Most of the leaders I coach are somewhere between 45 and 60, and they've spent twenty-five years getting very good at pushing through. Everyone around them calls it dedication. It's the skill that built their careers, and it's why people still call them when something breaks. What they notice now, if they let themselves, is that the pushing costs more than it used to. They're more tired at the end of a normal week, shorter with the people at home, and the work that used to

Most of the executives I coach got where they are largely by reassuring their teams. They're good in a crisis and good at keeping people calm. What they don't always see is that calm has a cost when it isn't real, and I didn't see it for a long time either.

I caught my hand reaching for my phone before I'd even decided to check anything. I was in LA a few weeks ago visiting my daughter, having my morning coffee while Sienna and Kade were still asleep, and there was my thumb, already hovering over the mail icon. I've been trying to break this habit for years. I don't check email on vacation, that's been the rule for a long time, and mostly I keep it. But the pull is still there.

Saturday morning, I walk to the farmers market with a list in my head: salad, tomatoes, kale, cheese, sausage, enough food for the week. I'm moving fast, eyes scanning stalls the way I'd scan a grocery aisle, and I get everything on the list in about twelve minutes. It's efficient. I also walk right past a little New Orleans-style jazz ensemble playing near the entrance without really hearing them, and I don't see a single person the whole time. If you've spent years buildin

I was standing in the San Francisco airport when my left arm and neck went numb, my heart started racing, and I was sure I was having a heart attack. The EKG came back normal. My doctor told me that if I didn't learn to reduce my stress, the next one would be real. That was the cost of decades of working hard on terms I had never stopped to examine. Last week, a 22-year-old described what I was missing better than I ever have: "Our generation recognizes a bad deal when

When Thomas Droge realized he was having a heart attack, he drove himself to the hospital and left the car running in the parking lot. He's a doctor. About fifteen minutes into it, he understood that this could be the moment three generations of men in his family had gone through; he was six months from the age his father was when he died, and his grandfather before him. And he still drove himself. If you've built a career on being the person who handles things, that reflex p

You're probably not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be slowly outvalued by it, one task at a time. Most of the senior people I coach don't worry about that, because a whole job rarely disappears at once, which makes the erosion easy to miss until it's well along.

"AI amplifies what the leader brings. If the leader brings confusion, you get confusion at speed. You get chaos. If the leader brings clarity, you get clarity and execution at speed." That's Jack Swift, back on the Midlife Remix this week. If a leader walks into Monday's meeting confused about what it's even for, everyone goes back to their desks, opens Claude or Copilot, and starts querying from that confusion. The leader's inner state has become a business variable.

I’m an immigrant which means I chose to call America home. This year I'm holding on two things that don't cancel each other out: I’ve been able to build a life and companies that I couldn't have built anywhere else, and I'm more worried about where this country is headed than I've ever been. These are the same concerns, I’ve been hearing from almost every executive I coach.

I see it in capable people who've spent a decade moving from one good job to the next, each taken in real hope it's finally the one that fits. For a while it is, and then the interest drains out of it again, and with it the fear that maybe the problem is you.

Simon Verhoeven spent years dreaming about a particular German Film Award, and the moment it was finally in his hand, the first thing he felt wasn't satisfaction, it was "okay, so what's next?" He's one of the most successful directors in Germany, with films that became hits and got remade across Europe. The film that won for him, Ach, diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke, roughly "this gap, this terrible gap," is about loss, and he made it during the same years he was lo

Last night, I almost turned off the game that became the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history. That urge to skip the hard part is one I know well at work and in my career, and one I watch the leaders I coach give in to all the time, usually right when it matters most.

Mike was 40, head of digital strategy and innovation at Bank of America, with a job that looked great on paper. He says that's the moment he realized he had become the corporate version of the person he'd spent his whole life saying he never wanted to be.

It’s a reasonable bet, and until this year it was a safe one. Then Meta cut about 8,000 jobs this May, a tenth of the company, and Groupon roughly a quarter of its workforce, both to move the money into AI, and the people cut were largely experienced, well-paid, and supposedly untouchable. Being competent but no longer engaged doesn’t protect you the way it once did.

The bonus clears, and for a few weeks, you can stop asking yourself if this is really what you want. Then the check settles into the account, time passes, and the question comes back.

Two weeks ago, I took her to Salzburg for her eighty-sixth birthday. While we were there, I finally let myself feel the full weight of what she survived, and what she chose to do with the rest of her life. She walked beside me on the cobblestones of a city we used to visit as a family, stopped for ice cream in a square we remembered, and looked up at the fortress on the hill the way we used to. I kept catching myself watching her, not because anything was wrong, but becaus

Most of the senior leaders I work with say yes too often, and they're paying for it in ways that don't show up on any quarterly report. I recently had Erin Holland-Collins on the Midlife Remix podcast, and one of the threads I keep coming back to is what I've started calling the "half-yes": agreeing to something not because you want to do it, but because the no felt harder than the yes.

Today I’m launching Remix Career. It gives you what I give my coaching clients: a clear read on who you are at this point in your career, where to take it next, and the specific steps to get there. You upload your résumé and walk through a guided reflection in your own words. The AI, trained on my coaching methodology, reads what you wrote and produces a Remix Report with your career archetype, recommended directions, a skills analysis, an AI impact read on each path, and liv

“I didn’t even realize that I wanted this promotion until someone else got it.” That came up when I was talking with Brittanni Hendricks on Midlife Remix, and she hears some version of it regularly from high performers. I keep coming back to it because it names what happens to the executives I coach, who have managed their own wanting for so long that, when it surfaces, someone else is already in the role.

While I was loving Kade without any expectation of who he would become, I was not doing the same for my oldest child. I was doing what a lot of parents do, especially parents who have achieved some professional success and are still carrying their own unresolved stuff. A lot of my ambition and struggles have been driven by trying to prove my worth to my parents, and, without realizing it, I was passing that same dynamic on to my own kid. Our children don't learn from what we