In an age of constant motion, few of us have time to think before reacting. Leadership coach and author Susan Marshall believes we’ve mistaken speed for progress and noise for knowledge. Every scroll, swipe, and instant reaction convinces us we’re keeping up, when in reality we’re just spinning faster. Through her Backbone Institute, she teaches what modern life forgets: that courage begins in quiet, and clarity only comes when we find stillness.
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It’s a deceptively simple question. What does it mean to truly think? Not to react, not to posture, but to think patiently and deliberately, with an ear tuned to consequence. When I asked Susan what critical thinking looks like today, she suggested it’s fading.
“What is critical thinking? From my perspective, in the years of work I’ve done, it’s the ability to understand the context in which you’re working and the variables of whatever you’re trying to resolve or understand before making a decision. I sure do think we are losing it as a society.”
Susan is the founder of Backbone Institute, LLC, a personal and professional development organization based in Wisconsin that helps individuals and teams build confidence and leadership through what she calls the “five fundamental skills”: critical thinking, decisiveness, clarity of communication, integrity of word and act, and consistency.
A longtime corporate consultant and author of How to Grow a Backbone, Susan has worked with several enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, such as Apple, GE, and Best Buy. Her mission, she says, is to “create a stronger, more confident future—one person, one team at a time.”
“We are bombarded with distractions—mental distractions, noise, ideas, technology. So, in my estimation, we have lost—or perhaps never learned—the ability to quiet ourselves, to step back or step up to look at the bigger picture, to understand our role and the possibilities, and then make decisions. Too often we are swept side to side by a mood or people’s opinions or the winds of change.”
Many of us have built lives that are too loud to hear ourselves in, she explains.
“I think these distractions have been more influential and impactful than we realize. We don’t stop to think about it much. It’s now just part of life. We’ve created this sort of latent and constant buzz of anxiety. Not what anybody ever intended, for sure, but it’s there.”
The word “buzz” doesn’t indicate a crisis; it’s the background hum that keeps our nervous systems at a simmer. You can live a long time in a buzz. You can also forget what stillness feels like.
Susan points to the compulsion loops we now accept as normal—the fear of missing out on the “frenzy,” the performative obligation to be current on the outrage of the hour, the way many of us have trained our minds to chase “what’s next” before we’ve finished our previous thought.
“We have lost the ability to distinguish between distraction and details that we perhaps need. Since nothing’s all that important, everything’s important. I think we have lost our identities. Aristotle said, ‘You are what you repeatedly do.’ When we are constantly scrolling, following no real thought to any conclusion other than what’s next, our brains literally get rewired. The synapses change.”
One reference point that helped her name this phenomenon, she says, was Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows,” which focuses on the impact of technology on the human psyche. “I read it initially when it first came out, and I went, oh dear, this could be problematic. I re-read it just a couple of months ago, and I was like, it’s all here.”
If the book offered a warning, the last decade gave her a vantage point. What she sees now is a culture that has made distraction not only acceptable but a method for companies to peddle their services or products.
“If you listen to the creators of technology, Zuckerberg and others, they say they purposely designed it to be addictive. We know that, but it’s like, even if I drink too much and I know I shouldn’t, I’m addicted. People are really struggling to find a way out of that particular trap.”
How, then, do we begin to reclaim attention? Not by grand declarations, she argues, but by modest and embodied refusals.
“I’m not tethered to my phone. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to leave for meetings in the morning and think, ‘Oh, geez, my phone’s still on the charger. Oh, well.’ That’s very intentional because I have seen other people and how it can become like an appendage.”
The alternative to constant input isn’t performative “digital minimalism,” but rather, it’s being present, noticing the world as it is, not as a feed curates it.
“I love being outside. If you’re standing in a grove of pine trees, the wind through one set of pine trees sounds different than the wind moving through another set of trees. Does that mean anything? Yeah, it means my brain is resting. I’m letting my brain rest. I’m appreciating. I’m not anxious about what I’m not doing, what somebody said or what I screwed up.”
