What keeps you grounded when everything around you feels chaotic? For many leaders, the answer isn’t another productivity hack or time-management tool, it’s a spiritual routine that keeps them connected to purpose and perspective.

In this special Best of Best Ever episode, Scott Eblin shares practical insights from five season one guests on the spiritual routines that help them stay centered and aligned with what matters most – even in the middle of demanding, unpredictable days.

You’ll hear how leaders use intention, reflection, faith, breathing, and meditation to reset, zoom out, and reconnect with their deeper “why.” These routines look different for everyone, but they all serve the same purpose: helping you live better and lead better.

Learn more about The Life GPS: https://courses.eblingroup.com/p/best-life-ever-course

Listen here:

Hear more from each guest in their full episodes:

Lara Lee, Open Heart, Strong Core: Lara Lee’s Mantra for Purposeful Leadership

Maggie Kane, Creating Space for Everyone: How Maggie Kane Leads with Purpose and Passion

Harry Kraemer, The Self-Reflective Leader: Harry Kraemer on Legacy, Humility, and Leading with Purpose

Richard Culatta, Leading with Curiosity and Humanity in the Age of AI

Muriel Wilkins, “I Know I’m Right” and Other Hidden Blockers, with Muriel Wilkins

The post The Spiritual Dimension of Your Life GPS®: Staying Grounded When Life Gets Loud first appeared on The Eblin Group.

The adrenaline of the new year has worn off. First quarter results are coming due, and your first quarterly business review is approaching fast. If bonuses are a thing in your company, they have likely just paid out and some of your best people are quietly weighing whether this is still where they want to be. The winter slog is dragging on while the pressure to deliver just keeps getting louder. And, oh by the way, Daylight Saving Time is about to knock everyone’s internal clock sideways.

Welcome to the real March Madness.

Here’s what I’ve learned in 25 years of coaching executives: the leaders who navigate March successfully aren’t the ones who grind the hardest. They’re the ones who manage their energy – personal, team, and organizational – intentionally so that they can lead for both results and relationships.

Energy, not time, is the true scarce commodity of leadership. You can’t manage time; everybody gets 168 hours a week. But you can manage the energy you bring to the time you have.

Let me share what you can do to increase and focus energy in three domains – personal, team, and organizational.

Personal Energy

Olympic gold medalist and championship coach Dain Blanton shared something about energy management on my Best Ever podcast that really stuck with me: “You don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your training.”

A lot of leaders believe that when the big moment comes – the QBR, the board meeting, the crucial retention conversation – they’ll rise to meet it. Sometimes they do. More often, they fall to whatever level their daily habits have prepared them for. If your preparation has been consistent, you get good outcomes. If it’s been sporadic under the weight of the opening months of 2026, March Madness will expose that.

So, the question isn’t if your energy and focus can rise to the occasion. The question is how can you raise the level of your training?

Here are some key practices that Coach Blanton uses with his championship players that can help you perform when the pressure is on:

• Visualize the Win – take five minutes each morning to visualize what winning looks like today – not what’s on your to-do list, but how you need to show up to get the win.
• Eat the Frog Early – get the hardest thing on your schedule done first when your energy is highest.
• Next Play Mindset – when something goes sideways, focus on what’s next rather than replaying the last play.
• Take a Stop-Down – keep the vibe of the last conversation from affecting the next by stopping and slowing down with 30 seconds of deep breathing to create an intentional transition.

All of these are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference. Which one would make the biggest difference for you this month?

Team Energy

Managing your own energy is necessary but not sufficient. Right now, the energy and focus of some of your best people may be dipping. Maybe they’ve been running so hard since the beginning of the year that they’re starting to feel burned out or, perhaps, lost in the shuffle. Or it could be that a bonus has hit their bank account. They could either be feeling appreciated, or they could be thinking, “I’ve got the cash, maybe I should take a fresh look at other options.”

So, what can you do to keep your team feeling focused, appreciated, and energetic during March Madness? I’d suggest you put three Ps into practice – protect, push, and promote. When you:

• Protect Your Team, you pace the work, provide air cover from distractions, and back your people up when things go sideways.
• Push Your Team, you keep goals front and center, work on expanding capabilities, and show your people how they’re growing.
• Promote Your Team, you speak for their work, build a narrative that threads individual accomplishments into a bigger story, and create opportunities for your people to shine.

Protect. Push. Promote. Which of the three needs more attention from you in March?

