I sat in the balcony of the Vermont Statehouse yesterday as an ungated observer.

No press credential. No assignment. No editorial filter between what I saw and what I could say about it.

The poem came first.

A member from Manchester read Amanda Gorman’s Earthrise as the morning devotional — about seeing our planet from space, about choosing hope, about an environmental movement rising like a new dawn. The chamber listened. Then it got to work.

What followed had nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with it.

I was there because I have been tracking this story for two months and I needed to feel it — not report it, not analyze it, but be inside it long enough to understand what it actually costs the people living it.

I came with more than one way of seeing — as someone who has stewarded land, who has sat inside systems, and who understands in her body what it means to be the person the official inventory doesn’t bother to count.

Rep. Mark Higley of Lowell rose and made his motion. He asked the House to relieve the Committee on Environment of House Bill 70 — a bill that has waited on the wall since January 2025, heard once, never voted on — and bring it to the floor for a vote pursuant to House Rule 51.

H.70 is a simple question dressed up in legislative language: should the 2.5 million acres of Vermont working farms and forests enrolled in the Use Value Appraisal program count toward the state’s conservation goals — specifically the path from 30% to 50% by 2050?

Vermont has committed to conserving 30% of its land by 2030 and 50% by 2050. Millions of acres of working Vermont land — managed daily, ecologically intact, enrolled in the state's own conservation program — are not counted toward the state's conservation goals. H.70 proposed to count them — as exactly what they are — a long-term land protection mechanism already doing conservation work.

The committee never voted on it. After 18 months on the wall, Higley invoked Rule 51 — a procedural mechanism that exists specifically to give the minority a path forward when a committee won’t move a bill.

The math was clear before the vote was called. He brought it anyway.

What happened next was not about H.70.

I have spent eighteen years in leadership rooms watching institutions respond to pressure. The particular pressure of a system being asked to examine itself. And what I witnessed from that balcony was one of the most precise demonstrations I have ever seen of what I call the Architecture of Certainty — the moment when a system stops asking whether it is solving the right problem and starts defending the mechanism it built to solve it.

The process became the sacred cow.

The room was flat when I arrived. Members at their desks, laptops open, half-attending. The procedural motion had been made. The outcome was already known by everyone present.

Then Alice Emmons rose.

Forty years in this building, and her voice caught. I felt it in my chest before I understood it in my mind — that particular weight of someone watching something they gave their life to feel suddenly fragile. It was heavy and palpable. The woman beside her put her hand to her mouth.

In that moment I understood what this day was actually about. Not H.70. Not Rule 51. Not the 2.5 million acres of working farmland waiting to be counted.

The sacred cow had entered the room. And its name was process.

“If we continue to do this — pulling bills out of committee — and this becomes the accepted practice and the norm, we will have destroyed this valuable general assembly here in Vermont.”

She meant it. Every word. Forty years of work, relationships, and institutional identity speaking at once. This was not performance. This was someone watching something she had helped build feel suddenly, dangerously unstable.

That is what fear looks like in an institution. I have seen it enough times to recognize the shape of it.

Others followed. The process is deliberate. The process is transparent. The process exists for a reason. The committee system is sacred. We do not pull bills from committees. This is not how we legislate policy.

Rep. R. Scott Campbell of St. Johnsbury, eight years in the chamber, offered what may have been the most telling statement of the morning:

“We live in a time of disregard for norms at the federal level, which is shocking to me and I think to many people.”

He connected a procedural motion about working farmland to the collapse of federal democratic norms. That is not a small leap. That is what fear looks like in an institution — the kind that reaches for the largest available frame when the immediate argument feels insufficient.

Rep. Thomas Stevens of Waterbury was the most direct. He voted no, he said, “to support legislative process rather than parliamentary anarchy.”

Parliamentary anarchy.

I sat with that phrase for a moment in the balcony. A motion invoked fewer than five times in forty years, using a rule that exists specifically to protect minority voices, brought by an independent co-sponsor who had watched a bill sit unvoted on for eighteen months — and the word chosen to describe it was anarchy.

I have sat with people like Rep. Stevens in leadership rooms. People who understand the power of words, who have spent careers using language with precision and purpose. When someone like that reaches for a word like anarchy, it is worth pausing to ask what the word is carrying that the argument alone cannot.

I cannot answer that question. I only know what I observed from the balcony.

The motion failed 80 to 58.

But something else was happening on that floor.

While the majority defended the institution, a handful of voices kept returning to the question underneath the procedure. And no matter how many times they were called out of order, redirected, or ruled not germane — the argument kept coming back.

Rep. Jed Lipsky of Stowe, an independent and co-sponsor of H.70, tried three times to make his case. Three times he was interrupted on points of order. Three times the Speaker reminded him to stay focused on process and not the underlying bill.

He stayed. He adjusted. And in the end he said this:

“I believe that when we make policy, we should consult and listen to those who will be most impacted by our policies. This process failed to happen.”

He was ruled in order. He voted yes.

Rep. Greg Burtt of Cabot made the argument nobody answered:

“Two legislative days ago, we voted unanimously to undo the process on that particular bill. We verified unanimously that the process didn’t work and we did it because we listened to Vermonters.”

He was referring to the unanimous repeal of Act 181 — the land use law that had triggered a statewide uprising from rural landowners. Two days earlier, every member of that chamber had agreed the process failed. Now, forty-eight hours later, process was sacred again.

No one answered that.

The silence after that argument was its own kind of data.

Rep. Gina Galfetti of Barre Town, who had made the same motion earlier in the session and watched it fail, was careful with her words.

She praised the committee process. She praised her chair. She acknowledged the institutional argument. And then she said:

She was trying to hold two things at once — respect for the institution and recognition that the institution had not served everyone equally in this case.

In my work on fear-based systems, I’ve written that courage is not the absence of fear — it is speaking with the fear present. Not as a heroic individual act but as a practiced decision to say the true thing in the room where the true thing is unwelcome. (See: Fear Is the Fuel)

Galfetti did that. She remained inside the system while refusing to pretend it was working perfectly. She didn’t blow it up. She didn’t comply silently. She threaded the needle with full awareness of what it would cost her in that room.

It didn’t change the outcome. It mattered anyway.

I want to tell you what it looked like from the balcony.

A small toy car — blue, plastic — sat on someone’s desk in the back row. I do not know why it was there. I only know it stayed there through the whole proceeding and somehow felt exactly right.

Three times the committee was called to the front of the chamber. Three times the floor broke down enough that the institution had to stop and reassert itself publicly. The third time I watched the cluster of people gathered around the dais — both sides in it now, someone taking notes in the middle, the conversations urgent and low — and thought: this is what a system looks like when it hits a wall it wasn’t built to absorb.

A woman in the gallery covered her face with both hands. Not dramatically. Just quietly, privately, done.

Rep. Jed Lipsky was cut off at the microphone. He sat down. He came back. He adjusted his argument to stay within the rules. He finished his point. He voted yes knowing he would lose.

When the final vote was called — 80 no, 58 yes — the people who had voted yes stood and spoke anyway. Not for the count. For the record. Farming is conservation. Don’t forget where you’re from. We listened to Vermonters.

I know something about work that registers in the individual and not yet in the aggregate. So do the people this bill was about.

I watched the woman at the center of it all after the vote. She was at her desk, hand to her mouth, pages of notes in front of her. She is not the villain of this story. She is the avatar of a system doing exactly what it was built to do — and living with what that costs.

I have sat across from leaders in that seat more times than I can count. The chair of the committee. The head of the division. The executive who holds the line because the line is all they know how to hold. They are not bad people. They are often the most committed people in the room — which is precisely why the system chose them and precisely why it costs them so much to carry it.

Sitting in that balcony yesterday, I had one thought about the woman at the center of it all.

I wanted to go down there and tell her there is a better way.

Not because the process doesn’t matter. It does. Not because institutions don’t need defending. They do. But because a system that was never designed to hear the people it was built to serve doesn’t need to silence them. It just needs to keep running.

And Vermont has always claimed to be something different than that.

I walked out of the Statehouse slowly.

The quotes on the walls stopped me.

“Born of a resistance to arbitrary power.” Vermont Senate Report, 1855

“Vermonters for 200 years have handed down certain attitudes of mind from generation to generation. Some folks call us old-fashioned and backward-looking for adhering to the ideals and principles characteristic of the people who settled our State. We value our heritage of ideals.” George Aiken, Governor, 1938

They called to me on the way out. Not as decoration. As witnesses. Written by people who understood that the spirit this state was founded on is not procedural. It is not institutional. It lives in the people doing the work — on the land, in the room, in the balcony — whether the official inventory counts them or not.

The quotes on the walls of the Statehouse have been there a long time.

They were written by people who understood that process is not the point. Process is the vehicle. The point is what the vehicle is supposed to carry — the voices of the people most affected by the decisions being made inside those walls.

Yesterday, the vehicle protected itself.

The people it was built to carry are still waiting outside.

Support this work at ko-fi.com/alexsysthompson

Alexsys Thompson is a consciousness-based leadership coach and investigative journalist. She writes about leadership, pattern recognition, and the systems we build and inhabit at alexsys.substack.com.

For the data behind H.70 — what Vermont’s conservation numbers actually show, and how it compares to the nine other states with 30x30 goals — watch for the forthcoming under the Vermont Investigative path of the yellow brick road.

You know it. Maybe you’ve had it for so long you stopped noticing it as a symptom and started accepting it as your baseline. You wake up already managing. Already calculating. Already running the quiet background process that checks, before you’ve had your first cup of coffee, what today requires you to hold back.

That is the cost of living inside a fear-run system long enough that its operating instructions became yours.

Nobody is tracking this. It doesn’t show up in the quarterly report. It doesn’t appear in the engagement survey because the engagement survey was designed by the same system that produced the exhaustion. It has no line item, no metric, no KPI. It is the most expensive thing your organization is paying for and it appears nowhere in the budget.

I. What It Does To The Body

The nervous system does not distinguish between a physical threat and a social one.

When you sit in a meeting knowing there is something true you cannot say, your body responds the same way it would if you were sitting across from something dangerous. Cortisol. Vigilance. The subtle but continuous activation of a system designed for emergencies, running as background infrastructure in an environment that looks, from the outside, completely ordinary.

Do that for a week and you’re tired. Do it for a month and you’re depleted. Do it for a year and something starts to go wrong that you can’t quite locate. Your sleep changes. Your patience shortens. You get sick more than you used to. You stop bringing your full attention to things that used to interest you because full attention has become a resource you can’t afford to spend freely.

This is biology, not weakness. The body was designed to respond to danger, resolve it, and return to baseline. Fear-run systems remove the resolution. The threat is always present, always ambient, never named and therefore never discharged. The body stays ready. And staying ready indefinitely costs everything it runs on.

Here is something worth knowing: this mechanism is ancient. Cognitive scientists have documented that humans are wired for agency detection — we perceive watchers even when none exist — and for authority bias — we defer to perceived power even when that power has no legitimate claim on us. Religious institutions understood this long before organizational psychology had a name for it. The idea that someone is always watching produces measurable changes in behavior even when the watcher is entirely imagined. Divine surveillance was the original nervous system hijack. Your organization didn’t invent this. It inherited it from the oldest control systems in human history.

That doesn’t make it less real in your body. It makes it more important to name. You are not experiencing a personal failure of resilience. You are running on infrastructure that has been refined across millennia specifically to keep you running on it.

The people inside these systems are often extraordinarily resilient, which is precisely why the system can extract so much from them before the cost becomes visible. Resilience in a fear-run system means you’re lasting. Thriving is something else entirely.

II. What It Does To Decisions

Fear-run systems don’t just exhaust people. They corrupt the information that decisions get made on.

Every layer of a fear-run organization is filtering what it passes upward. Not through conspiracy, through survival. People send the version of the truth that is safe to send. They frame problems in ways that don’t implicate the framework. They surface solutions that fit within the approved range of possible answers. By the time information reaches the people with the authority to act on it, it has passed through every learned silence in the building.

Leaders at the top of fear-run systems are making decisions in the dark. They believe they have a clear picture because the picture they receive looks clean. It looks clean because everyone below them has already removed the parts that would make it complicated. The complications didn’t disappear. They went underground, where they compound.

This is how institutions walk into avoidable disasters. Not because the information wasn’t there. Because the information was there and nobody sent it. Because the person who had it had already watched what happened to the last person who sent the unfiltered version.

And now consider where this ends up when it gets commercialized.

A startup called Objection.ai, backed by Peter Thiel and co-founded by the same collaborator involved in the litigation that destroyed Gawker Media, offers anyone willing to pay $2,000 the ability to file a complaint against a journalist. Former FBI, CIA, and British intelligence operatives assemble an evidence file. The journalist is invited to respond. The material goes to an AI tribunal that issues a public verdict. The result feeds into something called an Honor Index — a permanent public score attached to the journalist’s name, marketed as a measure of their integrity.

Press freedom organizations have described this as a privatized intimidation system designed to chill reporting on powerful figures. The $2,000 fee makes it accessible to corporations and political operatives at industrial scale.

This is the decision-corruption mechanism fully matured. The information that reaches the public about powerful institutions has always been shaped by what those institutions are willing to allow. What Objection.ai has done is build a product that automates and scales the filtering. The silencing gradient, which in Vermont’s legislature runs on informal signal and career consequences, here runs on intelligence operatives and algorithmic verdicts. Same mechanism. Industrial infrastructure. Available for $2,000.

The cost nobody’s tracking is the decisions that never get made on accurate information because the accurate information never arrives. In your organization that looks like a missed problem that became a crisis. At scale it looks like a permanent public score attached to the name of anyone who tried to tell the truth.

III. What It Does To The People Who Leave

Pay attention to who leaves.

Not the people who are pushed out, though they carry information too. The people who choose to leave. The ones with options, with skills, with enough self-knowledge to recognize what is happening to them before it becomes irreversible. These are disproportionately the people the organization can least afford to lose and most reliably drives away.

They leave because they did the math. The math is not complicated. What this costs me versus what this returns to me. The honest answer is that the cost has been exceeding the return for longer than they admitted to themselves. They leave because they got tired of editing themselves. They leave because they watched someone they respected get sidelined for saying the true thing and decided they didn’t want to spend the next decade making the same daily calculation about when to speak and when to go quiet.

