[author: John R. Kormanik]
Inspired by my Kenyan safari, “Field Notes” are my observations from the field where my clients and I work — coaching sessions. Each field note is drawn from actual client sessions and gives insight into the personal evolution of my clients.
Location: A Law Firm Founder’s Office, Southern California.
Observation: The frame you bring to a decision determines the quality of the decision. Every time.
It was a dense week. He’d let someone go. A major client had called to restructure the relationship. A key associate had been spotted interviewing elsewhere. Any one of those events would have been enough to send most founders into a tailspin.
He wasn’t in a tailspin. But he wasn’t fully steady either.
And the first thing that told me everything I needed to know? The word he used to describe the deadline he’d set for himself on the termination decision.
He called it a “made up” date.
1. Your Words Reveal Your Frame
He had not made up that date. He had set it thoughtfully, based on conversations with employment-law counsel, with his partner, with me. He’d given the situation a defined runway, observed what happened, and acted when it was clear things hadn’t changed.
That’s not arbitrary. That’s a decision architecture.
But calling it “made up” sent him quietly, almost invisibly into a catabolic frame. It’s just this thing. I don’t really need to stick with it. The word stripped the decision of its own legitimacy before he’d even made it.
Words are not decoration. They are data about the energy state underneath them. And the energy state underneath the decision shapes the decision itself.
He caught it the moment I named it. That’s the work.
2. The Cost He Didn’t Calculate.
He felt guilt the next morning. He’d walk past the empty office and feel it. Not because he’d made the wrong call; he knew he hadn’t. Because he was telling himself a story: I failed. In the hire. In the development. In the management.
That story is understandable. It is also not true.
Here’s what actually happened: he owned his 100%, sought input from the right people, gave the situation a fair runway, and made a hard call cleanly. That’s not failure. That’s leadership.
The guilt wasn’t evidence of a mistake. It was evidence of a story he was choosing. Choices can be changed.
What founders rarely do is calculate the cost of the story itself. The cost, or psychological tax, compounds every time you revisit a settled decision from a frame of self-indictment. It costs you energy. It costs you presence. It costs you the mental bandwidth you need for the decisions that are actually in front of you.
Journal it. Do the after-action review; honestly evaluate your performance. Then close the file.
3. When the Security Blanket Goes Away
The client relationship restructure landed hard. Not because it was catastrophic — it wasn’t — but because it had represented a predictable revenue floor. Comfortable. Reliable. The kind of relationship that lets you stop thinking about business development for whole stretches of time.
His instinct was sharp: maybe that’s a good thing.
It is. But that instinct needs architecture behind it to stay anabolic when the pressure is on.
Here’s the frame I gave him: you are not selling. You are the buyer. You offer premium work at a rate that reflects it. The relationship either becomes a win-win at that standard, or it doesn’t continue. Either outcome is acceptable. Neither requires desperation.
That’s not arrogance. That’s a CEO operating from a clearly defined value position.
The lawyer version of that conversation sounds like: what do I have to do to keep this? The CEO version sounds like: here’s who we are and what we deliver. You can come along or not.*
The difference in those two frames is not small.
The Bottom Line
Cognitive and behavioral architecture is not a soft skill. It is the infrastructure underneath every decision you make about people, clients, revenue, and growth. When the frame is wrong, even a good strategy underperforms. When the frame is right, even a hard week becomes useful data.
The founder who can diagnose the frame he’s operating from (and shift it deliberately) is already thinking like a CEO.
Field Exercise
In the last 30 days, identify one decision you made and ask:
1. What word or phrase did I use to describe the constraints around that decision, and what did that language signal about how I actually viewed it?
2. What story did I tell myself in the aftermath? Was it accurate or was it a frame I chose without realizing I was choosing?
3. Where am I currently operating from a “what do I have to do to keep this?” posture and what would the buyer’s frame look like instead?
The quality of your decisions is downstream of the quality of your thinking. Upgrade the thinking first.
End of dispatch.