Last Sunday I got up early and looked out the window at the weather to see whether horse riding would be possible. A clear sky and lots of puddles from the night’s rainstorm invited me to try. But I never did get on the horse. A bigger lesson was meant for me that day.

When I arrived at Yeguada Olmaz, the horse breeding ranch I’ve come to call a second home, owners Jesús and Guiomar looked worried. One of the foals, Pagolín, had lain down in a field and would not get up. We tried to flip him over to his other side to help circulation and to push him back onto his feet. It didn’t work. Guiomar called the vet. We put a cover on him to keep him warm and a sack of hay under his head to avoid damage to his eye socket.

A possible ending loomed as we all faced our own feelings about death. I felt incapable of concentrating on a riding class or listening to the instructions that Guiomar tried to provide. I struggled to momentarily forget the concern for the six-month-old foal lying on the field. So while she and her husband tended to their herd’s needs that day, I made myself a little dry seat out of stones beside Pagolín and his mother Lorca. I must have spent two hours out there on that wet field. It felt important to be there. It felt like there was no other place I should be. Not because I was needed in any way.

But because something very important was happening right in front of me. Something I didn’t want to miss. A lesson on how to face death without resistance. On how leaders are supposed to react to difficult crisis like terrorist attacks, or impending foreclosures, or even the outbreak of a deadly new virus. I remembered all the times I’d hung out in the stall with newborn Pagolín and mother Lorca in the previous six months, coming up with unique leadership training exercises.

They were always there for me when I wanted them. How could I not be there for them at a time like this? Once again, they taught me something about life and leadership that I hadn’t fully comprehended before. Once again, I confirmed that animals are here to teach us how to be better people and better leaders. They didn’t resist. They didn’t try to fight. They didn’t protest. They simply experienced those two hours with me in total serenity. The kind of serenity we humans search for all the time. Pagolín nuzzled my hands and very slowly teased my palm with a playful bite.

His limbs rigidly stretched out in front of him. His mother standing behind me in silence. Both breathing deeply and slowly, facing each passing moment of pain and fear without judgment or complaint. It’s not that leaders should do nothing in the face of catastrophe. Far from it. This learning is about staying calm if you want to use your full talent and skill. In serenity we know exactly what to do, while in evasive anxiety we rigidify into tunnel vision and blind repetition. Still, we waste so much energy trying to escape from the endings we fear in life. We run around worrying, gossiping hysterically in corridors and venting frustration during long, circular meetings. Or we deny the obvious, convincing ourselves we can conquer anything while acting as if everything will magically turn out okay.

The only way we know to keep calm is to repeat “it’s gonna be alright!” to others and to ourselves. A formula which actually does very little to tranquilize our followers, be they adult employees, or our own children and pets. I stood up eventually to bring some feeling back to my bottom and stood alongside Lorca the mare. I remembered she had lost a foal the year before. This is what our grandmothers used to go through. Bearing children one after the other, losing many of them to wars, plagues or accidents. How did they do it? It’s incomprehensible to parents of today.

I buried my face in Lorca’s neck, just behind her head. And she leaned on me softly. Tired, maybe grieving, maybe holding me in my own sadness. We each face our own weaknesses when we look at death. Endings bring out the stuff we haven’t yet resolved about ourselves. Today we live in a culture with absolutely no tolerance to death. A lot of what we do is about staying young and healthy as long as we possibly can. We pursue success and happiness like no other generation has before. We escape difficulty and ostracize losers. At the same time we struggle to stay motivated or to keep our employees involved in our business adventures.

We talk endlessly about creativity, inspiration, passion… all the things true heroes are made of. We forget that heroes are not forged by sitting in bliss. Endless success or unbreakable health does not make us heroic. It just makes us weak and dependent on more good stuff in order to keep going. Warriors become worthy of such a title by facing hardship and difficulty many, many times. Warriors become heroes by facing death. Why not us?

What I learned that Sunday on the field is that death is part of life. The horses already knew it. It’s not something to understand from the head. It’s a truth to be felt from the heart. That’s why we humans still don’t get it no matter how many times we’re told about it. We don’t become warriors or good leaders by reading books. We learn to be brave by facing death in its many forms.