They don’t always say this when they leave. Exit interviews in fear-run systems are not honest documents. They are the last performance of the role the person has been playing — one final calibration of what is safe to say on the way out the door. The real reasons live in the conversations they have with each other later, when they are no longer inside the system and no longer have anything to protect.

What leaves with them is more than talent and institutional knowledge. What leaves is the organization’s capacity for honest self-examination. These were the people who could still see clearly. Who hadn’t yet made the full accommodation. Who still felt the friction between what was true and what was said. When they go, the system becomes more coherent, more aligned, more efficient, and less able to see itself.

That is the system working exactly as designed.

IV. What It Does To The Mission

The cruelest part is, the people most damaged by fear-run systems are often the most committed to the mission. They stayed longer than they should have because they believed in the work. They absorbed more than they should have because walking away felt like abandoning something that mattered. They bent themselves into shapes that didn’t fit because the alternative was leaving the mission to people who cared less.

The system selects for this. The people who can be held by mission are more useful to a fear-run system than people who can’t. Commitment becomes the mechanism of extraction. The more you care, the more the system can take.

The religion piece asks a question worth sitting with: if you removed heaven and hell — if there were no cosmic rewards or punishments — how much religious adherence would remain? It is a question about whether behavior is sourced from genuine belief or from the management of consequences.

Ask it of your institution. If you removed the career consequences, the primary threat, the project defunding, the subtle sidelining — how much of the current compliance would remain as genuine commitment? How much of what looks like mission alignment is actually fear management dressed in the language of purpose?

That question is not cynical. It is the most mission-aligned question available. Because a mission carried by an exhausted, silenced, fear-managed workforce is not being served. It is being used. And the people doing the carrying usually know the difference. They just stopped saying so.

V. The Moment Someone Stops

It rarely happens dramatically.

There is rarely a single moment of clarity, a confrontation, a line crossed that makes everything suddenly obvious. More often it is quieter than that. An ordinary Tuesday. A meeting like every other meeting. Someone says something and you notice that you have stopped being surprised by it. You notice that you have not been surprised for a very long time. And something in you, some part that has been waiting with more patience than you knew you had, simply decides that it is done.

Not angry. Not righteous. Just done.

That moment is the beginning of the most disorienting passage you will move through in your professional life, because the skills that kept you safe inside the system are not the skills that will serve you outside it. The hypervigilance, the careful calibration, the expert reading of rooms — these were adaptive inside. Outside, they are the habits of someone still living in a place they have already left.

The body takes longer than the decision. You can decide to stop carrying it before your nervous system believes the threat is gone. You can know intellectually that you have unplugged before you stop checking, before you stop editing, before you stop waking up already managing.

Be patient with that. It is the body catching up to the choice you already made.

And underneath it, when the hypervigilance quiets and the calibration loosens and the editing slows, you will find something you may not have felt in a long time.

Your own voice. Unfiltered. Telling you what it actually sees.

That is what the system was running on. That is what you get back.

I encourage you to allow yourself the pause here, at the end of this piece, and feel the weight of this — your own voice, returning.

Part III: What You Build Instead — the infrastructure of courage, grace, and community, and what it actually takes to change the energy source.

Alexsys Thompson writes about leadership, pattern recognition, and the systems we build and inhabit. Graceveld.

Not is this working? It is working. The question is: working for whom?

Fear-run systems are not broken. That is the first thing to understand and probably the hardest. They are efficient, self-reinforcing, and precisely calibrated to produce exactly what they were built to produce. The confusion happens because what they produce for the many and what they produce for the few are not the same thing, and the system depends on the many not examining that distinction too closely.

Fear is how that examination gets prevented.

Not through overt threat, in the sophisticated versions. Through something quieter and more durable: a learned understanding of what dissent costs. A finely tuned awareness of which questions are welcome and which ones change how you’re perceived. A daily calibration, so internalized it no longer feels like a choice, between what you actually see and what you’re willing to say out loud.

That calibration is the fuel. And someone is burning it.

That someone is you.

I. What Fear-Run Systems Actually Produce

Let’s be specific, because specificity is what separates pattern recognition from grievance.

In Vermont’s legislature, a documented pattern has emerged that looks like this: a legislator raises concern about a piece of legislation. The reception is poor, not argued down, just poorly received. A second dissent finds them subtly sidelined. A third risks a primary challenge. No coordination required. The system self-organizes around the imperative to protect the framework. Within two or three cycles, most legislators have learned to read the signal. The silencing becomes internal. People primary themselves before anyone has to do it for them.

This is not unique to Vermont. It is not unique to politics.

In corporate institutions, the same sequence runs on a different timeline. The employee who raises a structural concern in the first quarter finds their project underfunded by the third. The manager who names a cultural problem gets labeled a poor culture fit. The executive who pushes back on a strategy the board has already decided gets managed out with a generous severance and a mutual agreement not to discuss the circumstances. Each of these moves is deniable. None of them required a meeting where anyone said silence the dissenters. The system produced the outcome because the system was built to produce it.

In nonprofits, the mechanism runs on mission. Dissent doesn’t just threaten the organization, it threatens the work. The children. The watershed. The community. Whoever the mission serves becomes the instrument of silencing. You can’t raise implementation concerns without appearing to oppose the cause. The loyalty demand is total because the stakes are framed as total. Meanwhile the framework that produced the poor implementation goes unexamined, protected by the very people whose commitment to the mission is genuine.

Different institutions. Different vocabularies. Same infrastructure. Same question worth asking: who benefits when the examination stops?

You already know the answer.

II. The Few, The Many, and The Fuel

Fear-run systems do not require villains. This distinction is important, because the moment we build villains we stop seeing the system and start prosecuting individuals, which is exactly the kind of distraction these systems are good at producing.

What they require is beneficiaries.

In every fear-run system there is a smaller group at the center. Sometimes they’re formally organized. More often they’re simply networked through shared interest, shared vision, shared stake in keeping things as they are. They didn’t build the fear and they weren’t awake enough to know it was there. Some of them are genuinely committed to the mission and have never once looked at the mechanism underneath it.

The fear serves them whether they examine it or not. It keeps the framework stable and filters out challenges before they reach the people making decisions. By the time information gets to the top it has already been sorted by everyone who learned, at some cost, what happens when you send the unfiltered version. The picture looks clean. It isn’t.

You are part of that sorting process. Every time you edit before you speak. Every time you read the room before you raise the thing. Every time you decide this is not the moment.

The many, the people actually doing the work, staffing the committees, running the programs, carrying the mission in their bodies every day, are not powerless here and that’s the thing nobody says out loud. You are the energy source. Your compliance, your daily decision to edit before you speak, to manage yourself, to call your own silence professionalism, that is the fuel. Without it the system cannot hold its shape.

That’s uncomfortable because it means participation. You would rather feel subject to the system than responsible for it. But the participation is real, and naming it isn’t an accusation. It’s the only place the leverage actually lives.

The few cannot run the system without you running on fear.

That is the rub.

III. Why You Haven’t Stopped

If you are the fuel source, why don’t you simply stop?

Because the system doesn’t just produce your compliance. It produces the conditions under which your compliance feels rational.

The first condition is isolation. Fear-run systems are extraordinarily good at ensuring you don’t compare notes. Not through surveillance, usually, through the simple structural fact that dissent is a private experience. You carry your silenced concern alone. You have no way of knowing that the person across the hall is carrying an identical one. The system looks like consensus from the inside because no one can see the suppressed data points that would reveal it as managed agreement. You think you’re the only one who sees it. You are not.

The second condition is cost visibility. The costs of speaking are immediate, concrete, and personal. The costs of silence are diffuse, slow, and institutional. You know exactly what happens when you raise the thing, you’ve watched it happen to others. You do not feel directly what it costs the organization when the thing goes unraised. That asymmetry is not accidental. It is the mechanism by which you make choices that serve the system over yourself and experience it as prudence.

The third condition is identity investment. You have wrapped your sense of purpose around this institution. To name what it is actually doing requires holding your commitment to the work alongside a clear-eyed examination of how the work is being run. Most people resolve that tension by adjusting their perception rather than their participation. The institution becomes what you need it to be, because the alternative is a grief you’re not ready for.

These three conditions are what keep you in the loop. Remove any one of them and the system becomes vulnerable. Remove all three and you stop being the fuel.

IV. What You Build Instead

Here is where most arguments like this go soft. They name the problem with precision and then offer the solution in generalities. Courage. Grace. Community. As though naming the virtues is the same as describing the work.

It isn’t. And the reason fear is such durable fuel is that replacing it requires building something the old system was specifically designed to prevent.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is speaking with the fear present. Not as a heroic individual act but as a practiced, daily decision to say the true thing in the room where the true thing is unwelcome. One person speaking is a dissident. A community that has built the practice of honest naming is a different kind of system entirely. You are not trying to be brave. You are trying to build something where honesty is structurally safer than silence.

Grace is not softness. It is the precision of seeing clearly without needing to destroy what you see. Fear-run systems train you to experience challenge as attack because the system itself responds to challenge as attack. Grace decouples those two things. You can name the pattern without making an enemy of the person running it. That is not kindness as strategy. It is accuracy. The person running it is usually also inside the system. They are not the walls. They are just closer to the center.

Community is the antidote to isolation but only if it can hold honest friction. Comfort-based community, the kind built around shared grievance or shared loyalty, reproduces the same suppression in a warmer register. What breaks the loop is community built around a shared commitment to examination. People who have agreed, before the pressure arrives, to tell each other the truth about what they’re seeing. That agreement cannot be improvised under fire. You make it now or you don’t have it when you need it.

These are not soft alternatives to fear. They are more structurally sound. Fear produces brittle systems, efficient until the first real disruption, then suddenly unable to process what they were never built to receive. What you build on courage, grace, and honest community does not shatter when the truth arrives. It was built to receive it.

V. What It Will Cost You

This is the section that has to be written, because leaving it out would be its own kind of fear.

Unplugging is not painless. The system does not release its fuel source gracefully. The mechanisms that managed your dissent do not suddenly become inoperative because you’ve decided to stop participating in your own silencing. There are real costs, professional, relational, sometimes financial, for the people who go first. You may be one of them.

Some institutions will not survive. Systems that have been running on fear long enough have no other infrastructure. Remove the fear and there is nothing holding the framework together because the framework was never built on anything else. That is not a tragedy to prevent. It is information about what the institution actually was.

Some of the people who benefited from the fear-run system will experience its deconstruction as persecution. Name that response for what it is, the discomfort of losing a structural advantage, and keep moving.

And some of you will find, in the transition, that you have internalized more of it than you knew. That the fear you were carrying was not only imposed but adopted. That your own leadership reproduces patterns you genuinely opposed. That is not a reason for despair. It is the most important thing you can discover, because you cannot build on a foundation you haven’t examined.

The transition costs something. Name it clearly, pay it consciously, and keep moving.

What you are building on the other side is worth more than what you are leaving behind.

Not because it feels better, though it will.

Because it is yours.

Alexsys Thompson writes about leadership, pattern recognition, the systems we build and inhabit, and Graceveld.

I didn’t come to investigative writing looking for self-knowledge.

I came to understand how systems work. How power moves through structure. How decisions get made before the meeting where they appear to be made. How frameworks get built, get blessed, get institutionalized — and how the people inside them stop being able to see the walls.

That’s what I was following. Architecture. Not people.

What I didn’t anticipate is what happens when you spend enough time mapping how systems foreclose — how certainty gets embedded, how dissent gets managed, how the mechanism protects itself — and you turn around and recognize the blueprint.

In yourself.

That’s where this piece starts.

I need to tell you something first.

I have been the Passionate Expert.

Not in the work I’m doing now — but in earlier chapters, in rooms I shaped, in frameworks I built and then defended past the point where defense was serving the work. I have been the person whose certainty outran her curiosity. I have dismissed concerns I should have stayed with. I have moved past voices that went quiet and told myself that meant the conversation was complete.

I didn’t know I was doing it while I was doing it. That is not an excuse. It is the actual texture of how this pattern operates — from the inside, it feels like clarity. Like finally understanding something well enough to act on it. The foreclosure doesn’t announce itself. It just gradually becomes the atmosphere.

I also know what it is to be on the other side of that dynamic. To be in the room where the framework is already decided and your job is to populate it, not question it. To learn which concerns are welcome and which ones cost too much to raise. To develop a translation layer between what you actually see and what you’re allowed to say.

I know both of these from the inside. That’s not a credential. It’s a history.

And it’s the history that makes the investigative work both possible and necessary for me — because following evidence honestly means I have to be willing to find myself in the story. Not as a subject. As a pattern I recognize.

Here is what the rigor has done that I didn’t anticipate.

It made me more permeable, not less.

I expected rigor. That part didn’t surprise me. I have always valued precision, sourcing, the commitment to get it right. What I didn’t expect was what the practice of rigor would actually require — not as a standard I held but as something I had to do in the body, in real time, every single time. Sitting with incomplete information while the pull toward resolution was present and not following it. Feeling the story want to go somewhere and asking whether that was the evidence moving or me. Correcting the record publicly while the shame was still warm. I expected the value. I did not expect what honoring it would cost in any given moment — or what it would quietly build in me over time.

The opposite happened.

When you commit to following the evidence wherever it goes, you have to stay genuinely open to being wrong. Not as a performance of humility. As a structural requirement. The story will take you somewhere you didn’t plan to go, or it won’t be the true story — it’ll be the story you already had, dressed in sourced clothing.

That practice — staying open as a discipline rather than a disposition — started bleeding into everything else.

I can amend now. Publicly, visibly, without making it a referendum on my credibility. When a piece of data turns out to be incomplete or incorrect, I correct it in the open. I feel it every time — the specific fear that being wrong in public means being seen as not worthy of reading, not worthy of the trust you placed here. That fear is not small and I am not past it. But it no longer runs the decision. The record matters more than my protection of the identity built around getting it right.

That’s new. Not the standard — I’ve held that standard for a while. The new part is doing it without the internal collapse that used to follow. The ability to be wrong without it meaning something catastrophic about who I am.

The villain thing is harder to talk about.

The pull toward villain-making is real and I’m not going to dress it up. When you’re looking at a pattern of decisions that have caused harm to real people — when the evidence is clear, when the convergence is undeniable — there is something in the psyche that wants to locate that in a person. To make it personal. To have someone be responsible in a way that feels commensurate with the damage.

