The Buoyant Leader

A team of Swedish researchers recently set out to answer a question on everyone’s mind: What happens when you drug a bunch of baby salmon with anti-anxiety meds?

They exposed Atlantic salmon smolts — young salmon making their once-in-a-lifetime migration from river to sea — to clobazam, a benzodiazepine. (Clobazam is in the same family as Valium and Xanax. It takes the edge off.)

They watched what happened when a predator was introduced. Normal salmon tighten up — they shoal, forming cohesive groups, doing the collective threat-response thing their species has been refining for millions of years.

The drugged smolts didn't. They drifted apart. They moved as individuals.

The drug did more than make the fish more relaxed. It made them miscalibrated.

Their environment is genuinely full of threats, including birds of prey, otters, fish, and even terrifying-looking merganser ducks complete with serrated bills.

Salmon’s nervous systems evolved to read those threats and respond.

Clobazam makes them environmentally illiterate.

I've been thinking about this study a lot lately — because most organizations are running the same experiment on their people, just without the benzos.

Workplaces routinely ask people to perform calm.

Don't bring drama. Don't catastrophize.

Don't make a fuss. Stay positive.

The implicit message — sometimes explicit — is that the appearance of being unbothered is the same thing as being well-adjusted, and well.

It isn't.

Performing calm and actually being regulated are very different states.

The first is a flattening, where people’s perceptions respond in a similarly limp fashion to threats and opportunities.

The second is a kind of capacity — the ability to take in information, including unwelcome information, and respond to it from a steady center rather than from panic or paralysis.

A regulated nervous system is online. It's reading the environment. It's noticing what's off.

A "nothing-to-see-here" workplace culture asks for the opposite. It rewards the appearance of regulation and punishes healthy responses to actual dangers.

It tells the people whose nervous systems are picking up real signal — the early warning, the pattern that doesn't add up, the customer drift, the quiet worry about a strategy — to settle down, look more relaxed, not be such a downer.

Those people aren't the problem. They're a functional sensing apparatus.

Every time the room signals that their concern is bringing the energy down, it doses them with a little hit of emotional clobazam.

Their threat-perception is compromised in ways their leaders won't see until something breaks.

This isn’t an ode to anxiety. It’s the difference between head-on-a-swivel regulation and why-bother sedation.

Seeing your team this way — as a sensing apparatus rather than as problems to manage — is a reframe I owe to my friend Ian Lawton, founder of NeuroHive, an organization supporting late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults.

Ian read an early draft of my forthcoming book The Buoyant Leader and pointed out, with characteristic kindness, that I'd wandered into territory that wouldn't serve a meaningful slice of my readers — autistic, ADHD, trauma-affected, and otherwise neurodivergent leaders, but also leaders whose teams include people across that full neurological range.

His feedback reorganized my thinking: regulation isn't an outward look, it's a stability of intention. The team member whose worry registers in her body before it reaches her words isn't failing at composure. She's regulating. She's also probably reading something the room needs to hear.

Ian's framework reorganized substantial portions of my book. More importantly, it should reorganize how you think about what "good leadership presence" actually means — both in yourself and in the people you're leading. Read his foreword when The Buoyant Leader comes out. (And while you're there, read the rest of the book.)

The drugged smolts didn’t die of relaxation. They died of illiteracy.

They lost the ability to read their environment, and each other.

They stopped shoaling, and lost their fear of very real and present dangers.

That’s what a “keep calm and carry on” culture builds.

So here's my question for you:

In the rooms you lead, are you cultivating a culture where people can stay regulated through hard things — or one where they have to look calm regardless of what they're picking up?

Only one of them lets your team do what the undrugged smolts do instinctively: shoal up, read the water together, and move as one through genuinely dangerous terrain.

Augustus III, King of Poland, received a cover letter in July 1733 from a German musician — some fella named Bach — attached to a bunch of sheet music. Here’s part of that letter:

“In deepest Devotion I present to your Royal Highness this small product of that science which I have attained in music, with the most humble request that you will deign to regard it not according to the imperfection of its Composition, but with a most gracious eye ... and thus take me into your most mighty Protection.”

That small, imperfect product? It was only his Mass in B Minor, widely regarded as one of the greatest compositions of all time.

Here’s how the Netherlands Bach Society describes it on YouTube, “In between an awe-inspiring Kyrie and the jubilant final Dona nobis pacem, there are nine completely unique arias and duets, fourteen impressive ensemble sections for four, five, six and even eight voices, a broad spectrum of instrumental solos, and an incredible variety of styles.”

A “small product” indeed ;)

I can’t read Bach’s mind (I’ve played violin since 1974, and I can barely read his Sonatas and Partitas), so I’m curious: was he really that modest, or was the self-deprecation a strategic gambit to get the job he wanted: court composer?

But what I really wonder about is how Augustus himself reacted to that letter.

Imagine the king's secretary handing him the package. Your Highness, a musician from Leipzig sent this. Says it's a small product of his attempts at music. Asks for your indulgence.

If Augustus had taken Bach at his word — if he'd glanced at the inscription, registered the apology, and filed the parts away unexamined — the world might have lost the Mass in B minor for another century.

He didn't. Three years later, Bach got the court composer title he was angling for.

But here's what I find myself thinking about: Augustus had to look past the packaging.

And most of us, most of the time, don't.

So what I want to talk about today is: how should leaders handle self-deprecation?

Somewhere on your team this week, someone is going to walk into your office or open a Slack thread with a sentence that begins:

"This is probably a dumb question, but..."

"I might be totally wrong here, but..."

