Hi there,

​​In 2018, Tara and I created the Earth Shakers Forum: 36 people across 3 groups with 6 facilitators.

It was a long program, spanning 18 months and ending in January 2020, but it wasn’t a particularly heavy time commitment. Members would meet 1:1 every week, and then groups would gather in-person for quarterly 3-day retreats.

One of the members of Earth Shakers was Michael Nagle, a brilliant Sri-Lankan American writer from Los Angeles.

In late 2023, Michael received devastating news: Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. The diagnosis was severe, requiring immediate and aggressive chemotherapy. The treatment ravaged his body, leaving him physically and emotionally depleted.

Without hesitation, Janine Parziale, a member of his Earth Shakers group, dropped everything to join his first chemo sessions and manage his care for the first 3 months. Then Mark Alexander, who also knew Michael through Earth Shakers, traveled to LA to help care for him.

What followed was extraordinary: In total, 9 Earth Shakers members, 6 from his group, created an informal rotation, taking turns living with Michael for weeks at a time.

When I found this out, I wept. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and pride for the people in Earth Shakers. And I knew that everybody who committed to this group would get similar support if they needed it — even the facilitators who led the group.

These people weren’t fulfilling an obligation. They weren’t checking a box or doing what was expected. They wanted to be there.

Even more amazing was that this was 4 years after the program had finished, and wasn’t organized by any one person or even asked for.

It emerged organically from the bonds formed during their time together.

“The obligation-free offering was huge for me. And knowing that they were coming from Earth Shakers I could trust that they weren’t doing it out of obligation.”
​- Michael Nagle

The power of groups that show up

After I witnessed this outpouring of support, it crystallized something I’ve always known about the power of intentionally structured support groups.

The connections we build in these spaces aren’t superficial networking relationships. They’re not the kind of support groups where people give unattuned advice or get stuck in cycles of unproductive empathy. When done right, these groups create bonds that run soul-deep.

When you’re building something significant - whether a company or a marriage - you need real support.

It’s why Tara and I have committed to our couples group for 18 years. We meet quarterly, for four hours, plus a weekend retreat every other year.

​And it’s why we want to build The Council as a community of practice for leaders.

So many executives, managers, and others carry their burdens alone. That isolation ripples through their organizations, affecting every employee, every team, every decision.

But when leaders get the support they need, it lifts up entire communities. The impact flows far beyond the boardroom, touching every person in their organizations, as well as the ones they serve.

Thought Experiment

Imagine that you are marooned on an island with 10 saints. These saints are unconditionally loving. They…

• Set healthy boundaries

• Show consistent care

• Love you for who you are, not for what you do or achieve

You have all your physical needs met — food, water, and shelter, and you are stuck on this island for 10 years.

After 10 years, you leave this island.

Who have you become?

Big Love,

Joe

Hi there,

I once coached the founder of a 300-person health-tech firm.

He had brilliant product sense and a generous heart. Yet, his team was constantly missing deadlines due to second-guessing.

One afternoon, while white-boarding priorities, I asked him to narrate his thoughts out loud.

What poured out was a stream of quiet self-doubt:

“This plan is probably naïve.”
“Marketing will poke holes in this. Maybe they’re right.”
“I’m not sure I’m the guy to lead the next stage.”

It struck us both: The hesitancy plaguing the company was simply his private soundtrack amplified through 300 speakers. His team’s Slack threads echoed his inner monologue,“Not sure… might be dumb… just a thought.”

That quarter we worked on a single lever: how he spoke to himself.

As the self-talk shifted—more curiosity, less contempt—meeting notes sharpened, roadmaps locked sooner, launches sped up. Same people, new atmosphere.

Your team culture is a reflection of your internal culture

I see this pattern play out constantly in leadership: Your inner consciousness as a leader is always reflected in the consciousness of your team.

• Your self-talk becomes team communication

• Your boundaries become company policies

• Your blindspots become organizational weaknesses

A founder who secretly fears conflict will, over time, seed an organization fluent in polite avoidance until unresolved tension eats away at the company.

A CEO who prizes flawless execution yet ignores their discomfort with vulnerability will hire for competence over candor and wonder why problems aren’t coming to the surface—blowing up parts of the company with no warning.

What we avoid personally doesn’t go away. It becomes institutional.

Boundaries tell a similar tale. Show me an executive who answers emails at 1AM, and I’ll show you employees who hesitate to take a real weekend. Show me a leader who doesn’t solve an urgent issue right away, and I’ll show you a culture that doesn’t meet deadlines.

Policy manuals matter, but the company receives its true operating system from the behavior it watches at the top.

In that sense, leadership isn’t just about steering an external ship. It’s also about tending your internal landscape. A cultivated mind becomes a cultivated culture; an untended mind forces culture to compensate for its overgrowth. Every organizational change initiative, when traced far enough upstream, arrives at a mirror.

Experiment

1. Name 3 things you want from your team, but you’re not 100% convinced that you deserve it or that it’s possible.

2. Write a short paragraph on how these negative beliefs affect your company culture.

(For example: “I want to have more time to do my own work, but I need to do everyone else’s job.” or “I want people to act like owners.” or “I want people to figure it out.”)

Go deeper: Listen to our podcast on Company Culture

The secret to thriving company culture

Big Love,

Joe

Hi there,

I had a client ask me this question recently:

“When entrepreneurs are going through massive personal transformation, how do they integrate that with the intensity of running a startup?”

Here’s what I told him:

If you can’t handle transformation on the inside, you won’t be able to handle it on the outside.

Every external breakthrough in a company requires a nervous system strong enough to hold the chaos and change it creates. Without that foundation, you’ll unconsciously resist the very transformation your business needs.

There have been several different occasions where I look at a company’s culture and it tells me about the CEO’s consciousness.

