These are my own essays — selected from a larger body of writing on human behavior, leadership, conflict, and what it actually takes to change. They were written over years of clinical work and lived experience, and are offered here because the thinking behind this practice is inseparable from the work itself.
The best way to know whether someone sees the world the way you do is to read what they write when no one is asking them to.
Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick
Nice doesn't scale. In leadership, as in diplomacy, a blanket philosophy of niceness is often more enabling than virtuous — and the leaders who avoid conflict in the name of being agreeable are frequently the ones costing their organizations the most.
Read →Who Are You When No One's Looking?
The most accurate version of you is the one who shows up when no one else is around. In leadership, that gap — between who you are in the room and who you are when the room empties — is rarely invisible for long.
Read →Learn to Be a Good Listener
Being a good listener is harder than almost anyone admits. After nearly two decades of working with people in significant conflict, one thing has become consistently clear: most people — including, I'll admit, me — don't actually know how to do it.
Read →This Is Gonna Hurt
When something in an organization isn't working, there are exactly three options: make it worse, stay stuck, or do the work. The discomfort is guaranteed regardless of which you choose. What you decide determines how long it lasts.
Read →Some Things Don't Scale
One of the most useful questions you can ask about any leadership philosophy is: does this actually scale? Compassion, niceness, and the avoidance of hard things — these work well in small doses, and produce serious problems when applied without limit.
Read →What You See Is What You Get
We don't perceive conflict neutrally and then assign meaning to it. The meaning is already loaded into how we see it — determined by experiences, beliefs, and interpretive habits formed long before the conflict began.
Read →These are selected essays curated for this context. For the full archive of my writing on human nature, behavior, and the examined life, visit Unbroken on Substack.