The Buoyant Leader

Last week, I bought a gelato shop in Andalusia.

I tell you this not to brag (or to admit to an extreme and fairly late mid-life crisis), but rather to tell you what I’ve learned about speed and focus and calmness in a business that can melt away your inventory if you’re a bit too languid or relaxed.

And I say “learned,” because my understanding of speed was mostly theoretical until now.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I associated moving fast with a frenetic nervous system. Which is understandable, since my own work as a coach, consultant, and writer relies on deliberate thinking and careful execution.

When I rush, it’s because I’m frantic about something. And when I’m frantic, the quality of my product plummets.

And without realizing it, I was projecting that understanding onto my clients.

But some businesses require speed.

For people who know me, this whole thing will take some explaining, but that will have to wait for another edition of The Buoyant Leader.

Suffice to say, I’m now the proud owner of Gelateria Natura.

I’m getting an hour-by-hour crash course in gelato, coffee, refrigeration, signage, inventory, bureaucracy, CoGS, profit margins, industrial cleaning supplies, food handling certification, and what shoes will guarantee that you fall on your ass on a puddle while scooting over to the sink to rinse out a dirty scoop.

The hardest part, so far, has been getting the gelato out of the deep freezer in the back and into the display freezer in the front. With 20 flavors, this takes time. And time is the enemy of good looking gelato.

Context: Andalusia, like most of Spain and much of Europe, has been experiencing an unprecedented heat wave.

A hundred and freaking eight? Are you kidding me?

What this means is that the ambient temperature in the shop, with the minisplit cranking at 61 F, doesn’t drop below 83 F.

And what this means is that the tubs of gelato start sweating and melting the very second I take them out of the chest freezer.

And what this means is that I have to transport those tubs from the back to the front as fast as possible. That includes loading them on a cart, moving them, removing their lids, arranging them in the display freezer, popping in the labels, and closing the freezer in fewer than 5 minutes.

Which means I am hauling ass.

At first, I was rushing. I could feel the panic. Especially after placing a large order to the fancy gelato supplier from Turin, Italy, I became very proprietary about my inventory. These tubs were my babies. (Especially the vegan ones, if I’m being completely honest. Sorry, Nocciola and Stracchiatella.)

And in my haste, I almost dropped tubs several times by picking them up by the long ends rather than the short ends. (By the time you finish listening to this, you will probably have enough knowledge to avoid at least a dozen of my mistakes.)

I bumped the trolley into the plastic hanging partition between back room and shop and knocked it completely off its track. (I’ve since replaced it with a large orange beach towel until I can find a drill.)

And I could feel the anxiety building up as my nervous system clicked into higher and higher gear.

I got snippy with my family members, who are here indulging my weird pivot.

I radiated the opposite of calm happiness as I dealt with the buying public. (Especially when they ordered in Spanish, which down here sounds very different from the Castilian I’ve been learning.)

And that’s when I realized that I needed to find a way to move fast without rushing.

I guess the definition of rushing is trying to go faster than is possible, or wise. I’ve often advised people to “not push the river.” And now I have a sense of what that means in practice.

Moving fast is simply doing what has to be done next, one step at a time, without unnecessary delay.

As I’ve repeated the morning and evening gelato routines for a week now, I’ve gotten better at them. I have to think less about what happens next: how to prop up the deep freezer, how to grasp the tubs, where to place the lids, how to arrange the flavors, and so on.

I’m not on autopilot, but something akin to it. A combination of muscle memory and focused, relaxed attention to each task, each moment.

I might even describe it as meditative.

Because that combination — automaticity and presence — means I can go fast and stay calm.

More than that: I’m learning how to access calm through speed.

So now when I talk with my clients about their stressful lives, full of deadlines and urgencies and “gotta-be-done-yesterdays,” I have a better sense of how to guide them.

First, connect with breath. The old 4-6 breath is my new best friend. There’s no way to rush without rapid, shallow breathing.

Second, conduct a 3-second body scan. There’s no way to rush without excessive muscle tension.

Third, get in touch with an intention to guide the work. I want to infuse my product with peace, love, and joy, so I view the rapid transition from one freezer to another as a way to imbue the gelato, the shop, and myself with those qualities.

Think about a recurring situation in your work where speed matters, where things need to get done fast and well. The investor deck due tomorrow. The production issue that just hit. The decision your team needs from you before lunch.

Now ask yourself: when I'm in that situation, am I moving fast, or am I rushing?

Here's a quick test for next time. Right before you dive in, take ten seconds:

1. Breathe. One 4-6 breath. Four counts in, six counts out. If you can't slow your breathing, you're rushing.
2. Scan. Three seconds. Where is the tension? Jaw, shoulders, gut? If everything is clenched, you're rushing.
3. Set an intention. Not a to-do. An intention for how you want to show up in the next five minutes. Calm, clear, generous, whatever quality you want to infuse into the work.