I was once doing a company offsite and working with the CEO, and I said to him “Your anxiety is going to destroy this company” in front of his entire team.

They were doing paired exercises — but they stopped immediately and fell silent to listen to his response.

“How did you know?” he said.

I responded: “Because your entire team is anxious.”

He said “Holy crap,” looked around the room, saw everyone’s faces and their concern, and then asked me: “How do I change that?”

For the next couple months we worked together to regulate his nervous system so he wouldn’t be operating from anxiety.

His business grew for the next two quarters, and his people were happier.

Your nervous system is the keel of your company

The most successful founders I’ve seen tend to their nervous systems.

Bill Gates disappeared into the woods every quarter for a “Think Week” with nothing but books and notebooks.

Steve Jobs practiced Zen meditation and took long, meandering walks.

I do five-day silent retreats on a regular basis to clear my mind and return to myself.

Why does this matter? Transformation goes beyond intellectual. It’s physiological.

When you train your body to stay open through inner upheaval, you become the kind of leader who can shepherd radical external change without collapsing under the weight of it.

What I often see is this: Massive internal change → Massive external growth.

Your nervous system capacity determines how you carry your vision, your team, and the future of your company.

Tend to it, and it will allow you to transform at every scale.

Experiment

Pleasure is one of the most powerful ways to build your nervous system capacity.

Listen to this guided audio to try it out.​

Pleasure Experiment

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there

I’ve seen this pattern in several of my CEO clients:

They feel superior as a way to protect themselves. But in actuality, they’re signaling their shame and shutting down their joy.

Here’s what I show them to break the pattern:

1 - Superiority and deep joy are fundamentally incompatible.

Try to name a single person who feels superior that is also deeply joyful. You won’t find them. Because superiority traps you in something called “Comparative Mind”

2 - Comparative mind is misery.

You can’t place others beneath you without placing others above you.

Even if you’re high on the ladder, there’s always someone above you—someone richer, smarter, or someone more in touch with themselves.

Putting people above you is comparative mind, and that’s misery.
Putting people below you is comparative mind, and that’s misery.
Putting people equal to you is comparative mind, and that’s misery.

Any form of comparison takes you away from your heart. In the end, we’re either humans connecting or humans comparing ourselves to each other.

3 - Superiority is not confidence. It’s a protective strategy.

It’s a maladaptive response to shame, rooted in the belief of “I’m not good enough so I have to be better.”

I’ve done this too. There was a time in my marriage where I saw myself as “better than” my wife, and it completely broke our connection.

Every fight was stuck. I couldn’t be vulnerable, couldn’t be seen, couldn’t feel what my triggers were asking me to feel.

Why? Because I was too busy trying to stay above her so I didn’t have to feel my hurt.

4 - Judgment is a form of superiority.

When we judge people we put ourselves above them. And every time we judge people, there’s an emotion we’re trying not to feel.

We struggle to accept in others what we haven’t made space for in ourselves.

For example: When someone’s sad and it annoys you, you’re probably not okay with your own sadness. Or, when someone’s showing off and it makes you cringe, you’re likely struggling with your own desire to be seen.

5 - Superiority isn’t always obvious.

Sometimes it looks like silent judgment, intellectual one-upmanship, or dismissing others as “less evolved.”

But sometimes it’s even more subtle... or generous-seeming like: Listening in order to help or fix, thinking “they’re not ready for my truth,” or feeling proud of being calm while others are reactive.

It’s all “better than” dressed up as emotional maturity.

So how do you let go of superiority and let in joy?

Once you realize that superiority hides something tender, it gets easier and easier.

Here’s an experiment you can start with:

Experiment

Every time you catch yourself judging someone, ask yourself: What emotion am I avoiding by being judgmental?

Once you find the feeling, feel it for 20 seconds. If you want to explore it with more depth, use Emotional Inquiry.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

A few years ago, I was coaching a young CEO who was having a hard time getting alignment in his team.

Despite his best efforts, his team kept saying they would do stuff, and then not doing it.

So one day, I went into his company and observed how he was interacting with his team. I sat in all his meetings, and watched what he said and did.

Very quickly, I noticed a clear pattern emerge. His meetings followed a predictable script: He would present an idea, explain its merits, and ask for alignment.

Everyone would nod in agreement. But, fast forward a few days later, and nothing had gotten done.

The disconnect left him puzzled.

The “No” Doctrine

When I saw this pattern, I realized something counterintuitive: The path to true alignment wasn’t through “Yes” – it was through “No.”

Think about great salespeople. They don’t chase agreement; they hunt for objections. Why? Because objections reveal the real barriers to moving forward.

It’s the same thing inside of a company.

So, we helped create the “No doctrine” for this CEO.

The approach was simple: Whenever he presented an idea, instead of asking for agreement, he’d ask, “What speaks against this?”

But here’s the crucial part – he didn’t defend. He listened, and he welcomed every objection as a gift.

Every “no” carries wisdom: Sometimes it’s subtle, like someone suggesting a minor shift in wording. Other times it’s transformative – revealing a fundamental misalignment with customer needs.

Every objection, large or small, contains the seed of improvement.

And, when people see their own fingerprints on a solution, they don’t need to be convinced – they’re already invested. Real alignment isn’t about agreement; it’s about involvement.

The change for this CEO’s company was remarkable. Meetings transformed from polite agreement to energizing spaces for honest feedback and collaboration.

Ideas became stronger, execution became smoother, and most importantly, the team moved as one – not because they had to, but because they felt like a team, not employees.

Experiment

Duration: 2 weeks

The Exercise:

1. Choose one important idea or initiative you want to move forward

   • Pick something meaningful but not mission-critical for your first practice

   • It should be complex enough to benefit from multiple perspectives

2. Set up a “No Session”

   • Gather your team (3-6 people works best)

   • Present your idea in 5 minutes or less

   • Instead of asking “What do you think?” use these prompts:

     • “What speaks against this?”