Organizational Energy

Personal energy keeps you sharp. Team energy keeps your people engaged. Organizational energy makes possible the cross-functional effort that pulls in the same direction instead of siloed efforts working at cross purposes.

The latter is what often starts happening during March Madness. As the pressure builds, leaders start over indexing on their functional responsibilities. Cross-functional collaboration slows down because everyone’s focusing on their own plans. The kumbaya of the beginning of the year kick-offs fade, and functional leaders and their teams go heads down on their plans. Silos harden.

A wise executive named Lucien Alziari shared something with me years ago that I’ve never forgotten: the most successful senior executives approach their work with a business first, function second mindset. That’s the essence of what’s called being on the first team. If you’re a designated leader, your first team isn’t the function you lead. It’s the leadership team you sit on.

First team leaders do a few things that are especially important during high-pressure stretches like March Madness. They start with the question, “What are we trying to accomplish as a business?” and reverse engineer back from there. They bust silos by reaching out to colleagues across the organization to solve problems that don’t fit neatly in any one function’s lane. They share resources – talent, ideas, budget – in service of the bigger game rather than hoarding them for their own scoreboard. And they have each other’s backs when things get hard.

The organizational energy question during March Madness is this: Are you showing up for your first team, or are you burrowing into your function?

The Real March Madness

So, the real March Madness isn’t about the brackets. It’s about the temptation to deplete yourself, your team, and your organization in pursuit of what’s right in front of you instead of taking a step back to invest in the disciplines, relationships, and clarity that create success that lasts.

Before you move on to your next thing, take a few moments to consider this last question, for each of the three buckets of energy – personal, team, and organizational, what’s one step you want to take this week to start making the shift from March Madness to March Mastery?

If you liked what you read here, subscribe here to get my latest ideas on how to lead and live at your best.

The post From March Madness to March Mastery: A Leader’s Guide to Managing Energy When the Pressure is On first appeared on The Eblin Group.

First, Ilia. Known as the Quad God, 21-year-old Ilia was competing in his first Olympics and was expected to win the gold going away. Until he collapsed – almost literally – in his concluding long program, falling out of several jumps and finishing 8th in the overall competition.

You had to feel for him – especially after the sportsmanship he showed towards the eventual gold medalist and the incredibly composed and candid interview he gave to NBC’s Andrea Joyce just after his results were announced. He acknowledged that the pressure of competing for the gold on the biggest stage in the world for the first time in his life got inside his head. Later, he said in another interview that in the seconds before he started his final skate, his mind was flooded with memories of every trauma he’d ever experienced. His interference overwhelmed his potential.

And then the exact opposite occurred in the women’s competition when 20-year-old Alysa Liu won the gold after giving the performance of her life.

Unlike Ilia, Alysa had been to the Olympics before, having competed and succeeded at the highest levels of world skating competition between the ages of 13 and 16. And then she walked away from all of that because she recognized she wanted to be a normal teenager. Eleven months ago, she realized that she still loved to skate, but the joy was in the skating, not the competition. So, she started skating again. But skating when you have the talent of Alysa Liu means you can skate with the best skaters in the world.

And that’s what she did this week on Olympic ice in Milan. She skated with pure joy. The point was the joy, not the gold. And from a place of freedom and joy she won the gold – decisively. With joy as her motivator, Alysa’s interference was eliminated and her performance just equaled her vast potential.

As Alysa skated, the NBC cameras panned to the face of Ilia Malinin watching her from the stands with a smile of deep appreciation. As a parent and as a human, my hope for Ilia is that after watching Alysa skate to her gold medal, the next time he’s on Olympic ice, he, too, will be propelled by joy and not the interference that comes with the pressure of Olympic competition. If he does, he’ll win.

Where in your life is interference overwhelming your potential? And where have you found the kind of joy that eliminates it?

If you liked what you read here, subscribe here to get my latest ideas on how to lead and live at your best.

The post The Joy That Wins Gold first appeared on The Eblin Group.

If there’s one relational routine that underpins every positive leadership outcome, it’s listening.

In this Best of Best Ever, Scott brings together some of the most powerful lessons from Season One to explore how intentional listening builds trust, strengthens relationships, and improves results—at work, at home, and in the communities we care about.

Across conversations with CEOs, physicians, nonprofit founders, and elite athletes, a consistent pattern emerged: leaders who listen well create the conditions for connection, collaboration, and sustainable performance.