"You probably already know this, but..."

What’s the best way to address the self-doubt?

Some leaders — not you, obviously — would welcome it.

Their thinking goes like this: if folks in their organization lack self-confidence, they can keep them at the low end of the salary ladder. Make them feel like they're lucky to have a job, so they won't complain or organize or jump ship. Feel good themselves by "lending" them their confidence.

There are good reasons to discourage self-deprecation, even though it can feel like having discount employees.

First, it’s not a discount. Self-deprecators are actually bringing a worse product at the same price. The person who hedges their words almost always hedges their thinking as well, editing ideas before bringing them. They don't challenge you when pushing back could be valuable.

They aren’t JS Bach with a humble cover letter. You're getting PDQ Bach, the one who mailed you only the bits they’re sure you’ll like.

Second, you’re going to end up pushing down or driving away good people.

People who self-deprecate in environments that reward self-doubt either shrink further, or end up leaving when they feel sufficiently under-appreciated. And those who leave first are the ones with options.

Third — and this is the one that should keep you up at night — the contributions most likely to be hedged are also the contributions most likely to contain information you don't already have.

People hedge when they worry you don’t want to hear what they have to say. Which means a leader whose team runs on self-deprecation systematically loses access to exactly the information that should be written in bold flashing 240-point neon font on a SWOT matrix.

That’s not a controversial argument. So where’s the issue here?

The issue is this: unless you’re paying very close attention, there’s a good chance that you’re unconsciously encouraging a fair amount of hedging, self-deprecation, and low-status behavior.

Because it’s a “feel-good-in-the-short-term” behavioral dynamic. For both parties.

While your directs self-deprecate to let themselves off the hook, notice how they’re letting you and your nervous system off the hook as well.

Notice what happens in your body when a direct report comes to you with “This is probably a dumb question, but…”

Deference. Safety. Low stakes.

Ahhh…

Now picture that same person walking into your office with more of a confident swagger. “I’ve thought this through. We should do X, and here’s why. What do you think?”

Now you’ve got to make an effort. You have to evaluate fairly. Possibly disagree. And risk being wrong.

Self-deprecation isn't a character flaw. And while a few self-deprecators are working the Bach angle — strategically performing humility to gain a hearing — most are not.

Most workplace self-deprecation is a protective adaptation. A habit formed in earlier environments that punished confidence.

That environment might be a family of origin, a culture where directness from a subordinate is unthinkable, or a toxic workplace where, for example, a confident woman learned that behaving the same way as a confident man got her tagged as "problematic."

The hedging worked — then.

It's up to you whether that habit still works for them, or whether it's no longer necessary, but simply costly.

When you hear someone hedge, you've been given a glimpse into their history. Wherever they learned that lesson, it wasn't from you. Now it's your job to help them discover that respectful, honest confidence is the best way to present themselves.

So the next time someone walks into your office with "This is probably a dumb question, but..." — what do you do?

Don’t reach for that platitude, “There are no dumb questions.”

(My first week in the private sector, I took that advice to heart when I asked a prospect, “What exactly do you mean by P&L?” My boss quickly learned that there are, in fact, dumb questions.)

And don’t give them the “act more confident” speech. That puts you in the position of critic rather than ally, and heaps an extra helping of shame on top of their already-negative self-perception.

Here’s what I recommend: notice how your body responds to the pre-apology. The quiet relief that you aren’t going to be challenged; no need to add to your cognitive load in this conversation. Can you feel this stance as a sensation?

If so, that sensation is a clear signal that your nervous system prefers the hedge to the more challenging contribution it would otherwise have to engage with.

Once you’ve become aware of this dynamic, you’re ready to respond differently.

Now mentally strip the hedge. Listen only to the claim underneath.

Then ask yourself a single question:

"If a senior colleague had made this same observation with full confidence, how would I respond?"

Respond that way.

Do this for a month and you'll notice two things.

First, you'll catch yourself hearing hedges you used to file under "deference" — probably more often than you'd have guessed.

Second, the people you respond to this way will start hedging less. Not because you overtly told them to change. But because their nervous system will clock that your nervous system can handle — and may even welcome — their full intelligence and presence.

In other words, your work isn’t making them more confident. It’s becoming a receiver who doesn’t need their confidence to register — and honor — their signal.

Three years after that letter, Bach got his court composer title. Augustus had read past the self-deprecation and recognized the Mass in B minor for the transcendent achievement that it was.

Whose hedge have you been taking at face value? And what might that person be able to tell you when you create the conditions that encourage and reward their full-throated transmission?

This is the kind of thing I work on with founders and senior executives one-on-one. If you've spotted yourself in this piece and want to think it through together, message me on LinkedIn or hit me up at HowieJacobson.com.

A brainless, single-celled organism can navigate mazes, design efficient transit networks, and reliably find opportunity — with nothing more than raw sensitivity to its environment. Can your organization say the same?

The organism in question is Physarum polycephalum — aka Mr or Mrs slime mold. No brain. No nervous system. Just a blob of goo that oozes around by extending bits of itself called pseudopods and then glurping along to catch up.

And yet, place a bit of oatmeal at the exit of a maze, and it will find the most efficient path through.

It does this with no central planning — just a simple, distributed sensitivity to its environment.

Researchers actually use slime molds to solve complex engineering problems, like designing optimal road and rail networks connecting ports and cities.

(Or are the slime molds using researchers to cook them oatmeal? Philosophically, it's unclear.)

Your organization also has no single, all-knowing brain. The question is whether it can match even this level of environmental intelligence — sensing opportunities, avoiding threats, and routing resources where they matter most.

