“There’ll be days like this
When all the parts of the puzzle
Start to look like they fit
Then I must remember
There’ll be days like this”

- Van Morrison, Days Like This

When I sit down to write about the state of the world these days, it’s hard for me to let go of my frustration and, at times, resignation. I’ve spent the last 9 months in a coaching program specifically focused on the question of how to love the world, and a common first reaction from me is still negativity.

Luckily, I have a gorgeous 5-month-old daughter and an incredible wife to remind me there are plenty of good things around me, and reasons to stay above the line.

My wife Kristen was the first to introduce me to Days Like This by Van Morrison (which embarrasses me a little because I’m usually the one who shares pop culture with her), and it’s a song she turns to when she’s feeling a bit blue.

I mean, who isn’t perked up by Van the Man’s lyrics about a world that works out for us, gives us peace and understanding, and lets us be who we are?

There is something deeply romantic about having a day he describes. It’s full of possibility, almost dream-like.

And it’s quite easy to make it the world’s responsibility to deliver it to us, to lie back like we’re being served breakfast in bed, separate from the goings-on around us and fully at life’s whim.

That’s the convenient take, no?

To look out there for what can happen to make in here more pleasant. If only the weather were better. Or other people weren’t rushing around. Or if nobody ever did anything crappy. Then, I could enjoy my day. I wouldn’t have to go searching for something else or respond in kind. I could finally be myself.

I’m not saying that was the song’s intent.1 I’m saying it’s an easy place to go. When other people or some uncontrollable forces are the problem, I don’t have to take any responsibility. Personally, I quite enjoy blaming others for my bad mood or bad luck at times. I get to feel righteous about it, which can feel good.

It just doesn’t actually help to make the world that Van’s singing about.

When I expect others to not cheat or take advantage or step on me, but don’t pause to look at how I might be doing any of those things, I’m actively making it more difficult (impossible?) for other people to experience the world I dream of.

Like, if we imagine a world in which everyone tells the truth but we don’t tell the truth, we make it literally impossible for that world to exist. Because we’re in the world. It’s just math. Six billion minus even one does not equal six billion.

My proposal is that we use this song as a series of inquiries about living the good life and being a steward of the world we dream about. Line by line, it would be something like:

• How much am I complaining?

• How much am I worrying?

• How much am I hurrying?

• Am I searching for answers?

• Am I open to the parts of the puzzle looking like they fit?

• Am I being up front? Am I playing tricks?

• Where am I freeloading?

• Where am I making it my business how someone else wants to live?

• Where am I stepping on others’ dreams?

• How much am I seeking to understand what others mean?

• How open am I to changes to how things are?

I could probably drop the mic here and let you be with those questions. They’re enough to last us for a lifetime if we engage with them sincerely. Beautiful mirrors, no?

Engaging with them honestly is called leadership. As is choosing to take responsibility for the answers, even when life around us is being a jerk. In many ways, it goes against our human nature and the ego that seeks to keep us safe by entrenching firmly in our held beliefs.

To live the day Van invites -- let go of complaining, pause our hurrying, relax into the unknown and into change, speak impeccably, let others be them, and remain open to understanding -- requires us to let go of our egoic attachment. We have to let go of the idea that the world can create those experiences for us, and instead actively find our own agency.

We start by taking the simplest, smallest step possible: choosing to believe we can and looking for an opportunity to practice agency.

The questions above are a great starting place, and might be followed by, “How might I...?” When we let ourselves wonder with curiosity, more choices open up and life generally feels more fun even if nothing changes.

There is no quick answer to manifesting a day as described in the song, and the only way to get there is to choose to move in that direction, starting today.

It starts with us.

Love.
Matt

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Come Train with Us

The Samurai Coaching Dojo is the coaching training that changed my life. I grew more as a human and coach thanks to the Coaching Dojo than anything else I’ve done, and the community of peers and friends it brought me will be with me for life.

After 5 years off, Toku McCree and I are relaunching the training and moving it to an expanded, 6-month format to give participants more time to practice and integrate everything we teach. Our next cohort kicks off in mid-September.

If you know me, you know I’m a stand for coaching mastery, and the style of deliberate practice and feedback we bring is the most potent way toward mastery that I know of. I can say that our practice container is truly unique and quite powerful.

The Coaching Dojo is for coaches who know there is another level for them but unsure what’s missing between here and there, and for those who want to stand out among the crowd to coach as they were meant to.

We just began sharing openly and taking applications for the September kickoff. If you’ve felt a calling to gain more confidence in your work, deepen your coaching, and find your unique transmission of the truth. We’d love to talk to you.

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I’m writing this as Opal is crying after waking up from a nap while my mom is here for the day.

They’re about 20 feet away, in her beautiful nursery that we decorated with forest animal stickers on every wall, while I’m in my office with noise-cancelling headphones on.

I can still hear them above the focus frequency music playing.

It’s taking everything in me to not get up and go peek inside, comfort my baby girl, and put all of my focus on her for the rest of the day. It takes everything in me to not do that every time I hear her cry. I have to hold back the urge.

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Leadership and Dadhood

Three months in, I know in my body that I’m a really good dad. Not “trying my best” — good. It’s the most certain I’ve ever been about anything I do, and I’ve spent my life seeking certainty in what I take on.

I feel very attuned to my daughter almost every moment I’m with her. I’m slow to frustration with her, and quick to love and care. I anticipate her needs and have an intuitive knowing of what to do quite frequently.

Before her arrival, I thought that was the part of being a parent that would grow me the most — being there for Opal.

It turns out, as I’m learning, that there is another part that is pushing me to grow more than anything else, and it’s really stretching me.

That’s learning to be the CEO dad.

I’ve started to relate to myself like a founder who knows the heartbeat of my business better than anyone, and knows well how to step in to fix things for everyone else.

What position does she want to be held in right now? Got it.

Is she tired or hungry or just trying to poop? I’m your man.

What does that noise mean? Let me translate.

Every founder I’ve coached has gone through this phase. They want to step in to approve every email, fix every line of broken code, put out every client fire, and give every pep talk. It feels good, but it’s not leadership.

The trouble is that every time I step in, I’m limiting everything and everyone else in our household from really thriving. I’m being the CEO whose team doesn’t grow because he inadvertently blocks their way.

If I’m only putting attention on Opal, I don’t have space anywhere else — not the house, not Kristen, not the work I actually love. I’m constantly scanning for where I can intervene on one part of the system, and the rest of it suffers for it.

When those other parts of our lives aren’t given attention, my quality of life suffers. I love and like my wife. I want to have room for her! I want us all to have a beautiful home, and friends, things we love doing. We have chosen an expansive life.

I also really love the work I’m doing, and I believe it matters. It stretches me — the change I’m trying to create, the clients I’m walking alongside, the edges I keep finding in myself. Collapsing into dad-only is a way to dodge all of that, and the growth that comes with it.

Finally, by always playing the hero, I’m not giving room for others to grow, either. I attribute a lot of my attunement with Opal to the emotional and spiritual work I’ve done the last several years. I use the word ‘work’ there intentionally — it means effort and intention.

Caring for Opal requires effort and intention. Staying tuned in with her when we’re tired, she’s tired, her cries are loud, or you name it, is work. My family can only get better at it when they have the opportunity to learn and grow. There are definitely crunchy moments along the way, but it’s the only way.

Being a Model, Looking in the Mirror

As I take ownership of my role as a dad leader, I’m starting to attune to what I model — for Opal and everyone else around me.

My mom is around Opal a lot, and I’m noticing she does the same things I do, mirroring my speech and actions. Sometimes I watch her do a thing and think, “That’s not the time I would do that,” and then I have to stop and ask: Am I controlling? Or is she just doing what I do? Am I just trying to be right?

It’s a sharp question. One that calls forward my focus, that I have to approach with an open heart.

What I usually find, underneath the impulse to step in, is an ache. My heart wants her to never feel discomfort. I can act from that pain without even noticing — reach for her, soothe, correct whatever’s happening around her — and call it being a good dad.

But the ache is mine, not hers. What Opal actually needs is the opposite of what the ache wants me to give her. She needs to be around people who aren’t perfectly attuned. The vast majority of the world is not going to slow down to her pace, and she doesn’t need me to build her a world where it does.

She needs practice with that, so that she can learn to express her voice, feel her internal knowing, and stand for what’s true for her.

On the other side, if I’m doing something I point out in others and not seeing it, I’m causing the very thing I’m objecting to. The mirror only shows what’s standing in front of it. If I don’t like what I’m seeing, that’s information about me, not them.

Again, it calls me back to even more presence and awareness, not only as someone caring for Opal but for me as a leader within a broader system. Either move — stepping in too much, or pointing out what I won’t see in myself — closes me off from learning, and from solutions that aren’t mine.

So now I find myself in the process of reading my own behavior through the mirror of the people who modeled themselves on me. It’s family-system feedback, in real time, with a 13-week-old as the most honest data source in the room.

What I’m up to rhymes with the work I do with my clients on a regular basis. Who you are in relation to your team is what the culture becomes.

The founder who can’t let anyone else solve a problem builds a company that can’t solve problems without her. The dad who can’t let anyone else hold his daughter builds a family that can’t hold her without him.

They reflect back exactly what we model. The work isn’t to step in better — it’s to notice what I’m creating by stepping in at all.

It’s quiet outside the room now. Opal and my mom figured it out, as they always do. That’s theirs to take on. This reflection has been mine to tackle.

And this writing is giving me another reason to not hang up my coaching hat to be a full-time dad: I’m undoubtedly a better coach now than I was 13 weeks ago, better able to meet my clients in any moment and walk alongside their growth. And I’ll be a better coach ongoing thanks to the evolution Opal and my family are calling from me every day.

Love.
Matt

Every time I’ve sat to write the past 9 months has felt like drinking from a fire hydrant.

There has been so much running through me that I don’t know where to start or where to end.

I have been moving every day just to keep up with the pace of my life, and Life, and the world, and constant change.

Exhale.

Hi there. It’s been a minute.

In February, we welcomed our daughter Opal to this wild world. For the 9 months prior, Kristen was pregnant (its own adventure), and we bought and moved into a house, and started doing all the things new homeowners do. I’ve been re-establishing myself and my business in Michigan (if you’re in SE Michigan, say hello!). And the world has been doing what the world does, only cranked to 11 this time around.

Opal has been the most inspiring light in my world for the last few months. Expect her to be a mainstay in my writing. She’s my truest mirror and the teacher I need now and in the future.

The reflection back today is about heart-wrenching desire, striving, and learning to meet ourselves where we are.

Opal is 10 weeks old and she already wants to stand. (She was only 8 weeks old when I first wrote that sentence; she pushes.)

You can see it in her legs when you hold her upright — the push, the intent. When we hold her, she twists to always face outside, and I can see her wanting to explore on her own. She stands on our lap, holding almost her entire bodyweight, when we try to adjust her to sit down.

She can feel that walking — and the freedom it creates — is coming someday. It’s a knowing in her body before her body has any of the capability.

Because while she wants to be walking, dude, she ain’t close. She’s not crawling. She’s strong for her age and can hold up her head and try all the related dangerous stunts, but the motor skills are still weeks or months out.

She’s still got to learn to use her arms to hold herself, her legs to direct herself, her core to sit up and balance and stabilize. She’s got to know the difference between sitting, kneeling, and standing, and shift between them. She’s just getting started with the core skills, yet the fire burns.

Her desire is ten steps ahead of her capability, and the wild thing is that it doesn’t dim in the slightest. It ratchets up. I can feel it in her yells (or screams or hollers) when her body doesn’t do what she wants yet.

My little mirror...

Back to the fire hydrant of ideas.

I’m a coach and writer. My job — as artist, as leader, as human, as whatever word you want to use — is to take what’s inside and bring it outside. To pull the invisible into the visible so I can see it, make sense of it, clarify it for myself, and then share it with others.

To teach. To inspire. To have people feel seen and less alone. To normalize the human experience.

That’s the work. It sounds clean when I say it like that. Distilled.

Here’s where it gets messy.

I also want my words captured exactly as they come out. Raw. Unpolished. Because the raw version is the real version — the one with blood and breath still in it. The one you, friend, can feel.

The polished version is useful, but it’s not the same animal.

And, speaking of words, there are so many of them.

Once they’re out, they’re overwhelming. I know in my soul there’s more to explore — cracks to find, threads to pull, juicy bits to tease apart. But the sheer volume of what I’ve already said, over years and years, let alone what’s coming through now, makes it hard to see the whole picture. Hard to do anything with it once it’s outside of me.

So I live in this tension:
Keep every word exactly as it is. And also, make sense of them — for me, for you.

I’ve been building a system to do this. A system that both catalogs the thousands (yes, thousands) of notes and ideas I’ve scribbled for the past 10 years and catches the philosophy as it falls out of me in real-time. That logs the beliefs, the frameworks, the stories, the growth edges. That holds the mirror up so I can see patterns I can’t see from inside my own head.

Something to harness the fire hydrant and direct it squarely towards the world I want to help create.

To stop losing months between sharing here, with you. To pull the two — or six — book ideas out of my head and into the world. To offer the vision I have for the world, in language others relate to, and maybe have them pick up the flag with me. To contribute to the signal in the crowd of noise we experience today. And to finally see the thoughts, beliefs, and patterns still in the way of me showing up fully for the world and my family.

And building this system is me learning to walk.

I’m doing what Opal is doing — working from the core foundation upward. I can see the mountaintop. I can feel that walking is coming. But I can’t skip to it. I have to learn every little part along the way, building skill after skill that pulls out what’s inside or catches what I’m already sharing so I can have it reflected back.

To me, it’s often drudgery. I want to yell like her sometimes when it feels like I’ve been in the same spot for days or weeks. When more words are lost or I still can’t connect the full picture.

