The quality of your attention shapes the quality of your decisions.

I learned this in my twenties, advising leaders in the European Parliament. I'd watch the smartest people in the room receive exactly the right advice, then struggle to act on it. Same pattern, again and again.

Until I understood: it wasn't a knowledge problem. It was a capacity problem.

So I spent the next decade studying what most leadership programs ignore: 15+ silent retreats, intensive work with secular Buddhist scholars, direct mentorship from the pioneers of boardroom coaching.

What I found: self-awareness isn't soft. It's the edge.

This is the paradox of my work. I help ambitious CEOs by slowing them down. Stillness isn't the opposite of performance. It's the source of it.

I work at the intersection of three things most advisors keep separate: inner work (seeing your own patterns), organizational systems (governance, strategy, culture), and peer wisdom (learning from others in the same seat).

Today, I create protected spaces where CEOs can surface what they haven't been able to see: through 1:1 advisory, organizational development mandates, or the Wise Leaders Fellowship, a CEO community that begins with silence.

If you're sensing there's something you're not yet seeing, let's talk.

Leadership means doing hard things in a human way.

Yours,

Nikolas

Nikolas Konstantin 🌱

How to install Psychological Safety: The Leadership Lever Most CEOs Misunderstand

In my work with founders and CEOs, I see the same pattern again and again: leaders demand high performance without creating the conditions for it to emerge.

They push their teams into what Amy Edmondson calls the Anxiety Zone. An environment of fear, judgment, and silent suffering.

I often see the symptoms showing up in my diagnostics: 
- Mistakes get hidden instead of discussed
- Innovation stagnates because nobody wants to be wrong
- Your best people leave cause they don't feel encouraged

And some CEOS even go the other way. 

They are too occupied being nice and land in the opposite trap: the Comfort Zone. 

When I enter those cultures, I notice the scent of artificial harmony: Everything feels collegial, everyone gets along, but nothing truly challenging ever gets said. No one dares to talk about the elephants in the room. 

The result? Comfortable stagnation. Wasted potential. Opportunities are lost to those willing to have courageous conversations.

Harvard Prof Amy Edmondson's framework maps how org cultures can get the best or worst out of people by mapping your culture across four zones:

Comfort Zone 
(High Safety, Low Performance): Safe and collegial, but unchallenged. Breakthroughs are rare.

Learning Zone 
(High Safety, High Performance): Open collaboration, embraced challenges, continuous improvement. This is where real results live.

Apathy Zone 
(Low Safety, Low Performance): Disengaged, emotionally checked out. Self-protection over contribution.

Anxiety Zone 
(Low Safety, High Performance): Fear-driven execution. Ideas withheld, mistakes hidden, burnout inevitable.

Most of the time, getting your team into the Learning Zone is the goal. 

Here are some interventions I use to get you there:

Normalize vulnerability
Share your own struggles and mistakes. Authenticity at the top creates permission throughout the organization.

Set ambitious, clear expectations 
Goals should inspire, not intimidate. Challenging but achievable. An invitation to rise, not retreat.

Invite real dialogue 
Don't avoid conflict; create space for it. Rigorous debate without fear of repercussion is a skill you can build.

Reward courage over outcomes 
Celebrate the willingness to speak up, confront problems, and propose bold ideas, even when immediate success isn't guaranteed.

This is difficult work. You need to be able to go into vulnerability and authentic dialogue with yourself. You can't fool the nervous system of your team. To effectively land in the learning zone yourself, you need to find a mirror and a working partner to land there yourself (and to look at your own anxiety or kindness traps). That needs you too look inwards and look at uncomfortable truths. But it pays off, in better cultures, smoother systems and better self-talk with yourself, too. 

A reflection for you: 
Which zone is your leadership inviting?

The person with the fewest blind spots wins. | CEO coaching, org advisory, silent retreats.

5 Books That Shaped How I Think About Strategy:
 
Most strategy conversations I have with CEOs start the same way: smart people, strong intuition, but no shared vocabulary for the choices they're actually making.
 
Strategy isn't about having all the answers. It's about asking better questions, recognizing patterns, and reducing them into an integrated set of choices.
 
