The Leadership Lab is now Side by Side

I’m currently amidst the biggest transition of my life to date.

On August 25th, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world. A son. He instantly became the most important thing in my life.

When I first saw him on an ultrasound an image appeared in my mind: all of my life’s priorities next to each other, atop roman-era pedestals, their relative height indicating their relative importance.

At the time his pedestal was already the tallest—twice as high as any other. Since his birth, his pedestal has become at least 10x higher than the rest.

The consequences of his pedestal’s purposeful assertion is that it’s driving me to re-evaluate my entire life. I love him so much that I find myself questioning everything: Do I love whatever I’m doing enough to pull me away from him? Is what I’m working on as true an expression as my love for him? Is it as aligned and purposeful?

I find myself thinking a lot about work. I’m re-evaluating who I’m serving, who I want to be serving, and how I want to be serving them. That includes this newsletter.

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I’ve been writing online since 2015. Spurred by a podcast where Seth Godin said that everyone should have a daily blog, I started one of my own. I mostly waxed poetic and wrote about whatever I was chewing on at the time. I found something deeply fulfilling in it.

I shuttered the blog in late 2015 when the pressure I was applying to it took all of the fun out of it. At the time I wrote that it was the pressure of writing daily. What really happened was that I started believing that it needed to be something “big” and thinking about how to grow it, which promptly killed all creative inspiration and the fulfillment I was getting from it.

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I returned to online writing in 2021 when I launched a newsletter to support my clients and hopefully grow my nascent coaching practice. The newsletter was called Peak Performance, which, alongside the format and content, was reflective of my mindset at the time. I was in pursuit of a mythical peak performance ideal, unconsciously hoping that if only I could achieve it then I might feel like I’m enough and rest easy inside of myself. I was obsessed with that pursuit and wanted to market what I was learning in the hopes of seeming smart and having people pay me to help them with it1.

In September 2022, I started to feel that the title “Peak Performance” was increasingly out of alignment. What I was writing and sharing was vastly different from where I had started. What began as listicle style newsletters about things like “The Growth Equation”, “Dopamine Fasts”, and “The Motivations of High Performers” had transformed into essays on what it’s like when we’re motivated by fear, how lacking self-acceptance deepens the “funks” we find ourselves in, and how life isn’t about performance, but about living.

This shift was, in hindsight, an obvious corollary to a shift in my inner world. I was increasingly moving out of a mindset of self-improvement to one of self-acceptance, from performance to alignment and authenticity, and from seeking right answers to exploration and experimentation. I was realizing that striving for a mythical ideal of peak performance was constraining and narrowing me rather than stoking and bringing me to life, not to mention reinforcing that feeling of not enoughness.

With the help of some friends and colleagues (who also helped with this – hi Jeremy 🙂) I rebranded Peak Performance to the Leadership Lab. This served two purposes. First, it more clearly spoke to the target audience for my business: leaders. Second, it aligned with my evolving beliefs on leadership and life – that there are no right answers, that each of our paths are our own, and that the only way to find your path is to let yourself get messy, experiment, and find out what works best and feels most true to you.

Despite the more aligned rebrand, I hadn’t resolved the tension between the newsletter as authenticity and the newsletter as marketing. My desire to show what I know and seem smart so that people wanted to work with me felt like it was disproportionately running the show. I’m incredibly proud of the output from that, including a series on building great leadership teams and essays on thriving in complexity, the cascading effects of a leader’s psychology, and how to give conscious feedback. They still register to me as valuable syntheses of what I was exploring at the time. But writing those pieces didn’t create the feeling that I was and am looking for. I felt constrained, like I was trying, efforting, and overly focused on your perceiving me how I wanted to be perceived.

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These days, what I want to feel is uninhibited. Free. There’s a state of joy and flow I notice when I let the truth, my truth, flow. It’s also when I experience my writing at its best, and it’s when I’ve experienced the most resonance from you. Be it an essay on the stuff that’s worked best for me, on how my efforts to solve in relationships are always more ineffective than my efforts to connect, on my struggle with the belief that I need to do hard things, or a poem that just came out of me one day, there’s a powerful resonance I feel in me, and between me and you, when I write from that place.

Which bring me to the newest incarnation of the newsletter: Side by Side. The name Side By Side comes from feedback I consistently get on my coaching. My clients tell me that one of the things they most appreciate about how I coach is that it feels like I’m a fellow person on the path. I don’t pretend to have arrived somewhere special or have it all sorted out. Rather I’m another person in the world who has their own challenges and uses these tools and methods in my own life.

I learned this way of coaching from Diana Chapman, co-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group and co-author of the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. While participating in the Conscious Leadership Group’s coaches training program, a fellow participant voiced their struggle to get clients to buy-in to methods they know work. Diana’s response was one I’ll never forget:

“I just tell people about my experience with it.”

No intellectualization. No generating “buy-in”. No defending or guruification. A simple “here’s what happens when I do it.” It felt and continues to feel so much more powerful to me than trying to intellectually explain why or how something works.

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I intend to use Side by Side to share the things that most light me up—what I talk about over dinner, on hikes, and what I nerd out over with friends. Things like conscious relationships, conscious parenting, and living an authentic path that goes against the grain.

My short description: Personal essays on conscious living, leading, spirituality, and our inner worlds. Written by a father, husband, brother, son, coach, and solopreneur. Subscribe to walk together, for as long as you’d like.

I can still sense the one in me who wants to use this newsletter to convince you of my wisdom. Who wants it to persuade you to work with me. I’m simultaneously welcoming that part and inviting it to take a back seat to whatever it is that wants to be expressed. I’m inviting the uninhibited truth to take the wheel.

My plan for the newsletter is to write monthly-ish. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I’m treating this as mostly for me, and hoping that in writing for me and offering it to you, you get whatever it is you’re here to get.

If that’s of interest to you, I hope you choose to continue walking alongside me.

Thanks for being here until now, and thanks to those of you who choose to keep walking with me, side by side.

In the event that you subscribed to my newsletter in the nearly 6 months since I last wrote and are wondering who I am:

I’m Justin Mulvaney. It’s great to meet you.

I’m a husband, father, brother, son, solopreneur, and coach. I’ve dedicated my life to being more conscious, exploring my inner world, and helping others do the same in the name of leading more fulfilled, purposeful, and aligned lives.

I hope you choose to stay for this next chapter, and I wish you nothing but the best if not.

Many thanks to Jeremy for his help editing this. My mind told me that I should get feedback from more people, but when I tuned in it became clear that Jeremy, with his dedication to craft, authenticity, and aliveness in writing was the person that I wanted support from. I strongly recommend subscribing to his newsletter, Jeremy's Newsletter to get to know him. He’s a beautiful soul.