Straight answers to the questions leaders and patients ask most.

The best teams I have worked with were not the most talented. They were the ones where people felt seen and safe enough to do their best work. That does not happen by accident. When a team is stuck, I look for the small moments of connection that have gone missing and we put them back on purpose: a real check-in before the status update, a note that lands when someone is underwater, a habit of naming what each person did well. Those are happiness tripwires, and the most connected teams run on them, delivering 18% higher sales and 50% less turnover than the least connected. Connection is not soft. It is the highest-leverage thing you can build.

People do not leave jobs. They leave feeling invisible, stuck, or taken for granted. Most leaders find that out in the exit interview, the one conversation that comes too late to matter. I coach leaders to have it early instead: an honest talk about what your best people want next, connection that is deliberate rather than accidental, and recognition specific enough to mean something. The most connected teams lose half as many people. Retention is a connection problem before it is a comp problem.

Treat AI as staff you manage, not software you install. The leaders who come out ahead stay accountable for the outcome and keep their people close through the disruption, because anxious, overloaded teams do not adopt anything well. Name what is changing. Give people a real role in the rollout. Protect the connection while everything else moves. Judgment, trust, and connection are the exact things a machine cannot copy, so they are what you lean on hardest right now.

Stop being the hero of every fire. The habits that made you great, like jumping into every deal, fixing it yourself, and answering every ping, are the same ones that keep you stuck in tactics once the job gets bigger. I call it the tactical hero trap. The way out is the Curveball Method. You don't pick the pitch; you control your swing. So when something hits, run PAUSE: Prepare, Assess what's signal and what's noise, Understand the patterns and your team's strengths, Strategize a fix that lasts, and Execute without being the single point of failure. Then protect your thinking time with happiness tripwires: small recharge moments set in your calendar before the hard week arrives, so you have the energy to lead instead of react. Strategic leaders still get curveballs. They just stop swinging at every one.

Plan your energy like a budget instead of running it until the tank is empty. Burnout is a depletion problem, not a willpower problem, and willpower is a bad system. A calendar is a good one. That's what happiness tripwires are for. Anticipate the hard moments you already know are coming: the board meeting, the end of the quarter, the week after a launch. Set a small recharge in front of each one before you need it, like a walk booked right after the board call, a favorite playlist queued for the Monday slump, or dinner with a friend on the night the numbers land. Then let it trip. Pair that with the Curveball Method. You don't pick the pitch, but you choose your swing, and that includes choosing what not to do. I used these practices to make my cancer year one of my happiest. They work on a hard quarter too.

A happiness tripwire is a small moment of connection, planted on purpose, that lands exactly when someone needs it. A favorite song that shows up in a teammate’s inbox at the Monday slump. A two-line note timed for the afternoon before a brutal deadline. It is deliberate, it is close to automatic, and it is one of the most underused levers a leader has over how people feel and how they perform.

The numbers are not subtle. Against the least connected teams, the most connected deliver 18% higher sales, 23% more profit, 50% less turnover, and 56% better performance. Workplace loneliness costs U.S. employers about $154 billion a year. Sources: Gallup Q12, BetterUp, and HBR. In the age of AI, connection is the one edge a machine cannot copy, which makes it the least sentimental investment on your list.

First, breathe. You have more time than the panic is telling you. Then take back the things you can control: get organized, ask for the information you are owed, and pull a small team of people around you. My book and free workbook walk through it step by step, from the questions to ask your doctors to the small rituals of joy that carry you through treatment. You are not a victim of this. You get to be a partner in charge of your own care.

Show up, specifically. “Let me know if you need anything” sounds kind and quietly puts all the work back on the person who is sick. Offer a real thing instead: a meal on Tuesday, a ride to the infusion chair, a playlist for the long appointment. Then keep showing up after the first few weeks, when the crowd thins out and the need is still there. Small, deliberate moments of connection are exactly what help someone heal.

Connection as the human edge in the age of AI, and turning curveballs into advantage. My signature keynote, Happiness Tripwires, hands the room a science-backed way to build the connection that drives sales, keeps your best people, and holds a team together under pressure. I also speak on resilience and leading through change, drawn from 27 years running go-to-market teams and from surviving cancer while I did it.