When I look at all the startups I’ve had to bury, I finally sense this need for endings if there are to be any new beginnings. As I embark on yet another hugely ambitious business adventure, I wonder every day if it will make it to adult life. I think of how much I’ve lost in the past: the money, the partnerships, the long days of tireless work, the credibility in a failure-averse country like Spain. And then I remember how very much I’ve learned. In my head, for sure, but especially in my heart.

Bravery and ambition are not concepts of the mind! When the vet arrived we all helped the foal back on its feet and got it out of the field with its mother, into a warm stall. X-rays and other tests ensued, eventually finding a fracture of the tibia, which may not be fatal if cured correctly. A ray of hope still shines over Pagolín’s future today.

None of us know if “it’s gonna be alright”, but we’re all a little bit braver than we were before, because testing ourselves against imminent endings slowly brings out the heroes we all carry…somewhere deep inside ourselves.

“I’ve decided business is like surfing. There needs to be a wave underneath us. We can’t do all the pedaling!” I joked over Skype to one of our partners in Holland last week. The hardest part of building new business models may be exactly this: knowing which waves to surf and which ones to stay away from. Because business, and life, are like a huge, turbulent ocean. It can carry you to success. Or it can drown you to death. At any given moment.

Many savvy business leaders rely on their instinct. Like old weathered sailors, they smell something’s in the air before the rest of us do. They feel it. And they go for it. Ruthlessly. Tirelessly. Fearlessly. They can spot the wave that will carry their surfboards high up in the air for many miles to come. Statistics, smart consultants and industry experts may provide background information, but each CEO builds his own vision. Each man must choose his own wave. Even while knowing that choosing the wrong one may be the death of him and everything he’s built.

But how does a CEO build an accurate instinct about waves of opportunity? Where does he get the stable security needed to swoosh from one ocean crest to the next without falling over, losing balance and falling off his chosen salty curl? Not his mind, I can tell you. He gets it from his body. I interviewed my osteopath recently. Car mechanics can tell a lot about the way we drive by looking at the cars we drive: how our tires wear out, or where our brakes and motor lose effectiveness. Professionals who work with our bodies are no different. The way our bodies break can tell us a lot about the way we’re surfing the ripples of our profession. Alvaro Moran is a reputed osteopath in Madrid with twenty years of experience.

He is my first visit after I fall off my horse. Yes, his specialty is the musculoskeletal system. But it’s not only about bones, muscles and joints. It’s about what causes injuries to happen and what keeps them from healing. He has studied traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy and Bach floral therapy. And I have to say he asks great questions about what’s going on with me by looking at where my body gets stuck.

So I asked Alvaro about the sample of patients who walk through his doors and what their bodies show about their biz surfing abilities. After a long strenuous disclaimer paragraph, which I promised to respect, he illustrated some basic ideas which –caution please!— can’t be considered scientific certainties. Yet they do provide some very interesting questions to think about.

Four key elements move our skeletal structure in response to the oceans of our lives: our feet, our knees, our hips and our neck. While our feet connect us to the ground and to our roots, knees flex to deal with ups and downs in life. Our hips allow us to advance and grow, whereas our necks turn to focus our eyes, ears and noses on what we wish to learn more about…told you this wasn’t science! It’s much more interesting than that 😉 If your feet often act up on you, then, you may want to ask yourself about what’s going on in your support structures: home life is a big one of course.

But so are shareholders, key knowledge holders in your organizations, support teams, anything and everything that you stand on to do business. Feet are used to support the body on the floor and to identify irregularities on the path we walk. Surfers need their feet to judge the strength and speed of the wave underneath them. And leaders who can’t trust their feet tend to operate more on theory than on reality because they are blind to the undercurrents that shape their industries.

Knees are about flexibility. Just as a surfer will absorb the bumps or shifting flows in the water by bending and stretching his knees, so too do leaders need to bend to higher powers: cash flows, market regulations, prices fixed by others, technological limitations…repetitive knee trouble may be pointing to a lack of flexibility. Do you fight more than you can realistically win? Do you make a business out of defying the establishment? Do you fail to bend your knee when your company needs you to? Hip problems relate to advancement and growth.

Hips are essential to weight shifts on a surfboard. Hanging back can sink the board into the water, slowing you down. While too much weight on the front can throw you right off the crest into a rolling, tumbling, even life-endangering tunnel of salty foam. Hip trouble raises questions about big decisions involving greater levels of responsibility. From having a new child to starting a new business, taking over our father’s company or launching a sophisticated new product.

