Inspired by my Kenyan safari, “Field Notes” are my observations from the field where my clients and I work – coaching sessions. Each field note is drawn from actual client sessions and give an insight to the personal evolution of my clients.
Location: The ELI Debrief with a potential client.
Observation: A founder built a firm on vision. His stress data says the vision disappears exactly when his team needs it most.
As part of my process, I conduct an Energy Leadership Index assessment and debrief with anyone who wants to work with me. Recently, I did so with the founder and managing partner of an EU-based law firm. On paper, her normal profile was strong. In the room, the stress data told a different story entirely.
Here’s what I saw in the field.
1. The Number That Should Reassure You, and Doesn’t
Under normal conditions, this founder’s energy was exactly what you’d want from a leader designing a firm’s future. Real presence at Level 4: the caregiver, the one who wants her people to win. Meaningful presence at Levels 6 and 7 above that. She is the visionary, the strategist, the woman who sees the whole board.
Then we looked at the stress data. Level 2: conflict, fight, jumped to over 40%. Level 1: helplessness, spiked to nearly a quarter. Combined, close to two-thirds of her energy under pressure was catabolic. The visionary who showed up so clearly a moment earlier, the Level 6/7 presence sitting near 25% in normal conditions, fell under 7%.
This isn’t surprising. Stress is chock-full of catabolic hormones. It’s what kept our ancestors alive. Yet, in 2026, as the leader of an elite law firm, her life wasn’t in danger.
I didn’t have to explain what that meant. She got there first.
2. When the Client Names It Before I Do
I asked her what happens on the ground when something goes wrong. She didn’t hesitate: “I go quiet.” Not calm-quiet. Withdrawn-quiet. She told me her team already knows what that silence means, because they’ve learned to read it as a warning.
That’s not a stress management footnote. That’s a leadership architecture problem.
The team isn’t calibrating who she is off her best Tuesday. They’re calibrating it off what happens the day a deal falls through or the ball gets dropped, and on that day, the visionary they usually get isn’t the one who shows up.
3. The Gap She Named for Herself
I reflected back what the data and the conversation were pointing to: a visionary leader with real strategic intelligence, who under stress loses that entirely and hands the room to a fighter instead, which leaves the people closest to her working for a woman they don’t fully recognize, and leaving her more alone in what she’s building than she wants to be.
Her answer: “Absolutely. That’s me.”
That’s not a Level 2 reaction. That’s a person naming her own pattern out loud, on first hearing it.
4. The Pause She Asked For
She didn’t wait for me to assign her homework. She named the work herself, and she had language for it already. She called it the “fighter ratch,” the shift from vision to fight that happens faster than she could currently catch it. What she wants is a pause: room to breathe between the trigger and the reaction, so she gets to choose the response instead of defaulting to it.
That pause has a name in this work. It’s the gateway, the moment between the trigger and the crossover into catabolic energy, where a founder still has a choice about who’s about to show up.
The Bottom Line
Competence was never the question here. This founder has the vision, the intelligence, and the track record to prove it. The question is which version of her is running the room when it counts, and right now, her team can’t predict the answer.
The gap between your best day and your worst day is not a character flaw. It’s data. Founders who close that gap don’t become different people. They catch the shift earlier, go less far into it when it happens, and find their way back faster.
Field Exercise: The Silence Audit
Think of the last time something went wrong and you went quiet, sharp, or absent. Ask yourself: Did my team read that silence as thinking, or as a warning? How long did it take me to find my way back to the person I am on a good day? If I could buy myself thirty seconds between the trigger and my reaction, what would I do with them?
If the honest answer to the first question is “warning,” you’ve found your growth edge.
End of dispatch.