     • “What might I be missing?”

     • “Where do you see potential problems?

​Big love,

Joe

Hi there,

A while back, I worked with a CEO who was brilliant, relentless, and exacting.

His startup was breaking into its first $10M year. But every time they got momentum, something bottlenecked. Engineering wouldn’t ship on time. Sales didn’t close fast enough. Leadership hires weren’t stepping up.

The problem?

He had an answer for everything.

In meetings, he’d jump in before the head of product could finish a sentence. He re-wrote client emails. He hovered over strategy decks like a stormcloud.

After one executive offsite, I asked him a simple question: “What does your team have to do to win?”

He paused.

“I don’t know,” he said. Then, after a long silence, he admitted: “...I have to let them.”

I was astonished and impressed with his self-recognition.

It turned out that their growth ceiling wasn’t strategy or product-market fit. It was the leader’s unconscious belief that if he didn’t control the outcome, the company would fail.

But here’s the paradox: If your team can’t grow, your company won’t grow.

And your team can’t grow if you’re always catching the ball before it hits the ground.

Mistaking control for competence

One of the most common traps in early leadership is mistaking control for competence.

On the surface, things run smoothly: Decisions get made, problems get solved, crises get contained. But underneath, something vital is missing: your team’s growth.

High-functioning teams require room to fail, learn, and rise again. Without that space, talent withers and initiative dies. And when every important decision routes through you, the organization slows to your bandwidth. You end up burned out and alone at the top.

Often, this pattern is fueled by the leader’s unconscious beliefs:

• “I need to do it myself, or it won’t get done right.”

• “I want my team to act like owners.”

• “We can’t afford to make mistakes.”

These stories may sound reasonable, even admirable. But they build an invisible ceiling on what your company can become.

If success isn’t clearly defined and jointly owned, your team will feel unsafe to make mistakes, because they don’t have a way to measure success—outside of trying to read your mind.

And if your team feels unsafe making mistakes, your team will stop taking risks.

Without risk, there’s no innovation. And without innovation, your company won’t scale.

In other words: You can’t build a championship team by constantly benching your players.

Experiment

Define success out loud.

Write down what success looks like for each of your direct reports.

Make sure it’s operational, observable, and measurable.

Your subjective review cannot determine success.

Then walk each person through it. Do this in monthly time frames. Watch what shifts.

Make sure each person’s success does not require your intervention (if you need to tell them how to do the job, it requires your intervention).

Keep iterating until you have a team that is high functioning and that you don’t have to micromanage.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

For a long time, I’ve been a student of the many ways humans make sense of life—psychology, spirituality, neuroscience, and beyond.

Among the most fascinating to me are the ancient medical systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda.

In those systems, there’s a core principle that feels increasingly relevant to how I see companies: When something is imbalanced in a living system, you can see it everywhere.

Take the liver, for instance: In TCM, they see that if there’s a liver imbalance, it doesn’t just hide quietly in the background.

It shows up in the color and shape of the tongue. In the texture of the fingernails. In the line next to the nose. In the pulse. In the eyes.

Every part reflects the whole.

How to Find Your Team’s Dysfunction

The same is true in a company. Nothing is isolated.

Just like the liver manifests in multiple signals throughout the body, dysfunction in a company will show up everywhere.

If there’s an issue with communication, you won’t just see it in one meeting.

You’ll see it in missed deadlines, vague emails, inefficient handoffs, and emotionally charged decisions.

If there’s a decision-making problem, you won’t just find it at the top. You’ll see it in a product team hesitating to ship, in marketing not knowing what they’re aiming for, in finance holding onto funds too long or releasing them too soon.

And if you, as a leader, are having the same challenge show up more than once—say, people being late, or avoiding feedback—you can be almost certain it’s systemic.

It may be a reflection of your own consciousness, or it may be a reflection of the culture. Most likely, it’s both.

What this means: Leadership stops being about fixing individual problems. It becomes about pattern recognition.

Instead of: “How do I get Bob to show up on time?”

You ask: “What is happening in this system that makes everyone show up late?” or “What is our culture’s relationship to accountability, time, and commitment?”

You become less of a manager and more of a diagnostician.

And when you approach leadership this way, a kind of x-ray vision emerges.

• You can walk into a meeting and know what the Slack messages look like.

• You can watch one person hedge their statements and know the team is afraid of offending.

• You can see one conflict avoided and sense that the whole organization is tiptoeing around truth.

Experiment

This week, observe your organization like a traditional medicine practitioner.

Look at your company as a living system. Choose one signal (lateness, low energy, vague communication, whatever it may be) and ask:​

• Where else does this show up?

• What does this reflect about our culture?

• What would need to shift systemically for this to change?

Then ask yourself: What’s the system-level shift that would make this problem obsolete?

Big Love,

Joe

Hi there,

Early in my career as a venture capitalist, I met two founders with very different approaches to their work.

The first ran his company like a clock. His calendar was precise to the minute: every meeting scheduled, every hour optimized. But every time I saw him, his energy was dimmer. It was clear that he was on the road to burnout.

The second founder ran a global business yet somehow looked lighter every time we met. He seemed to have more energy at the end of each week.

One day, I finally asked him what his secret was.

He laughed and told me, “I stopped tracking my time and started tracking my energy.”

He explained: “Some meetings drain me, some fill me up. Some problems are exciting to solve, others feel like trudging through sludge.”

“I used to think I just had to power through everything equally,” he continued, “Now I pay attention to what gives me energy and what takes it. I focus on designing my week around what revs me up. And when I find stuff that drains me, I focus on delegating it or learning how to enjoy it.”

Energy management, not time management

These two founders were both intelligent, hard-working, and deeply committed to their companies. They cared about their people. They worked long hours.

The only difference was the metric they used to measure progress.

