How to stop leading with fear (without losing your edge)

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THE ART & SCIENCE OF LEADING SELF
The Power of Attention

My friend, at last week's Wolfpack Women in Philanthropy Symposium, chef Vivian Howard shared a profound insight: "Fearlessness comes from focusing on process, not prizes."

This wisdom extends far beyond the kitchen. Your leadership effectiveness hinges on where you direct your attention. As Tony Robbins reminds us, "Where focus goes, energy flows." You have limited attention as a leader.

Where you place it determines whether you lead with fearlessness or find yourself trapped by the very outcomes you're trying to achieve.

The Attention Trap 🪤

When you fixate on prizes, aka the final results/outcomes, you feed the fear you're trying to avoid. Your mind becomes consumed with what might go wrong. Every setback feels like a threat. Every delay triggers anxiety.

Consider Marcus Oluwole*, COO of MedFlow Technologies, a 382-employee HealthTech company that has successfully built a robust patient monitoring platform. Scaling rapidly, MedFlow is now expanding into diabetes management solutions. This move requires FDA approval for their new continuous glucose monitoring integration.

The Fixation 🎯

With 3 major health systems as pilot customers and a tranche of $15M in Series C funding linked to regulatory progress milestones, including FDA clearance by Q3, Marcus anchored his attention on a single prize: meeting that deadline to secure the funding round and satisfy customer commitments.

He woke each morning counting down days until the Q3 deadline. Executive team meetings became dominated by timeline discussions. His laser focus attention was pointed at something largely outside his control: FDA's review timeline and approval process.

This fixation shaped how he perceived every development. When the FDA requested additional clinical validation data, he saw it as a threat to the funding timeline rather than an opportunity to strengthen their market position. When his 40-person engineering team identified potential improvements to the user interface, he viewed it as scope creep threatening his schedule.

The ripple effects cascaded throughout the organization. Marcus began pulling engineering resources from other product lines to focus solely on the diabetes platform. With backing from the CEO, he instituted daily stand-ups, interrupting deep work with status updates.

Department heads started managing up rather than managing the process. Innovation slowed as teams became risk-averse, afraid to surface potential complications. The collaborative culture that had fueled MedFlow's growth began fragmenting under pressure.

The Shift 🔄

The breakthrough came during a heated executive team meeting when Sarah, his VP of Engineering, said: "Marcus, we're so focused on hitting a date that we're compromising the product quality that built our reputation. Maybe we should focus on giving the FDA exactly what they need for the strongest possible approval rather than rushing to meet investor timelines."

That night, Marcus sat in his office replaying Sarah’s words. The truth stung: he’d been managing a countdown clock, not a company. His attention had been trapped in a future he couldn't control, while the present moment—where all his actual influence resided—was being neglected.

The next morning, he made a conscious shift. Instead of starting meetings with countdown timers, he asked: "What specific value can we create today that strengthens our regulatory submission and serves our pilot customers better?"

The Learning Organization 📚

Something remarkable emerged from this process focus: MedFlow became a learning organization at scale. No longer consumed with defending an arbitrary timeline, they became curious about regulatory excellence and customer success.

Cross-functional teams studied successful FDA approvals in adjacent therapeutic areas. They established "FDA Excellence" working groups, and every regulatory question became an opportunity to deepen their understanding rather than a threat to their schedule.

They documented learnings in a central knowledge base, creating institutional capabilities that extended far beyond any single product approval.

This shift from outcome fixation to process mastery didn't just improve team dynamics. It accelerated their progress toward the very outcome Marcus had been chasing. They received FDA approval 2 weeks ahead of their revised timeline. More importantly, they had built organizational capabilities in regulatory excellence that would serve multiple product lines for years to come.

The Detachment Connection 🔗

Marcus's story was crafted to illustrate the power of strategic detachment. Detachment isn't indifference to outcomes. It's recognizing that your path to achieving results runs through present-moment excellence, not future-focused anxiety.

When you detach from specific outcomes, you free yourself to engage fully with the processes that create those outcomes. Detachment enables the fearlessness that Vivian Howard described. When you're not consumed by what might happen, you can act boldly on what needs to happen now.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION
Putting It Into Practice

 Your Attention Audit:

1. Track Your Focus: Notice where your attention goes with one leadership challenge this week. Are you thinking about the process or obsessing over the outcome?

2. Identify Your Outcome Fixation: What outcome are you attached to that might be creating fear? How is this attachment shaping your perception?

3. Shift to Process: Name 3 specific process elements you can focus on instead of the final outcome.

DEEPENING YOUR KNOWLEDGE
Resources for You

🧠 How focus shapes your brain and results. (Link)

📊 James Clear's insights on systems vs. goals thinking. (Link)

🎯 HBR article on process vs. outcome self-leadership. (Link)

⚡️ Mindfulness practices for leaders. (Link)

EXCELLENCE UNBOUNDED
How I Can Help You

High-performing executive teams don’t happen by chance. They happen by design.

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Misaligned companies underperform in the following ways:

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❌ Slower strategic execution

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🎤 Speaking Engagements: My mom can attest to the fact that I LOVE to talk. 😂 Now, I put that talent to work delivering talks on Mindset, Courage, Resilience, & Innovation.

A few past clients include KraftHeinz, Amazon Women @ Payments, PAHEi, & the Panamá Chapter of the International Coaching Federation (I delivered this talk in Spanish).

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Until next Sunday,

Shawnette