Learn more about The Life GPS: https://courses.eblingroup.com/p/best-life-ever-course

Hear more from each guest in their full episodes:

• Harry Kraemer, The Self-Reflective Leader: Harry Kraemer on Legacy, Humility, and Leading with Purpose
• Cynthia Horner, Medicine, Mission, and the Art of Listening, with Dr. Cynthia Horner
• Maggie Kane, Creating Space for Everyone: How Maggie Kane Leads with Purpose and Passion
• Vivek Shah, Turning Rejection into a Billion-Dollar Strategy
• Dain Blanton, What Champions Do Differently

Listen here:

The post The Relational Domain of Your Life GPS®: Why Listening Is a Life and Leadership Advantage first appeared on The Eblin Group.

Here’s the trap many leaders fall into in February: as the pressure to drive for results ramps up, relationships get downgraded from strategic priorities to tactical necessities. Meetings get shorter and more transactional. One-on-ones become status updates. The focus shifts almost entirely to the content of the work that produces results and away from the connections with other people that make the results both possible and sustainable.

It’s not surprising, really. When you’re driven to deliver, it’s easy to deprioritize relationship building and maintenance. But here’s what 25 years of coaching leaders has taught me: the leaders who consistently achieve sustainable results are the ones who refuse to make the false choice between driving results and building relationships.

The best leaders bring a balance of behaviors that do both. And when they do, they don’t just get better results, they live better lives, and, through their ripple effect, make the world a little bit better as well. In this post, I want to cover why all of that’s the case and what you can do to lead and live that way.

Let’s start with the basics.

Two Buckets of Leadership Behaviors

For years, I’ve observed that leadership behaviors fall into two big buckets: the behaviors that drive results and the behaviors that build relationships. If you mapped those on an x-y graph, you’d see four quadrants.

Leaders who are weak in both buckets are completely ineffective and don’t last long. Leaders who are strong in just one bucket hit ceilings. They either burn through relationships to hit their goals or are viewed as nice to be around but not as leaders who get stuff done.

The leaders who end up in the upper right-hand corner – strong in both results and relationships – are the game-changers who spark value-added and often innovative 1+1=3 outcomes. Why? Because creating the space to truly collaborate builds trust, and trust is the accelerant for creating results that matter and last.

Three Options for Engagement, Three Levels of Results

So how do you show up as that kind of leader – the game-changer who is equally adept at driving results and building relationships? I’d suggest you use two of the three basic options that I’ve concluded we have for engaging with each other – transient, transactional, and transformational. You want to avoid the first style as much as possible and be intentional about hitting the sweet spot between options 2 and 3.

Let me give a bit of definition for each so you can see what I mean.

Transient engagement is what happens when we’re distracted and impatient. Our focus is on ourselves. We interrupt, we tell, we use yes-or-no questions. We’re not really engaging because our mind and attention is somewhere else. Transient engagement delivers 1+1=1 outcomes – it’s value detracting. Almost all of us do it on occasion but it’s a dynamic to be aware of and avoid as much as possible.

Transactional engagement is the basic way stuff gets done in corporate world. Here, we’re purposeful and focused, trying to solve a problem or move something forward. We ask open-ended questions and set timelines. This is the work of getting stuff done, and it’s essential. It delivers 1+1=2 outcomes – value-added and solid, but not necessarily remarkable. If you only practice transactional engagement, you leave value on the table.

Transformational engagement is where the magic happens. We’re creative, connected, and fully present. We’re not just listening to what’s said but also noticing and attending to what’s not said. Our primary agenda is connection, not just completion. It’s to engage as humans and not just as functions of production. Because it nurtures and unlocks the power of relationships, the irony is you often end up with 1+1=3 outcomes when you engage in a transformational way.

The real leadership unlock is to become adept at toggling back and forth between transactional and transformational engagement – mixing the problem-solving, next-steps focus of transactional engagement, with the open-ended and curious stance of transformational engagement. When people feel genuinely seen and valued, they bring more of themselves to the work. Creativity rises. Candor increases. Problems get solved faster. Trust grows.

The Physiology You Can’t Ignore

And here’s another benefit of prioritizing relationships as high as you do results – you live longer.

The Harvard Longevity Study and decades of aligned research demonstrate that people with strong relationships have both longer lifespans and longer health spans. Why would that be?

