The Thing about Initial Reactions

As I was kneeling in the neighbor’s grass, looking in the storm drain, I was thinking…

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“How the heck did she get out here?”

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“Am I going to be able to get her?”

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“Are my jeans going to be stained?”

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A few minutes earlier, Sean and I had walked out the front door to go get Michael from school. The first thing I noticed was the black and white tuxedo cat low-crawling out of our front yard.

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Spats!

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I told Sean to head out without me, set my Sprindrift and my phone in the driveway, and quickly walked in the direction I'd seen her go as Sean called out, "She went into the storm drain.”

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So, here I was, kneeling in the wet grass, pulling half-decomposed leaves away from the drainage rocks and I realized - I was never going to get to her. In fact, I couldn’t figure out how she even got in there.

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I decided the only thing to do was to get some treats and try to lure her out. It was really close to dinner time - I hoped she'd be easy to sway with food.

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You can imagine my surprise when I opened my front door, only to be greeted by my tuxedo cat.

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Yup, there was Spats, standing next to Foxtrot, ready to guide me to the basement to serve her dinner.

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I laughed with relief, gave her a big squeeze, and in the moments after, thought of my friend, Tony, an Army and operations guy, who likes to say, “the report from the front line is always wrong.”

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In other words - the first thing we hear, the first thing we see, the first wind of an issue we get - is incomplete. There’s always more to the story.

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This feels like another reminder that leadership isn’t about reacting quickly; it's about about responding wisely.

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Responding wisely requires us to slow down, gather more information, consider our sources, and understand the context.

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I think about all the ways we might jump into action as leaders before we have all the info:

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😬 We hear a rumor and our wheels start turning about how to address the "issue."

😬 Someone offers a short response in a meeting and our brains make it mean that not everyone's on board with a decision.

😬 A couple of deadlines get missed and we start problem-solving workload before we get curious about the underlying cause.

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As the holiday season gets into full swing and things feel busier and possibly more chaotic, we are even more likely to jump into action before having all of the information.

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So, here are a few reflection questions to help you slow down and close out the year with more intention:

• What assumptions could I test before making a decision?
• Who else might have some insight into what’s going on here?
• What do I think I “know” that someone else might “know” differently?

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And of course, the most important questions to start with: Is this the right problem to solve? Is it a problem at all?

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Hopefully a brief pause and an opportunity to act more intentionally can ease the journey, because sometimes we spend a lot of time looking in the storm drain before we verify it’s the right cat.

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If you are hoping to bring more ease, balance, or curiosity into your leadership team in 2026, I'd love to chat! Let's connect and get a conversation started.

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