Hello Kind and Curious Leader,
Somewhere near you this week, a kid is trying on shoes for a school year that has not started yet. There are notebooks with nothing in them. A backpack waiting by the door. Every fall, we spend real money and real attention getting the young people in our lives ready to grow. We believe in their becoming enough to put something behind it.
Here is the question I have been sitting with.
When did you last invest like that in your own?
I have spent more than three decades leading.
Rooms, companies, teams, a few brands you would know by name. And this year, I went back to school. I am earning my coaching certification, which means I sit down, do the work, record myself, and hand it to someone whose job is to tell me where I am still getting it wrong. At this stage of a career, that is a humbling thing to choose on purpose. I chose it anyway, because the day you decide you are finished learning is the day you start to shrink.
Which brings me to you, and to something you are probably carrying right now.
There is a conversation you have not had yet. Maybe it is feedback you keep revising in your head. Maybe it is a boundary that needs clearer language. Maybe it is a tension everyone in the room can feel and no one will name. You have called it timing. You have called it patience. Some quiet part of you knows it is waiting for your leadership.
Most of us were taught to be nice. Nice keeps the peace. It smooths the moment and protects everyone's comfort, including our own. Kind is a different thing. Kind tells the truth in a way another person can actually hear. It names what matters, protects the other person's dignity while it does, and stays in the room long enough for a real answer. Nice keeps the peace. Kind changes the world. The leaders people trust over time are the ones who learned to hold honesty and care in the same hand, especially when the room is uncomfortable.
This month, I am opening something I have been building for a long time.
It is called the League of Radical Kindness, a community for people who lead people and want kindness to be a discipline with a spine, not a soft word we hang on a wall. The doors open at the end of July.
I did not want your first step inside to be a password and a payment.
So I built a free way in.
It is called Kind, Not Nice, a free five-day sprint. In five days, you will choose the one conversation you have been avoiding, prepare for it with a practical framework, and walk away ready to lead it with clarity, courage, and kindness that builds trust.
We start the week of July 27, and we kick it off together at a launch party on Friday, July 24, at noon Eastern.
No cost. No catch. Five days of real work, in good company.
Save your seat for the launch party, Friday 7/24, 12:00 pm ET
One small thing.
Over the next two weeks, you will start hearing from me at a new address, [email protected].
It is still me.
Add it to your contacts so the sprint details do not slip into a folder you never open.
My parents used to say something I have never been able to put down.
Leave your corner of the world better than you found it. A hard conversation, led with kindness, is one of the truest ways I know to do that. It leaves a person clearer than you found them. It leaves the trust between you stronger than it was.
Come do it with me.
In Community and Conversation,
Jim
