Focal Point Coaching of Loudoun

09/10/2026

Cignetti replaced Fernando Mendoza, the No. 1 overall NFL Draft pick, per CBS Sports, with Josh Hoover from TCU. No sentiment. No extended deliberation. Process over history.

Indiana went 16-0 and won the national championship.

I think about that decision a lot, because I saw the same pattern play out differently in the rooms I worked in. Leaders who had every read right, who knew the person beside them wasn't built for the next phase, and still couldn't act on it. Not because they were wrong. Because they were loyal. Because history mattered. Because pulling someone who had carried them felt like betrayal.

The structural read and the emotional read were not the same thing. And when they diverged, emotion usually won.

For a founder, that gap is expensive. The person who got you to one stage is often not the person who gets you to the next, and most founders know this before they admit it. The problem isn't the analysis. The problem is that the decision lives in a relationship, and relationships don't follow org charts.

What Cignetti had, and what I watched the best crisis leaders have, was a discipline that didn't depend on how they felt about the person. They had separated the structural question from the personal one before the moment arrived. That separation isn't cold. It's prepared.

You can build it before you need it. That's the part most people miss.

Start with the Executive Leadership Scorecard at ericwojtkun.com—20 minutes, fully confidential, no pitch attached.

09/03/2026

74% of leaders say their daily decisions have grown 10x in three years. The most common response was to gather more.

More opinions. More frameworks. More data.

From the outside, it looks like patience. From inside your organization, it looks different.

Three postponed decisions is often enough to change how a team operates. They build workarounds. They stop escalating. And eventually, they stop surfacing problems at all. That silence isn't calm.

I've seen it in military crisis work and in boardrooms. The pattern is the same: the leader thinks they're being thorough. The team has already moved on without them.

This carousel names the four signs your due diligence has quietly become avoidance. If a decision has been sitting longer than it should, one of these is probably why.

09/02/2026

Composure under pressure is supposed to be a leadership asset.

And it is. Until it isn't.

I have watched genuinely strong leaders do this, not weak ones. Their composure was real. It was simply pointed at everything except the thing that mattered. The calm was not a lie. It was a hiding place with very good lighting.

This is the harder problem with stalled decisions: they rarely look like paralysis from the outside. They look like patience. Like due diligence. Like a leader who isn't rattled.

What's actually happening is that something about the decision stays unnamed. And while it stays open, the team feels it before the leader does.

They build workarounds. They stop escalating. Eventually, they stop bringing things to leadership at all.

That silence isn't calm. It's what a culture sounds like when it's learned not to trust its leader.

After 30 years of military and FBI crisis leadership, we see this pattern consistently: founders who move well under pressure aren't the ones with more information. They're the ones with clarity about what's theirs to decide.

The visible argument is almost never the real fork. Most decisions don't get avoided because something is missing, they get avoided because making them requires admitting something isn't working.

Composure is only an asset when it's coupled to action. The calendar full of open items doesn't lie.

Start with the Executive Leadership Scorecard at ericwojtkun.com—20 minutes, fully confidential, no pitch attached.

08/31/2026

A ship with a stuck rudder doesn't sit still. It drifts.

You know the decisions. You've known them for weeks, maybe longer. The problem isn't that you need more information. The problem is that something about each one stays unnamed, and while it stays open, your team feels it before you do.

They build workarounds. They stop escalating. Eventually, they stop bringing things to you at all.

That silence isn't calm. It's what a culture sounds like when it's learned not to trust its leader.

In crisis rooms, military and FBI, we used three questions to route any stalled decision back to solid ground:

1. What are we deciding here that we cannot undo later?
2. What would have to be true for this to be the right call?
3. If we're wrong, how will we know, and how soon?

Those questions don't require more data. They require honesty about what's actually stuck.

Colin Powell's 40-70 rule is worth knowing: once you have 40-70% of the information you want, act. Going past 70% is wasted time. At $8-10M revenue, most founders are sitting on 60% and calling it insufficient.

