GarthBox

This is the next entry in Unlocking Potential, where I ask a few questions that are less “interview” and more “permission slip.” Janet Stutz has spent years in education and leadership, and her poetry carries the kind of calm clarity that makes you want to try again…smarter this time.

Q: After a career in education leadership, what did poetry teach you that leadership didn’t—and what did leadership teach you that poetry didn’t?

Poetry taught me how to retreat and take a breath from the long days and pressure of politics in my position.  Even now retired, I can create and feel refreshed after busy days by finding beauty in poetic words.    Leadership taught me how to serve wholeheartedly, how to listen to others, how to bring forth a vision that was in the best interest of children even when it may not have been the popular warm fuzzy message.  

Q: What’s one small practice that helped you keep going through hard seasons that a reader could borrow tomorrow?

Reflect upon your day and keep a journal or notes that will assist you later to write.  I also found inspiration by reflecting near a lake, ocean, or someplace peaceful.  I listen to calming music when I write.  

Q: What “permission slip” would you hand to someone who thinks they’re too late to write (or to start over)?

Each day there is the opportunity to try something new, reword, rewrite, edit, or begin.  I started writing poetry when I was 16.  I learned to play guitar when I was 35.  I learned how to write an ekphrastic poem when I was 61.  Just begin. 

Q: Beverage check (personal curiosity: I own Garth’s Brew Bar on Monroe Street): what’s your go-to drink when you’re celebrating a good day—or surviving a weird one?

A glass of Cabernet 

Q: How can people find you?

StutzPoeticVisions.com

Stay Positive & Wholeheartedly Serve

A field guide for not wasting the only non renewable resource that matters: attention.

A meeting is just a room where time goes to decide whether it wants to be a hero or a hostage.

You have been in both kinds. The heroic meeting has that electric “we are cooking” feeling. The hostage meeting has the vibe of a microwave dinner served on fine china. Same container, wildly different outcome.

Here is the difference, in basics.

First, if you’re in the meeting, speak up. Not because you need to perform, but because silence is a vote too, and it often votes for confusion. If all you’ve got is a question, ask it. Questions are crowbars. They pry open the stuck parts.

Second, put an agenda in the invite. Not a novel. A spine. A simple list that tells everyone: this thing has a shape. If you do nothing else, do that. An agenda is a promise that the meeting is not going to wander into the woods and start a new religion.

Third, start with a human story. Thirty seconds. Something real. The tiny win from yesterday. The customer moment. The weird thing you noticed. People are not brains on sticks. They arrive from traffic, toddlers, inboxes, and existential dread. A story is how you get everyone into the same weather.

Then, recap the agenda out loud and ask if everyone’s aligned. Not as a formality. As a guardrail. Get the buy in or amend it now, while the clay is still wet. Otherwise you’ll spend forty minutes building a canoe and discover someone thought you were making pancakes.

Now say the magic sentence most adults are terrified to say because it sounds too direct:
“So, success of this meeting looks like X.”

Say it anyway. Say it like you mean it. Success is not a mood. It’s a destination. If you don’t name it, you’re just carpooling in circles.

During the meeting, call on the quietest person. Not to ambush them. To invite them. The quietest person is often doing the most processing, and sometimes they’re holding the one sentence that saves everyone two weeks of rework. Try: “What’s your thinking right now?” The phrase “right now” matters. It takes the pressure off perfection and gives them permission to be mid thought.

As people talk, recap what you heard out loud. Not like a parrot, like a translator. “What I’m hearing is…” turns a pile of opinions into a shared understanding. It also exposes the moment where everyone realizes they were agreeing to different things using the same words. That is the sneakiest meeting monster.

When it ends, don’t just vanish like a magician in a smoke bomb. Thank people for their energy. Not the fake corporate kind. The real kind. “Appreciate you showing up for this” goes a long way in a world where everyone is overbooked and underfed.

Then send the recap fast. Like, while the meeting is still warm. Include what you agreed on and the next steps with names attached. People love AI. People also love pretending AI will do it later. Meanwhile, commitments evaporate, ownership gets fuzzy, and the group chat becomes a haunted house of “just circling back.”

