Roots of Change

Roots of Change The leader we become reflects the lives we have lived. see my www.chtmodel.com/about page for more details

Our lived experiences directly impact our 'leadership style," and we may be blind to the patterns! | CCHL member

The patterns underneath your leadership started before your first leadership title.Every leader you ever had. Every envi...
09/09/2026

The patterns underneath your leadership started before your first leadership title.

Every leader you ever had. Every environment you grew up inside. Every lesson you learned, consciously or not, about what authority looks like, what strength looks like, and what safety looks like.

Those lessons are running underneath your leadership right now. Whether you are aware of them or not.

That is not a criticism. It is how it works for everyone.

But when you can finally see the patterns clearly, something shifts. You stop leading from a script that was written for someone else in a different situation. You start choosing which patterns still belong.

Leading from who you actually are is so much easier than leading from who you think you are supposed to be.

The Inner Game of Leadership is an audio program for that moment of finally seeing clearly. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message to register. The first 10 to register receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

I know what the opposite of this looks like because I have lived inside it.When I led from a genuinely people-centred pl...
09/06/2026

I know what the opposite of this looks like because I have lived inside it.

When I led from a genuinely people-centred place, the people around me brought their thinking into the room without being asked. Not because I told them to. Because the environment had already told them their thinking was wanted there.

They raised concerns early, before things became crises, because they had learned that speaking up was safe. Not performatively safe. Actually safe. No retaliation, no redirection, no quiet signal that the concern had created a problem for the person raising it.

I was not carrying everything alone in those days. The people around me had genuine ownership of the work, and they had grown into it. They were not managing up to me …they were working alongside me, thinking alongside me, solving alongside me.

And then something I did not expect happened. People started asking to be part of that team. Not because I was recruiting. But because the people already on the team talked about what it felt like to work there. That kind of environment, when the conditions are genuinely right, recruits for itself.

This is what patient-centred leadership actually looks like at the senior level. Not inspiring speeches or open-door policies. Structural conditions that make it safe to bring the full weight of what you know, including the hard things, consistently, over time.

That is not a personality trait. It is architecture. And it can be built.

Rooted to Rise: The leaders we become reflect lives that we have lived… is available for presale now. Link in BIO.

The Inner Game of Leadership audio program is open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 people to join receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

There are two questions that look similar but lead to completely different organizations.The first one is: is this how w...
09/05/2026

There are two questions that look similar but lead to completely different organizations.

The first one is: is this how we do things here?

The second one is: is this what our patients need?

The first question is about the system. It protects the existing design. It filters every new idea, every concern, every proposed change through the lens of what has always been done. It keeps things stable. It also keeps things stuck.

The second question is about the patient. It does not ask whether the idea fits the current model. It asks whether the current model is serving the people it is supposed to serve. That is a harder question to sit with, and it opens the door to real change.

When an experienced clinician brings a patient safety concern forward, the question that comes back tells that person everything they need to know about whether to keep trying. If the response is built around protecting the current process, the message is clear. If the response is built around what the patients actually need, something different becomes possible.

This is not a personality difference between leaders. It is a structural one. The question a leader defaults to reflects the design of the organization around them. Ie what gets rewarded, what gets dismissed, what the culture has learned to protect.

Building an organization that consistently asks the second question is not about finding the right person. It is about redesigning the conditions that shape how any person in that role responds.

Rooted to Rise: The leaders we become reflect the lives that we have lived …is available for presale now. Link in BIO.

The Inner Game of Leadership audio program is open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 people to register receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

The people running the units and managing the teams are not just middle management. They are the early warning system fo...
09/04/2026

The people running the units and managing the teams are not just middle management. They are the early warning system for the entire organization.

They are sitting in the space between the clinical staff and the executive team, and they see what a dashboard cannot show. They know where the gaps are. They know which patient populations are most at risk right now. They know what is working and what is not, and they know it in real time, not six weeks after the data has been collected and formatted into a report.

When those people stop talking, the organization loses something that cannot be replaced with better metrics.