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In coaching, I teach a framework called HALA — Honest, Accepting, Loving, Accurate. I’m practicing HALA right now, in real time, as I write this.

Honest: I want to be further along than I am. I feel the tension in my body — the desire to be ten steps ahead of my true position. Even practicing HALA causes annoyance.

Accepting: This is where I am. The system is half-built. The writing is still raw. The philosophy is still emerging. And that’s exactly right — because that’s how it is.

Loving: I have more and more compassion for my beautiful little girl. Her ambitions outpacing her capabilities, but not waning. Instead, ratcheting up while she learns to be with what is. I can offer myself that same compassion.

Accurate: I am a man in the early stages of capturing his own soul — not for productivity, not even just for my own understanding, but so that my daughter can know who her father was in his work and art. So that the people I serve can receive not just my techniques but my actual thinking. So that what’s inside me doesn’t stay trapped there.

I cannot be anywhere else than here, and this is the way to where I see I can be.

Just like Opal.

She is my greatest teacher. She is my mirror.

As she walks, so may I — with the same grace and fire.

May it be so.

Love.
Matt

A few weeks ago, I ordered something from Amazon that I really wanted to get quickly.

The site gave me the option to pick it up the next day at a nearby Whole Foods rather than have it delivered to my house in two days. Naturally, I chose the Whole Foods option.

Spoiler: I didn’t get it the next day. I didn’t actually get it for 4 or 5 days.

I’ll share the details of why quickly but they’re less important than my internal process and the shift that occurred as a result.

In short, the next-day delivery was later than expected and I wasn’t able to pick it up. The next I had a super full schedule. Then, it turns out the Amazon desk at Whole Foods has shorter hours than Whole Foods and is staffed by an entirely different team so when I attempted to get it a couple of days later, no one was there.

Finally, I arrived first thing in the morning, only for someone to show up 20 minutes after their advertised opening because the person who was scheduled had called in at the last minute.

For a second, I was quite upset. Amazon has always promised a seamless customer experience and I’ve grown to expect it. A previous version of me would have lodged a complaint with big, bold self-righteous energy for wasting my time.

Why? I thought I was supposed to. I thought it would help me win.

Trained to Spot the Flaws

Years ago, I remember Seth Godin saying that Americans’ greatest fear is inconvenience.

It may not be our fear per-say but it’s certainly our greatest annoyance. (I think the fear is a layer deeper, about what being inconvenienced means about us: that we’re not important, don’t matter, aren’t lovable, etc.)

Regardless, I took that idea and ran with it. As a professional marketer, I made it my job to assure convenience for my clients and their users. Plus, it fit perfectly with my Enneagram 2 (Helper) sensibilities. If someone felt inconvenienced, it was surely my fault and needed to be fixed.

So, I trained myself to spot friction everywhere and rail against it. I almost took a sense of pride in finding flaws in UX and experience design. There wasn’t a site or app on the planet I couldn’t critique or a customer process I couldn’t uncover holes in. My internal voice sounded something like:

“If it could be made easier, it should be made easier. No, it already should have been made easier. What’s wrong with you?”

I’ll tell you, though, feeling compelled to eliminate friction out there sure created a ton of friction in here.

There was a constant feeling of annoyance and disappointment. Nothing was as easy as it should be and it didn’t seem to be getting better fast enough.

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The Frictionless Future?

Lately, I have been considering the long-term impact of our march toward convenience and life without friction.

What happens when I can get every meal delivered with a few button clicks and never have to leave my house?

When every package gets to my door within a day and we never see the external costs to the environment or the effort it took to get there?

When my TV and music playlists know everything I’ve liked and feed me the same curated selections over and over?

When AI can do our homework, create our ads, book our vacations, and interact directly with a customer service (also AI) rep for me?

What happens when things get completely frictionless?

Where does our attention turn?

Remembering the Human

As I left Whole Foods, I noticed the familiar voice shouting that they should have a better system in place to make sure people show up on time. That they broke their promise of great customer experience. That their people don’t share the company’s values and need better training.

Then, I remembered that they’re people. Working a job that I wouldn’t really love, likely barely making a livable wage. Operating inside of the same system in which perfection is expected, rarely rewarded, and anything less is met with disdain. Having to deal with me. The Amazon representative’s morning was anything but frictionless.

I remembered my recent travels to Europe and my time spent living in Spain where the city shuts down for a couple of hours every afternoon. Or my friend living in Mexico where garbage is sometimes picked up and sometimes not. Or days in the not-so-distant past when I navigated around cities without a map on my phone.

As I sought to invite more patience into my life—internally and externally—I began to see that friction was the path I was inviting, not a problem to avoid.

That I didn’t actually need the things I bought the next day, that it’s probably a good thing that Amazon hasn’t fully cracked the code on this Whole Foods pickup thing, that they’re not open 24/7 for deliveries, and that someone calling out with an emergency is still felt by the world.

Because when we prioritize convenience and frictionless living above everything else, all things—people, nature and everything in our environment, our beliefs, social structures—become a means to something else.

But to what, exactly?

Beyond Convenience

Now, please do not mistake this for a call to dismantle our systems, structures, and technologies to return to some nostalgic past that didn’t exist.

I love science. I love the natural human tendency to create and explore.

There are plenty of (hopefully) near-term technological advances I’m excited for:

• Instant, free financial transactions employed by traditional banks and facilitated on the blockchain. (After pulling together funds for a down payment and crossing my fingers that everything cleared on time, not to mention the random fees just for transacting, I’m ready for something new.)

• Driverless vehicles and safer roadways

• Quantum computing and its potential to solve energy, environmental, and medical problems at scale

• Nuclear fusion for abundant clean energy

Each of those (should they become reality) promises to remove some friction point in our lives. That is the point of technology, after all. But it isn’t the point of life.

In my book, This is Coaching, I have a chapter titled “We Need Something to Push Against.” Here is an excerpt:

A few years ago, I had surgery to repair my Achilles. I couldn't put weight on my leg for a couple of weeks while my foot was in a cast. The entire bottom of my leg — the calf, ankle, and foot — had no stimulation the entire time. When the doctor removed my cast, my calf was the size of my wrist and my leg felt like Jell-O. I couldn't believe how small and weak it had become in a span of just a couple of weeks. I remember getting home and spontaneously bursting into tears over the shock of it all, along with a loving desire to build my body back to health.

This is the nature of how we humans work. We don't grow in space. If anything, we shrink. It's true not only for our bodies but our minds and spirits as well. Challenges propel us forward, grant us new skills and perspectives, strengthen our resiliency, and form us into the person we envision ourselves to be.

I wonder what becomes of a life without friction, without something to push against. Not to glorify suffering (to be clear) but to acknowledge what we require to grow.

What meaning do we derive? What would truly light us up, beyond short-term hits of pleasure? What becomes of our environment—natural or otherwise—and relationships? With our connection to the divine?

And if I were to design a life filled with joy, meaning, purpose, love, and connection, what ingredients would be necessary?

If we are to regenerate this miraculous planet we call home, what relationship do we need to have with it?

If we pointed our greatest technology and most capable creators towards the biggest opportunities for human thriving, where would we point them?

Towards a smoother meal delivery service for Millennials or towards improving mental and physical health?

Towards new financial derivative models or toward replenishing our soils and coral reefs?

Technology only frees us up to do whatever we want when we consciously choose what we want. And without opportunities for growth, what we want tends to make us look like the humans in Wall-E.

I, for one, am beginning to invite more friction in my life. Slowly, to be sure. I still have an Amazon Prime subscription. More than anything, though, I’m trying to catch myself expecting that life should always feel convenient. To value the friction and use it for growth.

Love.
Matt

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Today is my fortieth birthday.

I don’t normally write birthday entries. They look cool when others do them but I haven’t felt inspired to find 40 lessons I’ve gathered over the years. Frankly, that seems like a lot of work. Maybe that will change one day.

Yesterday, one of my best friends surprised me by flying in to visit. He and Kristen planned the whole thing without me having any idea (frankly, I have no idea how she kept the secret).

She had me hide out in my office when she prepared a giant present that turned out to be Toku ducked under a blanket. When I moved the blanket to look, he stood up and I jumped and screamed, scared half to death. (I thought it was a smoker or something for the new house.)

After a few minutes of laying on the couch waiting for my soul return to my body, I was able to fully let the joy sink in.

Our new house has been one of the things most on my mind of late. After months of moving and exploring in the van, and years of half-settling into rentals I knew I’d be leaving, I’m more than ready to root into one place.

To paint and select furniture I love rather than what’s convenient. To establish gardens and build relationships with my neighbors. To learn every square inch of it and practice loving everything.

Babs (our camper van) was a great teacher for getting started with that last part. Though we knew our time with her was temporary, we made her our own and she had just enough things break down that I got to know way more about home-built water systems, battery management systems, and Ram ProMasters than I ever expected. Thanks, Babs.

When we woke up on June 1, Kristen reminded me it was the last month of my thirties. That touched something in me that lasted all month.

A version of me was dying—thirty-something me—as something new emerges. I believe Death to be an important thing to feel into with regularity. Because for many of us (definitely for me) it’s not comfortable. It reminds us that thins ride doesn’t last forever. One day, likely before we’re ready, everything is gonna come to a stop.

Kristen’s reminder about the death of my thirties reminded me that there isn’t just one big Death waiting for me; there are scores of mini-deaths all the time, each inviting me to fully embrace what’s here now.

On many days over the last month, I asked myself if I was spending my time on the things I’d truly like to spend my final days. I tuned in more to my inspiration, to what’s been calling me in work and relationships. That caused less zoning out and succumbing to mindless TV and scrolling. It also caused less pushing toward what I thought should be some purpose-driven goal. Instead, I found myself taking simple, incremental steps forward more regularly. Less drama, more progress.

I do sometimes read others’ lists of lessons learned over the years, though, honestly, I think they’re quite long even as a reader. Forty golden nuggets at a time can be too much for me to metabolize.

There is one thing that’s been sticking with me, probably for more than the last month, though I can’t quite say for sure how long. It seems to be the most prominent of lessons from people I admire—especially those age fifty and beyond:

Relax. Enjoy it more.

For us driven folks, that seems to be the most difficult thing, often the last thing, to get. We figure out to win the awards. We get the stuff. We look good on the outside (at least people tell me I look good). But inside, most of the time we’re all wound up.

So I’ve been really trying that one on of late. Remembering that many people who’ve “made it” talk about the times when they were building being the good part.

I’ve been repeating to myself, “This is the good part.”

And it is. Really. (I’m starting to learn that it’s all been the good part but that might be too much for right now.)

Not just because I have things and people and moments in my life that I love. Not just because the things I’ve been planning for and working towards are showing up. That helps, for sure.

The crazy thing is, though, that when I intend to relax first—like truly, actually relax and not tighten up while telling myself to relax—this really does feel like the good part.

What if I could relax and enjoy life before I get where I’m going?

(It took me four years of hiking in Colorado to begin to put that into practice while on hikes. And add in several months driving around in Babs.)

What if I’m not behind all the time? What if I’m right on time? How might I behave if I knew everything was going to work out?

(“You’re right on time” was the message I got over and over during four nights of ceremony in 2022. It was tough to let in. What if it was already true, no matter how much I grip or thrash?)

Those are the things I’m playing with as I enter my fortieth year. Putting down concrete answers in favor of questions and felt experiences of life.

Perhaps the most shocking part of yesterday’s surprise by Kristen and Toku is that in the past, my subconscious largely wouldn’t let me be surprised. An ex-girlfriend came for a surprise visit once and I guessed she was there before I saw her. My mind and body were almost never relaxed, always on guard for something.

Interestingly, my hands were shaking for the hour before my surprise yesterday. My mind had no idea what was coming but something in my body did. In the past, I likely would have ruminated on it, thinking and thinking to try to explain it. Instead, yesterday I breathed with it and let it be.

I’m more relaxed that I can remember being, ever, and it feels quite good. Even when I was scared, it was a moment of being fully alive that I never could have experienced had I been on guard for a surprise. I’m letting life give me more beautiful things and it’s responding with enthusiasm.

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Last thought before I leave you today. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Joseph, who is in his fifties, told me that every year since he turned forty has been the best yet.

I told him that my job is to keep learning to receive because things feel pretty dang great right now. To quote a section of the book that the Universe sent through me a few years ago:

“There is a version of each of us open fully to the love the world wants to offer us. That's true for you, me, and your client. If we choose to let it in. Your client might not be ready to receive the gifts of your service. That doesn't mean you don't offer them.

Everything is perfect in this moment. How much can they let in? How much can you let in, even when they've hit their limit? How good can it get for both of you?

**Opens arms up as wide as they'll stretch**

This good!”

Let’s keep expanding.

Love.
Matt

A colleague recently shared how inspired they felt after getting clear on a bigger vision for their business. As they talked, I could see the energy radiating from them - the way their posture shifted, how their voice quickened with excitement. It was like watching someone plug into a renewable power source.

The topic of life-giving goals and visions has been top of mind recently. It was last month’s teaching topic in our coach community, and I’ve been heavy in vision mode with some clients.

I notice that sometimes when we ask ourselves what we want - really want - we tend to get tight. We avoid specifics because we're more afraid of getting it wrong than excited about getting it right. We'd rather stay vague than risk disappointment.

But what if the way we’ve been thinking about visions is the source of that tightness? What if the power isn't in getting it perfect, but in learning to use it for what it's actually designed for?

The Trap of Perfect Visions

We've been conditioned to think that visions need to be permanent, precise, and perfectly crafted before we can move toward them. That if we can't see exactly how things will unfold, we shouldn't take the first step.

