’s lies or when you notice its influence on you. Soon, those moments of celebration will grow in number and you’ll see change.

Until then, remember, you do not owe the Judge a report. You do not owe it an account of how you spent your afternoon, why you have not heard back yet, or whether you handled that conversation correctly. It will ask anyway. That is what it does. But you are bigger than it. And you get to decide how much say the Judge has in your actions or reactions.

But what do you do with it? You didn’t really need another to-do list. If we aren’t careful, the awareness of the problem can become a bigger problem. Research shows that it’s not always the stress that impacts you, but rather your thoughts about the stress. The same is true here. If your list from last week has become a new source of guilt, something you’re turning over in your head while you’re trying to be somewhere else, that’s not a solution. That’s just more of the same.

So before anything else: put the list down for a second. What follows isn’t another system to implement perfectly. It’s time to get curious; put on your lab coat.

Contaminated Time

Being in one place while thinking of another has a name. In her book, Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte called it contaminated time - when your brain is supposed to be in one place but keeps drifting to another. You’re on a call, but part of you is tracking what’s happening in the next room. You’re at the pool, but you’re mentally composing the email you didn’t finish. You’re neither fully at work nor fully anywhere else. You’re just constantly distracted. Your brain never gets a break. It keeps running the background calculation: should I be somewhere else right now? Am I missing something? Is this okay?

That’s the data you collected last week. Not a failure list. A map of where the contamination is heaviest.

Start with What You Want

Before you can figure out what to do to decontaminate your time, you have to figure out what you actually want. Not what would make you more productive. Not what would impress your boss or quiet the guilt. What do you want your time to feel like this summer?

When you’re at work, what does fully present look like for you? Is it two hours of uninterrupted focus in the morning? Is it being on a call without half your brain in the living room? What would it feel like to finish a work day, close the laptop, and not think about it again until the morning?

When you’re not working, what does fully present look like? Is it being outside without your phone in your pocket? Is it giving your kid your undivided attention while they talk about a video game? Is it taking time for yourself to read a book or float in a pool undisturbed?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the hypotheses you’re going to test. The tools in the sections that follow are only useful if you know what you’re trying to feel on the other side of them. Otherwise you’re just implementing someone else’s system in your life and wondering why it doesn’t fit.

The One Thing

Now that you know how you want your day to look and feel; name the one thing that actually has to happen today. You don’t need the full to-do list or a list of all the things you wish you could get done. Name the one thing that, if you did it and nothing else, would mean the day wasn’t wasted.

If you know that, you can protect it. You can build your day around making sure that thing happens, and let everything else flex around it. The summer is full of interruptions you can’t control. But if you’ve already decided what matters most, an interruption is just an interruption. It doesn’t have to become a crisis.

This also does something else. When you know the one thing is done, you can stop. You have permission to close the laptop. You don’t have to keep grinding through the afternoon to prove something to yourself. The work is done. The rest is either bonus or tomorrow.

The Art of the Pulse

OK. You can name the one thing, but you have no idea how to actually do it. This is where the idea of pulsing comes in.

Pulsing is the practice of working in focused intervals followed by genuine rest. Not scrolling. Not half-watching something while you answer emails. Actual rest. The research suggests ninety minutes as a natural work interval, but that number isn’t sacred. Forty-five minutes of genuine focus is worth more than ninety minutes of contaminated time. The right pulse length is the one where you can actually stay present for the whole thing before your brain starts drifting.

Here’s where it gets complicated in the summer. The original concept of pulsing assumes your rest interval is actually restful. But if your rest interval is also when your kid needs something, or when you’re supposed to be present for family time, it’s not really rest.

So the question isn’t just how long your pulses should be. It’s what each pulse is actually for. A work pulse means the door is closed, and you’re not half-monitoring the living room. A family pulse means the laptop is shut, and you’re not composing emails in your head. A contaminated pulse isn’t a pulse.

Time Confetti

Even with the best plans in place, summer is still full of scraps. The fifteen minutes waiting in the car pool line. The half hour at the pool while swim practice finishes. The gap between when one thing ends and another begins. Brigid Schulte calls these fragments time confetti.

The default move is to fill them with work. Catch up on email. Return a text. Get a head start on something. And sometimes that’s the right call. But is it the right call for you? The goal isn’t to optimize every moment and be productive. The goal is to figure out what works for you.

