The inner game refers to the nine conscious leadership qualities necessary to be the leader our world needs now. The inner game rules the outer game and influences your ability to give and receive feedback, engage in healthy conflict, develop meaningful relationships, sustain psychological safety, innovate, & drive purposeful action at work and in the world.

Gestalt psychotherapist Fritz Perls once asked, “How is it possible to be unattached to the outcome, fully in the moment, and yet have a clear agenda?” Having multiple leadership intentions without feeling scattered is hard. I want to empower my team while, at the same time, optimizing our best results. As a leader, it’s easy to miss the power dynamics with my team if they’re always feeling like I might swoop in, so I came up with four questions that helped me see how I can be better at empowering people and maximizing results.

“Stress is a systems problem,” at least when it comes to business and creative pursuits. If you’re getting bogged down by the Burdensome B’s (bored, bottlenecked, burned out, or buried by bureaucracy), this guide is for you. Free Time is not about working as little as possible. Nor is it about creating a lifestyle business purely for one’s own gain. Life-giving businesses energize everyone who participates in them, from owners to team members to clients and the community. You can, happily and strategically, work less. In fact, working fewer hours is often harder than working more. It requires building sophisticated systems and trusting a Delightfully Tiny Team to handle the details.