This episode requires taking a look at some visuals. You can find them here.

Here’s the official logo for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Take a quick look at it before continuing to read this article.

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No sooner had it been revealed to the public when a commenter on Reddit noted that it looked like a facepalm. Other Redditers immediately chimed in, “CAN’T UNSEE.”

The “Can’t Unsee” meme is all over the internet, and refers to a fascinating function of the brain: once your perception is changed in a particular way, you literally can’t go back to your old way of perceiving.

You may have seen three hands wrapped around a soccer ball when you first glanced at the FIFA logo. If you’re familiar with the world cup, you may have noted that the hands form the rough shape of the actual cup that goes to the winning team.

But once you saw the word “facepalm,” there is it, isn’t it? Try NOT to see the yellow hand covering the chagrined face — impossible.

Here’s a different example of #cantunsee, courtesy of Andy Clark’s 2023 book The Experience Machine. What do you see when you look at this image?

[IMAGE MISSING HERE]

I’ll tell you what it is: a black and white rendering of a greyscale photograph.

And I’ll write a couple more paragraphs so your eyes don’t accidentally see the photograph itself before you’re ready.

Most people who are shown this image see blotches of black ink and white spaces in the rough shape of a rectangle. (Of course, there’s isn’t any rectangle, but we’ll let that curiosity pass for now.)

The really interesting this about this image is that, after you see the second image, you’ll never be able to see it the same way again: as random blotches. You brain will have been irrevocably changed, with no going back. So don’t continue down this page unless you’re sure that you want to change your perception forever; as we used to say during playground tag, “no backsies.”

Ready for the second image?

OK, here it comes…

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[IMAGE MISSING HERE]

You don’t have to look at it for long. A quick glance will probably do the trick.

Now scroll back up to the previous image. Do you see the Dalmatian? Even if you try not to?

Do your eyes pay special attention to one area of the image now? I’m guessing it’s the eyes and nose that have additional salience compared to when you first looked a couple of minutes ago.

OK, so that’s a cool / cute / pointless phenomenon that you can now use to win bar bets. Beyond that, so what?

Here’s the thing: #cantunsee is how we process everything. The words you’re reading now were once scribbles on paper, until you learned to read. Now you can’t look at this scribbles without hearing words in your head.

Every thing in your world is filtered through your model of the world, and every time you add new information to your model you change how you relate to that thing.

And it’s true of people as well.

Your inability to unsee can be positive, as in the case of the Dalmatian — you can now find meaning that earlier eluded you.

And it can be, arguably, negative, if I ruined your enjoyment of a perfectly benign sports logo with a snarky reference.

But equipped with an understanding of how #cantunsee works, you can intentionally put it to good use.

For example, you may have formed negative opinions about some people in your life that could be updated by new experiences or information. And that updating could improve your relationships and your experience of life.

After all, we humans are quick to judge, and we’re never fully aware of the reasons for our assessments of others. Maybe your first impression was that Joe was rude, and now your brain is weighting Rudeness over all other behavioral patterns, just like the Dalmatian’s eye and nose.

Now, there is genuinely rude behavior out there, and you’d be a fool to ignore that fact.

But what if your initial impressions were highly incomplete; data collapses that omit the shades of grey?

You can actively look for counterfactuals to your first impressions. Direct your brain to seek out examples of Joe’s good manners and positive intentions.

You may very well find that you’ve tempered your black-and-white image of Joe with some shades of grey.

Maybe Joe brings coffee to Kwesi, who’s still on crutches after his skiing accident.

Maybe Joe’s “rudeness” is really an expression of him getting excited at brainstorming meetings, to the point where he interrupts other people.

Another way to #cantunsee is to make an effort to get to know someone in a fuller way. Initiate a conversation in which you invite them to reveal something tender about themselves, by you going first.