There is something radical about the idea of rest not being a luxury, but rather the precondition for moral and intellectual agency. If regaining attention is this attainable, why does it feel so hard? Because for many of us, quiet now nearly feels like a chemical withdrawal.
“You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. If I’m used to holding my phone in my left or right hand and I put it down and leave it there for a couple of hours, I’m going to be intensely uncomfortable. I have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing. That’s real counterculture.”
It’s a useful reframe: discomfort isn’t a failure; rather, it’s evidence that we’re rebuilding capacities that have atrophied. The same muscles that allow us to sit with an unfinished thought will enable us to sit with a hard conversation, a misstep, or a risk.
Change also takes a lot of energy and disruption, so rest is not optional. Without it, thought and courage fray.
“I ask people, ‘How do you rest?’ I get big blinks; some people start to cry because they don’t know. That’s tragic to me. It’s hard, and we have to work through that.”
In Susan’s framework, competence builds confidence, and confidence enables risk. None of that grows in a hurry.
“I think we are increasingly lonely and disappointed, and we don’t know what to do about it. So, we pick up our phones and scroll. Once we’ve put it down, we’re no different, except that three hours have gone by. Find something that lets you get in touch with your own thoughts and emotions. That’s hard.”
If distraction is the atmosphere we have acclimated to, families are barometers. Susan doesn’t blame parents but rather names the world they’re trying to parent in. In her opinion, social media has fragmented norms, multiplied anxieties, and turned boundary-setting into a referendum on identity—consequences way beyond just distraction.
“Parents for at least a generation and a half have now been subject to coercion by social media. Social media dictates fashion, ideas, and social mores. People are afraid to speak because of how somebody else is going to be triggered.”
The result, she says, is a subtle and pervasive uncertainty. She suggests that even if parents know a limit is needed, they struggle to enforce it because they’re managing not only their child’s development but also their peer group’s perception of them.
“All of this has gotten very, very fuzzy. I go back to this underlying hum of anxiety. Who’s going to be mad at me if I set a boundary that another family doesn’t believe in? Am I a bigot? Am I mean?”
The fuzziest place of all is the line where love is confused with negotiation. Susan’s counsel is that children need guardrails.
“Your kids are not going to like you. That’s okay. They need to understand safety. I was told something years ago that I’ve never forgotten. There’s a big high-rise bridge over the city of Milwaukee. If there were no guardrails on either side of that bridge, most people would go very tentatively. Put up the guardrails, and we’d go 65 miles an hour. We know the boundaries. We know where we’re safe. The same is true for parenting.”
Safety is not just physical. It’s emotional and cognitive, too. Children learn what reality feels like by bumping into it, and then they learn who they are by testing where “I” ends and “we” begins.
“If you are going to have your children out in a very busy, loud, noisy, distracted world with no guidelines, with no guardrails, you’re not doing your kid any favors. That’s a frightening thing for a kid.”
Her advice for parents trying to reclaim authority without alienating their children turns the question on its head. Don’t chase being liked; practice being reliable.
“We have to be willing to allow our children to grow and to experience all the bumps and bruises. We also have a responsibility to make sure they’re not intentionally hurting others or that they’re not doing stupid things we know are going to end disastrously.”
Reconciling both those responsibilities can be one of the most difficult parts of parenting.
What begins at home migrates into classrooms already strained by conflicting expectations. Susan acknowledges the toll this takes on the adults we ask to educate our children.
“Who’s setting the rules? Who’s creating those boundaries? I was at the New York City Leadership Academy years and years ago. I was astounded to hear about a 7-year-old who pulled a switchblade on a teacher. The mom came to school and sided with the kid. I was like, ‘What?'”
The shock gave way to a lesson that complicates simple judgments. A colleague suggested the parent’s behavior might have been an attempt, however misguided, at attachment.
