Your First Step to Growth Isn't What You Think
How high-performing leaders block themselves from their full potential.
Join me for Substack Live today, Tuesday, November 18th at 11am ET with Paul Sweeney of Sense Labs. We’re talking about Dysfunction at Work: Is It The People Or The System? You’ll walk away with leadership insights that will challenge conventional wisdom & common assumptions. Link to Join.
Catching up on previous Substack Lives? See them here.
If you’re a reliable, responsible leader who delivers again and again, you’ve likely hit this wall: you want to grow, but you can’t find the space for it.
The default answer?
Do more. Work harder. Be more efficient.
But that’s the wrong question.
Growth doesn’t come from doing more.
It comes from knowing what matters most and aligning your intentions with your actions. And here’s what I see every week with senior leaders: they sabotage their own development.
Not because they don’t know better, but because their fears won’t let them make space for it.
Here’s the truth most leadership advice won’t tell you: If you want to grow, you need to do less. Not more.
When you’re learning something new, it takes time to understand, practice, make mistakes, and try again. It often takes more time than you estimate.
And if you’re tackling something that scares you — leading differently, delegating control, having harder conversations — you need even more time. The emotional and physical energy it takes to source courage is taxing and requires recovery.
This means freeing up your calendar.
Creating white space.
Saying no to things that once defined your value.
And that’s where the real block shows up.
The fear isn’t about time management.
It’s about what saying “no” says about you.
I know because I’ve heard these arguments from my clients (and from my own inner voice):
“I need to do more to achieve more. My worthiness depends on how much I deliver.” (Hyper-achiever)
“I need to be on top of everything. When I’m not, things go wrong and I get blamed.” (Hyper-vigilant)
“People respect me because I’m responsive and helpful. If I pull back, I’ll disappoint them.” (People pleaser)
“I need to be involved in the details or my team might not get it right.” (Controller)
“I can’t control who pulls me into projects. They add me to meetings and I have to go.” (Victim)
These aren’t strategic choices. They’re saboteurs: voices that developed when you were young to protect you from fear of abandonment, failure, and not belonging.
They worked then. But they’re blocking you now.
Until you learn to catch these voices and shift to a different mindset, you’ll keep running the same patterns. You’ll keep saying you want to grow while filling every hour of your calendar.
Let me show you what it looks like when you break the pattern.
The Monday Morning That Changes Everything
Picture this: You wake up Monday morning, pour your coffee, and open your calendar.
Ten meetings. Back to back. No breaks. Two of them overlapping.
Immediately, the voices start:
“You should have caught this earlier.” (Judge)
“Everyone needs you. You can’t let them down.” (People pleaser)
“No one gives me any time to do my actual work.” (Victim)
“I can’t say anything now. It’ll disrupt initiatives already in process.” (Avoider)
Here’s what most leaders do: They white-knuckle through the day. They skip lunch. They stay late to catch up. They tell themselves next week will be better.
Here’s what leaders who’ve learned to master their mind do differently:
They take a few deep breaths. They notice those voices are coming from their saboteurs, not from reality.
They congratulate themselves for catching it. That awareness is the entire game.
Then they ask: What will be the most helpful next step?
They can’t change the past, but they can change what happens next. So they assess: Where am I actually needed? Where can I delegate, delete, or delay?
They message key people. They make the changes. They regain time on their calendar.
And they use that time to prioritize what matters most.
Starting with the deep breaths, that’s where the magic begins.
Most leaders never pause. They might feel the tension and the fear momentarily, but they are so caught up in their habits, they are are on autopilot. Nothing changes.
Learning how to be conscious of your thoughts and knowing that you can pause them is what separates wanting to grow from actually having the capacity to do it.
What Makes the Shift Possible
For years, I practiced meditation but couldn’t connect it to decisive action in high-stakes moments. I’d sit quietly in the morning, then spend my day running the same reactive patterns.
Then I trained in Positive Intelligence, a neuroscience-based approach to mastering your mind. It gave me—and now my clients—a repeatable process for catching saboteurs in real time and choosing differently.
It’s rooted in mindfulness, but it’s built for leaders who need to perform under pressure. You learn to recognize your specific saboteur patterns, understand where they came from, and practice shifting to what PQ calls your “Sage” mindset. This is the part of you that’s calm, clear, and creative even when the stakes are high.
The research behind it is solid: Stanford professor Shirzad Chamine found that we all developed inner saboteurs in childhood as a way to protect ourselves from our deepest fears—abandonment, failure, not belonging, missing out. These patterns were adaptive then. They’re limiting now.
But here’s what matters more than the research: I’ve watched VP and C-level leaders use this framework to:
Reduce their working hours while actually increasing their impact
Set boundaries without guilt or fear of being seen as difficult
Delegate real responsibility instead of just tasks
Show up to hard conversations with clarity instead of defensiveness
Make time for strategic thinking instead of just reacting all day
They don’t become different people. They become more of who they already are… without the saboteurs running the show.
Why This Matters for Your Leadership Now
You probably already know what you should be doing:
Spending less time in the weeds and more time on strategy. Developing your team instead of doing their work. Protecting your calendar. Focusing on the three initiatives that will actually move the business forward.
Knowing isn’t the problem. Doing it consistently is.
Because every time you try, your saboteurs show up with convincing arguments:
“But what if they mess it up?” (Controller)
“I can do it faster myself.” (Hyper-achiever)
“They’ll think I’m not a team player.” (People pleaser)
“I need to stay visible or I’ll be forgotten.” (Hyper-vigilant)
These voices sound like wisdom. They feel like protection. But they’re keeping you from the leader you’re capable of becoming.
The leaders who break through? They don’t ignore these voices or try to think their way past them. They learn to catch them, name them, and choose a different response in the moment it matters.
That’s the skill that changes everything.
Don’t be a leader with great intentions but who never makes progress.
The leaders I work with aren’t stuck because they lack ambition or intelligence. They’re stuck because no one taught them how to master their mind so they could take back control of their calendar.
They’re tired of:
Saying yes when they mean no
Leading from urgency instead of intention
Knowing what they should do but not being able to follow through
And they’re ready to lead differently—with clarity, boundaries, and the capacity to keep growing.
I’m opening a small pilot coaching cohort in early 2026 for senior executives (VP to C-level) who are done running on fumes and ready to create sustainable high performance.
This isn’t another time management course. It’s a 12-week intensive where you’ll learn to:
Catch your saboteurs in real time
Shift from reactive to intentional leadership
Reclaim your calendar so you can focus on what actually moves the needle
Build the muscle of saying no without guilt or fear
The program is rooted in Positive Intelligence, a neuroscience-based approach I use with all my 1:1 clients. It works because it doesn’t just give you strategies—it rewires how you think under pressure.
Spots are limited to 12 leaders. I want to design this cohort around what you actually need, so I’m asking you to fill out this 2-minute survey if you’re interested.
Tell me what’s blocking you. Tell me what you’re ready to change. Let’s build this together.
If this post resonated, give it a ❤️ so more leaders can find it. And share it with someone who’s ready to grow but isn’t giving themselves the space to do so.
May you lead without limits,
P.S. Catching up on previous Substack Lives? See them here.
Don’t miss today’s Substack Live at 11am ET with Paul Sweeney—we’re talking about Dysfunction at Work: Is It The People Or The System? Link to Join.