The decision isn't waiting on information. It's waiting on you.

The three decisions founders postpone longest are almost never information problems. They are clarity problems. And clarity is something you can work on this week.

Start with the Executive Leadership Scorecard at ericwojtkun.com—20 minutes, fully confidential, no pitch attached.

08/31/2026

The biggest number is not always the right answer. Most founders know this in theory. Almost none of them act on it when the moment arrives.

Fernando Mendoza walked away from roughly $2M, accepted 55% of his top NIL offer, to play for Curt Cignetti at Indiana. His mother helped him make the call. What followed was one of the most talked-about program turnarounds in recent college football.

The conventional read is that he got lucky. The more honest read is that he trusted the right person at the right moment, and the right person wasn't the one with the biggest check.

I've watched this pattern play out across 30 years of military and FBI crisis leadership. The leaders who hold when the pressure arrives aren't the ones who optimized for credentials or compensation on their way up. They're the ones who built the right room around them before the crisis showed up, advisors, team members, and voices they actually trusted, not just the most impressive options on paper.

Founders face the same decision constantly. A key hire. A strategic partner. A board seat. The instinct is to sort by the biggest number, the most impressive resume, the highest bid. It's a reasonable instinct. It's also how you end up surrounded by people you can't rely on when the decision actually matters.

The harder question, the one almost nobody asks until it's too late, is who do you trust when you can't be in every room?

Mendoza's mother wasn't the highest-paid analyst in the room. She had skin in the game. That's what made her worth listening to.

Start with the Executive Leadership Scorecard at ericwojtkun.com—20 minutes, fully confidential, no pitch attached.

https://www.thedailyhoosier.com/fernando-mendoza-reveals-he-chose-mom-over-money-in-picking-iu-football/

Fernando Mendoza has revealed bits and pieces of his decision to transfer from Cal to Indiana over the last few months. And it isn’t hyperbolic to suggest it was a decision that helped lead t…

08/26/2026

The room argued for 40 minutes about wording.
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The real decision, whether to act at all, never got named.
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That's not a communication problem. It's avoidance with an agenda.
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And it compounds. Each deferred decision makes the next one slower and heavier. Your team feels every one of them long before you do.
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By the third postponed call, something shifts. The team builds workarounds. They stop escalating. Eventually they stop bringing problems up at all.
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That silence is not calm. It's the sound of a culture learning not to trust its leader.
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Swipe through the breakdown, then read the full piece at ericwojtkun.com/blog (link in bio). The Executive Leadership Scorecard is also there, 20 minutes, no cost, worth it if your meetings feel busy but the hard calls keep getting deferred.

08/26/2026

I'm reading High Output Management by Andrew Grove, and he describes the need for leaders to focus special attention on employees starting a position or new project. He notes, even if they are overall competent as an employee, on the new task at hand they may be consciously incompetent.

Employees leaving high school or college will not get many opportunities to learn their trade from the ground up due to AI, and increasingly robots. AI will be doing much of the old grunt work many of us did to learn the system we jumped into.

So today's world will put a premium on leaders who learn to work in and out of the mold of teacher, consultant, and manager — shifting between the three depending on what the moment calls for, not what the org chart says their role is.

The old model assumed years of repetitive work before anyone handed you a real decision. That runway is shrinking. When AI absorbs the grunt work, people reach judgment calls faster than they build the instincts to handle them well.

That's not an argument for slowing hiring or lowering the bar. It's an argument for rethinking what leadership development means. Grove's answer was task-relevant maturity: match your style to the person's competence on the specific task, not their title or tenure. When junior people skip straight to complex work, that matching has to happen faster and more deliberately than it used to.

The leaders who handle this well won't be the ones with the best onboarding deck. They'll be the ones willing to teach in the moment, consult on the call, and step back once someone can carry it — sometimes all three in one conversation.

I'd love to hear your take.

08/24/2026

Most leaders assume they got blindsided because they were missing data.

They weren't.