Maybe you discover that Joe spent a couple of teen years in foster care, and now his “rudeness” looks like a coherent stance against getting bullied. His behavior may still code as “rude” to others, but now you see a fuller picture that allows you to pull him aside with kindness rather than dismiss him with disdain.

Because that's the essence of buoyant leadership: choosing to see the world — and the people in it — with fresh eyes, not as threats to defend against, but as opportunities to engage with courage, curiosity, and compassion.

This works both ways, of course: you’re a facepalm or a rectangle full of blotches to others. They’ve got their conditioned impressions of you, and the way you act day to day either reinforces those impressions or does nothing to correct them.

So this poses an interesting and potentially fun challenge: What can you do so the people who don’t know you as a full and complex human, #cantunsee more of the real you?

How can you greyscale yourself, or even add some color, so they #cantunsee your basic goodness even in your less-than-stellar moments?

In other words, what moves can you make that invite others to intentionally step into their own buoyant leadership?

The Mindset Mastery Memo is for ambitious professionals who want to lead with clarity, composure, and confidence. Each edition offers practical tools, mindset shifts, and real-world examples to help you navigate pressure, build stronger teams, and break free from patterns that no longer serve you—so you can lead with intention, not reaction.

My ragged breathing is drowned out by the hard rock soundtrack. I’m 7th on the leaderboard, and falling fast. All around me, women and men — mostly women — are sweating and grunting, churning out ergs and spiking their heart rates at paces I’m struggling to match.

This is my first — and probably only — class at Orange Theory, a strip mall gym in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We’re all wearing identical bluetooth heart rate monitors and sitting atop identical Water Rowers that relay our stats to a bank of identical screens on the wall in front of us.

Now 8th. Now 9th. Now I’m 11th, relegated to the second column as Fancy Nan 93 overtakes me in the race for the coveted top 10.

I don’t know why I care about my ranking, but I sure do.

I grit my teeth, tense my fingers, and redouble my effort on the water rower. Faster, faster, faster, I’m doing it, back in column 1, leaving Fancy Nan 93 in the dust, closing the gap between me and NellieCat — when WHAM.

The rowing machine’s seat flies out from under me as I uncoil and I plummet unceremoniously onto the hard wooden frame, bruising my coccyx and wrenching my lower back.

My heart rate also plummets, as do my ergs, and my self-esteem. I will spend the next 6 weeks recuperating, sitting gingerly, and shaking my head at my own foolishness.

I smashed my ass bones because I was bent on competing with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Because I interpreted the existence of a leaderboard as an unrefusable invitation to compete.

Orange Theory provided a literal leaderboard, but most of the leaderboards in modern life are more subtle. Social media in particular can conjure a psychical leaderboard that hovers over every aspect of our lives.

In the quest to be a good enough provider, partner, person, the easiest way to self-assess is to compare ourselves to others.

We compare ourselves to our colleagues when we consider our career trajectory. Do I deserve this promotion more than Kwesi or Pema? Have I added enough value? Burned enough (visible) midnight oil? Kissed enough C-suite ass?

We also compare ourselves to ourselves, via an arbitrary yet compelling imaginary timeline. Am I “there” yet? When will I get there? Have I fulfilled my potential? What are the Objectives and Key Results by which I can measure and judge myself, to use as carrot and stick to keep me on track?

Orange Theory has a leaderboard because it’s motivating. I’ve spent enough time straining on a rowing machine to know how boring, how aggravating, how annoying it can be after the first couple of minutes.

Rowing, after all, is a sport that involves racing against other rowers. The leaderboard at the gym is a way to recreate that incentive.

It makes us work harder. Do more. Transcend our self-imposed “comfort” limits.

Visible competition makes us stay later, ring more doorbells, and push through rejection in our quest to win the car or the set of steak knives.

While leaderboards have their place, they also have a cost. The problems of playing for position on the leaderboard extend far beyond a bruised booty.

Most obviously, playing for position on the board can interfere with our internal motivation. Countless athletes, who mastered their sports through maniacal passion in their youth, burn out when the pressure to win eclipses the joy of playing.