Then go. Move as fast as you need to.

Afterward, notice: did the quality of the work change? Did the people around you respond differently?

Drop me a line at howiejacobson.com. I’d love to hear about your experience.

And if you’re in town, the first scoop’s on me.

“Sometimes responsibility means you’re the only one who can change things.”

Whoa.

That line, from Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, rewired the word for me.

Before I read How Emotions Are Made, I thought of responsibility as a weight that I’m obligated to carry. A should that I fulfill because I’m a good person (or because I want to be perceived as a good person).

Barrett flipped it. Rather than thinking of obligation, I now recognize it as opportunity: I can choose to do this, and no one else can. I’m the only one standing where I stand.

That’s not a burden. That’s agency.

For leaders and founders, that flip is huge.

Responsibility as burden means that, no matter what you’re doing, you’re doing it reactively. You’re one step behind, solving problems, fixing messes, assuming more than your fair share because, well, who else will if you won’t?

And there are so many responsibilities, it’s so tempting to ignore or postpone the ones that feel like… just more than I feel capable of handling well right now.

• The conversation you keep putting off.
• The drift in your culture of respect and positivity.
• The lack of attention to detail.

No one else is coming to handle those.

If you view them as akin to cosmic punishment, you get drained and embittered.

If you see them as opportunity, because you’re the only one with the power to make things better — you get energized.

Energized by your agency.

Same situation.

Two completely different nervous systems.

It’s really hard to view a responsibility as a gift or opportunity when your nervous system is in fight or flight mode.

In fact, my suggestion that you do so may land as an annoying bit of preaching instead of genuinely insightful and helpful advice.

So the trick is to regulate your nervous system while holding a responsibility in mind.

Step 1

Think about the responsibility that’s weighing on you the most right now. The conversation you keep postponing. The drift you’ve been tolerating. The thing that tightens your shoulders just reading this paragraph.

Step 2

Before you think about it any further, take 60 seconds and breathe. In for four counts, out for six. As you breathe, lightly scan your body and notice where you’re holding. Jaw. Shoulders. Chest. Just notice.

Step 3

Look at that responsibility again. Does your mind now allow you the space to see what Dr Barrett saw? This isn’t a burden; it’s the fruit of a position only you occupy.

The reframe doesn’t come from arguing with yourself. It comes from regulating first, so your brain can actually access the part of you that leads, rather than the part that braces.

I’d love to hear what you find when you try it.

Drop me a line at howiejacobson.com.

Are any of the following folks familiar to you?

• The project manager who’s always singing dirges in the key of risk, no matter how well things are going.
• The ops person who keeps flagging a vendor dependency nobody else is worried about.
• The client-facing account manager who can “just tell” the customers are starting to drift even though the dashboard looks like a winning slot machine to everyone else.

These folks might annoy you.

They might be yucking on your collective yum.

They might be bringing down the energy in every meeting.

And they might be dead wrong.

But the answer isn’t to get rid of them, or sideline them, or to give them useful feedback such as “for the love of Mike, can you be please just be a tiny bit more effing positive?”.

Because here’s the thing.

The folks who sense danger sooner and more acutely than everyone else have a vital role to play.

They’re what biologists would call a “hyper-responsive sentinel node.” (Aren’t you glad I’m not a biologist?)

I prefer to think of them as Uncomfortably Hyper-Observant Humans, or UH-OHs.

If you picture a bell curve, UH-OHs are the people whose nervous systems are calibrated to pick up weaker signals of danger earlier than anyone else.

If you were living in our ancestral environment, in a hunter-gatherer band, you might not enjoy hanging out with UH-OHs, but you’d be grateful for their warning when the drought arrived or the locusts descended.

In your organization, they’re still sniffing the air for danger, for fluctuation, for risk. And sometimes they imagine it; seeing patterns in one-offs and extending short-term random wobbles into ominous trend-lines.

UH-OHs pose two problems for leaders who, rightly, want their workplaces to be energetic, positive, optimistic, cheerful domains of achievement.

First, their “constant drama” can bring down the energy of the team and the entire enterprise.

Second, the room can bristle at their concerns, so that UH-OHs learn to keep their worried mouths shut. Then what feels like a calm, happy meeting is actually a dashboard with duct tape over the check engine light. What feels like better team chemistry is actually less information reaching you.

Fortunately, these two problems aren’t opposite ends of the continuum. Rather, they’re both symptoms of a culture’s suboptimal relationship with the airing of risk.

The trick is to honor the information that the UH-OHs bring and actively request it.

Make Uh-OH into a function rather than a character trait. And celebrate the people who are highly skilled at it, the same way you’d celebrate those who are great at sales or strategy or inspiration.

