You have done everything right.
You built the plan. You ran the meeting. You set the goals, got the buy-in and watched everyone nod. Then the quarter ended and nothing moved.
Katie Mares is not surprised. She has been inside that gap for twenty years and she will tell you exactly what is there.
It is not your strategy. It is not your team. It is not the market.
It is the story running underneath all of it. And until that changes, nothing else will.
What Nobody Is Auditing
Mares is an executive coach, customer experience strategist and TEDx speaker who has coached leadership teams at Toyota, built guest experience programs for Celebrity Cruises and contributed to bringing the Forbes five-star rating system to the cruise industry for the first time. She holds a master’s degree in adult training and development and has spent two decades inside some of the most demanding organizations in North America.
She is also someone who rebuilt her own career from zero. That experience is not separate from her work. It is the foundation of it.
“I have never met anyone who failed because they lacked information or a strategy,” Mares says. “The gap is always somewhere else. In the state driving their decisions and the story making later feel safer than now.”
She calls it the state and story gap. It shows up in every boardroom, every one-on-one session and every person who has ever made a plan and then quietly talked themselves out of executing it.
Fear Mode Versus Love Mode
Mares frames every engagement through one distinction. People are operating from love or from fear. That is it.
Fear mode is not weakness. It is the default state of most high-performing organizations. It looks like urgency without intention, recognition that only measures output and a culture so focused on winning that the people doing the winning start to disappear.
She worked with a regional leadership team at a major automotive company that was performing at the top of its sector. The senior leadership was energized and inspiring. By the time that energy reached the people responsible for daily execution, something had shifted. Schedules overlapped with no room to breathe between them. Celebrations were tied exclusively to numbers. The field teams were running on edge.
“When the only thing being celebrated is the result, the human producing the result starts to feel invisible,” Mares says. “And you can feel it in the room.”
Love mode does not mean soft. It means deliberate. It means the five-minute pause between meetings so a leader walks into the next conversation present instead of reactive. It means specific recognition, not blanket praise that lands as noise. It means performance conversations held privately, built on curiosity instead of correction.
Mares introduced those shifts. The outcomes were not subtle.
“People were pausing,” she says. “People were smiling. Feedback was still being given, but it landed differently. The energy in the room changed. And so did the numbers.”
The strategy had not changed. The state had.
The Same Story Playing Out in One Person
The same principle that transforms a regional leadership team transforms a single human being.
One of Mares’ clients came to her with a struggling small business and no clarity on what to fix first even with a knowledge of what needed to be done. He was checking his bank account dozens of times a day, not because it changed anything but because fear needed somewhere to go. He had a strategy. He had always had a strategy. What he did not have was the internal state to believe it could work.
Mares did not start with the business plan.
“Your state drives your story,” she says. “Your story drives your emotions, your emotions drive your behavior and your behavior drives your results. If you want different results, you have to start where the loop actually begins.”
They worked on the story he was telling himself about money, about worthiness, about what he was capable of. They replaced it with something true and built practices to hold it there. If you do not replace a thought with a better one, it will repeat.
He now takes Wednesdays off. His calendar books out weeks in advance. His wife joined the NOW Rising community. His marriage is better. His team is growing.
The strategy that was always available to him started working the moment his internal state did.
The Method and the Decision Behind It
The NOW Planning Method is the framework Mares uses with every client and has used on herself. It is a daily practice built on a sequence most productivity systems skip entirely: thought into emotion into action, from the inside out.
She developed it during her own rebuild. There was a version of her with no money, no confidence and no career. A woman who knew exactly what she needed to do and kept finding reasons not to do it.
What she found, slowly and then all at once, is that transformation does not begin with a sweeping overhaul. It begins with one decision. A single small pivot, made consistently, until it becomes who you are.
“Stop negotiating with your future self,” she says. “Not tomorrow. Not when things calm down. Now. Because you cannot create the future from anywhere else.”
That clarity, she says, is available to anyone willing to look honestly at the story they are currently living.
The question is whether it is the story they chose.
Katie Mares is an executive coach, customer experience strategist and TEDx speaker. She holds a master’s degree in adult training and development and is the author of CustomHER Experience and Five Steps to a Five-Star Experience. She is the creator of the NOW Planning Method and the founder of NOW Rising. More information is available at katiemares.com.
