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“What do you want?” might be one of the hardest questions for humans to answer.

Not at the drive-thru or cafe — if you’re in line in front of me, you better have your order locked and loaded or I’ll be speaking to your parents, who I know raised you better.

My performance coach, Lauren, is constantly asking me various versions of “What do you want?” She fires short, seemingly simple questions from the hip, leaving me confused before I eventually ramble and stumble into something I didn’t even know I thought.

Lauren doesn’t know the answers when she asks “What does success look like?” or “What are you hoping for here?” Only I know that, somewhere inside. But she knows the questions create space. First, for me to think. And second, to decide what I want to do with these (often new) thoughts.

Count the people in your life who have ever asked you a question they genuinely did not know the answer to. If it’s a quiz with a right answer they were subtly and secretly steering you toward, that’s lawyering, and your friends typically don’t appreciate that (a lesson I learned the hard way). That means no “do you think...?” or “have you considered...?” That’s advice disguised as a question. A real question means someone didn’t know the answer and valued your perspective enough to look for your answer and be changed by it.

Those people are rare. Most of us can count them on one hand. Some of us can’t even do that.

Psychologist and MIT professor Edgar Schein called it Humble Inquiry: “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” The coaching world has prized it forever, and it’s why many great leaders have adopted the mindset of “manager as coach.” It fosters genuine curiosity: You ask questions because you really want to hear someone else’s thoughts, not steer them to predetermined conclusions. Fortunately, this skill can be learned, and its impact spans the professional and personal realms.

Want to go deeper on asking great questions? Check out this Big Think Class featuring Angie McArthur, Natalie Nixon, Jonah Berger and more.

In many ways, the world isn’t built for it. We tend to reward the fast take, the strong opinion, the reply that wins the thread. Curiosity, in contrast, is slow. To ask a real question, you have to stop being the center of attention and cede the floor to someone else. Lauren just did it all day, as if it were obvious, but it was also a skill she worked to perfect. And because this is a skill, it means we can break it down into parts, and the parts can be practiced. Here are three to start with:

1. The best questions are short and sweet

Most of us, when we try to ask a good question, make it longer. We add context. We supply half the answer inside the question so the other person knows where we’re going. We say, “I’m wondering if maybe part of what’s happening here is that you feel like the team doesn’t fully—” and by the time we arrive at the question, we’ve removed curiosity and the person in front of us has visibly aged. Get to the point faster.

Lauren’s questions were almost rudely short. “What are you hoping I’ll say?” “And then what?” “What would you tell me?” “What’s changed?” A short question leaves the whole space open and hands the other person openness to fill. Long questions narrow the aperture piece by piece, often railroading someone toward the conclusion you want them to reach. Brevity refuses to play such games.

2. Ask the question. Then stop talking.

The first time Lauren asked me something hard, she asked it and then said nothing. Five seconds. Ten. That is an eternity. I could feel the silence like a physical pressure. She just waited. So I started blabbing to save us both, and eventually, my real answer surfaced. I was as surprised as anyone to discover it.

I exploit this tactic in my work standing in front of a workshop audience because people hate silence. Oh, they despise it. And in a 1:1 setting, that permission (and it is permission) is important because even if the answer is rushed, allowing someone to continue until they find the golden nugget underneath is a gift. When you don’t interrupt, you signal this is a space for you to explore, to find your own answers. Please, continue.

This is the part almost everyone gets wrong, and it’s why most “good questions” die. You can ask the perfect question, but if you rush to fill the pause, you let the other person off the hook with their first, most shallow answer. Depth requires time. The answer worth having is usually the second or third, and it only arrives if you tolerate the quiet. One of Lauren’s best skills (and something common across the best facilitators, coaches, and friends I encounter) is a refusal to save anyone from silence.

3. Ask what, not why

I used to think why? was the deep question. It has the shape of insight. But it tends to trigger defensiveness (it’s a weird thing of the human brain) sending the other person hunting for a justification. Why did you do that? is rarely a fun question to face. Lauren almost never asks me why, because if I’m asked why, my brain is clever enough to come up with an excuse or a reason that sounds good but tends not to be the true reason. “I bought it because it was on a once-in-a-lifetime sale” was really “it’s pretty, and I wanted it.” We don’t have clean access to the inner workings of our own motives.

In contrast, what questions are open enough to surface unexamined assumptions. “What made that feel true at the time?” “What do you want to do next?” What questions provide space and permission to examine the thinking underneath the hood, which is the only kind that ever changes anything.

If you’re skeptical of coaching (and you should be a little skeptical), remember all I’m asking you to buy here is the idea that a good question moves someone further than good advice. People are best persuaded by their own arguments, not yours. Telling someone what to do, how to be, or who to be does not work in the long run.

The clinical foundation of this in psychology is motivational interviewing. What predicts whether someone changes isn’t how good your argument was. It’s the balance of what they say out loud. Push people into voicing their reasons against change, and they dig in harder. It’s called “sustain talk,” and it’s one of the better predictors that someone stays put exactly in the same situation. Good questions tilt the balance the other way, toward the person building their own case for change, and meta-analyses of the method find that balance is what tracks with what people actually do.

There’s a sideways benefit too. Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues at Harvard find that people who ask more questions, especially follow-ups, are better liked and learn more, and that almost all of us badly under-ask. There is a difference between being interesting and being interested. People tend to favor those around them who are interested. Questions are your vehicle to that particular destination.

Two final things worth holding onto here.

Number one. When you find someone who asks you the real questions and lets silence sit, be they a coach, a friend, a boss, whoever it is... hold on to them. They are rarer than you think.

Number two. You can be this person. It is the most undervalued thing you can offer the people you lead and the people you love. They don’t need your answers. They are rarely asking for your take and your best impression of Stephen A Smith. Giving the people in your life the space to hear themselves think and the patience to let them choose what happens next is a gift. It costs you nothing but a willingness to ask and then shut up. Most people never pay that price.

Who in your life asks you short questions and gives you the space to answer? And if the answer is no one, how could you become that person for the people you lead and the ones you go home to?

