Keep swinging …

Every owner and business leader hits a slump eventually. Sales go soft. A hire does not work out. A new offer falls flat. A decision that felt smart a month ago suddenly looks expensive. In those moments, it is easy to start pressing. It is easy to confuse one bad stretch with permanent decline. It is easy to panic.

My current favorite baseball player, Ronald Acuña Jr., is one of the most exciting players in the game. Part of what makes him so compelling are the amazing defensive plays and his offensive brilliance, that said, he’s not known for never having a bad month. To really understand his success, you have to take the long view and pay attention to the intangibles. The same is true of leaders.

The long view

The baseball season is long. Really long. There are 162 games in the regular season alone, which means there is plenty of time for hot streaks, cold streaks, bad luck, and correction. For fans, that is part of the fun. For players in a slump, it can feel endless. The best players understand something important, though: a long season rewards macro consistency, not emotional reactions to every small sample.

My dad used to say, “Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing you can do in professional sports. If you can hit a baseball three out of ten times, they put you in the Hall (of Fame).” That idea has stayed with me because it cuts against how most of us experience struggle. We expect competence to feel clean. We expect good performance to look smooth. But in baseball, and in business, excellence includes a lot of misses. One great game can carry a player through a long stretch of bad at bats because the season is long, and numbers don’t get tabulated until the end.

That is a useful reminder for business owners and leaders because slumps rarely stay contained to the numbers. They become emotional, a slow month starts to feel like a verdict, tne missed opportunity starts to rewrite the story you are telling yourself about your judgment, your team, or your future. That is where leaders get into trouble. Not because they hit a rough patch, but because they overcorrect in response to one. They chase bad pitches. They abandon sound habits. They confuse urgency with clarity.

When you take a chance and get it wrong, or you see sales dip for a month, it is easy to catastrophize. In those moments, it helps to remember the larger record. Remember the wins. Remember the judgment that got you here. Remember that consistency does not mean doing the same thing robotically, but it does mean showing up, reading the field, and continuing to make disciplined decisions over time. Sometimes that means swinging. Sometimes it means taking the walk. What it does not mean is panicking and flailing at everything near the plate.

That is one of the hardest disciplines in leadership. Owners, especially, feel pressure to prove they can fix every problem immediately. But not every downturn calls for reinvention. Sometimes it calls for steadiness. Sometimes the right move is not a dramatic pivot but a calm return to fundamentals: clearer priorities, better follow through, sharper conversations, and the patience to let good decisions compound.

The intangibles

One reason Acuña is so much fun to watch is that he brings an infectious energy with him. He is the kind of player whose presence changes the feel of the game. When he is playing well, the team responds. More importantly, when he is not playing well, he still brings visible joy to the field. When a teammate makes a great play or gets a big hit, he is often the one leading the celebration. He understands that being part of a team is not just about personal performance.

That matters even more in business than it does in sports. A leader’s mood is rarely private. It spreads. Your team takes cues from how you handle pressure, how you talk about setbacks, and whether you can still recognize progress when it is not your own. If you only celebrate the game winning hit, people learn to wait for heroics. If you celebrate smart decisions, steady effort, and smaller wins along the way, you build a healthier and more durable culture.

For owners and senior leaders, this is one of the real intangibles of leadership. You are not just setting targets. You are setting tone. You are teaching people, constantly, what matters here. Whether you mean to or not, you are showing them what a bad month means, what a mistake means, what resilience looks like, and whether confidence disappears the moment results soften.

It is easy to feel, in the middle of a slump, like you will always be there. But take a look around. The team is still doing its part. Progress is still happening in places you may not have noticed. Even at your best, you were never going to win it all on your own. Good teams carry each other for stretches. Good leaders let them.

So keep swinging. Stay disciplined. Do not start chasing balls in the dirt just because you are frustrated. Take the long view. Protect the culture around you. And remember that one of the clearest signs of leadership is not perfection, but the ability to keep your head, keep your standards, and keep stepping up to the plate when the last few at bats did not go your way.

