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Welcome back - it's nice to have you here!

Before we dive in...

Sometimes you don’t need a better plan. You need to put yourself somewhere the plan can change.

This one is a little different. Not because I’m changing what this newsletter is. Because I think I finally have better language for what it’s been becoming.

And, strangely enough, it took a chalkboard at a concert in Brooklyn to help me see it.

🎯 THE MOMENT

I almost didn’t go.

I was heading into New York and doing the thing I always do when I’m coming here: looking at concerts. There are approximately 19 shows every night in New York that I can convince myself I need to see. 😂

​The Beths were playing at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Tiny room. Sold out. Resale tickets weren’t exactly making the decision easier. And I had somewhere to be at 7:30 the next morning. So I waited. And waited.

I was probably three-quarters of the way through my train ride into New York when I finally found a face-value ticket on CashorTrade and pulled the trigger.

I’m glad I did.

When I got to the venue, there was a chalkboard near the stage. An actual chalkboard. Not a screen. Not an app. Not a QR code sending you to an “interactive fan experience.” Paper and chalk. Imagine that.

People were given slips of paper and could vote on songs they wanted to hear. The choices made their way onto the board, and that became part of what happened in the room.

The Beths were still the band. They still created the show. They still made the decisions.

But they had designed a little part of the night where the people in the room could participate in what happened next. I thought it was cool. Cool enough that after the show I took that picture.

Then my phone died.

I took the subway back to Manhattan, walked an unreasonable number of blocks, stopped for food, and eventually ended up in my hotel room way too late with that chalkboard still rattling around in my head.

I think I know why.

⚡ QUICK SPIN

Agency isn’t controlling what happens next. Sometimes it’s putting yourself somewhere you can participate in it.

I couldn’t know whether that concert would be great. I couldn’t manufacture the energy I’d get from being there. I certainly couldn’t predict there would be a chalkboard waiting for me.

But I could buy the ticket. I could get on the train. I could put myself in the room.

And I think that distinction matters far beyond concerts.

We can’t control everything that gives us energy. But we can build lives that give those things somewhere to happen.

🛠️ MY TURN

Years ago, when I first started coaching, I called myself an Energy Coach. This was not my finest moment in positioning. More than one person thought I worked with solar panels. 😂

The language didn’t work.

But there was something underneath it that I still believe deeply. I have always cared about energy. My own, certainly. But also what happens when I see people who seem disconnected from theirs.

Put me somewhere interesting, and I’ll probably find something to be curious about. A concert. A conversation. A city street. A person I haven’t met yet. An idea I don’t understand.

And I’ve always believed we have more agency over our energy than we sometimes realize.

For a long time, I might have described that as making your own energy. I don’t think that’s quite right anymore.

Because energy isn’t entirely self-generated. People change our energy. Relationships change it. Environments change it. A conversation can change it. Music certainly changes mine.

So can curiosity. Meaning. Belonging. Doing something you nearly talked yourself out of doing.

There are people I love who could have knocked on my hotel-room door after that concert and somehow, despite the late hour and the early morning ahead of me, I would have found another four hours.

The physical battery hadn’t magically changed. Something else had.

Energy affects what we have access to.

Our curiosity. Our patience. Our judgment. Our relationships. Our willingness to participate. Our ability to see possibility.

That’s part of why my thinking about energy has expanded.

The question isn’t simply: How do I have more energy?

It’s also: What am I building around myself that affects the energy I have access to?

And that question eventually gets much bigger than energy.

📚 THE BACKUP

We all build operating systems. Not consciously, necessarily. They accumulate.

Our calendars. Habits. Roles. Relationships. Responsibilities. Expectations. Boundaries.

Ways of making decisions. Definitions of success. Ideas about who we need to be. Rules we inherited so long ago that we stopped noticing they were rules.

Some of those systems came from us. Some came from our families. Some came from our workplaces. Some came from culture. Some came from the version of ourselves who was solving a very different problem ten years ago. And most of them probably worked.

That’s the important part.

The operating system that eventually limits you may be the same one that helped you get here.

Then the conditions change. Your company grows. Your job changes. Your kids get older. A parent needs you. Your relationships evolve. Your visibility increases. Your ambition changes. Technology changes what your work requires. Success creates responsibilities you didn’t have when you were chasing it.

Sometimes the transition is obvious. Often it isn’t. Life just gets a little heavier. Decisions take longer. Recovery doesn’t seem to go as far. The calendar becomes harder to control. Relationships require a different kind of attention. Things you used to handle without thinking suddenly cost more.

And because you’re capable, you compensate. That’s what capable people do.

You work harder. Carry more. Sleep a little less. Put off the decision. Hold onto responsibilities you should probably hand over. Add another productivity system. Maybe ask AI to squeeze a little more efficiency out of the whole thing.

Nothing looks catastrophically broken. You’re still performing. But it’s costing more to produce the same result.

The job often changes before the leader’s operating system does.

And increasingly, I think many of the ideas I’ve been exploring with you are different signals of that same mismatch.

Energy Debt. Decision Debt. Identity Debt. Readiness. Recovery. Relationships. Trust. Attention.

They aren’t always separate problems.

Sometimes they’re different warning lights coming from the same system.

The conditions changed faster than the way you were operating did.

🛠️ THE SYSTEM

Before you add another tool to the machine, look for the mismatch.

Start here: What changed?

What does your life or leadership require from you today that it didn’t require a year or two ago?

Don’t begin with what’s wrong. Begin with what’s different.

Then: What didn’t change with it?