Your organization also exists in an environment full of opportunities and threats. The question is — how good is it at acting on them?

Amoebas have an advantage here. They're single-celled, in intimate contact with their environment. They sense food or poison and extend an approach or avoid pseudopod immediately.

In organizations, though, the sensing function is separated from the decision-making function. The bigger and more complex the org, the bigger the gap.

Traditional hierarchies make it worse: the higher up you go, the less contact you have with the outside world.

The hundreds of small insights that sales, customer service, and tech support are gathering — about shifting customer preferences, changing price sensitivities, emerging complaints — rarely inform the control room — the C-suite — that sets policy.

The people who know what's happening don't have permission to act on it. The people with permission don't know what's happening.

That gap is where most bad decisions live.

More meetings. More reports. More Slack channels. More cc'd emails. It feels like progress — but it's just the organizational equivalent of really committing to that squint.

Leaders set up ad hoc task forces to deal with things that have already become emergencies. They complain that nobody takes initiative, that they're the only one acting like an owner.

Then they look for someone to blame when they miss the writing on the wall and watch quarterly revenue tank.

Yes, there are structural fixes — reporting lines, wiki access, AI tools, meeting policies. These things can be broken, and they can be fixed.

But in my experience, the real blocker isn't plumbing. It's fear.

The underlying issue I see over and over again lives in the collective nervous system of the organization as a constant buzzing of threat. Employees going about their days shadowed by a lack of psychological safety.

Ask yourself:

• How safe do my employees feel to share their actual thoughts and feelings?
• How encouraged are they to say unpopular or risky things?
• How are they rewarded for bringing up problems? For advocating for vendors and customers? For pointing out policies that interfere with good work?

A collective nervous system running on fear will miss the subtle signals that can inform wise action.

Imagine a leisurely stroll through the forest. Birdsong, the hum of insects, the gurgling of a brook. Deep green of last year's foliage, bright green of this year's new shoots. The smell of soil and pine needles. A pleasant breeze.

For an experienced hiker, this isn't just a bunch of sensory delights. It's data. The richness tells her where to find food, shelter, water — and whether a storm is coming or a predator is near.

And here's the key: none of this requires effort. She's not running mental checklists. She's just open — and because she's open, the information flows in and organizes itself.

A relaxed nervous system is a remarkably intelligent instrument. It picks up patterns, spots anomalies, and integrates vast amounts of information without being told to.

This is what organizational intelligence looks like when it's working. People at the edges — in sales, in support, on the factory floor — naturally absorb subtle shifts in customer behavior, market conditions, product quality. Not because they're instructed to, but because nothing is blocking the signal.

Now back to our hiker — a twig snaps behind her.

Instantly, everything changes. The richness collapses. She doesn't care about birdsong or soil quality anymore. All she cares about is: what's behind me, and how fast can I move?

When the threat is real, that narrowing is lifesaving. But when your nervous system is permanently locked in threat mode, you lose access to everything else. The aperture narrows. The edges go dark.

This is what happens inside organizations that run on fear. People stop picking up on the subtle stuff — not because they're incompetent, but because their nervous systems have been hijacked. They're scanning for danger — who's getting blamed, what's the political risk, will I get punished for this? — instead of scanning for opportunity.

Basically, treat your people as if they are actually competent and well-meaning.

Look for every policy that sends the message: "We don't really trust your judgment, your ability, or your intentions." Now imagine getting rid of those policies.

What comes up? Probably fear.

Because those policies represent control — or at least the illusion of it. If you're in the C-suite and you're used to making all the decisions, it can be terrifying to picture Sal in customer service empowered to make things right.

What if she could issue a refund up to $200 without asking anyone?

What if Iqbal in operations could pause a deliverable when he sees scope creep, instead of escalating through three levels of management?

Only a well-regulated nervous system can handle the open flow of information as data rather than threat.

Only leaders who've done the work on their own nervous systems — who’ve become buoyant — can take in as much reality as is available for processing.

A healthy organization is an organism. Its intelligence lives at its edges — where it actually touches the world.

When a leader's nervous system goes into threat mode, the aperture narrows and the edges go dark. The instinct is to compensate by pulling information toward the center: more meetings, more reports, more oversight, more blame.

But that's not wisdom. It's panic.

The fix isn't tighter control. It's a regulated enough nervous system to trust the edges to act — and to let what they're learning reach you before it's already an emergency.

This is what I write about in The Buoyant Leader — the practical neuroscience of why your organization's intelligence collapses under stress, and what to do about it.

The book lays out a four-part framework that gives leaders the tools to widen their aperture, trust the edges, and stop being the bottleneck between what their people know and what the organization does about it.

If this piece resonated, the book goes deeper. Find out more at howiejacobson.com.

If you ever want to make me feel inadequate, suggest to me that I “be fully present.”

For a long time, that was my aspiration. A thousand yoga and meditation classes drilled into my head that the highest virtue is to “be here now.”

I have no problem, in theory, with presence. One of the main themes of my work is to empower executives to tolerate their own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and urges.

I generally prefer presence to absence (except for some meetings). It’s the “fully” that’s been the problem.

Have you heard it a thousand times too?

"Be fully present." In meetings. In one-on-ones. In every conversation that matters.

It sounds right. Noble, even. Give 100% of your attention to the people or person in front of you.

But here's the problem: if you actually try to be 100% present, you become useless.

I’ve been to a bunch of events at Kripalu, a yoga retreat in New England. And one of the weirdest things I do there is mindful eating.

