Tolero Solutions

06/12/2026

𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙙𝙖𝙮 𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧: Most leaders are taught how to manage performance.
Far fewer are taught how to manage emotions—especially their own.

The reality is that leadership, change, uncertainty, conflict, growth, and innovation all come with discomfort. The strongest leaders I coach aren't the ones who never experience fear, frustration, self-doubt, or anxiety.

They're the ones who don't let those emotions drive the bus.

Instead of:
"Why is this happening to me?"

We eventually get to:
"What is this trying to teach me?"

That's where growth lives.

Whether you're leading a team through change, navigating a difficult conversation, stepping into a new role, or simply trying to survive a challenging week, remember:

You don't have to like every emotion.
You do have to acknowledge it.
Awareness creates choice.
Choice creates action.
Action creates progress.

And if you've made it through another week—even a messy, imperfect one—give yourself some credit. You made it.

Have a great weekend!

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06/05/2026

As we head into the weekend, this quote hit home for me.

So much of our personal and professional growth gets stalled because we're waiting for approval, agreement, or confirmation that we're on the right path.

The challenge is that innovation doesn't come from consensus. Growth doesn't come from validation. Progress doesn't come from everyone nodding in agreement. It comes from being willing to learn, adapt, refine, and improve.

In my coaching work, one of the themes that consistently emerges is the shift from external validation to internal development. The leaders, professionals, and teams who make the greatest strides are rarely the ones chasing praise. They're the ones focused on getting better.

They ask:
➡️ What can I learn from this?
➡️ How can I improve this idea?
➡️ What would make this more effective?
➡️ What assumptions should I challenge?
That's where growth lives.

And if we're honest, seeking validation often feels better in the moment. Improving ourselves, our thinking, and our ideas requires effort, humility, and sometimes hearing things we'd rather not hear.

But one creates comfort.
The other creates progress.

As you wrap up the week, consider this:
Are you spending more energy trying to prove you're right, or trying to get better?

One of those paths leads to short-term satisfaction. The other leads to long-term success.

Have a great weekend, everyone. You've made it through another week— hopefully one filled with a bit of growth and some progress. Take a moment to recognize that, recharge, and come back ready to keep growing.

-----------------------------------------
I'm Scott Span
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06/01/2026

🌈 LGBTQ+ Pride Month Starts Today. For Me, It's Personal.

I'm not just an ally. I'm a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
That matters because Pride isn't simply something I observe. It's something I live.

😖 Like many LGBTQ+ people, I've experienced what it feels like to be different, misunderstood, judged, and excluded. I've experienced adversity simply because of who I am.

𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙨 𝙨𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙚𝙙 𝙢𝙚.

They strengthened my resilience, deepened my empathy, and influenced the leader, coach, and human being I've become. They taught me the value of creating environments where people don't have to hide parts of themselves to be accepted.

My experiences also taught me something important: belonging is not a nice-to-have. It's a human need. That's one of the reasons the work I do today matters so much to me.

🏆 As a leadership coach and organizational development practitioner, 𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀 when people feel safe enough to contribute and bring their authentic selves to work. Engagement rises. Trust grows. Innovation improves. Teams perform better.

Turns out people do their best work when they don't have to spend energy hiding who they are.

Pride Month is a reminder.

A reminder of the progress that's been made.
A reminder of the challenges that still exist.
And a reminder that inclusion isn't something great organizations do one month a year. It's something they practice every day.

If you're wondering how to support LGBTQ+ people here are a few simple places to start:

✅ Listen more than you speak.
✅ Respect names, identities, and pronouns.
✅ Challenge bias when you see it.
✅ Make inclusion visible, not assumed.
✅ Support policies and practices that create psychological safety.
✅ Understand that allyship is an action not a title.

And perhaps most importantly:
✅ Stay curious. Learn. Ask respectful questions. Continue growing.

Pride isn't about asking for or expecting special treatment.

It's about ensuring everyone has the opportunity to be treated with dignity, respect, and belonging – every day.

That should never just be controversial.

For leaders, Pride Month is an opportunity to reflect:

What are you doing to create an environment where people can thrive, not just survive❓

𝙎𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙘𝙚𝙨 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙝 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙡𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜:

📚 HRC Corporate Equality Index:
https://lnkd.in/gMe55Q9x
📚 McKinsey — LGBTQ+ Voices, Learning from Lived Experiences: https://lnkd.in/gXEkagn
📚 SHRM — LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion Resources:
https://lnkd.in/ghWXeNYF
📚 American Psychological Association (APA) — LGBTQ+ Support and Allyship Resources: https://lnkd.in/gifYKqqu

05/29/2026

Empathy gets misunderstood a lot in leadership.