One reason would be that strong relationships elevate stress-reducing hormones like serotonin and oxytocin while decreasing stress response hormones like cortisol. Game-changing leaders who hit the sweet spot between driving results and building relationships help reduce the state of chronic fight-or-flight that the external triggers and organizational pressures of 2026 induce in many of us. When you dial back the fight-or-flight response for yourself and your team, everyone thinks more clearly, interacts more productively, and makes better decisions together. And everyone is less likely to fall ill and, over the long run, more likely to live longer, happier, and healthier lives.

In addition to what you achieve at work, that’s a pretty great legacy to aspire to as a leader – one who contributes to making everyone’s lives better.

From I-It to I-Thou

I’d suggest that aspiration is grounded in a mindset I learned years ago from a boss who introduced me to the work of the Jewish theologian, Martin Buber. He believed there are two basic ways we can relate to people: through an “I-It” lens where we view people as functions of production and a means to achieve our goals or through an “I-Thou” lens in which we recognize and honor the sacred, unique humanity in each person.

What I’ve observed in my life in general and my coaching work in particular is that when you begin to treat relationships not as means to particular ends, but as ends in themselves, something shifts. Paradoxically, this approach often unlocks better results precisely because people can sense the difference between being valued instrumentally versus intrinsically.

What’s Next for You?

We’ve covered a lot of ground here, so what’s next for you on hitting the sweet spot between driving results and building relationships? Here are three suggestions:

First, take a few minutes to plot yourself on the results-and-relationships graph. Be honest with yourself – where are you trending as we shift to the “go get stuff done” phase of the year? How does your trend serve the sustainable success of you and your team? What, if anything, do you need to adjust about the way you’re leading and engaging?

Second, initiate at least one conversation this week where your only agenda is transformational engagement. No problem-solving, no hidden agenda. Just genuine connection where you learn more about the other person and give them the opportunity to learn more about you. There’ll be plenty of time to get back into transactional mode – give the transformational mode a little space to breathe.

Third, notice the ripple effects. Pay attention to how investing in relationship quality affects not just that specific relationship, but stress management for yourself and your team, the quality of your collective decisions, and ultimately the results you’re all accountable for. I’m willing to place a bet that the trend will be positive on all three factors.

Results and relationships. They’re not mutually exclusive; they’re mutually supportive. The opportunity you have as the “go get stuff done” phase of the year starts this month, and the pressure ramps up is to be the kind of game-changing leader who not only gets that point but acts on it.

If you liked what you read here, subscribe here to get my latest ideas on how to lead and live at your best.

The post Results AND Relationships – How to Hit the Sweet Spot as the Pressure Ramps Up first appeared on The Eblin Group.

If you’re wondering how you’ve already lost that last 20%, here’s what I’ve noticed from 25 years of coaching corporate leaders – there’s a big chunk of the year that’s gone before you even start.

Just consider the year ahead for a few seconds. Things really don’t get cranked up for the new year until the second or third week of January as folks get their head back in the game after the holidays and a lot of “here’s what we’re doing this year,” meetings are held. Then, as the year progresses, there’s usually a dip around the week of Spring Break, and a big dip in the July – August time frames as summer vacations make it hard to pull together a critical mass of colleagues together to get big things done. There’s another mini dip around Thanksgiving and, finally, if you’re honest about it, the last two weeks or so of December are a wash as far as the office goes.

So that leaves you with around 42 weeks, not 52, to really get stuff done. And that means you need a plan and an operating rhythm for the year that is effective, efficient, and reality based. Here then are some tips and principles for creating an operating rhythm that enables you to live better and lead better in 2026.

Do a Post-Mortem – Start 2026 by doing a post-mortem on 2025. What worked well with your operating rhythm last year that you want to pull through to this year? What utterly failed and what does that tell you that you need to plan for, avoid, or mitigate in 2026?

Less is More – Differentiate yourself from most of your executive peers by not trying to cram 10 pounds of stuff into a 5-pound bag. When it comes to annual agenda setting, most executives’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs – there’s simply no way to accomplish every initiative on the wish list given the time and resources that are actually available. Don’t be that executive – decide to go deep on a smaller list of meaningful, high impact priorities and nail those, rather than going broad on a bunch and leaving a lot of loose ends and frustration in your wake at yearend 2026. So, go ahead and call it: What are your top three leadership priorities for 2026?