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Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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The feedback landed in a first-month check-in at my job: “You’re great, but you can be hard to get hold of.” I didn’t know what to do with that. I was in the middle of getting my PhD, and I needed to find full-time work to raise funds for my studies. In contrast to the doctorate — which involved disappearing for long, quiet stretches to think hard about a single problem — this work seemed to center on how fast you answered a Slack message. I found this odd. Nobody who knows me would say that I’m a fast responder on any media: text, email, or call — partly thanks to my instinct to guard the hours when my brain is sharpest, spend them on the thing that matters most, and let the small stuff sit. Apparently, the currency at work, according to my manager, was different.

It took me years to understand that my manager and I were each half right, and that Cal Newport, an author and professor of computer science, had already mapped the misunderstanding.

Newport has a name for what my manager was really asking for: “pseudo-productivity,” which he describes as using “visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.” Knowledge work never inherited a clean measure of output, so we reached for the crudest one on the shelf, which is motion. Are you at your desk? Are you answering emails? Do you have the appearance of being focused, your calendar is full, and therefore the image of being important?

“It’s no longer you just see me in my office looking vaguely busy,” Newport says. “You can actually see every email I’m sending and how active I am in a Slack chat.” Responsiveness became the currency and the standard because it was a literally visible metric.

Want to go deeper on the key principles of slow productivity? Check out Cal Newport’s lesson for Big Think members on Big Think Classes.

In my PhD, I’d been insulated from that nonsense. At the start, I was handed a key to an office and told that they would see me four years later. Good luck. My output was a dissertation and a few papers, to be judged by the quality of the thinking held within. So I’d learned to spend my best hours on the hardest problem in front of me and check email whenever I surfaced for air. And depending on when you might have seen me during the day, it might have looked like nothing (naps were commonplace). But I learned the hard way that a good 30 minutes was worth four hours, and a good three hours could be worth days of middling focus.

The instinct turned out to be sound, and the research is on my team here. Every quick reply we make (text, email, Slack, Teams, etc.) is a context switch, moving from one task to another. It takes a while for the brain to fully focus on the new task or return to the original one, so these are not cost-free switches. Psychologist Sophie Leroy named the tax: “attention residue,” the slice of your mind still stuck on the last thing when you start the next, and it takes time for you to reach full attention again.

In his 2024 book Slow Productivity, Newport folds in a related idea from the researcher Linda Stone: “continuous partial attention,” the state where you are mostly on one task while checking Slack every few minutes.

“If you could look inside your skull,” Newport says, “what you see is a train wreck.” Stay reachable all day, and no single task ever gets your full capacity, which means almost all of us are living in a state of constant, unfocused attention.

Still, my manager was right about some things. Complete non-responsiveness, on its own, is not discipline. It’s just being hard to reach, and possibly being an ass. What the PhD never forced me to build, because I mostly worked alone, was the other half of the equation: a way for people to trust that the important things would still get picked up on handoffs.

Fortunately, Newport’s real argument is not “withdraw.” It is to “educate and replace.” You take the availability people have learned to lean on, and you swap it for a system they can lean on instead. The predictability matters for others to be able to trust you.

Two mechanisms do most of the work. The first is office hours: set windows, daily or every other day, where you are genuinely reachable. “Jump on the phone, jump in my office, jump on Zoom, we can figure this out in five minutes.” (My addition to this is to genuinely and consistently hold those boundaries. If you don’t respect them, no one else will.) The second is the docket-clearing meeting: a shared document where anything non-urgent gets parked, then worked through together a few times a week in alignment with the highest priorities for your boss and/or the team.

Together, these help you move away from the promise of “I’ll answer the second you ask” (sacrificing the important for the urgent) and toward “nothing you need will fall through the cracks.” That second promise is the one people actually want resolved.

So please, don’t detonate your inbox this week. This is a slow build over time. Pick a single channel and give it a structure other people can see. Post two office-hour windows, and when a “quick q” lands outside them, reply once with where it goes: “I am focused on X right now. Let’s take this at 2 tomorrow, or drop it on the team doc, and we’ll clear it Thursday.”

The first few times may feel difficult. That’s ok. It will be an ongoing navigation and negotiation with others, but if you stick with it, you can get things done on schedule, with your full attention instead of a fragment of it. Non-responsiveness protects your best work only when it comes with a visible promise that the important things still land. Without the system, you’re just hard to reach. With it, you’re exercising judgment about where your attention goes to do the most important work.

What could you make next week if your sharpest three hours belonged to the most important work instead of the false urgency of your inbox?

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Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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It’s dusk in the backyard, and I’m juggling a soccer ball, counting: 40, 41, 42. Then the ball clips the outside of my boot and skitters into the bushes. Time to start over. I could go inside and call this practice done. But I don’t. Because a voice in my head has decided that 42 is not a number a serious person stops at, and that stopping at all, ever, is the first soft symptom of becoming someone who loses.

I was maybe 14.

For most of high school and college, this inner monologue ran on a constant loop: harder, faster, better, more. Whether it was soccer, school, or working out, there was no quota it would ever sign off on. Not enough service hours. Not enough time in the gym. Not enough sprints, not enough free kicks bent at the top corner of the net, not enough A’s, not enough hard classes stacked on the hard classes I was already drowning in. I’d hit the target. And then the target would move.

It seemed to work. The voice opened doors, so I never questioned it. You don’t audit the thing that’s winning. And because I credited every good outcome to that perfectionist voice, it got to take a bow each time, whether or not it had done any of the actual work.

That’s the question I couldn’t answer for a long time: Did the achievement happen because of that voice, or in spite of it?

Inner voice vs. chatter

Ethan Kross runs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and he has spent much of his career on the thing in your head that talks. Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist, calls the useful version the inner voice: the ability to use language, silently, to think. This inner voice lets you rehearse a hard conversation before you have it. It keeps a phone number alive in your head while you find a pen. It’s the thing that says don’t you dare send that text a half-second before your thumb presses down.

And then there’s the other version that’s less helpful and less healthy. Kross calls it chatter: “the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing.” This kind of negative self-talk can create friction in your relationships because you’re ruminating on your problems instead of listening to others, and it may lead you to become more irritable or to displace your aggression.

