Productive Flourishing

This month we’re doing something different. Instead of our typical Monthly Momentum Call, we’re offering a 90-minute workshop to help you give yourself permission to lean into your GATES instead of overvaluing “hard” things.

We spend a lot of time chasing the hard thing and undervaluing what comes naturally to us. But the work that flows most naturally is often exactly where our best work lives. This isn't about avoiding hard things. It's about recognizing where effort feels aligned rather than forced, where you're working with your grain instead of against it.

In this 90-minute workshop we’ll work through:

• Identifying your genius, affinities, talents, expertise, and strengths — your GATES

• Seeing where you’ve been undervaluing what’s already working for you

• Applying what you naturally do best to the goals and challenges in front of you right now

This isn’t about learning a new system. It’s about working from what’s already yours.

If you have results from CliftonStrengths, Sparketypes, or any other assessment, bring them along — there will be opportunity to put them to use. As a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach and Certified Sparketype Advisor, I love helping people put their results to work.

And if you haven’t taken an assessment of this type, don’t worry; there’s still plenty in the workshop to support you in identifying and applying your GATES.

This workshop is part of a...

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To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

Q1 gave your team real data. Some things worked. Some things created more drag than they were worth. Some projects that felt essential in January are harder to justify now, and some processes that seemed fine are showing their costs.

The risk in April is defaulting to the path of least resistance: keeping what’s familiar, avoiding the conversations that need to happen, letting the weight of Q1 just carry over into Q2. Breaking that pattern takes deliberate choice, and April — while energy is high and summer hasn’t yet disrupted everything — is the right moment to make it.

We’ll explore themes like:

• What Q1 revealed about your team’s real priorities and where to focus energy in Q2

• How to retire projects and processes that are no...

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🌟 While we no longer record the Q&A discussions during our Leadership Strategy Sessions, we continue to record the opening teaching. Enjoy a special preview of what we shared about identifying the hidden friction slowing your team’s work. If you want to see the complete teaching and take part in upcoming sessions, consider upgrading to join us live next month.

Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute: the right competency, capacity, and workways to deliver. This month, we turned to a harder question: what’s slowing your team down even when those things are in place?

In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight. Work stalls because someone is waiting on a response. Projects get touched too many times before they ship. Outputs require rework because something wasn’t clear upstream. These aren’t signs of a bad team. No human system is 100% efficient, and chasing that is a fool’s errand. The goal isn’t to eliminate all waste. It’s to reduce it, and you can only do that once you know where to look.

Using TIMWOOD, a framework from lean manufacturing adapted for knowledge work, we focused on the four patterns most likely to create drag in creative and knowledge-based teams: wait times, overproduction, overprocessing, and defects.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• How to lead fairly when your team members work at genuinely different speeds

• Making a clean exit from...

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In Part 1 of this series, we explored how Reviewing helps you understand where you are. In Part 2, Visioning clarified where you want to go. Then Part 3, Planning, charted the course between the two. Now we turn to the fourth and final phase: Executing, where you actually make the journey.

Some people naturally live in this phase. If you’ve taken our Momentum Quiz, you might recognize yourself as a Creator:

✨ Creator: Action-oriented doer who works best with clear steps or checklists. Creators achieve a lot but sometimes feel they're not progressing on what matters most.

Others struggle to stay here. Visionaries (big-picture thinkers) can find execution tedious once the ideation phase is behind them. Designers (master planners) can struggle to put the map down and start driving.

But all roles are needed in the planning process. And just as skipping the earlier phases creates problems, skipping Executing means none of the other work matters:

• Reviewing: You know where you are, but you never move from it

• Visioning: You know where you want to go, but it stays a dream

• Planning: You have a beautiful roadmap that never takes you anywhere

In the Planning phase, you named what success looks like. Now it's time to set yourself up for it.

Creating the conditions for success requires two things:

This is the combination of your strengths, affinities, and natural tendencies along...

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Mom and I just finished one of our household rituals: watching the Winter Olympics. Her favorite is figure skating. I’m not sure I have a favorite, but I do have a fascination: curling, where teams slide granite stones across the ice to a target.

What fascinates me about this sport is its precision: how tiny decisions in how the stone is thrown and the tiny adjustments that reduce friction between stone and ice (go sweepers!) affect the stone’s trajectory and eventual resting place in the target circle (the “house”).

As in curling, friction is often the enemy of our personal or team projects, too. Some of this friction we might not even be aware of, until we see the curling stone of our project slow and stall, rather than reaching the house for a score.

In March, the final month of Q1, we often sense the presence of friction even though we can’t identify exactly what’s causing it. We feel that slowdown right when we think we should be speeding up, reaching our groove, and crossing milestones at a clip.

