I mentioned to Steve the other day that I wasn’t really feeling April as a “start” as much as an “end” of a phase — and that it’s been this week, on the cusp of May, that I’ve really felt the shift.

So I’ve been thinking the last several days that I’m going to experiment with shifting from quarters to “semesters,” because May-August feels more in line with my seasonal energy than the April-June/July-September structure does.

For some of us, three semesters per year might feel more right and rooted than four quarters or even the four seasons. Especially because those calendar quarters and natural seasons don’t always align with each other.

That feeling of rightness might also align with patterns from childhood where our school years were structured much the same way. Two “in-school” semesters, Fall and Winter, and then the Summer semester off for holidays, vacations, and so on.

If you’re like me, you might be feeling a stronger pull towards something now than you were a month ago. That might be a pull towards rest, relaxation, and a summer slow, or the warmer temps might be providing a spike in energy, creating momentum rather than slowing it.

Depending where you live, May might also be a time when you really feel the seasonal change and a corresponding energetic shift, just like I am right now. It was a long, cold, and gray winter here in Vienna — the worst in 30 years I’ve...

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May has a way of catching people off guard. Not because anything dramatic happens, but because the calendar says one thing and your energy, your schedule, and your team say something else entirely.

On paper, you’re two months into Q2. In practice, you’re arriving at a genuine seasonal turning point. School years end. Schedules shift. The long, uninterrupted stretches of spring start giving way to something looser and less predictable. For some people that shift brings more energy. For others, it signals a natural slowdown. For most teams, it brings both at once.

This month, our Leadership Strategy Session explores how to get ahead of summer’s uneven rhythms before they get ahead of your team. And our Monthly Momentum Call looks at how to use this transition point to make intentional choices about the season you’re entering.

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

Leadership Strategy Session

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

Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 11am PDT

Note: We’re on a slightly different schedule this month. Our LSS is on the second Wednesday rather than our usual first Wednesday.

May's Focus: Getting Your Team Ahead of the Seasonal Shift

April gave your team some clarity about what to carry forward. Now comes the harder part: holding that clarity before everyone’s rhythms start to diverge. Some team members...

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

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

May's Focus: Make the Seasonal Shift Work for You

There’s a moment in May where you start to feel it. The rhythm that carried you through spring begins to change. Your energy shifts, your schedule starts filling differently, and the months ahead start to look and feel unlike the ones behind you.

Knowing your own seasonal patterns and planning around them before the season fully arrives makes all the difference. Which projects deserve your energy now? What’s worth setting aside until after the summer? Where do you want to protect your focus, and where can you afford to let things breathe?

We’ll explore:

• How to read your own seasonal energy patterns as summer approaches

• Which of your current projects are well matched to where your energy is heading

• What to prioritize for the stretch ahead, and what to set down until after the summer

• How to build momentum that travels through summer’s disruptions rather than depending on conditions that won’t be there

Bring questions about: What...

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

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

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

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

May's Focus: Getting Your Team Ahead of the Seasonal Shift

April gave your team some clarity about what to carry forward. Now comes the harder part: holding that clarity before everyone’s rhythms start to diverge. Some team members will head into the coming months with more creative bandwidth than usual. Others will be navigating school schedules, family commitments, or a genuine seasonal dip in energy. The result is a team that’s technically present but quietly out of sync, and collaborative work that gets slippery in ways that are hard to name until something drops.

The leaders who navigate this well get ahead of it. They read where their team’s energy...

Read more here... »

       

🌟 Enjoy a special preview of our April workshop! The clip we're sharing introduces the core idea that drives everything else: working from what's already in you changes everything about how you reach your goals. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full 90-minute recording and join us for upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our April workshop last week!

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

This workshop was an invitation to flip that script and start building a more honest picture of how you actually work best. We explored your GATES (the Genius, Affinities, Talents, Expertise, and Strengths that are already in you) and how to put them to work toward the goals that matter most.

During this workshop, we explored:

• The Effort Paradox: Why we both try to avoid effort and assign it outsized value, and how that pattern can lead us to make things harder than they need to be.

• Unlocking Your GATES: Discovering the attributes that help you do your best work, how to recognize them in yourself, and why the most powerful ones are often the hardest to see.

• GATEwayS to Goals: A reframe for how to approach your goals....

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Q1 gave your team real data. Now, at the start of Q2, you’re sitting with what actually happened: the wins that built momentum, the projects that quietly lost steam, and the patterns your team defaulted to when no one was actively steering.

Inertia runs in both directions. Teams get stuck. But teams also drift, moving in a direction you didn’t intend because the path of least resistance took over. And the momentum building in the right places deserves just as much attention as the things that have stalled.

April is one of the best windows in the year to address all three. Energy is high, summer disruption hasn’t arrived, and Q1’s patterns are fresh enough to act on.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• Helping a team shift from settled operational work to a new higher-priority project without losing the people in the process

• Relaunching a stalled creative project after a partnership breakdown, and why the apology tour usually isn’t necessary

• Distinguishing real deadlines from habitual urgency when rebuilding your work identity after leaving a...

