Stories, essays, and the truth about everyday leadership.
This is where I sort through the truth of it all with a little grace and a lot of humor in leadership, in technology, and in life. Sometimes that looks like a short essay on presence. Sometimes it’s a glimpse into my books-in-progress. Sometimes it’s just me sharing what it took today to keep moving forward.
I don’t write on a schedule; I write when there’s something worth saying. Sign up below to read the latest, or start with a few favorites below.
Essays on Presence — Reflections on clarity, boundaries, and showing up fully — even when the world is loud.
Book Updates — Behind-the-scenes notes on my memoir and nonfiction work. Drafting, revising, celebrating, and sometimes wrestling with words.
Personal Reflections — Stories and snapshots from everyday life — coffee on the deck, scary movies, bourbon nights. The moments that remind me why presence matters.
Stop Performing, Start Integrating: A New Way to Lead
There’s a quiet ache that shows up in leadership—the dissonance between how well you perform on the outside and how misaligned you feel inside. Most leadership models teach us to double down on performance: polish harder, move faster, endure longer. But performance alone fractures us.
The ache isn’t failure. It’s a compass. It’s pointing us toward another way of leading—one rooted in integration, not performance. The Integration Compass offers four simple moves—Presence, Power, Purpose, and Alignment—that help us return to wholeness in real time.
Leadership doesn’t need more polish. It needs more presence.
👉 Read the full post: Stop Performing, Start Integrating: A New Way to Lead
There’s a moment in nearly every leader’s life when the outside doesn’t match the inside. On paper, you’re checking all the boxes. Your performance is solid, maybe even exceptional. You’re responsive, polished, quick on your feet. You’ve learned how to carry the weight of expectations with a steady smile. And yet, beneath the surface, something doesn’t line up.
I call it the ache.
The ache is that quiet tug in the body, the restless dissonance you feel when the version of yourself the world rewards doesn’t match the truth you carry inside. It doesn’t roar; it whispers. And for a long time, I ignored it. I mistook it for stress, or fatigue, or just the cost of being a high-achieving professional in a demanding world. But over time, I realized the ache wasn’t a flaw to be fixed. It was a compass.
Looking back, I see how hard I worked to outperform the ache. I believed that if I just rehearsed more thoroughly, prepared every possible scenario, smiled a little brighter, polished a little harder, I’d finally feel the alignment I craved. But performance never brought peace. It only deepened the fracture.
The truth is, most leadership models were designed inside the very systems that create the ache in the first place. They emphasize productivity over presence, polish over honesty, endurance over wholeness. They train us to wear resilience like armor and call it success.
For years, I lived inside that paradigm. And for years, I grew more tired, more restless, more disconnected from myself. The ache became my teacher. It pointed me toward a different kind of leadership—one not built on performance, but on integration.
That’s where the Integration Compass was born.
The Integration Compass doesn’t promise to map every step of the journey. Instead, it orients you. It reminds you where true north lies when the landscape of leadership feels confusing or overwhelming. Its four quadrants—Presence, Power, Purpose, and Alignment—offer simple, repeatable moves you can make in real time, in real rooms, with real stakes. They are not performance hacks. They are un-performance practices.
And that distinction matters. Because while performance fractures us—splitting who we are from who we think we need to be—integration restores us. It brings the whole self back into the room.
This blog is my invitation to you: to stop performing, and start integrating. To notice the ache, not as a weakness, but as your own internal compass pointing toward a truer way forward.
There’s a quiet ache that shows up in leadership—the dissonance between how well you perform on the outside and how misaligned you feel inside. Most leadership models teach us to double down on performance: polish harder, move faster, endure longer. But performance alone fractures us.
The ache isn’t failure. It’s a compass. It’s pointing us toward another way of leading—one rooted in integration, not performance. The Integration Compass offers four simple moves—Presence, Power, Purpose, and Alignment—that help us return to wholeness in real time.
Leadership doesn’t need more polish. It needs more presence.
👉 Read the full post: Stop Performing, Start Integrating: A New Way to Lead