The first founder measured success by time spent: Hours logged, tasks completed, etc. He was efficient, but efficiency without awareness is just a faster way to burn out.

The second measured success by his energy. He asked different questions: Did I accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in a way that fed me or depleted me? Am I more excited at the end of this week than I was at the beginning? Do I have energy for my family, my health, and myself so I can feel fulfilled?

When your energy is high, your decisions are clearer and your team is stronger. When it’s low, even the smartest strategy can’t save you from bad judgment, short tempers, and shallow thinking.

Here are three practical ways to start optimizing your energy this week:

1. Name it early
​If something feels off, say it right away. “Something feels stuck here” or “I’m noticing I’m frustrated and I’m not sure why.” Unspoken tension is one of the biggest hidden energy drains in any company. It eats at you in ways that never show up on a to-do list but show up everywhere else.

2. Enjoy or redesign your work
​Ask yourself: can I increase my enjoyment of this work by 10%? Sometimes it’s delegating what saps your energy. Sometimes it’s changing how you approach your work.

3. Hire for energy
​Work with people you genuinely enjoy. If the relationship drains you, have the conversation or change the team. You can’t sustain high performance with people who exhaust you.

Go deeper: Your Obsession with Productivity is Killing Your Productivity

Listen to our podcast

Experiment

Start tracking your energy this week:

After each meeting, ask yourself: Did that give me energy or drain it?

After each task, notice: Am I more alive or more depleted?

How to Have Better Meetings:
Call out the Disconnection

If you’re in a meeting and feeling disconnected, say: “This meeting isn’t working for me” and explain why. Almost every time, you’ll find at least half the people are also unsatisfied with it. Then you can offer solutions or take solutions from other people in the meeting on how to improve the quality of conversation so it’s more effective and enjoyable for everybody.

Remember: Optimizing for energy doesn’t mean only doing what feels good. It means learning how to enjoy hard things the way an athlete enjoys working out. It means being strategic about when you do the hard things and making sure you’re not running on empty when you need to show up most.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

Last month, I worked with a founder who had just closed a Series B.

To the outside world, he looked like a rocket ship. But inside, he was hollowing out.

He told me he couldn’t shake the pressure that it was all on his shoulders. He’d stopped sleeping. He had to keep pushing. His success depended on it.

When I asked him what he was afraid of, he went to 20 tactical things.

Then I asked him to slow way down.

He paused, and then he went there:

“If I slow down, it could all fall apart. And if it all falls apart, there’s no one coming to save me.”

“I’ll be helpless.”

The one emotion every high-performer avoids

Almost every high-powered CEO I know struggles with two issues:

1. Feeling alone in the pressure

2. That eventually it all falls on them

It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in or how many people they manage. No matter how successful they become or how many decisions they get right, there’s this feeling they keep trying to outrun:

Helplessness.

This avoidance didn’t come out of nowhere. For most, there’s a moment they can trace back to, if they slow down long enough to look. Maybe it was an alcoholic dad. Maybe it was growing up poor, watching your parents juggle bills and stress and late shifts. Maybe it was something harder to name—emotional neglect, invisibility, or that you couldn’t be loved for who you were, only for your accomplishments.

At some point, something happened that overwhelmed your capacity to cope, and you realized: I am on my own.

This may look like a strength from the outside. And in a way, it is. It is what propels so many people to achieve remarkable things: Build companies from nothing, perform under pressure, push forward when others get frozen.

But it’s also the thing that needs to be felt and destroyed if you want to be a 10x leader.

There is a moment in the journey of every truly great leader when they turn around and stop trying to outrun the very feeling that built their strength.

A moment when they stop managing their inner world with the same control they use to manage their company. And that’s when your capacity multiplies by 10x.

Because here’s the counterintuitive thing: When we feel our helplessness, we actually become more capable.

You get a lot more done when you’re not trying to control everything.

You create space for trust, creativity, and shared ownership. That’s the deeper intelligence of helplessness. It’s not here to shut you down. It’s here to connect you—to yourself, and to the people you’re leading.

Experiment

1. Name one thing you feel like you can’t give up control of—something that feels too important, too risky, or too fragile to let go.

2. Now imagine the worst-case scenario if you did let go. Play it out in detail. What exactly happens? What do people think of you? What does it cost you?

3. Do Emotional Inquiry on the feeling:

Listen Now: Emotional Inquiry

​Bonus Question: What might be possible in your leadership if you no longer had to avoid this feeling?

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

An old client of mine was constantly terrified of failing.

Every week, she’d bring me a new variation of the same worry:

“What if this product doesn’t work?”
“What if my investors lose faith in me?”
“What if I just… can’t pull it off?”

On paper, she was doing great: Her company was growing fast and had just closed a Series A. Like every founder, she ran into some speedbumps here and there. But even when she succeeded, her anxiety never went away.

Every win seemed to create more fear, not less. And she knew that this anxiety was hurting her company. She was playing to not lose rather than to win.

One day I asked her, “What if your fear isn’t about failure? What if it’s about pleasure?”

She laughed. “What do you mean?”

I said, “You’ve built a life where every time you start to feel good, you find something to be afraid of. What makes you think that’s fear of failure rather than fear of enjoyment?”

She got quiet.

When I asked her to describe what happens in her body when things start going well, she said, “I tense up. My shoulders get tight. It feels like I shouldn’t go there or that there’s no point in going there.”

So I invited her to slow down, breathe, and simply begin to notice what pleasure actually felt like in her body. Within a few minutes, she began to cry.

“It’s weirdly uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s so big that my system doesn’t know how to handle it. It doesn’t feel like I deserve it.”

At that moment, she realized: She felt so unsafe because safety itself felt foreign.

The fear of having nothing to fear

Most people think they’re afraid of failure. But often what they’re really afraid of is what happens when everything is working.