Maybe for you, time confetti is folding a basket of laundry (Yuck), so that later, you can spend focused time playing a game with your family. But then, maybe your sanity is better preserved by a five minute walk down the street with your kid and the dog. Or maybe for you, it’s something else entirely. Again, the goal isn’t to optimize every minute of your day. It’s to stop letting them drain you further.

What does your time confetti want to be? What do you need in that gap so that when the next thing starts, you can actually be there for it?

Closing

This whole thing is a grand experiment, and the thing about experiments is that sometimes, they fail. That’s not a flaw in the method. That’s the method working.

You’re going to try a pulse length and find out it’s too long. You’re going to decide your time confetti is for walking and then stand outside in the heat wondering why you thought that was a good idea. You’re going to protect the one thing and then have a day where three other things explode and the one thing doesn’t happen anyway.

None of that means you’re doing it wrong. It’s just data. What didn’t work today is just as useful as what did. The goal isn’t to find the perfect system on the first try. (If you do, teach me how to do that!) The goal is to keep asking the questions: what worked, what didn’t, and what do I want to try differently tomorrow?

Don’t beat yourself up for a failed experiment. Celebrate the data. Adjust the hypothesis. Try again tomorrow. Summer is long enough for a lot of experiments.2

Reflect and Act

Reflect: Which of these concepts landed hardest for you? Contaminated time. Pulsing. Time confetti. The one thing. You don’t need all of them. You need the one that made you think: oh, that’s what’s been happening!

Act: Run one experiment this week with that concept.

• Pick a pulse length and test it.

• Decide what your time confetti is for and try it for three days.

• Name the one thing every morning and see what it does to the rest of your day.

One concept, one week, one honest assessment at the end: did it help?

You’ve been planning for summer since camps opened for registration in February. You saw summer coming and you made a plan. Maybe not a perfect plan, but still a plan. Kids in camp for the last part of June and part of July. School starts in late August. That doesn’t leave too many weeks to juggle. It seemed manageable. You’d figure it out. Some days your kid would be at camp, some days they’d be home, and on those days you’d just be flexible. You’ve been flexible before. You’re good at flexible.

That was when school was still in session, but school’s not open anymore. Reality is starting to set in.

The Deal You Make Every Morning

Here’s what flexible actually looks like by mid-June: You wake up and the time you used to protect for your morning walk, the coffee before anyone needed anything, the fifteen minutes of journaling that kept you even-keeled, all are now items you trade away before 7am.

Your thinking is sound: if you get a head start on work now, you’ll be able to close the laptop earlier. More time with your family. Less guilt. Better summer.

So you skip the walk. You skip the journal. You open the laptop before your brain has fully arrived. And then the day runs you over anyway.

The calls go long. The to-do list replenishes itself like it’s on a subscription. By the time you could theoretically close the laptop, you’re too tired to enjoy what’s on the other side of it. The thing you traded your morning for didn’t actually buy you what you thought it would.

What You Actually Gave Up

Your morning routine isn’t a luxury. It’s a load-bearing wall.

The walk wasn’t just exercise. It was the thing that kept you from snapping at your co-worker. The journal wasn’t navel-gazing. It was how you processed the day before so it stopped bleeding into today. The quiet before the house woke up was where you remembered what kind of person you were trying to be.

When you traded those things for a head start on work, you lost the infrastructure that was keeping you functional.

And here’s the part that’s hard to say out loud: the work didn’t get better. You’re getting distracted on calls by the noise outside your office. Things are slipping through the cracks in ways they didn’t used to. You’re more behind than you were in April, and you gave up the things that were helping you cope in order to get ahead.

The Half-Presence Tax

When you can’t be fully present where you are, it’s exhausting.

You’re on a call, but part of your brain is tracking what your kid is doing in the next room. You close the laptop to go outside, but you’re still mentally composing that email you didn’t finish. You’re at the pool but you’re not at the pool. You’re at your desk but you’re not really there either.

Working from home in the summer. Is it the best of both worlds? Or the worst? Or a little bit of both? The proximity to the life you want to be living makes the gap feel worse. You can see the backyard from your desk. You can hear the sounds of a summer afternoon. And you are on a call.

Fatigue is the cost of being mentally present in two places while being fully present in neither. Your brain doesn’t get to rest. It just keeps switching. You yearn to “be where your feet are.”1

What’s Actually Happening

Before anything changes, you have to be honest about what’s actually happening. Not what you planned, not what you intended, but what is actually true right now.

