I’ve said this out loud more times than I can count: I really like working.

Maybe you can relate. Or maybe you can’t. Either way, I recently sat with a question after recording a podcast with my friend Justin Roethlingshoefer that I haven’t been able to shake:

“What keeps people from fully living and enjoying life?”

Ugh. That feels like a gigantic life inquiry. The best way I know to answer it is to start with myself, then see if it mirrors something broader in how we all move through the world.

So here’s what I came up with.

In the past, I did not allow myself to fully live or enjoy my life because:

1. I was too busy striving for more and placing pressure on myself to prove myself.
2. I was not clear on what I wanted, where I was going, or what my priorities were in my current season of life.
3. I worried about the perception of others and what they would think about me.
4. I was disconnected from myself, from God, and from meaningful relationships.
5. I was hypercritical of myself.
6. I was never fully present in the moment.  Often reliving what I had just experienced or projecting into the future.
7. I was heavily guarded. I did not share vulnerably. I did not ask for help.
8. I took on too much at work. I was overextended. I micromanaged, even though I told myself I didn’t.
9. I measured my life against other people’s lives and always came up short.
10. I filled every quiet moment with noise or busyness so I never had to sit with myself.
11. I was always moving the goalposts.  More, more, more.
12. I didn’t know who I was outside of what I did or what I produced.

That’s quite a list.  And most of it was because I was too focused on myself, even though I was constantly “doing” for others.

And yet, as I have allowed myself to fully live life through many experiences, I’ve learned that transformation is not one dramatic moment. It’s a series of quiet choices, made over time.

Here are 4 tangible steps that I can pinpoint that changed everything for me:

1. I got clear on who I am, where I am being called to serve, what I want, and what I need to let go of to step into my next level.
2. I ruthlessly take care of my mind, body, spirit, and energy.
3. I let go of needing to have all the answers.
4. I show up to every interaction and experience open and with a relentless curiosity.

What does this bring up for you today? Can you relate to any of these? What is keeping you from fully living? What would be your next step toward fully living and enjoying your life? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to send me an email at carmen@carmenohling.com, I read every one.

If you want to hear more about my conversation with Justin, be sure to subscribe to the Amplified Life Podcast, because his episode is dropped next on July 6th! 

Until then, I will leave you with this quote to ponder:

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between work and play; labor and leisure; mind and body; education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” — Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

With relentless curiosity for life,

Carmen
CEO & Founder, The Amplified Life Company

My Miami Heat did not make the playoffs this year.  

Not exactly what any Heat fan wants to type. But here we are.

As the playoffs were happening, I did what any self-respecting basketball fan does: I watched someone else’s team. The New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs brought the kind of Finals energy that makes you forget you are supposed to be indifferent. Game 4 alone, the largest comeback in Finals history, was edge-of-your-seat competition.  Congrats to the Knicks for taking home the championship this year!

But the series I could not stop watching was the Western Conference Finals. Oklahoma City Thunder versus the Spurs. I was rooting for OKC. Not just because they were the defending champions. Because of what their story represents.

In 2022, the Oklahoma City Thunder won 24 games. One of the worst records in the league.

Three seasons later, they went 68-14 and won a championship ring. The most improbable climb in recent NBA history.  That kind of transformation does not happen by accident, and it is not reserved for professional sports.

Harvard Business Review recently published an article featuring OKC and research by psychologist Ron Friedman that surveyed more than 6,000 professionals across industries, from finance and healthcare to law and technology, with one central question:

What separates the best teams from everyone else?

What he found were seven consistent practices shared by what he calls superteams. High-performing teams that do not just perform well, they keep getting better. And every single one of those practices maps into what we witness inside the organizations we work with at The Amplified Life Company.

Here is what the research revealed, and what it means for the team you are building.

Secret 1: Run More Experiments

Here is a pattern we see constantly in high-performing organizations: teams find a strategy that works, it produces results, and then quietly, without anyone deciding to stop growing, they stop growing. They defend what works instead of asking what is next. The numbers stay solid for a while, and then the gap opens.

Friedman’s research quantifies exactly this. Teams that outperform their peers run significantly more experiments, are far more open to trying things that might not work, and are meaningfully more comfortable with the risk that comes with genuine innovation.

OKC did not protect what was comfortable. Twice, they traded away All-Stars in their prime to rebuild from scratch, long before that strategy was widely understood or respected. They abandoned conventional lineup formulas and ran combinations no one else would try. In Sam Presti’s own words, their competitive edge came from their tolerance for the messiness and regression that comes with pursuing real growth.

