Change Seats
Framed Minds, End of August Edition
It’s August 31. Thirty days left in Q3.
If you lead anything at all, whether that’s a sales team, a marketing function, a compliance group, an operation, or an audience you’re building as a creator, you already know what’s coming. Q4 is the busiest stretch of the year. Pipelines have to close. Campaigns have to peak. Year end deadlines don’t move for anybody. Content calendars start eating weekends. Everything you pushed to “later” back in July shows up in October wearing a due date.
I want to name what most of us are actually dealing with right now, because I’m in it too. The pressure hasn’t fully landed yet, but the narrowing has. When the heat rises, leaders pull inward. Your field of vision shrinks to the number, the deadline, whatever is on fire today. Decisions get faster and they get worse. Conflicts get sharper. And the people around you start dealing with a version of you that you wouldn’t pick if you were choosing.
The instinct is to push harder. I’ve learned the better move is to change seats.
Three seats
There’s a model from Neuro Linguistic Programming called perceptual positions. John Grinder and Judith DeLozier developed it, and Robert Dilts refined it later. I like it because it’s simple enough to use in a hallway and deep enough to change how you run a team. It says you can look at any situation from three angles.
First position is self. You’re sitting inside your own experience. What do I want here? What do I actually need? What is driving my urgency?
Second position is other. You step mentally into the shoes of your team member, your stakeholder, your customer. What does this pressure feel like from their chair? What do they see that I can’t?
Third position is the observer. You step all the way back, like a fly on the wall, and watch the dynamic between the people and the system itself. No stake in who’s right.
Leaders who can move through all three break out of their reactive habits. They make sharper calls and they handle conflict with a calm that’s hard to fake. That’s the foundation, and I’m grateful for it. But there’s a question the model leaves open, and it’s the question that matters most under pressure.
Why can’t you get to the seat you need?
The Frame in every seat
Your Frames decide which seat you default to, which one you avoid, and which one you believe you’re in when you really aren’t.
The Performer distorts first position. Its core belief is “I’m only valuable when I’m impressive.” Ask a Performer what they need and they’ll describe what would look good. The Controller does something similar with certainty. Its need is always more predictability and never rest.
The Fixer distorts second position. The Fixer steps into someone else’s shoes so completely that they forget to step back out. Empathy turns into absorption, and suddenly the leader is carrying everyone’s Q4 on their own back. The Judge has the opposite problem. The Judge can’t enter another person’s view without handing down a verdict on it, so second position never really happens.
The Isolate and The Protector fake third position. Detachment feels like objectivity, but the Isolate isn’t observing the system. The Isolate is leaving it. Real observation takes enough safety to stay in the room without building a wall first.
This is why “just take a step back” doesn’t work for most leaders when things get loud. Your Frame Stack is already sitting in one of those chairs, and it isn’t moving until you can see it.
Awareness first. Then strategy. Then execution. Get the order wrong and your strategy is just your Frames wearing a plan.
A Q4 strategy that looks at all positions
Here’s how I’d spend the next thirty days.
1. Know your Frames before you build the plan. The full assessment inside Framed Minds takes about fifteen minutes and maps all twelve Frames. Your top two or three will tell you exactly which seat you’ll abandon when October gets noisy.
2. Run your Q4 plan through all three seats on purpose. From the first seat: what do I actually need this quarter, underneath what would impress people? From the second: what does this plan feel like to the people who have to execute it? From the third: if I watched my team and me from the outside, where is the friction already showing?
3. Bring your team into it. The fastest way to drive output in Q4 isn’t more pressure. It’s fewer blind spots. When your people know their own Frames, second position stops being a leadership skill you carry alone and becomes something the whole team does together. That’s what Frame Circles are for, and it’s why organizations are starting to bring Framed Minds in for their teams.
4. Build the daily reset in now, not in October. The Daily Compass takes under ninety seconds each morning and orients you around your Frames before the inbox gets its hands on you. Stillness is there for the days when your nervous system has to come down before your judgment can come back. And the Frame Landscape lets you see how your Stack shifts as the quarter unfolds.
You perform at your highest capacity when you can move between seats freely. Your team performs at theirs when you’ve shown them how.
One practice this week
Take one live Q4 decision. A hire, a priority call, a hard conversation you’ve been circling. Sit in all three seats for two minutes each and write one sentence from each one.
Then notice which seat was hardest to reach. That difficulty has a name. It’s your Frame, and it’s telling you where your blind spot will be in October.
Before this week ends, ask yourself:
Which seat do I live in when the pressure is on, and which one do I never visit?
What does Q4 look like from my team’s chair right now?
If I had watched myself lead last week from the outside, what would I have seen?
If you want your Frames mapped before the quarter turns, the founding offer is still open. Use code FOUNDING for three months free and then $15 a month, locked in for as long as you stay. I’ve spent the last month heads down fixing what needed fixing inside the platform instead of promoting it, and I’d rather you come in now, while the community is still forming, than wait.
Thirty days. Three seats. Twelve Frames. Change seats before the quarter changes you.
More soon.
You are not broken. You are framed. framedminds.com
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