Reverse Engineer Back from Halloween – Realistically, if you don’t have your big milestones accomplished by Halloween, they’re likely not getting to done this year. Take some time down to define what success looks like at the end of October and reverse engineer back from that date to determine two things. One, are your plans do-able this year or do you need to reduce the amount of pounds you’re putting in your bag? And two, if your plans pass the pressure test, map out the mini milestones along the way and the people you’re going to need on board to reach them.

Start Early – Any big initiative (or this year’s milestone for multi-year projects) that doesn’t start by February probably isn’t going to get done by the end of the year. Scope it, communicate it, build the relationships you’ll need in January and early February if you haven’t already done so. Don’t discount the opportunity for relationship building now that will pay dividends when crunch time comes later.

The Terrain is Reality – There’s an old military saying that when the map differs from the terrain, the terrain is reality. As you draw up your map for the year, account for the reality of the terrain of the corporate calendar’s elements that are entirely predictable. Events like board meetings, quarterly business reviews, and budget seasons happen on a regular cadence every year and when they do they divert the time and attention of key players you probably need to get your stuff done. Keep the terrain ahead in mind as you make your plans.

Protect Your Time Now – The calendar monster will eat up your prime time for getting stuff done – the back half of Q1, all of Q2 and much of Q3 – if you let it. Get ahead of the curve and protect your productivity by blocking out deep think and deep work time for you and your team now. And because you and your team are only human, block out some rest and recovery time along the way.

So, where do you want to be at the end of 2026, scrambling to cram things in that are going to make the year a “success” or ending it with a feeling of accomplishment because you set forth a realistic agenda and operating rhythm back in January? What you do over the next couple of weeks will write the ending of this year’s book.

If you liked what you read here, subscribe here to get my latest ideas on how to lead and live at your best.

The post You’re Planning on 52 Weeks for 2026 When You Really Only Have 42 first appeared on The Eblin Group.

Your mind is your most important leadership tool. But in a world of nonstop inputs, it’s also the one that gets overwhelmed the fastest. In this episode of Best Ever, Scott Eblin brings together Olympic champions, CEOs, and innovators to unpack the mental routines that keep them grounded, clear, and intentional.

From activating your parasympathetic “braking system” with three focused breaths, to five-minute visualization resets, to lunchtime movement breaks, nightly curiosity rituals, and annual reflection retreats—these leaders show how small, consistent practices create outsized impact.

Learn more about The Life GPS: https://courses.eblingroup.com/p/best-life-ever-course

Hear more from each guest in their full episodes:

• Dain Blanton, What Champions Do Differently
• Vivek Shah, Turning Rejection into a Billion-Dollar Strategy
• Donagh Herlihy, Gratitude as a Leadership Superpower
• Richard Culatta, Leading with Curiosity and Humanity in the Age of AI
• Scot Wingo, Building Startups, Scaling Yourself

Listen here:

The post The Mental Dimension of Your Life GPS®: Think Clearer, Lead Better first appeared on The Eblin Group.

With 25 years in the rearview mirror and what looks like some awesome roads ahead, it feels like a good time to answer some questions about our journey. Specifically,

• What was your original vision vs. where you are now?
• What’s changed?
• What hasn’t changed?
• What’s been easy?
• What’s been hard?
• What’s the secret to growing and running a business together when you’re married?
• What’s next?

Original Vision vs. Today’s Vision

To be completely honest, our vision back in December 2000 was to earn as much as I did in the last year of my corporate job by building on my familiarity with the early days of executive coaching and my experience as someone who had always ended up advising the top executives in the organizations I had worked in in the first 15 years of my career. Through persistence, good luck, and doing the work, we slightly exceeded our year one goal.

About nine months into the business, I had breakfast with a senior coach, the late, great Neil Stroul, who encouraged me to develop my own intellectual property to differentiate myself in the market. I went home and started doodling on a legal pad waiting for inspiration to strike. It was pretty much crickets. Three years and many coaching sessions later, I had the core idea for my first book, The Next Level, which was to outline the behaviors and mindsets that leaders need to pick up and let go of to be successful as they advance in their careers.

The Next Level changed everything for us. Diane and I always viewed the book as one channel for a set of ideas that could be delivered and add value for clients in lots of different ways – 1 on 1 coaching, group coaching, speaking, workshops, 360-degree feedback, discussion guides, videos, online courses, etc. We intended to build our business around the book and that’s what we did.