The stress caused by chatter can also lead to negative physical health effects.

“What makes stress toxic is when it remains chronically elevated over time,” Kross says. “This is precisely what chatter does. We experience a stressor in our life, it then ends, but in our minds, our chatter perpetuates it. We keep thinking about that event over and over and over again. And that keeps that stress response active in ways that can predict things like cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation, and even cancer.”

Want to go deeper on how to manage the voice in your head? Check out Ethan Kross’s lesson for Big Think members on Big Think Classes.

Chatter, in case you could not tell, is a near, dear friend of mine. Your sharpest mental functions (focusing, planning, regulating how you feel) run on a limited supply of attention. When chatter sets in, you end up doing two things at once: the task in front of you and the running commentary of the pained voice narrating it. Kross describes it as jamming your executive functions with a “dual task.” It’s the same wiring that gives athletes the yips.

A working inner voice solves a problem and then lets you close the loop. Chatter, on the other hand, never lets the loop close. So a voice that generates a lot of output but never, not once, lets enough be enough is a drive that has slipped its leash. During high school and later in college, I mistook the constant refrain of “do better and more and do it now” to be my source of work ethic. But my achievements came from the work, not the beration. Chatter’s whole trick was to fuse the two so tightly I couldn’t tell them apart, so that the thought of dropping the lash felt like dropping the achievement. Lose the cruelty, lose the results. That was the implied threat. It was also a lie.

Turning down the chatter

You can’t out-argue chatter from the inside. You’re standing too close. Many of the tools in Kross’s “chatter toolkit” boil down to: step back far enough to see the voice as one voice instead of the only voice that speaks the unquestionable gospel truth.

I’ve written before about this tool: talking to yourself by name, in the second person, the way you’d talk to a friend who was running himself into the ground. Danny, what do you actually need to do here? It sounds fairly ridiculous. But temporarily shifting perspectives from ‘I am experiencing’ to ‘someone else is experiencing’ lowers the temperature and creates enough objectivity to take a clinical, calculating eye to the situation.

The above is a tactic, and the long-term strategy is to undercut the story underneath it. “Harder, faster, better, more” was a narrative I downloaded at some point and then never questioned whether or not it was true. I unwittingly welded my sense of self-worth with my achievements, and it took a lot of work to learn and then believe that I didn’t have to lash myself bloody to do good, hard, serious work. That I didn’t have to obey the voice casting me as Sisyphus, demanding I roll the boulder up the hill one more time to prove I was worthy of it.

I would love to tell you the chatter is gone for me. I really would. But chatter still shows up in my life, usually right before something that matters. It comes in whispering its old line about how this, finally, is the moment I’m exposed as someone who doesn’t do enough. The difference is that now I can hear it land and I can name it: there it is again. That half-second of recognition is the whole skill. It buys just enough distance to notice the chatter and decline to listen to its monologue. To quote Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Chatter, you are allowed to be a passenger in the vehicle of my life but “above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”

I’m still in the backyard some nights, counting. The difference is that now I can hear the counting for what it is. And some nights — not all, but some — I let myself stop at 42.

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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My phone buzzes late on a Tuesday. It’s a former colleague (let’s call him Steve) who’s been offered a role at a startup that feels like a better fit than his current job, but it’s a smaller paycheck, and there’s a risk the company won’t survive the next funding round. Steve’s been turning for weeks, driving himself, his wife, and his friends insane. Now, it’s my turn.

I talk through the spiral with him: Is his current steady paycheck worth the poor fit, and is that steady income the same as a “settled life”? What are the real motivations for staying or going? Imagine yourself down each path two years from now: Which one would you regret not doing? Steve goes quiet for a few moments, says “that helps,” and we hang up.

It’s nice to have been useful to a friend. But then I sit there in silence because I have a decision of my own that’s been lingering for a month, a yes-or-no almost structurally identical to his, and I’ve been spiraling anywhere but up for a while. Why can’t I help myself in the way I just helped Steve?

Self-distancing

We have all experienced some version of this, where the advice we give to our friends is precise, wise, and targeted. We can see it all so clearly. For Steve, when the decision was his and not mine, I reasoned from a distance, weighed the trade-offs, and held up two futures side by side for him to choose between. I was a strategist looking at a problem, concerned and caring for my friend, but cold and calculated about the situation.

When the decision is mine, however, I’m not looking at a problem. I’m trapped inside one. It’s my identity, my fear, my loss, all swirling together to lay out what this will inevitably (and negatively) cost me and the ensuing wreckage I will need to clean up. It is this closeness that narrows the exact faculties good judgment is built from: the ability to see multiple perspectives, a comfort with uncertainty, and the humility to hold that I might be wrong. But the closer we are, the harder it becomes to access those abilities.

Want to go deeper on how to manage the voice in your head? Check out Ethan Kross’s lesson for Big Think members on Big Think Classes.

Adam Smith, economist and philosopher, saw the mechanism in 1759. We can only judge our own conduct, he wrote, by viewing it as “the impartial spectator” would, and yet we “are apt to be most partial when it is of most importance that [we] should be otherwise.”

If you’ve ever seen a relationship that you know is destined for failure, you possess access to this good judgment. And if you’ve ever been trapped in a bad relationship, then you know the struggle of the downward spiral.

One of the ways we can improve our lives is to step into that cool, indifferent spectator for our most important decisions more often, before we take action, not just after the wreckage. Good judgment and wisdom are situational, not a permanent peak state. Depending on where you stand and where you sit, the switch flips off and on.

Solomon’s Paradox

The psychologist Igor Grossmann gave this a name: Solomon’s Paradox, a reference to the ancient King Solomon of Israel, famed for his wisdom. People would visit Solomon from all over to have the wise king settle their disputes. Once, two women both claimed to be the mother of a child. King Solomon’s solution: “Cut the baby in half! That way, each of you can have part of him.”

One woman was fine with that. The other wasn’t, saying, “Give him to her. Just don’t kill him,” revealing herself to be the true mother. Solomon’s wisdom cut to the heart of the matter.

