Most professionals spend their careers learning through experience. They take on new responsibilities, navigate unfamiliar challenges, make mistakes, adapt, and gradually figure things out along the way. The problem is that experience can be an expensive and time-consuming teacher.
Many leaders find themselves promoted into new roles without a clear roadmap for what comes next. The skills that made them successful in one position don’t always translate to the next. Yet few people feel comfortable admitting they don’t have all the answers.
It’s a challenge that Jody Michael Associates coach Don Eash has observed throughout his career—as an executive, CEO, and now as a coach helping leaders and professionals navigate career growth and transition.
It’s also what inspired his new book, The Right Altitude: What Nobody Tells You About Being a Leader.
“Experience is a great teacher, but a slow and expensive one — I wanted to get people there faster,” Eash says. “One of the things that I love about being a coach is the ability to help people solve problems and figure things out faster than they might on their own.”
The book represents decades of leadership experience combined with years of executive and career coaching. It is a collection of lessons learned, leadership observations, and practical tools designed to help readers avoid some of the common traps that can slow professional growth.
Why Leadership Transitions Are So Difficult
One of the central themes of The Right Altitude is that career growth requires more than simply acquiring new responsibilities. It often requires letting go of old ones. According to Eash, many leadership challenges emerge during periods of transition.
“We get put into a role because we’re good at something,” he explains. “People just assume that because you have the title, you know how to do everything that role requires.”
The reality is often quite different.
Whether someone is becoming a first-time manager, moving into executive leadership, changing careers, or taking on greater organizational responsibility, there is typically a gap between what they know and what their new role demands.
“We don’t give people a chance to be a beginner,” Eash says. As a result, many professionals continue relying on behaviors that made them successful in previous roles, even when those behaviors are no longer serving them.
A newly promoted executive may continue operating like a director. A manager may struggle to delegate because individual contributor work feels more familiar and comfortable. A leader may continue solving problems personally rather than empowering others to do so.
“Even though we might know we’re not supposed to do what we were doing before, we keep doing it anyway because at least it helps us feel like we’re contributing,” Eash says.
These are exactly the kinds of challenges Eash helps clients navigate through his coaching work at Jody Michael Associates. Whether working with executives stepping into larger leadership roles or professionals exploring career transitions, he often sees the same pattern: people trying to succeed in a new environment using the habits that made them successful in the old one.
Finding the Right Altitude
The book’s title comes from a metaphor Eash has used for years with clients and teams.
Rather than relying on traditional hierarchical language, he describes leadership and career progression through the lens of altitude.
Different stages of a career require different perspectives. What works at one altitude may not work at another. As responsibilities expand, leaders must learn to shift their focus, adjust their viewpoint, and rethink where they invest their energy.
“As my teams and my clients will tell you, I am a giant fan of metaphors and analogies,” Eash says.
The aviation theme runs throughout the book, using concepts such as cockpit checks, instruments, navigation, and flight planning to make leadership concepts more accessible and memorable. At its core, the message is simple: success often depends less on doing more and more on understanding what belongs at your current altitude.
From a “Junk Drawer” of Ideas to a Published Book
While The Right Altitude may feel like a carefully structured leadership guide, its origins were surprisingly informal.
For years, Eash collected observations, stories, metaphors, and leadership lessons in what he jokingly calls his “junk drawer” of ideas. Some came from his 30-plus years in executive leadership roles at Disney, Universal, and Gateway Ticketing Systems. Others emerged through coaching conversations with leaders and professionals navigating growth, uncertainty, and change.
When he finally decided to turn those lessons into a book, he took an unconventional approach.
“I started recording hours and hours as I walked around town,” Eash says. “My whole town probably thinks I’m a crazy person walking around talking to myself.”
Using his phone, he captured hundreds of hours of thoughts, stories, and frameworks. Those recordings were transcribed, organized into themes, and eventually shaped into the book’s chapters.
The process allowed him to preserve something important: the feeling of a real coaching conversation.
“My intention was that it would feel like a coaching conversation in writing,” he says. “Anyone who’s worked with me would read it and feel like it was a conversation with me.”
That approach closely mirrors the work Jody Michael Associates coaches do every day—helping clients uncover blind spots, challenge assumptions, and move forward with greater confidence and clarity.
Turning Insight Into Action
Unlike many leadership books that focus primarily on concepts, The Right Altitude is designed to be practical.
Each chapter introduces a leadership challenge through composite characters inspired by decades of professional experience. Readers are then given actionable tools and exercises designed to help them address similar challenges in their own careers.
“I tend to be an action-oriented kind of guy,” Eash says. “I gave people things that I’ve used to solve different problems. I like to help people with things they can do, not just think about.”
Every chapter also includes reflective “mirror questions” that encourage readers to examine their own leadership habits, assumptions, and opportunities for growth.
The combination of action and reflection reflects Eash’s coaching philosophy: awareness is important, but meaningful change requires action.
The Courage to Do the Hard Thing
When asked what he hopes readers remember most, Eash doesn’t point to a specific framework or leadership technique. Instead, he returns to a lesson that appears repeatedly in both coaching and leadership development.
“Do the thing you’re most afraid to do,” he says.
Whether it’s having a difficult conversation, stepping into a larger leadership role, letting go of responsibilities that no longer belong to you, or embracing uncertainty during a career transition, growth often requires confronting discomfort. “That’s probably the thing that’s going to unlock whatever it is that you’re trying to get to.”
A Resource Beyond the Coaching Session
Eash did not write The Right Altitude to become a bestseller. He wrote it to support the people he serves. After years of helping clients work through leadership challenges one-on-one, he wanted a way to make those lessons available to a broader audience.
That desire also influenced his decision to self-publish. By retaining ownership of the content, Eash maintained creative control over the book, companion tools, assessments, and future resources he plans to develop around its ideas.
For readers, the result is a highly personal guide built from decades of leadership experience, years of coaching conversations, and a genuine desire to help others navigate their own professional journeys more effectively.
For clients of Jody Michael Associates, many of the themes will feel familiar. Self-awareness, leadership effectiveness, career growth, and the courage to embrace change are central to both Eash’s coaching practice and the broader work JMA does every day.
As Eash reflects on the book’s release, he sees it less as a finish line and more as the beginning of a new creative chapter. In fact, the book has already sparked additional ideas for future projects, tools, and resources.
“It’s just the first of a whole series of projects that I’ve laid out for myself,” Eash says. “I found that it scratches a creative itch that I didn’t know that I had.”
For leaders navigating change, aspiring executives preparing for what’s next, or professionals seeking greater clarity in their careers, The Right Altitude offers practical guidance from someone who has spent decades helping others navigate exactly those moments.
The Right Altitude: What Nobody Tells You About Being a Leader is available now in print, e-book, and audiobook formats. Readers can learn more, explore companion resources, and purchase the book at therightaltitudebook.com.
About Don Eash
Don Eash, MCC, ACTC, is an executive and career coach with Jody Michael Associates. Before becoming a coach, he spent more than 30 years in executive leadership roles with Disney, Universal, and Gateway Ticketing Systems. Don holds the Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential from the International Coaching Federation—a distinction earned by fewer than 4% of coaches worldwide—as well as the Advanced Certified Team Coach (ACTC) designation. He is the founder of Don Eash Coaching and Don Eash Press and author of The Right Altitude: What Nobody Tells You About Being a Leader.