A word from our founder.

Help that meets you where you are.

For more than two decades as a psychotherapist, I sat across from people in pain, confusion, and crisis.

The discipline of over 20,000 clinical hours shaped me in profound and lasting ways. Most significantly, it branded my heart with this truth: every breakdown carries within it the seed of transformation—if we know how to listen, where to look, and what to do.

The vast majority of the people I worked with were ordinary men and women who carried extraordinary responsibility and influence. They were performing artists, songwriters, clergy, professional and Olympic athletes, physicians, therapists, and executives—leaders in some way or another. Behind their public personas, they were also sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and family members.

Over time, I began to see that these leaders weren’t just showing up in my office because their marriages or emotions were unraveling (though they often were). They weren’t merely wrestling with anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, or burnout. Those were most often symptoms—the keyhole into deeper struggles. They were wrestling with identity, purpose, and the ache of meaninglessness.

The longer I worked with them, the clearer it became: some of the best tools from therapy—empathy, vulnerability, insight, and truth-telling—belonged in the boardroom, the locker room, and the operating room every bit as much as in the counseling office.

Getting Off the Couch

For much of the last century, therapy became one of the safe places where people went looking for help. But too often, what they found was a diagnosis—a label that described symptoms but rarely reached the root.

Mental health counseling is a very specific worldview, one where the client and therapist agree that the patient is sick and needs to get well. It’s an illness lens. But a growing conviction began shaping my work: not every challenge, obstacle, or transition in life needs to be filtered through the lens of mental health. Being human is inherently stressful and complicated—and that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It simply means you’re alive.

For leaders, those challenges are uniquely salient. A leader’s life is a web of roles, relationships, and stories—each carrying competing expectations. How do we care for others while not abandoning ourselves? Every leader lives in tension—between vision and reality, authority and humility, confidence and uncertainty.

A New Ecology of Leadership

What began as The Leadership Lab—a small, scrappy experiment in heart-forward, human-centered leadership—grew into something much larger: an ecosystem for leadership development and organizational health.

My early work with leaders and executive teams confirmed what I had long suspected: most business problems are simply people problems in disguise—and compounded over time. Systems matter. Strategies matter. SOPs matter, but without self-aware, emotionally mature, and morally grounded leaders, they all eventually fail.

I believe leadership must evolve beyond metrics, strategy, and profit. The same capacities that once defined great therapists—empathy, attunement, courage, insight, wisdom, hope, boundaries, self-awareness, and presence—are now the very qualities that define great leaders.

My vision for Council Leadership is to bring those capacities into every layer of organizational life. From executive advising to culture redesign, from founder transitions to leadership academies, we are cultivating a new ecology of human development within the workplace.

Council Leadership was created to help leaders and organizations move from grind and effort to genuine transformation. Through our Individual Leadership Development, Organizational Health Process, Leadership DNA™, and Integrative Leadership Model™, we guide leaders and their teams in the hardest and most rewarding work of all: leading themselves, developing others, and cultivating high-performing, fully human organizations.

Doing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

So many good things have come from Western culture—democracy, capitalism, equal rights, just to name a few. But shaped as we are by the Industrial Revolution’s obsession with productivity and the Protestant Reformation’s moralization of work, an unintended yet devastating consequence has emerged. These forces have conspired—subtly, steadily—to shape identity around performance, profit, and output. Especially for leaders, this means we often measure our worth by what we do, not who we are. And the result? A quiet but profound crisis of meaning. We’ve never been more efficient, yet we’ve never felt more anxious, isolated, or disoriented.

Council Leadership stands as a corrective to that mechanized way of living and leading. It reclaims leadership as a deeply human, spiritual, and moral vocation—rooted not in the endless pursuit of more, but in the wise pursuit of what is beautiful, true, and good. In a world that prizes performance over presence, Council Leadership calls leaders back to wholeness—to integrate wisdom with strategy, empathy with execution, and soul with system. It offers an antidote to the burnout of modern ambition by cultivating a hopeful ecology of leadership—where flourishing replaces striving, trust replaces fear, and the workplace becomes a space of transformation rather than mere transaction.

The world hasn’t stopped hungering for meaning; if anything, the ache feels more severe than ever. People are craving depth and wisdom but aren’t sure where to find it. Most of the places we’ve traditionally turned for guidance—religion, community, institutions, even family—have fractured or faded.

One of the last accessible places to rediscover meaning and purpose is in the ordinary rhythms of daily life. And nothing is more ordinary—or more revealing—than work. Most of us spend more time with our colleagues than with our own families and friends. That makes leadership one of the greatest opportunities—and responsibilities—of our time.

But leaders cannot offer what they have not yet experienced themselves.Council Leadership is a developing living ecosystem that exists at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern leadership. Rooted in the pursuit of beauty, truth, and goodness, we walk alongside people who desire to lead and live with wisdom, courage, and heart. We focus our work on leaders of privately-held companies and high-impact nonprofits—those shaping people, communities, and families close to home.

Lead On!

Stephen James, Fall, 2025