But here's what I've learned through my own stumbling and watching hundreds of clients navigate this same challenge: we can't think our way to a perfect vision of the future. Our preferences will shift. We'll learn things about ourselves and the world that change what we want. The landscape around us will evolve in ways we never could have predicted.

The most useful part of building a vision isn't creating the perfect plan - it's developing what I call the vision-building muscle.

What a Vision Actually Gives Us

When we stop obsessing over perfection and start using visions for what they're actually good for, two powerful things happen:

Direction: A vision becomes your internal compass, pointing you toward where you want to go. It's not about having every step mapped out - it's about having a way to check in and ask, "Am I on the path I want to be on?" When the world tries to pull you into its flow, when other people's priorities start to feel more urgent than your own, you have something to orient by.

Fuel: A vision you can imagine with such clarity that you feel it in your body provides renewable inspiration. As Zig Ziglar said, "People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing, that's why we recommend it daily." Your vision is your daily dose of motivation - always available, always renewable, as long as you make time to revisit it.

The Both/And of Vision Building

This is where the magic happens - in the both/and space that most of us resist.

First, stop, take some time, and write out what you want for your life. Practice loving discipline and challenge yourself to be specific, no matter how difficult it feels. Do this regularly and devotionally.

Be in the continued practice of creating a clear, concrete vision for yourself. Make it precise because specificity gives you better directions and helps you measure progress. Include all three parts of a life-sustaining goal: the tangible outcome, the experience you'll have, and your deeper "What For." Always be seeking to make it clearer.

And.

Stop thinking of visions as endpoints that need to be perfectly crafted before you take action. You can, will, and ought to be returning to your vision along the way - tweaking what needs tweaking, re-immersing yourself in its inspirational energy, and acknowledging yourself for getting to know your desires better.

Lastly, be courageous enough to take action when inspiration is around. We build self-trust by doing what we say we’ll do and doing what we (really) want to do. Don’t delay. Take the step.

It’s not about getting it right on the first go. And it’s not about avoiding it altogether. Both are recipes for stagnation.

Building the Muscle That Matters

Once your vision-building muscle becomes strong, something beautiful happens. You'll never lack fuel for motivation because you can conjure it anytime. You'll be able to tune into your internal compass on demand.

This creates a virtuous cycle: renewed self-trust leads to courageous action toward your vision, re-orienting you in the direction you want to go, and allowing for refinement of where you want to be.

The vision becomes both destination and dialogue - you still care about getting somewhere, but the ongoing conversation about where and how becomes lighter, with less pressure to perform and far less drama as you choose what's next or what to let go of.

Here's what I want you to consider: What would it look like to hold your vision lightly enough that it can evolve, but clearly enough that it moves you?

I'm not suggesting you abandon long-term thinking or settle for vague hopes. I'm inviting you to use your vision for what it's great for - direction and fuel - and let go of what it's not good for: commentary on your worthiness or value as a human.

Your vision doesn't need to be perfect to be powerful. It just needs to be yours, and it needs to be alive - something you return to, refine, and let inspire you forward.

Because along the way, you'll get to know yourself a whole lot better. And that just might be the point.

Love.
Matt

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Last night, I had a dream that I was a football player on a team coached by my big brother.

What made it particularly strange was that I was simultaneously myself—a leadership coach—and an offensive lineman taking practice reps. (Trust me, in real life, I wouldn't last a single snap on the line.)

After practice, I noticed some players feeling anxious about whether they'd be successful. Without thinking, I gathered them around and heard myself giving a pep talk: "The stuff we're working on—the things coaches are inviting you to improve—these aren't challenges. They're simply invitations from life to bridge the gap. There's a space for you to step into and fill. You can choose to do that or you can choose not to, but they're not problems and they're not things in your way."

Then I asked them: "Do you think the people we're going to play against are getting better?" Everyone emphatically said yes. "So why wouldn't you imagine that your job is to also get better?"

I drew a line in the air parallel to the ground. "This is your current trajectory if you don't make any changes." Then I drew another line angled slightly upward. "This is where you're being invited to go if you choose to see this as an opportunity to grow."

The response was immediate—a couple dozen men cheering, suddenly seeing the opportunity in front of them instead of the burden. They understood that life itself is constantly moving, constantly inviting us to rise with it.

When Ego Goes Quiet

Here's the thing: I know this idea sounds like a platitude. The notion that we can choose whether to view life as opportunity or challenge is intellectually obvious, sometimes annoyingly so. We've all heard it before. We might even want to dismiss it, to insist that our problems are uniquely difficult.

But what struck me wasn't the message itself—it was how it moved through me in the dream. The words flowed with a clarity and confidence I rarely experience in waking life. I even looked my brother in the eye, and we acknowledged each other's wisdom. Somehow, I knew before I finished speaking that the message would land.

When I woke up, I realized what had made the difference: my ego wasn't in the room.

In the dream state, without the familiar voice of doubt and self-judgment, I could access and deliver wisdom that felt both profound and simple. The same insight that might sound trite coming from my anxious, trying-to-get-it-right self became transformative when it flowed from a clearer place.

The Grand Adventure

This dream came on the heels of attending church for the first time in a while, where the pastor invited the men forward to "receive the call of adventure that life is offering."

To me, those are the same invitation—seeing life as an adventure rather than a problem to be solved.

I'm not surprised I had this dream. I've spent many periods of my life longing to complete everything—to resolve all relationship issues, accumulate enough money and security so I could finally stop worrying, stop working, stop struggling. But then what would life be for if we just stopped forever?

Life really is a grand adventure we've been invited into, one we're lucky enough to be on. It asks us to grow and learn and change every day because everything around us is changing every day.

If we see life as one big problem to overcome, it's not going to be much fun.

We'll spend our days hunting for problems to solve, as if that will somehow fix the fundamental challenge of being human. But there's nothing to fix—there's simply life showing up, inviting us to fill the space, to bridge the gap, to say yes to the adventure.

Accessing the Clarity

The question I'm sitting with now isn't whether this perspective is true—I think we all know it is, somewhere deep down. The question is: how do we access that ego-free clarity in our waking lives?

Since the dream, what I carry with me is the felt knowledge that this energy can come through with such clarity. That it's possible for me to see life this way, even when my everyday consciousness wants to make everything complicated.

Maybe the first step is simply remembering that the wisdom is already there, waiting beneath the noise of our trying and worrying and figuring out.

Maybe it's about creating space for that clearer voice to emerge—the one that knows, without doubt, that we're being invited to step into something larger than our fears.

What if the next time life presents you with what looks like a challenge, you drew those two lines in your mind? One flat, one angled upward.

What if you trusted that the invitation to grow is always there, waiting for you to say yes?

Love.
Matt

After months of van life and constant movement, I expected to hit the ground running when my wife and I finally settled in Michigan.

Get the systems back up. Establish routines. Build the business. Reconnect with everyone. Make it all happen—fast.

But here's what I’m discovering about the transition: my nervous system was still traveling even though my body had stopped. It felt like our van had hit a wall and I'd been thrown through the windshield—my internal momentum carrying me forward while everything external had suddenly become still.

Settling isn't the same as starting.

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The Pressure to Perform

I expected to slide right back into peak performance mode immediately:

• Perfect morning routines

• Consistent business building

• Deep friendships

• Organized systems

• Clear daily structure

Instantly.

Instead, I’ve found myself scattered and disoriented. Things that had been suspended in the air during months of movement were suddenly coming down around me. I was trying to catch them all while simultaneously building new systems, reconnecting with old friends, discovering a new community, and figuring out who I was in a settled place.

I’ve been simultaneously looking for a house to buy, fostering a burgeoning community of coaches, creating new business partnerships (Stack and Inside-Out Leadership), learning about our new town (Ann Arbor), re-cultivating relationships with friends and family, being husband to a wife starting a new job, and trying to improve my health at least a little every day.

No wonder I felt like I was failing at something I should have been good at.

The Underground Work

This week, I remembered something about repotting plants, roots, and stability.

When you move a plant to new soil, it doesn't immediately shoot up new growth. For weeks, maybe months, all the action happens underground. The plant is working—hard—but you can't see it. It's establishing new roots, adapting to new soil, finding stability in unfamiliar ground.

During this time, the plant might even look like it's struggling. But it's not struggling—it's doing the most important work of all.

That's exactly what happens when we transition from one life phase to another.

Our nervous system knows things our mind doesn't. It knows when we need time to adjust, when we need to expand our roots before we can support new growth, when the sacred work is happening invisibly.

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What I'm Learning Instead

The difference between life on the road and life in one place is profound. On the road, I wasn't focused on building systems or deepening relationships. I was present, flexible, adaptive. Now I'm learning how to bring that same presence to the work of creating something lasting.

Slow is not the opposite of productive—it's the foundation of it.

Right now, I'm practicing:

• Moving at the speed of my actual body, not my expectations

• Trusting that root-building is just as important as visible growth

• Defining what rooting in looks like through regular habits and relationships

• Creating from settledness rather than franticness

• Letting some things take longer if it means they'll be more solid

This is showing up everywhere. In business, I'm doing the things I know work and staying consistent in a healthy way, rather than frantically launching new programs. As we prepare to buy our first house, we're being intentional about each purchase instead of rushing to fill every room.

The Sacred in the Slow

There's something deeply sacred about honoring our actual pace instead of the pace we think we should maintain.

What if slow isn't a consolation prize but the actual path to what we're creating?

What if moving at nervous system speed—rather than expectation speed—creates something more sustainable?

What if the invisible work of adapting and re-rooting is exactly what this moment calls for?

When I slow down enough to feel into what's really happening, I realize I'm not behind schedule. I'm right on time, exactly where I need to be, doing exactly the work that wants to be done.

The van has stopped. My body is no longer flying through space. And instead of seeing this stillness as something to overcome, I'm learning to see it as sacred ground for what wants to grow next.

The real question isn't "Why aren't I moving faster?"

It's "What wants to grow strong roots here?"

What transition are you rushing through right now? Where might slowing down actually accelerate your real growth?

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve found myself in a dance with technology that taught me more about myself than I expected.

I'd been hearing about this approach to building web things called "Vibe Coding" – guiding AI to generate code using conversational prompts rather than technical specifications. As someone who doesn't know much about programming, I was curious and a bit intimidated.

What would happen if I, a non-coder, tried to create something real using just my words and an AI companion?

What could I make that might be fun and useful to what I’m up to?

Our first project: build a check-in form that I could send to coaching clients before our calls. Something practical that would make my work more efficient and add some delight to their lives.

I didn't expect the emotional journey that followed.

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The Wonder-Frustration-Collaboration Cycle

The first day was pure magic. Within 20 minutes, I had a working prototype. Within another hour, I'd added features and worked through small bugs. Not only did I create a functional web app through conversation alone, but I also learned how to host it online – for free!

(I’m not sure my words can convey the degree of awe I feel about the statement above. I spoke some words into my phone and it gave me back words that looked like a form people can type into. Then it directed me to websites that let anyone host those words in a file for free that anyone in the world can access and use. And another site emails stuff from that first site to me, also for free.

Like, holy crap, we have so much available to us I can’t even fathom it.)

Let that land.

There I was, a non-programmer, putting something useful into the world within an hour. The possibilities felt limitless.

Then reality hit.

One critical feature – sending me email notifications of form submissions – simply wouldn't work. I spent hours going back and forth with Claude, watching it hallucinate solutions that weren't actually implemented. The tool that had seemed so magical was now frustrating me deeply.

Turns out that coding with AI is sort of like coding with a genius 10 year old who knows way more than you. It does stuff you don’t ask it to and then lies about it afterward…but you don’t really know how to check its work.

I’d had enough for the moment.

I set the project aside for over a week. When I returned to it, I felt an immediate urge to quit. The fun had evaporated. I'd lost trust in my AI companion. I had the story firmly cemented that since I couldn't code, I was effectively blind and useless in trying to solve problems.

But then I remembered why I started the project in the first place.

I had client calls coming up. I wanted this tool to be live – this week. By reconnecting with that commitment, I found new fuel. The purpose became more important than my frustration.

From "I Don't Know" to "Let's Figure This Out"

What's interesting is how quickly I had anthropomorphized the technology. I was genuinely angry at Claude for "lying" to me – as if it were a sentient being that knew what it was doing. It was similar to getting mad at the adorable groundhog in our backyard for digging up the soil. That’s just what it does.

That reaction revealed something deeper: my own fear of inadequacy. The frustration wasn't really about the AI's limitations – it was about my expectations and my discomfort with not knowing how to fix things myself.

Once I recognized this, I found space to slowly shift my approach. I started using Google's Gemini AI to check Claude's work. I began looking at the code myself, running Google searches, and asking more specific questions rather than just tossing the whole problem at the AI and hoping for solutions.

I turned to my own resourcefulness – the skills I already had for problem-solving – and started making progress. After about ten attempted fixes that didn't work, I finally identified and fixed the error.

When I tested it and it worked, I felt unreasonably excited.

(Again, hard to convey here. I really get now why people choose to code. I understood Neelay Mehta from The Overstory - compelled to build digital worlds.)

I was present again to that initial magic, but with a deeper understanding. Through just my voice and this new tool, I had made something that people could interact with in the world. More importantly, I had turned to my own resourcefulness to get past the limitations of the tool.

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What I'm Taking Forward

This experience taught me several valuable lessons:

1. The shift from "I don't know anything about this" to "Let's figure this out" is powerful and accessible anytime.

   This mental pivot transforms us from victims of circumstance to active creators of solutions. I've noticed how quickly this shift changes not just the outcome but how I feel in my body – from contracted and defensive to open and energized. The beauty is that this choice is available in any moment, regardless of our expertise level.

2. Recalling my commitment – what I wanted to create for my clients – provided fuel when frustration threatened to derail me.