I feel that pull. I still feel it.

What’s changed is what I do when I feel it.

I’ve started treating the pull itself as data — not about the story I’m investigating, but about something in me that wants resolution the evidence can’t provide. The need for a villain is usually the need for a container. A way to make the complexity manageable. A place to put the grief or the anger or the frustration of watching something that didn’t have to happen, happen anyway.

When I follow the pull, I stop reporting and start prosecuting. The story becomes about guilt rather than pattern. And that’s not only bad journalism — it’s bad faith with the people reading it, who deserve the more complicated truth.

So I’ve learned to feel the pull and not follow it. To stay with the harder question: not who did this but how does this happen, and what does it keep happening through?

That question is more useful. It’s also more forgiving — of everyone in the story, including me.

I am enjoying celebrating people now in a way I didn’t used to have full access to.

That surprised me as much as anything. I thought investigative work would make me more suspicious, more guarded, more attuned to what’s wrong. In some ways it has. But it has also made me more genuinely glad when I encounter someone doing something right — someone holding a hard question open, someone correcting the record, someone choosing complexity over convenience.

I think what happened is that the work clarified my actual values. When you spend time in the territory of what gets foreclosed and why, you develop a visceral appreciation for what it looks like when it doesn’t. Intellectual honesty becomes beautiful to me in a way it wasn’t before — not as an abstract virtue but as a living thing I can recognize when I see it. Courage is witnessed and revered.

Grace, it turns out, is easier to extend when you’ve had to practice it on yourself.

And practicing it on yourself turns out to require something I didn’t expect: rigor. Not softness. Not retreat. The willingness to follow the evidence about who you are, where you’ve caused harm, what patterns you’ve run — and to stay with that the same way you’d stay with any other investigation. Without collapsing into it. Without defending against it. Just looking clearly and amending the record where the record needs amending.

I am still inside this.

I want to be precise about that because the temptation in a piece like this is to write from the far shore — to make the learning sound more complete than it is, to offer the arc as a finished thing rather than a live one.

It isn’t finished. I still feel the pull toward certainty. I still sometimes move past a question faster than I should. I still feel the fear when I have to correct something publicly, even as I do it anyway.

What’s different is that I know what I’m feeling now. I have names for the mechanisms. I can see the pattern running in real time, which means I have a moment — sometimes just a moment — to make a different choice.

That moment is what the rigor gave me.

Not resolution. Not arrival. Just enough space between the impulse and the action to ask: is this true, or is this what I need to be true?

Most of the time, that question is enough.

Alexsys Thompson writes about leadership, pattern recognition, and the systems we build and inhabit.

That’s the first thing to understand. This isn’t a failure of perception. The closed loop doesn’t announce itself. It installs gradually, through a series of moments that each seemed reasonable in isolation — a meeting where your question got reframed, a draft where your language got replaced, a concern that got absorbed into the existing framework and returned to you unrecognizable, wearing the clothes of resolution.

You told yourself that was just how collaboration works. You told yourself the expert knew more than you. You told yourself your discomfort was yours to manage, not theirs to hear.

And each time you told yourself that, you gave something away.

This piece is about getting it back.

What the closed loop does to you

Before you can reclaim your footing, you need to see the mechanism clearly. Not to build a case against anyone. To recognize what’s been operating on you.

The Passionate Expert’s closed system doesn’t require malice to cause harm. It runs on a much more ordinary fuel: the social pressure to defer to certainty. When someone has been doing this work longer than you, knows more than you, cares more visibly than you — or at least more loudly — the system trains you to treat your own perception as the variable most likely to be wrong.

Watch for these specific moves. They are not always intentional. They are always effective.

The reframe. You raise a concern. The concern gets translated — sometimes mid-sentence — into a different concern, one that fits the existing framework and can be answered within it. Your actual question never gets addressed. The conversation moves on. You’re left wondering if you asked the wrong thing.

The absorption. Your dissent gets incorporated. Partially. Enough that it looks like it was heard. But when you see the output, the thing you were actually pointing at is gone. What remains is a version of your input that confirms what was already decided. You learn that speaking up produces the appearance of inclusion without the substance of it.

The urgency shield. There isn’t time for this conversation right now. The stakes are too high. This is too important to slow down. The implicit message: your doubt is a luxury the work can’t afford. Urgency becomes the reason your perception never gets a full hearing.

The loyalty test. Dissent gets coded — subtly, sometimes not subtly — as a failure of commitment to the cause. You’re not just questioning a decision. You’re questioning the work, the mission, the people who depend on it. The social cost of continuing to push rises. You learn to pick your battles. Then you learn to have fewer battles. Then you learn to stop naming what you see.

The expertise asymmetry. You don’t have the credentials. You haven’t been doing this as long. Your concerns, however legitimate, get filed under doesn’t fully understand the complexity. You start prefacing everything with apologies for your own perspective. You start believing them.

Each of these moves does the same thing: it locates the problem in you. Your timing, your understanding, your commitment, your expertise. The framework itself remains unexamined. The certainty remains intact.

And you get smaller.

Recognition: the inventory

Here is how you know it’s happened.

You rehearse before you speak. Not because you want to be clear — because you’re calculating what’s safe to say and what isn’t. You have a running internal edit in every meeting, a version of your thoughts that you translate before they leave your mouth.

You’ve stopped saying certain things altogether. Not because you no longer think them. Because you learned, through enough unrewarded attempts, that saying them costs more than it returns.

You feel relieved when a meeting ends without incident. Not satisfied, not energized — relieved. The absence of conflict has become your metric for a good day.

You explain other people’s skepticism away on the expert’s behalf. When someone outside the system raises the thing you’ve been thinking, you hear yourself providing the context, the complexity, the reasons the concern doesn’t quite land the way it seems. You have become an extension of the closed loop.

You have a different voice with people you trust outside this system. More direct. More certain. More like yourself. The gap between that voice and the one you use inside the work has become wide enough that you notice it.

You can’t remember the last time your perspective changed something real.

If you’re reading this list and feeling it land — that recognition is not a problem. That recognition is your perception working correctly. It is the first evidence that you have not fully abandoned yourself, even if it feels like you have.

Action: the spectrum

The path back to yourself does not require a single dramatic move. It requires a series of intentional ones, calibrated to your situation and what you can actually sustain. There is no hierarchy here between quiet and loud, stay and leave. There is only aligned action — what is true for you, taken at the level you can hold.

Quiet actions

Start with your own record. Begin writing down what you actually observe — not your interpretation, not the framework-compatible version, but the raw data. What happened. What was said. What changed. What didn’t. This is not a grievance document. It is a restoration of your own perception. You are training yourself to trust what you see again.

Stop translating your concerns into the system’s language before you raise them. Say the actual thing, in your actual words, once. Not as a confrontation — as a contribution. Notice what happens. The response will tell you more about the system than any amount of internal analysis.

Find one other person inside the loop who you suspect sees what you see. You are probably not the only one. You have probably been performing certainty at each other. A single honest conversation — I’ve been noticing something, I don’t know if you have too — can end an isolation that has been costing both of you more than you knew.

Reestablish your external reference points. Talk to people outside this system about your work. Not to vent, not to build a case — to hear your own thoughts reflected back through a frame that isn’t the closed loop. You need external calibration when the internal environment has become distorted.

Loud actions

If you have positional standing, use it with precision. Not to dismantle — to interrupt a specific pattern, in a specific moment, with a specific ask. I want to make sure we’re hearing the concern that was just raised before we move on. Can we stay with it for a moment? That single move, made consistently, changes what the room learns is possible.

Name the pattern, not the person. I notice we tend to move past dissent quickly in these conversations. I think we lose something when we do that. This is not an accusation. It is an observation about the system’s behavior. It invites examination without requiring anyone to defend themselves. It is also very hard to absorb and reframe, because it’s not a content disagreement — it’s a process observation.

If you have tried quiet action and it has not moved anything, say so directly to the person running the system. Not as a confrontation — as a clear statement of what you’ve experienced and what you need. I’ve raised this a few times and I don’t think it’s landing. I want to try again more directly. You are not attacking the work. You are asking to be in actual relationship with the person, not just a function inside their framework.

Stay or leave

This is the question underneath all the others, and it deserves to be asked clearly rather than lived around indefinitely.

Staying is not the same as abandoning yourself. Leaving is not the same as giving up on the work. The question is whether what you are doing inside this system is costing you more than it is returning — in your own integrity, in your actual influence, in your capacity to do work that is real.

Some closed loops can be interrupted from inside. Some cannot. The difference is usually not the depth of the expert’s certainty — it is whether the institution around them has enough independent function to respond to pressure that doesn’t come through the expert’s framework. If it does, you have leverage. If every channel runs through the closed loop, your leverage is limited to what you can model and witness — which still matters, but has a ceiling.

The question to sit with is not should I stay or leave. It is: what am I willing to do here, and is that enough to keep me whole?

If the answer is yes, stay and do that thing with full commitment.

If the answer is no, leave without making yourself wrong for leaving. The work needs people who are intact. If this system is making you less intact, your departure is not abandonment. It is preservation of something the work will need somewhere else.

What you are not

You are not too sensitive.

You are not failing to understand the complexity.

You are not disloyal to the cause because you can see the closed loop operating inside it.

You are not the problem that needs managing.

What you are is a person whose perception has been working correctly in an environment that trained you to doubt it. The doubt was the system protecting itself. The perception was yours all along.

Getting yourself back starts with believing that.

The flinch you felt reading the list of mechanisms — the recognition, the slight nausea, the yes, that — that is not weakness. That is the part of you that never fully agreed to the arrangement.

Start there. Everything else follows.

Alexsys Thompson writes about leadership, pattern recognition, and the systems we build and inhabit.

Not arrogant, exactly. Arrogance is self-aware at its edges — it knows it’s performing. This is different. This is the person who has spent years, sometimes decades, building genuine expertise in a domain they love. Who has read everything, attended everything, testified, consulted, shaped. Who can walk into any room and speak with the fluency of someone who has earned their convictions.

This is the Passionate Expert. And in the right conditions, they are extraordinary.

In the wrong conditions, they are a system waiting to capture something.

What the mirror shows

If you recognize yourself here, stay with that recognition a moment before you move past it.

The Passionate Expert doesn’t set out to foreclose anything. The origin story is almost always clean: a problem that needed solving, a system that was broken, a gap that nobody else was willing to name. You stepped into it because you cared, because you were qualified, because the work was real.

And the work was real. That part isn’t in question.

What changes — gradually, invisibly — is the relationship between the passion and the inquiry. In the early years, your expertise serves your curiosity. You know enough to ask better questions. But at some point, for many people in this archetype, the ratio inverts. The knowing begins to crowd out the asking. Your pattern recognition — which is genuinely sophisticated — starts running ahead of the evidence and filling in the gaps with conclusions you’ve already reached.

You stop noticing you’ve done this, because the conclusions feel so well-earned.

This is not a character flaw. It is what happens to expertise that isn’t regularly stress-tested by dissent. It is what happens when the rooms you’re in stop pushing back — because you’re the expert, because you’ve been at this longer than anyone, because challenging you feels like challenging the cause itself.

The passion becomes the argument for certainty. And certainty, over time, becomes a closed system.

Ask yourself: When did you last genuinely update? Not refine, not incorporate compatible evidence — but actually change direction because something you encountered didn’t fit your model? If you can’t name it, that’s data.

The moment of recognition and what to do with it

If you’re still reading, something landed.

Maybe it was the line about updating. Maybe it was the image of the rooms that stopped pushing back. Maybe it was quieter than that — just a shift in your chest, a small interior flinch that you almost moved past.

That flinch is not a verdict. It is an opening.

Here is what not to do with it: don’t turn it into a case against yourself. The Passionate Expert who discovers this pattern in themselves has a particular vulnerability — the same intensity that built the closed system will now build an airtight argument for self-condemnation if you let it. That is just the archetype running in a different direction. It is not accountability. It is not change.

Here is what the off-ramp actually looks like.

It starts smaller than you want it to. Not a public reckoning, not a dismantling, not a reversal of everything you’ve built. It starts with one conversation you’ve been avoiding — the person whose pushback you dismissed, the question you reframed as obstruction, the voice that went quiet and you told yourself that meant consent.

You don’t go into that conversation to confess or to defend. You go in to listen. Specifically, to ask: what did you see that I wasn’t able to hear at the time? And then you stay in the answer. You don’t explain. You don’t contextualize. You let what they experienced be true for the full length of the conversation.

That single practice — done once, with one person, without the apparatus of your expertise engaged — begins to rewire the architecture.

The second step is structural. Find one person in your current work who disagrees with your core framework and give them a genuine seat at the table. Not a courtesy seat. Not a seat where their dissent gets heard and then absorbed into your existing conclusions. A seat with actual weight — where their challenge can change something real. If you can’t identify anyone who disagrees with your core framework, that is your most important data point.

The third step is the hardest. It is sitting with the question of what the work looks like if you hold it more loosely. Not abandoning it. Not reversing it. Just: what would you do differently if you weren’t certain? What would you ask? Who would you include? What evidence would you go looking for that you haven’t gone looking for?

This is not weakness. This is the difference between expertise that serves the work and expertise that has become the work.

The recognition you just had is rare. Most people in this archetype never get here. The ones who do — who feel that flinch and stay with it instead of moving past it — are the leaders who become genuinely useful to the systems they care about.

The passion doesn’t have to go. The certainty does.

What the path looks like from inside it

There are people who tried to slow this down.

They may not have had the vocabulary to name what they were seeing. They may have raised concerns that got reframed as resistance, or opposition, or a failure to understand the complexity of what you were building. They may have asked questions that felt obstructionist in the moment — questions about who bears the cost, about what gets lost, about whether the map you were using matched the actual territory.

Some of them stopped asking. Some of them left rooms. Some of them watched something they valued get reshaped by a process they didn’t fully understand, driven by someone who was absolutely certain they were doing good work.

They were right that you were doing work. They were right that it was real.

What they couldn’t get you to see — and this is the specific damage this archetype leaves — is that the certainty itself had become the problem. Not the expertise. Not even the direction. The refusal to hold the work loosely enough to let it be questioned.

The Passionate Expert in full force doesn’t experience this as refusing. They experience it as protecting. There’s a cause at stake. There are years of work on the line. There are people depending on this going right. The urgency is real, the stakes are real, and so every interruption reads as a threat to something genuinely important.

