Frequency

The single word that defines my most fulfilling career moments, my most imaginative creative work, and the bonds that grew friendship.

Beautiful, seamless collaboration is rare enough that when you experience it, it fundamentally changes you. If you're lucky, these moments spoil you forever — recalibrating your standards and showing you what's possible when minds truly connect. The new bar for excellence becomes both blessing and curse. These experiences aren't just happy accidents. They can be designed.

I often reflect on projects throughout my career that lit me up — collaborations that pulled something extraordinary from me and pushed me into flow state. That's where any creative person needs to be to do their best work.

The outcomes were strong, but more importantly, everyone involved felt safe to be themselves — to speak up, propose half-formed ideas, and play at the edges of possibility without fear of judgment.

The Wavelength of Connection

I've been thrown into high-stakes projects with complete strangers and somehow found immediate alignment. We showed up for the same reasons, believed in the work and our roles within it, and supported each other without the typical professional power games.

What made this possible wasn't just shared goals but something more elemental — a shared frequency.

Frequency might sound like another word for trust, but it's different in crucial ways. Trust is binary and takes time to build. Frequency is dynamic — you can visualize it as sound waves or patterns in motion. In new relationships where trust hasn't yet been established, frequency can emerge almost immediately when the conditions are right.

This alignment doesn't eliminate tension or disagreement. In fact, the most productive conflicts happen precisely when there's frequency — when people operate on the same wavelength while bringing different perspectives. The foundation holds steady while ideas collide and combine. Without this underlying harmony, disagreements don't elevate ideas; they devolve into posturing. Concepts get microwaved rather than properly baked.

When I'm tuned to the same frequency as colleagues, my creativity flows without constraint. The fear of failure evaporates. There's no mental accounting of who gets credit or who's positioning for the next promotion. There's only shared curiosity and the ruthless desire to push ideas to their fullest expression — to create conditions where everyone can contribute authentically.

When the Signal Breaks

Frequency fractures when values and expectations misalign — when egos override collective purpose. The focus shifts from creating excellence together to advancing personal agendas. What was once about the work becomes about individual feelings, status jockeying, and hidden motives.

The opposite of frequency isn't discord — it's fear. Fear breeds fakery, corporate doublespeak, and the inability to have honest conversations. When frequency disappears, real communication dies with it, leaving only performance — pretending until we eventually die at our keyboards.

Language is the clearest signal of frequency's presence or absence. Genuine conversation, spontaneous banter, honest feedback, and the capacity to discuss difficult topics openly — these are all vital signs of healthy alignment.

When these elements disappear, replaced by carefully worded emails and passive-aggressive comments, you know the frequency has been lost.

Building Frequency From Scratch

How do you establish frequency with people you've never met? How do you tune into the same wavelength when starting at a new company or joining a new team?

A strong portfolio creates the foundation — evidence that you can execute at a high level. It creates a positive bias where people assume competence until proven otherwise. But technical skill alone isn't enough. If someone with impressive work turns out to be toxic or self-absorbed, the frequency quickly deteriorates. True resonance requires both competence and character.

This is where leadership, storytelling, and culture converge. A leader articulates a vision compelling enough that others want to help build it. Culture emerges from how the team moves toward that vision together. I've come to see frequency as the invisible bonds that enable unified movement, while culture manifests as the visible behaviors that signal whether those bonds exist.

I can detect frequency — or its absence — almost immediately. When joining companies, I've skimmed Slack histories that instantly revealed whether teams were aligned or fractured. Without frequency, communication becomes talking past each other, passive-aggressive positioning, and corporate jargon masking what people really mean. There's no humility, no changing of minds, no meeting in the middle. It's repellent.

The Body Knows

Job interviews are perfect frequency tests. Pay attention to your physical response during these conversations. Notice the language used, the conversational rhythm, whether ideas flow naturally or feel forced.

Are you genuinely present or performing from a script? Do you feel drawn to these people or merely tolerant of them? The body registers frequency before the conscious mind can articulate it.

Before any new professional relationship, the fundamental question is: what wavelength are we on? What do we truly value? How will we show up for each other when things get difficult?

Time invested in aligning frequency pays exponential returns, because without it, there's no foundation for meaningful conversation, let alone collaboration.

Frequency in Action

At a past job, I joined to evolve their brand identity — an organization with complex history and wounds from previous failed partnerships. Their skepticism wasn't personal; it was earned through disappointment. Most people in tech organizations have limited understanding of brand building, making change especially challenging. I knew that success wouldn't come from brilliant ideas alone. We needed to establish frequency first.

Instead of immediately presenting solutions, I spent months having conversations and creating space for people to voice their concerns. I listened for the fears beneath the resistance: that I would impose my vision without understanding their reality, make changes that disrupted their work, and then disappear, leaving them worse than before.

I responded with concrete examples and clear processes, showing where opportunities were hidden rather than claiming to have all the answers. In meetings, I explicitly invited better approaches: "This isn't about my vision and my ideas. It's about the best idea. If someone has a better approach, write it. Present it. Let's talk about it."

The presentation I gave to one hundred stakeholders wasn't just about what we would build, but about enrolling them in why it mattered — connecting our work to business outcomes and personal growth. I followed with countless one-on-ones, discussing everything from creative process to implementation challenges.

I knew frequency was developing when the most skeptical executives stopped attending oversight meetings. Their fears had been voiced and addressed. Their resistance had been respected rather than dismissed. They recognized they were working with someone who knew his shit front and back.

The project now had a fighting chance.

Within two years, this carefully cultivated frequency enabled work of exceptional quality and difficulty — work that pushed the company's vision forward and influenced every aspect of the business. What made me proudest wasn't the polished final product but the team that created it and what we collectively felt throughout the process.

The Heart of Frequency

At its most elemental level, frequency emerges from the ability to have genuine conversations. Can we talk without filters or masks? Can we discuss what troubles us, share ideas we're afraid of or obsessed with? Can we be vulnerable without performing vulnerability? Can we be real with each other?

This authentic exchange is both the foundation and the reinforcement of frequency. Real conversations can bring even skeptics into alignment, widening the circle of shared purpose.

The challenge is that this requires self-awareness and humility from all involved — qualities that seem increasingly rare in professional environments.

The deeper I go in my career, the less I see these values practiced consistently. People resort to masks and performance because that's what their experience has taught them. Perhaps they've only been rewarded for playing politics rather than doing good work. Perhaps previous vulnerability was met with judgment rather than acceptance. Now authenticity feels too risky.

The path toward better collaboration doesn't start with new methodologies or frameworks. It begins with creating conditions where people can find their shared frequency — where they can drop the performance and remember what it feels like when work transcends transaction and becomes transformation.

If you want to build something that matters, start by tuning in. Everything else follows.