“Hey, you have a nose for these things. Can you take on the role of ‘early warning detector” and bring us your concerns as soon as they pop up? We won’t impulsively act on them or ignore them. Rather, we’ll take them seriously, debate them rigorously, and use them to keep our SWOT analysis balanced between positive and negative.”

Given that explicit permission and encouragement, your UH-OHs can let go of their stridency or defensiveness, and name with clarity and pride what they’re offering:

“This might not be anything, but my spidey-sense says we should look into this more deeply.”

Now you can process early warnings and “constructive” feedback as data rather than attack.

You can have debate without drama, and discernment without dread.

Who are the UH-OHs on your team?

Instead of bracing when they raise a concern, be curious and open: “Tell me more. What are you picking up that the rest of us might be missing?”

Ask them to evaluate their concern: “What’s the evidence that this is signal, and what’s the evidence that this is noise?”

If you both agree, bring it to the team to get other data points and perspectives.

You might discover that your most annoying UH-OH is one of your team’s biggest assets. And opening that channel of communication can actually reduce stress and drama by ensuring that you’re pinging the horizon for unpleasant surprises.

I talk a big game when it comes to achieving buoyancy in the face of stress and uncertainty.

But that doesn’t mean I live a perfectly balanced, blissful life, facing all challenge and adversity with the ruthless grace and aplomb of an NBA starter at a neighborhood pickup game.

I dove into the study of stress and resilience, neurological imbalance and rebalance because I freaking needed it in order to navigate my own life.

I stress test my own IP every day. Necessary, frankly exhausting, and honestly a good thing.

Because I’m so far away from the “expert’s curse” — so close to being a struggling beginner myself — I can totally empathize with what my clients are going through.

Take two nights ago, for example.

My bladder helpfully woke me up at 3am, at which point my mind checked its agenda and called to order a full scale cosmic emergency.

First, the warm-up: This problem. That problem. This unresolved situation. That fraught relationship.

Then the main event:

• What do you have to show for your one wild and precious life?
• Have you utterly wasted your potential?
• Are you even now acting irresponsibly by trying to go back to sleep instead of dragging your ass to your desk and sending 10 prospecting DMs on LinkedIn?

That’s when I remembered that I’m the damn author of The Buoyant Leader, and I am the Driver of the unruly bus that houses my Internal Dysfunctional Family.

So I tried every cognitive trick I could think of to quiet the bedlam so I could return to sleep.

Defusion.

Reframing.

Perspective taking.

Curiosity.

Gratitude.

Nothing worked.

Every technique felt like repression rather than management. Like I was hiding a low-battery smoke detector in the freezer to block out the damn beeping, beeping, beeping.

And that’s when my agitation woke up my wife, who mumbled, “Can you try breathing or something?” before turning over and resuming her own slumbers.

Well, yes, I could.

I went into a round of Xi breathing, a technique I learned from Qigong teacher Robert Peng. (Here’s more info if you’re interested.)

By round 3, I was floating in a completely different head space.

I hadn’t banished the Doom Agenda, but it no longer had the same purchase. The accusations and perseverations were floating around my consciousness with the weightlessness of dust motes, there but no big deal.

Instead of treating my thoughts like fast-growing weeds, yanking them out in a losing game of whack-a-mole, I changed the composition of the soil, making it an unfit medium for them to take root and multiply.

As it turns out, I do have something useful to share, despite my own personal challenges.

And that is, the body is where the action is when it comes to managing the mind.

Changing your physiology through breath, or movement, or muscular contraction and relaxation — this is the node of highest leverage.

That’s because your body is the soil in which thoughts land. You can’t stop thoughts from hitting your consciousness any more than you can stop the rain from falling.

Though it doesn’t feel this way, your thoughts aren’t even personal; they’re just free-floating, and which ones land on you in any given moment is more or less random.

Once they land, though, the soil determines the rest of their fate. Whether they germinate (or not), thrive (or not), and reproduce (or not).

If you want to show up as the person you mean to be in high-stakes situations, work the soil of your body so your mind can hold the most empowering, creative, and curious thoughts you’re capable of.

Because your thoughts determine your “read” of every situation — whether you’re blinking into a threat or an opportunity.

Had I brought my worried mind into a meeting, I would have perceived every word, every tonal shift, every facial expression, and every physical movement through the lens of potential danger.

And every self-instruction to the contrary would just have passed through that same negativity bias, landing as a criticism or attack. A self-sabotaging feedback loop, shrieking louder with each pass.

Changing my breathing changed my blood chemistry. Releasing the tension locked in my ribs and back replaced the PA speakers at a high school gym dance with a mellow pair of Harbeth Super HL5 Pluses.

The sharp and painful thoughts could not thrive in that new environment. Other, more nurturing and helpful thoughts, were encouraged to take their place.

