Adjust your Settings
Somewhere on your phone, buried under Settings, there's a screen called Personal Growth. Inner Critic — ON. Limiting Beliefs — ON. Control — ON. Values — OFF. Purpose — OFF. Vulnerability — OFF. Presence — OFF.
Nobody sat you down and asked if that's the configuration you wanted. It came installed — by your first manager, your first really hard year, the last time delegating went wrong — and you never opened the panel to look.
Your leadership runs the same way. Default to control. Default to fixing it yourself. Default to staying quiet in the meeting where you disagreed. The reactive settings ship turned on. The deliberate ones — Values, Purpose, Presence — ship off, waiting for someone to switch them on manually. Most leaders never do. They just run the factory configuration for an entire career.
Your Team Has Read Access
Here's the part nobody tells you: you can't see this screen, but your team can watch it play out in real time. Every meeting where Control fires before Vulnerability gets a chance. Every time Inner Critic overrides Presence and you go quiet instead of pushing back. Every Friday where "I'll just do it myself" shows up right on schedule.
They've been watching the toggles for months. You're usually the last person in the room who hasn't looked at your own settings.
That gap — between what your team already knows about your defaults and what you've actually examined — is the job. It's the whole job.
Recognition. Agency. Growth.
This is the model AVEVV coaching runs on, and it maps directly to opening the panel:
Recognition — See the pattern. Control is on. Inner Critic is on. Not as a character flaw, not as "who you are" — as a setting that got installed somewhere along the way, usually for a reason that made sense at the time.
Agency — Examine it on purpose. Sit with it long enough to make a deliberate call on each one: keep it, or change it. Decide, specifically, that Values and Presence are worth switching on. Most leaders skip this step entirely. They either defend the default or feel bad about it — neither one is a decision.
Growth — Practice the deliberate version until it's the new default. Not a one-time toggle flip. Reps, in the actual job, until Presence is what fires under pressure instead of Control.
That last part is where most leadership development quietly fails. A weekend workshop can get you to Recognition. Maybe Agency, if it's a good one. Almost none of them get you to Growth — because Growth doesn't happen in a session room. It happens between sessions, in the actual meeting where the old default wants to fire. That's the piece AVEVV builds the engagement around: daily, real-time direction inside the job itself, not just insight delivered once every two weeks and left to fade.
Why Most Leaders Never Open the Panel
Nobody opens Settings for fun. You open it when something breaks, or when someone senior enough finally asks the question you couldn't answer. That's usually the moment a leader ends up in a coaching conversation — not proactively, but because they were just promoted into a role nobody prepared them for, and the defaults that worked as an individual contributor are actively working against them now.
That's the moment the panel needs to already be open. Not after the team's morale is the evidence, not after the second reorg. Before.
The Choice
You can leave the settings exactly as installed. Plenty of leaders do, and plenty of teams absorb the cost quietly, the way a phone drains its battery in the background without ever telling you why.
Or you can open the panel. See what's actually toggled on. Decide, deliberately, whether it's serving you or just running because nobody turned it off.
That's Recognition, Agency, Growth. That's AVEVV.
Ready to see what's actually running in the background?[Book a conversation with AVEVV →]