   Purpose is a remarkably potent antidote to perfectionism and fear. When I reconnected with why this mattered, the technical challenges became interesting puzzles rather than insurmountable obstacles. Our commitments to others often carry us through places where self-motivation alone might falter.

3. Over-reliance on any tool (whether AI or Google Maps) can lead to a lack of critical thinking.

   It’s on us to reclaim our role as the navigator. I see this pattern with my coaching clients too – outsourcing their internal compass to external validation or expertise. The tools are meant to augment our intelligence, not replace it. When we remember this, we maintain our agency and often discover capabilities we didn't know we had. Claude was a beautiful mirror for me, reflecting where I’d given away my agency and power.

4. Specific questions lead to specific answers.

   Vague problems rarely yield useful solutions. I wasted hours with general frustration before I started asking precise, targeted questions. This precision completely changed what I received back from both the AI and my Google searches. It's a principle that extends far beyond technology – the quality of our questions shapes the quality of our lives.

5. The most effective approach was collaborative – I had to do the work too, not just delegate it to the AI.

   Let’s take this lesson forward in every interaction with technology. True creation is rarely a passive process of consumption or delegation. The magic happened in the dance between the AI's capabilities and my human discernment, creativity, and persistence. This partnership model – knowing when to lean on tools and when to rely on ourselves – might be the most valuable skill for navigating our AI-augmented future.

What strikes me most is that growth rarely happens in single moments of insight. Instead, it unfolds through continuous commitment to action. It wasn't the moment I realized I was anthropomorphizing the AI that mattered – it was using that awareness to commit to a different approach going forward.

The lesson extends far beyond coding. How often do we give up when our initial excitement fades and challenges arise? How quickly do we tell ourselves stories about what we can't do rather than exploring what might be possible?

My answer: quite often. I’d like it to be less often.

Wins beget wins. My excitement from making this project work fuels me to tackle other challenges and to continue improving what I've built.

In the end, this experiment in "Vibe Coding" became much more than creating a simple web app. It became a mirror reflecting my relationship with challenge, commitment, and my own capabilities.

Tech notwithstanding, I wonder where in your life you might be telling yourself a limiting story about what you can create or contribute because you "don't know enough." What might happen if you shifted from "I don't know" to "Let's figure this out"?

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

Last Monday, my wife and I sold our camper van, Babs.

It has been a surprisingly intense process for me, marking the end of a period I’d planned so much for and that went by so much more quickly than I imagined. A part of me is still grasping onto our time on the road, trying to squeeze the juice out of memories before they’re lost.

The night before Babs’ new owner picked her up, we had a short ceremony to say goodbye and let her go. We burned some sage, shared words of love for her quirks, recalled a few favorite moments, and cried together.

I cried the next day, too, as I removed our last remaining items from inside. In past years, I’m not sure I would have allowed the emotions to flow so freely. Surrendering control to allow strong grief is generally not a pleasant experience for me. It might take me days of feeling tension and pain in my body before I realize I’m just sad or avoiding some other big emotion.

That’s still happening. It took a 30-minute bike workout this weekend and a hauntingly beautiful song to reconnect me to spirit to shake some tightness and pain I’d had in my upper body for more than a week.

Sharing that feels embarrassing.

That I can’t swiftly move through emotions and instead still hold them in my body, causing myself suffering over and over again.

That I feel so much about an inanimate object that I’ve personified and attached so much to.

That I let myself get caught in such human silliness as feelings in the first place.

The last one, especially, is an old story that circles back when life gets really big and new and scary and beautiful and great and sorrowful.

What a silly human I am. Who am I to feel so much?

Several years ago, a friend died in Africa in a motorcycle accident. It saddened me in an unexpected way and I couldn’t explain why. He was more of an acquaintance than a friend, my brain said. Who was I to feel so sad about the loss of a person I didn’t really know?

What right do I have to experience the feelings I have as I have them?

My therapist at the time helped me to hold myself, especially because it didn’t make sense to me. It still doesn’t most of the time — this being a human thing. I guess I feel what I feel and that’s just how it goes.

I feel sad about a van. I feel afraid I didn’t love it enough, enjoy it enough when I had it, spend enough time in it.

I didn’t think about that stuff much until we were about to part ways. It was in my driveway for weeks and I barely stepped inside, often considering it more of a burden than a gift. I just wanted it gone so we could stop worrying about it breaking or not selling and shifting the plans we have for what’s next.

As I write this, I step back and the van is my wife, my brother, my mom, my friends. It’s my work. This newsletter. It’s the bike I haven’t ridden in months, and any number of other things I’ve bought to bring me pleasure and at some point have related to as a burden or annoyance or with apathy. That I’ve blamed for my own disappointment with life.

Instead of offering them love and gratitude and profound joy — all the things they deserve.

I know I can’t get it right all the time, though I desperately want to. My coach, the whole time we were prepping our time with Babs, invited me toward humility, the acceptance of my human limitations.

We’re back to that human thing again.

Some days I define my work as normalizing the human experience. Here is mine: finding ways to beat myself up and question my innate goodness when I’m in the middle of big feels. Dodging reality by mentally teleporting to some alternate reality in which I get everything “right.”

Then, I wouldn’t have to feel the feels. Then, everyone might like me and feel loved and they wouldn’t have to feel the hard feels either.

But the big feels are still here, and I still get to feel them.

This is me working through my process, human through and through.

Love.
Matt

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Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

Why do you wear antiperspirant/deodorant (if you do wear it)? And why do you choose the scent you choose?

This was the topic of a conversation I had this weekend with some female friends, and it brought to light what I consider a limited way we tend to view the nature of choice.

While this particular discussion centered on women's experiences with personal care products, I quickly realized it illuminated a much more universal human challenge—one that shows up in countless areas of all our lives, regardless of gender.

Option 1: I wear antiperspirant deodorant because I have to. It's embarrassing to sweat and the women's deodorants don't work well. Either way, it's a matter of obligation and not something to make me feel sexy or attractive. More like reducing my unattractiveness.

Option 2: I don't wear any because I don't mind if I sweat, or since I do mind, I choose something that feels great when I put it on. Either way, I feel like I have to justify myself and I'm looked at as gross or too high-maintenance.

Neither option creates much joy, even though the part that's choosing thinks it's doing so to make me happy.

By many accounts, these seem to be the options for women when it comes to personal-care. And I think this all-in, all-out choice extends far beyond deodorant.

It occurs to me that many of us feel this tension in many aspects of life.

On one side is living entirely by what we're expected to do, or based on what we think will make the world around us happy.

On the complete other side is the attitude that I'm going to do whatever the f*ck I want, forget everyone else.

Of course, I doubt anyone lives entirely on one side or the other. There's a lot of gray area in between, and we'll probably lean to one side for some things more than others.

I see this tension play out in my own life constantly. When choosing what to wear, do I go with the safe, conventional option that won't draw attention, or do I express my personal style fully, even if it might seem unusual? When deciding where to live, do I choose based on proximity to family and social expectations, or do I prioritize my own desires for adventure or solitude?

These aren't just superficial concerns. They reflect a deeper pattern in how we navigate the world.

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The False Dichotomy

The thing with both those extremes is that they come from a perspective of either/or.

Either I do things for me at the expense of caring about others, or I do things based on others at the expense of myself.

They necessarily paint us into a corner and pit us against the world around us.

We might feel like we're always playing defense:

1. against others we're afraid will judge our self-directed choice

2. against ourselves for wanting something that goes against the community

The result is that many of our daily tasks feel like a burden. Like we're doing them because we're supposed to do them, not because we actually want to.

Or we feel like they have to be done in secret, like they're an indulgence we have to justify. (Who are we to simply feel good about how we live our life?)

Ascending Beyond Either/Or

I want to propose a third option that lies separate from the spectrum of me/them I've presented above. I describe it as: for me, for the world.

This option invites us to consider a world in which a choice for me is also good for the world.

In the case of selecting deodorant, as we select a style and scent that allows us to feel attractive and good in our body, we'll naturally emit a different kind of energy.

Similarly, when I choose clothing that expresses my authentic style rather than just following trends or playing it safe, I show up differently in conversations and creative work. I'm more confident, more present, and better able to contribute.

As we intend to bring joy to the process, delighting in giving our body a new kind of loving attention every morning, we'll open ourselves to receive more.

As we better understand our likes and dislikes, we'll be more confident and easeful in our decisions. We'll be able to better communicate our preferences to others and know when our partner is matching what we're asking for.

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Ripple Effects of Self-Trust

This extends beyond just personal care routines. When we make choices from a place of authentic desire rather than obligation, we bring our full creative energy to the world. Instead of offering diluted compromises, we contribute our unique gifts with enthusiasm and purpose.

Self-awareness and self-trust create the emotional bandwidth we need to truly listen to others. When we're not constantly anxious about our own unmet needs, we can be present with the people around us, fostering deeper connections and understanding.

By honoring what we truly want and need, we establish healthier boundaries in all our relationships. This reduces the resentment that builds when we consistently put others first at our own expense. The result? More sustainable relationships built on honesty rather than martyrdom.

We'll model self-trust to the people around us. We'll become more tuned in to their needs and wants because we're taking care of our own. This creates a permission field where others feel safe to express their authentic desires too.

The discernment we develop by making choices that genuinely resonate with us doesn't stay confined to personal matters. It extends to how we engage with social issues, how we consume, and how we show up in our communities. We become more thoughtful citizens, not less.

Beyond Self-Interest

Making choices for ourselves isn't selfish when we understand the ripple effect it creates. Our authentic self-expression gradually shifts collective norms, making room for everyone to live with greater integrity.

This isn't about ignoring others' needs or community standards. It's about recognizing that the false dichotomy between self and world keeps us playing small. When we choose for ourselves in a way that honors our deepest values, we naturally contribute to creating the world we want to live in.

What might change for you if you saw your personal choices—whether about deodorant, clothing style, career path, or where to live—as potential gifts to the world rather than indulgences to justify?

And what might happen if you softened to the impact of your choices —wanted or unwanted—to let all of it in?

Love.
Matt

Right now, I’m super into a theory related to how our bodies process information that has me more excited than anything I’ve come across in a long time.

It’s called vasocomputation and it connects a ton of dots for me about the whole human experience, including how our brains and bodies seem to be designed to work and how we might be able to better, er, human day-to-day.

Rather than try to explain the theory better than the author, here I’ll intend to continue my internal conversation about the implications of vasocomputation, including a practical application for expanding our thinking.

Defining Vasocomputation

In my brain, this conversation starts way back, billions of years ago, to the first organisms on the planet and how intelligence has evolved and expanded to its current manifestation in human brains.

That’s probably too much for today. A preview is here if you want to dive in.

To keep things simple: our vascular system - the veins and arteries that pump blood to every inch of our body - uses the muscles surrounding it to dilate and contract and share information with the neurons around it.

Essentially, as the vascular system constricts, it determines what we think, feel, and perceive. It’s a direct connect to how we process the world.

Also, these constrictions can create “latches” in smooth muscle around them, basically locking them in place and creating a lasting “thought” around that area. The longer it’s latched, the stronger that shortcut becomes.

Three big ideas on this:

1. If you’ve heard the term “the body keeps the score,” this is where it keeps the score. Trauma causes latches. Family energetic and belief patterns become latches.

2. The “brain” is the entire body, not only in our head. We get to update our language around getting out of the mind and into the body. They’re the same thing. Mind-body separation is not possible and our models for thinking need to be updated appropriately.

3. What’s latched can become un-latched. Muscular contraction can be felt and trained, especially as we have more awareness of this perceptual model. We can begin to practice new thought patterns and ways of being as positional stances with our bodies, i.e. how we hold the antenna will change the picture it creates.

The Brain as a Prediction Machine

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about how we use this to conceptualize why our body might utilize a system like this in this way and how we can work with it. (And if you’re not with me, comment below and I’ll fill in the dots.)

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The general ideas here:

1. Our body-brain is designed to keep us alive and reproducing, to expand intelligence and life, etc.

2. It does that by trying to predict what will happen so that we are safe and feel well.

3. Our body-brains are always working with past results to make new predictions, storing those results in memories and in the body as a way to avoid pain and move toward pleasure.

4. Over-indexing on avoiding pain is a solid survival strategy so it’ll tend to remember negative events more than positive ones.

5. Due to the crazy amount of information around us all the time, it has to do that in an energy-efficient way. Therefore, it makes generalizations and assumptions. Latches are a physical example of that - a latched muscle expends much less energy than an open one and takes in little to no new information.

6. The more our brain is “right” about something being dangerous and avoiding it, the more that pathway is reinforced.

This all makes a ton of sense and is a wonderfully elegant way of trying to make it through life. The only downside, especially when the world today is less physically dangerous than when the system was designed, is that freezing and holding on negative events begins to severely limit our options going forward.

What happens next is that we want something other than the life we currently have - to make more money; work in a new industry doing something that lights us up; seek a new, healthier relationship; move to a new country; learn to breakdance - and our body locks up because all of those things feel too dangerous.

Our desires begin to feel impossible and our unconscious habits - physically ingrained in our bodily cells by way of constricted muscle tissue and frozen neurons - determine our life.

Then, we double down on that crappy feeling and blame ourselves for not getting out of our own way because we read on the internet that because of neuroplasticity we can just make new thoughts whenever we want.

My hope is that if you’ve ever thought that about yourself, you’ll have more awareness now about what’s going on behind the scenes and intend to practice offering yourself some understanding and compassion.

You’re not alone. We all have latches and while they keep us safe in one sense, they severely limit us in another.

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Using Vasocomputation to our Advantage

Armed with some new knowledge, here are some steps to begin to relax into a new way of being and thinking that works with this system rather than against it.