So, neither you nor I have to be perfect.

We just need access, in the moments that take us, to the sleepy wisdom:

“Try breathing.”

Is it OK to get angry at work?

How about scared? Or anxious? Or ashamed?

Does being buoyant mean that you make yourself immune from emotions that get in the way of connection and productivity?

Listening to an episode of the podcast The Telepathy Tapes, I was struck by a comment made by a therapist who works with profoundly autistic children and their families.

Caregivers have to juggle the needs of their autistic kids with their other children, with their careers, with their love lives, with their own self-care — it’s a lot.

Sometimes too much.

And so those caregivers can feel resentful, or depressed, or terrified.

And then they feel ashamed or guilty for having those feelings, and so try to deny or suppress them.

And that’s where the problem compounds.

As one child explained to their parents, “I don’t care how you feel. I care that you know how you feel.”

In other words, the primary emotions aren’t a problem when they’re acknowledged and held cleanly.

You’re furious? Cool. Feel it fully.

But you’re furious and you feel that you aren’t allowed to have that feeling? Then it leaks out, and you become untrustworthy.

Primary emotions — your responses to your perceptions of your external and internal environments — aren’t the problem.

You can be angry with someone without causing damage.

But when you’re so uncomfortable with your anger that you mask it with pleasantness while seething underneath — that’s toxic.

You can feel fear without acting out fight or flight or freeze or fawn.

When you’re unwilling to admit that you’re afraid, and you hide it behind bravado — that’s destabilizing to the people around you.

The secondary emotion — how you feel about your primary emotion — is the thing that gets you into trouble.

Because when the secondary emotion arises from an unwillingness to acknowledge and feel the primary emotion, you’re in a real bind.

Instead of aversion to something that’s happening to you, you’ve now developed an aversion to the workings of your own mind.

Imagine a microphone connected to a loudspeaker that’s blasting sound back into the microphone.

That’s your mind when it becomes scared of itself — a screeching feedback loop that drowns out every useful signal.

Fear is a natural response to a perceived threat.

But when you’re unwilling to feel that fear, you experience fear of your fear.

And fear of your fear feels even worse than fear, so it’s natural to fear that.

The feedback loop has a name: anxiety. Unlike fear, it has no target or direct antecedent; it just floats in your field because it’s always there.

And the same is true for anger, or sadness, or any other emotion that you do not tolerate and feel fully.

I’m not saying that you should act on your emotions. It’s not a choice of “repress your anger” or “express your anger.”

This has nothing to do with behavior. It has everything to do with your capacity to be present to your own experience.

You do not have to swallow your feelings. In fact, only through feeling them can you metabolize them into the wisdom to act.

When you allow anger or fear or sadness to course through you, you’re simply respecting that emotion as a useful piece of intelligence.

Anger says, “Someone or something is violating a boundary of yours.”

Wisdom asks, “What’s the boundary, and do I need to defend it?”

Fear says, “There’s danger here.”

Wisdom asks, “What am I protecting?”

Sadness says, “You’ve lost something precious.”

Wisdom asks, “What have I lost, and what does that loss tell me about what I love?”

After sitting with the wisdom questions, you may act. Or not.

What’s important is that you stop running away from the feeling long enough to hear what it’s trying to tell you.

That autistic child had the measure of it. Your feeling isn’t the problem. Everything you do to avoid it — is.

This week, pick one emotion you've been unwilling to fully feel at work.

Not act on. Just feel.

Notice what it's telling you, and notice what your default response has been.

Then take a breath, and take a moment to ask the wisdom question, without requiring or expecting an answer.

Notice if anything shifts inside you. What options are now available to you?

When I lived in London in my early 20s, I took up juggling. The city was a hot spot for the best jugglers in Europe, who could make a lot of money as street performers in Covent Garden, the South Bank, and Camden Market.

I discovered that these elite jugglers practiced in a sports center in Blackfriars, at a weekly event sponsored by Max and Susi Oddballs’ Juggling Shop. I’d go every Saturday and watch a colorful cast of characters manipulate balls, clubs, rings, cigar boxes, devil sticks, diabolos, hats, eggs, and knives.

I’d practice on the periphery, watching other jugglers and trying to imitate their simplest tricks. Occasionally I’d gather the nerve to ask one of the pros to show me a pattern or give me feedback on my form.

One world-class circus clown took a break from juggling 11 beanbags (he was going for a world record) to give me pointers on Mills Mess. Another helped me change the angle of the clubs I was double-spinning to reduce the incidence of bloody lips.

But my favorite moments were when one of the professional jugglers took a few minutes to pass clubs with me.

We started with the simplest format: two jugglers passing six clubs back and forth in a simple “every other” pattern. That is, one toss from my right hand goes to my left hand, and the next to my partner. Add in two self-passes, and you get the pattern: 1-2-3 pass.