These five books have shaped how I think alongside executives when we're working through the hard stuff:
 
𝟭. 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗶𝗻 by A.G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin The clearest framework I know for making strategic choices. Not theory for theory's sake; practical scaffolding for real decisions.
 
𝟮. 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆, 𝗕𝗮𝗱 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 by Richard Rumelt Rumelt cuts through the noise. Most "strategies" are just goals dressed up in fancy language. This book teaches you to spot the difference.
 
𝟯. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 by Patrick Lencioni Culture isn't soft. Organizational health is your most durable competitive edge. Lencioni makes the case simply and well.
 
𝟰. 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 by Michael Porter The foundation. Dense, but worth the effort. Porter's frameworks still hold up after forty years for a reason.
 
𝟱. 𝗕𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝗢𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne When the game you're playing feels unwinnable, this book asks: what if you changed the game entirely?
 
I keep these on my shelf not as trophies, but as thinking partners.
 
What would you add?

How to understand your organization's DNA:

Where are you on the "4 Cultures Map"?

When I begin my work with CEOs, I use the "4 Cultures Map" to map where their organization is.

When you scale your company, you need to understand two metrics above everything else: 

a) People Orientation: 
→ How much are people valued in my organization?

b) Performance Orientation: 
→ How much is performance valued in my organization?

Your preferences for people and performance as a leader are the building blocks of your company culture. 

Without an understanding of your preferences, you will:
a) hire the wrong people
b) create the wrong incentive structures
c) mindlessly design a culture that doesn't fit you. 

You need to understand where you place yourself on the 4 types of organizational cultures. 

Here they are:

𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲

People and their well-being matter above everything else.
Example: Family Organizations

𝗔𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲

Neither the well-being nor the performance of the workforce is considered important.
Example: Bureaucratic Institutions

𝗗𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲

Performance is the most important metric. Well-being and people's quality of life are secondary.
Example: McKinsey

𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲

People's well-being and their performance are equally valued.
Example: AirBnB, Deep Mind


When I begin my work with CEOs, I use the "4 Culture Model" to ask these three questions:

• Where do you place your organization?
• Where do your employees place your organization?
• Where do you want your organization to be in 2 years?
 

This analysis gives me a deep understanding of 

a) the CEO's cultural preferences 
b) how working in that organization feels
c) the direction we need to design for.

The short:

The 4 cultures are a helpful guide to understanding your status quo and direction as you are growing your organization: 
• Caring Culture
• Apathetic Culture
• Driver Culture
• Inclusive Culture

Where do you place yourself?

I had a call last week with a founder who runs a 200-person company.

Brilliant. Strategic. The kind of person who holds five competing priorities in their head while making you feel like you have their full attention.

Halfway through, he admitted he'd been averaging four hours of sleep for three weeks.

"I'll catch up when we close this round," he said.

I've heard this hundreds of times.

But I also saw if the non-negotiables are being ignored. You don't run faster, but you are only over-clocking the machine. 

The best CEOs I coach are disciplined to their core to get the essentials right every day (Like Daniel Seidel, who never skips the workout, and swears by his daily celery lemon juice)

The fundamentals aren't boring. They're the whole game.

The people who sustain excellence over decades have built their lives around five essentials that most of us know about but few actually honor.

1. Sleep (The Master Regulator)
Fixed wake time. Bright mornings, dim evenings. Seven hours every night beats five weekdays + ten on Saturday.

2. Nutrients (Macro + Micro + Hydration)
80%+ unprocessed foods. Protein at each meal. Front-load hydration.

3. Movement (Resistance + Cardio)
Daily micro-bouts beat sedentary marathons. Ten minutes throughout the day beats one intense session followed by eight hours in a chair.

4. Light (The Circadian Lever)
Morning outdoor light. Dim nights. Consistency beats gadgets.

5. Relationships (Others + Self)
One meaningful bid for connection daily. One self-regulation practice (2-10 min).

These five aren't separate categories. They're a system.

The fundamentals aren't what you do after you've handled the important stuff.

They're what make everything else possible.

Which one do you most need to revisit?

To friendship, to being humbled by waves, enamoured by the ocean's majesty, and to the new ways to see and experience this life. 

