LIAM CHRISMER

CEO Mental Fitness Series: James Hollis' Living an Examined Life (Part 1 of 7) This is the first in a seven-part blog series exploring the lessons of James Hollis' Living an Examined Life through the lens of CEO Mental Fitness. Hollis is a Jungian analyst, not a business guru. His work may be the most important leadership reading you'll ever do. He explores the hidden drivers of human behavior: the unconscious patterns, inherited expectations, and adaptive strategies formed l

Bob used to be the fastest decision-maker in the room. The one who could look at a messy situation, cut through the noise, and call it. He thought that was what leadership was about. Then something shifted. It wasn't dramatic. There was no single moment where he lost confidence. But he wasn’t as certain as he used to be. It had become more difficult to make those quick-draw decisions. So, he hesitated. He started asking for more data before committing, pushing decisions to t

Gallup just released their 2026 State of the Global Workplace It’s a lot. 251 pages. More charts than a founder’s dream deck on crack. No CEO is going to read it. You know what they say about how to eat an elephant. You don’t. Here are a few morsels relevant to CEOs. First, overall, it’s not bad. The workplace is holding. Especially in the US and Canada. Surprisingly, manager engagement is down. From 40% engaged in 2022 to 36% in 2025. Here’s the nugget for the enlightened C

CEO Isolation: What Carol Tome Learned When She Took the Loneliest Job at UPS Carol Tome came out of retirement in 2020 to tame a beast. That beast was UPS. She became the first outsider in 113 years to run the company. She walked off a farm in Georgia and jumped right into the frying pan of CEO isolation. She had to lead half a million employees who could not stay home during the pandemic through a computer screen. She made big, bold decisions to eliminate bloat and simplify

CEO isolation is real. Research shows that more than 50% of CEOs experience it, and 61% report that it negatively impacts their performance. For first-time CEOs, the number jumps to 70%. It's not about being lonely in the way most people think of it. You're in meetings all day, every day. You're interrupted about every three minutes. You're not Tom Hanks in Cast Away looking for companionship in a soccer ball named Wilson. The isolation is something different. It's the feelin

As Featured in Forbes Coaches Council Remember gym class? Every year, K-12, because physical fitness mattered. But here's the thing no one ever talks about: nobody taught us how to think. Not in school. Not in college. Nowhere. And for CEOs, that's a problem. The demands on your brain have never been higher. Post-pandemic stress, accelerating burnout, and now AI doing more of our thinking for us. The result? We're getting worse at the one thing we're paid to do: think clearl

You sat down this morning to think about something important. You had the window. You opened your laptop, closed the door, and started. Then Slack pinged. Then your phone buzzed. Then someone knocked. Then you answered one email that turned into four. And when you finally looked up, forty minutes had passed and you had not spent a single second on the thing you sat down to do. That is not a bad day. That is every day. After a single interruption, it takes 23 minutes and 15 se

You’ve studied Jobs, Gates, and Musk. Their stories are compelling. Their decisions are instructive. And yes, they changed the world. But their stories won’t make you a sharper CEO. And at some level, you already know that. Biographies are inspiring. But we all have to write our own opus. “Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.” -Oscar Wilde I have deep admiration and respect for CEOs, particularly the unsung heroes who put everything on the line and battle it out, day

Man in yoga corpse pose As a CEO, your CEO Mental Fitness is your profit margin. And while everyone’s out there meditating, journaling,...

She'd had enough Is it worth it? That was the question I asked Diane. And the silence that followed said everything. Diane had been a...