It started on a Tuesday in Q3. A rep closed the biggest deal in company history. The celebration was real but the room felt empty.
Not tired. Not distracted. Empty. Something had shifted and I couldn't name it.
Blamed stress. Ran harder. Tightened the plan. Added another forecast meeting. Got more precise about things that were already precise. The numbers kept moving. The emptiness didn't.
Eventually I stopped trying to outrun it. Started asking the questions I'd spent a career (lifetime?) avoiding. Not leadership questions. The other kind. Who am I when I walk into a room? What am I actually carrying in? What's the thing between people when something real is happening versus when everyone is just performing real?
Those questions sent me somewhere else. Toward inner work. The examined life. I went there on purpose. It changed what I could see.
What I found wasn't a framework. It was a different kind of attention. Something moves through rooms when things are working. It's missing when they're not. People feel it before they can name it. I started calling it the field. I still don't have a complete theory for what it is. I have fifteen years of watching it work.
That Tuesday in Q3 wasn't an anomaly. It was a sign. The room was telling me the work had drifted from something true to something performed. I was the last one to notice.
Presence isn't performance. Rooms register the difference. Whether the person leading actually brought themselves in, or sent a version.
I'm co-authoring a book with Dr. Carlos Warter. Park Street Press, spring 2027. It's about the field itself — what it is, how to recognize it, what it means for how people show up. How they lead. Field Notes is where I'm working it out.
I'm still figuring out what that Tuesday was really showing me.
I know some things. I also know that I don't know nearly as much as I thought I knew. Everything is open to subversion.