when problem language is the problem
A few weeks ago, a client shared his frustration: “I couldn’t finish the report because the system didn’t have the right information.”
It’s a common trap, and it is problem language. It sounds like:
“I can’t…”
“The system won’t…”
“They didn’t…”
Problem language might be true, and it might even feel justified. And it rarely moves things forward.
I asked him: “How could you say that in a way that makes it easier for your leader to help you, or to trust you with more responsibility?”
Here’s the reframe:
“I’m having challenges completing the report because the data wasn’t available in the system. I’ve identified what’s missing and reached out to IT for a workaround. If that doesn’t come through by EOD, I have a plan to fill in the gaps manually.”
That’s solution language. It signals ownership, initiative, and resourcefulness. It earns credibility. And it makes you the kind of leader people want to bet on.
Quick Practice: Next time you catch yourself explaining why something can’t be done, try this:
🔹 Identify the obstacle
🔹 State the action you’ve taken
🔹 Offer a path forward
That shift alone can elevate how others experience your leadership.
Here’s to bringing solutions, not just problems,
Jena
performance drag
If I audited your mental load instead of your calendar, would I find you:
rewriting emails so they land perfectly?
replaying conversations later to check what you missed?
softening your message to manage other people’s discomfort?
stepping in to fix what you can already see going sideways?
You do this so often it feels normal. It’s not. It’s constant internal vigilance. You may even think this is what it takes to be a leader. It’s not. It’s over-functioning.
What starts as competence slides into over-functioning with deceptive ease.
There’s no warning sign or alarm bell. There’s no performance dip or dramatic moment where you realize you crossed a line. In fact, you are often rewarded for it. You hear from your leader that you are reliable, the stabilizer, the person that catches what other’s miss or don’t want to do.
This is why high-performers rarely question it. The results look great and the feedback is positive. No one is complaining.
Success hides the cost. And there is always a cost that comes with over-functioning. Constant vigilance narrows thinking. Over-owning dulls strategic clarity. Carrying what was never clearly handed to you reduces how high you can actually play.
Over-functioning is the reason your tired at 6 pm when nothing dramatic happened. It is why your brain feels full after a day that looked manageable on paper.
You do not need less ambition. You need a cleaner way to carry pressure. Let’s talk about this…and
Let’s remove the drag,
Jena
when leadership gets vague and controlling
I am seeing this pattern creeping into organizations recently.
Senior leadership gets anxious. Direction gets vague. Control tightens.
Suddenly, leaders are being pulled deeper into execution while getting less clarity about what actually matters.
Strategies are overridden without being renamed. Ownership shifts without being acknowledged. Expectations change without being clarified.
And the leaders in the middle are left trying to make it work. If that is you, this matters.
The Real Play
This is not a micromanagement problem. It is a clarity problem.
When senior leaders feel pressure or uncertainty, they often respond by inserting themselves into the work instead of sharpening direction. Visibility increases. Control increases. Clarity does not.
The cost is predictable: Unclear leadership creates more work, not less.
When direction is fuzzy, leaders are forced to guess. Guessing drains energy. Guessing erodes confidence. Guessing burns teams out.
This is not about effort. It is about structure.
Execute With Intention
You cannot wait for clarity to arrive. You have to create it.
1. Decide what matters now. Your team does not need certainty. They need priorities. Name the few things that matter this week and anchor execution there.
2. Clarify decision rights before debating execution. Ask directly: What decisions are mine to own? Where do you want involvement?
Do not assume. Ask.
3. Surface silent shifts. If ownership or direction has changed, name it calmly. ”I want to make sure we are aligned. Has responsibility shifted, or are we adjusting the plan?”
That is not confrontation. That is leadership.
Lead From Here
Where are you absorbing ambiguity that should be addressed out loud?
Clarity does not make you difficult. It makes you effective.
Lead accordingly,
Jena
is the horizon moving?
I was five or six years old at my aunt's house, staring across her pool at a raft on the other side.
It didn't look far. I jumped in.
I had to stop twice to catch my breath. And every time I looked up, the raft seemed just as far away as when I started. My swimming skills at that age were generous at best (image: a lot of thrashing and a not a lot of forward movement) and I couldn’t help but wonder if someone had moved it on me while I wasn't looking.
I made it eventually and grabbed the edge of that raft, out of breath and very proud of myself.
I've been thinking about that raft in my coaching conversations. I’m hearing from my leaders about target shifts, and how they are navigating what feels like choppy waters trying to figure this out and communicate with their teams.
The goals that were set earlier in the year are still technically on the board, AND somewhere between then and now, priorities shifted, resources moved, and the definition of winning got updated. And your team is looking up, treading water, wondering what happened to the thing they were swimming toward.
Are You The One Moving The Raft?! When you shift a target midstream, your team feels it even if you don't announce it. What seems like a reasonable strategic adjustment from your vantage point can feel like the raft disappearing for someone who has been swimming hard toward something for months. Targets change, that’s the reality. Teams can handle that. What they have a harder time with is when nobody says anything about it. They are wondering if the work they’ve done still matters and more importantly, they are asking this question internally: Is it worth going all in on whatever comes next? The raft can move. Just tell people before they've already swum halfway across the pool. And if they’ve already made the swim, give them a life preserver to hang onto for a minute to catch their breath, and get them realigned towards the new target so they can take their energy there.
