How "Everything Is Great News" Changed How I Lead

At the beginning of last year I was on a call with my sales mentor, Raphael Arjona , and I was frustrated. I’d spent weeks on a round of thoughtful outreach emails. I’d researched every person, read each one out loud before sending, and I was proud of them. Then I waited, and almost nothing came back. I told Raphael I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong, and he said something that made me want to hang up the phone. He said, “Everything is great news.”

I pushed back. Nobody was responding to me. In what world was that great news?

He said, “Because now you know something isn’t working. A few weeks ago you didn’t know that. You thought those emails were going to land. Now you have information, and information is what you use to fix things.”

I didn’t take that in right away. I spent a few days being annoyed with him before I started to see what he meant, and when I did, it changed how I handle frustration in general. The things that irritate me usually have something to tell me, and most of the time I’m so busy being irritated that I don’t stop to listen.

Here’s an example I’ve been working through for nearly 20 years. I get asked for my time constantly. Can we grab coffee. Can I pick your brain for twenty minutes. Can you look at my deck. Can you introduce me to someone. For a long time, that felt overwhelming in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t lived it. Every request felt like it needed an answer, and every answer felt like it needed to be a yes, and I would end some weeks feeling like my calendar belonged to everyone except me. It made me short with people who didn’t deserve it, and it made me dread my inbox.

Then I went back through my own assessments. I run a leadership development firm, so I’ve looked at hundreds of these for other people, and I know how much they reveal. Reading my own with fresh eyes, I could see the exact wiring that was producing the drain. I’m someone who moves fast and decides early, who treats a request as something to resolve rather than something to sit with, and who finds it taxing to carry other people’s processes. Once I could see that, the requests stopped feeling like an attack. They were just requests. The stress had been coming from how I was built to respond to them, and that was something I could do something about.

From there the reframe got easier. All of those people asking for my time are telling me something. They’re telling me I’ve built something people want to be close to. That’s demand, and demand can be shaped. It can be routed to my team, offered at my events, priced where it’s really consulting, and turned into something that serves a lot of people without exhausting one. What felt like a problem for years turned out to be one of the clearest signals I have about the value of the work.

The harder reframe was about other people. Those same assessments describe someone who expects the people around her to decide as fast as she does, and once I could see that in writing, I started noticing how often I’d been grading people against a standard they never agreed to. Someone who takes a month to decide on something I’d decide in a day isn’t being difficult. Someone who says they want something and then lets it sit isn’t wasting my time. They’re doing what most people do with a want, which is to live with it for a while before they act on it.

Here’s what I’d say to anyone who thinks of self-awareness as a performance tool, something you use to get sharper or faster or more productive. It does do that. What I didn’t expect is how much gentler it would make me. When I understand why something lands hard for me, I stop assuming my way of working is the only reasonable one, and I stop being so hard on myself for having a way of working at all. I get to extend to other people the same patience I needed someone to extend to me.

So the next time something frustrates you, you can try Raphael’s question before you reach for a judgment. What is this telling me? What do I know now that I didn’t know before? What about the way I’m built is making this land the way it is?