Lots of things can create friction for you in your personal projects, or in the work you and your team do together:

1. Unclear objectives (either yours or your team’s) that have you drifting instead of focusing.

2. Not leaving yourself breadcrumbs, so you need to spend more time relearning the project when you start it again.

3. Broken printers (you know the ones).

4. Procrastination, maybe because you’re fighting the air sandwich, you’re not...

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a short snippet to give our free subscribers a taste of the rich discussions and timely insights we explored together. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our February Monthly Momentum Call!

January’s vision work felt energizing. Then February arrived, and the gap between where you wanted to go and what you’re actually able to do right now became hard to ignore.

It’s tempting to question your commitment or your capability. But the more useful question is: which gap are you actually facing? There are really only three possibilities: a competency gap (skills and knowledge), a capacity gap (time, energy, and attention), or a workways gap (the habits, routines, and foundational self-care that make everything else possible). Getting clear on which one is limiting you changes everything about how you respond.

Here are some of the key themes we explored this month:

• The Readiness Framework: Identifying what’s actually blocking your execution using Competency, Capacity, and Workways.

• Implicit Learning and Team Habits: How modeling new practices consistently can shift team behavior without heavy-handed instruction.

• Unblocking Creative Freeze: Tools and analogies for helping people move past the freeze response and into generative thinking.

• Finishing and Leaving Breadcrumbs:...

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March is the last month of Q1, and something interesting happens around this time every year: we start to feel the friction.

Not the big, obvious obstacles. The subtler ones. The project that’s been hovering at almost-done for longer than you’d like to admit. The day when you check off task after task and still arrive at the end of it feeling like nothing actually moved. The team process that technically works but somehow always takes longer than it should.

This friction isn’t necessarily a sign that something is broken. It’s a sign that something is worth looking at, because unnecessary drag spends the time, energy, and attention you’d rather put toward work that actually matters.

This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session and Monthly Momentum Call explore what’s getting in the way and how to address it without squeezing the life out of how you work.

We hope to see you in March! (Details below 👇🏽)

For leaders navigating team dynamics, organizational priorities, and the challenge of maintaining sustainable momentum while delivering results.

Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute. This month, we’re looking at what might be slowing them down even when those things are in place.

In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight: work that...

Read more here... »

Please note that North America shifts to daylight saving time on March 8. If you’re joining from outside North America, we recommend checking your local time before joining.

Our Monthly Momentum Calls are designed to help you focus on what matters most, offering a supportive space to clarify goals, overcome challenges, and make meaningful progress — whether you’re pursuing a creative project, growing your business, or balancing life responsibilities.

Each 60-minute session blends teaching, hot- support-seat coaching, and interactive Q&A, providing real-time support and actionable insights to help you move forward with clarity and purpose.

We talk a lot about doing our best work. But what about the things that quietly make it harder?

There’s the project sitting at almost-done that you keep not finishing. The focus block that evaporates before you’ve gotten anywhere. The day when you’ve checked everything off your list and still feel, by the end of it, as if nothing important moved.

Some of what looks like wasted time isn’t waste at all — the walk where the idea finally arrives, the afternoon that looked unproductive but gave you exactly what you needed to move forward. We are not robots, and we shouldn’t try to be.

But there’s a real difference between the space that restores you and the friction that just drains you. This month, we’re looking at the...

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To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute. This month, we’re looking at what might be slowing them down even when those things are in place.

In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight: work that stalls because someone is waiting on a response, projects that get touched too many times before they ship, outputs that require rework because something wasn’t clear upstream. These aren’t signs of a bad team. They’re signs of a system with friction that no one has named yet.

In this session, we’ll use TIMWOOD to identify where the drag is coming from and what to address first. We’ll focus on the patterns most common in knowledge work and creative teams:

• Where ...

Read more here... »

Those you lead are continually asking themselves two questions:

1. Can I trust my leaders?

2. Where are we going?

By trust, I mean functional trust, not moral trust. Functional trust is the feeling that people will do what they say, have our backs, stick with us when things get tough, share or spotlight credit, and do their best to help us succeed. If they’re worried about moral trust — lying, cheating, stealing, etc. — the game’s already up.

The second question is a question of vision. Too many leaders confuse having a vision with having a plan and undershare where the team or organization is going because they’re waiting to figure out how they’re going to get there. Teammates are surprisingly open to there not being a solid plan and often like being part of creating the plan. But not knowing, in general, where you’re going makes it hard to do much but move within the parameters of explicit plans and guidance.

It’s really hard to overdo it when it comes to cultivating trust and sharing vision. It’s surprisingly easy to underdo it.

But leading from trust and vision isn’t just about the relationship from leaders to their teammates. It’s really:

1. Can leaders trust their teammates?

2. Can teammates trust their leaders?

3. Can teammates trust each other?

And on the vision side, it’s:

1. Are leaders sharing their vision with their teammates?

2. Are their teammates aligning their priorities, challenges, opportunities, communication, and...

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