They’re terrified of what is left when there’s no more fight, no more problem to solve.

This can sound counterintuitive. “Why wouldn’t I want to feel good?” is often the response I get.

But if you learned from a young age that to be safe you had to stay alert, deep pleasure and ease can feel foreign, even dangerous.

As a result, we unconsciously recreate struggle: Manufacturing endless stress, sabotaging our joy, and telling ourselves stories about why we just need to stay vigilant... even when the vigilance prevents growth. A soldier who is vigilantly keeping watch is defending, not growing.

The way to work with this is by learning to receive pleasure. It’s like building an atrophied muscle. At first, it feels awkward, even wrong. You might dissociate or feel the urge to run back to what’s familiar—even if familiar means anxious.

But just like any muscle, it gets stronger with practice. And as you’re able to allow more ease in your life, you will discover that you have far more energy when you’re not spending all of it creating tension just to feel safe.

Experiment

For the next week, note each time something goes right.

Maybe you take joy in it, maybe you don’t. Either way, write down the first anxious thought that arises after your win. Look for recurring themes. You’ll learn to see your specific flavor of fear that attaches to your enjoyment.

For example:

• “They’re going to realize I don’t deserve this.”

• “Something bad is about to happen.”

• “I should be working instead.”

• “I’m getting too comfortable.”

• “This won’t last.”

• “I’m wasting time.”

Go deeper:

Listen to our episode on Pleasure

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

There was a CEO I coached once who couldn’t stop talking about recognition.

He’d say things like, “I just want my team to know how much I’m doing behind the scenes.”

Or “It feels like no one appreciates how much I’ve built here.”

A few weeks later, I went to visit his team during an offsite to see what was happening. What I noticed was that his team actually deeply respected him. Yet, every time praise came up, he dodged it.

When employees brought up how great his leadership was, he’d change the subject. When his board thanked him, he would brush it off. And every time he deflected a compliment, he was teaching people to stop giving them. Nobody wants to give compliments to someone who’s not acknowledge them or dismissing them as lies.

In other words: He had created a world where he was constantly unseen by his own design.

Eventually, in a session, I asked him to run an experiment with me. I said, “When I tell you that you’ve built something extraordinary, just take a deep breath and say thank you.”

He laughed awkwardly, and then tried it a few times.

On the third or fourth time, he finally allowed the compliment in. He teared up instantly. He’d been starving himself of the very thing he craved.

The hungry ghost leader

The hungry ghost is an image that comes from Buddhist and Taoist traditions.

It describes a spirit doomed to wander endlessly with a huge empty belly and a tiny mouth: Forever hungry, but never able to be satisfied.

In leadership, the hungry ghost shows up as the need for status, validation, or approval that can never quite be fed.

You chase the next promotion, the bigger title, the board seat. You get it, and the satisfaction lasts maybe a day. Then the emptiness returns, so you chase the next thing.

I see this often: You crave praise and status, yet don’t know how to let it in when it comes.

A great way to work with the hungry ghost is to learn how to receive compliments and praise, as well as welcome all the complicated emotions that may arise with it: Discomfort, unworthiness, or the fear that you’ll be seen as arrogant.

This alone can be one of the most powerful transformational practices for a leader. I’ve seen it change people completely.

Experiment

The next time someone compliments your work, don’t deflect, minimize, or redirect the credit to your team.

Take a breath and say “Thank you.”

Let it land in your body for three full seconds before you say anything else. If any feelings of discomfort come up, do an Emotional Inquiry:

Get Emotional Inquiry

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

In 2009, a small team of neuroscientists set out to answer a question—can you really smell fear?

They began with two very different afternoons and a stack of cotton pads.

Afternoon #1
​Twenty volunteers ran hard on treadmills until their pulses raced. Researchers blotted the sweat from each runner’s underarms, sealed every pad in glass, and tucked the jars on ice.

Afternoon #2
​Then, those same volunteers suited up for their first skydives. As the plane hit 13,000 feet and the light over the door flipped from red to green, they tumbled into the open sky. Their sweat went into identical jars and the same deep-freeze.

Weeks later, a third group reclined inside an fMRI scanner for what they thought was a simple face-recognition task. Beneath the table, technicians piped in trace amounts of either “exercise” or “fear” sweat at random. Nobody reported noticing a smell—yet their brains noticed plenty:

• Exercise sweat: the amygdala, the brain’s alarm bell, stayed quiet.

• Fear sweat: the amygdala flared to life, and visual areas sharpened their focus as if danger had entered the room.

The invisible first impression

Humans are wired to read danger instinctively, below thought.

A single molecule of “fear sweat” reaches the amygdala in milliseconds, lighting up the alarm system long before language can form a sentence. That shortcut kept our ancestors alive on the savanna, and it’s still active under fluorescent office lights today.

If you walk into a quarterly review radiating unspoken anxiety, everyone breathes it in whether they notice a scent or not; micro-hesitations ripple across the room, questions grow sharper, and the energy tilts toward self-protection.

And even when you’re not sitting in the same room, the signal comes through micro-pauses, clipped sentences, and the way your eyes scan instead of land.

That’s why leadership atmospheres are chemical as much as cultural. Before a slide deck snaps into full screen, you’ve already delivered a message on how safe—or unsafe—it is to follow you.

Fear in leadership isn’t an issue. It’s when it’s unannounced or hidden.

When team meetings go wrong, it’s because people are acting from fear — scared that they’re going to have to do my work, that their voice won’t be heard, or that they won’t have enough resources.

And when somebody smells someone else’s fear, the amygdala gets engaged.

And when the amygdala gets engaged, we go into binary thinking. The room becomes a debate, and no one listens to each other.

What we have seen reduce the fear in organizations consistently: Asking for the underlying fear to be outed.

And when someone sees that their team sees and acknowledges their fear, the fear dissipates.