That is exactly the cognitive architecture that makes impact so hard to interrupt.

The people in the path aren’t collateral damage in any intentional sense. They’re just not fully visible to someone moving that fast, that sure, toward something that important. Invisibility is its own kind of harm.

What the system sees

This is where the analysis gets structural.

Institutions — committees, agencies, legislative bodies, planning processes — are not good at resisting the Passionate Expert. They are, in fact, almost perfectly designed to be captured by one.

Here’s the pattern: expertise is scarce, so the person who has it gets elevated. The elevated person shapes the framing. The framing determines what questions get asked. The questions determine what evidence gets gathered. The evidence — assembled by or through the expert — confirms the framework the expert brought in. The policy, the rule, the regulation, the plan reflects not the full complexity of the territory but the map the expert was already holding.

This is not conspiracy. It requires no bad faith. It requires only that an institution mistake the presence of expertise for the presence of neutrality — and that the expert mistake their passion for objectivity.

The compounding factor is this: the Passionate Expert often is right about the problem. The diagnosis is frequently accurate. What gets distorted is the solution set — narrowed to what fits the expert’s framework, filtered through their certainties, stripped of the local knowledge and competing values that didn’t make it into the room.

The result is policy that works in the model and fractures on contact with the actual ground.

And because the expert genuinely cares, the fractures get explained as implementation problems, as resistance from people who don’t understand, as the inevitable friction of important change. The model remains intact. The certainty survives.

This is the institutional damage: not the work that was done, but the work that became impossible to do once a closed system occupied the space.

The Graceful interruption

The antidote to this archetype is not less expertise. It is not less passion. The world needs people who know things deeply and care about them fiercely.

The antidote is a specific kind of interior practice that the Passionate Expert is uniquely resistant to, because it asks them to hold their certainty as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.

It sounds simple. It is not simple. It requires sitting with the discomfort of not-knowing in a domain where you have earned the right to know. It requires treating dissent as information rather than opposition. It requires asking — genuinely, not rhetorically — what would have to be true for me to be wrong about this? And then staying in that question long enough for an actual answer to surface.

It requires understanding that your expertise is an asset to the work only as long as it stays in conversation with the reality you’re trying to serve. The moment it becomes the lens through which all other input gets evaluated and filtered, it has become a liability.

The leaders who navigate this archetype well are recognizable. They carry their expertise lightly in rooms — not performing humility, but genuinely curious about what the room knows that they don’t. They can be moved. They’ve been wrong before and they say so specifically, not as a rhetorical gesture but as a lived record they keep.

They understand that the quality of the outcome depends not on the quality of their certainty, but on the quality of the questions they’re still willing to ask.

Passion without that practice is just a faster road to a closed system.

The work is keeping the door open. Especially when you’re sure you already know what’s on the other side.

Alexsys Thompson writes about leadership, pattern recognition, and the systems we build and inhabit.

Every flock has one. Or has had one. And if you’ve spent any time around a rooster you already know that he is a lot. Loud. Territorial. Absolutely convinced that the entire operation would collapse without him. He will crow at 4am to make sure everyone knows he’s there. He will puff up to three times his actual size over absolutely nothing. He will patrol the perimeter with the energy of someone who has just been given a title and a parking spot.

Let’s be honest about something first though: he is stunning.

The rooster is the most visually arresting creature in the entire flock. Nature dressed him that way on purpose — the iridescent feathers, the dramatic tail, the commanding comb. He was designed to attract attention before he does a single thing of substance. Biology gave him the ultimate personal brand package and he knows it.

And I don’t find that entirely unique to the barnyard.

We live in a world that has long rewarded the performance of capability over its actual presence. The leader with the perfect LinkedIn profile and the expensive suit and the hair that says I have arrived. The executive who commands the room not because of what they’ve built but because of how they’ve curated the appearance of having built it. Pretense dressed up as presence. Decoration mistaken for depth.

The rooster’s beauty is real — I want to be clear about that. Those feathers are genuinely magnificent. But beauty and leadership are not the same thing, and a flock that chooses its leader based on plumage is a flock in trouble.

The hens are not fooled. They appreciate the feathers. They are not led by them.

And here’s the complicated truth: sometimes he’s completely right.

A good rooster is genuinely valuable. He watches the sky for hawks while the hens have their heads down eating. He finds food and calls the flock over before he eats himself. He positions himself on the outside edge of the group when danger is near. When he’s doing his actual job, he is protection, provision, and presence all at once.

But a bad rooster? A bad rooster is just noise with feathers.

He’s not watching the sky — he’s performing watchfulness. He’s not calling the flock to food — he’s crowing to remind everyone he exists. He mistakes volume for authority and aggression for strength. And the hens — who are far more perceptive than he gives them credit for — know the difference immediately. They don’t feel safer around him. They feel exhausted.

I have met this rooster in every industry I have ever worked in.

He sits at the head of the table. He talks the most and listens the least. He interrupts not because he has something urgent to say but because silence feels like a threat to his position. He confuses activity with impact and presence with leadership. And the people around him — who are far more perceptive than he gives them credit for — are not inspired. They are managing him.

Here is what the hen house taught me about the cock in the room:

The flock always knows.

They know if you’re watching the sky or just pretending to. They know if you found the food or just showed up when someone else did. They know if your protection is real or performed. You cannot fake it with a flock and you cannot fake it with a team. Not for long. Not where it counts.

This is the Evolving tenet at its most raw — the relentless pursuit of aligning who you are with what you do. The rooster who has done that work is genuinely extraordinary to watch. Calm under pressure. Generous with resources. Protective without being controlling. He leads from actual strength, not from the fear of being seen as weak.

And this is the Connecting tenet too — the move from “I” to “we.” The bad rooster never makes that move. Everything is about reinforcing his position at the center. The good rooster has already decided the flock matters more than his ego. That shift changes everything.

The hens don’t need a rooster to perform for them.

They need one who actually shows up.

And if you’re reading this and wondering which kind of rooster you are — the fact that you’re asking the question probably tells you something important.

Basyl certainly knows the answer. She always does.

She’s been watching from the roost bar this whole time, calm and certain and completely unbothered, one corrective peck at the ready if needed.

Just one.

That’s all it ever takes.

Welcome to Chickenville. Mind the sign on your way out. 🐔

When new birds arrive at Chickenville, they don’t just get dropped into the flock. That’s a rookie mistake that ends badly for everyone. Instead they get their own space — a fenced area inside the larger yard where the established flock can see them, walk past them, observe them. No contact. Just visibility.

Ten days of it.

And here is where it gets interesting. Within hours of the newcomers arriving, you can tell everything you need to know about every bird in that yard by watching how they respond to the fence.

Some hens walk over and start pecking through the wire. Not playing. Not curious. Just establishing dominance over birds who can’t fight back yet. I’ve seen that same energy in every organization I’ve ever worked with — the insecure team member who starts undermining the new hire before they’ve even had their first day. The leader who feels threatened by new talent and starts creating obstacles before the person gets through the door. Same bird. Different feathers.

And then there’s Basyl.

She walks over and says hello.

Not aggressively. Not performatively. She simply goes over, takes a look, and communicates something that can only be described as you’re going to be fine here. The new birds visibly settle when she does this. I have watched it happen more times than I can count. The head hen’s welcome changes the nervous system of the whole situation.

There is always one bird on the inside too — among the newcomers, before anyone knows who they are yet or what role they’ll play — who steps forward to meet Basyl at the fence. Steps up to protect the others. Stands their ground without aggression. You don’t know their gender yet. You don’t know what they’ll become. But you see them choose courage before they have any reason to trust the environment, and you think: there’s a leader in there.

Leadership announces itself early. Even through a fence.

In the second week, I place food near the wire so both sides can eat from the same dish — the flock reaching in, the newcomers eating from inside. A shared resource. A common experience. No forced contact, just the slow building of familiarity through something as simple and universal as eating together.

Then one night, when the flock is roosting and calm and the lights are low, I place the new birds on the roost bars beside them in the dark.

And in the morning it is like they were always there.

No fanfare. No formal introduction. No all-hands meeting where everyone is forced to smile and pretend they’re thrilled about the change. Just belonging, arrived quietly in the night, and accepted by morning light.

The best integrations I have ever witnessed in organizations work exactly the same way. Visibility before access. Familiarity before immersion. Time for the existing culture to breathe while something new finds its footing. And then one day you look up and you cannot imagine the team without that person in it.

Rushing it breaks it. Every time. In the hen house and in the boardroom.

Basyl knows this. She has always known this.

She went over and said hello on day one — and by doing so, she told every bird in that yard exactly what kind of flock this was going to be.

That is the Co-Creating tenet in feathers and straw. Surrounding yourself with different talent. Demonstrating the ability to both lead and follow. Building something new together rather than just absorbing it.

The new birds didn’t join Basyl’s flock.

They became it.

Basyl came into this world in my hands — I hatched her myself — which means I’ve had a front row seat to her entire leadership arc. And I can tell you with complete certainty that nobody appointed her head hen. There was no vote, no interview process, no title bestowed. One day the flock just... organized itself around her.

She’s dark feathered, a little ragged looking if I’m being honest, and she stares at you like she’s already three moves ahead. Which she is.

What made the flock choose her? Not her looks. Not her size. Not the volume of her clucking.

It was her certainty.

She moves through the yard like she belongs there — because she knows she does. She doesn’t perform confidence, she inhabits it. There’s a difference, and every living creature in that yard can feel it. Chickens, it turns out, are exquisite detectors of authenticity.

I’ve watched other hens try to claim the top spot. They puff up, they posture, they make a lot of noise. The flock ignores them. Because the flock isn’t looking for the loudest or the flashiest — they’re looking for the one who is most sure of herself.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what Basyl taught me about leadership that no business book ever did:

She corrects, but she doesn’t punish.

When another hen steps out of line — gets too aggressive with a younger bird, tries to claim more than her share — Basyl intervenes with exactly one peck. Clear. Direct. Proportional. And then she walks away. No drama, no prolonged display of dominance, no making an example out of anyone.

One peck. Adjust. Move on.

I’ve sat in executive meetings where a leader has flogged a team member for twenty minutes over a mistake that warranted thirty seconds of redirection. I’ve watched managers make public examples out of people to establish dominance the way those posturing hens do — loud, performative, ultimately ineffective.

Basyl never does that. She doesn’t need to.

This is what the third tenet of Graceful Leadership calls Transparency — leading from your authentic self rather than from a performed version of authority. Basyl doesn’t base her sense of self on others’ perceptions of her. She doesn’t need the flock to fear her. She needs them to trust her. And they do.

She is also what I call Compassionately Powerful — she influences through an open presence and a clear agenda. She creates room for flow while maintaining structure. One peck. That’s her clear agenda. The flow that follows is the whole flock adjusting, recalibrating, returning to harmony.

Are you leading from confidence or from performance?

Because your team — like a flock — can tell the difference. They are exquisite detectors of authenticity too. They know when you’re sure of yourself and when you’re faking it. They know when your correction comes from clarity and when it comes from ego. They know when you’re the head hen and when you’re just making noise.

Basyl never makes noise she doesn’t mean.

She has been with me from the beginning — hatched in my hands, grown into the most grounded creature in my yard. And every single time I watch her move through that flock, certain and calm and completely herself, I think:

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Not the prettiest. Not the loudest. Not the most decorated.

Just the most sure.

They’re about who you become.

Or more accurately: who you lose sight of while trying to become the leader you think you’re supposed to be.

In my coaching work, these are the conversations that happen late in our sessions. After we’ve addressed the tactical issues—the bad meetings, the communication breakdowns, the team dynamics. After the surface problems are solved and we get to what’s underneath.

That’s when leaders admit: “I don’t actually know what I want anymore.”

Or: “I’ve been pretending to understand things for so long, I’ve forgotten how to ask for help.”

Or: “I’m climbing toward something I’m not even sure I want.”

Or: “I don’t know who I am outside of this job.”

These are the identity fails. The times when the role consumes the person. When leaders optimize their entire lives for a version of success they never actually chose. When they perform certainty to cover uncertainty, build in their own image without realizing it, and project their dysfunction onto everyone around them.

This is Part 4: The fails that happen when you lose yourself in trying to lead.

Plus one bonus fail—because sometimes your personal dysfunction becomes everyone else’s problem.

Fail #10: Faking It Instead of Admitting Not Knowing

A leader I coached had no idea what they were talking about.

They were in a strategy meeting. Someone used an acronym they’d never heard. Then referenced a framework they didn’t know. Then built on both of those things to make a point that everyone else seemed to understand.

And they nodded.

Like they knew exactly what it meant.

Then someone turned to them: “What do you think?”

And instead of saying “Actually, can you back up? I’m not familiar with that framework”—they just... started talking.

They used confident language. They referenced something adjacent that they did know. They spoke in that particular tone that sounds like expertise.

And they got away with it.

The meeting moved on. No one questioned them. They’d successfully faked their way through.

And they felt like shit.

The Pattern They Couldn’t Stop

It wasn’t just that one meeting.

It was conversation after conversation where they pretended to know things they didn’t.

It was saying “Yes, that makes sense” when it absolutely did not make sense.

It was nodding through explanations they didn’t understand, then frantically Googling afterward to figure out what people had been talking about.

It was building presentations based on concepts they only half-grasped, using language that sounded authoritative to cover up that they were genuinely unsure.

They were in constant performance mode. Every interaction was a test they were desperately trying to pass without anyone discovering they didn’t know the answers.

Why They Couldn’t Just Say It

Because saying “I don’t know” felt like admitting they didn’t belong there.

Everyone else seemed so confident. So sure. So fluent in all these concepts and frameworks and strategic approaches.

If they admitted they didn’t know something, wouldn’t that prove they’d been promoted beyond their competence? That they were a fraud who’d somehow convinced people they were more capable than they actually were?

Better to fake it. Better to act certain. Better to let people believe they knew what they were doing while they scrambled behind the scenes to catch up.

The Moment It Broke

There was a meeting where someone asked them a direct question about something they genuinely didn’t understand.

They started to do their usual thing—use confident language, redirect, act knowledgable.

And then they saw someone on their team watching them respond with this look that they recognized because they’d worn it themselves: Oh, she knows. I’m the only one who doesn’t understand this.