Mindful eating is one of those classic presence exercises. I sit down, nodding solemnly to my table mates, signaling that I’m an advanced spiritual being with barely any ego left.

No phone in my hand, no tablet in front of me. I gaze deeply at my food. I notice the aromas, the textures.

I silently thank the sun, the rain, the farmer, the trucker, the cook, the dishwasher, the accounts receivable clerk for the fertilizer company, the earthworms, the whole shebang.

I take small bites, chew carefully, notice everything.

It's beautiful.

Then someone repeats, “Can you slide your chair in so I can get by?" and I’m completely thrown. Earthworms and dainty bites out the mental window, replaced by a flustered annoyance.

It turns out that 100% presence for one thing means zero capacity for anything else.

That's fine —mostly — at a yoga retreat. It's a disaster in a leadership conversation where you need to listen, think, respond, draw on your experience, and track the bigger picture — all at the same time.

What actually works is something I teach coaches and leaders that sounds almost absurdly modest: keep about 5% of your attention on the fact that you are present.

That's it. A small, steady thread of awareness — I am here, I am paying attention — running quietly in the background. That lets the other 95% of your energy go where it needs to go: listening to what's being said, reading the room, connecting dots, formulating your response.

This is actually more like what experienced meditators do, for the most part. They don't white-knuckle their way to unbroken focus. Instead, they maintain a gentle witness — a part of their awareness that notices when they've drifted.

What happens without that 5% witness?

Sometimes, if the present moment isn’t engaging (because it feels unimportant or boring), you might catch yourself thinking about last night’s ball game or whether a double-perl stitch will work for the collar of that sweater.

More frequently, especially with leaders, something else happens. Something more insidious: autopilot.

On autopilot, you get so absorbed that you merge with your role, or the task in front of you. You’re so engaged that you’ve forgotten that “you are.”

You don’t notice your body. You don’t notice your breathing. “You the be-er” disappears and is replaced by “you the do-er.”

But wait, you might protest: this sounds like flow.

And that guy with the really long name says that flow is a desired state.

And sometimes it is.

Flow — all task, zero self-awareness — becomes a problem when there are other people in the equation, and their needs and goals and priorities are different from yours. And when your nervous system’s threat detection algorithm lights up.

This can look like:

• In a coaching conversation, you stop listening and start performing.
• In a strategy meeting, you stop tracking the room and start defending your position.
• In a difficult one-on-one, you stop being curious and start reacting.

Your witness goes dark, and you don't even realize it until later, when you start wondering what went wrong.

Here’s what went wrong: Your nervous system was running the show, and nobody was watching the controls.

That’s why allocating 5% of your awareness to mindful presence is so important; to notice your elevated heart rate, tensing muscles, and racing thoughts, and interpret those inner signals as a cue to slow down, check in, and recalibrate.

This is the inner game that separates good leaders from great ones. The leader everyone wants to work for is the one who can hold the full complexity of a conversation — your words, your emotions, the organizational context, their own reactions — while maintaining just enough self-awareness to choose their response rather than just having one.

That's what regulation looks like in practice. Not calm detachment. Not performative eye contact. A quiet, ongoing thread of I am here. I notice what's happening — in the room and in me.

5% awareness. 95% engagement. 100% effective. (Look at me doing math — Mr. Gonzalves, I apologize for asking, in 1978, when we were ever going to use percentages in real life. You were right.)

In The Buoyant Leader, I explore how the inner game of self-regulation transforms how leaders show up under pressure — not through more effort, but through smarter attention. If this resonates, I'd love to hear from you. Find me at howiejacobson.com and let’s talk.

Pretty much every leadership article about imposter syndrome says the same thing: dispute it, push through it, power-pose your way past it.

Cut a mantra-groove in your brain: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like me.”

The assumption, of course, is that imposter syndrome is a terrible thing to have.

Sometimes it is. And sometimes kicking it in the ‘nads is the right strategy.

But not always.

So here’s a couple of serious questions for those other times:

What if that voice isn't self-sabotaging or pathological?

What if it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do?

If someone asked me to perform surgery tomorrow, I'd say no. I’m not a surgeon, I hate the sight of blood, I never won at “Operation” as a kid. Get someone else.

Is that imposter syndrome?

Or just a healthy relationship with reality?

And yet we've lumped together those two very different situations under the same label.

There's the self-doubt that keeps you from doing things you're perfectly capable of.

And there's the healthy caution that says, "Hey, this matters. People are counting on you. Pay attention."

That second voice? I'd call it a guardrail, not a syndrome. (Especially if I’m the one on the operating table.)

When leaders step into new roles — a bigger team, a higher-stakes environment, a seat at a table they've never sat at before — they often feel a version of this. The voice that says you shouldn't be here; other people are so much better at this; wait until they find out that you’re a fraud.

The conventional advice is to silence that voice.

I think that's a mistake.

The voice is trying to protect you. It's reminding you that there are real stakes and real responsibility. Always a message worth keeping in mind.

But hearing it doesn't mean obeying it. You can acknowledge the risk and move forward. Feel the discomfort and act anyway.

Not recklessly, but intentionally.

Ground yourself with conscious breathing. Make a plan. Take people in. Focus on being curious rather than impressive.

Here's what happens when you do: you start collecting evidence that contradicts the voice.

You get through the meeting and people are pretty happy. Your top experts share their ideas, and you — new to role and in a bit over your head — take time to listen. You ask sharp questions. You encourage creativity and collaboration.

When you review your performance later, and you’re being honest, your brain registers a mismatch: Wait, the voice said I'm no good at this, but the evidence says otherwise.

