In the Seat

How do you wrestle with a problem you can’t clearly define?

In this episode of In the Seat, I work through a planning challenge where the training objectives are concrete, but the concerns surrounding them are harder to pin down. Different people assess the exposure differently, making it difficult to judge which adjustments would help—or when enough has been done.

If I can’t clearly define the problem, how do I know whether the measures I’m taking address it?

Dismissing an ambiguous concern could mean overlooking something important. Continually adjusting the plan could sacrifice training value without resolving the concern. Somewhere in that uncertainty, I still have to exercise judgment and move forward.

Practical lens:
What problem do I expect this change to solve?

Everybody carries a load.

Work. Family. Decisions. Problems. Expectations. Things that need attention.

This episode uses the idea of a bag to explore leadership capacity — how much we can carry, how well we organize it, and what happens when things start falling out.

It also wrestles with a harder question: how much grace should we give someone for what we cannot see, and at what point does managing their capacity become part of the responsibility they accepted?

Because other people do not see what is inside your bag.

They only see what falls out.

Practical lens:

What is falling out of your bag right now — and who else is having to deal with it?

I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly empathetic person.

I don’t naturally lead through emotion. I tend to process problems logically, make utilitarian decisions, and focus on outcomes.

But that description gets complicated when I look at how I actually lead people.

I still think about dignity. I still soften the edges of hard feedback. I still weigh someone’s personal circumstances against the mission. I still try to understand what a decision will mean for the person receiving it.

So maybe the better question isn’t:

Am I empathetic?

Maybe it’s:

Do people experience care in the way I lead them?

This episode explores the difference between feeling someone else’s emotions and deliberately accounting for their humanity—and whether the path matters as much as the outcome.

Practical lens:
When you make a difficult decision involving someone else, can they tell that you considered them as a person?

Setting a goal is usually the easy part.

The harder part is discovering that the path toward it is rarely as simple as it looked from the beginning.

This Talk uses my pursuit of a perfect fitness score as the backdrop for a broader discussion about difficult goals: failed attempts, changing plans, frustration, and discovering new problems only after solving the old ones.

The goal stayed the same. My understanding of what it required kept changing.

Progress and failure can happen at the same time. A setback can show how far you've come while also exposing what you still need to solve.

And persistence shouldn't mean blindly continuing because you've already invested the time. The question is whether, knowing what you know now, the goal is still worth pursuing.

If it is, keep adjusting.

Practical lens:
When you crest one hill and discover another behind it, is the goal still worth the climb?

Every new level brings authority, responsibility, and problems you have never actually carried before. Schools, doctrine, observation, and previous assignments can prepare you, but none of them let you be the commander before you are the commander.

This Talk came from a conversation with a junior officer who was apprehensive about taking command—and the realization that the apprehension itself wasn't unusual.

Experience doesn't necessarily make the unknown go away. It changes your relationship with it.

Over time, the confidence becomes less I know what I'm doing and more I trust myself to work through what I don't know.

Practical lens:
If you're uncomfortable stepping into the next job, ask why. Is there preparation you still need to do—or are you simply encountering responsibility you've never carried before?

A few months ago, What Are We Measuring? asked a basic question: when we evaluate another leader, are we measuring them against an objective standard—or against our own idea of what good looks like?

I was uncomfortable with how much of my own perspective inevitably entered that judgment.

I’m less uncomfortable with it now.

An evaluator’s job is not to somehow become perfectly objective. It is to give an honest, fair assessment based on what they know, what they have seen, and what they believe.

One evaluation is only one perspective. Over a career, different leaders, assignments, environments, and experiences accumulate into a much broader picture.

The same applies to mentoring and selection. You make the best judgment you can from where you sit, understand the limits of that judgment, and trust that yours is not the only perspective that will count.

The objective part isn’t you. It’s the accumulation of perspectives over time.

The Talks: Why It Exists

In the Seat starts with the questions I am still working through.

The Talks is where I take the ideas that have become clearer over time and talk about the answers: what I think, why I think it, the experience that shaped it, and where it may matter.

Some of those conversations will grow out of questions raised on In the Seat. Others come from leadership ideas developed over years, or newer thoughts that were already formed before I recorded them.

The two formats are connected. One explores the question. The other explains what I learned from it.

I put a lot of energy into command.

I’m present, available, involved, and usually operating at a pretty aggressive pace. I’ve always viewed that as a positive example of what engaged leadership can look like.

But I started wondering whether some people see something different.

Instead of thinking, I want to do that someday, do they think, There is no way I want my life to look like that?

This episode wrestles with the difference between modeling commitment and accidentally making command look more consuming than it has to be.

My brand of leadership works for me. But it’s not the only brand that can produce successful command.

The standard is not my calendar, my meeting schedule, or my pace. The standard is taking the responsibility seriously.

Practical lens:
Am I showing people how seriously command should be taken—or accidentally making command look like something they don’t want?

I built this podcast around a simple constraint: no polished answers.

The point was to work through real leadership tensions in public—to expose the uncertainty, tradeoffs, and unfinished thinking that usually get cleaned up before anyone else sees them.

Fifteen episodes later, that constraint is starting to create a new problem.

There are things I want to talk about that I am no longer wrestling with. Things I have learned, approaches I use, and ideas that may be useful—but they do not fit the format.

So the question becomes whether to protect the thing that makes this different, or change it so it can do more.

Complicating that is another uncertainty: I do not really know what part of the podcast people value, or how much reach justifies expanding it.

The broader leadership question is similar. Sometimes constraints create the value. Sometimes they simply become familiar.

Practical lens:

What am I actually trying to protect—the constraint that creates the value, or just the structure I already built?

We talk a lot about balance as if the goal is to keep every part of life evenly weighted.

I don’t think that’s how it actually works.

Family, work, military service, health, and personal priorities all demand different levels of attention at different times. Sometimes one of them needs to become the solo.

The question is not whether the mix is equal.

It is whether you are still paying attention to the meters.

A short period in the yellow may be intentional. Staying there too long is different.

This episode explores the difference between temporary imbalance and actual drift, and why the real problem may not be running one part of life hot—it may be failing to notice when it never comes back down.

Practical lens:
What channel is supposed to be loud right now, and what are the meters telling you about everything else?