In that moment, they realized: their faking wasn’t just about protecting themselves.

It was teaching everyone else to fake it too.

What Their Pretending Cost

When you’re a leader and you fake knowledge, you don’t just hide your own gaps. You create an environment where everyone else has to hide theirs too.

Because if the leader can’t admit not knowing, how can anyone else?

If they’re performing certainty in meetings, what does that teach their team? That knowledge is expected. That not understanding is weakness. That admitting confusion is a career-limiting move.

They were creating a culture of pretending. Where everyone performed expertise and no one asked real questions because asking questions would reveal that you didn’t already know.

They were all faking it, hoping to make it, and calling it professionalism.

Why Leaders Do This

Because we’re told to “fake it till you make it.” It sounds like confidence advice. Like you’re supposed to project certainty even when you don’t feel it, and eventually you’ll grow into the role.

But here’s what actually happens:

You fake it. And fake it. And fake it some more.

You never actually make it because you’re too busy acting “as if” to actually learn.

You build an entire leadership persona based on pretending, and it becomes harder and harder to admit when you don’t know something because you’ve invested so much in the performance.

The impostor syndrome doesn’t go away. It gets worse. Because now you’re managing not just your own gaps, but the elaborate fiction you’ve constructed to hide them.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Says it. Just says it.

“I’m not familiar with that. Can you explain it?”

“I don’t understand. Can you walk me through that?”

“I’m not sure I follow. Can you say more?”

A graceful leader understands that “I don’t know” isn’t a confession of inadequacy. It’s the starting point of learning. It’s the thing that turns a fake conversation into a real one.

The leaders who changed everything weren’t the ones who knew everything. They were the ones who could say “I don’t know, let’s figure it out together” without their voice shaking.

They were the ones who modeled that curiosity is more valuable than false certainty.

They were the ones who made space for not knowing without making it mean you were failing.

Action

What are you pretending to know right now?

What conversation are you nodding through without actually understanding?

What would happen if you just... said it?

“I don’t know.” “I’m not familiar with that.” “Can you explain what you mean?” “I’m not sure I understand.”

Maybe the thing you’re most afraid of—being revealed as someone who doesn’t know everything—is actually the thing that would make you most effective.

Maybe the impostor syndrome isn’t the problem.

Maybe the pretending is.

Fail #11: Believing Everyone Sees the World Like You Do

I coached a leader who was furious with someone on their team.

They’d agreed on a plan. Clear action items. Clear timeline. It was straightforward—or so the leader thought.

Two weeks later, nothing had happened.

When they asked about it, the team member seemed confused. “Oh, I didn’t realize you meant we were doing that now. I thought we were just discussing it as an option.”

The leader stared at them. “How was that not clear? We literally laid out next steps.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t explicitly say ‘go do this.’ You asked what I thought we should do. So I thought we were still in the exploratory phase.”

The leader was baffled. How could they have misread that so completely?

And then, in our coaching session, it hit them: The team member didn’t misread it. They just have completely different operating systems.

The Invisible Assumptions

Here’s what the leader thought was universal—what they assumed everyone else understood the same way they did:

When they said “What do you think we should do?” they meant: “I want your input before I make a decision, but we’re moving forward imminently.”

When they were quiet in meetings, it meant they were processing and thinking. Not that they disagreed or were disengaged.

When they sent a message after hours, they didn’t expect a response until the next business day. That’s just when they happened to work.

When they gave someone autonomy, it meant they trusted them. Not that they didn’t care or weren’t paying attention.

Those things felt obvious to the leader. Self-evident. The way things work.

Except they’re not universal at all.

The Team Member’s Operating System

For the team member:

“What do you think we should do?” meant: “We’re brainstorming. No decisions have been made.”

Silence in a meeting meant something was wrong. Speak up or people assume agreement.

A message after hours meant urgency. Required immediate attention.

Autonomy meant: “Figure it out yourself, I’m not going to help you.”

None of these interpretations were wrong. They just weren’t the leader’s.

And because the leader assumed everyone operated like them, they never explained. Never clarified. Never checked.

They just expected the team member to read their mind—or more accurately, to have the same mind as them.

The Pattern They Couldn’t See

This wasn’t just about one team member.

The leader kept having the same confusion with different people:

“Why didn’t they just ask if they didn’t understand?” (Because in their world, asking questions means you weren’t listening the first time.)

“Why are they waiting for permission when I already gave them autonomy?” (Because in their world, autonomy comes with explicit boundaries, not implied ones.)

“Why do they seem stressed when I’m being flexible about deadlines?” (Because in their world, flexible means unclear, and unclear means risk.)

Every time, the leader was baffled. Every time, they thought the other person was the one misunderstanding.

It never occurred to them that they were the one assuming their perspective was the default.

Why Leaders Do This

Because their way of seeing the world—the thing that feels most natural and obvious to them—is actually highly specific and not at all universal.

When someone doesn’t understand them, leaders think it’s because the other person is dense. Not because they’re speaking in their dialect and assuming it’s the universal language.

Clarity isn’t about how well the leader understands something. It’s about how well others can understand it through their framework, not the leader’s.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Assumes nothing is obvious.

When they want something done, they say: “I need you to do X by Y date. Here’s why it matters and here’s what success looks like.”

When they’re giving autonomy, they say: “This is yours to run. Here’s the boundary of your decision-making authority. Here’s when to loop me in. Here’s how I’ll stay informed.”

When they’re processing, they say: “I’m thinking about this. My silence doesn’t mean disagreement—I’m just working through it.”

When they ask for input, they say: “I’m asking for your perspective because it will inform my decision. But to be clear: I’m the one making the final call.”

It feels like over-communicating. It feels almost condescending sometimes.

But you know what it eliminates? All the confusion. All the “I thought you meant...” All the wasted time and damaged trust that comes from assuming people think like you.

A graceful leader does the work of translation. Of taking their internal logic and making it external and explicit.

They recognize that the people who think most differently from them—who don’t share their operating system—are often the ones who will push them to be clearer, more thoughtful, more effective.

Action

What do you think is obvious that probably isn’t?

What’s your operating system that you’re assuming is everyone’s?

Where are you frustrated with people for not understanding something you never actually explained—you just assumed they’d know because you know?

Before you communicate anything important, ask yourself: “Am I being clear by my standards or by theirs?”

And what would change if you stopped assuming and started translating?

Maybe the communication problem isn’t that they’re not listening.

Maybe it’s that you’re speaking in a dialect only you understand.

And calling it clarity.

Fail #12: Climbing the Ladder Against the Wrong Wall

A leader came to coaching because they’d achieved everything they were supposed to want.

VP title. Team of 50. Strategic influence. Compensation they’d never imagined when they started their career.

And they felt... nothing.

Not pride. Not satisfaction. Not even relief.

Just this hollow awareness: I don’t even know if I wanted this.

The Ladder They Never Questioned

Here’s what they knew how to do: identify the next rung and climb toward it.

Analyst to Senior Analyst. Senior Analyst to Manager. Manager to Senior Manager. Senior Manager to Director. Director to VP.

Each promotion was proof they were doing it right. Moving forward. Being successful.

They never stopped to ask: Toward what?

They just knew you were supposed to climb. Everyone around them was climbing. So they climbed too.

Better title. Better pay. Better office. More people reporting to them. More access to leadership. More responsibility.

But for what? In service of what?

They had no idea.

The Question They Avoided

People would ask them: “What do you want to do? What’s your vision?”

And they’d give the answer they thought people wanted: “I want to lead at scale. I want to drive strategy. I want to shape the direction of the organization.”

All true-sounding. All completely hollow.

Because the real answer was: “I don’t know. I just know I’m supposed to want to keep moving up.”

They’d spent 15 years climbing and they’d never once stopped to ask themselves: What am I actually trying to build? What impact do I want to have? What would make this feel meaningful instead of just successful?

They just kept climbing. Because stopping felt like failure.

The Wall They Discovered Too Late

That VP role? It was the wrong wall.

Not wrong for everyone. Just wrong for them.

Everything they’d been climbing toward—authority, scope, strategic influence—turned out to be things they didn’t actually value that much.

What they loved was mentoring people one-on-one. Deep conversations about growth. Creating things with their own hands. Solving specific, tangible problems.

None of which required a VP title. None of which they were doing anymore at the VP level.

They’d optimized their entire career for outcomes they didn’t actually want.

They’d confused “what you’re supposed to want” with “what I actually want.”

And by the time they figured it out, they were at the top of a ladder leaning against the wrong wall.

Why Leaders Do This

Because they follow the path that makes sense from the outside.

When people ask “What’s next for you?” they look at who’s ahead of them and say “That.”

When they feel unfulfilled, they assume it means they need to climb higher. Achieve more. Get to the next level where the real satisfaction will be.

They never stop to consider that maybe the dissatisfaction isn’t about how high they’ve climbed. Maybe it’s about what they’re climbing toward.

They’re so focused on the ladder that they never look at the wall.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Stops climbing long enough to ask: Is this the wall I want to be on?

They interrogate what success actually means to them. Not what it should mean. Not what looks impressive. But what would actually make this feel worthwhile.

They admit when they’re on the wrong wall. And they have the courage to start over.

Not because they failed. But because they finally figured out what they’re actually trying to do.

And it turns out, it’s not this.

A graceful leader knows their mission. Not what they’re supposed to want. But what actually lights them up when nobody’s watching.

It’s not what sounds impressive when you say it out loud. It’s what feels true when you’re alone with yourself and they align their lives to it.

Action

Do you know what your mission is?

Not what you’re supposed to want. Not what would sound good in an interview. Not what people expect from someone at your level.

But what actually matters to you? What you’re actually trying to build? What would make all this effort feel worthwhile?

And if you don’t know—if you’ve been climbing without a clear sense of toward what—maybe it’s time to stop.

Get off the ladder for a minute. Look around. Ask yourself:

Is this the wall I want to be climbing?

Or have I just been climbing because that’s what you do?

Sometimes the bravest leadership move isn’t climbing higher.

It’s admitting you’re on the wrong wall. And having the courage to start over.

Not because you failed. But because you finally figured out what you’re actually trying to do.

Find a coach to support this internal journey around values and mission awareness and alignment.

BONUS Fail #13: The 3AM Emails (Projecting Your Lack of Balance)

A leader I coached sent an email at 2:47am.

Not because it was urgent. Not because anyone needed it at 2:47am. But because they were awake, thinking about work, and it felt productive to get it out of their head.

They told themselves it was fine. They even added a note at the bottom: “No need to respond until morning—just sending this while I’m thinking about it!”

As if that disclaimer absolved them of what they were actually doing.

The Story They Told Themselves

They didn’t have good work-life balance. They knew that. They’d never been good at boundaries.

They thought about work constantly. They woke up at 3am with ideas. They worked on weekends because it’s when they had quiet time to think. They answered emails at all hours because their brain doesn’t turn off.

But that’s their choice. Their preference. The way they operate.

They weren’t asking anyone else to work like this. They were just... being themselves.

And that note at the bottom of the email? That was them being considerate. Acknowledging that not everyone works their hours. Giving people permission to respond on their schedule.

See? They were being thoughtful about it.

What They Didn’t See

When your boss sends you an email at 2:47am, it doesn’t matter what the note at the bottom says.

What you receive is: My boss is working at 2:47am.

Which translates to: Maybe I should be working at 2:47am too.

Or: If she’s working this hard, am I working hard enough?

Or: I have 14 unread emails when I wake up and I’m already behind.

Or simply: There is no off switch here. Work is always happening.

That note at the bottom—the one the leader thought was giving people permission to wait until morning?

It was actually highlighting that they weren’t waiting until morning. That they were working while everyone was sleeping. That the expectation, regardless of what they said, was constant availability.

The Culture They Created Without Meaning To

People started responding at odd hours. Not 2:47am maybe, but 10pm. 11pm. 6am.

When the leader asked someone about it casually—”Hey, I noticed you responded pretty late last night, you didn’t need to do that”—they said something that stuck:

“I mean, I saw you’d sent it at 3am so I figured it was important.”

“But I said it wasn’t urgent—”

“Yeah, but you were working on it at 3am. That seemed like it mattered.”

The leader had created a culture where their lack of boundaries became everyone’s lack of boundaries.

Where their inability to self-regulate and separate work from life made everyone else feel like they couldn’t either.

Where their 3am emails weren’t just about them being a workaholic—they were teaching everyone that this was what commitment looked like.

Why Leaders Do This

Because they’re scared.

Scared that if they stop working, they’ll fall behind. That someone will see they’re not as capable as people think. That they’ll lose the edge that got them here.

Scared that they don’t know who they are without work. That their identity is so wrapped up in being “the person who works harder than everyone else” that they don’t know how to be anything else.

Scared that boundaries would mean weakness. That balance would mean mediocrity. That rest would mean they weren’t serious enough.

Scared to be with themselves for any length of time not working, just being. Then what?

So they keep working. And working. And working.

And tell themselves it’s fine because it’s their choice.

While ignoring that their choices are shaping everyone else’s reality.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Gets help. Therapy. Coaching. Something to address why they can’t separate their worth from their work.

Sets actual boundaries. Not aspirational ones. Real ones. No email after 8pm. No work on weekends except genuine emergencies. No laptop at dinner.

Uses the delay-send function on email. If they’re awake at 3am and need to write something, fine. But schedule it to send at 9am.

Models balance instead of martyrdom. Leaves the office at reasonable hours. Talks about their life outside work. Takes actual vacation where they’re unreachable.

Stops treating their lack of boundaries like a virtue. Stops calling it “dedication” and starts calling it what it is: an unhealthy relationship with work that they’re broadcasting to everyone around them.

A graceful leader understands that their relationship with work—healthy or unhealthy—shapes everyone else’s.

And they choose to model balance instead of martyrdom.

Action

What are your 3AM emails?

What’s the dysfunction you’ve convinced yourself is fine because it’s “just how you are”?

What’s the unsustainable pattern you’re modeling and then wondering why your team is burned out?

Stop sending emails outside work hours. Use delay-send. If you write them at 3am, schedule them to send at 9am.

Leave at reasonable hours. Visibly.

Take vacation and actually disconnect.

Talk about your life outside work.

And stop treating your lack of boundaries like a virtue.

Working harder than everyone else doesn’t equate to great leader.

It’s demonstrating that it’s possible to do excellent work and have a life.