Experiment

Next time you’re working with an individual or a group and you notice that the debate has become binary, and that you’re having a hard time creating alignment, try this:

Ask your team these two questions:

1. What’s the thing you’re scared of having happen?

2. And how do you prevent it?

Go deeper: Listen to our podcast on Fear

Fear: a path to authenticity

​Big Love,

Joe

Hi there,

​​One day, while sifting through our company emails, I noticed a pattern — there was an endless amount of faffing going on.

You know the kind: One person would float an idea, someone else would chime in with an enthusiastic “Oh, good idea!” A third would add their thoughts, and the thread would grow longer.

But beneath all this apparent engagement, nobody was actually committing to anything. Ideas hung in the air, and no one was moving things forward.

What struck me wasn’t just the waste of time, but the sheer volume of energy being consumed by this elaborate dance of non-commitment. Each response took time to craft, time to read, time to process — all leading nowhere.

Rather than tackle this through meetings or training sessions, I decided to experiment with a simpler solution. We implemented a single, mandatory line at the bottom of communication — “Action Needed” followed by a specific person’s name.

This tiny tweak produced extraordinary results. Almost overnight, the meandering discussions and noncommittal responses evaporated.

When every message required explicit clarity about who needed to do what, people began thinking differently about why they were sending emails in the first place. We eliminated nearly 85% of our inefficient email exchanges without a single meeting, memo, or committee.

And most importantly, it empowered everyone in the organization: Anyone, regardless of their position, could assign an action to anyone else. This simple line helped turn every team member into a catalyst for progress.

How to Change Culture Without Anybody Noticing

There are two fundamental approaches to changing culture.

The first is through direct intervention – the traditional toolbox of leadership that includes hiring and firing decisions, implementing KPIs, conducting coaching sessions, and holding one-on-one meetings.

It’s the equivalent of standing in front of your organization and declaring, “This is how things need to be now.” While these methods have their place, they often trigger an instinctive resistance. As the old saying goes, “Force always meets resistance.”

The second approach is the structural method. It is far more subtle and far more powerful. It’s about shaping the environment that shapes behavior.

Think of it as organizational architecture: the rhythm of your meetings, the layout of your spaces, the principles on your walls, even the messages in your bathroom stalls. These seemingly minor elements create the invisible infrastructure of culture.

When we implemented the “Action Needed” line at the bottom of our emails, we weren’t directly telling anyone to be more accountable or efficient. Instead, we modified the structure of communication itself. The change was frictionless because it didn’t feel like change at all – it was just a new feature of the environment.

Experiment

Duration: 2 weeks

​Pick a way you don’t like how you use your phone. Instead of telling yourself the behavior you want to have with your phone, change the phone to promote the behavior you want.​

Here are some ideas:

• Make the home screen black and white

• Put screen time limits on it

• Use an app like ScreenZen that makes you pause before you open apps

• Put your most addictive apps 3 menus deep

• Turn off notifications​

Whatever you do, do not apply any discipline except to not change your phone back to the way it was.​

After two weeks, notice how your behavior changes without any effort.

Big Love,

Joe

A founder recently asked me:

In a lot of traditional finance, I see the classic story of investment banker chasing their client all over the place. Like “Hey, just checking in, checking in with you.”

It sort of seems to work, but I keep trying to find a more connected, VIEW-based version that isn’t coming from this desperate: “I really want you to write me back” place.

Your sales funnel never seems to chase anyone, yet it works amazingly. How?

It’s a fair question. Chasing feels like effort, like we’re “doing something.” But in practice, it erodes connection. Clients can feel the subtle desperation.

Anybody who’s ever dated knows how this works. We see it everywhere, from job interviews to schoolyards. You’re less attractive when you feel the need to chase.

On the other hand, if I have a conversation with someone with the priority of connecting with them, I will always end up finding out what their biggest problems are. My conversations when I was an investor weren’t about “just checking in.” They were direct offers of help with the very problems my clients cared about most. I rarely had to ask for a call, and when I did, I asked for it directly rather than dancing around my wants.

This approach works across industries, from real estate finance to coaching. Why? Because humans are wired to value what helps them move forward.

Here are a few other principles to keep in mind:

1. Teach first, sell second. Marketing isn’t a pitch—it’s the start of the journey. A coach might send an exercise that helps someone taste the work before they commit. An investor might share market context that helps a founder make sharper decisions. Done right, the prospect is more prepared, more confident, and more successful once they say yes.

2. Urgency works—when it’s real. “We’re closing this round” is compelling because it’s true. Real urgency can also look like: “Enrollment closes Friday so the group can begin together,” or “This pricing ends at midnight because we’re locking in next year’s calendar.” Fake urgency (countdown timers that reset, “last chance” emails that appear weekly) erode trust. But when urgency is tied to an actual moment in time, it galvanizes action.

3. Make sure they invest. People value what they invest in. Facebook was free, but it felt exclusive because you needed an invite. The same psychology shows up everywhere: a waitlist for a new product, a screening process for a coaching program, or requiring a short application for a partnership call. When people take a step to earn the interaction, they value it more deeply and show up more committed. Note: Don’t do this as a gimmick. Design their investment so that it screens your clients: You find out who’s actually interested, who they are, and if they’re a good fit for you.

Experiment

The next 3 times you talk to a client ask them “How/What” questions and find out what their biggest problems and questions are.

Connect with them as humans.

See how it goes.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

There was a CFO I once knew whose finance team never seemed to be able to deliver their quarterly forecasts on time.

Every quarter, the same scene played out.

The numbers arrived days late. The CFO would walk into the bullpen holding the packet like a piece of evidence, chewing the team out for not delivering when they said they would.

The team would scramble, apologize, and walk away feeling smaller and more defensive. They’d hit the next deadline out of fear, then burn out, then make the same mistakes again.

