Leadership Chemistry

Burnout seems to be hitting everyone I work with lately. If somehow you're lucky enough never to have experienced it, burnout is that cocktail of exhaustion, cynicism, and the feeling that your work doesn't matter anymore. Contrary to what many people think, burnout isn't a time management problem, it's an energy management problem. So today, I'm breaking down my four laws of energy. First, the law of psychic entropy, where every worry, decision, and scroll slowly leaks your attention, so you need anchor actions that are hard to start but leave you better off. Second, the law of the mind-body connection, because you've got to fix the hardware (sleep, movement, fewer cheeseburgers) before the software. Third, the law of oscillation, which says to work in 90-to-120-minute waves. And fourth, the law of the stress curve, which is finding that sweet spot between back-to-back matinees with a bucket of popcorn and going 16 rounds with Tyson. So take a hard look in the mirror, figure out which law you're breaking the most, and chase that 5% improvement this week.

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Back behind the mic after a long stretch of paternity leave, and I'm a little rusty but excited to dive into a new framework I've been piecing together during those 2:30 a.m. bottle feedings: three invisible forces that quietly keep leaders hooked, stuck, and less effective than they could be. Tools and scripts only go so far if we don't first notice the deeper pressures shaping how we see ourselves and the world. The point isn't to defeat these forces, but to get better at noticing when they have us and to respond with a little more awareness each time.

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If you know my sister, Jill, you'll know that she's kind of a legend when it comes to personal development. No one has challenged me to learn and grow more than she has. So today I wanted to re-release a conversation Jill and I had in October of 2025, to talk about the mindset shifts necessary for overcoming obstacles in our lives and the value of self-compassion in achieving high standards. You won't find a better example of leadership than Jill.

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If you asked 100 leaders whether or not "authenticity" was an important leadership quality, 99 would probably affirm that it is. The one that disagreed would be me. The "just be yourself, speak your truth" version of authenticity functions less as a virtue and more as an excuse to dodge accountability or avoid the hard work of self-awareness. The real question isn't whether authenticity matters, but what exactly we're supposed to be authentic to. Is it our core self, our aspirational self, the emotions of the moment, or the different versions of us that show up with family, friends, and coworkers? Whatever authenticity is, it isn't one fixed thing. Instead, I prefer the idea of "authenticity filters"—our values, emotional intelligence, conditions like sleep and health—as more useful ways to stay grounded and self-aware without collapsing into either rigidity or people-pleasing. Authenticity isn't about being unfiltered, it's about being intentional, self-aware, and honest about which version of yourself a moment actually calls for.

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Fresh off paternity leave and running on very little sleep, I'm back with an idea I'm calling the Russian doll effect of decision making, meaning the way every choice we make comes wrapped in hidden layers of time, cost, and complexity we rarely account for upfront. The big idea here is to make decisions with a simple formula: think slow, act fast. By really interrogating the hidden costs and the "should I even be doing this" questions before committing, when you do make moves, you'll be moving with real clarity instead of getting buried under obligations you never meant to take on. A meaningful life will always come with more layers than expected, but the goal is choosing more deliberately which dolls are actually worth opening.

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Coach Kaycee is back on the pod for a conversation about a tension that a lot of leaders quietly struggle with: the false choice between being liked and being respected. Leaders who rank low on likability are almost never rated as great leaders, no matter how strong their short-term results look. We spend some time talking about boundaries, breaking down what the "boundaries" really mean in practice: that a boundary is about your own behavior, not about controlling someone else's, and that it only works if you decide it, declare it, and actually deliver on it. The same goes for expectations—starting from curiosity instead of blame when something slips, then re-establishing what needs to happen and building a plan together. Ultimately, warmth and power aren't opposites. The best leaders hold both, but getting there takes real, deliberate work.

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There's a conventional formula most of us grow up believing: that we have to think or feel our way into the right emotions before we can act. But the research, and my own experience, points the opposite direction—behavior comes first, and the emotions and thoughts we're chasing tend to follow. It's not the same as "fake it till you make it." Real action, not performance, is what actually reshapes identity over time. Motivation isn't a prerequisite for getting started, it's a byproduct of it. The bigger theme, as always on this show, is that leadership starts with self-leadership—and self-leadership often starts with just showing up before you feel ready.