Under the right conditions, your brain recalibrates. It steps back, slowly but surely, and lets you lead. And the part of you that’s curious, that’s creative, that’s collaborative — there ain’t no leadership better than that.

This is a power move. When you're focused on helping someone else, you “you-ness” fades into the background. Your own anxiety becomes a side show because it’s irrelevant to the task at hand.

Think about it: if you see someone trip and fall on the sidewalk, you don't stand there wondering, Am I qualified to intervene? Do I have my ten thousand hours of “helping someone up” training? Can I name all the muscles and tendons involved in this maneuver?

You just help. The impulse to serve cancels out the impulse to doubt.

The same principle applies in a boardroom, a team meeting, or a difficult conversation with a direct report. The moment you shift from How am I doing? to How can I help?, the “get me out of here before someone notices that I’m a large sentient insect” voice loses most of its power.

Sometimes the voice is louder than the situation warrants. When there's shame, anger, or fear that feels disproportionate to what's actually happening, that's a signal. Something from the past got stuck and never got resolved.

Michael Singer taught me to think of it like a thorn that’s embedded so deep it's covered with scar tissue. You can't see it anymore, but it still causes pain in certain situations.

When that happens, it's actually an opportunity. Slow down. Ask yourself: Where is this in my body? What are the words it's saying? Do I remember the earliest times I felt this way — in other words, can I pinpoint the original thorn, so I can bring awareness to it and extract it?

This is the deeper work — the kind that doesn't fit neatly into a listicle. And it's often the work that creates the most lasting change.

The leaders I admire most haven't eliminated self-doubt. They've developed a different relationship with it. They treat it as data, not as identity. They've learned to hear the voice, extract the useful information, and then choose their next move from a place of centered authority rather than reactivity.

That's not something you can hack with a morning affirmation. It requires genuine self-awareness, often supported by a coach or therapist, and the willingness to look at parts of yourself that would rather stay hidden.

But the payoff is enormous: you get to lead with both confidence and humility. You stay responsive to real risk without being paralyzed by imagined inadequacy. And you model for everyone around you that growth and self-doubt can coexist — which might be the most uplifting thing a leader can do.

If this resonates — if you've been white-knuckling your way through self-doubt rather than working with it — I'd love to hear your experience. Find me at howiejacobson.com. And if you're ready to explore what's really driving the voice, let's talk. That's the work I do with executives every day.

You're in a one-on-one with a direct report. They're telling you about a problem — maybe a project that's off the rails, a team dynamic that's souring, or a client relationship that's circling the drain. About thirty seconds in, you get it. You can see the whole thing in your mind. You know what's going on, and you probably already know what they should do about it.

Guess what?

You're almost certainly wrong.

Not about the general shape of the situation. You've been doing this long enough that your pattern-matching is excellent. But about the specific reality this person is living in? The details that actually matter?

You're running on a movie your brain invented — complete with set design, lighting, and a cast of characters straight out of your brain’s best simulation of Central Casting.

I see this constantly in my coaching work. A leader comes in with something like, "My team just isn't stepping up." Or: "I keep getting pulled into the weeds." Or: "I've got a senior person who's checked out."

My instinct is to immediately start solving. I can see the situation. I can see the checked-out senior leader scrolling through their phone in a meeting. I can see the overwhelmed VP staying late to redo their team's work. I've constructed a vivid mental movie, and I believe it.

But it's a total fantasy. My brain is constructing reality, like it always does.

And that means that my solutions, which will work perfectly in the theater of my mind, always fall flat in the real world.

As a coach, I’ve learned to insert a simple but powerful technique between an initial description of a problem and an in-depth diagnosis.

I become a movie director.

Instead of working from the generalized story, I ask for a specific scene. Not "tell me what usually happens" but "tell me about a specific time this happened." Not the pattern — one actual instance. And in enough detail that I can see the movie in my mind.

"Well, last Tuesday in our leadership meeting, I presented the Q3 priorities and Davina just sat there."

"Great. Take me through that. Where were you sitting relative to Davina? Who else was in the room? What exactly did you say, and what did Davina do — specifically?"

I keep asking questions until I could instruct actors on a set. And if my client watched the resulting scene, they'd say, "Yep, that's exactly how it happened." (They’d also say, “I think Ryan Gosling should play me.”)

When you zoom into the specific scene, two things happen.

First, you stop coaching a situation that exists only in your imagination. You stop offering brilliant guidance that's irrelevant to what's actually going on.

Second — and this is the part that still surprises me after all these years — the person starts solving their own problem.

When they shift from "Davina’s checked out" to "Oh… I realize that when I presented the Q3 priorities, I didn't ask for input. I just talked at the room for twenty minutes. And actually, Davina had sent me a strategy memo the week before that I never acknowledged…" — suddenly the issue looks completely different, and the path forward is theirs.

One of the reasons leaders stay stuck is that they've generalized. They now have a situation.

And you can't solve a general situation. You can only solve the moment you're in.

This is one of the most underrated leadership skills I know — and it works whether you're coaching a direct report, running a retrospective, or navigating a conflict between two senior people.

The next time someone comes to you with a problem, resist the urge to solve the abstraction. Instead, try:

"Tell me about a specific time this happened. Walk me through it like I'm watching a movie."

You'll be amazed at how often the solution emerges — without you having to provide it.

I work with executives and leadership teams on the mindset shifts that turn reactive management into buoyant leadership. If that's a conversation worth having, let's talk. Drop me a line at howiejacobson.com.

In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that you don’t see the world “as it as,” but rather you construct it, moment by moment, by filtering and analyzing the torrents of sensory input that you receive.