People think it means:

➡️ Feeling bad for someone

➡️ Absorbing everyone else’s emotions

➡️ Lowering standards to avoid discomfort

But real empathy is much more nuanced...

✔️ Listening to understand instead of listening to respond

✔️ Recognizing perspectives different from your own

✔️ Being aware of emotional impact without becoming emotionally consumed by it

✔️ Creating space for people to feel heard while still helping move forward

And here’s the part leaders often forget. Empathy for yourself matters too! Self-care matters. It's necessary.

You can’t continuously pour patience, understanding, and emotional energy into everyone around you while treating yourself like a machine with unlimited capacity. Self-empathy isn’t selfish. It’s awareness. It’s recognizing your own limits, stress signals, and humanity before burnout makes the decision for you.

If this week tested your patience, your energy, or your resilience…

You survived another week. Well done. That counts more than most people admit.

05/04/2026

I’ll be honest… I’m not just sharing this. Grieving the recent loss of my Dad, I’m living this right now.

As a leadership coach, I spend a lot of time helping others push, grow, adapt, and perform.

But here’s the part we don’t say out loud enough:
👉 You can’t coach (or lead with) clarity, resilience, or performance from a place of depletion.

This visual from Justin Wright nails something I see across leaders and teams every single week—we treat “rest” like it’s one-dimensional.

Sleep more. Take a day off. Power through. But burnout doesn’t come from a lack of sleep alone… it comes from a lack of the right kind of rest.

Lately, I’ve been doing my own audit:
✅Physical? Decent.
❌Mental? Overclocked.
✅Creative? Work in progress.
❌Emotional? Carrying more than I should.

Sound familiar?
Here’s what I see in high-performing leaders (and yes, I’m raising my own hand here):
We’re great at producing… terrible at recovering with intention.
And without intentional recovery, your “high performance” becomes unsustainable performance.

So instead of asking:
❌ “When do I have time to rest?”

Flip your script and try:
🎯“What type of rest am I actually missing?”

Because the fix isn’t always a vacation.
Sometimes it’s boundaries.
Sometimes it’s quiet.
Sometimes it’s saying “no” without over-explaining.
Sometimes it’s doing something that has zero ROI… except for your brain.

I’m recalibrating this in real time—not as a concept, but as a practice.
If you’re leading people, building something, or just trying to keep pace right now…this isn’t soft stuff. This is sustainability strategy.

👉 Which type of rest are you actually missing right now?

03/17/2026

🧠Another one for 𝙉𝙚𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙒𝙚𝙚𝙠…

Did you know Scott Kelly—NASA astronaut, spacewalker, and someone who literally spent a year in space—has ADHD.

🚀Let that sink in for a second. Because growing up, ADHD wasn’t exactly being framed as a “you could become an astronaut someday” kind of story.

And if we’re being honest… what kid didn’t want to be an astronaut at some point?

(Still a little disappointed that path didn’t pan out for me—I mean, I do love space exploration)

But here’s why this matters. We’ve spent a long time defining neurodiversity—especially ADHD—by what it struggles with. Focus. Structure. Consistency.

Meanwhile, we tend to overlook what it can fuel:

💥Curiosity

💥Resilience

💥Big-picture thinking

💥The ability to operate in complex, high-stakes environments

You don’t get to space without a different way of thinking.

In my work coaching neurodiverse leaders (and my lived experience), I see this all the time—people who’ve been told to “𝙛𝙞𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙢𝙤𝙡𝙙” finally realizing the mold was the problem, not them.

🎯When leaders and organizations shift from “How do we fix this?” to “How do we leverage this?”…

That’s when performance changes.

That’s when confidence shows up.

That’s when people actually thrive.

More coming this week as we continue recognizing Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

📚In the interim, check out some great resources on how to support the neurodiverse people in your life and workplace: https://www.neurodiversityweek.com/resource-hub

-----------------------------------------

I'm Scott Span

➡ I support you to overcome what’s holding you back and get results ⬅

Repost this to spread the learning📑

Contact me for a chat 📲

03/16/2026

🧠Today marks the start of Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

And here’s a fun fact many people don’t know: Justin Timberlake has ADHD.

For a long time, ADHD and other forms of neurodiversity were talked about almost exclusively in terms of limitations.

But that narrative misses the bigger picture.

Many of the traits associated with ADHD—energy, creativity, pattern recognition, nonlinear thinking—are the same traits that drive innovation, performance, and leadership when they’re understood and supported.

I know this from two perspectives:

✅I have ADHD.

✅I coach neurodiverse professionals and leaders navigating the workplace every day.