This is not a morale problem. It is a structural one. When the environment consistently signals that concerns are unwelcome, that ideas will be redirected, that raising a flag is more likely to create problems for the person raising it than to solve the problem being flagged, people adapt. They go quiet. They manage what is in front of them and stop thinking ahead.

And the organization goes right on making decisions based on incomplete information, wondering why the same problems keep appearing in different departments, different teams, different quarters.

The silence is not neutral. It is costing patients.

Senior leaders who understand this do not just tolerate the people closest to the work raising hard things. They build the conditions that make it possible.

Rooted to Rise: The leaders we become reflect lives we have lived… is available for presale now. Link in BIO.

The Inner Game of Leadership audio program is open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 to join receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

It does not always end with someone leaving.Sometimes it is slower than that. A charge nurse or manager who raises a con...
09/03/2026

It does not always end with someone leaving.

Sometimes it is slower than that. A charge nurse or manager who raises a concern twice, hears nothing back, and quietly stops raising concerns. A director who brings an idea to the table, gets it dismissed, and a few months later stops bringing ideas. A skilled clinician who moves into leadership full of energy and gradually, incrementally, learns that the energy is not wanted.

Nobody announces this shift. There is no meeting where someone says: I have decided to stop trying. It just happens, over time, through accumulated signals. The proposal that went nowhere. The concern that was redirected. The question that was treated as a problem rather than an asset.

What is left is a leader in the role but not really in the work. Present, functional, managing the daily load, but no longer bringing the full weight of what they know and see. They have learned what the system rewards, and it is not that.

This is one of the quietest and most costly forms of organizational loss. There is no departure to track, no exit to notice. Just a gradual narrowing of what a person is willing to risk, over months or years, until the box they were put in becomes the box they live in.

And the organization goes right on thinking everything is fine.

Rooted to Rise: The Leaders we Become Reflect the Lives we Have Lived presale is open now. Link in BIO.

The Inner Game of Leadership audio program is open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 people to join receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

Here is what actually happens when a system pushes out someone who wanted to make it better.The role gets filled. Someon...
09/02/2026

Here is what actually happens when a system pushes out someone who wanted to make it better.

The role gets filled. Someone else comes in. The onboarding cycle starts again.

And the problems? They stay right where they were. The gaps in handover, the patient safety concerns, the things that needed fixing ... none of that moved. Because the problem was never the person. The problem was in the structure. And the structure did not change when the person left.

This is the part that does not show up in exit interviews. Not really. Someone might mention frustration or a lack of support, but the deeper thing - that a clinician with years of pattern recognition just walked out the door along with everything they could see - rarely gets revealed clearly.

Healthcare organizations lose this kind of knowledge regularly and do not account for it anywhere. There is no line item for it. There is no dashboard metric that shows what a departing manager knew about the unit, what a director understood about the pressure points between teams, or what ideas a skilled clinician had been developing over the past year and a half that never received a fair hearing.

That knowledge disappears when the person does. And the organization continues to manage the symptoms of problems, it no longer has the capacity to see clearly.

Rooted to Rise: The Leaders we Become Reflect the Lived we have Lived is available for presale now. Link in BIO.

The Inner Game of Leadership audio program is now open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 are getting a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being in a system that keeps asking you to be smaller than you ...
09/01/2026

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being in a system that keeps asking you to be smaller than you are.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just the slow, steady pressure to stop raising concerns, stop offering ideas, stop noticing what you notice, and start performing a version of leadership that fits neatly into a box someone else designed.

The person I am thinking about did not leave because they stopped caring about patients. They cared as much on their last day as they did on their first. They left because they were not willing to become what the system was asking them to become: quiet, compliant, and contained.

That is a different story than burnout. It is a story about integrity. About what happens when someone chooses to remain whole rather than remain employed in a role that requires them to abandon what they know.

That choice is not always visible from the outside. It looks like resignation. It looks like another departure. But inside it, something important is happening. Someone is choosing their values over their position, and that choice tells you something real about the culture they were leaving.

When good people leave by choosing their integrity, the organization does not always register what it lost. It fills the role and moves on. The cost is quiet and slow, and it is always passed on to the patients.

