Thrive Global

There is a particular kind of moment you face in business, and in life, when someone who hasn’t yet reached the place they dreamed of reaching looks for someone to blame. Someone to point the finger at. Someone to make responsible for the distance between where they are and where they wanted to be. I have faced that moment more times than I can count. And for a long time, for too long, I let it shake me. Not anymore. I started my business making $15,000 a year. Then $30,000.

By Emily Winter, MPH, SEP, E-RYT Photo: Getty Images + Unsplash Last night you crawled into bed at 10:30, bone-tired, but couldn’t fall asleep. The day had ended, but some inner part of you couldn’t slow down. We live in a culture that demands high-paced movement. We work 40-plus hours a week, keep up with the errands, emails, and appointments, maybe raise kids, try to be good partners and friends.

TL/DR: My pottery practice has taught me more about time that I could have anticipated: Rushing usually backfires. Going too fast tends to create more problems than it saves, so patience often saves time in the end. Things take as long as they take. You have influence over your time, not control, and most folks are terrible at time estimation. Plan for that, and check in instead of forcing it. Not everything is precious.

Healthcare leaders are dealing with staffing shortages, burnout, new technology, an aging population, and growing expectations from patients. I was struck by how often the solution comes back to something basic: leaders need to understand what the work actually feels like for the people doing it. Below are selected insights from my conversation with Dr. Kate Tulenko, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Corvus Health.

Truck mounted boom lift operators get asked this by every nervous client on every tall job. The basket is two hundred feet up and eighty feet out, the machine underneath looks small, and physics appears to be on nobody’s side. It stays put because the weight it lifts is being handed down a chain, link by link, into ground that has been checked to take it. Follow that chain and the whole thing stops looking like a magic trick. Stability Is a Balance of Moments Everything starts with one simple idea.

There are questions we become very good at answering as we move through our careers and lives. What needs to get done? What does my team need from me? What’s the next priority? What would be the sensible career move? What does my family need? What should I be working towards? And then there is a much simpler question that many women find surprisingly difficult to answer: What do I actually want? Not what would look impressive. Not what you think you should want at this stage of your career.

David Phillips knows every crack in his own foundation. What he cannot see, he says, are the cracks in anyone else’s.

At 18, Leah Marie woke up with her neck feeling “a bit funny.” Within an hour, she had lost movement in her arm. There was no medical explanation. She was a pianist, a dancer, and a fitness devotee with ambitions to compete in bodybuilding, and was told she might never move her arm again. What followed was 13 years of complex injury, three surgeries, and a steady stream of well-meaning advice to stop pursuing the things she loved. She kept going anyway.

What do you hope for? This is one of those BIG, deep questions that we often don’t give a lot of mental airtime to answering. When we’re feeling low or discouraged, it’s easier to focus on what’s not working and play the blame-shame game, instead of turning to hope and looking ahead. Especially during seasons of uncertainty, we have the opportunity to refocus on the things that matters most to us – our priorities, relationships, goals, and desires (and if you’re struggling with focus, start here!).

A quiet revolution is underway. It’s happening in leadership. The command-and-control style that once defined effective leadership is losing its grip, not because it failed in the past, but because it no longer fits the world we live in. The pace of change, the complexity of our problems, and the diversity of our workplaces demand a different kind of power—not rooted in authority but in collaboration. Yet many leaders continue to rely on a playbook written for another era.