I spent years believing that if nobody was complaining, everything was fine. I was wrong, and this thirty second clip is where I first said why, before I even knew I was describing my own business.
The clip on this page is from a keynote I gave before I'd written my book or built out the framework I teach today. But watching it back recently, I realized I was already describing the exact mechanism I now spend most of my time helping leaders break, just without the fancy name and visuals.
The desire to maintain the status quo is how we get burnt out and overwhelmed. The world changes whether we want it to or not, so if we plant our feet and refuse to move, we don't avoid the change. We just delay dealing with it, and then we're scrambling to catch up all at once instead of adjusting as we go.
I teach this stuff, but I am guilty of it too…
At the start of 2019, business was slow, so I put my head down and ground it out. Cold outreach, relentless marketing, the whole grind. I built the business back up. And what I actually wanted, if I'm honest, wasn't to keep growing. It was to reach a point where I could finally stop pushing so hard.
Then 2020 happened. COVID-19 hit, and everything changed at once. I didn't pivot. I didn't innovate. I just tried to stay afloat, using the same playbook I'd always used, because that's what you do when you're in survival mode.
Coming out of it, I went right back to doing things the old way. Except the old way didn't work anymore. The market had moved. The world had passed my old playbook by, and I was behind, once again playing catch-up.
Status quo. Change happens anyway. Scramble to catch up. Briefly stabilize. Repeat.
Here's where it gets dangerous for leaders specifically: Most leaders believe no pushback is good news. Nobody's complaining, so the change must be landing fine. I used to believe some version of this myself; that a quiet team is a settled team.
It isn't. Apathy often looks exactly like compliance. People show up, do the minimum required, stop offering ideas, stop asking questions, stop pushing back on anything, and from the front of the room that reads as smooth sailing. It's not. It's the beginning of the exact cycle I just described, except now it's happening to your whole team instead of just to you. No news is not necessarily good news. Sometimes it's the quietest warning sign you'll get.
How to Break Out of Apathy
This is why I built the YES AND Framework, because breaking this cycle isn't about working harder during the scramble phase. It's about changing what you do during the quiet phase, before you're forced to.
Yield to what is. Stop treating the change as something to outlast and start treating it as something already true, so you can respond to it instead of resenting it.
Explore and express your core. Figure out what actually matters to you or your team underneath the disruption, so you're not just reacting to noise.
Start small, take small steps. You don't need a full pivot plan before you're allowed to move. Act, analyze, adjust. One next step beats a perfect plan you never start.
Access and apply your inner creative genius. The solution to "the old way stopped working" is rarely more of the old way. It's permission to generate options before you judge them.
Notice and nurture emotion. The overwhelm in that cycle is real, and pretending it isn't there doesn't make people move faster. Naming it does.
Dig deeper. Ask why the old approach stopped working instead of assuming it just needs more effort. Usually the real problem is one layer beneath the obvious one.
I don't run through all six with every team on day one. But every version of this cycle I've watched, in my own business and in the organizations I work with, breaks at one of these six points. Usually more than one.
Your One Concrete Step for Today
If you're leading a team through a change right now, here's the one question worth asking this week. Not "is anyone pushing back?" but "who on my team has gone quiet, and when did that start?." That question will tell you more about where you actually stand than any survey will.
If this is landing because you're watching your own team go quiet right now, there are two ways I usually work with organizations on it. Some bring me in for a keynote, to give the whole team the language and the wake-up call in one high-energy session, the same kind of talk that clip is pulled from. Others want to go deeper, working with me directly as a trainer or consultant to actually build a Yes And culture into how the team operates day to day, not just for one event but as the operating default. Either is a real starting point. Which one makes more sense depends entirely on whether you need a spark or a rebuild, and I'm happy to help you figure out which. Get in touch here.