And if you want to go the extra mile, message someone right after and ask for feedback on how you led it or what you could have done better. Not your best friend. Not your biggest fan. Someone honest. That one move quietly upgrades you from “meeting host” to “leader who learns.” It also makes the next meeting better, which is the whole point, unless your real hobby is scheduling.

Stay Positive & Stay Positive & Make The Tiny Life Move The Bigger One Forward

I once watched a guy try to make coffee like he was defusing a bomb. He stared at the machine, pressed three buttons, sighed like a philosopher who just discovered socks, then asked everyone in the room what they thought the coffee wanted to be when it grew up. (Okay, that was actually me.)

It was a perfect corporate ritual: maximal talking, minimal doing, and listening that was mostly just waiting for his turn to speak again.

The truth is, most of us are amateur alchemists. We keep tossing ingredients into the bubbling cauldron of work and relationships, hoping the mixture turns into trust, progress, and maybe a little magic. But the potion only works when you nail the ratio.

Listening is your mercury. It slips into the cracks. It reveals the real problem hiding under the polite problem. Talking is your sulfur. It ignites. It names the thing. It makes the room move. Doing is your salt. It grounds. It proves you meant what you said. Without it, every conversation is just a scented candle in a hurricane.

So how do you become an expert at the mix?

Start by treating every interaction like a recipe, not a vibe. If results are slow, you probably need more doing. If people are confused, you need cleaner talking. If you keep solving the wrong problem with impressive confidence, you need more listening.

Then master the three micro moves:

Listen one question deeper than feels necessary. Most people stop at the first answer because their ego is hungry. Starve it a little.

Talk in small, sturdy sentences. Say what you think is happening, what you need, and what you are proposing. No fog machines. Clarity is charisma.

Do something while the moment is still warm. A recap, a calendar invite, a prototype, a decision, a next step with an owner. Action is how you turn sincerity into reality.

If you want a simple scoreboard, here it is: listening earns the right, talking makes the promise, doing pays the tab.

Stay Positive & The Pros Are The Ones Who Tip Well

Welcome back to Unlocking Potential, where I ask smart people a few pointed questions and let their answers do the heavy lifting. Erika Meitner writes poems that notice what most of us step over. So, I asked her four questions designed to nudge our attention (and maybe our lives) a few degrees in the right direction.

Q: You’ve done work that blends documentary sensibility with lyric intelligence. When you’re writing near “real life” (place, people, record), what’s the one ethical or artistic rule you refuse to break?

I often do documentary poetry projects where I go on the road with photographers to cover topical issues in verse (some samples are up here). When I’m working on longer-term documentary poetry projects, I include an essay with the work about my process, and some background on the issue I’m exploring. I would never write a stranger’s voice into a more documentary poem without including context in some way, either in the poem, or an accompanying essay.

Q: What’s a small, ordinary detail you’ve noticed recently that changed your mind about something bigger than itself?

I walk almost daily around Tiedeman’s Pond, which is a conservancy area, and there are always a ton of birds there: blue herons, sandhill cranes, redwing blackbirds, and many other species. Last spring I saw an entire fleet of pelicans fishing as a group, and if you’ve never seen this, it’s an amazing feat of cooperative feeding. In general it made me think about how much better humans could be in working together to accomplish a common goal.

Q: If you could give a reader one “field assignment” to make them feel poetry in their body this week, what would it be?

I would tell them to take a field trip to a frozen lake or pond near them (in Madison, you’re never far from one), hang out on the shore for 10 minutes, and make a list of 5 things they saw, and 5 things they heard. Then I’d tell them to spend one minute making a sketch of one of the things they saw. (This is a variation on Lynda Barry’s Quick Diary method from her book Syllabus.)

Q: Beverage check (personal curiosity: I own Garth’s Brew Bar on Monroe Street): what’s your ideal drink for reading poems?

In the winter, a Guiness. In the summer, a French 75. (I know—it’s two drinks! Sorry!)

Q: How can people find you?

If you want to link to my website, that would be great!

Stay Positive & See You On The Frozen Lake

Most teams do their best thinking the way goldfish do their best exploring.

