Mindset enables your team's performance, here’s how to shape it.

For all new leaders

Dear New Leader,

First, congratulations. You’ve earned the opportunity to lead not just with your results, but with your presence. And now comes the most powerful, misunderstood, and underused lever at your disposal: mindset.

Humans are unique. Just the idea of something bigger than themselves can drive people to work through the night, put up with failure again and again, take bold risks, and even put others first. In a world shaped by AI, rapid change, and now daily ambiguity, you’re going to need exactly that from your team: conviction, courage, and belief. In the mission, and in you.

Most people think of mindset as something individual, a personal asset you “work on” quietly. But now, your mindset is not just yours. It’s contagious. It sets the tempo. It shapes culture more than any quarterly review or KPI dashboard. It multiplies performance, or bottlenecks it, every week.

Neuroscience tells us the brain operates in one of two primary states: threat or challenge. Under threat, the amygdala floods the system with cortisol, narrowing perception, shutting down creativity, and driving reactivity. But under challenge, the prefrontal cortex lights up, enabling problem-solving, motivation, flexible thinking, and trust. You, as a leader, influence which system activates - not just with your words, but with your tone, posture, cadence, and the way you emotionally hold your team’s experience.

Every interaction you lead is an opportunity to shape mindset. The way you open a Monday call, respond to a mistake on Wednesday, or tell the story when results fall short - these are not throwaway moments. These are the moments that make the results happen.

Leadership is not about masking uncertainty or powering through with pressure. That just shuts people down. It narrows their capacity to think, and pushes them back toward what’s familiar, even if it’s not working. Real leadership is about modeling reflection, emotional regulation, and grounded clarity. It’s about helping your team move from reactivity to response and comfortable dealing with truth as their norm, especially in dealing with each other.

So think of your meetings not as obligations, but as mindset activators. Done right, they become rituals that cultivate a challenge response, build trust, and create room for new ideas to take root.

And there’s a tool most leaders overlook: awe.

Awe reduces self-focus, quiets the ego, and expands our sense of what’s possible. Even 60 seconds of awe, a NASA image, a story of overcoming, a walk under the stars, has been shown to increase empathy, cooperation, and humility. This isn’t fluff. It’s neuro cognitive realignment. Awe shifts us from survival mode into perspective. When your team loses theirs, bring awe to the table.

Whether it’s a start-up fighting for traction, or a corporate team battling to make change, the story you tell, the why behind the work will catalyze a mindset shift. It can turn exhaustion into drive, and fear into forward motion.

Ask yourself often: How am I, in the eyes of my team?

Mirror neuron research shows that observing another’s emotion activates the same neural networks in the observer. What you model emotionally, especially under pressure, becomes the unspoken language of your team. Optimism, paired with accountability, becomes rocket fuel. Your calm presence, and grit, becomes becomes culture.

So your job now is to be the keeper of mindset. Train others to see setbacks differently. Design cadences where people leave meetings with more clarity and courage than when they entered. Build cultures that value presence as much as output. Lead people not by shielding them from difficulty, but by teaching them how to stand inside the fire, even enjoy it, and grow.

That’s what great leaders do. They don’t just scale businesses, they scale humans.

Keep this close. And remember: the most powerful shift you can lead is the invisible one - the one that changes how people think, what they believe, and how they show up, together.

Meeting by meeting. Moment by moment. That’s how you move a company.

Onward,
Lee

PS, here is one of my favorite examples of leadership & coaching. You don’t have to deliver it in this style, always create your own authentic one. But you do want to create this level of energy and performance.

Teddy Atlas & Tim Bradley "We are Fireman!"