“She said, ‘What you may not understand is that may have been the very first time that parent and child bonded.’ I think that’s how many of us live. We don’t really understand, but we want to say this was wrong or that was right.”
She doesn’t cross the moral line that “a kid pulling a switchblade on a teacher is wrong, period,” but she uses the moment to argue for a different posture: listen first, then address without contempt. “People need to be directed, but they don’t need to be judged or dismissed.”
It’s a delicate balance, one she believes schools desperately need as they attempt to teach in a climate of accelerating pace and collapsing consensus. “The pace of life, the pace of technology, and just the broad expanse of information available to us, buries much of the opportunity for understanding,” she says.
What anchors a classroom, then?
“If you put kids together who have families with very different ideas, expect them to talk about it. They need an adult facilitating those conversations. If we were to slow down and train ourselves to be more focused and less distracted, some of this could be solved.”
Her counsel to educators doubles as a benediction.
“Give yourself grace. Everyone right now is under pressure. Look at the results that you’re generating. If it’s not what you want, think about it. Talk to people about it, and then figure out how you’re going to change things. Always with respect, always with time.”
When I asked Susan about the biggest challenges to a child’s confidence now, she reiterated the importance of safety as a foundation for a child’s sense of self.
“If there aren’t strong guidelines, strong guardrails, there’s little safety. Then, the kids are figuring everything out for themselves. Sometimes, we expect children to know what we know, and they simply don’t. Your job is to help these little creatures become functional, caring, contributing humans. How do we do that? Little by little.”
In practice, she suggests pairing separation from social media with shared attention and finding common cultural touchpoints to share together. The example she uses is charmingly ’90s, but its logic is timeless.
“The show ‘90210’ was really popular. I would pop a big bowl of popcorn and sit on the floor with my daughters, eat, and watch the show together to talk about it. I got to know their world through a common external thing that gave us access to one another.”
As we move from adolescence to adulthood, the same pressures reappear—shorn of the safety nets we offer kids. Social media feeds tell us how to look, what to want, and which side to be on. Outward appearances have become a proxy for personhood.
“Packaging is important because you need it to navigate life, but it’s not the most important. Marketing exists to make you want something you don’t have. Move away from that. Talk about what matters to you instead. Does authenticity mean blurting out whatever comes to your mind with no filters? No. It’s thinking about what it is you want to say, to whom you’re speaking, and what impact you desire your words to have.”
In a culture where “being real” often means performing relatability, her question cuts to the bone: if distraction has separated you from your own interior life, who really is performing?
“We bought this notion that authenticity is just being real. Okay, but how far do you open the kimono? Nobody needs to see all that, right? Over time on social media, I picked out the best parts of me, and I put them out there. I know, and if anybody thought for 10 seconds, they would know too, that I look like that about 1% of the time. An equal share of the time, I’m eating Cheetos, drinking Chardonnay, and sitting around in my sweats. Nobody sees that. Which is more authentic?”
When our conversation turned to how women approach risk-taking or find confidence, Susan resisted platitudes in favor of the particular.
“Probably the most effective way to get to the root is to really explore the story they’re telling themselves. Most women, in my experience, are reluctant to take risks or step into something they really want to do and have great aspirations to be great at, because they’re concerned about the impact on their relationships. Once we begin to change behavior, people go, ‘Oh, you’ve changed.’ And rather than saying, ‘yeah, I’m working on it, thanks for noticing,’ we say, ‘no, no, I haven’t.’ That’s fear, and it’s relationship-oriented for women much more so than it is for men.”
For men, she adds, the anxiety often tracks status; for women, belonging. Either way, the gravitational pull is outward. The work is to come back to a center that is strong enough to choose.
It’s a bracing reminder that authenticity isn’t the absence of editing; it’s the presence of intention. It asks for the very practices that distraction erodes—attention, reflection, restraint. Without them, relationships begin to orbit performance.