In late July 2026, public hydrological forecasts showed Danube flows at Romania's entry point dropping to roughly one-third of their July average, around 1,650 m³/s against a seasonal norm near 4,750 m³/s, according to Reuters. The data was sitting there, available to anyone watching. Weeks later, Romania shut down both reactors at Cernavodă simultaneously for the first time in history, eliminating roughly 20% of the country's electricity supply.

The gauge reading existed. The connection between that gauge and Nuclearelectrica's operational exposure did not.

That is the distinction that keeps appearing in high-stakes leadership failures, whether the arena is a supply chain, a reorganization, or a crisis unfolding faster than the org chart can process it. The failure is rarely about information. It is about the join, the structured, deliberate link between a signal and the decision it should trigger.

After 30 years of military and FBI crisis leadership, we have seen this pattern more times than we can count. Organizations build dashboards. They monitor indicators. They receive the observation. What they don't build is the discipline of connecting that observation to the entity, the exposure, or the decision that depends on it. So the signal arrives and passes without consequence, until consequence arrives on its own schedule.

The common defense is that the situation was too complex, too fast-moving, that no one could have known. Sometimes that is true. More often, the data was there and the join was missing, and the join is not a technology problem. It is a leadership and organizational discipline problem.

Building that discipline before the pressure arrives is the work. It is slower and less urgent-feeling than installing another monitoring tool. It is also the only version that actually holds when things move fast.

Check out the background on this story...https://bit.ly/4cMCa5W

Start with the Executive Leadership Scorecard at ericwojtkun.com—20 minutes, fully confidential, no pitch attached.

08/21/2026

A Year of Fortitude
Just over a year since I went full time as a coach, and today's meditation reading on fortitude hit home like a hammer on a glass jar.

I don't care if you are smart, wise, in tune with your inner self, or sitting on top of a gold mine. In the business world, if you don't dig deep and gut it out, you will not build the dreams in your heart and mind.

Yes, this means hearing a thousand, "No thank you." for every "let's do it!"

It also means looking at each little success as the series of sparks which you know will start the fire, and signal survival and success.

It means finding mentors who help you take the walk. I say thank you to mine.

My greatest pride is watching my clients filled with hope, and building the fortitude to keep it through all those tough times. The stories we now have are simply epic, yet only the first chapter in our adventures.

Looking towards the future this morning, and I'm excited. Big new on the horizon, but not signed sealed and delivering yet.

So it's time to dig deep and show some fortitude and get back to work!

Thanks Phil Gilkes, Scott Wiley, Jim Petersen and so many others. I look forward to seeing you out there!

08/19/2026

Composure accounts for roughly 67% of what observers rate as executive presence.

Not polish. Not communication style. Not how you run a meeting.

The way you hold yourself when something breaks.

Think about what that actually means for a founder. A key person walks. A client fires you. A quarter goes sideways. In that moment, you are not just managing a problem. You are the signal your team is reading to decide whether to hold or scatter.

A weather vane spins with the wind. A compass needle holds, regardless of conditions. Most leadership development teaches people to be better weather vanes, more responsive, more adaptive, more present. What it rarely teaches is how to be the compass.

Composure under pressure is not a temperament you were born with or missed out on. It is a discipline. One built through repetition in conditions where the cost of getting it wrong is real.

Research on stress physiology shows that uncertainty produces more physiological strain than a guaranteed bad outcome. That is why capable, experienced leaders freeze, not in worst-case scenarios, but in ambiguous ones. The situation hasn't peaked yet. The team is watching. And the body has already sent distress signals the mind hasn't caught up to.

We built our crisis leadership work around this reality. Thirty years of military and FBI environments, where decisions made in the first minutes of a crisis set the conditions for everything that followed. The discipline that steadied leaders in those moments is the same discipline that matters when a founder faces something that feels like it's on fire.

More room to recover. Same team watching.

Start with the Executive Leadership Scorecard at ericwojtkun.com—20 minutes, fully confidential, no pitch attached.