Advancing in life requires complex shifts and adaptations which articulate through our hip joints. And finally the neck. Who doesn’t have neck trouble after forty? This power joint brings together upper back muscles and shoulders in coordination with the head. Not only does our neck determine what we look at and listen to. It also keeps our head stuck to our body, no matter how much it tries to fly off into excel projection paradise!

For a surfer, to look at where he’s going is essential. His entire body adapts instantly to the direction marked by his head and eyes. Neck tension is often related to combats between head and body that could never happen on a surfboard, but often take place in executives’ lives: CEOs that don’t want to look at their company’s problems, business owners who want to pull their companies faster along than they can go, investors who fall prey to fantasies of grandeur in their heads while denying their bodies’ insistent objections.

Necks that try to control their bodies into strict obedience quickly become painful. Our physical body is the most important business tool we possess. It is built to surf waves of uncertainty and swirls of chaos instinctively. When it breaks down it’s very often trying to tell us something critical about the way we surf our professional oceans. Forget external gurus, experts and advisors. Nobody knows your business like your body does. Listen to its advice. And it won’t have to get injured to make you listen anymore!

Many are now coming back to routine these days with heavy hearts. Summer prepares to leave our gardens in search of southern destinations, while we lazily wake up to find all the stressors we’d happily left behind a few weeks ago. As it turns out, however, the worst stressor of all is our own excessive self-discipline.

It just might be our biggest weakness as leaders. One of my clients was complaining on a phone session about how his last week on holiday had become a nightmare. His son had got into teenage trouble and he had fought with his wife: “this is exactly the opposite of what I needed from my family when I’m preparing to take on a new company! I have to get ahead of our key Asian competitors a.s.a.p. and break in a whole new management team before Christmas…”

It’s typical to see tension building in families as the end of the holiday approaches. Nights become restless with nightmares and fights break out of nowhere over the dumbest little mishaps. Our bodies know that routine, work and school are right around the corner, and though our minds may still try to get the most out of our vacation, pressure activates uncomfortable feelings and sensations. Because we are mammal animals, we share the pressure unconsciously through sighs, snappy remarks, curt replies and an entire assortment of non-verbal cues which kids (and pets) immediately pick up on and act out in full color. No doubt my client’s challenges were big enough to keep anybody awake at night.

Still, he was carefully hand-picked by very selective shareholders to take on that job. If anybody can turn that company around it’s him. All he needs to do is reduce the pressure, and everything else will fall into place, including his rebellious teenage son and angry wife. But how?

Very often the quickest way to reduce excessive pressure is to eliminate “have to” from our vocabulary. Let’s be clear: Leaders don’t “have to” do anything. If you “have to” move or act in a certain way, then something or somebody else is leading you. This is the quickest way to identify the leader in a fish tank full of males. Who chases everybody else? The number of sentences containing “have to” we tell ourselves each day, therefore, is an interesting indicator that betrays our own excessive pressure on ourselves. Yes, we may be pursued by shareholders, we may be provoked by the speed of our competitors.

But we can choose to be rudely pushed by the situation, or become graceful pushers ourselves. It’s all about managing pressure and knowing when to send it right back to where it came from. If fish can do it, can’t we? In Spanish there’s a saying that goes “más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo”, which translated to English, means that the devil is smarter because he’s old, than as a result of his devilish nature. Board level executives are much the same.

The older they get, the smarter they are at keeping their cool under every kind of attack, patiently waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike back. They know that the first rule of leadership is keeping your cool at all times. Because when you feel cool, at ease, in perfect control of your own skills and resources, you don’t have to anything. You know you are killing it with every gesture, you can hear your own tone of voice rounding syllables in beautiful symphony, and you know exactly where the conversation is going to go: where you want it. An insecure player has to win the contest.

A cool, savvy player enjoys displaying his own talent without pressure or obligation, knowing full well he’s going to win. He just knows it in his gut. He can feel it. I’m sure you’ve felt this way at some point in your life. It’s unforgettable. When “have to” expressions pop up too often in our minds, we’re probably losing our cool and transforming into little helpless fish in a tank full of much larger, mean, bully-type fish. Yet it’s an illusion driven by our own insecurity. We aren’t fish in a fish tank. We’re leaders! We choose our battles. We can figure out a way to knock the other guy off his pedestal of certainty. We… just need a little more time.