This is the type of accountability that most people encounter.

And it fails to work for one simple reason: It’s filled with shame.

The two ingredients of shame-free accountability

Shame-based accountability produces temporary compliance and long-term dysfunction.

People hide mistakes, play it safe, and ultimately only tell you what you want to hear. Eventually, they stop taking ownership altogether.

Leaders then try go in the other direction. They don’t call people out, because they’re scared of having conflict or creating defensiveness. Which also doesn’t lead to an accountable team.

So how do you create accountability, performance, and productivity without shame? There are two ingredients:

1 - VIEW-based Accountability

Have a VIEW conversation where you are Vulnerable, Empathetic, Impartial, and full of Wonder. This is powerful because it changes from an attack to a collaborative effort.

Then ask these four How/What questions:

1. What made this not happen?

2. What are you going to do differently?

3. How are you going to ensure it’s going to happen next week?

4. What support do you need?

Then, listen. Don’t try to convince. Don’t worry about if you’re heard. Just seek to understand the problem.

These questions empower your team. They make it clear that accountability isn’t a burden they carry alone, it’s a shared process. At the same time, it doesn’t allow people who are not performing to sneak under the radar.

They also help you both understand what exactly is breaking down, and what is required to shift. In other words, you’re understanding the problem before you’re trying to solve it.

2 - A shared definition of success​
​
The second ingredient is absolute clarity on what “success” actually means.

Most teams think they know, but in practice people rarely have a crisp understanding of the outcomes that truly matter. KPIs are often forgotten or outdated; everyone is constantly prioritizing, trading off, and navigating conflicting demands.

I’ve walked into dozens of teams of successful companies and less than 20% of people I ask can tell you what success looks like in a crisp way. All of them had KPIs.

It’s like playing a championship basketball game without a scoreboard.

If you haven’t defined success together, you leave people guessing, which means you also leave them unaccountable. The thing that I’ve seen be most consistently successful is a dashboard of simple graphs that get updated regularly.

This gives people a stable reference point. It lets someone say, “I didn’t deliver X because I was focused on Y, and Y is the thing we agreed matters most.”

That level of transparency is impossible when the picture of success is vague or shifting.

Experiment

1. Ask everyone on your team what success looks like for them.

2. See how many can have it clearly defined and measurable.

Bonus experiment:

Ask the four questions above the next time someone on your team doesn’t perform.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

Self-reliance began the first time you realized you weren’t going to be taken care of.

It was when you learned, often at a young age, that you needed to take care of your caregivers, whether it was your parents, grandparents, or teachers. Perhaps you needed to make them happy, relieve their fear, or stop their criticism.

The belief underneath is: “People aren’t going to be there for me. So I need to take care of myself.”

What most people miss about self-reliance is that everyone carries this pattern to some degree. The question isn’t whether it’s present, but how deeply it’s running your life.

Self-reliance has a lot of upsides. It’s often the thing that drives people to be successful. But it can also have lots of negative side-effects. Here are some ways self-reliance can end up impacting your company:

1. You take responsibility for your team’s emotions

When a child learns it’s their job to keep caregivers regulated, they carry that responsibility forward. As a leader, this shows up as managing feelings instead of setting direction, taking responsibility for people and their outcomes, and a constant feeling of obligation.

Over time, this creates resentment in the leader and the employees. You feel like you need to take care of others in ways that you’re not actually able to. And the company as a whole starts to organize around protecting feelings instead of producing outcomes.

2. You rarely share your wants

Self-reliance teaches you that wanting is dangerous. If your job was to take care of your caregivers, your wants become secondary, invisible, or not allowed.

As a leader, this creates two problems at once. One, you don’t clearly express what you want, so your team doesn’t know how to win. And two, the wants that do surface rarely come out cleanly.

The result is fear. Your team doesn’t know what success looks like, so they often feel scared because they don’t know if they’re doing a good job, and end up in inefficient loops because they’re trying to guess what will keep you happy.

3. You have a hard time asking for help

When a child learns their job is to take care of others, asking for help feels foreign, weak, or even selfish. But your desire for help doesn’t just disappear, it gets stuck.

This creates a paradox: Wanting help while pushing it away. The stronger your self-reliance, the more you secretly wish that someone can someday take care of you.

But at the same time, you reject or invalidate the help that’s actually available by asking in ways that seem indirect, resentful, vague, or desperate. This repels people, so they’re less likely to help. And this reinforces the original belief that “No one will help me.”

4. You don’t own your power

Most self-reliant leaders don’t trust authority, because your early authority figures were unsafe, unreliable, or emotionally costly. This creates a double bind with power. You don’t want anyone to have power over you, yet you also feel uncomfortable in authority positions, because of what you experienced authority to mean.

The result is a desire for power without fully being able to own it. And that creates power vacuums. It creates a leader who is technically in charge, but not fully occupying the role. A leader who doesn’t feel comfortable telling others what to do when it’s needed. And when the team sees this vacuum, they feel unsafe or step in to fill it. This leads to unnecessary conflict or drama.

Go deeper. Listen to our podcast:

Podcast: Self-Reliance is a Trap

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

Johannes Landgraf had everything most founders want.

His company had just raised $25M, big-name banks were using his product, and over 2 million developers were on his platform. From the outside, it looked like everything was amazing.

From the inside, he could see a different reality.

The product architecture that got them here couldn’t get them where they needed to go. It created friction for customers and slowed his own team down. Staying the course would keep things looking good for a while… then slowly kill the company.

Changing course meant something brutal: They would have to re-architect the product and lay off 30% of the company.

When Johannes sat down to write that email, he felt the draw to write what many leaders default to in those moments: Vague, distancing, and “nice” enough that nobody could really blame him.

…All the while feeling a deep sense of shame, guilt, and the weight of all those people who had trusted him with their livelihood.

