INSIGHTS FOR GROWTH

Most leaders spend 40–60% of their time below their altitude — not because they can’t delegate, but because the work below feels productive. One question sorts the calendar: does this require me?

Decision fatigue is one of the most misdiagnosed patterns in high performers — and it runs faster when fewer of your decisions are automated.

Tired comes from volume. Drained comes from the kind of work. The Energy Audit maps which is which — one week, one plus or minus at a time.

Every other chapter is about performing better at your altitude. The last one asks whether it’s the right altitude at all.

Your boss isn’t withholding recognition. Most of the time, they just don’t see the work. The Friday Update is three lines a week that close the visibility gap — without a single brag.

How often do you think about your dentist? Only when you need them. There is a leader in every organization who is someone else’s dentist. Brilliant at one thing. Invisible at everything else. Not excluded — just not thought of.

Every leader builds monsters. Not on purpose. One good decision at a time until the thing you built is consuming you. Four patterns. Name the ones in your calendar right now. Pick one. Kill it this week. That’s one of 48 tools in the book.

One of the people who read The Right Altitude early is Blessing Nnachi — a consulting delivery leader at Google Cloud. I coached her for eight months during a pivotal transition. She wrote something about the book that I keep coming back to: “Don has the ability to gently and persistently dismantle the mindsets that limit our potential.” Gently and persistently. That’s the whole job. Not fixing people. Not telling them what to do. Helping them see what they can’t see on their

Every leader hits the same wall. The moment when the thing that got them promoted stops working. Twelve chapters. Forty-eight tools. Built from 6,000+ hours of coaching. The book is live today.

“The skills that got you here are not the skills that will keep you here.” That’s page one. Twelve chapters. Forty-eight tools. Built from 6,000+ hours of coaching conversations with more than 1,000 leaders.

She did the best work in the building. Nobody knew. Renata delivered every quarter, solved the problems no one else could, and never once raised her hand. She was invisible — and she chose to be.

When something needs to be addressed, you have 48 hours to have the conversation. After that, the details fade, the narrative hardens, and you start building a case instead of having a conversation.

The conversation you're afraid will break the relationship is usually the one that saves it. The tension is already there. The other person already feels it. Having the conversation doesn't create the problem — the problem already exists.

Every conversation you're avoiding has a compound interest rate. Week one, it's an annoyance. By month three, you're not avoiding one conversation — you're avoiding a web of conversations that all grew out of the first one you didn't have.

Every conversation you avoid has a cost. And the cost compounds. The longer you wait, the harder it gets — not because the conversation changes, but because the resentment and the workarounds build up around it.

The whole idea behind the right altitude is not a metaphor for ambition. It’s a metaphor for fit. The altitude where your natural ability meets the work you’re actually built for. Not too high, not too low. Just right — and nobody can assign it to you from the outside.

Thirty years in executive leadership. Seven years coaching 750 leaders. Six thousand hours. The same twelve patterns kept showing up — and at some point I stopped being surprised and started writing them down. Something is coming in June.

Nobody I’ve ever coached needed me to give them the answer. In seven years, not once. What they needed was someone to ask the question they’d been avoiding, hold the space for them to sit with it, and not let them off the hook when they tried to skip past the hard part. The answers were always already there.