However, in Solomon’s own house, not all was well. Jonny Thomson, who runs Big Think’s Mini Philosophy column, has a great piece about this paradox, nailing a key point:

“In his own life, he was notoriously shambolic. His poor parenting gave rise to one of the cruelest tyrants in the Bible, his son, Rehoboam, who turned Judah into a pit of abomination and sin. Solomon had many pagan wives and concubines, with a likely host of illegitimate children. He was profligate and extravagant, and gave little thought to the temperate, sensible life. For all his sagacity when it came to others’ affairs, Solomon was woefully myopic when it came to his own.”

In the modern day, Grossmann and his colleague Ethan Kross took that paradox into the lab and found two things. One, people genuinely reason better about others’ problems than their own. And two, when people are prompted to reason about their own dilemma in the third person, the quality of their thinking rises to meet how they’d reason about a stranger.

So, helping yourself often means learning to temporarily reframe the problem such that you’re not the protagonist. What you need is to borrow distance on purpose to examine the situation, the players, and the moves with objectivity.

The next time a decision of yours has been circling longer than it should, write it down as though it belongs to someone else. Give that person a name. Describe their situation in the third person: Sarah has been offered a role that fits her better and pays less. Now advise Sarah. Out loud, or on the page, in the voice you’d actually use with a colleague you respect. Then read it back to yourself as instructions. It’s a move I use in my own life and now run with both coaching clients and executives who’ve been circling the same decision for months, and there is palpable relief on their faces when the answer arrives after we’ve whiteboarded the problem as if it belonged to someone else.

This exercise will feel weird at first. Talking about yourself in the third person is a certifiably insane thing to do in most circumstances. But done well, this exercise can help you step back to consider what Sarah needs. The situation becomes trapped on a literal or metaphorical page, which you may find easier to traverse than the infinite, landmine-ridden rabbit holes of our minds. Self-distance makes this possible.

After that Tuesday call, I wrote my own decision out as if it were a stranger’s. I gave this person a name: Nebuchadnezzar. And I gave some advice to old Nebby.

The answer I hadn’t reached in a month arrived soon after. It was remarkably simple, but I’d been standing too close to hear it. Incredible what a little distance can offer.

What decision are you carrying that you’d have already solved if it belonged to someone else?

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Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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I have what is affectionately know as a “baby face,” which is another way of saying I get asked about student discounts more often than seems statistically likely. It’s an inconvenient feature to have as a facilitator of leadership development, where much of my job involves walking into a conference room with a long table, too many chairs, and silence from a group of important people who haven’t yet decided whether this will be worth it.

I was, for example, recently presenting to a group of senior administrators within a major hospital system. Before we started, they asked: Why are we spending two hours with this person?

Fair question. One answer could center on my résumé: a PhD in behavioral science and years working with C-suite executives at Boeing, Pfizer, Anheuser-Busch, and FEMA. But experience alone doesn’t always settle a room like that.

Executive presence

It often takes something called executive presence. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, whose research tracked 4,000 professionals and 300 senior leaders over more than a decade, breaks executive presence into three main components: gravitas (the depth of your knowledge and conviction), communication (your ability to get that depth across), and how you present yourself. The three matter, but not equally: Gravitas accounts for roughly two-thirds of what experienced people read as executive presence, according to the research.

Hewlett identifies the core of gravitas as grace under fire: “keeping your poise, your calm, your wits about you when the going is rough,” as she told Big Think. That requires performance, though not in a phony sense. Every leader who has walked into a difficult room with uncertainty in their chest and delivered with conviction has performed, at least a little. The problems arise when that performance isn’t backed by a genuine conviction that you have something useful to say.

Most people, including leaders at the tops of their organizations, experience imposter syndrome at some point. But Carla Harris, a Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley, told Big Think that one way to quell those anxieties is to remind yourself that “if you’ve made it into that room, you know what you’re supposed to know.” She suggests one way to boost confidence is to ensure you know what you want to say, and that you understand your subject matter inside and out.

As far as how you present it, Hewlett’s research found that professionals want to hear leaders speak compellingly, concisely, and extemporaneously. “In other words, lose the security blankets, endless notes, checklists, hugely long PowerPoints; all of this gets in our way,” she told Big Think.

Go through what you know

So how do you find that kind of confidence and authority when you’re standing in a room full of people who you think might be questioning why you’re there? Ultimately, I think it’s arriving at the conviction that you have something genuinely useful to share and to say for the people in front of you.

Before I walk into a room where I look like I might be someone’s intern, I go through what I know. The times with specific people in specific rooms where I’ve made a difference. A nurse moving into hospital administration who realized everything she already knew about tending to people under pressure was exactly what the role demanded. The stories from the retired generals in a breakout room. I remember where the knowledge came from, and I settle into what I’m actually there for: these are people who want to get better at something. Regardless of age, position, and experience, most people are looking for some kind of improvement. And I have learned things that might help with that important goal. That’s the whole transaction. And that can be enough for me to relax and for them to learn.

I still walk into rooms where I look like someone’s child they brought alongside to watch them at work. But I have spent enough time at the front of enough rooms to know that the leaders who earn a room do it by arriving at something internally before they try to signal it to the audience.

In that hospital conference room, the shift happened about twelve minutes in. I stopped trying to convince the room that I belonged in front of it. I just started teaching what I knew to people who wanted to learn it.

Before you walk in, get clear on what you actually have to offer and for whom. The room doesn’t need settling when that’s clear.

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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Lois knew by March. Her direct report, Derek, was missing deadlines consistently enough that she was quietly routing work around him. She told herself she was being patient, that he was still getting up to speed, and that she’d bring it up after the next project wrapped. That never happened.

Lois has been a manager for five years, and nobody ever warned her about how hard it can be to tell her people the truth. She wants to be the good boss — the one people say good things about. Which means she absorbs the friction and adjusts around him. She gives vague encouragement in their one-on-ones, but ultimately she takes on more work to fix his errors, saving the real assessment for conversations with her own manager. Silence becomes the default, and by December, she’s doing his job and hers. Derek has no idea.

In ten years of coaching leaders, I’ve never met someone who withheld feedback because they didn’t care. It’s almost always the opposite.