Which routines, responsibilities, assumptions, relationships, boundaries, expectations, or ways of working are still designed for the old conditions?

Something can have worked beautifully and still have reached the end of its usefulness.

Then: Where am I compensating?

Where are you using extra effort to keep an old system functioning?

This one matters because capable people can compensate for a surprisingly long time. Your performance can hide the mismatch.

And finally: What does my current system make possible?

I don’t mean just productivity.

Does the way you’re operating leave room for curiosity? Connection? Recovery? Unexpected conversations?

The person who needs you? The person you need? The challenge you didn’t know was coming? The experience you didn’t schedule six weeks ago? The concert you almost didn’t attend?

A good operating system shouldn’t merely help you survive everything you already planned.

It should leave enough room for life to participate too.

💡 THE SHIFT

When the conditions change, our instinct is often to try harder inside the system we already have.

More discipline. Better time management. Another tool. Another routine. Another optimization.

Sometimes those things work. But there comes a point when optimizing the old system becomes a way of avoiding the more interesting question:

Would I design my life this way if I were starting with the conditions I actually have today?

That question has been sitting with me. Because the goal isn’t to create a perfect operating system. There isn’t one.

And the goal certainly isn’t to optimize every available minute. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of systems that do. An optimized life can accidentally become a closed system.

Every hour accounted for. Every input controlled. Every outcome anticipated. Every open space converted into something productive. And suddenly there’s nowhere for the unexpected thing that might change your energy, thinking, relationship, or direction to happen.

Maybe margin isn’t only capacity for what goes wrong. Maybe it’s also capacity for what might go right.

🧭 THE TRANSITION CHECK

So here’s the filter I’m carrying forward:

What changed?

What didn’t?

Where am I compensating?

What needs to be recalibrated?

And now, courtesy of a chalkboard in Brooklyn: What am I leaving room to happen?

That last question might be the easiest one to miss.

We spend so much time protecting ourselves from disruption that we can accidentally protect ourselves from possibility too.

Agency doesn’t mean controlling all of it. Sometimes agency is choosing the room.

And leaving a little space for what happens once you get there.

🤗 YOUR TURN

There’s probably something in your life that still works. Technically. You can still carry it. Still manage it. Still compensate for it.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it still fits. So don’t overhaul your life this week. Notice one mismatch.

Where have the conditions changed but the way you operate hasn’t?

Then ask yourself:

If I were designing this for the life I actually have today, what would I do differently?

You don’t have to solve it immediately. Seeing the mismatch is a pretty good place to begin.

👊 LET'S TALK

This is where I want to pull the camera back for a minute. If you’ve been reading Plugged In Leadership for a while, you’ve watched my thinking evolve in real time.

I started with optimism and autonomy. Then energy. Then EnergyOS.

Then I kept finding these other things underneath how ambitious people operate: decisions, identity, relationships, trust, recovery, readiness, capacity.

For a while, I think even I treated them as different threads. I don’t anymore. They’re different parts of the same system. And increasingly, they’ve brought me to the work I now call Transition Leadership.

Because one of the hardest things about transition is that the new job, life, responsibility, pressure, opportunity, or identity often arrives before we’ve built the operating system to support it.

That doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It might mean something changed. And the system needs to change with it.

That’s also where I see Plugged In Leadership going.

A few months ago, I moved this newsletter from Friday to Monday. At the time, that was partly a publishing decision. It feels like more than that now. I’m less interested in sending you something to reflect on as the week ends. I want this to give you something useful to operate with as the week begins.

Something you can see. Name. Question. Test. Install.

Because insight is useful. But installation is where things actually change.

And that brings me back to that chalkboard. The Beths could have decided exactly what everyone in that room was going to get. Instead, they left part of the experience open.

So I’m going to do the same thing. I’m putting up my own version of the chalkboard.

The weekly email isn’t going anywhere. But as these ideas get deeper, I’m increasingly interested in what happens after you read them. Because seeing a pattern on Monday and changing how you operate when pressure hits on Thursday are two different things.

So I want to know:

If Plugged In Leadership helps you see the pattern, what would help you actually change it?

What would help you take these ideas beyond the weekly email and put them to work in your life or leadership?

It might be a tool. A conversation. A different format. Access. Accountability. Or, please, something I haven’t thought of.

Hit reply and please tell me.

Don’t make it polished. I’m genuinely trying to understand what should come after: “I see it.”

👉 adamwbarney.com​

Cheers, Adam

P.S. There's an obvious lesson here about staying up ridiculously late after walking all over New York when I had somewhere to be at 7:30 the next morning. I'm choosing not to explore that lesson at this time. 😂

🔌 STAY PLUGGED IN

Sometimes the timing on these things is almost too good. This week's Is Anything Real? conversation is with Mike Brown, founder of Sightworks, and we ended up exploring a question that I didn't realize would connect this directly to a chalkboard in Brooklyn: If everyone's busy building the intelligent future, who's building the human one?

Mike has spent decades thinking about spaces, experiences, and the conditions that help people gather, connect, belong, and feel more alive. We talked about AI and design, but also something much more fundamental: what are we actually designing our systems to make possible?

Agency. Connection. Belonging. Empty space. Human messiness. The things optimization can accidentally squeeze out.

Which feels like a pretty good companion to this week's question: What are you leaving room to happen?

👉 🎙️Listen to Who's Building the Human Future? AI, Design, and Belonging with Mike Brown.

IS ANYTHING REAL? • EPISODE 80 Who’s Building the Human Future? AI, Design, and Belonging | Ep. 80 w/ Mike Brown 27:01 MORE INFO

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