Same bowl. Same castle. Same little plastic plant that looks like it was designed by a committee that once tried to outlaw joy.

Then everyone wonders why the ideas taste like tap water.

The secret is not more intelligence. It is interference. A clean outside factor. A friendly collision. Someone who does not know the rules of your little aquarium and therefore has no reason to obey them.

Bring someone else into the ideation session.

Not because they are an “expert.” Experts are great at polishing what already exists. What you need is someone willing to point at your sacred cow and say, “Why is that cow in the conference room, and why are we feeding it budget?”

Invite a leader from a different category to speak at your sales kickoff. A chef. A school principal. A paramedic. A concert promoter. A person who has been yelled at by reality and learned to answer calmly. Their breadth and depth is less important than their willingness to contribute, speak up, challenge, and stay curious when your slide deck starts chanting.

Here’s the twist: an intern can do this as well as a CEO.

In fact, sometimes better.

Because interns have not yet signed the invisible contract that says, “I will nod politely while we reinvent the same wheel, quarterly.” They do not have the scar tissue of past failures that makes everyone whisper, “We tried that once,” as if the universe handed down a ruling.

An investor can play this role the same way someone from a pitch session last week can. A customer can do it. A vendor can do it. Your friend who runs a small business can do it. The common thread is not prestige. It is permission. Permission to interrupt your autopilot.

Stay Positive & Autopilot Is The True Enemy of Momentum

Most people think budgeting is math.

CMOs know it’s permission.

A budget is the story you convince the company to believe: this is what winning looks like, this is what it costs, and this is what we’ll trade to get it. The spreadsheet is just the receipt you slide across the table after everyone stops arguing about fear.

Start here: the plan, not last year’s template. Build for 70% delivery, not because you’re settling, but because reality always sends surprise guests. Buffer isn’t laziness—it’s leadership. Your job is to make 70% land like 100% to the rest of the organization.

Then lock arms with the two people who can make your year either surgical or chaotic: the CFO and CRO.

With the CFO, don’t sell “marketing influence.” Sell a model: investment → expected return → timing → risk. Earn the right to keep a small slice of “unmeasured” budget for experiments by delivering relentlessly on the measurable majority. Tech won’t save you if the motion is broken—software just scales whatever you already are, including confusion.

With the CRO, define pipeline like adults. “Developing” is not “qualified.” If you don’t share definitions and SLAs, you’ll budget off mirages and call it forecasting. The fastest way to win sales trust is to improve velocity, not just volume—conversion, time-in-stage, quality of opportunities. A cheap opportunity that wastes sales time is expensive in disguise.

And when the CEO asks for $10M in nine months?

Don’t flinch. Translate it into physics. Show the pipeline math, the assumptions, the tradeoffs. You’re not there to manufacture optimism—you’re there to manufacture clarity.

The best budget isn’t the one that looks smart.

It’s the one that survives contact with the year.

Stay Positive & Budgeting Doesn’t Sound Easier, But It Does Sound More Fun Now, Doesn’t It?

HT to Brandon Young for the insights.

Most people keep a to do list.

It is loud. It wants applause. It wants a gold star and a witness and a group chat reaction that says, “Look at you go.”

The list I am talking about is the opposite. It is a silent list.

It is the private ledger of things you did when nobody was clapping, nobody was watching, and nobody would have known if you chose the couch and the scroll and the sweet narcotic of “tomorrow.”

This list is not for productivity. It is for proof.

Your mission will come back later like a debt collector with a poem in its pocket. Not to shame you, but to ask, calmly, “Did you mean it?”

And when it asks, you will want receipts.

Not the flashy kind. The quiet kind.

The five minute call you made to someone who was unraveling, and you did not post about it because you are not a brand, you are a human.

The walk you took when your mind was trying to sell you a conspiracy about how everything is pointless.

The extra repetition, the extra edit, the extra apology, the extra thank you.

The money you did not spend. The drink you did not pour. The ego you did not feed.

The moment you kept your word even though it would have been so easy to wiggle out of it with a well crafted excuse and a charming smile.

That is the silent list.

Stay Positive & Stack The List Like A Spine Against Gravity