Your Peak of the Week
Hey Reader,
Welcome back to Peak of the Week — where we talk about what it really takes to perform at your best. As a person. As a leader. And increasingly, as an organization.
This Week →
- The story that changed how I see transformation
- Why individual breakthroughs don’t stick inside broken environments
- What I’ve been building toward and where this newsletter is going next
My Son Was Throwing Chairs
I was at the bottom of the leaderboard, not in my body, crawling through the darkest season of my professional life.
And at home, my son was in crisis too. Explosive rage. Throwing chairs. A ten-year-old carrying something none of us fully understood yet.
We were both drowning. At the same time. In different rooms.
My acupuncturist looked at me and said something I have not and will never forget EVER…. “When you heal, your son will heal.”
I didn’t fully believe it. But I was desperate enough to try anything. So we both did the work....neurofeedback, the deep nervous system stuff, learning breathwork, adding nature back into our routine....AND the excavation of patterns that turned out to be generational.
And now, a few years later, my ten-year-old reached over at the State Fair and held my hand. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Please know if you would have told me this son would be kind and loving again....I would not have believed you. He had healed. Because I had healed.
The ripple was real.
And I became so convinced in that truth: when one person does the deep work, the people around them change too. Heck, I built my entire coaching practice on it. Helped executives do their inner work. Helped high performers break the patterns that were costing them their health and well-being. Watched people step into their bigness and finally feel like who they are underneath it all, who they really are is some magnificent.
Individual career coaching felt like enough… until I saw the bigger mission. My calling.
The Domino With Nowhere To Fall
A coaching client... someone I'd worked with deeply, someone who had genuinely transformed, went back into her organization after our work together.
She was different. Clearer. More grounded. Less reactive. Operating from a completely different place internally than she had been six months before. And within ninety days, the environment had walked back almost all of it.
Her commitment was real. Her transformation was real. But she was one changed person inside a system that hadn't changed at all. The same unspoken rules. The same approval dynamics. The same reward structures that had trained her old patterns in the first place...still running, still reinforcing, still pulling.
She was the first domino. And there was nowhere to fall.
Seeing our work unraveling, it showed me something about what transformation actually requires at scale. One person healing is profound and necessary and real. But if the environment around them is still designed to produce the exact patterns they just spent months dismantling, the healing has nowhere to go.
The first domino needs a second one.
What I've Been Understanding
I spent 20 years hearing the signal from the outside: 30,000 conversations with people telling me what was breaking down inside organizations, what was draining them, what had finally crossed a line they couldn't uncross.
And now the deep individual coaching work, helping people transform their relationship with themselves, with their work, with the patterns they inherited.
Both of those things pointed to the same problem from different angles.
The gap between who people actually are....the fullness of what they're capable of, the gifts they carry, the quality of thinking they could bring... and what the environments they work inside actually allow them to give.
That gap has been costing organizations and the people inside them for decades. Most of the norms we still manage by were built for a different era… when work meant standing at a production line, when performance was measured by hours logged and tasks completed, and when getting the most out of people meant dangling the right reward or threatening the right consequence. The nature of work has changed completely. The operating systems most organizations run on haven't.
It's not a people problem. It's a design problem.
My recruiting career, my coaching work, the breakdown that broke me open, and now getting on the inside of organizations seeing these patterns up close…. all of it keeps pointing at the same thing….
You can coach the person. And you absolutely should.
But if the environment isn't designed to let them give what they've got… if the way work is structured, how decisions get made, and how people (because they are people, not robots!) are developed is working against everything they're capable of, you're asking them to sustain transformation inside a system that is consistently pulling in the opposite direction.
Individual transformation is the first domino. The environment is the second. Both have to move.
What This Has All Been Building Toward
I’ve been writing to you for the past several weeks about things I’ve been seeing inside organizations. The signals that go unread, the belonging that quietly erodes, the authority that never got clearly designed, the standards of mastery that live in someone’s head and never reach the people who need them most.
None of that was accidental.
I’ve been walking you toward something I’m deeply passionate about. Something I can confidently say is some of the most important work I’ve ever been part of.
My business partner Jason and I have been building a methodology for redesigning how work gets done inside organizations. Not from the outside. From the inside. Diagnosing the environment before diagnosing the people. Asking what the system is training people to do before asking what’s wrong with them.
It’s called UNLOK Human Potential.
And this newsletter is about to become its home.
Starting next week, Peak of the Week becomes The Weekly UNLOK.
Same voice and conviction (you feel it, right?). Same belief that the way we work has to change, for people and for organizations. Just a bigger container for everything I’ve been building toward.
I never, ever could have guessed this is where I’d end up. The recruiter who spent 20 years on the outside. The coach who helped people transform individually. Now, on the inside of organizations, asking the question I’ve been building toward my whole career:
What if we stopped fixing people and started fixing the room?
That’s what’s next. And I hope you’ll come with me.
Your Turn:
My Question for you This Week: Think about a time you did real personal work... read the book, hired the coach, had the breakthrough, and then walked back into an environment that made it nearly impossible to sustain. What was the environment doing that pulled against the change?
Please please please reply back on this one. This is one I'd really love to know if it's hitting.... does this resonate? ✨
And I've never been more convicted that this is the work I was always meant to do.
See you next week… inside The Weekly UNLOK.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura
P.S. — If your team is working hard but something feels stuck or flat, I'd love to talk about where the standard might be missing. Book time here.
P.P.S. — If you’re looking for individual support, I work with a small number of people one-on-one. Book an activation session and let’s get into it. Book here.