You didn’t fail. You learned what flexibility costs when you have no margin. The routines you traded away weren’t optional. They were the reason you were able to move forward through uncertainty.

The tension you’re carrying (trying to be in two places at once) is information. The tension is telling you that the bargain you’re making has a price.You’re more tired, less present, and somewhere under the fatigue there’s a low-grade resentment that everyone else seems to be outside having fun.

It’s a pattern that you can’t change until you notice it.

Reflect and Act

Reflect: Think back to the last two weeks. What did you give up in order to make room? Did it actually buy you what you thought it would? Where are you most aware of being half-present?

Act: For the next week, don’t change anything. Just notice. Keep a running note (on your phone, on paper, wherever) of the moments when you feel the split. Work when you can’t fully be present with your family. Family when you can’t stop thinking about work. Just collect the data. We’ll do something with it next week in Part 2.

I’ve gotten stuck in Maycember!

If you have a child in school, you already know. If you don’t, let me paint the picture: May is the month where the calendar, which seemed perfectly manageable in April, suddenly reveals that it has been lying to you. Field day. Spring concert. End of year awards. Promotion ceremony. Teacher gifts. (Oh, no! I forgot teacher gifts!). The last week of elementary school for my child, who is heading to junior high in the fall and all of the activities and emotions that go along with closing the chapter on this season.

Layered on top of that: a consulting trip, a busy coaching season, International Coaching Week, and the general sense that the world had collectively decided that May was the time to schedule everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.

In other words, I got caught in the whirlwind.1

Here is the part I find ironic: I coach people on this. I work with people who are so busy keeping everything running that they can’t find the time to do the things that would move them forward. There’s no margin. I know the pattern intimately, and this time, I caught myself in it.

But I remembered my resilience menu. I stopped trying to outrun chaos and made a few simple choices.

Simple choices like coffee and a YouTube rabbit trail on productivity systems, obviously. But also: fifteen minutes in the afternoon sun between calls. A quick LEGO build. Journaling. Sitting still long enough to notice what I’m actually feeling instead of just reacting to the next thing on the list.

It wasn’t flashy or dramatic, but it is helping to pull me out of the whirlwind. (Well, maybe the YouTube rabbit trail isn’t really helping with that.)

Recently, I’ve been working through the idea of a resilience menu, a short list of small, restorative things you decide on ahead of time so you don’t have to think when the pressure builds. Turns out I needed to use my own.

If you’re in Maycember too, I hope you find your fifteen minutes of sun.

Reflect: What’s your version of Maycember? When have you realized you were caught in the whirlwind? What was the first thing that slipped?

Act: Build your resilience menu. Write down five to eight small things that restore you, making sure that they vary in time, energy, and location. Keep it somewhere you’ll actually find it when you need it. (Mine is on a sticky note on my desktop.) Because you will need it. The whirlwind comes for us all eventually.

Need help building your resilience menu?

Let's Talk!

When I started coaching, I told myself that the right credentials would bring the right clients. So I got certified. And then I got certified in something else. And then I started eyeing the next certification, the advanced training, the additional framework that would finally make me feel ready enough to be found.

It took longer than I’d like to admit to see the trap I was in.

In their book How Women Rise, Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith describe one of the most common patterns that holds women back in their careers: overvaluing expertise. It’s the belief that if you just keep getting better at what you do, the right people will eventually take notice; your work will speak for itself. Competence, accumulated in sufficient quantity, will open the doors that have stayed closed. But on its own, expertise will not do this for you.

Helgesen recounts a conversation with Ted Jenkins, the fourth person hired at Intel, in which he describes four distinct kinds of power available to anyone building a career:

The power of expertise - what you know and what you can do.

The power of connections - who you know and who knows you.

The power of personal authority or charisma - how you show up and how people experience you.

The power of position - the formal authority that comes with a title or role.

As Helgesen writes: “Expertise, connections, and personal authority are all non-positional kinds of power you can nurture and practice throughout your career. The more you develop these complementary powers, the more prepared you’ll be to assume positional power.”

The problem isn’t expertise. Expertise is a genuine and necessary kind of power. The problem is what happens when it becomes the only power you’re building.

The Path of Least Resistance

Expertise becomes the default because it is often the easiest power to develop. You can take a class from your couch. You can earn a credential on a schedule that fits around your existing job. You can read a book, complete a course, attend a workshop, and walk away with something measurable to show for your time. Expertise is concrete. It is within your control, and in a role where very little feels within your control, that matters more than most people admit.