The goal is to send each pass the perfect distance, at the perfect height, and with the club perfectly vertical when it reaches their open hand. When a toss is perfect, catching becomes trivially easy. The club hits your palm and your fingers automatically close around it.

The hard part about clubs, compared to balls or beanbags, is that clubs are not symmetrical. If you put too much or not enough spin on a toss, your partner has to catch the wrong end, or contort their arm to compensate.

That in addition to the other challenges of distance, height, and speed.

So here’s what happened.

When I passed clubs with a pro, they caught every shitty pass I made. They bent, they scooped, they reached. And with ease and dexterity, they flipped the club back to me in the perfect arc, so that I just had to hold my hand up and catch it.

We could pass this way for a couple of minutes — that is, an eternity — until I dropped one or made a throw so errant that there was no way to save it.

But when I passed with a regular old juggler, the pattern never formed.

There was too much instability, with neither of us able to compensate for the flaws in the other’s technique. We’d start over and over again:

1-2-3 pass. Oops, dropped it. 1-2-3 pass. Oh, sorry.

Neither of us would learn much.

As I improved, this shifted. I no longer needed to bother Max Oddball or Charlie Holland or one of the Russian street performers who practiced at the gym when they cycled through town.

I could work with the skilled amateurs, and they had to make fewer and fewer heroic saves as my passes grew more consistent.

Eventually, I became a stabilizing node of the system, and started to work with beginners who could juggle clubs but hadn’t yet been initiated into the mystical art of passing.

We’ve all been in relationships that feel like two amateurs trying to pass clubs; good intentions lead to errant throws, drops, and frustration. No matter how hard we try, every move ends up making things worse, until it feels like we’re just pelting each other with clubs instead of creating a beautiful back-and-forth dance.

And we’ve been in relationships where the clubs spin back and forth smoothly and accurately, seemingly without effort.

What’s the difference?

It’s how much buoyancy each of us brings to the interactions.

If I’ve learned how to shrug off triggers — and everyone gets triggered — and return to a stable neurological state, I can catch your fears and frustrations and insecurities and pass back to you curiosity, compassion, and confidence.

And vice versa.

Leadership these days is all about bringing out the best in the people around you.

Because any other manifestation of leadership eventually makes you the bottleneck, where your team and organization rely on your vision, knowledge, expertise, and inspiration to get things done.

Bringing out the best in others is how you scale your leadership. And helping others bring out the best in others is the exponential form of scaling.

So a big part — I’d argue the biggest part — of your leadership journey is going from beginner to expert at neurological co-regulation, the relational equivalent of club passing.

When you’re Max Oddball, you can bring out the best in people who have not yet learned how to regulate their own neurological states, and get them to a place where they can. And once they have the skills and capacity to self-regulate, they can in turn contribute positively to the teams to which they belong.

This week, notice which role you're playing in each challenging interaction. Are you the stabilizing node, catching wobbly passes and sending back clean ones? Or are you the beginner, lobbing errant throws and hoping the other person can save the pattern?

Pick one relationship, at work or at home, where you know the clubs keep dropping. Instead of trying to fix the other person's technique, focus entirely on the quality of your own passes.

Catch what they send you, however awkward, without flinching. Pause (you can do this in conversations, if not in literal juggling). Flip it back with curiosity and compassion.

Do that for a week and see what happens to the pattern.

And see what it does for your ability to stay buoyant when the waters around you become choppy.

In the original Karate Kid movie, Daniel spends what seems to be days of wasted time performing menial chores for Mr. Miyagi.

Four days of waxing the car, sanding the floor, refinishing the fence, and painting the walls.

The reveal comes when Daniel blows up and accuses Mr. Miyagi of taking advantage of him: “I’m being your goddam slave is what I’m being, man. For four days I’ve busting my ass and I haven’t learned a goddamn thing!”

That’s when Mr. Miyagi shows him how he's been learning karate all along, and he’s now got powerful defenses against punches and kicks firmly embedded in his muscle memory.

From that movie, my generation learned about putting in the reps.

Being a buoyant leader — one who maintains a regulated nervous system when things get tough — requires three things. And the third one has everything to do with reps done right.

First, you have to know what to do.

How to have the difficult conversation.

How to think strategically.

How to guide someone who’s struggling without disempowering them further.

Fortunately, knowledge is easy to acquire. Four gazillion business and self-help books are published every week, with dozens of frameworks for everything, and they mostly work fine.

But you’re not going to have a leadership breakthrough just from reading another leadership book.

You also need your nervous system to read safety rather than danger in the moment of action. When you’re triggered into fight or flight, what you know how to do becomes severely constrained by what your body thinks it needs to do in order to survive the next 30 seconds.