The main tool your brain uses to do this, once you’ve acquired language, is categories.

What category includes the following?: a house, a fly swatter, a beekeeper’s suit, and a degree in entomology.

Things that protect you from stinging insects.

Cool, huh? These items have nothing in common, except for a specific goal. And once you’ve formed the goal, you can add other things to the category: a bottle of DEET, a zapper, a plane ticket to Antarctica.

Whether you’re aware or not, you approach every situation with multiple goals. These goals shape what you notice, what you prioritize, and how you behave.

You’re aware of some of your goals: “find out what this person thinks” or “build team safety and camaraderie” or “impress the boss.”

But you also have goals that are running below your conscious awareness, like “be the smartest person in the room” or “avoid conflict” or “don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Can you see how the unconscious goals might interfere with and even sabotage your conscious ones?

Unconscious goals are even more powerful than conscious ones in determining what you experience in any given situation. That’s because you’re not aware of them, so you can’t perform any reality checks.

If your goal is “be the smartest person in the room,” your brain will be working as follows:

1. Other people’s ideas are stupid, or flawed, or incomplete
2. When people ask me questions, they’re challenging my competence rather than being genuinely curious.
3. All feedback is actually criticism.

If your goal is “avoid conflict,” here’s what your brain will do:

1. Anyone expressing a strong opinion is being dangerously aggressive.
2. All disagreement is a personal attack.
3. All sighs, glances, and movements signal tension that could erupt into conflict at any moment.

If your goal is “don’t draw attention to yourself,” your brain will automatically perform the following tricks:

1. Anyone who speaks up confidently is showing off, and is not to be trusted.
2. Any opportunity I might volunteer for will expose me to judgment, and is too dangerous to consider.
3. My own contributions aren’t good enough to share.

In each case, the unconscious goal acts as an invisible filter that constructs your experience of the situation before you even have a chance to think critically about it.

These goals are so harmful because you don’t experience them as goals. You experience the distorted perception they engender as reality.

I’m a big believer in uprooting the schemas — the unconscious ways of seeing the world — that underly these goals. The process of doing so — activating the original belief and exposing it to disconfirmatory knowledge — can be surprisingly tolerable, brief, and effective.

But what do you do in the next meeting, the next one-on-one conversation, or the next performance review to construct a more helpful, empowering reality?

You might think it’s by reinforcing your conscious goals: “find out what this person thinks”; “build team safety and camaraderie”; “impress the boss.”

Like, repeat them as affirmations on your way to the meeting, draw them in shaving cream or lipstick on your bathroom mirror, and make them your screensaver.

The problem with this approach is that you’re setting them up to fight with the unconscious goals. And the unconscious always wins, eventually. And the unconscious always wins, under pressure.

The elegant, effective move here is to set value-based goals that don’t try to fight against old patterns of self-protection. Where you identify how you want to be, rather than what you want to accomplish.

For example, before a conversation where you’re trying to get someone’s opinion, set your goal as relentless curiosity. It’s imperative that you find out what they think!

Now all your self-protective circuits will rally around that goal, rather than the one of making you seem smarter than the other person. You’ll construct a reality in which their perception has value, and that it’s in your best interest to find out what it is.

Another game-changing goal is compassion. When your goal is to be emotionally supportive of other people, you’ll see their behavior through the lens of their needs, which you can attend to.

That’s very different than viewing their behavior as provoking and dangerous.

The third game-changing goal I’ll mention here is creativity — yours and everyone else’s. If you’re consciously focused on cultivating an atmosphere where new and exciting ideas can be born and nurtured, your “don’t get noticed” circuitry gets assuaged by the fact that you’re drawing attention to ideas, not yourself.

Before your next meeting, take two minutes to set a single conscious goal — curiosity, compassion, or creativity — and notice how it changes what you see. Notice the ideas you might have dismissed, the people you might have misjudged, the opportunities you might have ducked.

And if you'd like help shifting your team's or organization's culture to one rooted in curiosity, compassion, and creativity, reach out to me at howiejacobson.com. Let's build something together.

In her book How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett tells a story of going on a date with a guy from her lab that she wasn’t really into. As the date progressed, however, she found herself increasingly more attracted to him. Her face flushed, her heart rate increased, and she started feeling butterflies in her stomach.

After agreeing to a second date, Barrett went home, got into bed, and had the flu for a week.

In other words, those bodily sensations were an incipient illness, not signs of sexual attraction. But when her brain had to interpret those sensations, it did so through the context of a dinner date. So it predicted, “You’ve got the hots for this dude.”

She wasn’t lying to herself. She was simply doing what all of us do, all the time: constructing reality from incomplete data.

This is the predictive brain at work.

You don’t experience the world raw, without filters. (You’d be bombarded with so much data, you’d be completely unable to function.)

Instead, you experience a model of the world that your brain constructs on the fly, assembled in about half a second from sensory data, memory, and your brain’s best guess about what’s happening, what it means, and what you need to do about it.

Most of the time, the model is close enough for you to function successfully. You bring your fork to your mouth instead of your eye, you don’t walk in front of traffic, and you laugh at the punch line of the joke.

And that model does get things wrong — a lot. Most of the time, that’s not a problem. Your brain compares incoming sensory data with its prediction and updates its model.

Prediction, comparison, prediction error, updated prediction.

That loop is your brain at its best — learning in real time.

But sometimes prediction errors don’t get corrected. Say you interpret a harmless glance as accusatory, or the innocent absence of an instantaneous response to a text message (“my phone died”) as anger.