The reality is that many workplaces are still built around a very narrow definition of how people are “supposed” to think, focus, and communicate.

But different brains bring different strengths.

🏆And when leaders understand how to harness those differences instead of suppressing them, the impact on teams and organizations can be powerful.

As Justin Timberlake said:

"𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙖𝙣𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙢𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙖 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙪𝙣𝙡𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪'𝙧𝙚 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩."

This week I’ll be sharing more insights about neurodiversity, neurodiversity in leadership, and how organizations can create environments where different thinking styles actually thrive.

And check out the Neurodiversity Celebration Week website for more info and some great resources: https://www.neurodiversityweek.com/

Stay tuned.

03/13/2026

🧠I’m neurodiverse. I have ADD. And yes… that absolutely shapes how I see the world—and how I coach and go about my work.

Next week (March 16–20) is Neurodiversity Celebration Week, a global initiative focused on challenging stereotypes and changing how neurodivergent people are understood and supported in schools, workplaces, and communities.

For me, this week isn’t just another awareness campaign. It’s personal.

For years, neurodiversity was framed almost entirely as a problem to fix. But the reality is far more nuanced. Different brains process information differently. That includes ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and many other ways of thinking and learning.

And here’s the thing I see every day in my work:

Many of the same traits that create friction in traditional workplaces can also be sources of creativity, innovation, and strategic thinking when the environment supports them.

That’s why I care about this week.

🏆As a leadership coach, I work with neurodiverse professionals and leaders navigating workplaces that weren’t always designed with them in mind. When organizations learn how to harness different thinking styles rather than suppress them, the results can be pretty remarkable.

Better teams.

Better problem solving.

Better leadership.

💪Next week, I’ll be sharing more about neurodiversity, resources from Neurodiversity Celebration Week and practical ways leaders can build neuroinclusive workplaces.
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Because inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s also good leadership.

Stay tuned next week as we celebrate the power of different minds.

03/10/2026

I recently had the chance to discuss 𝙣𝙚𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚 as a guest on the Working Class Autistic podcast with Kevin Joseph.

Our conversation focused on something I spend time helping leaders and organizations understand:

Neurodiversity isn’t a problem to solve.

It’s a reality of the workforce to be understood to lead well.

We talked about a few things that often get overlooked in workplace conversations about neurodiversity:

• What reasonable accommodations can actually look like in practice

• Why authenticity at work can strengthen teams and relationships

• The leadership role in creating psychological safety

• And how organizations can rethink the way they measure performance so people can truly do their best work

Because when leaders get these things right, the outcome isn’t just inclusion.

It’s better communication, stronger teams, and better performance.

And yes… Kevin even managed to get me talking about some of my special interests.

And perfect timing with the start of Neurodiversity Celebration Week beginning on March 16th!

🎧 Give the full episode a listen here: https://rss.com/podcasts/working-class-autistic/2612278/

Leaders and teams I work with often ask the same question that came up in the episode:

Are we measuring performance in ways that actually make sense for the people doing the work?

🧠 Worth thinking about.

“Neurodiverse individuals themselves are not any less efficient or any less productive than non-neurodiverse or neurotypical individuals, especially if you provide them with the reasonable accommodations to be successful.” -Scott SpanMy guest this week, Scott Span, is a speaker and coach that he...

03/06/2026

😖As you head into the weekend, a quick leadership reality check.

Burnout doesn’t always look like someone dramatically throwing their laptop into the nearest body of water. Most of the time it’s quieter… and easier to miss.

Sometimes burnout looks like:

• Creativity suddenly going on vacation

• Being tired and irritable even after a full night of sleep

• More complaining than problem-solving

• Random physical aches that seem to show up around Monday morning

In my coaching work with leaders and teams, burnout rarely starts with workload alone. It usually starts with misalignment:

– Too much doing, not enough meaning

– Constant reacting instead of intentional leadership

– Carrying stress that no one is talking about

A few things I encourage leaders to check before the new week starts:

✅Audit your energy, not just your calendar. What actually drained you this week?

✅Notice the signals. Irritability and low creativity are often early indicators.

✅Create one small boundary for next week. Not ten. One.

✅Ask your team a better question Monday: “What’s been draining lately?”

💆‍♂️Burnout prevention isn’t about spa days and inspirational posters. Although, I'm not opposed to a god spa day.

It’s about awareness, conversations, and small leadership adjustments before the tank hits empty.

If you’re seeing these patterns in yourself or your team, that’s exactly the kind of work I help leaders unpack and reset. Let's talk!

🧘Enjoy the weekend. Reset the brain. Leadership works better when the human running it is actually recharged.