The problem is, most of us are carrying a heavy load of unmetabolized stress all the time, which means we’re just a sideways glance or a critical Slack message away from flipping into survival mode.

In order to follow a framework, you need your neurology to be in shape. Spending time every day de-stressing is critical for how you show up when the waters get choppy.

You know what to do.

You’ve prepared your body so it has the capacity to do it.

But the thing about the frameworks in business and self-help books is, if they came naturally, you wouldn’t need the books.

If coaching for performance were the normal mode of conversation, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my career teaching leaders how to bring out the best in their teams.

What you need is a training system that turns the new behaviors into your defaults.

In other words, reps.

What’s missing in most training and self-development plans is the reps.

You've read the books and listened to the podcasts. You've got a daily breathwork practice dialed in. On a calm Tuesday afternoon, you're the leader you want to be. But calm Tuesday afternoons aren’t where your leadership gets tested.

You discover on Thursday morning that marketing totally ignored your directive to double the number of webinars. Your voice gets loud, sharp, and angry before you’ve even realized that you’ve let it. And now your team is walking on eggshells or making a mental note to email that headhunter the moment they get home.

Or your director of sales is coasting on last year’s numbers, while insisting that the problem is lead quality. You need to have a difficult conversation with them, but you keep finding reasons to put it off until next week. And when you do, you soft-pedal the hard feedback so exquisitely that they miss it — and you’re relieved when they do.

Knowledge and body readiness are necessary but not sufficient when your ingrained habits are pulling you in the old dysfunctional direction.

Under stress, you’re going to default to that old behavior, unless you put in the reps so that the new and unfamiliar becomes second nature.

You’ve got to put in the reps. Wax on, wax off.

If Daniel had walked away from Mr Miyagi’s house and given up on Day 4, those reps would have been utterly wasted.

What made the training effective was Mr Miyagi throwing punches and kicks while shouting at Daniel to “paint the deck” or “sand the floor.”

To change behavior, you’ve got to practice reps in context.

In The Karate Kid, the context was martial arts.

In your workplace, the context is the various situations that can hijack you into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (the basic menu of stress responses).

Which means that any effective program to transform and elevate your leadership must dig new pathways.

Most leadership training gives you the knowledge.

Self-care routines like yoga, breathwork, and meditation can bolster your neurological stability.

Are you missing the third element: the neurological pathways for the new behavior firing faster than the old ones?

What’s your most costly hijack trigger — the situation that pulls most powerfully against your best leadership?

What’s one way you can start preparing for that situation?

What’s your version of Wax On, Wax Off? And where can you practice it in increasingly relevant and charged contexts?

Everything above is trainable. But not by reading about it, and not by yourself, alone.

Daniel needed Mr Miyagi’s attacks to turn implicit knowledge into effective action.

The way to close that gap between knowing and being able to do it consistently is to experience real-life pressure repetition under real emotional load.

In a room that's safe enough to let you fail and structured enough to make the failure useful.

A stress dojo, if you will.

That's what The Buoyant Leader Experience is. Two days with a small cohort of leaders, each working the specific moment that triggers them — the board question, the confrontation, the crisis.

And you do it live, with peers who are practicing same as you. Through realistic scenarios, you enter conversations and situations that would normally hijack you, and pause and re-enter them again and again, until the new pathways start to hold.

You arrive having mapped your hijack. You leave having worked it: felt it fire, caught it, and responded from buoyancy instead of reactivity. Not as a concept, but as a lived experience your body remembers.

Date and location are coming soon. If this is the work you've been circling, let's start the conversation now. Hit me up at howiejacobson.com.

As a coach, trainer, and facilitator, one of my great strengths is empathy. I’ve learned how to tune in to other people’s emotions, which means that I can help guide them to better places.

When I’m working, I can stay attuned to others while maintaining my own power.

But as a civilian, living my life every day, I can easily get swamped by other people’s energy. My superpower turns into my kryptonite.

When I’m around happy people — energetic, bright, optimistic — I match their vibe. When folks are negative, cynical, depressed, worried, and dissociated; same thing. I feel myself hollowing out, draining, deflating.

I come home from an entrepreneurial meetup or lunch with a prospect feeling hopeful and excited, possibilities buzzing — and if someone in the family is in a bad mood, within 30 seconds I can’t even remember what I’d been excited about.

In short, the opposite of buoyancy.

One way to be immune to other people’s emotions is to ignore or override them. That’s not what I’m going for.

The cover of my new book, The Buoyant Leader, features a rubber ducky. I’ve loved the image since my daughter first suggested it as a visual theme for the concept of buoyancy, but I love it even more when I apply it to my own life.

Because it shows me how to protect my boundaries. It has an impermeable membrane, so it won’t pop like a balloon. It won’t take on water, and won’t become the water.

At the same time, it doesn’t ignore the water. It moves, bobs, submerges, and pops back up.

