Day 1: When Answers Are Infinite, Relationships Matter More

Eight years ago, I thought I knew what I was doing. I stepped up, focused, and delivered a reverse punch into a piece of pine.

I felt a twang.

I broke my pinky metacarpal.

Ashamed and embarrassed, I wondered if I should abandon my martial arts fantasy.

What was I doing wrong? I did the technique. Why didn’t it break?

I stayed. But I changed how I practiced. I stopped chasing the outcome and started paying attention to my relationship with the movement itself.

Five years later, I tested for my black belt. This time, it was a concrete slab. I was scared, because there’s no way to know if your new way of thinking works until the moment you have to use it.

For months, I rehearsed the feeling in my body as I fell asleep. Alignment. Timing. Commitment. The relationship.

When the concrete broke, I took a mental snapshot of how my body felt. It worked. I had learned to relate to sensation, timing, and balance, not just technique.

That moment mattered because I wanted proof. Proof that this was not just a nice idea, but a real practice that produces results.

The Leadership Shift

Leadership offers the same opportunity.

When people step into leadership roles, many can feel this truth in their bones. Then the machine kicks in. Pressure, metrics, speed.

Control starts to matter more than connection. Clarity gets fetishized because it feels safe, even when it’s not. Performance quietly outranks relationship.

And yet, your relationship to the work shapes everything. The company. The product. The users. The team. And you.

In the age of AI, this matters even more.

When ideas are instantly accessible, contextualized, and executable, leadership is no longer about pressing the right button. It is about pausing long enough to ask a different question:

Does this decision improve the relationship, maintain it, or does it erode it?

Without that pause, you get short-term gains and long-term fragility. To become one of the greats, you need a deeper connection to what you believe, so you can think fast and talk smart, to borrow Matt Abrahams’ phrase.

1. Your Relationship to Ideas

Pick any word you use regularly as a leader. Efficiency. Innovation. Accountability. Culture. Authenticity.

Most leaders treat these words like keys. Say the right one, and the door should open.

Great leaders ask a different question: What is my relationship to this idea?

• Do I feel energized by it or constrained by it?

• Confident living it or defensive when challenged on it?

• Aligned with it or quietly at odds with it?

If you keep saying “be authentic” but feel guarded every time you try, your relationship to authenticity is strained. People can hear that strain.

You cannot lead others toward an idea you are currently fighting, let alone one you have not embodied. Otherwise, it becomes word soup, lip service, or performance.

Connection starts with honesty about the quality of that tether.

2. Your Audience’s Relationship to Ideas

Leadership communication is a conversation. Not a monologue.

To lead in stride means moving with people, not assuming they experience your words the same way you do.

If you talk about efficiency, but your team associates that word with layoffs or burnout, you are not connecting. You are colliding.

Credible leaders do not force alignment. They create space where multiple relationships to the same idea can exist long enough to evolve. And in doing so, assumptions are brought to the surface and handled appropriately.

This is not about softening the message. It is about respecting how meaning is actually negotiated.

3. The Role of the Medium

Ideas do not move on their own. They move through mediums.

Meetings. Slides. Slack. Email. Video. AI-generated text.

Technology shapes the relationship between you, your audience, and the idea. It can amplify meaning or quietly distort it.

Ask yourself: Does this medium preserve the nuance of the idea, or flatten it?

Giving critical feedback over Slack is not neutral. The same words land differently depending on how they are carried.

Leaders must account for this.

What’s Next

Stop asking, “Do I understand it?”

Start asking, “What is the quality of my relationship to it, and what relationship am I creating when I say it?”

Tomorrow, Day 2, we’ll talk about how to lead in a way that inspires people to connect ideas, people, and technology, because together we can achieve more.