Or your stomach drops before a team all-hands, and your brain codes that as Something's wrong with the vibe in here — what are they not telling me? rather than I just drank too much coffee.

When that happens, you don’t feel wrong. Your brain doesn’t update. To the contrary; you feel certain. Certain that you’re under attack, and there’s a threat that needs to be dealt with.

You feel that certainty as evidence of objective truth, when it’s actually nothing more than evidence of your brain’s confidence in its own prediction.

Instead of learning, you’re stuck in a self-sealing feedback loop.

Borrowing from Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, I call it a “thorn”: an old wound, encoded under conditions of real threat or loss, that got locked into your prediction algorithm as “the most important thing to consider here.”

What Andy Clark refers to in his book The Experience Machine, in the charmingly technical terminology of neuroscience, as “a heavily weighted prior.”

A heavily weighted prior — a thorn — isn’t a memory that you can visit; it’s a pair of glasses you see through without even realizing that you’re wearing them.

And because you can't see the glasses, you assume what you're seeing is the world. As meditation teacher and author Richard Dixey puts it in his book Three Minutes a Day, “We react to the display we ourselves have created as if it is unreservedly real, actually the case.”

Your brain mistakes its own construction for ground truth. It refuses to update because it’s unable to find evidence that disconfirms its prediction.

That’s what I refer to as a “glitch”: not a broken brain, but a brain unable to replace outdated data with new learning.

Barrett’s flu date was a harmless glitch — her brain updated the next morning and she was able to laugh about it.

But the glitches that derail your leadership aren’t so cooperative.

When your CFO pauses before answering and your brain codes that silence as “she’s unprepared” or “she’s unwilling to confide in me,” it’s quite possible that you’re not reading the room. You’re reading the thorn.

When a board member asks a pointed question about your revenue projections and your chest tightens and your heart races as your brain screams “They’re coming for you!”, that’s the loop running on old data, generating a prediction so vivid it feels like perception.

The physical sensations are real. But they’re based on your interpretation, which is a construction rather than reality.

And that construction is only as good as the data your brain is willing to consult, and the algorithm it uses to weigh and prioritize that data. And when a thorn is involved, its salience all but drowns out everything you’ve experienced since it was embedded.

The good news is, glitches are fixable.

Not by arguing with your brain. (Who would be doing the arguing, anyway?)

Not by slapping a positive label on a sensation that your body has very good historical reasons to flag as a warning of present danger.

But by learning to recognize the loop in action, by identifying situations and people and internal states that tend to trigger it, and by training yourself to interrupt it before the seals shut and your triggered behavior emerges on autopilot.

Eventually, you can even teach your predictive system that the old data is out of date — actually removing the thorn so your prediction loops can function as intended.

That’s how you move from being hijacked by your predictions to being informed by them.

In my new book, The Buoyant Leader, I teach the full RISE method for doing exactly that — moving from being hijacked by your predictions to being informed by them. But if you want a taste of it first, I run a free online workshop every month where we put these ideas into practice together. You can find the next one and register at HowieJacobson.com/workshop.

Your brain uses about 20% of your body’s total energy budget all by itself, before a single muscle moves or a single molecule of food gets digested.

Which means it has to be ruthlessly efficient in how it spends those calories.

It achieves efficiency by predicting what’s about to happen based on past learning.

But not only that. It also predicts what’s happening right now.

That sounds weird, right? I mean, why does it need to predict, when it can just watch and listen and find out?

Because tracking reality in real time is a colossal expenditure of energy. If your brain did that, there would be no energy left for action.

In his book The Experience Machine, Andy Clark explains this using the metaphor of how streaming software handles video. Rather than looking at every single pixel in every single frame of a video, the software’s algorithm focuses only on the differences between each frame and the next.

That way, a video can be rendered using a fraction of the data.

Similarly, your brain is constructing your reality, and checking the data from your senses for errors; things in your environment that don’t align with the prediction.

Faced with prediction error, your brain updates, in one of two ways.

It either updates its model with the new information, or instructs you to act on the world to bring reality in line with the model.

Those two options — update the model, or act on the world — are both functional. But your brain has a third trick up its sleeve, and this one actually keeps you from learning.

The third trick is to ignore error signals from the environment.

Your brain does this when it’s more confident in its model of the world than the evidence of your senses. Basically, it’s refusing to acknowledge that it might be wrong.

For example, a leader whose nervous system has learned that disagreement means danger might walk into a routine strategy discussion and read every pushback as a power play — not because it is one, but because their model is predicting threat that isn't there.

In that scenario, their brain deems it too risky to disregard the perceived threat, even if it doesn’t actually exist in their present environment.

Remember how much energy your brain burns through? That’s why bad predictions are so costly — they burn through resources at an alarming rate.

Here’s what most senior leaders don’t realize: when you’re stressed, a significant portion of your daily energy isn’t being spent on the actual challenges in front of you.

Instead, it's being spent on your nervous system's outdated predictions about those challenges — predictions formed years or decades ago, running silently in the background, burning energy to fight threats that aren't in the room.

This explains that afternoon slump. The disproportionate exhaustion after a meeting that wasn't even that hard. The weekend you need to recover from a week that, on paper, shouldn't have been that demanding.

That’s not you weakening.

That's simply a brain burning premium fuel on bad data.

As a senior leader, you’ve got chops. You’ve got experience.

You’ve learned a ton about how to get your organization from here to there.

You’ve gotten a PhD from the school of hard knocks about dealing with uncertainty and constraints and sudden threats.