That is to say, it’s sensitive to its environment without merging with it.

So how do we do this?

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply decide to. To imagine yourself encased in an energetic membrane (for me, obviously, a giant rubber ducky suit), protecting your energy — whether joyful or reserved, outgoing or introspective, silly or serious — while you stay in touch with the needs and desires of others.

For some folks, simply practicing this visualization can lay down new patterns.

For others, this will be a band-aid or worse: an useless exercise in “positive thinking” that eventually erodes confidence when it doesn’t work.

If that’s you, I recommend getting support in first understanding the protective purpose of losing yourself in other people’s energy fields.

Eg: You might have learned that being happy when others were miserable is selfish.

You might have learned that the way to stay safe is to blend in.

You might have learned that the only way to be loved is to mirror those around you.

Or any of a thousand unique lessons, specific instructions coded into your nervous system so deeply that they seem unarguable.

Breaking those patterns requires deeper work; typically guided by someone skilled in supporting you to uncover and disconfirm the predictions that were baked into your nervous system.

Once you can choose how to respond to other people’s energy, you can choose how to support them.

Once others see that you can hold your own energy in the face of theirs, they’re much more likely to come to you — and trust you — with their concerns.

When your nervous system is regulated, you can be creative, nuanced, and light. Qualities that are much more likely to lead to positive outcomes.

And rubber ducks can make life more fun, as many of us learned watching Sesame Street.

Change always starts with awareness.

The next time you walk into a room and feel your energy shift, try this — pause, feel your feet, and ask yourself: “Is this mine?”

Today I feel like a fraud.

On the one hand, it’s Monday, and time to draft this week’s Buoyant Leader newsletter.

On the other hand, I’m feeling decidedly non-buoyant: sluggish, sad, scared, and stuck.

I open my note-taking app and looked through all the newsletter ideas — and I got pissed off at my past self for offering all this smug advice that I really need right now.

Because when you’re not buoyant, the last thing you want is someone telling you how to right yourself.

Which is a useful thing for future me to remember when I’m out of my funk and feeling helpful again.

But I don’t want to abandon this feeling of fraudulence that quickly. I want to twist on this hook for a few more paragraphs, in case you might also have a touch of “who the hell am I to…?” now and again.

The fraudulence has two parts to it.

First, I’m the guy who has supposedly figured this stuff out, and here I am again. I feel like calling some coaching clients and paying them to coach me today.

And I know, conceptually, that having off-days doesn’t disqualify me from — well, from anything really, except maybe surgery or air traffic control.

But it’s hard, and frankly annoying, when the advice and empathy and perspective I can dole out like the world’s best bartender falls so flat to my own ears.

Probably it’s an example of why bootstrapping isn’t a thing — while self-coaching can help with surface issues, in order to lift spirits we need each other.

But I wouldn’t want my clients to see me this way, and if I had a call this afternoon I’d fake energy and charm and positivity.

The second part of the fraudulence is the old refrain, Do As I Say And Not As I Do.

Because, honestly, this funk was pretty preventable.

I’ve neglected my morning practice for a couple of weeks now.

I’ve avoided several tough conversations because of the emotional discomfort I feared they would trigger.

And I’ve dealt with my unwanted feelings mostly by watching YouTube videos that review “buy it for life” products and brands. Exactly the opposite strategy of what I recommend (“feel it in your body”), and exactly the opposite of what would actually help.

This is the part of the post where I feel like I should be humbly redeeming myself.

Or subtly inviting comments commending my courage for posting this.

Or hit the Delete key until I’m back to a blank note.

Maybe I should sleep on it.

Well, now it’s tomorrow, and I’m feeling much better. Full of beans (literally: scrambled tofu and mung beans for breakfast), and ready to align actions with values.

So maybe this is buoyancy; not expecting every day to be smooth sailing, but simply getting back up after going under.

The opening of Steward Brand’s new book, Maintenance: of Everything, tells the story of three boatsmen competing in 1968 to complete the world’s first (that we know of) solo circumnavigation of the earth in a boat that could not dock or take on any supplies or get outside help of any kind.

Rather than focusing on strategy or derring-do or luck, Brand explores how each of the competitors handled maintenance of their vessels and their health.

All faced setbacks that had them on the verge of quitting (or dying).

The ones who succeeded were better prepared by virtue of being less optimistic.

So when the storm came, or the accident happened, they didn’t panic. They had faith, not in the sea or the wind, but in their ability to weather whatever came.

When an insurmountable problem arose, they took time to think, to reflect, to consider before taking action. And fortunately for them, those actions rendered the insurmountable… surmountable.

So maybe yesterday was just one of those storms for me.

An inner storm.

Maybe had I done more morning qi gong and afternoon breathwork it wouldn’t have happened.