The other three powers are harder.

Connections require other people’s time, cooperation, and reciprocity. You cannot manufacture a strong network the way you can complete a training module. Personal authority requires a different kind of work entirely: the slow, uncomfortable process of understanding how you come across, what you project, and whether the version of yourself you’re presenting to the room matches the leader you actually are. That’s not a class you can take. It’s a mirror you have to be willing to look into.

And position? Position requires someone else to say yes. You can prepare for it, advocate for it, make the case for it, but ultimately it is not yours to control. For women who have been conditioned to believe that hard work and competence are the primary currencies of advancement, that loss of control is deeply uncomfortable. So they go back to what they can control. They sign up for another certification.

This completely logical response to a system that has historically rewarded women for being excellent at their jobs while quietly failing to promote them for it is not a character flaw. The expertise trap isn’t a personal failing; it’s a pattern. And like most patterns, the first step out of it is simply seeing it clearly.

Indispensable Is Not a Compliment

Here is what the expertise trap looks like from the inside of a middle management role.

You are good at your job. Genuinely, measurably good. Your projects land well. Your team respects you. Your manager relies on you. You have become, in the language of How Women Rise, indispensable. And as it turns out, indispensable is a ceiling dressed up as a compliment.

When you are the person your team cannot function without, you become very difficult to promote. Moving you up means creating a gap that nobody knows how to fill. Your boss knows this. Somewhere, you probably know it too. But instead of addressing it directly by advocating for yourself, building the relationships that would make a transition possible, developing your team so they don’t need you quite so much, you do what feels productive. You add another skill. You take another course. You make yourself even more indispensable, and the expertise trap compounds.

This is where the four powers become useful not just as a career concept but as a diagnostic tool because the question isn’t whether or not you have expertise. You know you do. But rather, what have you been neglecting while you were busy accumulating it? Studies repeatedly show that women in the workplace are skilled at building relationships, so why isn’t the power of connection helping them advance their careers? There is a difference between being well-liked and being well-connected in the way that actually moves careers forward. One is about warmth. The other is about mutual advantage. Leveraging your relationships is the willingness to ask for what you need, offer what you have, and let relationships do the work they are capable of doing.

That distinction is uncomfortable for a lot of women. It can feel transactional. It can feel like using people. But leveraging a relationship for mutual advantage isn’t manipulation, it’s how power actually works. And refusing to do it, however virtuous it feels, keeps you exactly where you are.

The Honest Look

Before you can address the imbalance, you have to see it clearly. Consider the four powers and rate yourself honestly on each one. Where are you strong? Where are you growing? What have you overlooked?

The power of expertise - your knowledge, credentials, and technical skills.

The power of connections - not just the relationships you have, but your willingness to leverage them for mutual advantage.

The power of personal authority - how you show up, how people experience you, whether the version of yourself you present to the room matches the leader you actually are.

The power of position - the formal authority you currently hold and how intentionally you are using it.

Most women reading this will say that the power of expertise is their strongest power. That’s expected when it’s the power you’ve been building longest and most deliberately. The more useful question is this: Which one feels the most uncomfortable to consider honestly? That’s where the work is.

A significant gap between your expertise and your connections is the most common pattern and the most costly one for women who want to move forward. But any gap between expertise and the other three is worth paying attention to. The goal isn’t to abandon what you’re good at. It’s to stop letting it be the only thing you’re building.

One Step in a New Direction

The certification you’re considering probably won’t hurt you. But before you sign up, it’s worth considering: is this actually the next thing I need, or is it just the most comfortable next thing available?

Expertise got you here. It is a real and necessary kind of power. But it has a ceiling, and you may already be bumping against it. The people who move forward are not always the most credentialed people in the room. They are the ones who figured out how to let their relationships do some of the work, who got comfortable being seen, who stopped waiting to feel ready enough and started asking for what they wanted. That shift doesn’t require a new certification. It requires a different kind of investment.

Reflect: Look back at your self-rating. Which power has the biggest gap from your expertise? What have you told yourself about why that power is harder to develop and is that story actually true?

Act: This week, take one step toward your most neglected power. If it’s connections, reach out to one person you’ve been meaning to contact and be specific about what you’re hoping to explore together. If it’s personal authority, say the thing in the room you’ve been keeping to yourself. If it’s position, have the conversation you’ve been avoiding about what comes next for you.

One step. Not a new curriculum. Just one step in a different direction.