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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Most of the leaders I coach describe themselves as driven, strategic, maybe a little intense. But underneath the drive, there's often a vigilance that never turns off, a background calculation running before every decision: what could go wrong here, what am I exposed to. It doesn't feel like fear, it feels like being thorough.

Most of the leaders I work with aren't stuck because they lack strategy. They're stuck because busyness has become the thing that keeps them from noticing what's actually driving their decisions — and it doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels ike responsibility.

For twenty years, I did what most driven leaders do: I worked harder, earned more, rose higher, and assumed I’d eventually arrive at a life that felt right. And by most measures, it worked. I had the career I’d been building toward since my twenties.

The behaviors that got you here, the control, the drive, the need to be the one with the answers, didn't just become habits. They became how you understand your own value. So when something asks you to let go of them, it doesn't feel inefficient. It feels like a threat to who you are.

I've been noticing something in myself lately, and I wonder if it's true for you too. My days are full. Work, kids, aging parents, and the constant demand for everything that needs attention. I'm rarely alone. And yet, something's missing. I think it might be loneliness. Not the kind where no one's around. The kind where you're surrounded by people but not really with any of them.

That response is cortisol—a hormone designed to help us escape predators. Tens of thousands of years ago, when a sabertooth tiger chased us, cortisol flooded our system, shutting down digestion, immune function, and anything else that wasn't essential for survival. The system was built for threats that resolve in minutes. When cortisol stays elevated for months, it stops protecting us and starts breaking us down.

You have established credibility, effectively led your team, and achieved steady results. However, if you aim to advance further, whether as a CEO, in any executive role, or to gain true enterprise influence, the same strategies that brought you success could now be limiting. Constant execution and the need to be involved in every detail, fueled by a desire to demonstrate your value, might become obstacles to your growth.

In my coaching practice, I work with capable, emotionally intelligent leaders who are often overlooked, not because they lack results, but because they don’t dominate meetings or make everything about themselves. Many of them work for narcissistic bosses, leaders who avoid responsibility, take credit for others’ work, and care more about optics than outcomes.

I don’t know how this past year was for you, but for many of us, it was unsettling. Tumultuous in ways we didn’t expect. The kind of year that looks at your carefully constructed life and asks us questions on who we are, what we value, and what’s no longer working. And while that kind of year can leave us feeling disoriented, it can also open up space to reflect, to learn, and to grow in ways we never would have chosen, but apparently have to deal with anyway.

In midlife, many of us begin to feel a tension between seeking comfort and security—staying with what we know and what feels predictable in our work and lives. Another part of us desires growth and change, not just for novelty but to live and work more in line with who we truly want to be. What seems responsible is often simply what feels safe. The real challenge is recognizing when responsibility shifts from a genuine choice to a way of choosing security over alignment.