Results without "The Suck"
You're not going to want to hear this: the costliest drag on your business is hiding in plain sight—and it's easier to eliminate than you think.
(Quick note before we begin: if you’re a coach, have a coach, or are coaching-curious, I’ve started a live podcast called Coach Show. It’s like happy hour for coaches, and we’re talking about real work, real results, and real transformation. This week’s topic is Working with Leaders in an Exponential World.)
The vision-drag paradox
You know what matters most. You understand what deserves your focus. Yet day after day, you find yourself pulled into the whirlwind of operations, urgent requests, and the never-ending stream of "just this one thing."
This isn't a failure of knowledge or discipline.
Over the past week on LinkedIn, we've followed Sarah, a founder-CEO whose experience mirrors what I see with nearly every leader I coach. Despite clear intentions and genuine commitment, she consistently found herself diverted from the strategic work that would define her company's future.
What Sarah discovered—and what I want to share with you today—is that this gap between intention and action isn't a personal failing. It's a predictable result of how our brains work, how modern work environments are designed, and how we've been conditioned to approach leadership.
The good news? Once you understand these forces, you can work with them rather than against them.
Why knowledge isn't enough
Sarah had read the books. She'd highlighted the passages about strategic focus. She'd blocked time for vision work.
Yet knowledge alone couldn't overcome a fundamental aspect of human psychology: our tendency to value immediate rewards over future benefits, even when we intellectually understand the greater value of those future benefits.
Behavioral economists call this "hyperbolic discounting." In leadership contexts, it shows up as the irresistible pull toward checking email, handling the client issue, or responding to the team question—all of which provide immediate small wins—instead of doing the harder, more ambiguous work of shaping the future.
Recognizing the moment: Next time you find yourself reaching for your phone during strategic work, pause and ask: "Am I choosing this because it's truly more important, or because it offers an immediate sense of accomplishment?"
The neurobiological forces that pull us away
Sarah's struggle wasn't unique. Our brains evolved in environments where immediate threats and opportunities were what mattered most. The future—even one year out—registered as abstract and theoretical.
Two modern research findings explain why strategic thinking is so challenging:
Cognitive Load Theory: Our working memory has limited capacity. When it's consumed by operational details, there's literally no room for big-picture thinking.
Attention Residue: Each time we switch between tasks, previous activities leave a "residue" that reduces our cognitive capacity for subsequent tasks.
The modern workplace exploits these tendencies, designing tools and environments that maximize responsiveness rather than reflection. Slack, email, and meetings all create a context where "urgent" always wins over "important."
This isn't about laziness or lack of discipline. It's about working with your neurobiology rather than against it.
Five practical experiments
Through Sarah's journey, we discovered five specific practices that create space for vision work without requiring superhuman willpower.
1. The externalization practice
Before starting strategic work, spend 10 minutes writing down every operational concern currently occupying your mind. Don't solve them—just acknowledge them.
This creates cognitive space by "closing the open loops" that consume mental bandwidth. Sarah found that this simple practice doubled her capacity for strategic thinking.
Implementation tip: Keep a dedicated notebook solely for this purpose. The physical separation reinforces the mental separation between operational and strategic thinking.
2. The environmental design
Sarah's breakthrough came when she left her phone in another room during strategy blocks. This wasn't about discipline—it was about removing the trigger entirely.
Implementation tip: Identify your specific technological triggers and create physical distance from them during vision work. For some leaders, this means working in a different location entirely for strategic blocks.
3. The urgency audit
Sarah systematically evaluated her calendar commitments, distinguishing between:
Genuinely time-sensitive work
Habitual meetings that had outlived their purpose
Important work that didn't require immediate attention
Work that could be handled asynchronously
This audit revealed that nearly 30% of her calendar was consumed by meetings that created little value.
Implementation tip: Color-code your calendar based on these categories for a visual representation of how you're spending your time.
4. The meeting redesign
Sarah converted her standing team meeting to an asynchronous update, immediately reclaiming 45 minutes of collective focus time each week.
Implementation tip: For each meeting on your calendar, ask: "What's the specific dialogue that must happen synchronously?" Everything else can be handled through other channels.
5. The cognitive transition
Sarah discovered that even with physical space protected, her mind needed help transitioning between operational and strategic modes.
She developed a five-minute transition ritual: three deep breaths, a brief review of her vision document, and a single focusing question: "What would make this time most valuable?"
Implementation tip: Create your own transition ritual that signals to your brain that you're shifting modes.
Designing environments that work with your psychology
Sarah's most profound insight was that environment shapes behavior more powerfully than intention or willpower.
Rather than fighting against her psychological tendencies, she redesigned her environment to work with them:
Physical spaces dedicated to different types of work
Technology arranged to support focus rather than fragment it
Team norms that respected cognitive boundaries
Calendar structures that created natural buffers between operational and strategic work
Key principle: Small, consistent adjustments compound over time. Sarah didn't radically overhaul her work style overnight. She made one small change each week, allowing each to become a natural part of her approach before adding the next.
The subtle shift from frantic to focused
Six weeks into her experiments, Sarah noticed something unexpected. She wasn't working fewer hours. She wasn't handling fewer issues. But something fundamental had changed in how she experienced leadership.
The shift wasn't in what she did, but in how she did it.
Her team noticed it first—a new quality of presence in meetings, a clearer sense of purpose in decisions, an ability to maintain perspective amid operational challenges.
Sarah had moved from reactive to purposeful leadership.
Signs of the shift:
Decisions made from vision rather than urgency
The ability to maintain perspective during crises
Increased creativity in problem-solving
A sense of creating the future rather than simply responding to the present
Leadership as a creative act
The vision-drag paradox isn't unique to Sarah or to any particular industry. It's the central challenge of modern leadership.
In a world that constantly pulls us toward reaction, true leadership means creating space for vision.
This isn't just about productivity or efficiency. It's about reclaiming leadership as an act of creation rather than simply reaction.
The approaches Sarah discovered aren't about working harder or doing more. They're about working differently—in alignment with how our brains actually function.
From theory to results—faster than you think
I've shared these concepts and tools because I've seen firsthand how transformative they can be—and how quickly they can create tangible results.
While Sarah's journey took six weeks, I help leaders eliminate drag with simple tools that increase velocity and insight 2-3X in a matter of days, not months.
Fifteen minutes into a recent session, I helped a client identify over $40,000 that could be recouped by eliminating just a few hours of drag.
For another CEO, we located several hundred thousand dollars in potential sales by implementing simple agreements that optimize for decision velocity.
These clients aren't waiting months for results. They're seeing transformation in a single session, allowing them to move more boldly to align with the accelerating pace of change and chaos around them.
This isn't about long-term excavation. It's about precise interventions that create immediate clarity and momentum.
If you're ready to experience this kind of transformation in your leadership and organization, let's talk. I can help you get results like these quickly, creating the conditions for both immediate wins and sustained clarity.
Your vision is too important to be continuously derailed by drag. Let's eliminate it together.
Find me on LinkedIn or send me an email
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