Our ALC Perspective

After working with hundreds of organizations and coaching thousands of leaders, one of our core beliefs is this:

The number one thing holding you back from your next level of success is your current level of success.

The leaders who plateau are rarely failing. They are succeeding on yesterday’s strategy and calling it enough. Superteams ask a different question: not what got us here, but what does the next level require of us that we have not yet been willing to try?

Secret 2: Make Curiosity Contagious

The most persistent myth in organizational leadership is that great leaders must project certainty. In practice, the research shows the opposite. Leaders of the highest-performing teams are significantly more likely to openly admit the limits of their knowledge, and that honesty builds something that certainty never could: trust.

This matters because of what trust produces. Google’s research on team performance across 180 teams identified psychological safety, the belief that you can surface a problem or admit you do not know without consequence, as the single greatest predictor of how well a team performs together.

OKC’s coach Mark Daigneault names this explicitly: “It is not about me being the teacher and them being the student. It is about everybody in the room being on a journey of personal growth, including me.” That posture, leader as learner, is what makes curiosity spread.

Our ALC Perspective

The majority of leaders we work with still carry the belief that their credibility depends on having answers. Through coaching, we help them build the capacity to let that go. When they do, something shifts fundamentally. They move from controlling the conversation to opening it. They build a table where every voice is genuinely welcomed, where the team becomes more adaptive, more honest, and more committed to improving together. That is what a coaching culture looks like in practice, and it is what we help organizations build.

Secret 3: Ask the One Question Most Leaders Avoid

Walk into most team meetings, and you will see the same format: updates, progress reports, things that make the work sound complete and under control. It is a format that feels productive and almost never is. Because the things that most need attention are rarely the things that sound complete.

The research shows that leaders of high-performing teams run meetings differently. They orient toward problems, not progress. They create the conditions where surfacing a challenge is welcomed rather than avoided. And often, it starts with one simple question:

“What are you stuck on?”

That question reframes everything. It normalizes difficulty. It signals that honesty is expected, that asking for help reflects engagement rather than weakness, and that the team exists to solve problems together rather than to report around them.

Our ALC Perspective

One of the tools we teach teams is called Stress Testing. It is a structured process that replaces the update trap entirely. Team members present real work in progress, name where they are struggling, and invite the group to examine it through the lens of risk, possibility, and support. The result is real candor, shared accountability, and the kind of trust that holds when pressure is highest.

Secret 4: Roll Up Your Sleeves, Even When You Do Not Have To

There is a model of leadership that says the more senior you become, the further you should step back from the actual work. Delegate. Elevate. Trust your team. That model sounds right. The research says it often backfires.

Leaders who stay close to the work, not to control it but to contribute to it, build something distance never can: shared ownership, clear standards, and the awareness to see problems before they arrive. That is not micromanagement. Micromanagement is about control. This is about presence. One builds capacity in the people around you. The other slowly erodes it.

Sam Presti, the architect of OKC’s dynasty, has built his reputation on this. Despite running a full scouting operation, he still spends most of his year on the road in gyms and film rooms, studying players most fans will never see. That choice communicates something to every person in the organization about what it means to be serious about the work.

Our ALC Perspective

As CEO of The Amplified Life Company, I personally have touchpoints with every client and every team member. I co-facilitate at least one coaching session or workshop alongside our team in every engagement. That is intentional. Real relationships require real presence, and modeling the standard of excellence we ask of others requires being in it, not just describing it from above.

This is the foundation of what we build with every organization we work with: A clear development path from manager to leader, and from leader to coach. A leader who coaches builds capacity in the people around them. 

Secret 5: Make Feedback Feel Like Support

A large-scale review of feedback research found that in more than a third of cases, feedback not only fails to improve performance, it actively makes things worse. That is not a small number. It means that without intention and skill, the feedback most leaders give is doing damage. 

What separates effective feedback from harmful feedback is not the content. It is the environment it lands in. When people feel evaluated and judged, the brain shifts into self-protection mode. Learning stops. When feedback arrives as curiosity, observation, and genuine investment in someone’s growth, the brain stays open. That is when real improvement happens.

Daigneault demonstrated this brilliantly with OKC. After a game with 30 turnovers, he assembled the film session and set the footage to a Bruce Springsteen song. He told the team: if we are going to watch 30 turnovers, we might as well enjoy the music. He was doing something specific: keeping his team in a state where they could learn, rather than shutting down in embarrassment or defensiveness. That is elite coaching.

