CHAPTER 1
The First Error

Hubris.
Hu·bris/ˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/: excessive pride or self-confidence.

I’m not going to try to redefine the word. It already has a definition. I’m humble enough to work with what is here. It is often hubris that leads us into thinking we should redefine everything for a new generation.

I am not that fool—though I do other foolish things.

One of the reasons I work at being simple and direct is that I understand I am dealing with a worldwide audience. My writing reaches people in at least thirty countries. To get colorful with my speech or to use big words just to show off would be making this about me. As a teacher, it’s about all who might read it. It’s about ensuring they can understand.

Leaders are simple and direct with their communication to ensure they are understood.
Educated people sometimes like to show off the words they learned.Education does not equate to intelligence, and I have dealt with many educated idiots over the years. Some of the most intelligent people I have ever met never made it out of high school.

Education systems often favor those who can regurgitate. Simply because one can repeat something does not mean one understood it. One understands when one can explain the material and the concepts in the simplest speech possible—in their own words.

This is not a new concept. You can dig up a hundred quotes that express the same understanding. It is a universal truth.

And it is often hubris that leads us to think we should be quoted.

I have made posters with some of my own quotes—things I have said. I waited until over a dozen people, over the course of years, asked if they could quote me before I ever quoted myself on a poster. I checked myself for hubris long before I ever allowed myself to “abuse the holy living shit out of Canva.”

If one cannot use oneself as an example when delving into understanding, one does not have a clue what one is talking about.

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On social media, hubris takes over the moment someone is corrected. We’ve all seen it: the defensive rage, the desperate scramble to discredit the corrector, all to save face and protect the illusion of being the smartest one in the room. In the office, this behavior costs companies a ton of money and costs people their jobs. It is the culture of the fragile self, terrified of being seen.

It is the culture of the leadership industry.

Look around. Most of what is being sold by the coaching and leadership industry is a rewrapping of everything old, pretending it’s new. My peers in this space hate it when they see my name because I find the holes in what they are presenting. I point out the emotional triggers being used to sell instead of to create actual change.

They sell certainty. They sell a “personal truth.” They validate opinion.

But here is the law I work from: Personal truth is a lie.

A truth that is only true for you, that cannot withstand challenge or be applied without harming others, is not truth. It is a story. A fragile, personal story. And building a leadership philosophy—or a life—on a collection of personal stories is building on sand. It is the foundation of the “hubris economy,” where feeling right is more valuable than being right.

Where intent is used as a shield against responsibility.

I meant well is the mantra of this economy. It is the hubristic claim that your good intentions absolve you of the damage caused by your ignorance, your lack of study, your refusal to verify if what you’re saying holds true or just sounds good.

Bullshit.

One’s intent does not remove the responsibility for the results from one’s shoulders. Leaders look at the potential results regardless of their intent to minimize the harm that might be done. Leaders make sure they are correct, or they pose it as “I think,” “I feel,” “in my opinion.” They do this to ensure they do not lead people astray. When it comes to giving guidance that changes lives, the most important thing is to be correct. Anything less is irresponsible and dangerous.

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So, what does the opposite of hubris look like?

Leaders take pride in a job well done—and then they drop it and move on to the next task. They never rest on their laurels or deeds of the past. They never make themselves bigger than those around them for self-gratification.

And when someone can point out an error?
A leader exercises humility.They accept the correction. They thank the person who offered it.

Leaders never let hubris get in the way of what is best for the sum of us—even if it means being corrected in public.

This is the first error because it is the error that makes all other errors possible. It is the voice that says, I know, when you don’t. It is the wall that blocks new understanding. It is the addiction to being perceived as the smartest, the most enlightened, the most in control.

You cannot evolve from here.
You cannot innovate from here.
You cannot lead from here.

The first step off this path is not a step forward. It is a step back—from the illusion of control, and into the practice of letting go.


CHAPTER 2
Eliminating Control

WordPress recently reminded me that it has been eleven years since I started blogging on this platform. When I saw the notification, it was the last thing I expected.

It was also a perfect data point for the law I live by: I have zero control over anything.

Not over algorithms, not over readers, not over outcomes. I work at managing myself and my efforts. I use the responses of others only as feedback to see the results of my management skills. The outcome itself is never mine to command.

This is not a philosophy of passivity. It is the first and most critical discipline of power.

I learned it through my son.

When he was four, I started attaching behaviors to his nickname. When he would act up, as any child will, I didn’t yell. I didn’t punish. I asked a simple question: “Is that being The Dude?”

It upset him that I didn’t see him as The Dude in that moment. His answer was always no.
Then I asked,“What does it mean to be The Dude?”

He would give me the list we’d built together: kind, strong, helpful, honest.
I would then tell him,“Okay. Go be The Dude.”
And off he went—self-corrected,reminded of his own standard, with no punishment, no resentment, no struggle for control.

By age eleven, wild geese would swim up to him and let him pick up their babies.
By age fourteen,he thanked me for the way I used his nickname and for all the punishment I spared him.

I have no control over my son. I never have. I managed my son well by managing myself first. When I take into account that he now lives four hours away, the idea of ever having controlled him is laughable. But the idea that I helped him learn to manage himself is everything.

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This is the control paradox: The more you try to control an outcome, the less you control the source of all outcomes—the coherent, willing state of the people involved.

“Control” is the application of force against a system’s own natural spin. It is the attempt to impose your fragmented will onto a coherent field. It creates friction, resistance, and hidden failures.