When winning becomes the sole focus, we jettison playfulness, curiosity, and self-awareness. Because they’re dangerous distractions from the “climb the leaderboard ladder at all costs” game we’ve chosen.

Obsessing about our position on the leaderboard can distract us from the fact that we’re not enjoying the game itself. We may want to win because other people want to win, not because it’s something we truly care about in the soft, cuddly parts of our soul.

For a cinematic representation of this phenomenon, I refer you to Steve Frazelli (Ed Norton’s character in The Italian Job, who is the very personification of mimetic desire: wanting what others want only because others want those things).

The upshot: by optimizing our experience for the leaderboard, we sacrifice meaning, joy, and self-expression.

I’ve currently reading Tiny Experiments, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Highly recommended.

Le Cunff writes as, and for, the Google demographic. Smart young people who jump into an insanely competitive environment, surrounded by other smart young people, and who can climb the ladder of status and money and challenge by playing by the rules. And who find themselves gasping for air in the midst of career win after career win, wheezing out the lyrics to “Is This All There Is?”

The single-minded quest for “success” can blind us to what it takes to have a worthwhile and enjoyable existence. We can run the race, always striving to be ahead of others, and never allow ourselves the recognition that the race itself is making us miserable.

So what can we do? Is it possible to gain the benefits of good-natured competition without making the game more important than the experience?

My friend Keith Corbin offers an interesting thought experiment. Suppose everyone in your organization were paid exactly the same, whether they worked in the mail room or the C-suite. Whether they were a VA or a CFO.

In that situation, what would your ambitions be? What role would you most want?

What would motivate you to perform?

And what would you want to motivate your colleagues?

In the absence of that structure, of course, competing for raises and promotions makes sense for you as an individual.

But taking the time to reconnect with intrinsic values — being of service, solving tough problems, brainstorming new approaches, etc — can serve as a moment-by-moment counterweight to the relentless focus on the endgame.

And, I’d be willing to bet, playing the game for the game’s sake is one of the best strategies for “winning,” both in terms of experience and outcome.

And you’re much less likely to end up with a bruised ass.

In one of my favorite movies, War Games, Matthew Broderick’s character almost triggers a global thermonuclear war by exploiting a backdoor: a vulnerability that was programmed into the core software running the NORAD computer system.

In real life, we each entered this world with a similar vulnerability; a backdoor programmed into our nervous system that allows the world to trigger some of our least useful behaviors. Some of us go apeshit mad; others retreat into timid avoidance; still others babble and blurt words we immediately wish we could take back.

The backdoor is this: your nervous system is deeply influenced by the nervous systems of others. When someone else acts as if they’re threatened, your threat response system comes online and takes over your body.

What does this look like?

Basically, your body prepares you to run away and hide, or conversely, to get big and fight, depending on how your mind reads the situation and what it predicts will give you the greatest odds of survival.

Your vision narrows to focus exclusively on the threat. Your heart beats faster and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid, to get more oxygenated blood into your big “run away or kick or bite or punch” muscles.

Your posture turtles to protect your soft, unarmored neck and belly.

Your bodily functions that aren’t urgent get shut down to save energy. These include growth, repair, healing, digestion, and reproduction.

And your mind shifts from creative, strategic, long-term thinking into a short-term focus on not getting killed in this moment.

This is all extremely useful if you’re a gazelle, say, hanging peacefully with your friends at the watering hole, and Sally, who has a slightly better sense of smell than the rest of you, lifts her head and registers “lion.” Suddenly her ears prick up, her tail twitches white, and she freezes while trying to determine the location of the feared predator.

The sooner you convey Sally’s threat detection to your own nervous system, the more likely you are to skip town and survive.

And if Sally’s wrong, or the scent is just a echo of a lion who was wandering this area a couple of days ago, then no harm done. You tremor a bit to release the tension and blissfully resume grazing and drinking as if nothing had happened.