Our ALC Perspective

Early in my career, I ran performance reviews the way everyone else did: twice a year, formal, structured. And on paper they looked fine. But I kept noticing the same thing. People were getting feedback on work that had already passed. We were reviewing the past instead of building the future.

So I changed it. I met with my team members for 1:1s monthly. The formal reviews stayed on the calendar, but they became something different: a test of my own leadership. If anyone was surprised by what appeared in their annual review, I had not done my job. Growth was happening in real time, through honest monthly conversation, not through an annual accounting of what had already passed. That is the shift we bring to every organization: from performance evaluation to a genuine culture of coaching.

Secret 6: Encourage Growth, Even When It Does Not Benefit You

Most organizations treat employee development as a transactional investment. We develop you so you can perform better here. The research points to a more expansive model: the leaders who build the strongest teams invest in the whole person, not just the professional function, and they do it without requiring a direct return.

Employees who grow in their lives bring that growth back to their work. The skills, the perspectives, the energy that comes from pursuing something meaningful outside the office, all of it expands what the team is capable of together. And the goodwill generated by a leader who cares about someone’s full life does not show up in a single performance metric. It shows up everywhere, in retention, in commitment, in the willingness to go above and beyond when it matters most.

Our ALC Perspective

Every member of The Amplified Life Company team has a venture, a practice, or a pursuit outside of ALC. That is not a coincidence. It is a direct reflection of one of our foundational beliefs:

Personal development is the foundation of dynamic leadership, meaningful relationships, optimal health, and extraordinary business outcomes.

The ideas, tools, and experiences our team members bring back from their lives outside this company make ALC stronger. We learn from each other constantly. When you build a team of people who are committed to growing as full human beings, you build a team that is capable of far more than their job description ever captured.

Secret 7: Lead With Meaning, Not Just Metrics

Numbers tell a team how they are doing. Purpose tells them why it matters. And when people genuinely understand why their work matters, something shifts in the quality of everything they produce. They stop asking what is required and start asking what is possible.

The research shows that leaders of high-performing teams are significantly more effective at connecting daily work to something larger. That connection is what fuels discretionary effort, the work people choose to do beyond what is asked, and it is what keeps a team from settling for good enough when something better is within reach.

The OKC story here is extraordinary. When Presti arrived in Oklahoma City in 2008, he visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which honors the victims of the 1995 federal building bombing. He came across a quote from journalist Tom Brokaw about the character of the city’s people: that in their response to tragedy, they had elevated everyone around them with their essential goodness, their sense of community, and their compassion for one another.

Those words became the culture. To this day, every new player and staff member visits the memorial when they arrive in Oklahoma City. It is a ritual that answers the question every team member carries, even if they never say it out loud: why does this matter beyond the scoreboard? The answer is built into the organization’s foundation. Inside every championship ring are two engravings: Labor omnia vincit, Latin for work conquers all things and Oklahoma’s state motto, alongside the number of every team member, not just the stars. Everyone.

Our ALC Perspective

We worked with a credit union client that was performing well by every external measure. Revenue was solid. Operations were running. But when we conducted our needs discovery at the start of our engagement, the same word surfaced again and again: routine. Everything felt like business as usual. When we asked what the team was collectively working toward, the answers were vague and varied. There was no shared vision. No lived values connecting the daily work to anything larger.

We guided the CEO, the board, and the full organization through the work of building a real vision, not just a document, but a direction that people could see themselves in and feel proud to be part of.  When you walk in now, employees do not wait to be asked how things are going. They want to tell you. About the project they are pursuing. The win they just had. The opportunity they spotted and decided to chase. That is not a team hitting its numbers. That is a superteam. And it starts with the first foundational pillar of the Amplified Performance Framework: Vision and Lived Shared Values.

So What Does This Mean for You?

OKC went from 24 wins to a championship ring in three seasons. Not because they found better players. Because they built a better organization: one that experimented when it was uncomfortable, stayed curious when certainty was easier, asked hard questions when updates would have been simpler, led from the front when distance was an option, made feedback feel like an investment, grew its people without keeping score, and connected every person to a purpose bigger than the job.

Those habits are not reserved for NBA franchises with draft picks and arena budgets. They are available to any organization whose leader is willing to build them.

The question is not whether your team is capable of becoming a superteam.

The question is whether you are willing to lead like one.

Carmen Ohling
CEO and Founder, The Amplified Life Company

P.S. If you are curious where your team stands across the seven practices, tell me about your team HERE, and I will personally reach out to explore this with you.

Reference: Friedman, Ron. “How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better.” Harvard Business Review, May-June 2026.