The email he actually wrote was different.

I encouraged him to write it from the perspective of a fully empowered leader. Not a defensive leader or people-pleasing leader, but one who was willing to tell the truth, feel the impact, and still stand in the decision.

He wrote to the team about why the old architecture wouldn’t work. He owned the fear and the mistakes that led them there. He was honest about how painful the layoffs were going to be—and he was clear that this was the right move if they wanted to play to win.

A year later, the company has multiplied revenue by 3x, the business is growing rapidly, and his team trusts him more than they ever did before.

Open the Drawer + Principles that Make 80% of Decisions Automatic

That email didn’t just announce a layoff. It became the seed of a new operating principle that now runs through his company:

Today I’m excited to share this video I recorded with Johannes, exploring the operating principles that have made his company go from good to great.

And, how he built a company from a place of radical transparency, vulnerability, and emotional intelligence. It was an awesome conversation:

​Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

The atomic structure of every company consists of two things

• Your decisions

• Your relationships

If these two things are high quality, the company will succeed. If they are not, it will fail in the long run.

Today’s teaching will be diving deep into the inner mechanisms of decision-making.

The Neurology of Decisions

You’ve probably been told by parents, teachers, or some sort of authority that the key to making great decisions is to be logical and to stop listening to your feelings.

You’ve been told they get in the way, or that they cloud your judgment.

But when we rely only on logic, we miss a critical detail.

In 1982, a Portuguese neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio made a fascinating discovery. His patients with damaged emotional centers could think with perfect logic and ace IQ tests. Yet they couldn’t choose a pen color or decide what to eat for lunch. Hours would pass as they analyzed every possible option, unable to make a choice.

The lesson was clear: It’s not logic that drives our decisions, but our emotions.

And when you make decisions as a leader, you’re often doing it to feel a certain way, or not feel a certain way. For example, if you’re scared of feeling like a failure, you’re less likely to make moves yout think are risky. If you’re scared of rejection, you’re less likely to speak your truth to an employee who might not like it.

This is why leadership failures rarely come from lack of intelligence. They come from unexamined emotional drivers that are quietly shaping choices.

So if you want to make the sort of decisions that make a great company, you must go beyond “logic” and “frameworks.” You must develop a deeper understanding of your emotions, and develop a new relationship to them.

When you try to be “purely rational,” emotions don’t vanish. They surface as analysis paralysis, procrastination disguised as rigor, and persistent unease despite strong data.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

A founder I worked with years ago told me that he hated selling his team.

Board meetings were easy for him. Investor pitches were fine.

But the moment he had to “sell” his own team on a new direction, something tightened in him.

He’d over-explain, talk too fast, and push too hard for agreement. And the more he pushed, the more the room pulled back.

One day, after watching another meeting derail, I asked him what he was trying to avoid.

He said, “I don’t want them to think I’m trying to control them.”

He paused. The irony was clear even to him.

Trying to get his team to think anything about him was a form of control.

You’re always selling, whether you own it or not

People often think of selling as a “necessary evil,” but if you really understand it, it’s just an extension of who you are.

You’re always selling.

Especially as a leader, whether you want to admit it or not. You want people to respect each other, to be in alignment, to trust each other, and to understand your vision.

What feels terrible about selling is when you’re trying to force people into an outcome.

And that’s when things often go sideways in business. A contract that is created by force often goes south. People who feel forced often become passive aggressive. And customers who feel cajoled often become dissatisfied and speak poorly about your company.

Trying to force people is what most people call “selling,” but it’s just a disguised fear of being dismissed, misunderstood, or rejected.

The easiest way to see if fear is in the picture is whenever you are using any sort of force or chase to convince people.

That never feels good, and never pays off in the long run.

Experiment

Look back on your week and find one place where you were using force or chase to convince somebody of something.

Then, ask that person what would be required for them to be excited for the outcome that you want.

Example:

• You notice that you were trying to force a customer to buy your lampshades.

• Call up that customer and ask them: “What would make them excited to buy your lampshades?”

Example:

• You were trying to force your kid to brush their teeth.

• Ask your kid: “What would make you excited to brush your teeth?”

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.

Hi there,

There’s a saying I love: If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.

The number one reason to talk to venture capitalists is not to get their money. It’s to get a better understanding of how to build your business.

Most founders will need to speak with 30 to 50 venture capitalists before getting funded. But the irony is that most founders ask for money, and then don’t even take the advice that comes with it.

As if somehow they know better than the folks who’ve collectively watched more companies rise and fall than most of us will ever see.

When you walk into a VC meeting with wonder, rather than trying to prove something, the dynamic shifts. They become more curious about you. And when you come back having acted on what they told you, it means they’ve participated in building your company.

That makes it a lot easier for them to write a check.

Neediness repels

During a recent talk I gave on pitching, I brought two volunteers on stage and asked one of them to embody neediness: to just hold that energy in their body.

I asked the other: “Do you want to step toward her or away?”

Away. Every time.

Then I asked her to shift: embody the question “Is this person right for me?”

The other volunteer stepped forward.

This is the real dance happening in a VC meeting. Long before you get to slide five, they’ve already read your nervous system.

If you walk in needy, they lean out. If you walk in genuinely evaluating whether they are the right fit for you, they lean in.

Investors are incredibly hard to fire. Bad board dynamics have killed countless companies with brilliant products.

So the most effective question for you isn’t just “Will they fund me?” it’s “Do I actually want to be in business with this person for the next seven years?”

Experiment

Before your next investor conversation, write down two lists:

1. The three things you genuinely want to learn from this person — not perform for them, but actually understand.

2. Two questions you’ll ask about whether they are the right fit for you.

Bonus experiment:

Ask the four questions above the next time someone on your team doesn’t perform.

Big Love,

Joe

This newsletter is brought to you by The Council.