Leadership does not start with control. It starts with recognizing how one can best serve the person in front of them now, regardless of how one was treated in a similar position. A leader seeks to be what they would have liked to have had. A leader never seeks to control anything or anyone—only to find the solution that works best for the whole based on the variables involved.

At times, that means stepping back and letting another take charge. When you let go of the very idea of control, there is no fear of losing it. You find the freedom to admire the work another can do. You have no fear of losing status by letting another step up.

The idea of control is rooted in the idea of expectations. If you have no rigid expectations, there is nothing for you to try and control.

This is where we must make a crucial distinction: Goals are not expectations.

When you set an expectation, you set strict parameters you are demanding be met. It is a contract for a specific output. When you set a goal, you define a destination but leave the door open for the structure to be built as it flows. You allow for flexibility, for discovery, for the intelligence of the process itself to become part of the solution.

You will never have control over the results.
But you can manage the systems and the people who produce them.You can give them a goal.

Or, you can make that goal an expectation that comes with an “or else.”

We call this second path performance management. It is a mix of goals and threats. It is a structure that brings a brittle, fear-based order to chaos. In it, everyone is perpetually “out of control,” stressed about meeting a rigid demand, coached under duress. Why can’t I make them understand? becomes the mantra of the manager who chose control over clarity.

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The path of The Dude is the alternative. It is the path of identity-based guidance.

You do not control the behavior. You invoke the identity. You connect the person to their own internal standard—their own “Dude”—and you get out of the way. The alignment comes from within them, not from force applied by you.

This is the first evolution of the leader: the move from external controller to internal cultivator.
FromHow do I get them to do this? to How do I create the conditions where they choose to do their best?

It starts with the hardest person to manage: yourself.

When you eliminate the need to control others, you are left with the only thing you ever truly could manage: your own mind, your own reactions, your own expectations. This is where your real power has been waiting.

The illusion of control is a cage. It keeps you frantic, focused on the wrong levers, and constantly at war with reality.

Letting go of it isn’t losing power.
It’s stepping into the only kind of power that is real:the power to manage your own gyre so well that other gyres begin to spin in harmony with it, by choice.

This is the foundation. Without this, every leadership tactic is just a more sophisticated form of coercion.

With this, everything else becomes possible.


INTERLUDE
The Neutral Gear

Between understanding a principle and living it, there is a gap. This gap is filled with reaction—the old patterns, the emotional triggers, the sudden urge to defend or to prove.

Chapter 2 was about the principle: eliminating the need to control what is outside you. This interlude is about the tool you must build to do that. It is the neutral gear for your mind.

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One of the most beneficial tools I ever gave myself was training my instinct to have a neutral, investigative reaction. Not a non-reaction, but a neutral one. It inserts a space between stimulus and response. In that space, I have time.

Time to ask myself: Why do I feel this desire to argue?
Time to ask:Why do I want to agree so quickly?

It forces me to stop and investigate instead of reacting blindly. This neutral space has no emotion. It is the observational platform. It is where you find out why you are inclined to feel one way or the other about anything. Sometimes, you don’t feel a thing—and that’s okay. We do not always have to be feeling something. A core purpose of meditation is to find that peace zone, absent of all emotion.

Those who get practiced can learn to tap into an endless sea of bliss from this neutral point.
Those who get skilled can find either state—bliss or pure peace—at will.
Those who gain mastery live from this meditative state andcreate bliss through peace.

If you don’t understand how that’s possible, that’s okay. Most people don’t. The idea is one of energy transmutation.

As an Empath, I am always taking on emotional energy that is not mine, simply by breathing. I decided to see if I could make use of it. The practice is this: to allow being at peace to create an inner process that turns whatever foreign emotion I’ve absorbed into pure, coherent energy—a healing frequency that simply radiates from me and goes where it needs to. This mode of living takes one’s vibration to its peak.

It turns the problem (being an emotional sponge) into the power source.

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I will not give you a ten-step manual to achieve this. That would be building another dependency. Instead, I will empower you with the same two tools I used to teach myself. They are the seed. You are the soil.

The first is a meditation. A simple process of aligning with your higher self, of asking questions and listening for the answers that come not as words, but as knowings. The end of it can be changed to suit whatever you need to learn.

The second is a Reiki recital. A sequence of intentions to flush and purge your own system, to clear the static so you can hear your own signal.

Adding these two tools to your daily routine will teach you more than I or any book ever could. You will teach yourself. You will become your own master.

The ultimate instruction within them is this: “To breathe without breathing.” To breathe so slowly and deeply that you no longer feel the wind of each breath, only the rise and fall of presence itself. This is the somatic anchor of the neutral gear.

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This interlude is not a chapter of philosophy. It is a workbench.
The neutral gear is not a metaphor.It is a neural pathway you must carve.

You build it by:

1. Catching the reaction.
2. Shifting to neutral.
3. Investigating the impulse without judgment.
4. Then choosing the response.

Without this gear, the principles in this book are just more mental furniture. With it, they become engineering protocols for your consciousness. You cannot achieve balance, empathy, or patience if you are perpetually in drive or reverse, jerked around by every stimulus.

Shift to neutral.
Investigate.
Thenchoose.

This is how you stop being controlled by the world and start managing your interaction with it. It is the prerequisite for everything that follows.

Copy and paste this for yourself.

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