Always Guided

Remember the game you played as a child? A friend hides an object in the room, and you look for it with two words to guide you: warmer and colder.

You always find it, because the guidance never varies. Move toward the object and you hear warmer. Move away and you hear colder.

Life continues to play that game with us. Most of us stopped noticing the guidance.

Our guidance is in the feeling

We assume our circumstances cause how we feel. A tight deadline brings pressure, a hard meeting leaves us discouraged. But the feeling never comes from the situation. It comes from our thinking about it. When we feel calm and peaceful, our thinking is serving us, and we are getting warmer. When we feel stressed or stuck, our thinking has turned against us, and we are getting colder. It seems our feeling is about what is happening. We are only ever feeling our thinking about it.

I coached a leader who would freeze in senior meetings, like a deer in headlights, she was told. The fear was not coming from the room. It was her thinking about the room. When she understood that, she stopped trying to push through the anxiety. She saw the feeling revealed thinking she did not have to engage with. The years of trying to fix her thinking had only kept it alive. She did not have to fight the feeling, only stop taking the thinking seriously. Soon she could walk into those meetings and be present, listening, speaking when she had something to say. She had always been that capable. She had only been caught in habitual thinking that did not serve her.

This matters for a leader, because our poorest decisions are made in our poorest states of mind, which feel urgent and serious at the time. A bad feeling signals that our thinking is not reliable right now. When we let it settle, a clear mind returns. We don’t have to do anything to become clear. Clarity is there when we stop engaging with contradictory thinking.

This reaches past any one leader. A leader’s state of mind sets the weather in the room. When we are lost in our thinking, the people around us feel it and brace. When our mind is settled, there is space for everyone to find their own clear thinking. The same understanding that frees one person changes how a whole team works.

Surviving requires effort. Thriving does not.

This is also why capable people burn out. Worry does not keep itself going. We must keep it alive, imagining the worst case, and that runs on our own energy. The work itself is rarely what exhausts us. It is the effort consumed by contradictory thinking. We have all known the other side, when an insight arrives and we act without struggle. We are in flow.

If you are waiting for a practice, there is none. There is nothing to do about this, only something to understand. We do not have to manage our thinking or control our feelings. We only need to notice how we feel. Are we moving toward what we want, or away from it?

You are always guided. It is in the feeling.

When you feel better, you’re getting warmer.

Follow that feeling. It’s your wisdom guiding you.

Key Takeaways

• Feelings come from thinking, not circumstances. The same meeting, deadline, or conversation can feel completely different depending on the thinking behind it in the moment.
• A bad feeling is a signal, not a problem to fix. It means current thinking isn’t reliable right now, not that the situation itself is as dire as it feels.
• Fighting a feeling keeps it alive. The leader in the example stopped improving when she stopped trying to manage her anxiety and simply stopped taking the thinking behind it seriously.
• A leader’s state of mind is contagious. A settled mind creates room for a team to think clearly; a lost one puts everyone on edge.
• Burnout often comes from sustaining worry, not from the work itself. Imagining worst cases takes ongoing effort that has nothing to do with the task at hand.
• There’s no technique here, only noticing. The practice is simply paying attention to whether you’re feeling warmer or colder, and following that.