Maybe the most important work you could do isn’t answering one more email.

Maybe it’s learning to close the laptop.

And teaching everyone around you that they can too.

NOTE: The generational differences in the workforce seem to highlight this more than ever. The way we work is changing.

End of Part 4 (and The Field Guide)

Closing Thoughts: The Grace in Failing Forward

If you’ve made it through all four parts of this field guide, you’ve probably recognized yourself in at least a few of these fails. Maybe more than a few.

That’s not a problem. It’s the point.

Leadership isn’t about not failing. It’s about failing honestly, learning loudly, and having the grace to adjust.

The best leaders—the graceful ones—know their failures intimately. They tell stories about when they got it wrong. They adjust when they realize they’re causing harm. They lead from a place of earned wisdom, not unearned expertise.

Graceful leadership isn’t about moving smoothly through every situation without error.

It’s about having the courage to name the failures, the humility to learn from them, and the commitment to do better.

Not perfect. Just better.

One fail at a time.

Planners. Journals. Two mugs. A bowl of lemons. And yes — tarot cards. Sitting there without apology, right next to the gratitude journals and the 2026 planner, like they belong. Which they do.

I’ve taken pretty pictures of that table more than once. Because it’s genuinely beautiful, and because the story it tells feels complete without explanation. You can make up whatever narrative you want from those images and you probably won’t be wrong.

What I haven’t done — until now — is narrate it out loud in this space.

That hesitation has a name. It’s not drama. It’s not crisis. It’s just the quiet, chronic fear of judgment that every single one of us manages in a thousand micro-moments every day. The almost-didn’t. The pause before you hit send. The thing that works that you keep slightly out of view because you’re not entirely sure how it will land.

I think a lot of leaders are living inside that gap — between who they are privately and what they let people see professionally. And I think that gap costs more energy than we want to admit.

So. The table.

The Table

Every morning, we set the table.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The good mugs come out. The music goes on — tuned to a specific frequency, the kind that settles something in the nervous system before the day gets its hands on you. We sit in that for a few minutes. Not long. Just enough to remember that we’re human beings before we’re anything else.

Then quiet.

I open my gratitude journal first. Not as a performance of positivity, but as a genuine reset — a way of locating what’s actually good before I start interrogating what’s hard. And then I move into the cards.

On Mondays I pull a card to set the thread for the week. A projected intentionality, something to follow. Then the day cards — sometimes one, sometimes three. I come to them through numbers; numerology tells me which card to pull. My partner Carrie comes to hers through energetic pull, a sensory knowing toward a particular card. Same destination, completely different entry points.

Then we sit with what surfaced. Individually, quietly. No comparison yet.

And then — and this is the part that actually matters — we share. Two minutes each. Here’s what landed. Here’s what I’m thinking about. What do you see?

Then we feed the dogs and go about our day.

Why This Isn’t Woo

If you’re an analytical leader reading this with one eyebrow raised, I want to offer you something to hold onto.

Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist who gave patients inkblots — ambiguous, meaningless images — and asked what they saw. The insight wasn’t in the inkblot. The inkblot had no meaning. The insight was in what the person brought to it. What surfaced from underneath their own filters, assumptions, and interior weather.

That’s what a tarot card is. A structured Rorschach.

The card doesn’t tell me anything. It can’t. It’s paper and ink. What it does is create a moment of open-ended inquiry that bypasses my analytical brain and lets something underneath speak first. What I see in a card on a Monday when I’m navigating a hard decision is completely different from what I see in the same card on a Friday when I’m feeling expansive and clear.

The card is just the prompt. I am the data.

Your Ritual Doesn’t Have to Look Like Mine

Here’s the part I most want you to hear.

It doesn’t have to be tarot. It doesn’t have to be cards at all.

It could be a walk. A run. A specific playlist you only play in the morning. A few pages of longhand. A cup of tea you drink before anyone else is awake. Five minutes of stillness before you open your phone.

The form is almost irrelevant. What matters is that you choose something — deliberately, consistently — that creates enough interior quiet for an honest internal conversation to begin. Something that asks: What am I actually thinking? What am I moving through? What needs my attention that I keep skating past?

Most leaders are extraordinarily good at answering everyone else’s questions. The practice is about getting good at answering your own.

The Part the Journal Can’t Do

I want to be careful here, because I know journaling gets recommended constantly and I don’t want to dismiss it entirely, in fact it is fundamental to my practices.

AND here’s what I’ve learned: for most people, a journal has a ceiling.

It reflects you back to yourself — which has real value, up to a point. But the journal only knows what you already know. It can’t surprise you. It can’t bring an angle you genuinely couldn’t manufacture alone. It can’t look at your face when you say something and see what you’re not saying.

For that, you need another human being.

Not a therapist necessarily. Not a coach. Not a formal accountability structure. Just someone with whom you can bring a live thread from your internal landscape into real conversation.

And here’s the thing — they don’t even need to know they’re participating in your practice.

You have your morning ritual. You surface something that’s genuinely alive for you — a question, a tension, something that piqued your curiosity about yourself or about a situation you’re moving through. And then later, maybe at lunch, maybe on a call, maybe over dinner, you weave that thread into a real conversation with someone you trust.

Not as a disclosure. Not as a vulnerability performance. Just as something you’re genuinely curious about. I’ve been thinking about this lately — what do you notice?

And then you receive what comes back.

That’s the biofeedback. That’s the part that completes the circuit. Because what a trusted human reflects back to you is honest in a way nothing else can be — they’re not responding to your morning practice, they’re responding to you. Which means what comes back is real.

The Architecture

So here’s what I’m actually offering you, stripped of any mysticism:

Create a container. Something intentional and repeatable that signals to your nervous system: this is the time we go inward.

Surface something alive. Not a to-do list. Not a performance review. Something you’re genuinely curious or uncertain about in your own interior landscape.

Bring it to a human being. Someone safe, someone honest, someone who will give you something real. Weave it into conversation with intentionality, even quietly.

Receive what comes back. Actually let it land. Notice what resonates and what doesn’t. Let it inform how you move through your day or your week.

That’s it. That’s the whole practice.

It takes about twenty minutes on a good morning. It has changed the way I lead, the way I make decisions, and the way I move through uncertainty — which, if you’re leading anything real, is most of the time.

On the Gap

I sat with those photos for a while before I decided to narrate them out loud.

Not because I’m not sure the practice works — I’m completely sure. But because that quiet fear of judgment doesn’t disappear just because you’ve built something that genuinely serves you. It just gets more specific. It shifts from will this work to will they get it to what will they think of me.

The people I most respect tend to have a version of that table somewhere. A practice they don’t quite announce. Something that works and that they’ve quietly stopped trying to justify. Maybe it’s meditation. Maybe it’s a run where they talk to themselves. Maybe it’s something that would raise an eyebrow in a boardroom.

The gap between who we are privately and what we let people see professionally is real. And maintaining it takes energy — energy that could be going somewhere else.

I’m not asking you to adopt my ritual or explain yourself to anyone. I’m just asking you to notice the gap. And maybe, when you’re ready, to close it a little.

The table is already set.

What does your morning practice look like? I’d love to hear — hit reply or leave a comment below.

When things are easy, almost anyone can lead well. You can be patient, thoughtful, strategic. You can take time to coach, to listen, to consider multiple perspectives.

But when the pressure hits—when deadlines compress, budgets shrink, and leadership above you starts panicking—that’s when you find out what kind of leader you actually are.

In my years of coaching, I’ve watched leaders transform under pressure. Not necessarily in inspiring ways, always in revealing ways.

The collaborative leader becomes controlling. The empathetic leader becomes dismissive. The strategic leader becomes reactive. The shield becomes a funnel, directing all that organizational chaos straight down onto their team.

These are the pressure fails. The times when stress strips away the leadership persona and reveals the patterns underneath. The times when leaders stop leading and start surviving—and take their teams down with them.

This is Part 3: The moments when the weight gets heavy and leaders forget who they meant to be.

Fail #7: From Creative to Reactive (Pushing Shit Downhill)

There’s this thing good leaders are supposed to do: be a shit umbrella.

The pressure comes from above—unrealistic deadlines, budget cuts, organizational chaos, leadership panic—and you absorb it. You filter it. You protect your team from the storm so they can do their best work.

I watched a leader who used to do that beautifully.

And then one day, they didn’t.

When the Pressure Hit

The project timeline got cut in half. The budget got slashed. Leadership was freaking out about optics and stakeholders and things that had nothing to do with the actual work.

And instead of absorbing it, the leader panicked.

They called an emergency meeting. They used words like “urgency” and “critical” and “all hands on deck.” They forwarded emails from leadership with “Thoughts??” at the top, which is code for “I’m stressed and now you get to be stressed too.”

They stopped thinking strategically. They stopped asking “Should we do this?” and started asking “How fast can we do this?”

They took every ounce of pressure they were feeling and transferred it directly onto their team.

They told themselves they were being transparent. Keeping everyone informed. Not sheltering them from reality.

But really? They were just too overwhelmed to lead.

What It Looked Like

Suddenly everything was urgent. Every request from leadership became an immediate priority for the team, regardless of whether it actually mattered.

Someone from two levels up would ask an offhand question, and the leader would turn it into a project. “Can you pull together some data on this?” would become three people dropping what they were doing to create a deck by end of day.

The team stopped doing deep work. They stopped thinking creatively. They went into survival mode—reacting, executing, checking boxes as fast as possible to make the pressure stop.

Just like their leader was doing.

The Meeting That Broke Through

One of the team members—someone who was always steady, always professional—finally broke.

“What are we even doing?” they said in yet another “urgent” meeting. Their voice was quiet, but everyone heard it. “Like, what is the actual goal here? Because it feels like we’re just running in circles reacting to whatever panic is happening upstairs.”

The room went silent.

And they were right.

The team wasn’t building anything. They weren’t solving anything. They were just... churning. Reacting to reactions to reactions.

The leader had turned their team into an anxiety delivery system.

Why Leaders Do This

Because they’re scared.

Scared of looking like they can’t handle it. Scared of pushback from leadership. Scared of being seen as not responsive enough, not urgent enough, not enough.

When you’re in reactive mode, passing the pressure down feels like leadership. It feels like accountability. It feels like you’re taking things seriously.

But really, you’re just abdicating your actual job.

Your job isn’t to be a conduit for organizational panic. It’s to be a buffer. A filter. A translator who takes the chaos and turns it into clarity.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Absorbs the hit.

When leadership is panicking, they say: “Let me think about this and get back to you” instead of immediately turning it into a team emergency.

They ask: “Is this actually urgent or does it just feel urgent?”

They protect their team’s time, their focus, their ability to do work that actually matters instead of work that just feels responsive.

They are the filter between organizational chaos and their team’s ability to think clearly.

When the panic escalates, they slow down. “Before we mobilize the team, let’s clarify what problem we’re actually solving.”

When someone above them is reactive, they force themselves to be strategic.

It’s terrifying. It feels like being difficult. Like not being a team player.

But their team can breathe again.

Action

When pressure hits, ask yourself: Where is it going?

Are you absorbing it, filtering it, and translating it into clarity?

Or are you just passing it down, turning your team into an extension of your own panic?

Your team will match your energy.

If you’re reactive, they’ll be reactive. If you’re panicked, they’ll be panicked. If you’re scattered, they’ll be scattered.

But if you’re steady and remain curious and creative—even when everything around you isn’t—they can be too.

That’s the job. Not transferring the pressure. Transforming it.

Sometimes grace isn’t moving like water. Sometimes it’s being the rock that doesn’t move.

The rock that says: “This stops here. I’ve got this. You keep doing the work that matters.”

Fail #8: The False Choice Between Caring and Results

I coached a leader who genuinely believed they had to choose.

Either they could be the leader who cared about their team—who asked how people were doing, who made space for their lives outside work, who prioritized their wellbeing—or they could be the leader who got results.

Caring leader or effective leader.

Soft or successful.

They couldn’t figure out how to be both.

The Way They Saw It

When things were going well, they could afford to be the caring leader. They could ask about people’s weekends. They could be flexible about schedules. They could have those longer one-on-ones where they actually talked about growth and development.

But when the pressure was on? When deadlines were looming and deliverables were due and leadership was watching?

That’s when they thought they had to flip the switch.

Put on the “let’s get shit done” hat. Push harder. Care less about feelings and more about outcomes. Be the tough leader who makes hard calls and doesn’t get distracted by soft stuff.

They told themselves this was pragmatic. Realistic. What the situation required.

What It Looked Like

One of their team members came to them one Monday looking exhausted. Like, truly wiped out.

“Hey, you okay?” the leader asked.

“Yeah, just... rough weekend. My dad’s sick and I was at the hospital most of—”

“That’s tough,” the leader interrupted. “Listen, I know the timing sucks, but can we talk about the deliverable that’s due Wednesday? I need to know where we’re at.”

They saw him deflate. Just a little. Just enough.

“Yeah, of course. It’ll be done.”

The leader felt like shit, but also felt like... what else could they do? They had a deadline. The work had to get done. They couldn’t let him off the hook just because life was hard.

Right?

The False Logic

Here’s what the leader believed:

Caring about people = letting them off the hook = work doesn’t get done = I fail as a leader.

Therefore: If I want to succeed, I have to choose results over relationships.

They thought toughness and compassion were opposites. That holding people accountable meant not caring about what they were going through. That high standards and human kindness couldn’t coexist.

So they toggled between them. Caring leader when they could afford it. Results-driven leader when they couldn’t.

And they wondered why their team seemed confused about who they actually were.

What It Actually Cost

The team member finished that deliverable. It was fine. Not his best work, but it was done.

And then two months later, he left.

Not because of that one conversation. But because of the pattern that conversation represented.

In his exit interview, he said something the leader will never forget: “I never knew which version of you I was going to get. Sometimes you cared. Sometimes you just needed things done. I couldn’t figure out how to succeed with you because the rules kept changing.”

He was right.

The leader had made care conditional on convenience. They’d made compassion something they could afford when things were easy, and abandoned when things got hard.

And in doing that, they’d communicated something they never meant to say: Your humanity matters less than your productivity.

Why Leaders Do This

Because somewhere we learned that caring and achieving are opposing forces. That empathy is weakness. That high performers are driven by fear and pressure, not by being seen and supported.

