WTL_Why White Space Is Your Best Strategy_Full Episode_Audio_1
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Kristiana Corona:
Strategy doesn't arrive when everything is loud. It arrives when you finally make room to listen to yourself. Here's the bottom line. If you wanna be strategic, you'll create the time, not later, not someday. Now, white space isn't a luxury. It's your best strategy. Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go?
I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside, but on the inside I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results.
Now I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out.
Hello my friends, and welcome back to The Worthy To Lead Podcast. So glad that you made time to join us for today. So today's episode is very personal for me because we're talking about making white space, and I am notoriously bad at this. For years I've lived with back to back meetings, sometimes running a few minutes late, and that constant sense of rushing from one thing to the next, it's like sprinting through your day at full speed, sometimes without lunch or even a single pause to catch your breath.
And for a long time I thought that was just the cost of leadership. This is the environment that I have opted into. And when I became an entrepreneur, I genuinely thought this would change. I thought I have less demands, I have less stakeholders. I have more control over my time. This will be great. My environment will just magically create the white space that I need.
And yet. What actually happened, I managed to fill my schedule back to back most days of the week. Different meetings and different responsibilities, but same behavior. So here's the humbling truth, you take you with you wherever you go. I have become so accustomed to working this way that I hardly knew how to work any differently.
There's always too much to do and too little time, right? So let me ask you something. How many times have you said, I wish I had more time to focus on strategy, or, I don't have time to innovate right now. I'm too busy, if that resonates, you're going to appreciate this episode. Most senior leaders I work with are not lacking intelligence, experience, or ambition.
What they're lacking is the white space to do the thinking. Their calendars are crammed, their days are fully stacked, and their thinking is forced between the cracks between those meetings. We tend to talk about this like it's a time management issue, but actually it's not that simple. Here's what's happening.
For most of us, we're constantly streaming inputs. I am talking about emails, slacks, meetings, news, podcasts, notifications, social media. Even our breaks at work are filled with noise. We rarely give ourselves empty space to step away from our devices and truly think. An empty space is actually where that thinking happens.
There's a network in the brain called the Default Mode Network, or DMN, and it becomes active when we're not focused on an external task. This network is responsible for self-reflection, making meaning of things, imagining future scenarios, and connecting ideas that don't quite seem related at first. It's the part of the brain that helps you make sense of the things you already know.
And here's the key. The default mode network only activates when external noise and inputs are reduced. When you're constantly consuming information, it stays offline. There's no synthesis happening as we're consuming that next leadership podcast instead. The thinking that we want is showing up at 3:00 AM when we're trying to sleep, because that is the only white space that our brain could find.
So if you've ever woken up in the middle of the night worrying about strategy or replaying your decisions, your brain is not broken. This is simply happening because your thinking has been crowded out of your day. And this is where leadership culture often gets it wrong. We try to force strategy to happen by putting all these people into a room and then running through slide decks and then doing on-demand creative activities to go innovate.
But research and cognitive psychology and focus tells us something different. According to work. Popularized by Cal Newport and supported by decades of attention research complex thinking requires uninterrupted time. Strategic work does not happen in little fragments, and it can't be rushed. It doesn't survive when we're constantly shifting context.
Leaders who consistently protect uninterrupted blocks of time don't just get more done. They think more clearly. They make better decisions, and they connect the dos that others miss. This isn't a productivity hack, it's a leadership discipline. Another thing we underestimate is the role our body plays in complex thinking.
According to research from Stanford University, walking increases creative output by up to 60% compared to sitting. And researchers found that movement activates areas that the brain tied to idea generation and planning. So that's why so many of us figure out so little when we're sitting in a conference room around a table and so much when we just go out for a walk.
This biological phenomenon is so natural, but so easy for us to miss when we put in earbuds and listen nonstop to audio books, which I am prone to do. One way I'm harnessing this in the new year is by taking lunchtime walks. I'm using this time to get the steps in while also processing the morning's meetings so that I can enter the afternoon reset and clear without all of the mental clutter.
I'm also leaving myself short voice memos in order to capture those ideas and capture those action items while I'm on the go. So let's make this practical for you. Here's an experiment. After this podcast, turn off your phone and go for a 30 minute walk. Let your brain process what is already there. No other inputs, no earbuds and no noise.
Just let your default mode network do its thing. Don't try to solve any particular thing, just see what comes up. Most people are quite surprised by how much clarity they already have without even trying to force anything. Next, I want you to take a look at your calendar. Block off chunks of time for white space and thinking, and consider them as important as if your CEO had just put a meeting on your calendar, you would not miss those, and you don't wanna miss these either.
You wouldn't miss a meeting with your CEO and you don't wanna miss a meeting with your default mode network either try blocking three hours on your calendar, and I know for some of you that can be incredibly hard to do and don't fill it with anything else. You can give your brain an intention of what you wanna focus on, but don't over structure the time.
Just allow your brain to do the natural process of thinking that it would do and then. Go experiment. Try being in nature. Try sitting by water or listening to the trees. Try walking or movement, running, rowing, try drawing, journaling, sipping coffee, and just appreciating its aroma. So many of these mindless activities that we do can be used for strategic thinking.
The key is to find what works for you. So you wanna notice your energy during these moments. If sitting is really not doing it for you, then go get active. If being active isn't bringing on the right kinds of thoughts, then try curling up on the couch with a notebook. There's no one right way to do this.
The key is to listen to yourself, find the kind of activity that allows your mind to truly release. And once you've found something that works consistently for you, try finding repeatable time that you can block off to start making this a weekly ritual. This is one of the most important practices that I'm working on in 2026 to improve my strategic thinking.
One of the most important parts of your strategy this year may not be what you add. It may be what you remove. And I'm not just talking about removing meetings. I'm also talking about reducing the noise. Think through your day and where you are currently consuming information from the morning news to checking your email, daily meetings, podcasts on the commute home, watching TV while you work out, and then Netflix to relax.
Where in your day or evening could you eliminate one of these inputs? Replace it with some quiet thinking time. If you're having trouble finding alone time to think. Many executive leaders that I work with use coaching sessions as a forced break from the racetrack of the day. It's the one place where that noise can get quieted.
We slow things down. We go deep into your thinking. We examine ideas from every angle in a way that can honestly be kind of hard to do on your own. What surprises most leaders is that they don't lack insight. They just lack uninterrupted space to find it. Coaching is a powerful tool, not because someone is giving you the answers, but because it helps you build the discipline of taking time to think deeply, clearly, and without distraction.
Coaching creates the necessary white space for your wisdom to emerge. So whether. You wanna get your white space from coaching, from taking a walk or protecting time on your calendar, the principle is still the same. Strategy doesn't arrive when everything is loud. It arrives when you finally make room to listen to yourself.
Here's the bottom line. If you wanna be strategic, you'll create the time, not later, not someday. Now, white space isn't a luxury. It's your best strategy as you head back into your day. I'll just leave you with this one question. What's one thing you could remove this week to make room for deeper thinking?
And if you did that consistently, what would change about your strategy and the direction of your business? If this episode resonated, I would love for you to subscribe so that you get these insights on a regular basis as I release them. You can go to worthy to lead.co/subscribe and please leave us a review and let us know how we're doing and feel free to share this with a colleague if you know somebody that is lacking that time to get strategic direction figured out.
And I will continue right here working on making Whitespace a way of life, and I'll let you know how it goes. And as always. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work that matters and keep leading like you're worthy to lead because you are. Bye for now.