One of the biggest factors in evolving our vision for the business was completely unexpected – my 2009 diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. As I’ve written here, the first couple of years with MS were pretty rough until I became a regular practitioner of yoga and learned that managing my stress response had an enormous impact on my ability to manage my overall health. That insight prompted me to look at my work with executives in a different way. It led to publishing my second book, Overworked and Overwhelmed, in 2014 and informs a holistic vision of how I approach my work with and for leaders today – when you live better, you lead better. Effective self-management creates the platform for positive leadership outcomes.

What’s Changed?

What’s changed over 25 years? Way too many factors to list so here are three that stand out for us:

Ubiquity: A couple of years ago, the folks at Coaching.com referred to me as a coaching OG when I was a guest on their podcast. I’d never thought about that before, but it’s got a lot of truth to it. When I told people at parties in 2000 and 2001 that I had left my corporate job to be an executive coach, the most common responses I got were blank stares, “What’s that?” and “Is that like life coaching?” Twenty-five years later, no one has to explain what executive coaching is because there are tens of thousands of us (at least).

Time Shifts: In the early 2000’s it was common (and expected) for me to spend 60 to 90 in-person minutes meeting with my clients – usually on a bi-weekly cadence. I know that’s hard to believe (it kind of is for me too) in an era when most of us work in some combination of analog and digital modalities and a lot of executives I know and work with are taking meetings in 15-to-30-minute increments throughout the day. These days, the coaching comes in a mix of phone calls, Zooms, emails, and texts. In-person meetings are reserved for deeper dive pull-ups with each other to note and learn from the patterns of the past several months.

Stress and Distractions: Both higher. The world is a much more challenging operating environment for leaders in 2025 than it was in 2000. I’ve always believed that you have to meet clients where they are and account for what they’re dealing with. As the world has changed, I think more and more of my job is to create the space for my clients (and readers and listeners) to step back, observe the patterns, and determine what’s next. That approach lines up with the definition of mindfulness that I offered in Overworked and Overwhelmed – it equates to awareness plus intention.

What Hasn’t Changed

Success is Defined by the Client: There’s a long running and often dogmatic debate about the difference between coaching and consulting. Our position is it’s the wrong debate. In my experience, the more important question is what’s going to help the client and their organization be successful? If it’s coaching, fire away with the questions that make a leader think, self-observe, notice, and change. If it’s consulting, don’t hesitate to offer your perspective or even an answer. It’s often a both/and, not an either/or.

It’s a Business, not a Practice: We were clear from the jump about who we were serving – business leaders in large organizations. They expected a systematic approach and a professional presentation. We were serving business leaders, so we managed the Eblin Group as a business, not a practice (which is how a lot of coaches referred to their work when we were starting out). We’re not as militant as we used to be on that point, but running a business with sound processes, systems, and practices has been vital to us being around for 25 years.

Relationships Rule: We’ve always viewed our business as one that is built on building long-term relationships. That’s true for the core team of professionals who support us – some of them have been with us for over 15 years. It’s true for our clients – there are client companies we’ve worked with for 20 years and individual executives I’ve worked with off and on for over a decade as they achieve new milestones in their careers. It’s true for the folks who read my books, follow me on LinkedIn, read my blog or listen to my podcast – we’ve always had an anti-spam mantra that the content we share should do two things: raise awareness and add value.  We believe that has been a relationship building approach.

What’s Been Easy

Being clear about who we’re here for: I remember the first time I got to speak for GE back in the day, I was sitting in the back of a shuttle bus that was carrying everyone from the hotel to the meeting venue and, as the bus filled with bright-eyed high potential leaders, I thought to myself, “These are my people.” There’s an old piece of advice to writers that you should write what you know. More generally, that advice has been how we’ve grown the business. We knew the challenges facing leaders in large organizations because I had lived that experience myself. The methods and points of emphasis have changed over the years, but the people we’ve been here for remain the same.

Maintaining the voice and approach – Early on, we recognized that both my approach and my voice could be summed up with the words simple, practical, and immediately applicable. Those words have been both my goal and filter in my coaching, speaking, and writing for most of the past 25 years. Your mileage may vary, but those words have been easy to use as a guide in the business because they’re authentic to me and they appeal to the leaders I work best with.

Bringing the joy – There’s a great line from Friederich Buechner that (paraphrasing here) joy is found when your great passion intersects with the world’s great need. That’s how it’s been for us in our work over the past 25 years. For me, that’s looked like bringing my lifelong passion for strategy and leadership and personal development to the work I do with high talent leaders who are seeking to live better and lead better. For Diane, it’s been using all of her skills to build a kick-ass business that makes a difference for people and changes lives.