Maybe it was on my inner horizon and there was no avoiding it.

Maybe it was one of those cleansing storms that leaves the bright crackle of ozone in its wake, rainbows chasing away the receding cumulonimbus.

And maybe this is all a story in my head, which is now in yours.

I dunno.

“Prepare better”?

“Be gentle with yourself”?

“Be kind to others; everyone is fighting a hard battle”?

You choose.

For me, it’s a reminder that we’re all in this together.

Today I lift you; tomorrow you return the favor.

Going under happens. It’s not a sin, it’s not a crime, it’s not a shame.

And buoyancy isn’t some earned thing, although you can tilt the odds in your favor.

Buoyancy can be our natural state. We can rise again, dripping and spluttering, and our underwater experience can contain gifts for ourselves and others.

So yes, prepare better. Be gentler and kinder with yourself and others. (Even — perhaps especially —to your harsh and unkind inner voices; they’re trying their best to keep you safe.)

And remember that, maybe, we’re all frauds sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we stop doing the work.

And it doesn’t make our work any less precious.

One aspect of taking care of yourself that’s often overlooked is nervous system maintenance. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll define your nervous system as the body’s opportunity/threat scanner.

It’s constantly pinging your environment, looking for clues that you’re either safe (and should focus on finding good stuff, like food, mates, or season two of Beef) or you’re in danger and should focus on hightailing it out of there or preparing to fight).

When this system works, you spend your energy wisely. You make good decisions. You respond rapidly to change and take appropriate and proportionate action when called for.

When your nervous system is out of whack (that’s some fancy neuroscience jargon thrown in to impress you), you over- or under-react to threat. You either miss clear danger signals, or (more commonly) respond to every glance, utterance, email, or traffic light as an invitation to extend your adamantine claws and fight.

In other words, what can look like an objectionable personality (what Bob Sutton refers to, in organization development jargon, as an “asshole”) is often based on a miscalibrated survival imperative.

And that’s good news. We don’t know how to cure “asshole.” But we know a lot about repairing and maintaining the nervous system, to restore it to a state of sensitive harmony with its environment. And it starts with the body.

Your allostatic load is how much stress your body is carrying at any given time. When it’s high, it takes very little additional stress to catapult your nervous over the red line — the point where your nervous system flips from “thoughtful and strategic” to “eat or get eaten” mode. Not a great look at team scrums or standups.

Allostatic load is a big problem in our modern environment, because all the things that lower it are in short supply for many of us: birdsong, the smell of fresh soil, long vistas, singing and dancing around campfires, and picking insects out of each other’s fur. (All, interestingly, associated with safety and the absence of predators.)

Those classic stress-reducing triggers have been replaced by stress-inducing ones, like being surrounded by thousands of strangers, enclosed spaces, artificial lighting, and bad covers of classic rock songs.

So your allostatic load, which in your ancestral environment would generally have reset to close to zero by the time you awoke, can just keep climbing. Day by day, little prods and annoyances ratchet up the stress, with no relaxation in sight. From morning to night on any given day, your allostatic load climbs like the foam on top of boiling spaghetti water.

That’s why an innocent word or otherwise insignificant event can put you over the red line: because you were already doing the hokey-pokey right at its edge.

Because stress is a physiological response, working with your body is the fastest way to bring down your allostatic load. The most accessible lever is your breath.

Usually, our bodies breathe automatically and unconsciously (which is nice, because it leaves you free to sleep without worrying that you’ll forget to breathe and die during the night).

But breath is unique among your body’s automatic processes in that you can bring it entirely under your conscious control.

The hack is simple: spend 1 minute, 3 times a day, breathing consciously, with the out-breath taking slightly longer than the in-breath.

As you breathe, lightly scan your body with your mind, noticing any tightness, holding, discomfort, comfort, and fatigue.

Try it now and see what changes for you.

*hums Jeopardy! theme song*

You back? How’d it go?

Now, I’m not claiming that this simple practice, which you can do for free anywhere and any time, is the total cure for a miscalibrated nervous system struggling under a ginormous allostatic load.

What I am claiming is that you can use it to move away from the red line, so you have more “fuse” between trigger and boom.

And if you make this a regular practice, like brushing and flossing your teeth, you can begin to restore your nervous system to a healthier state over time.

There are many other strategies, but reconnecting with your body and stimulating your relaxation response on a regular basis provides the physiological foundation upon which those other strategies can build. Without it, you’re just trying to think your way out of a problem that has become immune to better thinking.

Once you’ve regulated your nervous system on the physical level, you can then address the next steps on your journey to buoyancy: inoculating your mind against unhelpful thoughts, seeing a bigger picture, and engaging in your world with wisdom. All stuff we’ll explore in upcoming issues of The Buoyant Leader (so subscribe if you want to keep exploring this stuff with me :).