Social media complicates that equation by substituting approval for understanding. Susan has watched the faulty logic seep from screens into workplaces and families.
“We’re not really engaged in the relationship. We’re engaged in an image we’ve created or an expectation we’ve bought that now has to be protected. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say, ‘I feel like I’ve just lost my friends, because even when we get together, they’re on their phones.’ I see couples texting each other over dinner tables. We are increasingly isolated.”
If authenticity is intention in speech, courage is willingness in action. Why, I asked, do so many people silence themselves even when they feel that something they’re witnessing is wrong?
“In a word, fear. ‘I fear judgment, I fear harm, I fear ostracization. I fear loss of status.’ We learn to comply. If people ran stop signs all the time, God help us all. Compliance with basic rules, we understand. When those rules get violated and more people say, ‘I don’t need to do that,’ that’s when things get dangerous. So, courage is fundamental in deciding who you are and how you’re going to live.”
Courage is not an excuse for contempt. There’s a clean line between bluntness and intelligence, between bravado and respect.
“It’s about respect. Respect for me, because I’m going to speak. Respect for you, because you’re willing to listen. Courage is doing or saying something when you know there are consequences. Tact and diplomacy are also about respect. We live to fight another day. This argument does not need to be resolved at this moment. Give it some time. Give it some space. That, too, takes courage.”
Even in the micro-rituals of modern life, like being the one to send the last message in a text thread or the compulsion to tidy every exchange with a “thumbs up,” she sees anxiety masquerading as etiquette.
“Once you start paying attention to it, it’s everywhere, which, to me, says people are not confident. They don’t know how to rest.”
Change, when it comes, is often modest and interior: a decision to stop double-tapping; a choice not to return to a reflex you’ve outgrown. Those choices can feel wobbly at first. “For everyone, it’s a little different, and there are consequences when we change behavior; they’re extraordinarily uncomfortable,” she says.
Having a backbone is the willingness to stay with that discomfort. It’s also the ability to hear feedback, especially the harsher kind, without surrendering the authorship of your life.
“Anytime I speak, it’s coming from behind my eyeballs, from my own experience. That’s a singular voice. Everyone I engage with has their own voice, too, and they can tell me I’m ‘full of’ whatever. Once you know yourself and you’re comfortable in your own skin, people can tell you all kinds of things about yourself that you know are not true; they’re actually telling you about themselves. You know you. Pay attention.”
In the face of those disparaging moments, humor can loosen the grip of fear. One way to find that humor is to journal and reflect at the end of the day, just as she does. “Oh, it’s my favorite. You can find the absurdity if you look for it, but you have to calm yourself and be willing to look,” Susan says.
“It’s important when you can laugh at yourself and say, ‘Look at that, I produced that, not what I was going for, but okay—what can I do differently next time?’ That’s the fun of exploration and that’s the promise of growth.”
So how can people tell they’re on the right path out of distraction and into integrity? Susan offers a test that focuses more on origins than on outcomes.
“Pay attention to what you’re doing. It feels different when you’re doing it because you’ve chosen to. When you’re caught up in something that you do just because you’ve done it for so long and you still don’t feel good about it, that’s a big clue. You’re going to struggle, be really good some days, really bad other days, give yourself permission to be uncomfortable and to screw up.”
Susan’s philosophy, animating the Backbone Institute, runs through every answer: critical thinking, decisiveness, clarity, integrity, and consistency are habits that sustain courage. In a world tuned to speed, she argues for cadences that honor understanding. The point isn’t to win arguments faster or to appear bigger or better; it is to live truer. That is slower work—frequently invisible and often misread.
Put up guardrails for the people you love; put them up for yourself. Replace performance with presence; replace speed with respect. Be willing, in her phrase, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable.” The path is not glamorous. It doesn’t need to be. Courage is often quiet and contagious. If we practice it, our lives begin to match our language. Word by word, act by act, the buzz recedes, and the backbone returns.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