What’s Been Hard

Building a business ain’t easy: We wouldn’t want to leave with you the impression that building our business over the past 25 years has been a straight up and to the right journey. There have been dips and uncertainty along the way (see the point about pivoting below) that required tenacity, belief, unwavering partnership, and the quality of being what became our favorite word – relentless.  

Pivoting: It hasn’t exactly been hard for us to pivot when necessary, but you have to be ready and willing to do it when you need to do. Just think about all the externalities – 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, DOGE – in the last 25 years that have led to pivots for successful businesses and failures for ones who didn’t. You’ve got to be ready to make some moves. For instance, when COVID hit in March 2020, our projected billings for the rest of the year literally went to almost zero as clients cancelled all the in-person programs and speeches we had booked. We pivoted by quickly cutting a new highlight reel that emphasized virtual delivery using old footage, new B roll Diane shot on an iPhone, and a new voice over that I recorded surrounded by pillows underneath a table with a sheet draped over it. We released it in early April. That video combined with the relationships we had built over two decades saved our year.

Easier to build a platform when you already have one: Back when I was writing The Next Level and Diane and I were thinking about how to get it out to the world, we kept reading and hearing about the importance of having a platform. We quickly learned that it’s easier to build a platform when you already have one. We didn’t, so we got to work on building one. It reminds me of that old question about what’s the best time to plant a tree. The first best answer is 20 years ago. The second-best answer is today. To the degree that I’m known in the world as an executive coach, author, educator, etc., it’s been because we’ve been relentless (see above) about raising awareness while adding value (also see above). The work of building a platform never ends – we’re still doing it now as we build an audience for my podcast, Best Ever and our online life and leadership courses.

Marriage and Business Lessons

One of the most frequent questions Diane and I have gotten over the years is how do you run a business together and stay married, let alone having a happy marriage? The first part of my answer (maybe not hers!) is marry a super multi-talented person who you love hanging out with. Then, once you’ve done that, keep a few rules in mind like:

It ain’t personal, it’s business – You can disagree about business decisions without bringing the disagreement to the dinner table.

Play to each other’s strengths – I’ve said for years that when it comes to the business, I’m the face (even though she’s way better looking than me) and Diane’s the brains. My strength is understanding and coaching in the client’s world and creating content for leaders. Diane’s are multitudinous but some of the key ones are creating processes and systems, keeping our team (and me) on track, and marketing. If I do say so myself, we’ve been an awesome team in 25 years of business and 38 years of marriage.

It’s about collaboration, not competition – We’ve never felt the need to compete with each other. We recognized early when we celebrate each other’s strengths and collaborate, we win together.

Invest time in the marriage without the business sneaking in – It can be easy to let the business you’re running together take over your marriage and life. We realized about five years into our marriage that we needed to be deliberate about date nights, occasional trips without our kids, and taking an annual retreat together to create the marriage and family we envisioned. Having eight years of reps with that approach under our belts before we started the business paid enormous dividends that compounded as we sustained those routines.

What’s Next?

So, what’s next for us and the Eblin Group? As I’m reminded of the old line about man plans and God laughs, the honest answer is, “Who knows?” I can, however, tell you what our intentions are, and they’re based on an idea I’ve learned in the last couple of years from the author, Arthur Brooks.

One of his main points is that over the course of our life, most of us graduate from fluid intelligence in our younger years to crystallized intelligence in our later years. Another way to put it is like the guy in the Farmers’ Insurance commercials, “He knows a few things because he’s seen a few things.”

That’s what we envision for the Eblin Group in the coming years, building on the crystallized intelligence formed over the past 25 years to support leaders in living better and leading better. From our current vantage point, that looks like high leverage coaching engagements with C-Suite leaders, digital courses and programs to support high potential leaders, and written and spoken conversations through my books, online presence, and podcast, to support leaders and anyone else interested in how effective self-management can be the foundation for positive outcomes not just at work, but at home, and in your world in general.

If you’ve read this far, good on you, and thank you. Thank you not just for reading but, from Diane and me both, for the role you’ve played in making 25 years in business simply amazing.

If you liked what you read here, subscribe here to get my latest ideas on how to lead and live at your best.

The post Questions and Answers on 25 Years in the Executive Coaching and Leadership Development Business first appeared on The Eblin Group.

