I keep meeting entrepreneurs who can’t speak a calm sentence. Not because they have nothing to say — they have plenty to say. But because they’re constantly out of breath. Running between the next meeting and the last one.
Reacting before they’ve finished processing.
Present in the room, absent from themselves.
I was one of them.
What changed for me wasn’t a system or a strategy. It was simpler and harder than that. My coach kept saying the same thing, session after session: “I want you to connect to your feelings.” I didn’t understand what she meant. I thought I was already emotional — impulsive, even. I thought connecting to feelings was something other people needed.
It took a long time to understand what she was actually asking.
Awareness is the ability to notice what’s happening inside you before you act on it.
Not to suppress it. Not to analyze it to death. Just to notice it. The tightness in your chest before a difficult conversation. The excitement that tells you something matters to you. The irritation that usually means a boundary has been crossed. The flatness that tells you something has been going on too long.
Most entrepreneurs are extraordinarily good at overriding these signals.
We are trained to push through.
We celebrate endurance.
The signals get quieter and quieter until we stop hearing them altogether — and then one day something breaks, in us or around us, and we can’t figure out why.
Contact is what happens after awareness. It’s the willingness to actually meet what’s in front of you — a person, a situation, a feeling — rather than managing it from a safe distance.
Most of the communication problems I see in leadership aren’t about strategy or clarity. They’re about contact:
- The leader who gives feedback without ever actually landing in the room with the person they’re speaking to.
- The founder who talks about culture but hasn’t had an honest conversation with their team in months.
You can be very busy and have very low contact. I’ve seen it many times.
The good news is that both awareness and contact can be developed.
Not through more thinking — through practice, often uncomfortable, of simply slowing down enough to notice what’s actually happening and staying present long enough to respond to it.
No magic required. Just those two things, repeatedly.
Where in your work right now are you moving too fast to notice what’s actually going on?