The pattern

Everyone knows what it feels like to sit across from someone with something hard to say. Those memories are partly why so many of us avoid tough conversations. Sheila Heen, a negotiation expert and professor at Harvard Law School, told Big Think that receiving feedback puts two core human needs in direct conflict.

“Human beings are wired to learn and grow,” and feedback helps us do that, she said, adding that research consistently shows we tend to be happier and more satisfied when we can see ourselves getting better at something. “But alongside that lies this second core human need, which is the need to be accepted and respected and loved just the way we are now. And the very fact of the feedback suggests that how we are now is not quite a-okay.”

That explains why smart, caring leaders choose silence. I recognize this in leaders I work with who genuinely love their people. That’s what makes it hard. But to organizational psychologist Adam Grant, withholding feedback amounts to choosing your own comfort over someone else’s growth.

Want to go deeper on how to give effective feedback? Check out Adam Grant’s lesson for Big Think members on Big Think Classes.

The reframe

Grant added, “If you’re worried about hurting their feelings, it’s a sign that you haven’t earned their trust. In healthy relationships, honesty is an expression of care.”

Timing is part of that honesty.

“A lot of leaders wait until performance reviews, and that’s when they deliver the unvarnished truth,” Grant said in Big Think Class on leadership. “That comes as a surprise to their direct reports, who for the last six months thought everything was fine. If you deliver a message during a performance review that comes as a surprise to anybody on your team, [...] you have failed to give the feedback in real time so that they can learn from it, adapt, and make an effort at improving.”

If left unchecked, withholding feedback produces a team that learns — slowly and without anyone deciding it — that certain things don’t get said out loud.

From our good intentions and desire for comfort, people end up being managed around, evaluated privately, and denied the one thing that could actually help them and their long-term growth. That might feel protective, but it isn’t.

The practice

Another reason leaders stay silent is that they don’t trust themselves to give feedback well. They fear damaging the relationship, saying the wrong thing, making it worse. In my work, I’ve found the best way to address those concerns (or excuses) is the SBI² framework: Situation, Behavior, Impact, Inquiry. I teach this framework weekly, and I use it daily in all aspects of my life, personal and professional. It helps turn feedback from a “you vs. me” into an “us vs. the problem.”

Research reviewed in a meta-analysis by Kluger and DeNisi covering feedback studies found one consistent pattern: Feedback becomes less effective the moment it moves from specific behaviors and toward the person — their character, their competence, their worth. SBI² keeps everything anchored to observable behavior, which is the only thing either party can act on.

1. Situation: Name the specific context. Using vague terms like “always” or “lately” tends to invite defensiveness (it’s easy for the receiver to wave it off). Meanwhile, “In Tuesday’s client call” describes the event with precision.

2. Behavior: Describe only what a camera would have captured — no interpretation, no motive-reading. “You interrupted me while I was presenting the budget,” rather than “you were dismissive.”

3. Impact: Share the actual effect on you, on others, on the work. “I felt undermined in front of the client,” or “three people came to me afterward.”

4. Inquiry has two parts: First, invite their perspective before drawing conclusions. Ask, “What was going on for you?” Most behavior that lands badly wasn’t intended badly. Asking this question turns a feedback delivery into a conversation, and often surfaces information from the other person’s perspective (e.g., a sick child, unavoidable traffic, a family member’s severe diagnosis) that can change the picture entirely.
   
   Second: “What should we do about this now?” This shifts the conversation from litigating the past to “here’s what we’re solving together.” It gives the other person agency and co-ownership of the solution.

What’s next

When my old boss and I would conduct workshops, executive sessions, or presentations, we would debrief after each one. The two of us worked through what landed, what didn’t, and what we’d each do differently. We agreed early on that this was best for the client and our relationship. Over time, it meant I knew where I stood and he knew where he stood. When something harder needed to be said, and it often did, we could have those conversations because the channel was already open and our feedback muscle was already built.

Feedback culture, done well, keeps hard conversations small because they happen early and often. It means building a culture where we say the thing, which is how we learn and how we ultimately get better.

If you’re managing someone right now and you’ve been routing work around a conversation you haven’t had, pick one thing: one situation, behavior, or impact. Say it this week. Make it positive feedback if you’re looking for an easier onramp. But see what happens when you ask what was going on for them.

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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In 2013, the renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson told Big Think a story about a man who was perhaps the unluckiest farmer in Australia. For generations, the man’s family had farmed the same land, scratching out a living from soil that gave just enough back. Then the rains failed one year too often. The family abandoned the farm and moved to Perth.

Years later, near the end of his father’s life, the man suggested they visit their old place one last time. They drove for hours. Pulling up, the dirt track they remembered was now a paved road. The old farmhouse sat surrounded by buildings, trucks, and cranes. A sign read: “The Western Australian Nickel Company.” A government-commissioned geological survey had discovered a huge seam of nickel running 18 inches below the topsoil. It was worth millions.

The son looked at his father, expecting shock.

“[The father] just burst out laughing,” Robinson said, “because he realized they had spent years, generations, picking out this thin living from this farm, and right beneath the surface there was the treasure trove that would have, you know, set them up for life if they’d had — if they had only dug down a bit.”

What’s possible if you dig deeper? What capacities are you walking over every day because you’ve never done the excavation?

“Just like the earth, it seems to me, human resources are often buried deep beneath the surface,” Robinson told Big Think. “You can spend your whole life completely oblivious to some talent you may have because the opportunity never showed up for you to discover your resolve to develop it.”

Want to go deeper on the art of self-actualization at work? Check out Sir Ken Robinson’s lesson for Big Think members on Big Think Classes.

Robinson describes finding your element as exploring two territories simultaneously. The inner world contains your private consciousness, your aptitudes, and the values and interests that guide your choices. The outer world presents opportunities to test these out and reveal new aspects of yourself.

Your inner landscape filters every opportunity, choice, and possibility. If you don’t develop this inner sense, you chase what looks good because you have not developed the capacity to recognize what feels good. Writer Anais Nin captured this when she wrote, “I don’t see the world as it is. I see it as I am.”