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dormant energy
coils all winter, then bursts forth—
that’s why it’s called “spring”

With bluebonnets blooming everywhere, Spring has officially arrived here in South Texas. As we enter April (hands down the best month of the year here), I’m feeling this build-up of restless energy.

That seasonal change — along with some personal changes, including a milestone birthday this year — has me in the midst of a “crisis.” Not as in “something bad that’s happened” but as in “turning point” or “point of decision.”

That energy has had me, over the past couple of weeks, really considering… well… everything.

Small stuff, like: do I switch my morning coffee for green tea?

Obvious stuff, like: do I switch my walks from evening to morning now? (Yes! I always make this change as the weather warms, and switch back the other half of the year.)

And bigger stuff, like: is my daily haiku practice still serving me as a creative outlet, or is it getting in the way of me working on another creative project I’d rather be doing?

Or: as more and more of Mom’s caregiving is taken over by the professionals, what is my role? And what does that mean in terms of how I spend that found time?

What No Longer Serves?

The core questions I’m asking myself as I consider all of these changes to habits / practices / identities / beliefs / goals / projects / possessions / relationships:

• What no...

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Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a short clip from the middle of our conversation — a spontaneous riff on why goal persistence matters and what it actually costs you when ideas and commitments don't have a home. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

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

This month’s conversation kept returning to the same underlying question: what is actually getting in your way? Sometimes it’s a practical system problem. Sometimes it’s the emotional residue of a hard decision. Sometimes the obstacle is the story you’re telling yourself about the harder path being the more worthwhile one. And sometimes it’s simply that your body isn’t giving you the capacity your plans assumed.

Whatever the shape of it, naming what’s actually in your way changes everything about how you respond to it.

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

• Following What’s Working: When one path has traction and another has stalled, how to trust what’s actually working instead of chasing what’s theoretically better.

• When Decisions Leave Residue: Why every important choice carries some emotional remainder, and what to do with those feelings instead of letting them keep you stuck.

• Pausing Projects Without Losing Them: How to put a project down well when something more...

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April is a month of adjustment. After three months of plans meeting real life, you know now which projects are actually moving, which habits are serving you, and where the friction you noticed in March has been quietly costing you. That’s useful information, but only if you do something with it.

This is the moment to sort through what you’re bringing into Q2 and what you’re better off leaving behind. Not as a way of writing off the first quarter, but as a way of stepping into the next one from a clearer foundation. Spring’s energy is real. The question is what you point it toward.

The challenge is that it’s easy to keep moving with the current of what’s already in motion. Old habits, projects that have outlived their purpose, team patterns that no one has stopped to question. Momentum has a pull, and not all of it is pulling in the right direction. Making the most of April means consciously deciding what you’re carrying forward and what you’re better off putting down.

This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session and Monthly Momentum Call explore how to use April’s energy to make those adjustments intentionally, before the summer window closes.

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

Leadership Strategy Session

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

Wednesday, April 1, 2026 at 11am PDT

April’s...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know Your Strengths?

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

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

This workshop is part of a...

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

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

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

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

April’s Focus: Leading Against Inertia

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

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

We’ll explore themes like:

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

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

Read more here... »

      

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

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

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

This month’s Q&A also covered:

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

• Making a clean exit from...

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

Why Executing Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create the Conditions for Your Success

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

Creating the conditions for success requires two things:

1. Understanding your unique working profile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Broken printers (you know the ones).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Finishing and Leaving Breadcrumbs:...

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

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

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

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

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

Leadership Strategy Session

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

Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 11am PST

March’s Focus: Finding the Drag in Your Team’s Work

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

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

Read more here... »

      

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

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

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

March’s Focus: What’s Actually Getting in Your Way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March’s Focus: Finding the Drag in Your Team’s Work

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

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

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

• Where ...

Read more here... »

      

Those you lead are continually asking themselves two questions:

1. Can I trust my leaders?

2. Where are we going?

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

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

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

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

1. Can leaders trust their teammates?

2. Can teammates trust their leaders?

3. Can teammates trust each other?

And on the vision side, it’s:

1. Are leaders sharing their vision with their teammates?

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

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February reveals what January concealed: vision alone doesn’t guarantee execution. There’s a gap between where you thought you’d be and where you actually are. Missed deadlines. Team members spinning their wheels. Work that should be moving isn’t.

The instinct may be to add more people or to push harder. But execution gaps aren’t solved by throwing resources at the problem or demanding more effort. They’re solved by understanding which constraint is actually in your way.

Most execution problems come down to one of three readiness constraints:

Capacity: Too much planned for the resources actually available. Your team is stretched too thin, and adding more people won’t help if you haven’t identified the real problem first.

Competency: Wrong skills or knowledge for the work required. You have the people, but they don’t have the training, experience, or expertise to do what needs doing.

Workways: Individual skills are strong, and people have the time, but the team can’t come together. You have all-star...

Read more here... »