But people don’t do their best work when you ignore their humanity in service of deadlines. They do their best work when they feel seen, supported, and trusted especially when things are hard.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Refuses to choose. Keeps their heart open. Locates the place where compassion and power co-exist.

That conversation could have been:

“Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah, just... rough weekend. My dad’s sick and I was at the hospital—”

“God, I’m sorry. How’s he doing? How are you doing?”

[Actually listen. Actually care. Actually be a human for three minutes.]

“Listen, I know you’ve got the Wednesday deadline. What do you need from me to make that work given what you’re dealing with? Should we talk about pushing it? Can someone help? What would be most useful?”

That’s not soft leadership. That’s not lowering standards.

That’s creating conditions for someone to do good work even when life is kicking their ass.

A graceful leader holds people to high standards AND cares deeply about their wellbeing. They’re demanding AND compassionate. They expect excellence AND create space for people to be human.

Because the heart IS how you get results.

Action

Stop toggling between caring and driving results.

When someone on your team is struggling, don’t abandon your humanity because there’s work to be done.

Ask: “What do you need from me right now to handle both the human thing and the work thing?”

Hold high standards. Show deep care. Do both, simultaneously, without apology.

The best work doesn’t come from choosing between caring and achieving.

It comes from refusing to choose.

Fail #9: Getting Promoted and Forgetting Where You Came From

Six months after their promotion, a leader sat in a leadership meeting listening to someone from their old team present a proposal.

The presenter was nervous. You could see it. That thing where you’re talking too fast and over-explaining because you’re not sure the people in the room get it.

The leader used to be that person. Literally. They’d been in that exact seat eighteen months ago.

But in that meeting, they found themselves getting impatient.

Just get to the point, they thought. Why are they explaining so much context? We don’t need all this.

And then they heard themselves say it out loud: “Can we skip to the recommendation? We’re short on time.”

The presenter stumbled. Rushed through the rest. Left without getting real engagement on their idea.

After the meeting, another leader—someone who’d been at this level longer—said casually, “Man, remember when we were the ones presenting to rooms like this? Brutal, right?”

And the newly promoted leader had this sickening moment of realization:

They didn’t remember. Or they’d stopped letting themselves remember.

The Shift They Didn’t Notice

It happened gradually.

First, they moved to a different floor. Different meetings. Different problems. Different lunch spots.

They stopped grabbing coffee with their old team. Not on purpose—they were just busier. Different schedule. Different priorities.

They started saying things like “the team” instead of “we.” As if they weren’t part of it anymore. As if they’d transcended to somewhere else.

When someone from their old role would bring them a problem, they’d catch themselves thinking: Why are they making this so complicated? Just handle it.

The things that used to be genuinely hard for them? They’d forgotten they were hard. They’d rewritten their own history to make it seem like they’d always seen things clearly, always known what to do, always had perspective.

They erased their own struggle from the story.

What They Started Saying

“When I was in that role, I just...”

“It’s not that complicated, you just need to...”

“Back when I was doing this work, we didn’t have these issues because...”

Every sentence contained an implied: And if you were better at this, you wouldn’t be struggling.

They’d become the leader they used to hate. The one who’d forgotten what it actually felt like to be in the thick of it, drowning in details, trying to make sense of problems that felt overwhelming.

The one who made it all sound easy in retrospect.

Why Leaders Do This

Because remembering makes them uncomfortable. It reminds them that they weren’t special. That their success wasn’t just brilliance—it was also luck, timing, support, and a thousand small moments where things could have gone differently.

They edit their own history. They take all the struggle, confusion, and genuine difficulty and smooth it out into a clean narrative where they always figured things out, always had it together, always had perspective.

They forget that they used to stay late trying to decode vague feedback. That they used to rehearse difficult conversations in their head fifty times. That they used to feel like everyone around them knew something they didn’t.

They erase the mess to make their success look inevitable.

And in doing that, they make it impossible for anyone currently in the mess to relate to them.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Stays connected. Not just physically, but emotionally.

Keeps having lunch with people doing the work they used to do. Keeps asking questions about what’s hard. Keeps listening instead of solving.

Tells the messy stories. The ones where they failed, struggled, got it wrong, needed help. Demonstrates vulnerability as resilience.

Remembers out loud. “God, I remember how confusing that was. Here’s what helped me figure it out—but it took me months to get there.”

Makes space for things to be hard. Stops acting like everything that’s difficult for others was easy for them.

The best leaders tell stories about when they struggled. Not in a humble-brag way. In a real way. In a “I genuinely had no idea what I was doing and here’s how uncomfortable that was” way.

They don’t erase their struggle from their story. They lean into it. Because the struggle is what makes them credible.

Action

Since your promotion, what have you forgotten?

What used to be genuinely hard for you that you now treat as simple?

What struggles have you erased from your own story?

And who are you failing to help because you can’t remember what it was actually like?

Go back. Remember. Tell those stories.

Not because it makes you look good. Because it makes you useful.

The people coming up behind you need to know that the path wasn’t as smooth as it looks from where they’re standing.

They need to know you were scared too.

They need to know you didn’t always have it figured out.

They need to know that where they are right now? You’ve been there.

And you made it through.

Not because you were special. But because you kept going.

Remember that.

For them. And for the leader you’re becoming.

End of Part 3

Next week: Part 4 - The Identity Fails (When we lose ourselves in the role) + Bonus Fail

They’re the comfortable ones. The ones that feel right in the moment because they align with how you’ve always operated, what you’ve always valued, what’s always worked for you.

These are the fails that happen when leaders optimize for what feels easy instead of what’s right. When they build in their own image instead of building for what’s needed. When they choose comfort over growth—for themselves and their teams.

In my coaching work, I’ve watched brilliant leaders handicap their own effectiveness by staying in their comfort zone. They hire people who think like them. They say yes to opportunities they don’t actually want. They hand out resources without doing the work of integration.

These failures feel responsible. Strategic, even. They masquerade as good leadership right up until you realize they’ve created organizations full of blind spots, burned-out people, and wasted potential.

This is Part 2: The Comfort Zone Fails. The times when staying comfortable costs more than you realize.

Fail #4: Hiring People Who Look and Think Like You

A leader I worked with hired five people in eighteen months.

All of them were great. Smart, capable, hard-working. Culture fits. People they could see themselves getting coffee with. People who “got it” right away in interviews.

They were building something. The team had great energy. Meetings flowed. They finished each other’s sentences. Someone would start an idea and someone else would complete it. It felt like chemistry.

Their boss even commented on it: “You’ve built a really cohesive team.”

They felt proud.

And then one day, they were in a strategy meeting with another department, and that department’s leader—someone who approached problems completely differently—suggested something that made the entire team immediately uncomfortable.

It wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t bad. It just felt... foreign. Like she was speaking a different language about the same problem.

The leader found themselves getting defensive. Ready to explain why their approach was better.

And then they looked around their own table.

Five people. All nodding along. All ready to back them up. All thinking exactly what they were thinking.

Because of course they were.

They’d hired them.

The Pattern Leaders Don’t See

Here’s what this leader didn’t notice while building their “cohesive team”:

Everyone had similar educational backgrounds. They’d all worked at similar companies. They all approached problems the same way—lots of analysis, lots of process, lots of “let’s think this through.”

They were all... variations of the leader. Just slightly different versions.

When interviewing candidates, the ones who felt like “culture fits” were the ones who thought like the leader did. Who communicated like they did. Who had career paths that looked like theirs.

The ones who challenged their thinking in interviews? Who approached problems differently? Who had different experiences and perspectives?

The leader talked themselves out of them. “Not quite right.” “Something felt off.” “Didn’t seem like they’d mesh with the team.”

What they meant was: “Made me uncomfortable.” “Would require me to lead differently.” “Might disagree with me.”

The Cost of Comfort

That other department leader’s “foreign” suggestion? It ended up being exactly what they needed. It came from a completely different angle than any of them had considered.

Because none of them could consider it. They all had the same blind spots. The same assumptions. The same default approaches.

They were fast. They were efficient. They rarely had conflict.

They also had no one to tell them when they were wrong. No one to spot what they were missing. No one to say, “Have you considered that this entire approach might be flawed?”

The leader had built a team that made them comfortable. And comfort is the enemy of growth.

Why Leaders Do This

Because “culture fit” is an easy way to rationalize hiring people who make you feel validated.

The candidates who make leaders slightly uneasy—not because of red flags, but because they approach things differently—those are exactly the people they need to hire. But those are also the people who will challenge them, push back, make them reconsider their assumptions.

Leaders tell themselves they’re looking for “the best people.” But “best people” somehow keeps meaning “people who think like me.”

They filter out difference before candidates ever get to a second interview. And they do it so smoothly, they don’t even realize they’re doing it.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Actually interrogates what “culture fit” means. Is it “shares our values” or is it “thinks like me”? Because those are very different things.

Gets uncomfortable in interviews. The candidates who make them slightly uneasy—not because of red flags, but because they approach things differently—those become the people they seriously consider.

Builds a team for what they need to become, not what they already are.

Asks themselves regularly: “If everyone on this team agrees with me, what are we missing?”

Looks at their team and honestly assesses: Do they all approach problems the same way? Do they all have similar backgrounds? Do meetings feel comfortable because everyone’s basically on the same page?

Because that’s not cohesion. That’s homogeneity.

And homogeneity feels great right up until you need innovation, creativity, or someone to spot the massive problem you’re all too similar to see.

Action

Look at your team. Really look.

Do they all approach problems the same way? Do they all have similar backgrounds, experiences, perspectives? Do meetings feel comfortable because everyone basically agrees?

If yes, your next hire needs to be someone who makes you think differently. Who challenges your assumptions. Who brings perspectives you don’t have and experiences you haven’t lived.

Hire the person who makes you think, “Huh, I’m not sure about this.” Hire the person who approaches the problem from an angle you’d never considered. Hire the person who will respectfully tell you when you’re wrong.

Your future self—and your team’s impact—will thank you.

Even if your present self is squirming a little.

Fail #5: The Promotion They Kept Accepting (Even Though They Hated It)

A leader came to coaching because they were miserable.

Not obviously. Not in a way they could articulate to their boss or their team. But deeply, fundamentally miserable in a role they’d worked years to achieve.

The first time they’d been offered a leadership role, they said yes because it felt like the only answer.

This is what success looks like, right? You do good work, you get promoted, you lead people, you climb. That’s the path. That’s what you’re supposed to want.

The money was better. The title sounded impressive. They had “access”—to rooms they weren’t in before, to decisions they didn’t get to influence before, to leadership that actually listened when they spoke.

So they said yes.

And then they were miserable.

The Second Promotion

Not right away. Not obviously. But slowly, they realized: they hated this.

Not the people. Not the work itself. But the leading part.

The endless meetings about meetings. The performance reviews. The budget conversations. The politics. The having to care about organizational dynamics and stakeholder management and who said what to whom.

They missed making things. They missed solving problems with their hands, not through other people. They missed the flow state of deep work instead of the fractured attention of constant management.

But then they were offered another promotion.

More money. Better title. Even more access.

And they said yes again.

Because what else do you say? “No thanks, I’d rather not advance”? That’s not how this works. You don’t turn down opportunities. You don’t plateau by choice. That’s career suicide.

Right?

The Cost of the Wrong Yes

By the time they came to coaching, they had a vocabulary for what they were feeling. They knew they didn’t want this. They knew the money wasn’t worth it. They knew the access was hollow if they were using it to do work that drained them.

But they felt trapped. Because saying no at this point felt impossible. It felt like admitting failure. Like wasting potential. Like disappointing everyone who’d invested in them.

Here’s what happens when leaders keep saying yes to leadership they don’t want:

They get bitter. They resent their team for needing them. They phone it in because they have no passion for the actual work of leading. They make decisions from obligation instead of vision.

They become the leader they would have hated working for.

And worse—they take up a role that someone else might actually want. Someone who would love doing what they’re forcing themselves to do. Someone whose yes would be enthusiastic instead of resigned.

Their reluctant yes blocks someone else’s authentic yes.

Why Leaders Do This

Because we’re told there’s one definition of success: upward.

That if you’re good at something, the natural next step is to manage people who do that thing. That individual contribution has a ceiling and leadership is how you break through it.

That saying no to a promotion means you’re not ambitious. Not driven. Not serious about your career.

But what if the real ambition is knowing what you actually want? What if the real drive is toward work that energizes you instead of depletes you?

What if success is defining your own path instead of following someone else’s?

What a Graceful Leader Does

Says no. “Thank you, but no.”

“I’ve realized leadership isn’t where I thrive. I’m better as a senior contributor than a manager. I want to go deep, not wide.”

“The money is tempting, but it’s not worth doing work that makes me miserable.”

“I’m not interested in climbing. I’m interested in mastering.”

A graceful leader knows themselves well enough to know what actually makes them come alive. And they’re brave enough to choose that, even when it looks like they’re choosing less.

They redefine success on their own terms instead of accepting the default definition.

Action

Before you say yes to that next leadership role, ask yourself:

Do I actually want to lead? Or do I just want the things that come with leading—the money, the status, the access?

Because if it’s the latter, you’re building a career on compensation for doing work you that will slowly suck the soul out of you.

And that’s not success. That’s just expensive misery.

If you keep taking promotions you don’t want, eventually you’ll wake up senior enough that everyone expects you to want this, and too invested to admit you never did.

The ladder doesn’t care if you’re on the right one.

Don’t wait that long.

Fail #6: The Leadership Book They Weaponized By Accident

A leader read a great leadership book, and it changed everything for them.

The frameworks! The insights! The way it articulated things they’d been feeling but couldn’t name!

They were lit up. Energized. Ready to transform how their team worked.

So, they bought copies for their entire team.

They handed them out in a team meeting with genuine enthusiasm. “This book is incredible,” they told everyone. “I think it’s going to really help us level up how we operate.”

The team smiled. They thanked them. They took their books.

And then... nothing happened.

Well, that’s not true. Something happened.

What Actually Happened

Some people read it. Some people didn’t. Nobody said anything about it.

The leader would see the book on someone’s desk and feel a little spark of hope. “Oh, did you get to chapter three yet? The part about—”

“Oh, uh, not yet. Been busy.”

Weeks passed. Then months. The books became part of the office landscape. Decorative objects that silently accused everyone of not reading them.

And the leader started to feel... resentful.

I gave them this resource. This incredible tool. And they’re just ignoring it.