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Today, positive psychologist Niyc Pigeon joins me for a conversation about what it really takes to build a happier, more resilient life—not the curated version, but the honest one. We talk about how positive psychology gets misread as "just be happy all the time," when the real work is learning to find something worthwhile even inside the hard stuff, and why practices like gratitude can go flat once they become routine, along with a few ways to bring them back to life. A big thread running through the episode is the trap of "I'll be happy when..." — treating happiness as a reward you earn after the goal, when the evidence actually runs the other direction. But positive psychology isn't only for our personal lives, there's real application in leadership and coaching too. We can learn how to support other people without absorbing their emotions as your own, how to know when someone needs to be challenged versus met with compassion, and small, practical ways to build more genuine connection into a team. As I like to say, leaders leak their emotional state to everyone around them, so the real work starts with how you treat yourself.

Connect with Niyc on Instagram: @niycpidge

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It finally happened. I finally got all three of my siblings—Brandon, Jill, and #Connor—in one place for a rare joint appearance. I'm constantly asked why and how we have such a strong sibling bond, and it comes down to intentional effort we've all made over the years, and maybe a dash of our parents wiring "family first" into us from the start. And while we may all be the best of friends, we aren't the kind of people to shy away from tough conversations and disagreement every now and then, and you can hear that first-hand in this episode. Each of us has lived a very different life than the others, but we share many of the same goals, including the kind of people we're striving to become—consistent, creating space for others to grow, and leading yourself before you try to lead anyone else.

Follow Jill: @jillFit

Follow Brandon: @itsbrandoncoleman

Follow Connor: #Connor

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Staying calm as a leader isn't about suppressing emotion, but about building real practices around it. I've often said that leaders "leak," meaning that our emotions and stress are contagious to the people around us—and if you don't believe me, check out the research done on cortisol and mood contagion. And while it seems like a good idea, the trendy version of stoicism that pushes people to just suppress feelings and "have more discipline" usually backfires and leads to burnout. Instead, I have some more practical ideas: decide in advance who you want to be under pressure, investigate where your emotions are really coming from, reshape your physical environment, and keep practicing empathy. Your team doesn't need you to be a robot, they just need to trust that whatever you're feeling won't sink the ship.

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In this episode, I sit down with my longtime mentor Dr. Jade Tita to unpack what actually makes someone both liked and respected as a leader. We dig into his rewrite-rewire-retrain model of change, arguing that most leadership advice fixates on habits while ignoring the deeper layers underneath: the stories we form as kids, the emotions that fuse to them, and the competing identities that hijack us the moment we get triggered at work. Jade walks through how to actually knock on the door of one of these identities, ask it what it needs, and use techniques like memory reconsolidation and written identity therapy to defuse the old story instead of just white-knuckling new behaviors. We close on the practical side of influence, where Jade breaks down how he moves people—releasing their psychological defenses by validating where they are, asking Columbo-style questions instead of pushing advice, and ultimately treating people according to their best possible selves rather than who they currently seem to be. It's a conversation that moves from big-picture leadership theory all the way down to the nervous system.

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Why do so many leaders refuse to take PTO? What are the emotional and cultural barriers that keep managers chained to their inboxes even on vacation? Today, Head Coach Kaycee and I break down the PTO problem. According to Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz's "stressor detachment model," there are four pillars of real recovery—psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. While we may have different ideas on how to get to that recovery, what we can agree on is this: hoarding PTO isn't a flex, and being "irreplaceable" often just means you've built a ceiling over your own career. Ask yourself whether your team could function without you for two weeks—and if the honest answer is no, then there's real work to start doing.

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The work of knowing yourself as a leader never really finishes, and that's actually the fun part. This week, I'm chatting with Meleah Rose—a somatic practitioner and leadership coach who works with high performers, executives, and founders. We talked about her path from training as a marriage and family therapist toward somatic leadership coaching, sparked by an illness that forced her to slow down mid-master's-degree and eventually walk away from licensure entirely. From there we got into what "performative leadership" actually means, and why showing up as a polished, always-composed leader tends to erode trust rather than build it. We also got into people-pleasing, a pattern she said she's known intimately since childhood, and how she learned to filter her writing and decisions through one question: is this my truth, and can I stand on it? It's a conversation about vulnerability, nervous-system awareness, and what it really takes to lead without losing yourself in the process.

Connect with Meleah on Substack:

https://meleahrose1.substack.com/

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This week, I brought on my sister, Jill (who you may know as JillFit) for a wide-ranging, off-the-cuff conversation about what it actually takes to lead yourself and others. We dig into self-leadership and how "public declaration" is Jill's secret weapon for following through as a solopreneur, then moved into how she learned to let go of perfectionism and trust her team enough to let them figure things out rather than hovering over every decision. We got into self-awareness too, and why admitting mistakes as a leader builds trust instead of eroding it. From there we talked productivity, and how her real edge isn't doing more, it's doing less: taking real downtime, outsourcing anything that doesn't matter, and working in focused, high-energy blocks instead of staying half-on all day. We closed things out with some bigger-picture life lessons—mainly that you can't make everything important, so you might as well get intentional about the handful of things that are.