Curiosity Wins

The other day I was having one of those rare, valuable, deep conversations with my son. He’s 15, which means he has that particular teenage confidence that does not always come with much appreciation for nuance. He’s also smart enough to make arguments that sound right on first listen, which is usually how people, adults included, get themselves into trouble.

I eventually realized I do not actually need to win every point with him. What I want is something simpler and harder. I want to teach him how to be wrong and how to recover from it without turning it into shame or a fight.

It is better to be right eventually than feel right right now.

That line is easy to agree with in theory. In practice, it runs into one of the strongest forces in leadership: the desire to be seen as certain. Executives are rewarded for conviction. People look to you for direction. Your name comes up when there’s an open board seat, a community issue, a tough call that needs a steady hand. Over time, it gets tempting to confuse being trusted with being correct.

If you’ve found any success, it’s also easy to start getting high on your own supply. You have pattern recognition. You have instincts that have paid off. You have stories you can tell about times you were right when everyone else hesitated. Those are real strengths. But they can quietly turn into a weakness if they make you less curious.

Curiosity is not asking more questions in meetings so you sound thoughtful. Curiosity is the willingness to look for what is true, even when it threatens what you already said out loud.

Hank Green, a science educator, talks about the difference between arguing like a lawyer and arguing like a scientist. A lawyer argues to win one case. If precedent is on their side, they lean on similarity. If it is not, they lean on differences. They show what helps them, and they keep the rest tucked away unless they are forced. They use opaque but often brilliant sounding rhetoric to confuse the point rather than elucidate it. A scientist argues because they think they are observing something real. They show their work. They invite critique. They try to simplify where possible. They want other smart people to stress test the idea, not because they enjoy being challenged, but because the goal is to arrive at what is right, not to win a single disagreement.

This is a useful mirror for leaders because most of us, under pressure, default to lawyer mode. We build a case. We select the facts that support the plan. We describe the outliers as exceptions. We defend the decision because we made it, and being wrong feels like it will cost us authority.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth. A leader who cannot change their mind is not strong. They are brittle.

Real strength is the confidence to be wrong and try again.

That is not a moral statement. It is a practical one. It is especially practical in small business, where you do not have the budget or the time to stick with a losing strategy just to protect your pride. Big organizations can afford to be slow learners. They can carry expensive mistakes for a long time, sometimes without anyone outside the building noticing. Most smaller firms cannot. If you keep walking in the wrong direction, the numbers will tell on you quickly.

That is why curiosity matters. Curiosity is how you notice the early signs that the story in your head is drifting away from reality. A customer keeps asking the same question, which means your message is not landing. A deal keeps stalling at the same stage, which means something in your process is creating doubt. A key employee stops disagreeing and starts going quiet, which usually means they have decided it is not safe or useful to be honest. Those are not random annoyances. They are information.

The ability to change your mind is what you do with that information.

To be clear, changing your mind does not mean changing direction every week. It means having enough self control to separate your identity from your opinion. It means being able to say, given what we knew then, this made sense, and given what we know now, it doesn’t.

The leaders who do this well have a particular kind of confidence. They can make a call without theatrics, and they can revise a call without drama. They do not treat the update as an admission of incompetence. They treat it as a normal part of staying aligned with what the world is actually doing.

This is where curiosity becomes cultural.

If your team thinks you need to feel right, they will protect you from reality. They will soften updates. They will delay bad news. They will quietly build workarounds instead of bringing you the underlying issue, because workarounds are safer than telling the boss their plan is not working. If your team believes you would rather be right eventually than feel right right now, they tell you the truth sooner. They bring you what they are seeing, not what they think you want to hear. That is not just nicer. It is faster. It saves money. It prevents small problems from becoming expensive ones.

So when something goes sideways, and something always does, the question is not just what happened. The question is how you responded. Did you get curious, or did you start building a case? Did you look for the simplest explanation, or the most flattering one? Did you invite critique, or did you seek confirmation?

Brilliant but wrong does not help anyone. It does not help your team, it does not help your customers, and it definitely does not help your bottom line.

When you are wondering what went wrong, look around, listen, and ask yourself one question.

Am I arguing like a lawyer or a scientist?