When the people around you feel your absence

I catch myself in rooms where my body is present but my mind is already gone.

Next meeting. Next email. Next thing on the list.

Most people never notice when they lose presence.

But the people around them always do.

I used to live like this constantly. Half-listening to my children. Skimming conversations. Being "busy" but never truly here.

I thought momentum mattered more than connection.

Until my daughter asked me a simple question:

"What did I just say?"

I didn't know.

That question changed everything.

I started small. One meeting where I closed my laptop. One dinner where my phone stayed in another room. One conversation where I just listened instead of solving.

It was harder than I expected. My brain kept reaching for the next thing like an addict reaching for a fix.

But slowly, something shifted.

My daughter started coming to me first with her stories. My team stopped needing to repeat themselves. The work I was afraid of missing didn't disappear—it just stopped controlling me.

Now I work with leaders who are where I was. Smart. Capable. Running fast but slowly disappearing from their own lives.

We don't work on productivity hacks. We work on something harder: learning to stay when every instinct says to move.

Because the leaders people want to follow aren't the ones with the most answers.

They're the ones present enough to ask the right questions.

If something in your chest tightened reading this—if you recognized yourself in that half-listening, always-moving version of me—you're not broken.

You're just running a system that was never designed to let you be present.

The good news?

That system can change.

I know because I did.