The Subconscious Simmer™, explained

You arrive at your destination and you cannot remember the drive.

You finish a chapter and realize you have no idea what just happened around you for the last forty minutes.

You stand under the shower and the answer to a problem you've been chewing on for two weeks suddenly arrives, fully formed, like it was waiting for you to stop trying.

These aren't unrelated.

They are all the same thing... and that thing is one of the most underused tools in modern professional life. I call it the Subconscious Simmer.

What is the Subconscious Simmer?

Your brain has two working modes.

The first is the conscious flashlight. Narrow. Focused. Holds about five or six things at once. This is what you use to read this sentence, drive a car in traffic, run the meeting, build the slide deck. It is high-effort and low-bandwidth.

The second is the subconscious room. Wide. Quiet. Holds essentially everything you have ever taken in. It runs in the background, looking...

There's a task on your list right now you've been dragging for two weeks. Maybe two months. Every time you see it, something in your chest tightens, you think I'll get to it, and you move on to something easier.

That task is doing something most productivity advice misses.

It's not just sitting on your list. It's changing your state - the mood, energy, and posture you bring into every room you walk into. The dread leaks. Into dinner. Into how you respond to your spouse. Into the email you'll send tomorrow morning that's slightly shorter than you intended.

Most productivity systems try to help you grind through that task faster.

That's the wrong move.

The right move is to sort your list differently.

Step 1: The Brain Dump

Get alone. Close the door. Write down everything you have to do - home, work, family, projects, health, side things, the items you've been meaning to handle for a year. One page. One mind map. Whatever your tool is.

This is non-negotiable. You can't sort what y...

Most of what you've been taught about body language is wrong.

Folded arms doesn't mean defensive. Broken eye contact doesn't mean lying. Pursed lips doesn't mean hiding something. The "X equals Y" approach to reading people... the one you'll find in airport bookstores and viral threads... is comfortable, repeatable, and dangerously misleading.

There's a better way. And a horse named Clever Hans showed us how more than a century ago.

The horse who could do math... well, or so they thought

In 1907, in Berlin, a horse named Clever Hans got famous for doing arithmetic. His owner, Wilhelm von Osten, would pose a problem (basic addition, simple multiplication, sometimes historical questions with multiple-choice answers) and Hans would stomp out the correct response with his hoof.

People assumed it was a trick. The owner must be signaling. Scientists tested it. They brought in different questioners. They changed the format. They varied the topics. Hans kept getting answers right.

It was...

Most of the advice you've read about difficult conversations is wrong about one thing. Not wrong in general - wrong in the specific moment when you need it most.

That thing is eye contact.

Conventional wisdom says to lean in. Make eye contact. Hold it. Show you're present. And in the vast majority of conversations, that is solid advice. I teach it. I use it.

But there is a specific category of conversation where it backfires completely... and if you're a leader, a physician, a risk manager, or anyone who has to have hard talks with people who are hurting, you need to know when that category applies.

The Stuck Conversation

A client of mine - a rising CEO recently brought in to scale a nonprofit - called me for help. The founder of the organization had stayed on staff in a scientific and technical role. He had built the place. He was losing it. Not to incompetence, but to the natural ceiling of his own skill set. The board knew it. Everyone knew it. He knew it.

He was not handling ...

In 1910, a French criminologist named Edmond Locard founded one of the world's first crime labs in Lyon. They eventually started calling him the Sherlock Holmes of Lyon. He left forensic science with a principle so foundational that no investigator works without it today.

The principle is simple: every contact leaves a trace.

When two people make contact, or a person makes contact with an environment, materials transfer between them. Hair. Fibers. Fingerprints. Skin cells. Even heat. The criminal doesn't know what he's leaving behind. The detective counts on it. Without this physics of unintended evidence, the entire field of forensics collapses.

Now let's leave the crime lab and walk into your life.

The traces you don't know you're leaving

Every email you send leaves a trace on the person who reads it.

Every meeting you walk into leaves a trace on the room.

Every conversation with your spouse, your kid, your colleague — leaves a trace on them. And on you.

Most of these traces ...