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Emotions aren't the enemy of a good life—they're the path to one. The philosophers of yore argued that logic should rule over feeling, but why can't we have both? Losing access to our emotions doesn't increase cognitive function. In fact, we know what a life without emotions looks like, and it ain't good. (Ted Bundy, anyone?) Emotions drive our decision-making, self-control, service to others, and the pursuit of goals, so we have to be able to name and sit with our emotions, instead of trying to outrun them. So if the goal isn't to eliminate emotion, instead let it be to understand our feelings well enough to let them move you toward the life you actually want.

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We're living through what researchers call a "trust recession"—a collective decline in confidence in businesses, institutions, media, and each other. Today, I dig into why that's happening and what it costs us economically, professionally, and personally. When uncertainty creeps in, our brains crave certainty so badly that we start trusting the loudest, most confident voice in the room, even though research shows those quick, confident answers are wrong more often than not. Meanwhile, low-trust environments make everything slower, costlier, and more exhausting. To get the opposite of that, we need to start building real trust, through integrity over time.

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The one and only Kaycee Coleman—head coach at the Leadership Collective, trained social worker, therapist, and, yes, lead singer of KC and the Moonshine Band—is back this week to help me dig into something we both geek out over: leadership language. We kicked things off talking about how the everyday words leaders use aren't just filler, but are actually doing two jobs at once. They reveal mindset, and they program it. Researcher James Pennebaker at UT Austin even built a computer program to prove it, finding that word choices predict everything from personality traits to shifts in mental and physical health. Kaycee and I then got into some of the specific phrases that make our skin crawl. Things like calling your team "entitled," saying "that won't work," or the classic "I'm a nice person!" We break down what those phrases actually signal about a leader's beliefs and how they quietly poison team culture. We also got into the fun stuff: the language shifts that actually move the needle, like swapping "I can't" for "I don't," "I should" for "I could," and "I'm nervous" for "I'm excited," plus some wild research on how just adding the word because to a request can boost compliance by 50%, and how asking someone if they're "a voter" rather than if they're "voting" increased turnout by 15%. The bottom line we kept coming back to is simple: your words are building something, whether you're paying attention to them or not, so you might as well be intentional about what you're constructing.

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It's been a big few weeks—Kels and I just bought our first house, baby is six weeks out, and I finally have my own Costco membership, so I'm basically a full adult now. But hitting some of these milestones got me thinking, because society's checklist for adulthood misses the most important part: emotional maturity. Maturity can be seen in three stages—the child who operates purely on pleasure and pain, the adolescent who becomes transactional and people-pleasing, and the adult who does the right thing simply because it's right, not to get something in return. That third stage is where real self-worth lives, and it's where leaders need to operate. The problem is that under stress, we regress. Our insecurities surface, our self-control slips, and we start justifying bad behavior. So the framework I want to leave you with is playing above or below the line: above the line is integrity, ownership, empathy, and curiosity; below the line is complaining, victimhood, defensiveness, and fear. You're going to slip below it at some point, but the goal is to build enough self-awareness to catch yourself and get back above the line faster.

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Let's all give a warm welcome to my sister-in-law Kaycee Coleman—licensed clinical social worker and brand new head coach at the Coleman Leadership Collective. This week we're kicking off the first installment of a brand new monthly leadership series. Since "leadership" is such a nebulous term and no one can seem to agree on what it actually entails, Kaycee and I wanted to unpack our personal rules of great leadership. We get into why the most powerful leadership moments often have nothing to do with strategy or metrics, what it really means to lead yourself before you can lead anyone else, and why the small things you think nobody notices are actually the things people remember most. If you've ever wondered what separates a run-of-the-mill manager from a leader people actually want to follow, you'll want to tune in.

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Every time I speak at organizations, I watch the same thing happen: people nod along enthusiastically until someone says, "That's great, but it won't work here," and suddenly the room fills with a kind of collective helplessness. But that mindset has a name: an external locus of control, and research shows it's linked to higher stress, worse job performance, even a 50% greater risk of coronary heart disease. You already know we're gonna flip that script. First, stop arguing for your limitations—there's a critical difference between fault, which lives in the past, and responsibility, which is about what you can do right now. Second, shift your focus from your circle of concern to your circle of influence, because the more energy you pour into what you can actually control, the bigger that circle grows. Third, start small and start now, because lasting change doesn't come from overhauling everything at once, it comes from doing one small thing well. We all have the power to lead from wherever we sit.

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