First, acknowledge that your current results comes from your body-brain keeping you safe and alive. We don’t have to relate to it as anything being wrong; it’s actually doing its job. These constriction patterns once served us well but no longer do. And since they’ve been doing their thing for a while, it’s okay if they take some time to shift.

Now that you’ve given yourself some grace, here are some gentle ways to start shifting habits are not aligning with your desired results.

Identify one place in life where you find yourself feeling like you have severely limited options (or one option) to respond, like it’s locked in somehow. Any place you find yourself experiencing suffering is a place to begin.

Notice what you experience in your mind and body when you bring it to mind. Where are you tense or loose? What thoughts, judgments, and emotions arise? How do you know you have to react as you do?

Consider how long this has felt like something with one choice. Where did that notion begin? How does it make sense for you to have this idea?

It’s likely that something scary or that you’d like to avoid occurred when you deviated from your habitual choice. Or a powerful event caused you to choose this as the only option. What was it? Continue to notice where you’re loose and tight in your body through this process.

Simply understanding can be a powerful step in the practice of self-awareness. Changing your habit isn’t a requirement. If you want to, though, there are some options.

1. Ask yourself: If it was possible for a person to have other options, what might they be (without any requirement to do them)? Write down at least 5 and intend for 10 to practice expanding your idea of what’s possible.

2. Consider what someone might feel or believe in order to take some of those actions. What must they find true (again without you needing to believe it; it’s just an imaginary practice) about themselves and the world? What might they feel?

3. Also ask yourself if you have any memories of choosing one of the alternate options and getting a neutral or positive result. This is providing new data to your prediction machine to update its prediction abilities in the future.

4. Then, the next time you encounter the situation, see if you can shift to feeling what you imagine someone who’d act different might feel or think what they might think. Go as slow as you’re able and intend to adjust the tension in your body toward this feeling/thought you imagine.

5. Alternatively, you can do what my friend Gregory Russell Benedikt invites and take bold action in spite of feeling uncertain. Assuming you don’t get hurt or die, this will give your prediction machine new real-time information to demonstrate that alternative options are safe. The more you do this and receive positive results, the less you’ll rely on the old patterns.

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In many ways, building habits is simply a matter of awareness and reinforcement. As we become more aware of the tension we’re holding in a given moment, the meaning we’re giving it, and how it affects us, we can begin to choose something different and reinforce something different.

Of course, I’m not implying it’s an easy, effortless, or quick process. And given that we don’t yet fully know how to instantly release latches in our bodies, going from severely limited choice to near-infinite is not as simple as just choosing differently. Certain aspects of our perception are physically locked until we can actually move them (somatic-based modalities seem to be most effective at this, which might be self-evident).

More will definitely be coming as I continue down this rabbit hole. Try out the steps above, even if you think what I’m offering sounds wacky. If it doesn’t work, no harm done.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

As a 90’s kid, video games were instrumental to my childhood, from the Nintendo we got before I could figure out how to work it to the various editions of Playstation of my teenage years.

I spent countless nights playing, only to find myself stuck battling some final boss - those seemingly impossible obstacles standing between me and the next level. I'd stay up far too late, trying over and over (remember when you couldn’t save your progress so you had to keep the system powered on), learning patterns, improving my timing, until finally...victory.

Those memories reemerged recently during a powerful conversation with a client about challenges in our lives. What if the obstacles we face aren't roadblocks but rather opportunities - the "bosses" we need to defeat to level up in our own stories?

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The Bosses We Avoid

We all have them - those intimidating challenges we circle around rather than confront directly.

If we want a business that more than covers our bills, we need to learn how to sell that business and create product-market fit.

If we want a deep and intimate partnership, we need to engage with the parts of ourselves that withdraw from connection.

These aren't problems to be solved once and forgotten. They're the bosses on our path that require us to become more than we currently are.

The temptation to avoid these bosses is strong. We tell ourselves we'll face them when we're better prepared, or we convince ourselves there's an easier route. But deep down, we know: the way through is forward.

There Is No Wrong Path

Here's where it gets interesting - there is no wrong path. Every choice has consequences, certainly, but there isn't a "correct" way to approach our challenges.

Sometimes I needed to stop playing a game for awhile before returning to it with fresh eyes and upgraded skills. Other times, I sought the guidance of a friend who gave me a secret tip I hadn’t considered.

Someone who keeps hitting the same wall in their business might be best served by switching gears, seeking a coach or mentorship, or potentially just sticking it through. We can’t know ahead of time what’s going to work.

I use a distinction that helps me when thinking about these hairy challenges - the difference between obstacles that are in the way versus on the way.

When something is in the way, we see it as a blockage, something to be removed. But when we recognize challenges as being on the way - actually part of the path itself - everything shifts.

If I'm seeking a romantic relationship with depth and intimacy, and I'm with a partner who challenges me in ways that feel uncomfortable, there's no guarantee they're the right partner for me - and no guarantee they aren't. I get to explore imperfectly what I find to be true.

Leaving when it's challenging isn't the wrong choice. Staying isn't the wrong choice either. Both have their costs.

By leaving, I might delay the opportunity to move through challenges that any partner will present - those things that are on the way to me experiencing the depth and intimacy I seek. If I stay, I get to move through those challenges more quickly, with this unique playing partner.

When we can hold that no choice is wrong and that every choice has an impact, we can approach our paths with more grace, compassion, and patience.

Developing Meta-Skills Along the Way

What I've come to appreciate is that defeating these bosses isn't just about getting past a single challenge - it's about who we become in the process.

In learning to find product-market fit for our business, we develop meta-skills: learning to talk to people, crafting compelling messages, managing our anxieties and fears, confronting limiting beliefs. From that perspective, defeating the boss isn't about defeating the boss at all - it's about becoming the person who can.

In my video game days, defeating a boss wasn't just about memorizing its attack patterns. It was about developing skills that would serve me throughout the game: patience, pattern recognition, timing, persistence.

The way through is commitment - being so clear on what we seek to create and who we are committed to being in the world that we'll do what it takes to shift our being and our doing. In my gaming days, it meant staying up as late as needed, playing over and over again until I beat the boss - doing the reps, learning from mistakes, and returning to my commitment.

The real work isn't finding the perfect answer before making a choice. It's choosing now, in this moment, how we want to proceed - the person we want to be as we're proceeding, the lens and perspective from which we want to make our decisions, the values we want to operate by going forward.

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The Ultimate Victory

Sometimes the lesson is perseverance - moving through the current breakdown quickly and unceasingly. Sometimes it's taking a rest. Sometimes it's completely shifting our strategy.

When we can hold the orientation that neither of these choices is wrong and we remain committed to defeating this boss, then we're winning no matter what. As the folks at Heroic say, "Win or learn."

The bosses in our lives aren't there to stop us - they're there to transform us. What meta-skills are you developing as you face your current challenges? What parts of yourself are emerging that wouldn't have otherwise?

Remember, the way through is forward. And the person who emerges on the other side might be exactly who you've been trying to become all along.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

I had a dream last week in which I was at an old workplace and they got a call from someone asking to talk to me after seeing my book. They were a college student awaiting the admission results for a program they wanted to get in and feeling quite anxious.

I could feel the pressure they put on themselves, the fear of disappointing others if they didn't get in, and the internal turmoil that was causing.

"Me too," I said. I began crying in the dream. Tears welling because I knew their pain. I knew how alone they felt in their experience and how hard it must have been for them.

I'd been there and I wanted them to know it. To feel my solidarity with them, that they weren't crazy or wrong. That writing a book on transformation doesn't preclude me from human suffering or a turbulent mind.

Truth Without Love is Brutality

I woke up thinking about a quote by Christian author Warren Wiersbe: "Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy."

For much of my life, I've been great at one or the other. Delivering truth without love - to myself and others - like a whipping device intended to scare us back into line. Or withholding much-needed truth, pretending it was from love, when it was only a way to hide.

It reminds me of the early days of my meditation practice. I would intend to practice mindful showering - focusing on my breath and actions with intention. Every time I noticed I lost focus, I'd beat myself up about it, somehow expecting immediate perfection.

A lesson from Sharon Salzburg, author of Lovingkindness, some years later opened my eyes to the harm I was doing to myself. She noted that "winning" at meditation is not done through never losing attention on our breath. It's in noticing when we do and returning. We can celebrate the moments we "lose" because it gives us more opportunities to "win" by coming back to our intention.

Hearing those words created an opening in my body I didn't know I needed. A shift in my internal environment. A softening to myself - truth mixed with love.

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The Student Within

My therapist and I discussed the dream afterward, exploring the student in the dream as a part of me looking to heal. What I said in the dream was true - I could relate to the fear of letting others down by failing to achieve something. To the experience of being so caught in my own mind I didn't know where to turn.

I'm no stranger to hostile internal environments. It's one of the reasons I believe coaching is such a powerful tool. The coaching container allows us to outsource safety for a time to the space with the coach, as we develop our ability to create safety inside. As a coach, I get to invite my clients to remember the power they have to influence their minds and bodies. Eventually, they see the safe space of our sessions isn't only my doing, as much as they want to give me the credit at the start.

It's been a process for me to learn how to bring truth and love to myself in equal measure so that I feel more of the internal peace I know is available. Still in process, as I continue to sit with that freaked out student.

Creating Internal Safety

I can trace the self-flagellation habits to an idea that I grow and learn best from tough feedback, from being pushed. My early coaches had that sort of temperament. It's my go-to to yell inside my head: just get better!

And when I slow down to think about the environment that I believe supports the most consistent growth, it's not that. It's gentler, more loving, while still holding standards for excellence. That's what I'm seeking to cultivate more of for myself.

This ought to be a question we all ask (with love and truthiness combined) anytime we look outside for comfort: how safe is my internal space? What can I be responsible for?

PS: The Ultimate Results Formula reflects this. It distinguishes internal and external environments so we can measure how they're impacting our experience of life.

The conversation with my therapist left me in a place of incompletion - still feeling some sadness. That's okay, we decided. It's all okay.

The Practice Now and Forever

A lesson I'll likely repeat in the future came to me. I gained it on a retreat when I asked one of the teachers for some guidance. I'd been receiving what I felt were clear, potent downloads from spirit and when I tried to shift my energy toward bringing them into the world, the energy stopped.

For my Dragonball Z fans: I told her I felt like Goku when he first achieved Ultra Instinct and could dodge flawlessly but whenever he moved to attack, he started thinking and lost all his power. I could receive but not give.

She told me to feel grateful for where I was.

That's it. That was the practice then and it's the practice now. Gratitude for seeing my little freaked out student part, sitting with his fear. Gratitude for catching myself when I lose focus in meditation. Gratitude for my current internal environment, however safe it feels.

Gratitude for a space to share this and do my work in public. For you and the light you bring to the world.

Turtles all the way down.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

More and more, I find myself being asked a question along the lines of: "What will coaching look like in a world increasingly powered by AI?"

As language models have become more sophisticated (admittedly, I was pretty slow to adopt, only diving in fully last December), I’ve watched the reactions around me with curiosity.

While many expressed concern about being left behind or losing clients, I've always been more excited about the possibilities of AI. I see these tools as powerful allies, not replacements – catalysts we can use to call forth the best of our humanity.

I've spent years developing my craft as a coach, navigating the messiness of human emotion and transformation, and I know that those skills will evolve rather than disappear.

Maybe you've felt it too – that moment of wondering whether what you offer as a coach or leader still matters in this rapidly evolving landscape. Whether the human element remains essential or if we're all just one prompt away from obsolescence.

My hope for this essay is not to provide a final verdict on what’s to come, but to start a conversation and to invite the best in each of us to chime in. Consider this just one of many future considerations of human and machine.

The Two Worlds We Navigate

The more I’ve learned about how Large Language Models (the underpinning of ChatGPT and others) operate, the more I found myself returning to a concept from David Epstein's book "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" that perfectly frames our current moment: the distinction between "kind" and "wicked" environments.

Kind environments are domains where patterns repeat, rules remain constant, and feedback is clear and immediate. These are spaces where expertise can be codified, where practice leads to predictable improvement, and where the relationship between cause and effect is visible. They're the well-mapped territories of human knowledge, where boundaries are defined and outcomes follow recognizable patterns.

Examples of kind environments include:

• Chess, where every possible move has been analyzed

• Tennis, where the court dimensions never change

• Mathematics, where proofs follow established rules

• Surgery for common procedures, where protocols are refined

• Accounting, where principles are standardized

Wicked environments, by contrast, inhabit the frontiers of our experience. They're characterized by ambiguity, incomplete information, changing conditions, and delayed or unclear feedback. These are spaces where no amount of pattern recognition from previous experiences fully prepares you for what's coming next. They're the territories where maps are sketchy at best, and often nonexistent.

Examples of wicked environments include:

• Relationships, where each person brings unique history and context

• Career transitions in rapidly evolving industries

• Parenting, where each child requires different approaches

• Entrepreneurship in emerging markets

• Social movements and cultural change

• Climate events that haven't been seen before

• Personal transformation and growth

AI excels in kind environments because it has been fed all the “maps” that already exist - the collection of the internet and most books. Its strength comes from being trained on the collective wisdom that humans have already discovered and documented. Every chess move, every known medical diagnosis protocol, every standard business practice – these are all built from lessons humans have already learned and recorded. AI can process these patterns faster and with fewer errors than we can, making it extraordinarily effective at navigating territories where the rules are clear and consistent.

Humans, however, are naturally wired for the wicked. We are explorers and meaning-makers by design. When faced with novel situations, we draw on intuition, creativity, and empathy – capacities that aren't just computational. We make intuitive leaps based on minimal data. We connect seemingly unrelated experiences to form new insights. AI doesn't yet "think" the way we do; it refers back to what we've given it. Without us venturing into unmapped territory, AI would have no new patterns to learn from. It can refine what exists, but it cannot create what has never been.