Which is what I advised my frustrated client: “stop forcing yourself to over-perform and give yourself the space you need to regroup, relax and plan a strong, well-rooted strategy. Nobody is pushing you. Stop pushing yourself!” You should have heard his sigh of relief. I should have recorded it! I’m sure his family is secretly thanking me for that momentary shift. So, so simple. Yet so counterintuitive for us these days.

For some reason we are literally obsessed with self-discipline and effort. It reminds me of sweaty, worn posters on the walls of small gyms where unlikely bodybuilders slave away at their abs: “No pain, no gain!” If we’re not killing ourselves –rather than killing it at work – we may even feel guilty… sound familiar? All our leadership theories, our research publications and self-help books reinforce this global attitude of self-punishment in order to reach our goals. To the point that many executives actually decrease their own performance because they consume huge portions of energy in silent, often unconscious, self-recrimination and judgment: shouldn’t have said this, must improve that, have to do this a.s.a.p…. we are pushing ourselves to win instead of enjoying the test of our talent.

We will ourselves to be more like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg or Bill Gates with excessive force, and even silent cruelty at times. Somehow we’ve become shamefully violent trainers to our innocent, animal bodies. The minute they stray from the path we’ve dreamed up in our heads, we beat down on them like there’s no tomorrow.

This, my friends, is the biggest source of pressure I see in many, many CEO’s and business owners today. It’s incredible! Leadership is not about pain. It’s about flow. And flowing is one of the most pleasurable sensations in life. Forget “have to.” Trust your body to flow. It’s strong, powerful and talented. And it simply loves to show off! The rest will fall into place. Family included.

Have you ever heard of Wilhelm Reich? If you pride yourself a leader, you certainly should. Reich was the unique rebel who revolutionized the world of twentieth century therapy by bringing the body into the discussion of mental illness. Now well into the twenty-first century, it’s about time we did the same with our leadership thinking. I should warn you: Reich died in jail.

Of course I’m secretly hoping I won’t end up the same way, but you never know what you’re starting when you tease people to think differently, do you? Helping CEOs realize that the shortest path to improving their company’s results is to connect back into their own bodies and “embrace the wild within them” is quite the provocation in our over-intellectualized leadership industry. But what can I say? I’m convinced it’s true!

Reich argued that mental illness couldn’t be cured without involving the body in the process. He thought all mental rigidities were reflected as matching holding patterns or tensions in the body. Much to traditional psychoanalysts’ dismay, Reich touched his patients. He used his thumbs or palms to press on different parts of his clients’ bodies in order to help them become aware of their tension armors. And he talked about sex all the time, which didn’t make anybody feel more comfortable. So I will refrain from writing about sex in leadership discussions. At least for the time being! 😉 I’m leaving it for my next book! Chuckle, chuckle!

But seriously, Reich’s ideas fuelled the development of several schools of therapy that thrive today, such as Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetic analysis, Fritz Perl’s Gestalt therapy, or Arthur Janov’s Primal therapy. While the mind dwells mostly on thoughts, the body feeds on emotion and lives through movement. Trying to change a person’s thought patterns without looking at his body is limited at best.

Thus, ninety-nine percent of leadership training is simply not enough to achieve real change. It’s just thinking, talking and arguing. Bla,bla,bla! Here’s the thing. If leadership is about getting it right in every situation, then it requires total flexibility from us. If a leader is to walk into an unknown market, build a customer base out of strangers and grow an organizational structure that can counter unprecedented levels of uncertainty, perfect adaptability to each and every change of circumstances is a must in this day and age. The human body is designed to do this. Evolution filtered out all the other technologic versions that couldn’t adapt as well as we did. So improving our leadership is about increasing our flexibility and adaptability. In our minds and in our exquisitely designed bodies.

As much as many gurus will try to convince you that you can learn flexibility from a business case discussion, reading a book or watching somebody else do it, we all know this only leads to needing more books, more coaching, more MBAs…and more money for gurus! Reich’s point is more relevant today than ever before. Our limitations to greater adaptability can be found in our bodies in the form of armors that impede our movement, bury our emotions and restrict our thought processes inside rigid frames of impossibility. CEOs are especially convinced that they know everything there is to know about their situation, having carefully analyzed every nook and cranny in their minds.