And to words, in their lushious rich textures that give texture to the unexplainable. 

Thank you life. 

(with Fritz Rabeler)

Some of my favorite moments last year came from working with Live EO CEO Daniel Seidel.

Watching a founder navigate the tension between “what we are today” and “what we could become” is always fascinating. Daniel did this with rare patience, groundedness, and visionary leadership.

LiveEO already helps infrastructure operators monitor railways, power lines, and pipelines from space. 

Today, they officially announced that they’re launching their own satellite constellation to do it better. 

While others were announcing, Daniel built the foundations and partnerships to set the stage to their own satellites. Three years in stealth. No empty marketing. Just obsessive focus on the foundation.

Daniel, it’s an honor to be in your corner. Here’s to the new era 🇪🇺.

"Most of us are living four or five years behind our own transformation."
 
We talk a lot about the fear of change. But there's another fear we talk about less: the grief of staying the same.
 
The slow erosion of pretending that what used to fit still does.
 
The fatigue of maintaining a version of yourself you've already outgrown.
 
This is the hidden tax of avoidance.
 
Not dramatic failure, but quiet deadening.
 
The sense that you're performing your own life rather than living it.
 
You know the right things to say, you hit the milestones, you keep the machine running. And somewhere along the way, you stopped being surprised by your own days.
 
𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨: "𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘈𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨"
 
->

Open article: The Transformation You're Avoiding by newsletter.nikolaskonstantin.com

Why you might be living years behind yourself

What stops many CEOs from working with a coach is finding the right one. Here are the 3 most important dimensions to consider (coming from a coach who does 70+ CEO workshops/year):

1. What type of coach do you need?

There are essentially 2 types:

Expert coaches bring deep sectoral knowledge. They've scaled organisations, led transformations, implemented frameworks. They tell you: "This is how I did it at Mercedes" or "Here's what worked at Google."

This can be valuable - especially if you're scaling for the first time. You're getting their playbook, their version of the best path forward.
_

Systems-thinking coaches don't hand you solutions. They help you understand your organisation's unique DNA - your systems, patterns, blind spots. They're sector-agnostic. The solution comes from within your context.

Neither is wrong. But be clear about which one you're getting.

When a coach says, "Everything we did at Spotify, you should do too," what’s the likelihood that’s going to fit an organisation of your size? Stay realistic.
___

2. Where should each type sit?

My take: At the highest level, you want a systems thinker. Someone who helps you understand what's actually happening before prescribing solutions.

Then bring in experts for targeted interventions - OKRs, structures, specific implementations.
___

3. How deep do you want to go?

Some want operational guidance - someone who's done it and can tell them what to do. Valid. Just know you're adopting someone else's strategy.

Others want lighter coaching - 60 minutes monthly, some questioning, nuggets of insight.

Then there's deep intervention work. Where we question everything. Deep work sessions where you move to slow thinking to uncover the deeper strategic and personal levers holding you back. This is where you set long-term goals and uncover blind spots you couldn't see running. 
___

My best advice: Don't hire a coach for their resume. Hire them because their approach aligns with what you need to grow.

When you decide someone's capacity for growth is limited, you have slipped into a fixed mindset yourself.

When I first start working with executives, many believe they operate from a growth mindset while their teams are stuck in a "fixed" one.

This is what I call the "fixed mindset fallacy".
 
When you decide someone else's capacity for growth is limited, you have quietly slipped into a fixed mindset yourself. You just cannot see it yet.
 
The truth is simpler and more hopeful:
 
No one is permanently stuck.
 
We all move between growth and fixed mindsets throughout the day. The environment determines where we tend to land.
 
Which means your real job as a leader is not to fix people. It is to create conditions where growth becomes the natural default.
 
Three starting points I return to with the CEOs I coach:
 
𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁. 
Where do you contract? What triggers your fixed mindset? Self-awareness here is non-negotiable.
 
𝗖𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀. 
When you only reward results, people stop taking the risks that lead to learning.
 
𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲. 
Dedicate real time to reviewing how your team arrived at results, not just what they achieved.
 
These three shifts sound simple. They are not easy. But they change cultures.
 
What has helped you build an environment where growth mindsets come more naturally?

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