That's a profound insight for us to carry as we consider our place in tomorrow's world. We are not being replaced – we're being called to evolve. To step more fully into those spaces where no clear rules exist, where creativity and human connection matter most. Into the very environments where coaching finds its deepest purpose.

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The Pathfinders' Advantage

Coaches are, by definition, pathfinders. Our primary responsibility is to model the transformation we invite our clients to undertake, and to push the boundaries of what's possible in our own lives first. Through exploration of our own inner territory, we hone our ability to walk alongside others in theirs.

We ride on the edge of wicked environments with ourselves first. We deliberately step into uncertainty, confusion, and growth – navigating our own transitions, facing our own fears, and discovering our own patterns. Through that exploration, we transform what was once wicked into something more familiar. Those experiences allow us to experience life more and more as a kind environment, until we push again into new territory.

The more we do this work, the more our coaching feels like a kind environment to us. We develop frameworks for navigating uncertainty. We recognize patterns in transformation that might look chaotic to others but feel familiar to us. We learn to name what was previously unnamed, to detect early signals of change, to anticipate the emotional terrain of growth.

Breakthrough knowledge comes from turning wicked environments into kind ones – from finding patterns in the chaos, developing theories others can use, and navigating uncertainty successfully enough that we emerge with insights worth sharing.

At the same time, great coaches work continuously on their own self-regulation so they can successfully navigate the wicked environments that inevitably appear, even for the experienced. No matter how skilled we become, there will always be clients, situations, and challenges that don't fit our existing maps. The difference is that seasoned coaches don't panic when this happens – they lean in with curiosity, presence, and trust in the process.

Our courage and generosity to share those insights afterward create new understanding that helps define the territory for those who follow. Those very insights are also what train AI models going forward. This cycle of exploration, integration, and sharing isn't just what makes coaching powerful – it's the blueprint for how humans and technology can evolve together.

We're not being replaced. We're the pathfinders whose explorations create the maps that everyone – humans and machines alike – will use in the future.

The New Coaching (and Leadership) Paradigm

Dan Sullivan gets it right when he invites us to "Systemize the predictable so that you can humanize the exceptional."

This perfectly captures the opportunity before us. The routine aspects of coaching – the patterns we've seen before, the foundational frameworks, the standard processes – these can be systematized and even enhanced with tools. But this isn't about offloading our work; it's about freeing our uniquely human capacities for where they matter most: the exceptional moments where no pattern yet exists.

Leadership follows this same model. The best leaders move into new, uncertain territory; inspire their teams to find their way through, navigating the messy middle; then build processes to capture what they've learned. They recognize when they've entered a wicked environment and don't pretend to have all the answers. Instead, they create conditions for collective exploration, learning, and adaptation. They help their teams develop the resilience to stay present in uncertainty and the creativity to discover new paths forward. Once that path is clear, they systematize it – turning today's breakthrough into tomorrow's standard operating procedure, freeing everyone to tackle the next frontier.

This perspective has clarified my perspective on sharing our wisdom with the world and emboldened me to go further – to contribute more in order to fill the gaps others might see, while also encouraging myself to take the next steps forward. My current work is to better systematize so that my exceptional becomes even better.

The question now isn't whether coaches and leaders will be replaced by AI, but rather how we position ourselves in relation to these emerging tools.

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The Choice Before Us

We must remember that all philosophical or societal questions about technology start at home. If we become worried that AI will destroy human creativity, it's on us to practice being creative. If we worry that AI will take our job, it's on us to grow to the next version of our job.

Our fears about losing our humanity only materialize when we step aside and let them. It's not only our choice but our responsibility to use our unique gifts: to explore, invent, create, and then to explain. We can either contribute to building the world we want or idly watch one built by default.

The best coaches will thrive by:

1. Embracing tools that help navigate "kind" environments efficiently, freeing up energy and attention for the truly complex work.

2. Developing their capacity to stay present, creative, and responsive in "wicked" territories – those novel, turbulent, atypical scenarios that require responses that haven't occurred before.

3. Documenting and sharing the insights gained from exploring uncharted territory, which benefits both human coaches and improves the tools we use.

Think of it this way: humans are explorers finding their way through new territory, meeting what emerges. Our tools – including AI – ease the journey the next time around, but someone needs to make that first expedition.

I’ll go as far as to say it is our duty to share the lessons we’ve learned - collectively and individually. They’ll be essential to navigating the next challenges we face in increasingly uncertain times.

Creating Spaces for Emergence

I'm reminded of my education at a small liberal arts college, where classes often consisted of just 6-10 students engaged in deep discussion. Those environments taught me something that no textbook or algorithm could: how to think creatively, engage with uncertainty, and find my way through complex problems without a roadmap.

That's precisely the kind of environment we need to foster – not just in education, but in our coaching practices, leadership approaches, communities, and families. Spaces where people can practice navigating wickedness together, strengthening the muscles of adaptability, creativity, and discernment.

As coaches and leaders, our role is evolving. We're not just guides helping others follow established paths; we're co-explorers helping craft new understanding in territories where the rules are still being written.

Your Role in the Wicked and Kind

So what does this mean for you?

Where do you find yourself most comfortable – in the kind, predictable environments or in the wicked, uncertain ones?

What wicked territory have you navigated that gave you insights worth sharing?

How might you use tools to support you in handling the predictable so you can reserve your energy for the unpredictable?

And how might you contribute your lessons to the greater knowledge base humanity is creating?

The future belongs not to those who can replicate known answers, but to those who can stay present and creative when there are no answers yet. Not to those who fear new tools, but to those who use them wisely while developing the uniquely human capacities that no tool can replace.

Thrive in the kind. Be prepared for the wicked. That's how to lead and coach today and tomorrow.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

I’m currently in Florida, squeezing the last bit of sunshine and warm weather I can before heading back up to Michigan for this next life chapter. It’s been a welcome reset and opportunity for Kristen and me to connect and find our feet together.

We’re spending a few days with my aunt and uncle — two people I adore but rarely see because we’ve always lived across the country from each other.

My aunt is an incredible artist and creator. She’s one of the preeminent tailors (I daresay) in the country, a master gardener, and incredible maker. For the last several years, she’s been making custom garments using plant dyes and natural processes, all entirely by hand.

We’ve been blown away getting some sneak peeks into the process, by her creative capacity, knowledge, and hard work. It’s truly watching a master in her workshop.

It’s currently art show season for her so most of her weekends are spent in a booth somewhere in Florida or the Southeast, telling folks about and selling her wares. In between shows, she spends morning until night making new pieces to replace what she sold, never quite getting ahead of the demand and constantly feeling some pressure to catch up for the next show.

As a natural-born visionary, I often find myself wanting to push her to scale her operations. Trust me when I say her work is stunningly beautiful. I know that with just a little marketing and publicity, along with some additional hands, it would take off.

And every time I’ve tried to suggest that in the past, she’s been very clear she’s not interested in it.

She loves her work as it is — coming up with designs, making clothes, working with her hands, and feeling the joy of the work. She loves the process, loves the simplicity, and has no desire for what comes with scaling.

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This trip, I finally held my tongue, as I reminded myself of the parable of the fisherman the the MBA. It goes something like this:

A successful businessman went with his family on vacation to a tropical island. On the island, he saw a fisherman who would wake up every day, fish for a few hours, return to cook what he caught and eat with his family, and sing with friends around a campfire at night, before heading to bed.

After a few days, the businessman had an idea. He went to the fisherman and said, “You’re clearly quite skilled at fishing, bringing enough food for your family and others every day. Have you considered bringing others to fish with you so that you could catch more fish and sell those fish to your neighbors to make more money?”

To that the fisherman replied, “And then what would I do?”

“Then, you could buy another boat so that you could fish more areas, catch larger fish from deeper parts of the ocean, and sell those fish outside of your village and make even more money.”

“And then what would I do?”

“After a even more time, you could sell your fishing enterprise to a large corporation for a bunch of money and be able to do what you want because you’d be rich. Isn’t that amazing? Just think - what would you do if you were rich?”

The fisherman replied, “Well, I’d probably wake up when I wanted, fish for a few hours with my children, play guitar by the campfire at night, and share stories and sing songs with people in my village.”

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The Joy of Loving the Process

I’ve spent many minutes, hours, and days of my life doing things that I hoped would create a result that would let me feel happy and free. All the while, I forgot to pay attention to the moment I was in, to ask myself if I was enjoying my life now instead of just looking forward to some imaginary future.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to build a big, beautiful fishing company or scaling our clothing brand…if that’s what we want. When we choose to grow because we enjoy the building process.

The mistake we make (I make) is to try to do it because we think it will somehow make life pleasant or fix something that currently feels out of place.

My aunt knows herself. She knows what she likes and what she’s willing to take on each and every day. Even if she had a huge brand or loads of money, she’d get up early, design some clothes, work with her hands, and immerse herself in her work. It’s who she is.

I’m grateful for her clarity and the reminder that we get to choose work that we love, no matter how it looks. She truly models being an artist.

Of course, I’m who I am, too, so we’ve been recording videos of her process that we’ll be sharing. I’ll never stop wanting the world to discover my favorite people and their art.

One of the most beautiful (and potentially scary) things about this life is that we get to make what we choose of it. We’re all swimming in waters that tell us to grow because it’s the “right” thing to do.

Startup and business founders pushed to seek big funding rounds and aim for 100x returns because it’s just how things are done.

Coaches pushed to scale to $50k months, fueled by online ads and sales teams because that’s what the media defines as success.

This week, I reminded someone in my community it’s quite okay to coach part-time. What a gift it is to get to do what we love as much as we want, no? To choose what our art looks like and how we share it with the world.

I’m lucky to have beautiful souls on all parts of the spectrum in my life, each settling into joy and contentment in whatever size market they want for themselves. Their honesty keeps me honest, as I rumble with my inner fisherman and MBA, to find the sweet spot for my days.

How would I spend my days if I were rich? How would you?

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

This week, I had back spasms that disrupted my running and training schedule. I woke up with back pain, tried to push through it for a run, but only made it a half mile before having to turn back as the pain intensified.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I'm training for a 10K on April 5th – the longest race I've ever attempted as someone who's naturally built for sprinting. While the timing of these spasms couldn't be worse for my training plan, I recognize they're partly a consequence of the training itself, combined with my neglect of proper posture over the past week. My body was sending a clear message that I couldn't ignore.

It was a familiar sensation, though not a welcome one. And as I breathed and stretched on the ground, I realized how much this experience parallels something I see in leadership and organizations all the time.

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When Protection Becomes the Problem

The recent back spasms stem from an old college baseball injury. During my senior year, I injured the area under my shoulder blade, creating a pattern of knots and tightness that has stayed with me for years. When I'm stressed or maintain poor posture for too long, that area flares up like clockwork.

What fascinates me is how my body adapted around this old injury. My other muscles — particularly those in my core — learned to tighten protectively around the vulnerable area. This created a cascade of compensations throughout my body, each muscle group taking on a role it wasn't designed for, all in service of protecting that original weak spot. These protective patterns became so ingrained that my nervous system wrote them into my physical operating system.

Then in 2018, I ruptured my left Achilles and had surgery to repair it. This new injury completely disrupted my body's chain of movement, adding another layer of compensation to an already unbalanced system. I couldn't use my left foot for weeks, navigating life on crutches. When I learned to walk again, my right leg provided most of the power and stability.

Despite my efforts through physical therapy and recovery, my left side remains weaker than my right. As I've ramped up my running distances lately, I've noticed how the imbalance flows throughout my entire body – not just in my Achilles, but radiating through my knee, hip, and likely my entire kinetic chain. My right side became the default for stability and power bursts. It's grown accustomed to being relied upon, and as a result, carries additional tension almost constantly.

Before I know it, my entire body is locked in a pattern of tightness, all because one small part got angry years ago, and another part had to step up to carry the burden.

The Paradox of Holding On

When I manage to relax my right side, I notice my left side relaxes too. Everything moves into better alignment. But my right side resists relaxation. It's grown comfortable with tightness, with being the reliable one. It clings to its role of providing stability and support.

It reminds me of how our hands ache when we finally release something we've gripped tightly for too long. The muscles have learned a certain position and resist relearning how to let others take over.

Here's the problem: my left side can never learn to step up if it's never given the chance. My body will remain perpetually imbalanced, uncentered, and operating below its potential. What began as a helpful adaptation has transformed into a limitation. Not only does it prevent my left side from developing strength, but it also puts my right side at risk of overuse and injury.

The Organizational Parallel

I see this same pattern play out in organizations constantly. A leader brings on someone new and holds onto responsibilities while the newcomer gets up to speed. The intention is good – to eventually hand things over – but after a while, the leader becomes accustomed to carrying that load.

They grow reluctant to let go, even though that was the original plan. This inadvertently stunts the new person's growth by withholding opportunities to take on new challenges. Simultaneously, the leader prevents their own evolution by clinging to tasks they should release. And just like my overworked right side, they edge closer to burnout with each passing day.

The morning I awoke with back pain, I tried to stretch and loosen it up enough to go for a run. I wanted to continue to train even though my body wasn't feeling great. I made it a half mile out before I had to turn around and walk back. With every step, it was getting tighter and I could barely breathe. That's the risk of waiting to get into balance. The longer we go, the closer we get unbearable pain.

What started as protection becomes the very thing holding everyone back.

The Natural State is Balance

Our bodies inherently want to function at their highest level. They're designed for balance and efficiency. The compensations and adaptations we develop are temporary solutions that our nervous system eventually writes into our physical patterns. While initially helpful, they often become the obstacles to our next evolution.