And every single leadership skill you’ve invested in has a ceiling — and that ceiling is your nervous system. Because no matter how brilliant your thinking, you can’t simply think your way out of a physiological state.

And as we’ve seen, thinking while triggered is the most expensive thing you can do, on an organizational as well as a personal basis.

To understand the true cost, multiply that “burning premium fuel on bad data” across your leadership team and down your whole organization.

Because your nervous system isn’t a private experience. It’s a broadcast.

When your nervous system isn’t responding to what’s going on right here, right now, your team picks it up. Their own threat systems activate. Their thinking narrows.

They shift from “let’s make something great” to self-protection mode. They stop bringing you problems early, when they’re solvable.

They stop taking the risks that drive success.

In other words, triggered leaders create triggered teams. And triggered teams create organizations trying to manage collective hallucinations rather than responding creatively to reality.

This explains why Google’s Project Aristotle found that the single biggest predictor of high-performing teams is psychological safety.

It’s not about passing around rose-colored glasses. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: lenses that are clear enough to see reality as it is.

And nervous systems that are regulated and stable enough to disagree, to hash out conflict over ideas and approaches, and to be willing to be uncomfortable in the service of something greater.

Remember that 20% energy budget? When your nervous system is regulated, that energy finally goes where it was meant to — toward seeing clearly and leading well.

When you stop hemorrhaging energy on inaccurate predictions, everything about your team improves. Your regulated nervous system can steady a meeting, steer a project, and shift a culture.

This is what my upcoming book, The Buoyant Leader, is built around: a framework for becoming trigger-proof. If you’d like a sneak peek before publication, let me know by commenting “BOOK” or DMing me.

I teach leaders two things that are both true, and mutually contradictory.

One: know everything as soon as possible.

Two: unplug often.

Ruh-roh. How can you do both without losing your mind or your edge?

Since the function of leadership is to navigate the unexpected, you have to be in the business of intelligence gathering all the time.

You have to be relentless in collecting feedback in as close to real time as possible. Both internal and external to your organization.

Internally: How’s the initiative going? Is the coding team at risk of mass resignations because of perceptions of unfairness? How are we training our next generation of managers?

Externally: What will the current war mean for our supply chains and energy costs? What advances in agentic AI might force us to rethink our user interface? What does that latest climate study suggest about the location of our current headquarters?

You have to limit your exposure to the endless scroll of news and information and opinion so that your brain and nervous system don’t start glitching from overwhelm.

Which means consciously unplugging from incoming data and letting your body return to (or at least move back in the direction of) present-based awareness.

That doesn't mean switching tabs from Slack to Insta. That’s still consuming. It means stepping away from screens entirely and letting your body and mind process what you’ve already taken in.

So which imperative wins?

I was on a Zoom call this morning with a friend in Abu Dhabi who’s watching war planes fly overhead, while missiles get shot down and bombs explode in the distance.

She told me that the UAE government shares information proactively, which makes it easier for her to step away from the news feed. She knows that if anything happens that she needs to do anything about, she’ll hear about it quickly.

Others in the current war zones who are deprived of credible, up-to-date information react with panic to every new development. They rush to stores whose aisles are empty and buy plane tickets without knowing if the airport is open.

The more in-the-know you are, the safer it feels to take a news break; to stop consuming and start digesting.

And the more you’ve digested what you’ve already consumed, the steadier you are when the next thing hits.

Lissa Rankin, MD wrote this week about how we react when the news is relentlessly, systemically bad; when revelations about powerful people break trust on a societal scale.

One reaction is to learn everything we possibly can. To scroll and scroll and scroll as the algorithms dutifully feed more outrage to keep eyeballs glued.

Another reaction is to check out entirely. To choose ignorance and hope it leads to something tolerable.

Rankin reminds us that we must pendulate between healthy consumption and healthy digestion.

Consumption because we must know and understand the threat in order to deal with it.

Digestion because without it, what we’ve taken in becomes toxic, turning information into a vicious cycle of every-increasing urgency and panic.

And in the dance between the two, we find a way to hold that contradiction.

But here's the thing most leaders miss: the hardest information to get isn't out there in the news cycle. It's inside your own organization.

Your Insta or YouTube feed doesn’t care what kind of mood you’re in — it just broadcasts what it’s gonna broadcast.

But the people who know how your system's really working? Who know who's unhappy and may quit? Who know what C-suite-promoted initiatives are sinking like a lead balloon in middle management? They're watching you before they decide whether to speak up.

A leader who's all consumption and no digestion is easy to spot. They're reactive. They're overwhelmed. And the people around them learn very quickly that this is not someone who can hear hard truths right now.

The higher you rise in leadership, the harder it gets to acquire this information, since the people who report to you (and the people who report to them) are scared to tell the truth up the ladder.

They see you more as a megaphone than a two-way radio.

But the more you’ve actually digested what you’ve consumed, and the more trustworthy your behavior, the more likely they’ll be to tell you what you need to know.

Because everything about your presence — your tone, your pace, your willingness to listen without reacting — is signaling that it's safe to tell the truth.

Leadership isn't about choosing between consumption and digestion. It's about learning to dance between them.

What’s your strategy for managing the various firehoses of information that matter to you?

How much of what you're consuming are you actually digesting — and how is the undigested stuff showing up in how you lead?

How much are your people not telling you — and what would they share if your presence made it safer to speak up?

These aren't easy questions, and they're not meant to be answered alone. If you'd like to think through what a healthier balance of consumption and digestion looks like for you and your team — or if you suspect there's a gap between what you're hearing and what's really going on — let's talk. I'm always up for that conversation. Find me at howiejacobson.com.