Because they are often highly intelligent individuals who work tirelessly, diligently looking up all relevant information, you can be sure they have checked everywhere. The labyrinth of a CEO’s mind, however, has secret doors the CEO can’t see or feel. Opening only one of these doors changes the entire configuration completely, uncovering new solutions to his mental maze.

One of my favorite clients came to a session with a complex decision on his mind. A successful entrepreneur in the eco-fashion industry, he is about to close an important capital increase operation. He brought me piles and piles of financial projections, market studies and business case narratives to help me get up to speed with the complexity of the issue we were to analyze. He makes me laugh! I of course didn’t read a single page. All his documents are projections of the labyrinth he carries in his ambitious, world-conquering mind. I simply asked him to tell me briefly the biggest reason to go ahead with the operation, and the biggest reason to stay put. “Briefly, please!” I insisted.

So he walked me through his elaborate paths of thought as he had already done so many times on his own. As he thought and talked, his body had a parallel conversation with me that I found quite interesting: when he dwelled on the capital increase, the new investors, structural enhancements and market impact, his eyes emptied out, his face skin seemed to detach itself and his body tensed up into a rigid, upright position.

When he described a scenario where he did nothing, however, his entire body seemed to come back to life: Expressive worry in his eyes, twitches and moving wrinkles around each gesture, even a strangling of his voice to control escaping emotion. I didn’t tell him what to do because that’s not my job. What do I know about the eco-fashion industry? I just opened a secret door in the maze of his mind by telling him what I saw in his body. The capital increase operation took him away from his present reality, stealing him entirely out of his body. His mind flew away into oblivion and future possibilities.

Doing nothing kept him connected to the problems he was facing, inside his body, with its unpleasant sensations. My observation was that he ran the risk of complicating his business enormously just to escape the ugliness of now. And if this was true, those problems would only get bigger, and eventually catch up with him. This client actually lost his first company precisely because he increased corporate debt to a point where the global financial crisis ate it alive in minutes when it hit.

In his case, the risk of repeating a well-known pattern of escape into the future is pretty high. I didn’t press my thumb into his chest or ask him about his sex life like Reich may have done. But I did bring his body into the discussion. By telling him what I saw, he became aware of physical sensations and reactions that were always there in his background, hiding behind the secret door he couldn’t discern in his mind’s jungle of thoughts. His entire demeanor relaxed visibly, as he connected the dots and acclimated to a new mental configuration. He looked more tired, sadder, slower.

But he was significantly more connected to reality, his breathing was more ample and his eyes were full of life. He had regained an inch of flexibility lost long, long ago. In the twenty-first century our bodies are more armored up than ever before in human history. We ignore it because we’ve been that way as far back as we can remember, and most people around us are too. But our armors steal away the natural adaptability we were designed for, the flexibility and split-second reactivity to our context that we need in order to lead our organizations successfully.

If you want to lead, you need to let down your guard and dissolve your body’s armor of tension. Just start by paying more attention to what your body feels and does about what you are thinking. Bring it into your discussions with yourself and listen to what it has to say. And in case you’re wondering… Yes.

Your sex life will also improve as you relinquish your armor. But that, my friend, is a whole other story…

One of the most counter-intuitive notions of true leadership is smallness. In a culture where size seems to matter a lot more than it should, we’ve lost sight of the real proportions at play in life and business. The unbelievable truth is that the higher up you rise in business hierarchies, the smaller a fly you become in the pie of affairs you manage. Trying to stay big is a sure way to mess everything up. The Spanish country manager for one of the big four consulting firms told me recently that he felt smaller and smaller every day. He had realized that his role was more about channeling requests and needs to the right people than it was about anything else.

His learning efforts were completely focused on navigating the oceans of complexity with maximum efficiency: Which were the problems he needed to attack and which ones should he ignore? How fast could he get a grip of what each issue implied for his organization? And how quickly could he hand it off to somebody who would solve it autonomously? Spreading his reach and influence on the market was directly related to how small he could make himself in each deal. Sadly, his insightful perspective as leader of several thousand employees does not abound like it should.