The same principle applies to our organizations. Teams and companies naturally want to operate at their highest capacity. When leaders hold onto responsibilities too tightly, they disrupt this natural flow. The beautiful truth is that as we learn to let go of old patterns and provide others with the structure, time, patience, and training they need to succeed, everyone rises.

The organization, like the body, finds its way back to balance – if we allow it.

The challenging part? Letting go feels vulnerable. It's uncomfortable. When we've been compensating for so long, releasing that pattern can even be painful. Our nervous system interprets the new pattern as potentially dangerous, triggering resistance.

But growth lives on the other side of this discomfort. Balance waits beyond our grip. And our highest potential – both individually and collectively – requires us to move through it.

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How to Start Letting Go

If you recognize this pattern in yourself or your organization, here are some practical approaches to begin shifting:

1. Visualize the desired future state: Take time to imagine what it will look like when everything is in balance. How will it feel when your weaker side (or team member) is operating at full capacity? What will you be free to do?

2. Practice patience with all sides: Remember that no one knows how to function in this new pattern yet. The stronger side needs to learn to trust, and the weaker side needs time to build capacity. Growth is messy and uncomfortable – be gentle with the process.

3. Move progressively: Release one thing at a time rather than everything at once. In my physical recovery, I use progressive muscle releases and gradually add more weight to my left side. In leadership, start by delegating one responsibility fully before moving to the next.

4. Focus intentionally on development: The weaker part needs specific attention to grow stronger. Provide targeted training, resources, and opportunities to the people who are taking on new responsibilities. Build strength with intention.

5. Expect rebounds: Old habits reassert themselves, especially under stress. When you notice yourself slipping back into compensation patterns, simply acknowledge it, identify the trigger, and gently restart the process. Rebound doesn't mean failure – it's part of rewiring.

6. Measure and reflect: Track progress regularly. As balance improves, update your vision for what's next. What becomes possible when everything is moving at optimal capability?

For organizational leaders specifically:

• Create clear documentation for processes you're handing off to help the transition

• Schedule regular check-ins focused on development, not just task completion

• Identify what success looks like for delegated responsibilities

• Be transparent about your own struggle to let go – vulnerability creates space for others

• Celebrate when team members exceed your capabilities in specific areas

• Find peers who can hold you accountable to your commitment to let go

• Allocate time to explore what you could be doing with your newly freed capacity

Parallel Patterns

What’s happening in my body is most definitely a reflection of what’s happening in my mind and business. I suspect it’s the same for you.

That means we get to work on all of them in service of being our best in the world. So here are some ideas for how to build balanced strength in your body, in addition to your team. First, all of the approaches above are relevant to your internal parts as well as your team.

If you’re dealing with physical imbalances like mine, consider working with an outside professional to get back to great. Regular body scans (just taking a moment to notice where you're holding tension) can also help break unconscious patterns. And remember that breathing deeply into tight areas often begins the release process.

A few additional tips for physical compensation patterns:

• Incorporate cross-training that specifically targets your weaker areas

• Practice mindful movement, slowing down to feel which muscles are actually engaging during exercise

• Schedule regular recovery time – your body needs space to integrate new patterns

• Consider manual therapies like massage or myofascial release to help break up old patterns of tension

• Pay attention to your daily posture and ergonomics – compensation patterns often worsen during mundane activities

The path to our highest potential – in our bodies and our organizations – requires us to recognize when we're holding on too tightly, and then to summon the courage to let go.

I’m working on mine one day at a time.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

The waitlist is now open. Learn more and add your name today. We start March 25th. Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

I got a text message from the owner of the house/dog we're sitting for this morning that riled me up.

He let us know he'd seen the dog on the house's exterior cameras outside of his fenced area and asked us to keep the dog inside. (We didn't realize the dog wasn't allowed in that area because he'd been out there the day we arrived, but that's not the point of this post.)

What riled me up was hearing that he was watching us on cameras without our knowledge. What happened next revealed something about the choices we all have when we feel our power has been taken away.

Watching my response

My first reaction was anger and resistance.

Resistance Matt gets philosophical and indignant. I quickly expand beyond my personal story to all of society. This time was no different.

I thought of the current political climate and the frustrations many people are feeling with institutions all around us. So much happens without our knowledge or control – decisions made in boardrooms and backrooms that shape our lives while we remain unaware until we feel their effects. That sense that someone else is pulling strings we can't see creates a deep unease many of us carry daily.

I get why people are skeptical of the government, surveillance, and misuse of information. I am quick to anger when I feel my rights have been violated and many people's rights have been violated.

The issue is not the surveillance itself, it's permission and consent. The anger comes from a feeling of powerlessness and being controlled.

Lack of communication creates lack of trust. He may have felt hesitant to tell us ahead of time for fear we'd then avoid the cameras or feel watched. The irony is that him not telling us ahead of time makes us trust him less, more on guard and suspicious.

We create the reality we focus on: distrust breeds distrust.

There I was, in this swirl of self-righteousness, trying to convince myself that he was wrong because I now felt distrustful. (It feels so good to be right.) (Right?!?)

In the past, I've reacted from this place of anger and almost always regretted it later, creating messes I then had to clean up. The trail of burned bridges from my reactive moments serves as a reminder of what happens when I let my triggered self take the wheel.

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The moment of recognition

As I sat there, watching myself want to respond in negative or inflammatory ways, something deeper inside me said: "This isn't who I want to be."

My mind raced with potential responses: sending a snarky text message about privacy violations, physically moving or blocking the cameras, deliberately taking the dog outside again as an act of defiance, or plotting a scathing 1-star review detailing his surveillance methods to warn future house-sitters. The surge of righteous indignation felt momentarily satisfying, like I was reclaiming some power.

It wasn't an immediate shift. It was a series of moments over several minutes that gradually helped me move toward being at choice. My body was still humming with the energy of being violated, but my mind was beginning to create space between stimulus and response.

I noticed how quickly my thoughts had jumped to worst-case scenarios. Was he watching us sleep? Listening to our conversations? Tracking our every move? Each question ramped up my nervous system further, narrowing my vision to only see threat.

But then I paused. I looked at his actual message again – it was polite, direct, about the dog. Nothing sinister. I was the one adding layers of malicious intent where there might be none.

That pause allowed for a breath and the beginning of a shift in perspective.

Choosing intentionally: Who do I want to be?

From anger, I want to be short, sarcastic, passive aggressive, or aggressive aggressive. I want to blame him for my response, too. If he had only been upfront, I wouldn't feel this way and I wouldn't be responding in a harsh way.

That's true for anything in life, though, right?

I can always find a way to blame others for my response. I always have a reason to feel slighted, to be on guard.

If that's true, then my power lies in how I choose to respond in the presence of that. More options become available.

If the only option when I'm relating to myself as victim is to stay here feeling trapped and uneasy, then asking myself how I'd like to be going forward shows new paths. Each will have an impact - internally and externally.

We can choose to leave if I feel sufficiently unhappy or betrayed. That might harm our reputation on Trusted Housesitters. It would definitely put the owner in a difficult situation.

We can choose to stay and relax knowing he's monitoring on a regular frequency. We can choose to believe he's acting from general goodwill and is not intentionally looking to harm us or do anything creepy.

We can choose to have a conversation with him explaining the impact of being monitored unexpectedly. My initial fear is that he wouldn't take it well and ask us to leave, but right now I know we have some leverage. Should we leave, he'd have to scramble to find someone to care for his house and dog. I'm sure he doesn't want to spend the next day figuring that out or pay someone to come and cover for us. Nor do I think he wants a bad review on his profile.

Those choices are only available once I ask myself who I'd like to be beyond my initial, anger- and fear-based reactions. They require a calmed nervous system and access to my higher-level thinking brain. I have to let go of my patterned thinking and righteousness in favor of something different.

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Finding empowerment in any situation

Ultimately, Kristen responded with a kind message affirming we'll keep the dog in his proper space. We chose to empower being here, to see this as an opportunity rather than a violation.

This experience reaffirms that I can choose how I want to relate to any situation in life. I can be upset and choose to play victim, get angry and resist; or I can accept I'm here because I chose, and either decide whether I want to change that choice, re-negotiate my situation, or empower it.

When was the last time you felt this kind of powerlessness creeping in? How did you respond?

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When we feel that familiar surge of powerlessness rising, here are some practices that helped me find my way back to choice:

1. Slow down before responding. Notice your upset before acting on it. Share it with someone you trust who can help you see how your energy is shifting. Ask yourself: "What am I feeling in my body right now? Where is this sensation located?"

2. Give others the benefit of the doubt. Our minds love to assume ill intent, but most people are just doing their best with the awareness they have. Separate the feeling of violation from the fear of being trampled on. Try asking: "What other explanation might there be for this person's behavior?"

3. Remember your younger self. Moments of heightened emotion like feeling powerless usually come from a younger part of us who didn't have any say about something growing up. Slow down and comfort that part, remind them that adult you has things under control. Consider: "How old do I feel right now? What does that younger me need to hear?"

This feeling of surveillance touches something deeper in our collective psyche right now. My reaction to being surveilled is a microcosm of what many of us feel daily – that sense that we're constantly being watched, evaluated, and potentially judged without our consent.

A general feeling of powerlessness seems to pervade our culture at the moment. No matter which side of the political aisle we reside on, we're skeptical of the people we perceive to be pulling the strings on the other side. Tech giants know everything about us, from our late-night searches to how long we linger on particular posts. Our phones track our locations, our smart speakers listen to our conversations, and algorithms predict our next move before we've decided to make it.

We've willingly given up power over our information in favor of convenience, often without fully understanding the bargain we've struck. And so much of our world has gotten so advanced that we barely comprehend the systems governing our daily lives – from financial markets to social media feeds to the invisible data trails we leave everywhere we go.

The zeitgeist seems to scream that something is broken in the system but we're all stuck inside it, like fish unaware of the water we're swimming in until something makes us suddenly conscious of our containment.

But are we really? Or is this another opportunity to choose who we want to be?

The perpetual invitation of now

What I realize more deeply through this experience is that communication upfront could have prevented this entire situation. If I'm nervous about someone reacting in a particular way, the longer I act from that nervousness, the more likely I am to cause exactly that response. I want to choose more honesty and transparency across the board, less assumption.

I would have liked the host to acknowledge it might be uncomfortable to know he's watching and to ask us what we're comfortable with – when he might check in, etc. But I can't control what he does or doesn't communicate. I can only choose how I respond.

This moment is a reminder that I always have choice and that I get to choose who I want to be in any moment. No matter who I was the moment before. It can all shift in an instant. Now and now and now and now, I can choose.

Our minds will make up wild stories and we've all seen scary movies that will shoot into our brains. Taking care of yourself doesn't mean gaslighting yourself into ignoring real signs of danger, and it also doesn't mean believing the catastrophes your mind screams. If you have to leave momentarily to get to a calm state, it's okay to leave.

But in that space of calm, ask yourself: Who do I want to be in this moment? What's actually true? What choices do I have?

Because in the space between stimulus and response lies our greatest power – the power to choose who we become.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

The waitlist is now open. Learn more and add your name today. We start March 25th. Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

Last Thursday, Kristen and I found ourselves in Florida after several days of driving down from Nashville. We had been looking forward to this stay for weeks - the longest we'd be alone in one place since leaving Colorado last August. The promise of unstructured days stretching before us had been a beacon as we navigated our busy schedules on the road.

But something strange happened the next morning. Despite finally having arrived at our destination, we both woke up with a knot of anxiety in our stomachs. There we were, with days of freedom ahead of us, and instead of feeling relaxed, we felt... unsettled.

This paradox isn't unique to us. Many of us spend our busy weeks longing for free time, only to feel oddly anxious when it finally arrives. We dream of unscheduled weekends but then struggle with how to actually be in that open space. It's as if the removal of structure itself becomes a source of discomfort rather than the relief we imagined.

While researching this post, I learned this strange relationship with free time has deep roots in both our psychology and our culture. And while I don't have all the answers, I'd like to share what I'm learning about navigating this tension — because it pops up for me on a regular basis and I suspect that making peace with unstructured time might be one of the most important skills for wellbeing in our hyper-scheduled world.

The Fear of "Wasting" Free Time

When we arrived in Florida, that first morning we were immediately hit with a high amount of anxiety about our to-do list. All the things we hadn't been able to address while driving suddenly demanded attention. But beyond the practical tasks sat a more existential worry: with this precious block of free time, what was the best way to spend it?

This is the fear of wasting free time — the pressure to optimize even our leisure. Should we explore the beaches? Catch up on projects? Rest? Connect with friends? Is it okay to spend time inside when we came here specifically for the warm weather?

The weight of these choices can paralyze us, transforming potentially restorative time into a source of stress.

The irony is palpable. In seeking to make the most of our free time, we rob it of the very qualities that make it valuable in the first place — spaciousness, spontaneity, and rest.

How Productivity Culture Makes Us Feel Guilty About Rest

Previously, that anxiety was a useful tool for both of us. It drove us to action. But these days, it's more paralyzing than motivating. We don't want to hunker down and rush through tasks because we've experienced periods of life free from those worries. Yet the programming runs deep.

We live in a culture that glorifies busyness and productivity. Social media feeds are filled with "rise and grind" messaging, side hustles, and productivity hacks. Rest is often framed as something that must be earned rather than a fundamental human need.

Even though I espouse turning inward to define success for ourselves, I’ve long measured my value by the amount of money I’m bringing in or how much I’m producing in the world. I’ve become solid at prioritizing sleep, though often justified on the basis of making me more useful the next day.

From this place, little is done for its own sake.

This productivity mindset has crept into our leisure time as well. We feel compelled to have "productive weekends" or engage in "productive rest" — concepts that betray their inherent contradiction. Even our vacations become achievements to optimize and document.