It’s as true for leaders as it is for colleagues, spouses, partners, parents, and friends. Basically, if you’re a human (and if you’re reading this, you almost certainly are unless you’re Chat GPT or some other bot), you benefit not just from hearing thanks but from giving it.

I’m guessing your experience backs that up, but so does the research. Here are examples of how gratitude impacts your work, your body, and your lifespan:

Your Work

Consider the work of Adam Grant at Wharton. In a famous study his team conducted with fundraising callers, one group received a simple visit from a director who said, “I am very grateful for your hard work.” That was the only variable that changed. The result? That group made 50% more calls the following week compared to the control group.

This tracks with data from Glassdoor, which found that 80% of employees would work harder for an appreciative boss. If you want your team to move from compliance to commitment, gratitude is the key to unlocking that discretionary effort.

Your Body

It turns out that expressing gratitude is a fantastic way to get yourself out of a state of chronic fight or flight. Researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough have found that gratitude practices act as a stress reset button. People in their study who practiced gratitude had lower levels of stress hormones like cortisol and, as a result, reported better sleep, less fatigue, and showed lower levels of cellular inflammation. Shifting from fight or flight to rest and digest reduces cognitive noise and enables you to think more clearly.

Your Lifespan

If higher team performance, feeling better and thinking more clearly haven’t quite gotten you there on the value of expressing gratitude throughout the day, how about living longer?

A massive study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, analyzing data from nearly 50,000 nurses, found that those with the highest levels of gratitude had a 9% lower risk of death from any cause over a three-year period. It turns out that an attitude of gratitude protects the heart, both figuratively and literally.

Put It to Work

Knowing the science is one thing; building a habit and putting it to work is another. If you’re not in the habit of regularly expressing gratitude, here are three simple practices to help you shift from “have to” to “want to.”

• The “Three Good Things” Routine: This is a classic for a reason. Before you go to sleep or first thing in the morning, write down three things that went well in the last 24 hours. But here is the critical addition: briefly write why they went well. This trains your brain to scan the environment for positives rather than just fixating on the fires you have to put out.
• The Specific Thank You: In the Wharton study, the “thank you” worked because it was sincere. General praise (“Good job everyone”) often falls flat. Instead, once a day, send one email or stop by one desk to thank a team member in a clearly specific way. “I really appreciated how you handled that client objection in the meeting today – it showed great composure on your part and helped keep the meeting on track.” That’s the kind of specific thank you at work (or at home for that matter) that makes a longer-term impact.
• The “Get To” Reframe: This is a mental shift I use personally when my calendar makes me feel overwhelmed. When you catch yourself saying, “I have to go to this event,” pause and change one word: “I get to go to this event.” It sounds small, but it shifts your internal narrative from obligation to opportunity. It reminds you that you have agency.

Your Next Step

Pick just one of the three practices above, the “Three Good Things,” the “Specific Thank You,” or the “Get To” Reframe, and commit to doing it for the next 48 hours. Notice what changes about the way you feel and how others respond. And what better time to get started than (in the United States at least), Thanksgiving week?

What about you, what’s been working for you in expressing gratitude? What difference has it been making? What’s your gratitude strategy for this week? Share your insights and plans in a comment on LinkedIn.

If you liked what you read here, subscribe here to get my latest ideas on how to lead and live at your best.

The post Gratitude: Why It’s Too Important to Just Save for Thanksgiving first appeared on The Eblin Group.

Physical routines fuel everything—your energy, your focus, and your ability to lead and live well. In this Best of Best Ever episode, Scott Eblin brings together standout moments from season one guests who share how they’ve built simple, sustainable physical routines to support their performance and presence.

From morning movement to mindful rest and daily fuel, these conversations reveal how small, consistent choices create the foundation for long-term success, on and off the job.

Learn more about The Life GPS: https://courses.eblingroup.com/p/best-life-ever-course

Hear more from each guest in their full episodes:

• Maggie Kane, Creating Space for Everyone: How Maggie Kane Leads with Purpose and Passion
• Dain Blanton, What Champions Do Differently, with Dain Blanton
• Craig Mullaney, Lessons in Leadership from the Battlefield to the Boardroom, with Craig Mullaney
• Dr. Rick Bedlack – Hope as Medicine: Dr. Richard Bedlack on Science, Fashion, and Living with Joy

Listen here:

The post The Physical Dimension of Your Life GPS®: Essential Building Blocks for Living and Leading at Your Best first appeared on The Eblin Group.