Are You Swimming Toward the Ever Moving Raft?! If you're the one in the water watching the target drift, the worst thing you can do is keep swimming in silence hoping it stops moving. Say something. Ask what success actually looks like right now. The leaders who are shifting targets aren't always aware of how disorienting it feels from where you're standing, and most of them would rather know.
And if the raft keeps moving no matter what you do, that's information too. Some environments are just unstable right now, with priorities shifting before you can finish anything. If that's the pattern, the problem isn't your swimming.
This Week's Challenge
When did you last check whether your team's understanding of the goal actually matches yours? If there's a gap, what would it take to close it this week?
Is there a target in your work right now that feels like it keeps moving? What would it look like to say that out loud instead of swimming harder and hoping it settles?
Here's to making it to the raft. And to telling people when you've moved it,
Jena
the one spot i didn’t protect
Picture this. I'm at the beach, being the responsible adult I am, carefully applying sunscreen everywhere. Arms, legs, shoulders, the back of my neck. I felt very thorough.
I missed one tiny strip. Right where my swimsuit met my skin, on my bum. (Am I the only one?!)
You already know where this is going. That one forgotten strip got so burnt I could not sit down without wincing for days. Days, y'all. All that careful coverage everywhere else, undone by one small spot I didn’t check.
SPF stands for something else in my world
I've started calling SPF something different. Instead of Sun Protection Factor, I call it Self-Protection Factor.
Look, most of us are actually pretty decent at protection. We shield our teams from office drama and politics they don't need to carry. Our numbers get watched. Our client relationships get guarded like they're the whole business, because let's be honest, half the time they are.
And then there's the one small strip we forget to cover. Maybe it's the constant weekend texts answered without ever setting a boundary. Maybe it's the emotional weight carried from every hard client conversation, with nowhere to put it down. For a lot of leaders, it's the fact that they haven't taken a real day off in months because taking one feels like letting people down.
These small unprotected spots they never got around to covering, because it seemed too minor to bother with, is often the thing that takes us out.
And just like sunscreen, this isn't something you apply once you're already burnt. By then you're just managing pain instead of preventing it.
This Week's Challenge
Okay, be honest with yourself for a second. Where's your own unprotected strip?
What has skipping that spot already cost you? Even the small stuff counts.
Pick one tiny thing you could do this week to start covering it.
Here's to covering the spots you can't see in the mirror,
Jena
P.S. I've never been bum-burned since. This lesson only needed to be taught once. ;)
Are you building the boardwalk?
A boardwalk is a strange piece of construction if you think about it. It sits between the beach and the town behind it, existing purely to help people cross the in-between part, the part with no clear ground, without sinking into the sand.
That's a lot like what change management looks like. Years ago, I led a team through a reorg. From where I sat at the time, it was hard to see how that change was going to go inside of the organization.
There were so many questions and almost no answers. People wanted to know what their role would look like, and whether their project still mattered. I didn't have most of those answers either. It was a hard stretch as a leader.
The space between land and ocean
That's what a reorg feels like for the people living through it. The old structure is gone. The new one hasn't fully solidified yet. Everyone's walking across sand that shifts under their feet, and the job of a leader in that stretch is staying honest about that, rather than projecting a steadiness that isn't really there yet.
The job is to build the boardwalk. Give people something to stand on even while the landscape around them keeps moving. Start with what you know, then admit where the gaps still are. People can handle uncertainty. What erodes trust is pretending you have it all figured out when you don't.
Looking back, the moment that helped my team most was getting clear with them. I told them plainly that we didn't have the answers, and we weren't going to get the answers we wanted anytime soon. It would be our job to fill in the blanks ourselves. We might get some of it wrong, and we'd adjust as we went. The one thing that mattered was finding a way to keep moving forward.
For my team specifically, that meant blocking out the noise and continuing to do the work the way we always had with some small modifications, because in either structure, that work was still going to be needed. That was the boardwalk, something solid enough to keep people moving forward instead of stuck in the sand.
This Week's Challenge
Where in your own leadership have you been waiting for solid ground before acting, when what people really need is just a boardwalk to stand on today?
Here's to building something to stand on, even before you know exactly where the path leads,
Jena
Most leaders are drowning because they refuse to climb
I got engaged at the top of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse in North Carolina, twenty six years ago this summer.
If you've never climbed it, it's worth doing at least once. It's the tallest brick lighthouse in the country, 198 feet, and getting to the top means climbing 257 steps in a tight spiral staircase. Your legs know about it the next day.
And it's worth it! The views from the top stretch for miles and miles, ocean on one side, the Outer Banks curving out on the other. Standing up there, you can see things you'd never notice from ground level.
The lighthouse doesn't rescue anyone
A lighthouse never leaves its post to go pull a ship out of trouble. It just stays lit and stays exactly where it is, so that every ship out there can find its own way past the rocks.
As leaders, we spend a lot of time thinking about rescuing. I see it constantly with my clients. They get so pulled into the day-to-day weeds of running the business that they never make it back up to the top of their own lighthouse.
Being down in the weeds sometimes really is the right move. Staying there for good is what wears people out. I've watched clients try to carry their whole organization on their backs, answering every question and touching every project, until they're exhausted and running on fumes.
What helps a team more is a leader who spends real time looking out from above. Someone people can actually find. Not buried three layers deep in your inbox for six hours while the team waits on a decision.
This Week's Challenge
Where have you been rescuing lately when the better move might have been standing still and staying visible?
Here's to being easy to spot from far away,
Jena