Rooted to Rise: The Rise of the Patient-Centred Leader presale is open now. Link in BIO.

The Inner Game of Patient-Centred Leadership audio program is open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 people to join receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

Someone came into a leadership role with real clinical background and real ideas. Not theoretical ideas. Ideas built fro...
08/31/2026

Someone came into a leadership role with real clinical background and real ideas. Not theoretical ideas. Ideas built from years of watching what actually happens to patients when there are gaps in the system.

The issue they could see was straightforward. Agency nurses rotating through shift after shift, no one knowing the patients, no continuity, no one tracking the small things that matter in care. They had specific thoughts on how to fix it. Better handover processes. More consistency. Proactive protection for patients caught in the gaps.

They brought it forward.

They were told: that is not how we do things here.

It was not a conversation. It was a door closing.

I have heard this story more times than I can count. Not always word for word, but the shape of it is always the same. Someone brings a real problem, rooted in genuine concern for patients, and hits a wall that has nothing to do with the problem and everything to do with the structure around it.

The problem with "that is not how we do things here" is that it does not ask whether how we do things here is actually working. It only protects the current design, even when that design is failing patients.

Rooted to Rise: The Rise of the Patient-Centred Leader is available for presale now. Link in BIO.

And if you want to go deeper into the inner work behind this kind of leadership, the Inner Game of Patient-Centred Leadership audio program is now open for registration. Comment INNER GAME below or send a direct message for details. The first 10 people to join receive a free signed copy of Rooted to Rise when it publishes.

You did not lose yourself when you crossed into leadership.You crossed into new territory without a map, which is a very...
08/30/2026

You did not lose yourself when you crossed into leadership.

You crossed into new territory without a map, which is a very different thing.

The clinical skills you built over years, the listening, the steadiness under pressure, the genuine care for people, those are still there. They did not disappear when you took the title. They are the foundation of the kind of leader healthcare actually needs.

What the transition asked for, and what most clinicians are never given, is a way of understanding what you brought with you. The patterns formed before the title. The tools that worked in one context and need to be held differently in this one. The instincts that are strengths and the gaps that need honest attention.

That map exists. It is not complicated. It does not require you to become someone else. It requires you to look at what is already there and understand it more clearly than you have before.

That is where the best healthcare leaders I have ever seen started. Not with a new framework or a harder work ethic. With an honest look at what they carried in, and a willingness to use it with more intention.

The Inner Game of Patient-Centred Leadership is for any healthcare leader who at some point began their career in clinical practice. Four reveals, audio format, weekly pace. The first reveal can be completed even before your coffee gets cold. Comment INNER GAME below or send me a direct message and I will personally send you the registration details.

Your clinical training prepared you to care for patients with skill, precision, and genuine presence. That training is e...
08/29/2026

Your clinical training prepared you to care for patients with skill, precision, and genuine presence. That training is extraordinary.

It did not prepare you to lead people.

Specifically, it did not give you candour. The ability to say something direct and uncomfortable to someone who needs to hear it, and to say it clearly, without softening it into something easier. It did not give you a specific type of decisiveness, the confidence to make a call and stand behind it, even when not everyone in the room agrees. It did not give you accountability in the leadership sense, the willingness to hold a standard and not move it when someone pushes back or gets upset.

And it did not give you the understanding that your job as a leader is not to solve your team's problems for them. It is about building the conditions in which your team can solve those problems themselves.

These things are not flaws. They are gaps. And gaps can be filled.

But most healthcare leaders are never taught these things. So they rely on what they know. They over-give or over-control. They work harder on what they already have rather than developing what they actually need. And leadership keeps feeling harder than it should.

The Inner Game of Patient-Centred Leadership is for any healthcare leader who, at some point, began their career in clinical practice. Four reveals, audio format, weekly pace. The first reveal can be completed even before your coffee gets cold. Comment INNER GAME below or send me a direct message, and I will personally send you the registration details.

Address

Box 234
Lundar, MB
R0C1Y0

Telephone

+14317780652

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Roots of Change posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to Roots of Change:

Shortcuts

Share

Category