What’s the big deal? What’s wrong with having your threat response system activated in today’s world?

The problem is two-fold.

First, most of us never encounter predators bent on eating us.

The type of threat you typically face in daily life is much more likely to be symbolic: getting criticized in a meeting; reading a snarky email; finding out about a poor decision by a direct report; hearing a complaint from a significant other; getting stuck in traffic; missing a deadline; forgetting an appointment.

Which means, the flight-or-fight programming is a serious mismatch for what’s actually gonna be useful in those situations. Not just unhelpful, but profoundly counterproductive.

(Just picture yourself leaping over your desk and sprinting out of the conference room, or biting your assistant’s hand to understand just how mismatched your physiological preparation is to those situations.)

Second, our big brains and never-quiet minds can run home movies of past and future threats all the time — even when we’re totally safe in the moment.

This means that you could be in some form of flight-or-fight all the damn time; muscles tensed, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, breathing shallow, torso turtled to protect against an attack on your squishy organs.

If you’ve ever “lost it” at work, you’re probably aware that your leadership took a hit in that moment. Losing your temper, anxiously micromanaging your team, or avoiding challenging conversations are three common results of having your threat response system triggered.

If this happens a lot, your leadership suffers. You appear less trustworthy to the people around you.

And since you’re broadcasting threat, they entrain to your nervous system and start broadcasting their own threat signals. Now your workplace has become a psychologically unsafe zone, with everyone focused more on covering their asses than getting useful stuff done.

This is not a character flaw, this abdication of agency. It’s an involuntary physiological response — one that evolution made non-negotiable a few million years ago.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it.

Actually, there are four steps to becoming “trigger-proof”; that is, able to navigate life without going into flight-or-fight at symbolic or imaginary threats.

Here’s a mnemonic: RISE.

The RISE pyramid has four steps:

Regulate Your Nervous System

Inoculate Your Mind

See a Bigger Truth

Engage with Wisdom

Learn what relaxation and stress feel like in your body.

Discover and practice techniques for resetting your nervous system. From breathing to progressive relaxation to body scans to movement to time in nature, figure out what works to bring your threat detection system into harmony with the actual degree of safety and threat in your immediate environment.

The safer you feel in your body, the more it will take for outside events and internal thoughts to rattle you to the point of “losing it.”

Once you’ve regulated your nervous system, you proactively train your brain to stop overreacting by safely exposing yourself to predictable stressors in small, controlled doses.

This process of "extinction" teaches your ancient survival hardware a new lesson (“this is not a threat”), turning a life-threatening alarm into a minor annoyance.

Once your nervous system is regulated and you've inoculated your mind against your predictable triggers, you can replace the narrow, distorted view of a hijacked mind with a panoramic leader's perspective.

The mechanism is simple but powerful: consciously activating curiosity and compassion. This shift allows you to look beyond blame and judgment to perceive the deeper needs and feelings in any situation.

This is the apex; the point where your mastery becomes an active, external force. With a regulated system, a resilient mind, and clear sight, you are completely free to choose to respond with creativity.

You are no longer just behaving well; you are leading well. This means practicing the unexpected move, breaking old patterns, and consistently engaging with the world in a way that elevates everyone around you.

How do you maintain or regain self-mastery over your physiology, psychology, and leadership?

What are your favorite strategies to maintain your stability of intent and action when your inner or outer worlds trigger your backdoor threat response?

What are your go-to resources — internal, environmental, and social — that can dependably bring you back to your best self?

Find out more at HowieJacobson.com.

The coaching question that's changing everything...

Most leaders I work with come to me stuck in "problem mode": focused on what's wrong, what needs fixing, what's blocking their path.

But here's what I've discovered: There's ONE question that transforms problems from brick walls into doorways.

It's not "What outcome do you want?" (though that's important).

It's not "How do we solve this?" (we'll get there).

The question that changes everything is simpler... and more profound.

