Executive Inner Work · Field Notes
The German word for executive is Führungskraft: leadership force. Your calendar stays full. You don't. Every Sunday: the state you lead from, and how it turns into freedom, flow and force.
One practice per edition, usable the same day.
Free. One email a week, on Sundays. Double opt-in, you confirm first. One click to leave, any time.
Average across our clients. Measured, not claimed.
By Achim Feige, co-founder of VERTICAL Development, Berlin. More than 1,600 leaders trained, in over 16 countries.
Board members and managing directors in large companies. Founders in aerospace, tech and AI, with TUM Venture Labs and The Delta. Family business owners, with The Pioneer.
An essay on an inner tension you know and rarely name. Around 870 words, five minutes, with your first coffee.
Nervous system, cortisol, flow, and the researcher behind it. Science that satisfies your critical ego.
Inner work has to fit a full calendar or it stays theory. Six breaths before your first meeting is often enough.
Every edition ends with a single next step that fits its topic. No pile of offers, just the one thing that actually helps you this week.
Your calendar is full because your head is full. The first work goes inward, to the place you have been driving around for years. Almost every CEO knows it and never names it.
The ego that got you here holds you here. Control, speed, being right. Look at it once instead of defending it, and capacity opens up that was tied down before.
What is resolved inside aligns itself outside. Same week, same chaos, different ease. Flow instead of pressure, one north star instead of a hundred options, and a connection to yourself and the world that holds.
That is Executive Inner Work: the leadership operating system for successful change, from the inside out. Every Sunday you get a piece of it, in the order in which it works.
Porges calls it neuroception: your nervous system decides about safety before you think. Six seconds in, six seconds out, and the vagus takes over.
Before your first meeting tomorrow: three breaths. Name one decision that is truly yours today. The rest can wait.
You don't need to do more. You need to lead deeper.
I was a competitive athlete, then a brand strategist for 15 years. On the outside everything worked. On the inside I ran at high pressure, high blood pressure included. Eleven years of my own inner work brought me to what I now train with CEOs.
Field Notes is the notebook from that work. I write it myself, every week.
From the heart, Achim
The load stays the same. So does the responsibility. What changes is the vessel you lead from. We call it Growing the Cup: what is missing is capacity, not content.
From there the view gets wider. Decisions come from clarity instead of reflex. Care costs no effort any more, it is simply there. And freedom here means: you decide how you carry the load.
That is what Executive Inner Work is built for: freedom, flow and force.
It's You. Just evolved.
Five minutes of reading. One practice for the week. The rest happens inside.
Free. One email a week, on Sundays. Double opt-in, you confirm first. One click to leave, any time.
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