Episode 7: Find the Right Altitude, Get the Right Attitude

A simple model for perspective, coherence, and better leadership decisions

We all know the feeling.

You’re so close to a problem that it looks like a horror show. You’re inside the details, inside the emotion, inside the urgency. Then you pull back, get a little altitude, and suddenly the thing that felt catastrophic looks… workable.

That’s the core idea behind this episode of The Executive and the Mystic, co-hosted by Fred LaFranc and Christina Wiltsee.

Altitude creates perspective. Perspective creates choice. Choice creates leadership.

In this conversation, Fred and Christina map human experience, and leadership performance, across a set of “altitudes.” Think of it like a hot air balloon. The higher you go, the more landscape you can see. The key is not to live at one altitude forever. The key is learning to move up and down on purpose.

Why altitude matters in business and life

Christina shares a very real workplace dynamic. Teams can obsess over metrics and reporting cadence so intensely that they spend more time fixing the reporting system than letting the actual business grow.

Fred compares it to watching the stock market all day. You’ll feel sick from the constant fluctuations. If you never pull back, you lose context. You lose discernment. You lose the ability to see what matters.

So the question becomes:

What altitude are you living from right now?

The Altitudes

0 feet. The Grounded State

The body. The breath. The runway.

This is the state you wake up in and the state you need to return to in order to sleep. When people can’t sleep, it’s often because they can’t return to “zero.” Their mind is still flying.

Christina tells a story from long meditation retreats. Ten hours a day of deep observing. It created enormous equanimity, but sometimes it made sleep harder because the mind stayed in an elevated, disembodied observer mode.

The solution was simple and physical.

Move attention into the body. Focus on breathing.

Fred adds a practical nervous system trick for middle-of-the-night wake-ups.

Make the exhale longer than the inhale.

That shift naturally signals the body to relax.

They also talk about grounding in the literal sense, barefoot on grass, no rubber soles, no concrete. Not as a spiritual aesthetic, but as a regulation tool. It’s a way of “landing the plane.”

Mantra for 0 feet:

I am here. I am safe. I can feel the ground beneath me.

A practical ritual:

At the end of the day, take 15 minutes.

• Write down the 1 to 2 things you truly accomplished

• Write down the 3 things that matter most tomorrow

Fred makes a sharp point here. If you do 15 minutes a day, that’s roughly 90 hours a year. That’s basically two weeks of planning. You already have time. You just don’t collect it.

And there’s a bonus. Writing it down gets it out of your head.

500 feet. The Transactional Mind

Beta mode. Doing, solving, managing.

This is where most modern people live.

It’s the go-go-go, cause-effect, two-dimensional mind. It’s not evil. It’s a tool. It’s how you execute. It’s how you solve problems. But if it runs all day, it creates damage.

Fred names a leadership risk here. When you’re stuck in transactional mind, you get abrupt. You push too hard. You demand more without reflection. That is how teams fall into the drama triangle, the victim, persecutor, rescuer loop.

It becomes addictive. It becomes cultural. It becomes the background music of a workplace.

Christina’s point is blunt.

The transactional mind is a hammer, and not everything is a nail.

Mantra for 500 feet:

I can act without becoming my actions.

And her favorite self-check from retreat life:

Am I reacting, or am I acting?

Even 30 seconds of pause can move you out of reaction mode and back into choice.

5,000 feet. The Strategic Mind

The contemplative mind. The quiet answer.

This is where insight appears.

Fred describes something most people recognize. You put a question into your mind. A day later, the answer shows up in the shower. Or on a walk. Or during silence.

That’s not luck. That’s a different mental altitude.

Fred’s take.

Intuition cannot work in a loud room.

This is why walking matters. Large muscle movement, outdoors, rhythmic motion. It shifts the brain out of tight tactical loop mode and into a contemplative pattern where strategy becomes visible.

Fred uses a sailing metaphor.

Tactics are how you tack. Strategy is the bearing you keep even when you tack.

At this altitude you start distinguishing.

• Is this a true constraint?

• Or is it just an obstacle I can route around?

Mantra for 5,000 feet:

I rise above to see the whole picture.

15,000 feet. The Integrative Heart

Coherence. Flow. Compassion. Culture.