Too many CEOs still think of themselves as larger than life, falling into delusions of grandeur and risk miscalculations like the ones that blew up global financial markets just a few years ago. What’s this obsession with size about? For one thing, it’s unconscious. We don’t realize our bodies and minds are itching for opportunities to make us look and feel big. Some won’t even admit to it when told through friendly feedback or hostile third-party gossip.

Our bodies automatically inflate like blowfish before we’ve even had the chance to analyze our context: we separate our legs stiffly into cowboy-like positions, or our voice booms out with excessive volume. We may pet colleagues on the shoulder in patronizing fashion or always shake hands with our own hand on top. We may use exaggerated language and superlative words, or use up too much meeting time to ramble on in an effort to be more present than others. Dressing in eye-catching color schemes and fashion styles, or buying flashy cars are also ways our bodies favor to get the largeness they’re looking for.

A lot of bulky behaviors across the animal kingdom are about alert and fear. Humans are no different. Our bodies choose to enlarge because they perceive danger. Often our bodies still insist on over-stepping once we’ve judged the room to be safe and alert-free, silently telling us they don’t trust our judgment. We could even ask ourselves whether our judgment is biased by the feelings of false security we draw from our bodies’ swollen stances. Once we go large, we feel safe, and everything else around us seems small. But our bodies could be over-reacting for many reasons completely unrelated to the present moment.

Remember that our emotional reading of context happens in the amygdala, inside the limbic brain. The amygdala is known for reacting very fast, though it does so by loosely associating scenarios without considering details. Thus, our amygdala can trigger a full-fledged Master of the Universe type statement in a conversation just because the other person’s features vaguely remind us of a scary school teacher from childhood. Our oversized behaviors can involve old episodes of fear, but also grief or anger.

Another reason why we unduly jack up is our inherited love of forceful whips. For many generations before us, violence, excessive discipline and punishment were seen as ideal remedies to many problems. When we inflate our egos into comically bloated Buzz Lightyear costumes or tough Marlon Brando attitudes, we literally armor up against our own sensations, emotions or impulses. We demand good behavior from ourselves and forbid our bodies to express or even hint at any unpleasant feelings. Forcing ourselves to play big when our bodies are feeling like itsy-bitsy spider is exactly like using a whip to dominate a horse, a dog or any other innocently honest animal. It’s fast and it’s effective. But it’s also cruel. And as experience shows, it destroys our own body’s trust in anything we say. Which would explain why our body would distrust our judgment.

Just as horses and sea lions rebel against unfair masters as soon as opportunity arises, so will our bodies override our mental instructions with apparently random panic attacks or fury frenzies. When we over-discipline ourselves to appear confidently oversized, our bodies wait to get back at us the second we loosen our grip, get distracted or relax. Sound familiar? In every case you can bet it’s impossible to focus on nimbleness, fluidity and effective channeling of demands for a person engaged in fierce battles with his own body. Now you know why we seem to use only ten percent of our brain power.

The rest of our brain is too busy bickering internally behind the closed doors of that mysterious closet we call unconscious. Giving into smallness is not only counter-intuitive to our modern business minds, it’s far beyond our current ability to practice. But only because we’re focusing on the wrong things. Instead of investing so much useless energy on analyzing business scenarios before us, all we need to do is focus our attention on what’s going on inside. Stop obsessing with outside information, other people’s words, macroeconomic indicators, world issues and negative micro-gestures on your shareholder’s face.

Start paying attention to what your body feels right now. You’ll be on your way to the kind of spontaneous petiteness and adaptability historic sports heroes have always displayed. A little bit of looking at ourselves at work can go a long way to deprogram our bodies’ excessive displays of power. Write down how many times you catch yourself over-inflating each week. Examine the details of your oversized reactions: what were you thinking about? Which details of the context did you focus on? What ways did your body choose to make itself bigger? What kind of sensations or emotions did you feel and where were they located in your body? Register how many times your body retaliates against you as well.

Ask yourself if there is a pattern, or a connection to highly important events in which you overdid your self-discipline. Learn to make yourself small by helping your body release excess emotions from its past.

Slowly, with patience and trust, like you would train a child or an animal. The smaller you become, the bigger and more flexible your leadership will be. The farther your influence will reach. And as a bonus, the more relaxed your will feel: you will lead with the flow!