The result? Many of us carry a subtle but persistent guilt about truly doing nothing. We've internalized the message that our value comes from what we produce, not who we are. And that belief doesn't simply disappear when we close our laptops for the weekend.

The Trappings of Extended Off Days

On the other hand, I’ve also become accustomed to completely tuning out the outside world and taking days or weeks completely off. Spending nearly 4 months with little agenda beyond spending time in the next beautiful place taught us the joy of fully unplugging, at the expense of anything beyond our day-to-day.

Being on the road feels like a much different life than days of focused work or creating. There's a rhythm to travel I get used to. The rushing, being pulled about, and feeling off-kilter becomes oddly comfortable. I'm drawn to its inertia, even though I know deep down it’s not a viable schedule for more than a couple of days.

I have to listen to the deep wisdom reminding me that comfortable and pleasurable are not the same thing — over the long-term at least.

Living completely devoid of structure and purpose-driven projects leaves me empty. I wind up overly hungry for them. All urge and no structure to hold it. It’s like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet after a long fast. I don’t know where to start so either start nowhere, overwhelmed by feeling and choice, or I shove too much on my plate at a time.

It’s an unwinnable game I’m beginning to redefine.

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The Difference Between True Relaxation and Avoiding Scheduled Activities

We always imagine we'll settle in quickly and joyfully when we pause our travels — immediately relaxing and finding a flow to our days that feels satisfactory, enriching, and mindful. In reality, it often feels like our to-dos are just lagging a day behind us while we're on the road and slam into us all at once when we stop moving.

This highlights an important distinction: removing obligations doesn't automatically create relaxation. True restoration requires a shift in our internal state, not just our external circumstances.

There's a difference between "empty time" (the absence of scheduled activities) and genuinely restorative time (a state of being present, content, and at ease). The former is a condition of our calendar; the latter is a condition of our nervous system.

In fact, some of the most restorative time comes for me in the form of activities — especially those that require my entire being. The more I enter into a moment, the more it nourishes my body and soul.

Most of us haven't been taught the skill of transitioning from "doing mode" to "being mode." Without this skill, we can find ourselves with plenty of free time but little ability to truly inhabit it. We remain mentally busy even as our bodies are still.

Why Our Brains Perceive Lack of Structure as a Threat

From an evolutionary perspective, our brains are wired to seek predictability and structure. Uncertainty - even the uncertainty of an unscheduled day - can trigger mild stress responses. Our ancestors needed to plan, predict, and prepare to survive. Unpredictability meant potential danger.

Structure reduces cognitive load and decision fatigue. When our days follow familiar patterns, we conserve mental energy. Suddenly facing a wide-open Saturday requires making numerous decisions about how to spend our time, and that mental effort can be exhausting.

This is what happened that first morning in Florida. The sudden "threat" of open time activated our stress response, despite the fact that we'd been looking forward to this freedom for weeks.

Why We Simultaneously Resist Structure

Yet, paradoxically, we also resist too much structure. We have a fundamental need for autonomy and self-determination. Being told exactly what to do and when to do it feels confining, even if that structure comes from ourselves.

This creates a tension: we need some boundaries to feel secure, but we need enough freedom to feel autonomous. Finding that balance is a personal journey, and one that may shift depending on our circumstances and season of life.

For Kristen and me, our time on the road created a particular rhythm that, while sometimes hectic, had become familiar. The sudden absence of that rhythm in Florida left us feeling both relieved and adrift.

The Gap Between Anticipation and Reality

There's often a significant gap between how we imagine our free time and how we actually experience it. In our anticipation, we focus on the relief of obligations lifting. We don't anticipate the mental chatter, restlessness, or discomfort that might arise in that space.

We also underestimate the transition period needed between structured and unstructured time. After weeks or months of constant activity, our nervous systems need time to downshift. This transition isn't instantaneous — it's a process that requires patience and gentleness with ourselves.

Our expectations for our Florida downtime didn't match reality. We imagined immediate relaxation and ease, but instead encountered anxiety and adjustment. Understanding this gap helps us set more realistic expectations for future transitions.

It’s important to remember we never leave ourselves behind no matter how far we are from home. Our mind is our mind, our thoughts are our thoughts. When we stop making the chatter and anxiety a problem, we can look at it with a new perspective.

Finding Balance: Practical Approaches

So how do we navigate this paradox? How do we honor both our need for structure and our desire for freedom?

The first thing Kristen and I did that morning was simply notice what was happening. We recognized the anxiety and how it was trying to make us do everything all at once. We saw how it was making everything feel like a burden rather than a joy.

From this awareness, we took small, intentional steps to shift our state. We're dog sitting here in Florida, so I invited Kristen to bring love to the simple act of feeding the dog. This immediately shifted her to a state of joy in connecting with the animal. Meanwhile, I stepped outside to stand barefoot on the ground and feel the warm sun on my skin. After all, enjoying the weather is one of the main reasons we came to Florida.

After these small reset moments, we focused on doing just one thing at a time. Kristen made coffee, and we enjoyed breakfast together. Then we created a manageable list of priorities for the day rather than trying to tackle everything at once. Once we had the space to see things piling up, we were able to slow them down and spread them out across our time here.

The Power of Small, Conquerable Lists

One technique that's been particularly helpful for us is breaking down our to-do list into small, conquerable sections. Rather than facing a daunting master list of everything we need to accomplish during our stay, we allocate just a couple of things to each day — and we intentionally make those things easy to complete.

The key is checking first with our priorities and vision for the coming weeks or months. This ensures we're only taking on tasks that truly align with what matters to us right now. It's remarkable how many items can be eliminated or postponed when viewed through this lens.

Then, I add these selected tasks as blocks on my calendar. This provides just enough structure to ease the anxiety of unstructured time without becoming overbearing or rigid. The blocks create a gentle framework for my day while leaving plenty of room for spontaneity and rest.

What I've noticed is that this approach actually creates more spaciousness than having no structure at all. When I know I have dedicated time for my essential tasks, my mind can more easily release its grip on the constant need to remember and worry about them.

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Cultivating Presence in Every Moment

I know that ease, groundedness, and abundance are the energies of the next phase of my growth — trusting that everything I want is already unfolding. I regularly ask myself if I'm present to that in any given moment, and how I might be trying to control outcomes or feeding fearful energy.

One specific technique that helps me is to check in with my enjoyment. If I notice I'm not enjoying what I'm doing, I ask myself what I'm feeling instead. Then — and this might sound counterintuitive — I tune into what I absolutely love about feeling that emotion. For example, if I'm feeling annoyed, I let myself fully bask in the energy of annoyance, and stop avoiding it. This practice gets me back to being at cause for my state of being and reveals that I always have a choice in how I'm being, regardless of the circumstances.

I seek to have greater awareness of my being while I'm doing. Rather than mindlessly trying to shift from one mode to the other, the question I'm asking is: how might we have attunement to our being even as we're doing? This integration allows for presence regardless of activity.

Practicing Gratitude for Our "Problems"

As Kristen and I worked through our anxiety that Friday morning, we found ourselves shifting to gratitude. We recognized that the stress of adjusting to free time is, in many ways, a privilege. Not everyone has the luxury of unstructured days or the freedom to design their time.

We reflected on other "problems" that are really privileges in disguise — the stress of selling our camper van versus the privilege of having one in the first place; the challenge of deciding which loved ones to visit versus the blessing of having many people in our lives who matter to us.

This perspective shift doesn't invalidate our feelings. The anxiety is real. But contextualizing it within the broader scope of our fortunate circumstances helps restore proportion and ease.

Embracing the Paradox

Perhaps the most important insight I've gained is that this tension between craving and fearing free time isn't something to solve once and for all, and not even something to avoid. It's a paradox to be navigated continuously, with awareness and compassion. We’re up to so many cool things, it’s inevitable we’ll feel overwhelmed at times.

The goal isn't to eliminate the anxiety entirely but to recognize it as a natural response to the shifting tides of structure and freedom in our lives. With practice, we can learn to surf these waves rather than being pulled under by them.

For now, Kristen and I are embracing the messy middle ground of our Florida stay. Some moments flow with ease; others feel sticky with residual anxiety. We're practicing patience with ourselves and with the process of finding our rhythm in the spaciousness we've created.

This is the ongoing practice of making peace with unstructured time — not a destination to reach, but a relationship to nurture.

I'm curious, do you experience this paradox in your own life? How do you navigate the tension between structure and freedom?

What shows up for you on days with nothing on the agenda? How does spaciousness feel in your body and mind (without judgment)?

Where do you find yourself on the spectrum between craving organization and resisting it?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

The waitlist is now open. Learn more and add your name today. We start March 25th. Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.

Today, I want to talk directly to one part of you.

It’s a part that runs the show more than you say you’d like it to. I think it runs the show for most of us more than we think we’d like it to.

Something we simultaneously seek to reject and hold onto with sheer strength. A double source of shame and personal rejection: once for having it and again for believing what it says.

A part that seems universal to the human condition, that I suspect we all have in some capacity, regardless of our status or pedigree.

A driver of angst and fear as well as great accomplishment and progress.

The part I want to speak to today?

It’s the part that believes something in us is fundamentally flawed.

What it has to say

You might know this part well. It reminds us of all the times we’ve failed.

That fight with a friend? Our fault. Even when we’re sure it wasn’t? Our fault for choosing them as a friend or giving them the upper hand.

Our parents’ divorce? Our fault. Relationships that didn’t work? Our fault. Lack of motivation? Our fault. Business not growing? Our fault.

And not just our fault, but a reflection of who we are deep on the inside. Prof that something inside of us is broken and cannot be fixed.

This part pushes us to do more, take on more, try to make something that will finally overcome our brokenness. And no matter how great the thing we make turns out to be, it’s not enough. There’s another hill to climb. More to prove.

This part also urges us to just give up, to stop pretending that anything we do will ever work. It’s tricky like that, keeping us in a constant push and pull.

It runs an unwinnable game in this way by moving the finish line ahead as we get near it and then convincing us that if we weren’t flawed, we’d be there already.

And it arranges the world around us to give credence to its claims. It’ll pull in partners who echo its arguments and always find a new project to tie our worth to.

Its fingers are everywhere. That’s what I’ve noticed and that’s what I want to tell it today.

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Loosening the grip

Here’s what I want to say directly to that part:

You’re not a problem.

You can’t be. There is no longer anything scary about you once I see your influence on everything around us. You’re just there.

We’ve made it this far with you screaming in our ears all the time. If you never goes away, we’ll continue to be okay. Your grip isn’t actually that tight once we stop struggling. Your words don’t cause such pain.

Oh. And you’re not right.

It’s okay that you believe what you believe. It’s just not true. None of us is fundamentally flawed.

I don’t even need to get poetic about it. I can see through your game that says any of us can do something to suddenly be fixed. In the event we did, the thing we created would have come from us so we’d be the source of the fixing in the first place.

Also, don’t even think about trying to run the next version of the play and argue that believing we have a fundamental flaw is itself a fundamental flaw. You’re not a fundamental flaw. You can’t trick me into believing that, either.

I will say, that is some commitment to the role to try to make yourself savior and villain at the same time.

Now, I know you’re not going anywhere. Again, that’s okay. Not a problem. I don’t need you to change. I just want you to know we see you now. And from here forward, we’re going to choose how things go.

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What to do when you’re stuck in the game

Talking to you again, reader, and not just that part. Here are some strategies to help you relax and accept when the little gremlin in your head tells you that you’re somehow broken.

I know first-hand the grip it can hold, how it can dominate and direct our lives.

The first step is to breathe. So simple and so powerful. Just breathe. It can’t stop that. You’ve been breathing for this many years now. If that part never yielded, you’d still be breathing. What a gift.

Next, some questions to invite you into your heart wisdom, a vital source of creativity and freedom. It’s a simple question.

“If I were lovable, how would I proceed?”

Now, you might get this in response: “But I’m not.”

That’s okay. Slowly and as many times as needed, while breathing, simply ask: “But what if I was?”

Slowly because this might feel new. Slowly because you deserve to be treated with care. Slowly because you’re opening something precious and powerful.

Ask until you get even enough for just one sliver, one crack. That’s all we need. Feel the answer. Feel what it’s like in your body to receive the answer.

You might not even act on it immediately. That’s okay. Just receive it and notice what it’s like to receive it.

Once we have an opening, we can always access it again.

The crack is how the light gets in

Opening that crack has felt painful for me at points. Like pushing a giant boulder to reveal a hidden doorway. It took all of my strength to move it an inch.

That’s what it took for me to let the light in. We all have our own way of opening and that way, too, is free from fundamental flaws. It’s simply ours.

You can feel the freedom on the other side of the opening, right? Not once we’re fixed but once we see through the charade? Once the grip of being broken is no longer a straight-jacket?

That’s what you’re here to receive. What life seeks to offer to you, a shared delight.

Your next project is not going to fix you. Your next relationship won’t rid you of the feeling you’re not broken. That stuff can’t do it.

Part of you won’t let them on their own. You get to let it in by realizing that no matter what, you’re okay. You always have been and you always will be.

We all are.

Love.
Matt

Special Invitation for Coaches: Partner with Me to Grow Your Business

Exciting news: I'm partnering with Stack to help 5 dedicated people build successful leadership coaching businesses.

Notice I said "build businesses," not "become coaches." That's because Stack isn't a course or coaching program — it's an accelerator designed to help serious, ready founders get from zero to one as quickly as possible.

Think of it like having a complete founding team behind you:

• Me as your experienced co-founder, sharing every detail of how I built my practice

• Stack's team supporting ops, admin, and client acquisition

• Professional designers building your custom brand and website

• On-call support for everything from admin to business strategy

Learn More

The waitlist is now open. Learn more and add your name today. We start March 25th. Come build something you love with my support every step of the way.