There Is No Formula
The business world loves a blueprint. I’ve never used one.
I want to talk about something that’s been swirling around in my mind for many months: reconciling the popularity of online courses, containers, and programs with my own approach to developing leadership. As many of you have seen, in every corner of the online business world, there are people promising clarity in a matter of weeks. Master your mindset. Scale your offer. Build your brand voice in a weekend. The packaging is polished, the testimonials persuasive. For the right price, you’re told, you can fast-track your way to leadership. Several times I’ve second-guessed myself and thought, should I be doing this too?
And yet, the more I’ve worked with leaders across industries—authors, entrepreneurs, creatives, creators—the more deeply convinced I am that meaningful leadership doesn’t emerge from a formula. It’s not a series of steps, scripts, or workbooks. It’s a deeply personal, often nonlinear, and entirely ongoing process.
This isn’t a criticism of courses or strategy itself. There are skills that can and should be taught—copywriting, offer design, audience psychology, back-end systems. I’ve taken excellent trainings and walked away with tools I still use. But leadership is something else. It lives not in the technical, but in the relational. It reveals itself in how you move through complexity, how you return to your values when things get loud, and how you define success on your own terms—even when the market suggests otherwise.
Daniel Goleman, whose work on emotional intelligence reshaped how we talk about effective leadership, found that truly impactful leaders score highest not in technical skill, but in self-awareness, empathy, and adaptability. In other words, what makes someone worth following isn’t how polished their pitch is—it’s how present they are to themselves and others.
These qualities can’t be downloaded or templated. They are cultivated over time.
Coaching is not a shortcut to results. It’s an invitation into deeper clarity.
My philosophy is rooted in the belief that leadership development must be personal, relational, and deeply human. I don’t believe in universal formulas or fixed frameworks. Instead, I focus on creating space for reflection, honest dialogue, and thoughtful experimentation. I’m less interested in teaching people how to follow a system and more interested in helping them build the kind of internal clarity that allows them to lead in a way that feels natural, sustainable, and true. Leadership is not something to be imposed—it’s something to be revealed. And I believe that process looks different for everyone.
Leadership requires discernment. It requires knowing when to pause, when to reimagine, and when to trust that just because something is working on the surface doesn’t mean it’s working for you.
Ron Heifetz, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the foremost thinkers on adaptive leadership, differentiates between “technical problems,” which can be solved with expertise and straightforward action, and “adaptive challenges,” which require new learning, a shift in values, and transformation at the level of identity. Most leadership work, in my experience, falls into the latter category. Which is why it doesn’t happen in twelve weeks. And why the most profound outcomes rarely show up on a results page—they show up in how people lead their teams, tell their stories, and move through uncertainty with integrity.
My Own Ethos and Principles
While there’s no single path to becoming an effective leader, there are qualities I return to often in my work—anchors that help people lead with greater clarity, stability, and personal alignment.
Decisiveness
Many of the people I work with hold themselves back waiting for the “right” decision, when in reality, there are no right or wrong decisions—only decisions we commit to making right. Leadership means being able to move, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. It’s learning how to trust your inner signal and take full ownership of your choices, without outsourcing them to someone else’s certainty.
Adaptability
Rigid thinking doesn’t scale. What I try to help build is a kind of thoughtful flexibility—the ability to adjust without losing yourself. Adaptability doesn’t mean being reactive. It means being grounded enough in your purpose that you can evolve as needed without compromising the integrity of your work.
Pattern recognition
Strong leaders know how to read between the lines. They can identify the real issue in the room, the unseen pattern in a client’s behavior, the hidden opportunity in a moment of challenge. This kind of thinking isn’t flashy, but it’s transformative. It turns chaos into insight, and insight into action.
Hard conversations
This is where a lot of people get stuck. The ability to have honest, direct conversations—with clients, collaborators, partners—is a skill that unlocks everything else. I help people build the language, the emotional tolerance, and the self-trust to navigate tension with clarity, not fear. It’s one of the most powerful things you can learn, not just as a leader, but as a human being. (And yes, I’m still learning it myself!)
The shift from business owner to CEO
At a certain point, the question becomes: Are you still building a business, or are you leading one? That shift requires letting go of control in some places, stepping into higher-level decisions, and learning how to hold the big picture while delegating the day-to-day. It’s not about hierarchy, it’s about vision, and about creating systems that support the life you actually want to live.
These are not quick wins. They’re long games. But they’re what allow a business to not only grow—but grow with you.
For those of you who are new here: welcome.
I know there are many of you who are relatively new to my Substack, so welcome! As you'll soon realize, this is not a space for blueprints or guarantees. It’s a space for reflection, inquiry, and slow, sustainable growth. I work closely with entrepreneurs, creatives, and founders who care more about building something honest than selling something fast.
Leadership isn’t a headline—it’s a practice. And the best leaders I know are still deep in it, years in.
If you’ve got any leadership tips to share, please drop them in the comments! And if you’ve got a question for me that you’d like me to answer in my weekly Q&A column (launching next week ;), you can either comment or reply directly to me.
Thanks for being here!