Urgency Was Lying to Me….
A few years back, I was deep in the trenches—running marketing for a telecom startup. The kind of mornings fueled by coffee and chaos. Juggling team dynamics, competing priorities, and that constant sense that we were always reacting instead of leading.
Leadership felt like a firefight. Decisions stacked up. Emotional weight leaked into everything. Clarity wasn’t missing—it felt unreachable.
I knew we needed a reset. But there was no space for big programs, no appetite for consultants, and honestly, no bandwidth. The CEO was buried. I was buried. And the usual fixes—longer hours, tighter schedules, more meetings—only added noise.
One week in particular still stands out. Launches slipping. Cross-functional breakdowns. Me trying to hold the line while the fog thickened. I was snapping at small things, second-guessing decisions, and carrying stress I hadn’t slowed down enough to name.
Everything felt urgent.
Nothing felt grounded.
So I did something different—not strategic, not polished. Necessary.
I started prototyping what became the HITSLeadership™ 20-Minute Reset right there in my home office in Bend, Oregon. I needed something simple. No prep. No tools. Something that could interrupt the spin without blowing up the day.
I set a timer for 20 minutes.
I observed—without fixing.
I harvested the truth—what was actually heavy, not what looked broken.
What surfaced wasn’t the task list. It was unclear expectations. Eroded trust. Leadership drift I hadn’t slowed down enough to see.
I oriented—zoomed out far enough to see the system again.
I made one small adjustment. Not a grand plan. A calm, pressure-free team check-in to reset alignment.
I communicated it clearly.
Then I checked back in.
The shift was immediate.
Not magical. The startup grind didn’t disappear. But the heaviness lifted. Decisions felt anchored again. I could lead from presence instead of panic. That moment mattered because it proved something important to me:
This wasn’t theory. It worked when I needed it most.
And then… life intervened in a way no business ever could.
It wasn’t another crisis at work—it was cancer.
Treatment doesn’t care about your calendar. Or your momentum. Or your identity as “the capable one.” It forces stillness. It strips urgency of its authority. And in that forced pause, something unexpected happened: the solutions I had built out of necessity years earlier finally got the attention they deserved.
What I thought were situational tools revealed themselves as patterns. Rhythms. A way of leading that worked not just under pressure—but under uncertainty, loss of control, and fatigue.
That’s when Hands in the Soil™ truly took shape.
The Reset had been a seed—useful, proven, but largely unwatched. Cancer forced me to kneel beside it. To water it. To see that leadership doesn’t start with force or speed—it starts with presence, observation, and tending what’s actually happening beneath the surface.
That’s why I built the free 20-Minute Reset and made it available without gates or pitches.
I needed a lifeline—something that restored clarity without asking for more energy than I had. If it could pull me out of reactive mode in a high-stakes startup—and later help me find steadiness in a season where control was gone—it could help other leaders carrying the same invisible load.
It’s six grounded steps—Observe, Harvest Truth, Orient, Adjust, Communicate, Check In—plus a short Mini Workbook to capture what surfaces before it fades. It’s not the full HITSLeadership™ system. That’s for when you’re ready to go deeper.
This is the starting point—the one that grew out of lived experience.
If you’re in that firefight right now—or in a season that’s forcing you to slow down whether you want to or not—give yourself 20 minutes.
I built this because I lived it. And because it reminded me of something I had to relearn the hard way:
Real leadership begins when you slow down enough to touch the soil.
👉 Get the free reset here:
What moment in your life forced a reset you didn’t choose—but later needed?
Share below. Those stories matter.
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