Leadership Beyond Metrics: What You Gain When You Let Go
Leadership Beyond Metrics: What You Gain When You Let Go For Founders, Executives & Leaders Navigating Reinvention
Control got me through pitch rooms and breakdowns. It helped me lead, perform, survive.
But eventually, control stopped working. It couldn’t help me grieve a company. Or sit in silence. Or rebuild from the inside out.
As a founder or executive, control is often what gets you through the early stages. You learn to read the room, manage the crisis, hold the vision. You’re the one making things happen. That ability to anticipate, steer, and solve becomes part of your identity.
But what got you here isn’t what will get you through your next chapter.
There comes a point—especially after major transitions—where control becomes a cage. And the skills that served your outer success begin to fail you internally.
Over the Last Two Years, I’ve Lived This Truth
I exited a startup I helped build. It didn’t end the way I imagined. I opened my own business—while navigating legal battles, personal separation, and deep financial unknowns. I let go of the identity I had spent years constructing—and stood, raw and uncertain, at the threshold of reinvention.
Instead of jumping into the next thing, I did something far more difficult: I paused.
Here’s what that looked like:
I traveled to India and sat at the Dalai Lama’s New Year address, surrounded by a sea of prayer flags and breath.
I lived in an intentional community for 30 days, waking before dawn to sit in meditation with strangers who became sacred mirrors.
I spent two weeks in total silence. No phone. No identity. Just my breath, my body, and the weight of everything I’d been running from.
I attended 25+ national convenings with engineers, technologists, futurists, and energy thinkers—no longer performing, but absorbing.
And perhaps most transformational of all: I learned the value and practice of meditation.
Meditation didn’t solve my problems. It didn’t erase grief, debt, or doubt. But it did give me access to something I had long abandoned—stillness that could hold discomfort without collapse.
In that stillness, I started to hear my real voice again.
What I’m Avoiding Right Now
Taxes.
I don’t owe anything. But I’ve avoided sitting down to face the spreadsheet. Why?
Because it’s not really about taxes. It’s about the story they seem to tell: “You did all this—and for what?”
No revenue explosion. No obvious ‘win.’ The spreadsheet doesn’t reflect expansion, healing, or becoming.
And yet I know this: Not all wealth is measurable. Not all success is visible. Not all transformation translates into numbers.
What We Can and Can’t Control
Reading Stop Avoiding Stuff shook something loose in me. It named the emotional tension so many high performers live in: trying to control what we were never meant to manage.
What We Can’t Control:
Thoughts and emotions that arise uninvited
Urges, memories, physical sensations
How others think, feel, or behave
Our past
Our future
The conditions we inherit or fall into
What We Can Control:
How we respond to thoughts (observe, not argue)
How we relate to emotions (allow, not suppress)
How we treat our nervous system (with care, not critique)
How we show up (especially when no one’s watching)
What we choose to value, pursue, and protect
The shift from performance to presence lives here.
What Real Leadership Looks Like Now
It’s not built on control. It’s built on willingness.
Willingness to slow down. To not know. To feel. To still lead with grace when the metrics don’t make sense.
This is where meditation changed my leadership. It taught me to breathe through the pressure, and not flinch. To listen beneath the noise. To act from truth—not urgency.
Redefining Wealth
The last two years didn’t make me richer in the traditional sense. But they made me:
Rooted
Sovereign
Soft
Resilient
Awake
My wealth now is not in capital—it’s in connection.
It’s in my ability to ignite friendships, create partnerships, and stir awe. It’s in how I inspire communities that are growing into their next stage. It’s in supporting leaders—quietly, deeply—as they shift from high-functioning depletion to integrated aliveness.
Spiritual awakening is no longer optional. It’s knocking on every door: In our organizations, our ecosystems, our homes, our hearts.
A Final Invitation
I’m in San Francisco until August, and actively seeking speaking and facilitation opportunities for teams, leadership groups, and mission-driven communities.
If your organization is grappling with transition, burnout, or the desire to lead with more alignment and less armor— I’d love to be in that room.
Because when we stop avoiding, we don’t just become more productive. We become more whole.
And that wholeness? That’s the foundation of every future worth building.