Curiosity is one of the most important practices of any great leader, but most leaders point their curiosity outward. What is happening in the market? What are our competitors doing? What do our customers want? What is changing that we need to pay attention to?
Those are good questions, but some of the most important questions are the ones you ask yourself. Where did my energy go this week? How did I show up for my team? Did my work give people energy, or take it away?
The best CEOs I coach are constantly learning about their companies, their people, and themselves. They don’t assume that because they’ve been successful, they’ve figured it out. They stay curious because the moment you stop learning as a leader is the moment you start plateauing. Don’t just get older in the job; get better at it.
This is exactly why we built the CEO Weekly Reflection Template. It's a simple, four-part worksheet built around the questions I just asked you:
Fifteen minutes, once a week, do it consistently, and you'll start noticing patterns you'd otherwise miss entirely: the meeting that always drains you, the teammate you haven't praised in a month, the blind spot your team sees but won't say out loud unless you ask them directly.
Almost every CEO I've ever coached agrees reflection matters, but none of them do it consistently. Not because they don't care, but because they're buried. Status updates to write, KPIs to chase down, and a calendar that doesn't leave room for fifteen quiet minutes with yourself.
This is where I get genuinely excited about what's happening with AI right now, not as a trendy buzzword, but as a real answer to a real problem. If a CEO is already thinking out loud in Claude or whichever AI tool of your preference, capturing notes, working through a decision, drafting an update, that thinking shouldn't have to be manually retyped into Rhythm; it should just flow.
That's exactly what we built the Rhythm AI Connector to do.
Chris Gumas, Director of Customer Experience at Ruland Manufacturing, told us something that stuck with me. Chris runs sales, marketing, production, and customer service for a precision manufacturer founded in 1937, and his team is spread out; he's traveling eight weeks out of every twelve, and before the AI Connector, his weekly Rhythm updates were, in his words, thorough but “like a book,” accurate, but nobody had time to actually read them, including him.
“I was already doing a lot of my Rhythm work in Claude or Copilot," Chris told us. “The AI Connector let me connect that work straight to my updates. It contextually knows what I am trying to do. Very effective.” - Chris Gumas, Ruland Manufacturing
Instead of thinking through something once in his AI tool and then retyping it into Rhythm, his priority updates and Week in Sync notes now condense down to three to five clean bullets, because the AI already has the context of what he's trying to do.
That's curiosity and reflection, scaled. Chris didn't stop thinking carefully about his week; he just stopped losing that thinking to a blank status field. His team stayed aligned on one rolled-up project despite the distance, and when it came time to draft next year's annual priorities, he had six-plus months of contextual history to draw from, not a fuzzy memory of “what did we say we'd do again?"
Here's what I want you to take from this: the CEO Weekly Reflection Template and the AI Connector aren't two separate ideas. They're the same idea, applied at two different points. One gives you the questions that build your leadership capacity, while the other removes the friction that keeps you from asking them consistently.
Ask yourself this week: if you sat down right now and answered four honest questions about your energy, your team, your words, and your learning, would you like what you found?
Download Tool Kit #2: the CEO Weekly Reflection Template and start the habit this week. If you want the full picture of the seven practices behind it, The Journey to CEO Success walks through all of them, including the ones that took me from a startup founder to guiding AvidXchange through an IPO. If you're already living in Claude, Copilot, or another AI tool every day the way Chris is, take a look at the Rhythm AI Connector; it might give your reflection habit the runway it needs to actually stick.
Growth doesn't stop being your job just because the company got bigger. Stay curious about yourself; that's where it starts.