Read the article to discover how one simple mindset shift can turn any mundane problem into what I call "a doorway to the sacred."

You know what to do. You have the skills. You've bought the tools.

So why do you still feel stuck?

The self-help world blames "limiting beliefs." But that frame is often the very thing holding us back. It suggests we have a cognitive flaw we must fight.

In today's newsletter, I offer a useful reframe: from "limiting beliefs" but "protective knowings."

Here's what I love about that shift.

From Limiting to Protective: It's not a bug; it was a feature. A shield you created to survive past challenges.

From Belief to Knowing: It’s not just in your head; it’s a deep, experiential truth that lives in your gut.

From Victim to Agent: You aren't flawed; you were resourceful. And you can draw upon that resourcefulness once again.

By thanking that protective part of you for getting you this far, you can finally partner with it to decide if its strategy is still useful. You stop fighting yourself and start evolving.

The "agreeable" people on your team might be more triggered than you think.

They look calm. They sound reasonable. They don't raise their voice or storm out of meetings.

But here's what I've learned: appeasers often carry the most tension.

Two telltale signs:

— Their energy feels "off" even when their words are perfect

— They leave critical thoughts unsaid to avoid discomfort

If that's you (and it's definitely been me!), how can you move from appeasement to genuine ease, where your words and energy align?

That moment when someone challenges your idea in a meeting and you feel your jaw clench...

Most leaders think they have two choices: react defensively or bite their tongue and stay quiet.

But there's actually a third option that changes everything.

Understanding it has transformed how the executives I coach handle pressure, conflict, and unexpected challenges.

Here's the thing: What feels like an instant reaction (trigger → response) actually has two invisible steps in between where you can completely redirect the outcome.

In my latest article, I map the 4-step process and share three practical intervention points you can start using immediately.

This isn't about suppressing your emotions or "staying positive." It's about rewiring your leadership responses at the neurological level.

Worth sharing with your leadership team?

The most successful CEO I know, Alan Mulally, regularly admits his ignorance in meetings.

Yet according to most LinkedIn "power language" advice, he's undermining his own leadership every time he speaks.

Something doesn't add up.

I've been watching these "7 phrases that kill your confidence" posts flood my feed, and I'm seeing a massive blind spot.

The advice isn't wrong—it's just backwards.

In my latest newsletter, I break down why the most popular leadership language advice is missing the mark—and what actually creates authentic authority.

Everyone talks about collaboration. Management consultants worship synergy. Leaders preach teamwork.

But genuine collaboration remains elusive—and it's getting rarer.

It's not about skill or will. It's about trust.

In the 1970s, researchers got lab rats addicted to morphine. Isolated in tiny cages, these rodents would press the drug button obsessively, ignoring food and water until they died.

Psychologist Bruce Alexander suspected the environment, not the drug, was the real problem.

He created "Rat Park"—a rodent paradise with toys, friends, and space. Two water sources: one laced with morphine, one clean.

The rats in paradise barely touched the drugs.

According to my friend Morag Barrett, 79% of white-collar employees feel lonely at work. 20% have zero meaningful relationships with colleagues.

We've created organizational cages—environments where isolation breeds dysfunction and collaboration becomes impossible.

Collaboration requires vulnerability. It means making yourself dependent on others, reducing your control. In a cage-like culture, that feels too risky.

• Distributed leadership, not bottlenecked authority

• Democratic governance, not performative suggestion boxes

• Mission-driven culture, with profits as means, not ends

• Assumed coherence—everyone's perspective has value

• Systems thinking—multiple viewpoints are essential

• Leaders who address undiscussables, not dodge them for comfort

Want to win the decade of disruption?

Stop building cages.

Create a Rat Park culture that enables human connection and invites co-creation. Only then will you find team members willing to rise above their personal fears to build something amazing.

