The leap
“Leap and the net will appear.”
That quote lived on a Post-it on my computer screen from freshman year of college until I finally believed it enough to take it down.
An acting class assigned us Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way when I was 18. At the time I didn’t fully understand why. Now, 20-something years later, I see exactly why.
I got lucky early. My dad’s mentor was Norman Vincent Peale. I grew up hearing about the power of the mind every single morning over coffee. By the time I hit college, I was serendipitously handed one of the original bibles of self-development.
I didn’t choose those inputs, but I’ve spent my entire career watching what happens to leaders who never got them, or who are only just finding them
This morning I was on a walk with my fiancé and my daughter in Munich, Germany — because we decided to play airport roulette and take a last minute trip to anywhere with open seats (I really wasn’t kidding about leaping becoming part of who I am!).
On the walk, Brent and I got into something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:
The difference between having something and being the kind of person who creates it. Which comes first? Which accelerates you?
We all want things. Better teams. That bonus or promotion. Stronger cultures. Employees that rise. KPIs that move. Relationships that elevate us and don’t feel like friction. The confidence to leap.
But most of us skip the most important step: Who do you need to become first?
The leaders I’ve coached over the last 15 years who go the farthest, the fastest — they’re not the ones with the clearest strategy. Read that again. They’re the ones who get radically curious about their blind spots. They question how they need to grow to facilitate the shift they seek. They don’t blame external circumstances. They turn the mirror on themselves. They get out of their own way faster than everyone else. They take the leap and grow before the net is visible.
Because no matter what, when you want to move fast, you’ll be doing things that are uncertain constantly. And only thing you’ll find in the unknown is more of yourself. This makes teams slow down. Despite every strategy you try, despite having wonderful, brilliant well intentioned leaders.
What I see in the companies we work with:
When they know BRAVE, the uncertainty actually speeds them up. It makes complexity, change and the constant demands rocket fuel for their growth. Because they looked at their blind spots together. Because they grew faster then their company numbers.
Here’s the thing… Leaders come to BRAVE because they want to move an OKR or hit a number. They stay — and send their entire teams — because they realize something along the way:
The external is just a reflection of the internal. The missed targets, misalignments and morale dips come from a missing layer of infrastructure you never thought to build: an operating system for your people.
When leaders and teams do the real work of learning how to talk to humans, when your conversations are exceptional, the employee experience improves and then the OKRs, the KPIs, the client results take care of themselves. And this is what most big overarching culture programs get wrong: it’s not about big, fancy gestures — it’s about the tiny moments, the micro-interactions that shape how people feel about work and their role within it.
This is the founding insight of BRAVE. Every step of our framework comes back to it.
You can’t build a high-performing team on top of broken conversations. And most organizations are being forced to move at velocities that break conversations now that were in what I’ve been calling the Acceleration Age.
Your business can only grow as fast as your leaders are growing. Because all humans have blind spots and until we do the work of finding them, they’ll block our progress. But after we do… 3, 2, 1 blast off.
If you’re a founder or executive, read this.
You’re not thinking about feelings. You’re thinking about speed, scale, and survival.
You need the market won. You need the team aligned. You need decisions made fast and executed clean. When things stall, your instinct is to push harder — clearer goals, tighter accountability, louder urgency.
But here’s an insight you won’t hear at the board level (unless I’m on your board):
The bottleneck is almost never the strategy. It’s the conversations underneath it. The ones your people aren’t having with each other. The ones your managers are having poorly. The ones you yourself are accidentally shutting down without knowing it.
Every Culture Cliff™ I’ve ever seen — the moment organizational speed outpaces the humans holding it together — started the same way. Not with a bad plan. With a communication breakdown that compounded in the background until it became expensive.
Your people leaders are not failing you. They are running out of runway. And they need you to understand that what looks like an execution problem is actually a conversation problem — and that you are part of that conversation whether you show up intentionally or not.
The ROI you’re looking for lives in that gap.
If you’re a people leader, read this.
You see it every day. The tension between what leadership wants and what the team can actually hold. You’re translating up, translating down, absorbing the pressure from both directions — and somehow expected to build culture in the margins. Phew!
You know the engagement scores aren’t just numbers. You know why that top performer went quiet in the last all-hands. You know exactly which team dynamic is about to break if nobody addresses it.
But getting the business to see it the way you see it? That’s where it gets hard.
You’re early, I know that. You see the writing on the wall before anyone else. Just know: I see you.
The research you already know — psychological safety, trust, belonging — it’s not separate from the P&L. It IS the P&L. The founders and executives you support are starting to find out what you’ve known all along. They just need it translated into their language.
That’s exactly what BRAVE gives you. A shared framework that lets you walk into any room — board, exec team, or frontline — and make the case for the human work in terms that land. Because when the conversation changes, everything changes.
Here’s what links you both:
Founders: your people leaders are your earliest warning system. They are sitting on intelligence about your organization that never makes it to your desk — because the conversations that surface it don’t feel safe enough, fast enough, or valued enough to rise.
People leaders: your executives are not ignoring you. They’re translating everything through the lens of risk and return. When you speak that language — when you can connect the human work to the business outcome — the door opens.
BRAVE is where both of you learn to close that gap by giving both sides a shared operating language for the most underleveraged asset in your company: the quality of your conversations.
We’re in the middle of Q2.
Which means a lot of you are looking at your numbers and wondering why the strategy isn’t landing the way you drew it up.
I’d invite you to look somewhere else first.
Look at the conversations.
Are your leaders equipped to hold stress, complexity, and change without defaulting to control, silence, or people pleasing or performance anxiety?
Are your teams safe enough to say the true thing — fast enough to matter? Before you lose runway?
Are you becoming the kind of leader who makes all of that possible? You may hope you are. But do you know, with certainty?
Do you understand the neurobiology of business? Is everyone aligned on standards? Does information flow where it needs to? Does everyone step up and take ownership, share ideas and drive for better? Are people constantly speaking up about what’s not working? No? That all stems from the neurobiology of how we work together, so maybe it’s time to learn…
There is no better time to become a leader who has the tools and the capacity to hold more — with calm, with clarity, with a poise that people around you feel and follow.
That’s what we build at BRAVE.
If this resonated, maybe this is your sign...
Leap, and the net will appear.
Bravely,
— Elisabeth
P.S. Not sure where to start? The How to Talk to Humans Bootcamp is where most leaders begin — founders, executives, and people leaders all in the same room, finally speaking the same language. It’s where you stop reacting and start leading on purpose. [You can book for your team or apply to join our fall cohort individually → here ]
