Field Notes: The Hole Doesn’t Need to Be Bigger

Inspired by my Kenyan safari, “Field Notes” are my observations from the field where my clients and I work — coaching sessions. Each field note is drawn from actual client sessions and gives an insight into the personal evolution of my clients.

Location: A Law Firm Founder’s Office, Pacific Northwest

Observation: Founders who feel stuck don’t need more capacity. They need to stop saying yes to the wrong things.

She walked in frustrated. Traffic. A day hijacked. A meeting across town she never should have agreed to. She knew it before she said yes. She went anyway — and didn’t mention it to her husband because she already knew what he’d say.

That’s not a time management problem. That’s a self-awareness problem she’s now actually aware of.

1.The Environment Is Telling You Something

She’d figured something out through journaling. Away from the office — kitchen table, coffee in hand, dogs out — her thinking is completely different. Ideas move. She knows what she wants to say. She can see who she’s becoming.

At the office? That version of her goes quiet.

She asked if I experienced the same thing with my own writing. Yes. One hundred percent yes.

There are six core energy influencers that either support your ability to do the thing you’re trying to do — or they don’t. Spiritual. Emotional. Mental. Physical. Social. Environmental. She had landed, on her own through journaling, on a real insight about the sixth one. Her environment was suppressing the exact energy she needed for the work that matters most to her right now. That’s not a personality quirk. That’s a signal worth taking seriously.

2. Start, Stop, Go

When I asked her to put an energy level to what she was feeling, she didn’t reach for a number. She reached for a picture.

“It’s like sitting in traffic. Start, stop, go. Bottled up. Constrained.”

That’s a Level 2. Frustration. Energy trying to move with nowhere to go.

When she described what she actually wanted — the writing, the thinking, the next version of herself — she landed on a 5. Forward motion. 

Possibility.

The gap between those two numbers isn’t a scheduling problem. It’s a design problem.

3. Bigger Is Not the Answer

She came to a reasonable conclusion: “The hole needs to get bigger. I need more room to put in what I want.”

I let her answer hang in the air. I just sat there giving her space to process the logical result of the course she thought was correct. 

Here’s what I knew: A bigger hole wouldn’t fix it. A bigger hole just means the cross-town meeting fits. The happy hour she doesn’t want to go to fits. Every obligation she already knows is wrong fits. You haven’t solved anything — you’ve just created more surface area for the same problem.

What she actually needs is a more exclusive funnel. Not more room. Fewer things.

She got there herself: “Bigger is not better.”

Right. You have 168 hours in a week. The answer is never more time. It’s doing fewer things with the time you have. That’s Level 6 thinking — we all win, or we don’t play the game. You’re designing your game. Not somebody else’s.

Field Exercise: The Funnel Audit

Find one thing on your calendar this week you agreed to and didn’t want to.

Ask yourself:

1. Did I say yes because I wanted to — or because I didn’t want to hear the conversation that comes with saying no?

2. Does this belong in the life I’m designing, or the life I’ve defaulted into?

3. If I made the funnel more exclusive — not bigger — what’s the first thing that comes out?

If you already knew you shouldn’t have said yes, you’ve found where you, perhaps, ought to lean in; your growth edge.

End of dispatch.