You've kept it together. Through the reorgs, the shifting team dynamics, the quarters that never let up. Something underneath hasn't matched the surface in a long time. Jami de Lou names it: functional masking — the practiced, often unconscious skill of performing composure while your nervous system runs something else underneath. This one is for the leader or individual contributor who has been holding it together for so long, they can't remember what not holding it together even feels like.

This episode airs during Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. After losing her sister to stage four colorectal cancer at 43, Dacia Heck shares with Jami de Lou how she turned grief into action. Like many, the signs were there but kept getting reframed as something else. Something hindsight makes clearer. In this episode we talk about why polyp history matters as much as cancer history, how to advocate for yourself when providers dismiss your symptoms, and what leadership looks like to ensure support for your people when someone they love is terminally ill.

GH Foundation: gh-foundation.com | Project Blue

When the invisible load gets heavy, decisions don't just slow down, they accumulate. The unmade ones. The reactive ones. The ones everyone thought were already made but weren't, not really.

That accumulation has a name: decision debt.

In this episode, Jami names decision debt as a systems outcome, not a leadership failure. She walks through four types of decision debt, the unmade decision, the reactive decision, the undiscussed decision, and the forced decision, and what they cost organizations, teams, and the people leading them.

This episode includes a personal story about a yes that wasn't, a breakdown of decision friction vs. analysis paralysis, and a three-question Decision Debt Inventory you can use this week.

If something has been sitting on your list longer than it should, or if your team is running in three different directions, this episode is for you.

SHOW NOTES TO INCLUDE:

Decision Debt Inventory (3 questions):

1. What decision has been sitting the longest?

2. What is the cost of continuing to defer it?
3. What would a good enough decision look like right now — informed enough, honest enough, and reversible enough to move forward?