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Clarity doesn’t come from more leadership development or better thinking. It comes from seeing what thinking can’t see.

This past week, my LinkedIn feed was full of thoughtful people offering better answers. Better purpose, better culture, better leadership, better mindsets, and more. All sincere. All intelligent.

And yet, something feels off. It has for some time. I first wrote about it 2012 for the Cutter journal.

This endless circling has been playing out relentlessly for decades, year after year. The faces change. The language evolves. But the pattern remains.

Marshall McLuhan observed decades ago: "The medium is the message." He was pointing to television's impact—what he called the electric age—on how we live, work, and interact.

He said the medium itself shapes us more than any content it carries. The technology changes how we think, not just what we think about.

But the medium isn't just LinkedIn. It's the mind itself. We're using conditioned thought to try to transcend conditioned thinking, but we don't see it.

We're the projector creating what we see, but we keep trying to change the screen. We're asking the voice that creates problems to offer solutions. Then we wonder why nothing fundamentally changes.

What we get instead is endless refinement on leadership, organizational change, culture, and more.

We are witnessing minds speaking to themselves and other minds. Everyone shouting and defending their position. No one resting in truth. Endless circling and the noise gets louder and louder.

What Changes Everything

What if the voice offering solutions is the same voice creating the problems?

Clarity doesn't come from better thinking. It comes from recognizing we are not the voice in our head. We are the awareness in which thinking appears.

That recognition changes everything, not because you've learned something new, but because you've stopped looking for clarity where it can't be found.

When you stop identifying with the voice in your head and rest in what notices that voice, a shift occurs. The beliefs, judgments, conditioning begin to drop away. Not through effort, but through recognition.

This happened to me most visibly over the past five years. What emerged wasn't a new perspective on leadership. It was leadership emerging from a different place entirely. Or what Jaworski calls leadership unfolding through us

From that state, leadership becomes natural rather than performed. Clarity becomes obvious rather than constructed. Not because I became better at leadership. Because I stopped leading from the voice that was blocking it.

Maybe leadership doesn't need more explanations right now. Maybe it needs recognition of what exists before explanations begin.

The space where clarity lives isn't empty. It's what you already are beneath the noise of the conditioned mind. It requires nothing from you except that you stop defending what isn't real.

The shift isn't adding more frameworks, more skills, more tools to your thinking. It's recognizing you are the space in which thinking appears.

— Bill

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A Simple Check In

Last week I experimented with a live, shared session. A few people were interested, but timing didn’t quite line up.

This work doesn't ask you to add another thing to master. It invites recognition of what's already true.

How that recognition happens is different for everyone. Some need community, some need solitude, some need both at different times. Before I decide what this becomes in 2026, I'm genuinely curious:

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