There are two standard explanations for burnout, and one of them is much better supported than the other.

The first says burnout is a failure of individual resilience — that the person lacked the coping skills, the mindfulness practice, the boundaries. The second says burnout is a failure of org...

Most leadership programs teach skills. Executive psychology changes how leaders think.

It is not coaching, therapy, or motivational talk. It is a science-driven approach to understanding how leaders make decisions, manage complexity, and maintain clarity under pressure. At The ACP Group, we work wh...

Field Notes. 
By Kristen Tolbert

Anyone leading a team of people is inevitably going to end up in a situation where they're managing some kind of chaos and a lot of heated emotion in the room. When I'm working with consultants, for instance, they're expected to be the experts in the room. They're wo...

In leadership settings, confidence gets treated as one thing: certainty, flawless execution, the absence of visible doubt. It isn't one thing. The word is doing double duty for two entirely different psychological systems, and conflating them is what produces the anxious, perfectionistic high per...

Four laws of human systems. 

Leadership is described in the language of vision and influence. Experienced leaders know something less flattering: no matter how fair, generous, or thoughtful you are, dissatisfaction arrives anyway. The benefit you fought for gets absorbed into the baseline within ...

Why the real drain on your thinking isn't workload — it's switching

High performers tend to assume the way to think faster is to do more at once — hold several threads, toggle between them, keep everything moving. It feels efficient. It's the opposite. The largest hidden tax on executive cognition ...

Field Notes · by Kristen Tolbert

Most leadership books are written for managers inside well-resourced organizations. The assumption is that leaders operate with a buffer — budgets, teams, established process, institutional support. Even when things get hard, the system absorbs some of the strain. O...

Why indirect communication is a form of control and why "just be direct" isn't the fix.

We mistake passive behavior for harmless behavior. But avoiding conflict is not the same as avoiding control. It is frequently a subtler and more corrosive version of it.

Indirect communication is what happens ...

Everyone says growth is uncomfortable. Almost nobody explains why it's specifically hard for people who are already good at things — or why being good at things is, past a certain point, an obstacle to getting better.

The explanation is not motivational. It comes from learning science, and it is mo...

What the research actually says and why the label becomes the obstacle

The sentence is everywhere now. I'm anxiously attached. He's avoidant. Said with the confidence of a diagnosis, and treated like one — a fixed fact about a person, explaining everything and excusing most of it.

It is a misreadi...