There's a colleague at every workplace whose desk is loaded with photos. Family. Pets. A vacation shot or three (or 15, LOL). Little mementos. To some people it looks cluttered. To some it looks unprofessional.

The research suggests it's a competitive advantage.

What the studies actually show

Across environmental psychology, human factors, well-being research, organizational behavior, and pet therapy, multiple studies have found correlations between personal photos and mementos at workspaces and a meaningful set of outcomes... reduced stress, better emotional well-being, higher productivity, and improved retention. The pet-specific version even has a name in the literature: the pet effect.

There are real trade-offs. Photos can carry weight. An anniversary, a loss, a fractured relationship...  sometimes the reminder pulls you in the wrong direction. Personal items can also become conversation starters that build connection with colleagues, or they can become distractions. The tool i...

 It's Time to Think About Time Differently

Every Monday morning, I color in a small box.

It’s part of a life calendar I’ve kept for years—52 boxes across, 80 rows down. One box for each week of an 80-year life.

Every week, the box reminds me:

I’m still here.

Still living.

Still shaping time.

This week, the box felt heavier than usual.

There’d been a wedding anniversary.

News of someone’s passing.

A few deep conversations with family.

Moments of joy with my children.

And the thought wouldn’t leave me:

We don’t just live in minutes and hours. We live in moments and threads. In beads and eras. In chunks of meaning. 

🔘 Moments

Some moments shift everything.

A look.

A laugh.

A text.

A decision.

A pause that changed your path.

You never know when it’s happening—but looking back, you always see it.

🔗 Beads

Moments strung together.

A ritual.

A weekend away.

A tough season followed by healing.

A recurring dinner that, in hindsight, became sac...

After demonstrating the power reframes can have on our own emotions in episode 001 of The Influence Every Day podcast, the obvious pushback would be, "Yeah, but how is this practical? It's all well and good in a made-up imagery session. I just don't see it working in the real world."

Well, ok, here are some examples from the real world - these are my personal examples, so I am intimately familiar with them. More importantly, though, I deliberately practiced rapid reframing until it became a habit. These stories are examples of major pivots in real-time. These moments weren't planned out, so I didn't have time to elegantly craft the best possible reframe language to use. Instead, this "rapid reframe habit" was able to capitalize on unexpected moments of opportunity and turn them into magical gifts. (Here's the Influence Every Day podcast episode where I discuss that 006 Three Transformative Reframes)

Story #1 - Angry With Someone? Get Present With The Future

Many times, when our emot...

Frame management is one of the most powerful tools in communication, behavior change, rapport and influence. In the first episode of "Influence Every Day," I touch on frame management and why we should use it.

Let's start with a demonstration; I will walk you through some imagery. Take a few minutes to relax and reflect on it.

I want you to imagine there is a little girl, about four years old, and she is looking back over her shoulder, giggling intensely. Imagine this four-year-old girl laughing really hard – the sound you hear in those cute viral videos of children – as she looks back over her shoulder, running forward.

Take note of how you feel in this moment about this scene with this happy little girl.

Now, imagine that two adults are chasing after her. One has their arms outstretched. Both of them have a look of worry on their face. They are clearly horrified as they chase after her. She is still giggling hard, looking back over her shoulder, running forward. But she's heading...

Body language can be cause AND effect. For example, when we have rapport with someone, we tend to exhibit certain behaviors (matching, mirroring, eyebrow flash, etc). If we want to establish rapport, we can start by intentionally exhibiting those same behaviors.

So it is with listening.

When you are listening intently, you will show the 3 behaviors covered here. Likewise, when you want to listen intently (but aren’t doing so), you can exhibit these 3 behaviors and you will begin to listen more intently.

Let's cover the 3 components of the body language of listening:

#1 Slightly Tilt Your Head

Component number one is to slightly tilt your head. 

Think about it. You've seen many animals, right? If they hear a sound, there's something that's interesting. What do they do? They tilt their heads. They move their ears. They angle themselves to hear the thing better. Right? You’ve seen cute pictures of kittens or puppies that when a sound is made and they cock their head.

You actu...