Most people treat anxiety as a thinking problem: too many thoughts, too fast, too overwhelming. But what looks like overthinking is often overfeeling that hasn't found contact. Anxiety becomes the dominant signal when an emotion is trying to surface and can't find language, safety, or space to land....

There are two very different ways to explain anxiety, and each is partly right. One says anxiety is about the future — the mind bracing against a threat that hasn't arrived. The other says anxiety is about the present — a way of not feeling something that is already here. These are usually presented...

Most people treat anxiety as a signal about the future. But anxiety is often not about what's coming. It's about what you're trying not to feel right now. It is not, in these cases, fear of an event. It's fear of a feeling.

That distinction is not a metaphor. It is close to the founding insight o...

Reading other people's emotions well is a real strength — until it isn't held by anything. Attunement without the capacity to stay separate curdles into two failures that look like care and aren't: taking on what isn't yours, and softening the truth to keep the peace.

Emotional attunement gets tr...

Conflict doesn't just make us emotional — it makes us think worse, in specific and predictable ways. The good news is that the degradation is trainable, and there are a few concrete tools for staying clear when the room gets hot.

Most people assume the problem with conflict is emotional: you get an...

The automatic ways you respond under pressure can be changed. Not by understanding them, and not by absorbing more frameworks — by a specific kind of practice, in the conditions where the old reflex fires.

Most leadership difficulty isn't a knowledge problem. Leaders usually know, in the abstract, ...

We've built an industry of tools for transmitting ideas to each other. Almost none of it helps us think together — which is where the actual value is.

We have built an enormous apparatus around communication: messaging platforms, slide decks, collaboration software, coaching frameworks, presentat...

Why the Classical Analytic Frame Struggles to Hold the Founder's Mind

The neutral, hierarchical stance was built for a different kind of patient — and the field's own relational turn points to what actually works.

The founder is not a typical patient.

They tend to be high-agency, creative, int...

A specialist sees the problem their training prepared them to see — which is a strength until it's the wrong problem.

Abraham Maslow put it plainly in 1966: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The line has lasted because it names something that gets truer, not less true, a...

Three thinking tools for making better decisions under uncertainty

Most leadership advice is about behavior — how to communicate, motivate, delegate. But underneath the behavior sits something more basic that rarely gets trained directly: the quality of a leader's thinking. Every decision, every st...