Most people spend their energy exclusively on outer exploration. I did, and it’s still easy for me to slip into the habit. It feels productive to apply for jobs, take courses, switch industries, and move cities. Still, none of this addresses the challenge of discovering what we are actually looking for.

I think of one of my dearest friends, Jake, who pursued engineering in college. He hated it but succeeded in his studies anyway, slowly learning to tune out his internal response. The system rewarded the override of his own emotions to “fit in,” not greater attunement to the truth of his inner world. And if he had kept going to graduation, he would have mastered suppressing the very feedback that could guide him toward work that he would love. Fortunately, he realized the path he was on, and he left his degree. It was not for him, and he is much happier and much more fulfilled as a result. In his journey, Jake had to find an alternative path because the system didn’t ask those questions.

How many people never get off the track, staying in a world and a job that requires them to shut off from everything inside of them? I worry that too many of us know people like that, and that too many of us have been (or are still) those people.

The practice

Instead of mindlessly pursuing external opportunities, the cycle that I’ve found actually works looks like this: Test something, listen to what happens inside you, reflect on what got revealed, and test again with new information. It is the ‘street version’ of the scientific method and running experiments.

Most people evaluate their work in binary terms: good job or bad job, love it or hate it. But what if you broke a role into its actual components? Instead of “I hate my job,” you might notice: I hate the reporting structure, love the problem-solving, and feel neutral about the team dynamics. Instead of “I should quit,” you might ask: Which pieces energize me? Which drain me? What would a role look like that amplified the first and minimized the second?

For designer Ayse Birsel, this kind of deconstruction requires you to hear signals you’ve trained yourself to ignore. To start creating more sensitive hearing, Birsel asks people to start by drawing your life as a circle. Who takes your time? What fills your days? Now divide that circle into four quadrants: emotion, physical, intellect, and spirit. Where do your activities cluster? What patterns emerge? What’s missing entirely? What’s overrepresented to the point of crowding out everything else?

The patterns may reveal things you haven’t consciously processed. Maybe all your energy goes to intellectual work while the physical and spiritual quadrants sit empty. Maybe you’re emotionally drained because nothing in your week replenishes that capacity. The map shows you where the imbalance lives.

Now, when you encounter external opportunities in the world, you have something specific to evaluate them against. Does this role let me use these aptitudes? Does this organization’s purpose align with these values? Does this path serve these priorities?

With what you’ve learned, your job is to create one small test. It can be tiny. Pick an opportunity to use a strong aptitude or explore a suspected line of passion for you. There is no failing here; our job is just to collect data. After the test, reflect on what got revealed. What energized you? What drained you? What surprised you? Use that information for the next test. Your radar gets more sensitive. What you’re looking for becomes clearer because you’ve built the capacity to recognize it when it appears.

What’s next

Work-life integration happens when inner excavation meets the outer opportunity you find yourself in. This requires careful attention to what a particular kind of work reveals about what you’re capable of and what you value. But once you’ve done that work, the outer exploration becomes exponentially more productive because you’re drawing on a ‘clean’ fuel source of your inner inspiration, strengths, values, and essence.

The excavation work is learning to dig repeatedly through your experiments, building capacity to recognize signal you’ve been trained to ignore, and calibrating your radar to tell the difference between what looks good and what feels true.

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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Sunday evening. I’m staring at my to-do list for the week ahead, and that familiar weight settles into my chest. There’s the newsletter draft I need to finish. The client presentation to revise. Three strategy documents waiting for review. Dozens of unread emails.

My first thought: “I’m already behind.”

My second thought: “Have I ever truly felt on top of things?”

That question took me by surprise. A lot of these tasks are things I chose. There’s work I care about, client deliveries I find meaningful, and working with colleagues I care about. Not to mention side projects, such as writing articles like this. These are all, in theory, things I like. So why does it feel like I’m drowning in obligation?

Author Oliver Burkeman, who wrote the bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, might say it’s because of my belief that it’s ever possible to get on top of things in the first place.

“There will always be too much to do,” he told Big Think. “That’s why I think we need a way of understanding and thinking about work and productivity that does not treat getting on top of everything as the goal.”

The pattern

In my desperation to wrangle my PhD, I read every book under the Sun about productivity. And while I did find practices and principles that helped (thank you, Pomodoro Technique), I also deeply embedded a pernicious and destructive idea about productivity: that all of us start each day underwater.

In my mind, and the minds of many insecure overachievers, there’s some invisible ledger at the desk of some cosmic judge tracking what we owe the world — what Burkeman calls a sense of “productivity debt.” Everything we accomplish is just paying down the debt. Finish the presentation? Great. You’re slightly less behind. Clear 50 emails? Wonderful. Only 200 more, and you might deserve to relax.

“I just need to get caught up,” you tell yourself. “Once I clear the deck, then I can focus on what matters.”

But the to-do list is never empty. You can’t get on top of an infinite pile of possible things to do. As author Oliver Burkeman points out, “If you dedicate your life to clearing the decks, the decks will just refill as fast as you can clear them.”

Want to go deeper on creating meaning at work? Check out Oliver Burkeman’s class on productivity for mortals on Big Think Classes. He breaks down a more grounded path to productivity that actually works for real, imperfect people.

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Your mind can categorize your to-do list as either paying down debt or building credit. When you frame work as debt, every task is something to trudge through. You feel relief when things get done, but you might not be energized by it. Frame the same task as credit-building — as a vote for working towards something or someone you care about — and it pulls you forward. The work feels different because what it means to you is different.

The reframe

Here’s Burkeman’s radical suggestion: You don’t owe the world anything to justify your existence. You start each day at zero balance, and everything you do after that is credit, building towards something you choose.

When I start my day thinking “I’m behind,” every task becomes evidence of my inadequacy. When I start at zero, every task becomes a choice I’m making to build something.

The done list becomes more relevant than the to-do list. Made coffee? Credit. Wrote 200 words? Credit. Had that hard conversation with a client? Absolutely credit. Piece by piece, brick by brick, action by action, you’re building a portfolio of choices that serve who you want to become.