#collaboration #leadership #psychologicalsafety #futureofwork

The Mindset Mastery Memo is for ambitious professionals who want to lead with clarity, calm, and confidence. Each edition offers practical tools, mindset shifts, and real-world examples to help you navigate pressure, build stronger teams, and break free from patterns that no longer serve you—so you can lead with intention, not reaction.

For years, I've referenced and coached teams using Steve Blank's seminal book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. It’s a cornerstone of structured entrepreneurship, a masterclass in tactical, evidence-based execution. We focus on the "four steps"—the customer discovery, the validation, the metrics, the pivots.

But we often glide past the most important word in the title: Epiphany.

Why would a book filled with meticulous process, stage-gates, and canvases encourage us to reach for something so intangible? This paradox holds a critical lesson for every modern organization.

Blank’s methodology is rigorous. It feels like a science: You follow the steps, you gather the data, you test the hypotheses.

It creates the illusion of a predictable system. If you do A, B, and C, you should get D.

Like smacking the cue ball into a rack of pool balls, if you knew all the variables—the vectors, forces, and angles—physics would allow you to predict where every ball will end up.

But business isn't a game of pool. Blank's genius was realizing that even with the most rigorous process, the goal isn't a predictable outcome. The goal is an emergent one: an epiphany.

The word comes from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning "a shining upon." It describes a moment when a profound truth suddenly appears to you, revealing a new way of seeing the world.

It’s not a deliverable. It’s not a spreadsheet, a PDF, or a canvas. It’s a transcendent shift in understanding that cannot be reverse-engineered from a process chart.

And this is the crucial point for all of us, whether we're in a startup or a global corporation.

Too many leaders and organizations have become obsessed with process, but have forgotten the purpose.

They run the plays, fill out the templates, and hold the "innovation workshops," but don’t know how to create the conditions under which epiphanies can emerge.

We are engineering processes, not insights.

In an era dominated by AI, this distinction is more urgent than ever. We risk outsourcing our thinking to models that are exceptionally good at collating existing knowledge.

If our only goal is to respond to the future by analyzing the past, AI will always do it faster.

But AI, as it currently exists, cannot have the epiphany.

The ability to see and create a better future is our unique human advantage.

The future won't be won by those who simply follow the steps better. It will be won by those who can cultivate the conditions for these profound, unpredictable moments of insight.

An epiphany is not a predictable outcome, but an emergent breakthrough that arises from a prepared mind in a prepared organization. To create the conditions for these insights, you must build specific, foundational capabilities.

Find the Calm to See Clearly.

Epiphanies avoid minds that are hijacked by stress. The first step is therefore mastering composure under stress.

By developing the ability to reset your mind and body when you get triggered, you keep your prefrontal cortex online when others are panicking. This mental quiet is the non-negotiable headspace where new ideas can actually form.

Reframe the Problem to Reveal New Paths.

Epiphanies often come from seeing the same landscape through a new lens.

Once you can hold composure and neutrality in the face of alarming developments, you can begin to apply cognitive flexibility: the skill of holding competing ideas and swapping mental models on demand.

Instead of seeking the one right answer, you learn to ask "What else could be true?", nourishing ambiguity and creating fresh perspectives that are the raw material for a breakthrough.

Map the System to Uncover Root Causes.

Once you’re willing to let go of default thinking and embrace new ways of looking, you’re ready to put on the most powerful lens of all: the holistic one.

The most profound organizational epiphanies happen when you stop fixing symptoms and see the whole. When you cultivate systems thinking to map the feedback loops and hidden forces, you can “beautiful mind” your way to stunning new insights and solutions.

The ultimate competitive advantage isn't a more refined process or a faster algorithm. It is the ability to create and maintain an environment where predictable effort gives rise to something transcendent and unexpected.

I'm reserving time on my calendar for Capability Audits for leaders who are tasked with preparing their organizations to survive and thrive in the next five years. You can schedule it at https://link.howiejacobson.com/widget/bookings/hj60disc.

#Innovation #Leadership #BusinessStrategy #CorporateCulture #2030-skills