No Signal, No System: What Elastic Waistbands Teach Us About Leadership
There’s a study I read years ago that I’ve never been able to forget.
In a prison setting, people were gaining significant amounts of weight, not because of diet, but because of their pants. The facility had switched to elastic waistbands, and the researchers noticed something fascinating: when the feedback of tight waste bands disappeared, people simply stopped noticing when they were full.
The elastic waistbands had removed a crucial feedback loop.
No signal, no awareness.
That idea stayed with me, especially since, after a surgery, I lost some sensation in my lower abdomen. I couldn’t feel that subtle “pressure” that tells you you’ve had enough—but I could still remember the principle. I had to rebuild my feedback system consciously: different cues, same goal.
It struck me how that principle applies to nearly everything, not just eating, but leading, working, living.
When we remove friction, we lose awareness.
When we lose awareness, systems drift.
This is true for metabolism, and it’s true for life.
The Waistband Principle: Awareness and Feedback Loops
Whether you’re managing your personal goals or leading a team, comfort without felt feedback is a silent erosion of stability. The waistband is a metaphor for the structure—for the small, daily signals that help us course-correct before we’ve gone too far off track.
In goal setting or weight management, that structure means noticing the physical or emotional signals you’d rather avoid.
It’s the subtle feeling of stress leading you to the snack cabinet (the emotional signal), or the way your sleep quality declines after a late meal (the physical signal). These small frictions are valuable data points.
In work and leadership, that structure is the accountability you build into the system—your organizational waistband.
It’s creating a culture where a junior team member can safely tell a senior leader that a process is broken. It's not just using quarterly metrics; it’s the candid, daily conversation about capacity, misalignment, or resource fatigue.
If your environment is too "elastic,” meaning it’s too comfortable, too agreeable, or has no honest metrics or difficult conversations, you are going to lose the signal. And when you lose the signal, you lose awareness.
Leadership and self-leadership both thrive on felt feedback; the moment we stop feeling it, we start to drift.
What You Focus On Expands: Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
There’s a reason so many people struggle with large goals. They’re too big, too distant, and too emotionally loaded.
I’ve learned that it’s not about focusing on losing weight, earning more, or “being better.” It’s about focusing on the path.
If I track the tasks—e.g., my next steps, my water, my meals—and I stay inside my circle of control, I don’t have to wrestle with willpower. The system takes care of itself.
It’s the same with leadership, of self and others. The best leaders aren’t obsessed with outcomes. They’re obsessed with inputs. What they can actually influence. They build an environment that shapes the behaviour that creates the result.
So find the goal, but focus on the work.
The rest will follow.
The Marathon Mindset: Effort, Rest, Repeat
Progress is a marathon of calibration, not constant acceleration.
For weight loss, I work in one-month cycles: one month on, one month maintenance. It’s not a trick—it’s system design. That month of focus helps me build habits and momentum; the next month lets my body and brain integrate them. During the month “off,” I don’t throw away the structure, I just loosen it. I stop tracking every detail, but I keep the core habits (like walking daily and eating mostly the same way).
This system works because it honours human reality. If your goal is to finish a massive writing project, the "on" month is dedicated to word count and outline completion, while the "maintenance" month might be for light editing and researching the next section. If you are building a new skill, the "on" month is intense practice, and the "maintenance" month is casual application.
It’s the difference between living to track and tracking to live.
The smartest achievers and most resilient organizations build recovery into their design. They recognize that integration is a mandatory part of growth.
For Personal Goals: This means scheduling reflection, strategic downtime, and genuine rest after a major effort (a product launch, a complex project, or a writing push). The human body and the human brain deserve this grace.
For Organizations: This means implementing "cool-down" periods after a large deployment or a busy quarter and dedicating time to process improvement, documentation, and team connection, rather than immediately moving to the next urgent task.
When you design for rhythm, you prevent burnout and ensure the habits you just built have time to solidify.
Perspective and Data: Detaching from Judgment
Data should be an objective tool for navigation, not a source of moral verdict. But when those numbers are tied to our identity or history, they instantly become emotional obstacles.
Here’s one small thing that changed my mindset in goal management: I weigh myself in kilograms.
Because I don’t have an emotional history with those numbers, they feel neutral. Scientific. A reading to interpret, not a moral verdict. It turns the scale into a data point, not a judgment day.
his same principle applies directly to how we read metrics in any endeavor, from personal projects to organizational results. Whether it's quarterly results, engagement stats, or the daily count of focused work blocks, we must remember that data tells you what is, not who you are. The power is entirely in your interpretation, and your ability to remain detached from personal shame.
In Goal Achievement: A sudden drop in performance metrics, like a spike in the scale or a missed deadline on a creative project, is a signal. Sometimes weight spikes because of inflammation or stress. Sometimes a creative project stalls because of necessary, unplanned research, or because your process—not your logic—is flawed.
In Leadership: Sometimes team performance dips for reasons unrelated to ability—like process friction, fatigue, or fundamental misalignment on priorities.
In any of these cases, if you treat the metric as an objective signal, you can ask, "What caused this?" If you treat it as a moral judgment, you only ask, "Who is to blame?"
Perspective is the essential skill that keeps you from turning information into shame. It allows you to analyze the signal and make necessary adjustments (or not) without letting a single data point derail your entire system.
Awareness Without Punishment
The thread running through all of this, from the waistband to the weigh-in, is simple: awareness without punishment.
That’s where growth lives.
Feedback isn’t the enemy. Discomfort isn’t failure. They’re signals, invitations to reconnect with what’s real.
When I pay attention without judgment, I make better choices, naturally. When I build feedback loops through honest conversations, clear metrics, and kind accountability, my goals thrive the same way my body does: with clarity and rhythm.
Because health, goals, and life all obey the same law.
Change doesn’t require force; it requires feedback.
Growth doesn’t require perfection; it requires rhythm.
And success?
That begins when you apply those truths to yourself first.
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For decades, I lived inside a storm I couldn’t name. A restless mind. A body always braced. A heart that felt heavier than it should. I blamed myself. I blamed circumstances. I worked harder, tried harder, forced myself into routines that never stuck. I spent years believing I was simply too much and not enough at the same time.
Then, a diagnosis reframed everything.