Once you shift from debt to credit, you can start asking a different question about every task and problem that shows up: “How can this serve me?”

This becomes a creative practice of reinterpreting what happens in ways that serve you and what you care about.

Your to-do list becomes a menu of ways to serve your values, your mission, your identity. You’re choosing what serves you and what you care about, and problems and challenges are unavoidable along that journey. A life without them would not be easy; it would be meaningless.

The practice

Three tools to shift from debt to credit:

Start your “done” list

At the end of each day, write down what you accomplished. Not what’s left. What you actually did.

Burkeman recommends that three to four hours of deep, focused work is a great standard for a day, not 10 hours of scattered task-switching.

“Alex Pang details a lot of this in his book Rest, where [many great artists, scientists, and thinkers], to an astonishingly uniform degree, dedicate about three or four hours a day, no more, to the core work of their lives that requires sort of deep thought, quiet, and focus and reflection. There’s also lots of evidence to suggest that you actually are going to make more progress on focused work if you constrain it in this way.”

If you need to start smaller, begin with 25 minutes and work your way up by five-minute increments every other week. That’s how I survived my PhD.

Your modest menu

Every morning, answer this: “If I just did these few things aligned with who I want to be, today would be good. So what do I need to focus on today?”

In other words, what are you voting for with your time and energy? Choose the handful of items that matter today. For me, I have 10 minutes of journaling, 10 minutes of reading, 20 minutes of working out, 50 minutes of deep work on my personal projects, and 8,500 steps. I don’t hit all of them every day, but I try not to end days on “zero,” and the days I hit all of them are consistently great days.

Ask “How can this serve me?”

When problems arise, pause and ask: How can this obstacle serve who I’m becoming?

Reinterpret the interruption as building. Choose to act from one aspect of your values, character, essence, or virtues. Is it a chance to be creative? To be kind? To practice setting boundaries? To build strength? To stay curious?

As the writer Richie Norton puts it: “Decide who you want to be, then act from that identity immediately.” By doing so, you’re transforming the problem into something that serves a higher good, either for yourself or for others, acting and building toward what you care about.

What’s next

This morning, I started my day at zero balance. I meditated (while I was distracted for the majority of it, that’s still a credit). Wrote for 25 minutes (that’s a credit). Sent an email to a student at my old college struggling with the decision to do a PhD or not.

None of that felt like paying down a debt. Those actions built toward the person I’m choosing to become: someone who writes consistently, who shows up for people, who protects time for what matters.

Tomorrow, the work will still be there. Unfortunately for me, the problems will keep arriving. The to-do list will regenerate, reshape, and reform. But I won’t start underwater, already drowning before the day even begins. I start at zero. And everything I choose to do will be building credit toward the person I am, the person I hope to become, and the people and causes I care about.

What’s one thing on your to-do list today that you’re choosing because it serves who you’re becoming?

Related Class

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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4:47 p.m. Slack notification. “Hey, the client wants to see the deck reformatted first thing tomorrow morning. Can you turn this around before you log off?“

You had dinner plans that you’ll now have to skip, but that’s not really the problem. You agreed to work hard when you took this job. You’ve pulled late nights before, and you’ll do it again.

The problem is that you know — and your project lead knows — the client doesn’t actually need this. It’s cosmetic: a different color scheme, bullet points instead of paragraphs. Your lead just won’t have the hard conversation to say, “This can wait until Monday.”

So they’re passing their unwillingness to have a hard conversation down to you. You’ll do it. But something shifts. The work you loved yesterday suddenly feels hollow — not because it got harder, but because it became meaningless. Sound familiar?

THE PATTERN

This is the destruction of meaning in real time. It’s everywhere, and it sucks:

• The return-to-office (RTO) policy that lands via company-wide email with no explanation. Just “we’ve decided” and a date. Your team spent two years proving they could deliver remotely, and now you’re commuting three hours a day because...why, exactly?

• The layoffs with no context. Names disappear from Slack overnight. Your colleague of five years — gone by 5 p.m. Monday. Was it performance? Budget cuts? Nobody knows. So the silence gets filled with fear and guesses. Top performers start quietly interviewing elsewhere. Your entry-level folks start to wonder whether loyalty even matters. And everyone spends more time managing anxiety than doing their jobs.

• The project lead who keeps asking for unnecessary client revisions because they won’t set boundaries. You stop volunteering for the interesting projects because you know what comes with them: a leader who won’t protect your time.

What all of these have in common is leadership cowardice — the unwillingness to do the hard work of explaining, protecting, or saying “no.” When leaders avoid discomfort, they drag people down. From purpose to confusion. From confidence to anxiety. And from ownership to apathy.

THE REFRAME

That downward slide is what author and entrepreneur Chip Conley calls “dragging people down the pyramid” of self-actualization, a concept inspired by the “hierarchy of needs” framework from psychologist Abraham Maslow.

Leadership cowardice blocks our connection to that top level — the why.

In Conley’s pyramid, the base is survival: security, money, the basics. The middle level is success: recognition, achievement. And the top is transformation, the sense that your work actually matters. Getting there requires a solid foundation.

People can’t connect with their purpose if they’re worried about just getting through the week. That unexplained RTO knocks people down from “I’m building something that matters” to “Do I even have a job I can sustain?” The unexplained layoffs put everyone back in survival mode, rushing to update their LinkedIn and frantically start taking recruiter calls.

All that uncertainty does more than pull us away from meaning. Stress lights up the brain’s threat circuits in the amygdala and quiets the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for reasoning and self-control. The result: emotion takes the wheel, and logic rides in the back seat.

It’s surprisingly easy for people to drop down to those reactive levels. That’s why a leader’s job is to secure the bottom of the pyramid first: to create safety and explain the “why” so clearly that people can return to the work they love.

Want to go deeper on creating meaning at work? Check out Chip Conley’s class on emotional wisdom and employee motivation on Big Think Classes. He breaks down the full pyramid and explains how to help your people move from job to calling.

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Leaders don’t have to create meaning. They just have to stop getting in its way.