This is where Christina gets excited, and honestly, where leadership gets real.

She describes the internal system like an elevator. Overthinkers get lopsided. The elevator bangs into the shaft. It can’t rise.

When the heart comes online, the system balances.

You stop trying to “break all the rocks” in the river to remove rapids. You start navigating flow instead. You become less force-based. More aligned. More coherent.

Fred brings it into business.

Some great businesses are “all heart.” Not sentimental, heart. Stakeholder, heart.

Employees, vendors, customers, community. That’s heart-led leadership. That’s also what protected companies during COVID. Cultures with psychological and emotional safety survived better. Toxic cultures didn’t.

This altitude is also where paradox becomes holdable. Push and pull stop being enemies. You start sensing where balance is needed.

And this is where emotional intelligence becomes possible.

Fred is clear.

Emotional intelligence cannot exist without an integrated heart, because empathy requires it.

Not sympathy. Not polite distance. Actual presence.

Sometimes the most emotionally intelligent thing you can do is sit in silence with someone who is suffering, and not try to fix them.

Mantra for 15,000 feet:

I am the bridge between mind and soul.

Christina adds a powerful nuance. The mind is naturally solipsistic. It can’t truly grasp another person’s full internal world. But the heart can relate to shared human states easily, grief, loss, fear, longing. That’s why heart-based presence often lands better than “the perfect thing to say.”

35,000 feet. The Field of Love

Surrender. Non-duality. The fabric.

This is the altitude of transcendence.

Christina describes the state many people touch in meditation, dreams, or peak experiences. Everything is connected. Everything is love. You feel like a thread in the fabric of reality.

It’s beautiful, and it can be a trap.

Her confession is honest. For years she craved the formless, because being in a human body felt hard. She sought that high, expansive state as relief.

In Buddhist terms, she names a core hindrance.

The craving for the formless.

Fred responds with a grounded version of this altitude. He describes a transformative trip to India. Many temples, ceremonies, and deep meditative states. He returned changed, especially in the heart.

Then something unexpected happened. He re-engaged with a deeply toxic client culture he’d been judging before he left.

After returning, the judgment was gone.

Not condoning. Not tolerating. Not staying.

But compassion replaced contempt.

“They’re fractured souls doing the best they can with what they were given.”

That is the 35,000-foot view in practice. The situation didn’t become acceptable. Fred simply stopped needing to hate it.

He left. Cleanly.

That’s what love can do when it becomes practical. It removes the poison without removing discernment.

Mantra for 35,000 feet:

All of it is love becoming form.

Becoming form is the key phrase. Because you still have to land. You still live in a body. You still eat and sleep and lead and make hard decisions.

The goal is not to escape life. It’s to meet life without losing yourself.

The point of the model

Don’t live at one altitude. Learn to move.

Both hosts return to the same truth.

You’re not meant to stay at one altitude.

There’s a bell curve to a day. You rise, you return. You take off and land repeatedly.

Some altitudes can be accessed daily.

• 0 feet through breath and body

• 500 feet for execution

• 5,000 feet through walking, silence, reflection

• 15,000 feet through coherence practices and heart-based presence

The 35,000-foot field of love tends to require deeper work. Retreat, extended silence, spiritual immersion. It can happen spontaneously, but it’s less available on demand for most people.

And Christina adds the best warning in the whole episode.

Don’t spend all day at 500 feet.

Try this today

A simple altitude check

If your day is spiraling, ask:

1. What altitude am I at right now?

2. What altitude do I need next?

Then choose one move.

• If you’re dysregulated, go to 0 feet. Exhale longer than inhale. Feel your body.

• If you’re reactive, pause for 30 seconds. Am I reacting or acting?

• If you’re stuck, go for a walk. Let the strategic mind come online.

• If you’re hardened, return to the heart. Presence, compassion, coherence.

• If you’re clinging to control, consider the higher view. What if this is love becoming form?

Altitude is not intellectual. It’s state management.

And state management is leadership.

Closing

The core promise of this episode is simple.

If you can change your altitude, you can change your attitude.

If you can change your attitude, you can change your outcomes.

If you can change your outcomes consistently, you change your culture, your life, your relationships.

And you stop living inside a horror show close-up that was never the full picture.