What leaders are responsible for is having difficult conversations, setting boundaries, explaining their decisions, and protecting their people’s time and energy from meaningless suffering. These are the hard responsibilities of being a leader, not just a manager. It is an inherent and moral obligation of being in charge of others, part of a sacred trust.

When leaders don’t do those things, they’re asking people to suffer meaninglessly because they won’t do their job.

THE PRACTICE

Two tools to stop destroying meaning:

Tool #1: Commander’s intent

Before any ask or announcement, answer these two questions:

• Why does this matter?

• Where does it fit in the larger picture?

This is borrowed from military leadership. Commanders in the special forces are not taught to simply issue orders; that’d rob their teams of the initiative and ownership that’s essential to rapidly changing, high-stakes environments. Commanders are taught to explain why the mission matters and how it connects to the broader objective so that everyone has a sense of the bigger picture. It helps the work make sense.

If you can’t answer these questions clearly for yourself, you’re not ready to ask anything of anybody.

Tool #2: The post-announcement check

Before any major decision lands, run through four questions:

1. How do I want people to feel after hearing this?

2. What do they need to hear to access that feeling?

3. What obstacles or worries will block them from getting there?

4. Am I willing to protect this “why” if challenged by stakeholders, clients, or executives?

That last question is the killer — if you’re not willing to protect the meaning, you’re just creating meaningless work.

Both tools require the same thing: leadership courage. The willingness to have hard conversations. To explain yourself even when it’s uncomfortable. To say “no.”

This week, before I ask my team for anything, I’m going to make sure I can answer the question, “Why does this matter?” If I can’t, I’m not ready to ask.

What’s one ask you’re making right now that you need to explain better?

Related Class

What leadership decision destroyed meaning for you?

Hit reply — I read every response.

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.

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Three years into a consulting career that looked successful on paper, I was staring out a plane window at nothing in particular, asking, What is this actually for?

Alabama on Tuesday. Ohio on Thursday. Good firm with good people to work with, meaningful and intellectually stimulating work, satisfied and not-overly-obnoxious clients. By all measures, things were going well. And yet, I was profoundly unsatisfied.

It wasn’t the only time I’ve felt that. Whether it was securing a fully funded scholarship for my PhD or landing my dream job, I just could not find sustained satisfaction. The signs pointed back to me and what I was valuing in those situations. I knew what the next step for my career was, but none of it felt meaningful. As a behavioral scientist, I started asking questions and running experiments to see if I could change it. I eventually found that I could.

That’s what this newsletter is about: understanding what’s happening beneath the surface in moments like that, and practical things you can try the next time you’re in one.

In my day job, I design leadership programs, facilitate leadership development with high-performing teams, and coach executives at Fortune 100 companies. Over the past year, I’ve also been focusing on writing, both on Substack and on Big Think, interviewing thinkers like poker player and decision scientist Annie Duke, behavioral scientist Arthur Brooks, and social psychologist Emily Balcetis.

Whether interviewing someone for an article or coaching executives, one question I often come back to is What is this for? It’s deceptively confronting. And it’s the entry point for almost every meaningful change I’ve seen in leadership, in my own life, and in the executives and teams I’ve spent the past decade working with. Most people hear that question and wait — maybe until it forces something: a burnout, a resignation, or a promotion that feels like a finish line, if only for a moment.

You don’t have to wait that long.

THE REFRAME

Finding an honest answer to What is this for? takes wisdom, something we spend our whole lives earning, often in humbling ways. Accumulating knowledge, skills, and credentials does not guarantee you’ll make wise decisions. Knowledge is what you’ve learned; wisdom is what you’ve extracted from that knowledge: patterns you can name, biases you can catch, predictions you can make, and the judgment to know how to act in the crazy situations you find yourself in.

Wisdom in professional life can show up in four different ways. Almost all of us are severely underdeveloped in at least one.

There’s knowing what actually matters to you: the values and priorities underneath the goals you’re pursuing. That kind of clarity usually requires slowing down in ways that can feel uncomfortable, and doing the self-examination to know which goals are genuine and which are status games you’ve drifted into without quite realizing it.

There’s the ability to see how your own thinking gets distorted under pressure: The sunk costs you protect. The confirmation bias shaping how you read your team. The emotional reactivity that narrows your thinking at exactly the moment it needs to be at its broadest and most creative. (A leader I coach once described his communication style under pressure as “direct.” His team, on the other hand, described it as “being an ass.” Both could be true, but you can’t lead well from patterns you can’t see.)

There’s understanding how your patterns land on other people. You can be reasonably self-aware, values-aligned, and a strong decision-maker in isolation, and still be a destructive leader if you don’t understand how your presence ripples outward and affects others.

And there’s judgment — knowing when to act, when to wait, and what action actually fits the situation. This is the hardest to teach and the easiest to overlook.

In my day job, I work with people who are, by every measurable standard, at the top of their game. Most of what the industry offers them is more knowledge: better research, sharper models, cleaner frameworks. Those matter and they can help. But Work Wise is interested in a harder question: who you’re becoming through the choices you make at work, and how to make more of those choices aligned with the wisdom of who you already are and who you want to be going forward.

THE PRACTICE

Each newsletter starts with a moment that didn’t go well — usually something from my week or a client’s. From there, we’ll look at behavioral mechanisms that might help explain what happened, borrow a reframe from a field that has something useful to say about it (military strategy, evolutionary biology, philosophy, cognitive science, etc.), and then end with something practical — something you can try in your next meeting, your next difficult conversation, your next moment of deciding whether to say the thing. The tools here are tested in real organizational contexts, in Fortune 100 companies, in leadership teams navigating genuine complexity, and in my own life, where I try to apply them before I write about them.

THE REAL WORK

The question What is this for? eventually got me off the road and out of that particular job. What came out of that examination shaped everything I now do: the leadership programs I design, the executives I coach, the friends I talk through these questions with at dinner (and will now also have those conversations here, every week).

The work I care most about is helping people who are good at their jobs 1) get better at them and 2) get clearer about what those jobs are actually for. So, if you want to get better at the parts of work no one formally teaches you, you’re in the right place.

Work Wise lands in your inbox every week. Let’s get to work.

Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.