They’d notice someone handling a situation in exactly the way the book said not to, and think, If you’d just read chapter five...

They never said that out loud. But the team could feel it. The weird tension around the unread books. The way the leader would reference concepts from it and get blank stares back.

The Fail They Didn’t See

Here’s what the leader didn’t do:

They didn’t tell the team why they wanted them to read it. Not really. Not specifically.

They didn’t say, “I’m hoping this helps us address the communication gaps we’ve been having” or “I think the framework in chapter four could solve the problem we keep running into with project handoffs.”

They didn’t create space to discuss it. No dedicated meeting time. No book club. No structured conversation about how they might actually use any of this.

They didn’t ask what people thought. What resonated. What felt useful. What felt like bullshit.

They just... gave them homework. And expected them to do it. And integrate it. And somehow telepathically understand how it connected to their actual work.

And then they judged them when they didn’t.

What It Became

That book—that thing the leader was so excited about—became a test the team didn’t know they were taking.

Every time someone didn’t reference it, the leader marked them down. Every time they handled something differently than the book suggested, the leader chalked it up to them not reading it.

The leader had turned a resource into a weapon. A tool for growth into a measure of commitment.

“If they really cared about getting better, they’d read it.”

Never mind that the leader had given them zero guidance on what to do with it or why it mattered to their specific context.

Why Leaders Do This

Because they want the shortcut of someone else’s brilliance fixing their team’s challenges without having to do the hard work of facilitation, integration, and actual change management.

They want magic. Instead they something to dust.

Leaders treat professional development like they’re handing out vitamins. “Here, consume this and you’ll be healthier.” But they don’t talk about what health looks like. They don’t create conditions for the vitamins to work. They just distribute them and hope.

And then they wonder why nothing changes.

What a Graceful Leader Does

Actually integrates resources into the work instead of just dumping them on people.

“Hey team, I want us to read this together over the next month. Let’s dedicate 30 minutes in our weekly meeting to discuss one chapter at a time. Here’s why I think it’s relevant to what we’re working on...”

Or: “I read something that gave me language for the struggle we’ve been having with X. Can I share the framework? Let’s talk about whether it actually fits our situation.”

Or even: “This book really resonated with me personally. I’m not expecting everyone to read it, but I wanted to share it in case anyone else finds it useful. Happy to discuss if anyone wants to dig in.”

Any of those would have been better than: “Here’s a book. Go be better now.”

Action

Before you buy your team that book (or send that article, or recommend that podcast), ask yourself:

Am I willing to do the work of actually integrating this? Am I ready to create space for discussion, disagreement, and application? Am I prepared to help connect these ideas to our actual work?

If the answer is no, save your money.

A book without context, conversation, or commitment to integration isn’t professional development.

It’s just another item on their to-do list that makes them feel guilty.

Maybe the most graceful thing is to stop throwing resources at people and start having conversations instead.

Instead of “read this book,” try: “I’ve been thinking about how we handle conflict on this team. What’s working? What’s not? What do we want to be different?”

And then, if a book could help that specific conversation, bring it in. Thoughtfully. With intention. With actual integration.

Not as a cure-all. As a tool.

One you’re willing to help them use.

End of Part 2

Next week: Part 3 - The Pressure Fails (When stress reveals who we really are)

Not the dramatic, career-ending failures. The smaller, more insidious ones that slowly erode trust, waste people’s time, and turn well-intentioned leaders into exactly the kind of people they swore they’d never become.

These aren’t the fails you read about in leadership books. They’re the ones that feel reasonable in the moment. Professional, even. The kind where leaders are genuinely trying to do the right thing and somehow still managing to do it wrong.

This is the first installment of what I’ve observed and coached many leaders through: the performance fails. The times when looking like a leader was confused with being one. The times they prioritize optics over honesty, process over effectiveness, appearance over truth.

These are the fails that happen when leaders care more about seeming good than doing the hard, uncomfortable work of leading gracefully.

Let’s start with the most mundane one—because it’s probably happening in your organization right now.

Fail #1: The Meeting That Should’ve Been a Phone Call (To One Person)

I watched a leader call a meeting that should’ve been a phone call.

Actually, scratch that. It should’ve been a phone call to one person.

But instead, eight people gathered into a conference room. There was an agenda. There were talking points. There was that thing leaders do where they pretend they’re “collaborating” when really they’re just making sure everyone witnesses that they’re handling something.

Thirty minutes in, six people were multitasking while pretending to pay attention. One person was actively contributing, the one that actually needed to be there.

The other six? They got their afternoon stolen so the leader could feel like they were “keeping everyone in the loop.”

Here’s what needed to happen: a five-minute call with the one person who could make the decision. Maybe a follow-up email to the team. Done.

Instead, they performed leadership. Demonstrated process. Created the appearance of inclusion while frustrating and clogging the decision pipeline and path to action.

Why Leaders Do This

Because somewhere along the way, we learned that good leaders have meetings. They bring people together. They create forums for discussion. They demonstrate transparency.

All of which sounds great until you realize you’re using meetings as theater. As proof that you’re handling things. As a way to distribute responsibility so thinly that if something goes wrong, you can say “well, we all agreed in that meeting.”

The truth is: time is being stolen from people who could be doing real work. Teams are learning that their presence matters more than their contribution. A culture is being created where people sit through hours of irrelevant meetings because “visibility” has become more important than effectiveness.

What a Graceful leader does

Asked one simple question before sending that meeting invite: Who actually needs to be in this conversation for it to move forward?

Not: Who should be kept informed? Not: Who might have an opinion? Not: Who will feel left out if they’re not included?

Just: Who needs to be here for this decision to get made or this problem to get solved?

The answer was two people. Maybe three.

Call them. Have the conversation. Make the decision. Send a clear, concise update to everyone else.

Done in 10 minutes instead of stealing 60 minutes from eight people. Let’s do the math so it is a visible metric; 8 people X 50 an hour payrate X 1 hour = $250. If senior leaders double it. Most people’s calendars are double booked in many places. Let’s say 6 hours of meetings for these 8 people $2400 in a single day. You can take the math from there. Step back and ask yourself, “did we hire these folks to attend meetings or something else”.

The Real Cost

It’s not just the wasted time—though that alone should be enough to make us stop.

It’s that every unnecessary meeting teaches teams that their time doesn’t matter. That process matters more than progress. That leadership is about gathering people into rooms rather than actually moving things forward.

And slowly, the best people—the ones who could be creating, building, solving—start spending their days in meetings about meetings. Performing work instead of doing it.

Action

Create meeting discipline and clear communication strategies and platforms to keep everyone informed along the way. If someone expresses frustration listen and adjust as needed.

Fail #2: The “I Value Your Input” Performance Art Piece

Many leaders I have coached already made the decision and performed failure one (meeting) to try to hide it. Hint- they didn’t.

They knew exactly what they were going to do. They’d thought it through, they had their reasons, and honestly? It was probably the right call.

But they didn’t want to be that leader. The autocratic one. The “my way or the highway” person. They wanted to be collaborative. Inclusive. The kind of leader who “values diverse perspectives.”

So they called a meeting.

They asked for input. They nodded thoughtfully. They wrote things on the whiteboard. They said things like “That’s an interesting angle” and “Let’s explore that.”

And then—subtly, skillfully—they steered every single suggestion back toward the conclusion they’d already reached.

When someone proposed something different, they’d say, “Hmm, I wonder about the timeline on that” or “Great thought, but given our constraints...”

They facilitated the group right into their pre-determined outcome.

At the end, they thanked everyone for their valuable input. They might have even said something about how “this collaborative process really strengthened the decision.”

But here’s the thing: the team knew.

Maybe not consciously. Maybe they couldn’t articulate it. But somewhere in their gut, every single person in that room knew they’d just participated in theater. That their input was decorative, not functional. That they’d been asked to collaborate on a decision that had already been made.

The Cost of Fake Collaboration

You know what’s worse than just making a decision and owning it? Pretending you haven’t.

Because when leaders do this—when they perform collaboration instead of actually doing it—they don’t get credit for being decisive AND they lose trust for being manipulative.

Teams learn that “let’s discuss this” actually means “let me convince you.” They learn that their input is window dressing. They learn to stop bringing their real ideas because what’s the point?

And the really ugly part? The leader has now made them complicit in wasting their own time.

What a Graceful leader does

Just owned it.

“Hey team, I’ve thought about this and here’s what I think we should do. Here’s my reasoning. I’m open to hearing if I’m missing something major, but I want to be transparent—I’m pretty convinced this is the right direction. What am I not seeing?”

Or even simpler: “I’ve made a decision on this. Here’s what it is and why. I’m not looking for a debate, but I want you to understand the thinking so you can execute it well.”

That’s not autocratic. That’s honest.

Sometimes the most graceful thing a leader can do is stop performing leadership and just... lead.

Even when it feels uncomfortable. Even when it doesn’t look like the “collaborative” leader they think they’re supposed to be.

Action

Before calling that next meeting, ask yourself: Have I actually made up my mind?

If yes, don’t disguise it as collaboration. Own your decision, explain your thinking, and move forward.

If no—if you genuinely haven’t decided and you genuinely need input—then shut up and actually listen. Don’t guide. Don’t steer. Don’t subtly redirect every conversation back to your preferred outcome.

Real collaboration is messy. It takes longer. Sometimes people suggest things you haven’t thought of that are actually better than your idea.

Fake collaboration is worse than no collaboration at all.

Fail #3: The Credit Thief (Who Didn’t Mean To Be)

Sarah figured it out.

Not her manager. Sarah.

She saw the problem, connected the dots, and came up with a solution that was genuinely brilliant. The kind of thing that makes you think, “Why didn’t we see this six months ago?”

Her manager was excited. Proud of her. Genuinely thrilled to have someone on the team who thought like this.

So when the manager’s boss asked how things were going, the manager told him about it.

“We cracked the issue with the client portal,” they said. “Turns out if we restructure the workflow and integrate it with the existing system, we can cut response time by 60%.”

We.

They said we.

And then they explained the solution. The one Sarah figured out. Using all the details she’d walked them through. Her logic. Her process. Her breakthrough.

The boss was impressed. “Nice work,” he said. “This is exactly the kind of strategic thinking we need.”

The manager thanked him.

And then went back to their desk feeling pretty good about themselves. About their team. About how well things were going.

It wasn’t until later—maybe a week—when the boss came back around and offered the manager kudos for their strategic thinking. There was no mention of Sarah.

The Sin of Omission

Here’s the thing: The manager didn’t lie. They didn’t explicitly take credit. They didn’t say “I figured this out” or “Here’s my brilliant idea.”

They just... didn’t correct the assumption.

They said “we” when they should have said “Sarah.”

They presented her work when they should have presented her.

They let their boss’s praise land on them when it should have landed on her.

And the inconvenient truth is, it felt natural. Easy. Like they were just reporting up on their team’s progress, which is literally their job.

Except their job isn’t just reporting progress. It’s making sure the people who do the work get the recognition they deserve.

Why Leaders Do This

I think leaders tell themselves stories about why this happens:

“They know it’s a team effort.” “I’ll mention Sarah next time.” “She knows I appreciate her.” “It’s my job to represent the team’s work.”

But here’s the truth: in that moment, sharing the win up the chain feels like their win. Their team’s success feels like evidence of their leadership. Their team’s brilliance reflects well on them. While true the leader is a part of the win, it is an incomplete truth.

And that feels... good.

Good enough that they don’t interrupt the moment to redirect the credit where it belongs.

What It Costs

Sarah never knew this happened. Her manager never told her. Why would they? It would just be awkward.

But here’s what she did know: she came up with something brilliant, and as far as she could tell, it disappeared into the organizational ether. No recognition. No visibility. Just another day’s work.

And here’s what her manager taught her, without meaning to: your best work might make someone else look good. Innovation is its own reward, because you probably won’t get external recognition for it. Over time this becomes an engagement issue.

What a Graceful leader does

When their boss said, “How are things going?” they should have said:

“Sarah just cracked something brilliant. Can I bring her into your next check-in so she can walk you through it? You’re going to want to hear this directly from her.”

Or even in that moment: “Sarah figured this out. Let me get her—she can explain it better than I can.”

Or at minimum: “Sarah saw this. Here’s her thinking...” And then later, following up to make sure their boss knew this was Sarah’s win, not theirs.

The Grace in Sharing Light

Leadership isn’t collecting credit. It’s redistributing it.

The more leaders shine light on their team’s brilliance, the more brilliant their leadership actually becomes. Not because they’re performing generosity, but because they’re creating an environment where people’s best work is seen and valued.

Where Sarah’s next brilliant idea doesn’t disappear into a void.

Where people know that doing exceptional work leads to recognition, not just more work.

When leaders get this wrong and let someone else’s win become their moment, it costs them something more important than their boss’s approval:

It costs them the chance to be the kind of leader people trust with their best work.

Action

Before you share your team’s wins upward, ask yourself: Will the person who actually did this work get the credit they deserve?

If the answer is anything less than “absolutely yes,” stop talking and figure out how to make sure they do.

Their brilliance isn’t your credential.

It’s their story. Make sure it stays that way.

End of Part 1

Next week: Part 2 - The Comfort Zone Fails (When we build teams in our own image)

But what if it’s backwards?

What if the exhaustion IS the lack of discernment?

The Mechanics of Depletion

It’s not the dramatic no’s that drain us - those are obvious. It’s the thousand micro-yeses that slowly hollow us out.

The conversation you have three times because you didn’t name the pattern the first time. The meeting you take because saying no feels “mean.” The way you translate your knowing into softer language so no one has to feel uncomfortable with the truth. The relationship you stay in six months past its expiration date because leaving feels “unkind.”

Every act of self-abandonment disguised as kindness creates a leak.

Not a trickle. A hemorrhage.

The Willful Fog

Here’s what we don’t admit: we’ve made exhaustion our hall pass from discernment.

“I can’t handle one more thing right now” becomes permission to not name what’s actually happening. “I’m too tired for this” translates to “I’m too tired to know what I already know.”

But staying in the fog is MORE exhausting than seeing clearly. Every moment you spend pretending you don’t know what you know costs you. Every choice to not look is a choice to abandon yourself.

And self-abandonment - that’s the real exhaustion. That’s the thing that takes years to recover from.

The Intelligent Loop

This is where it gets brilliant. The pattern reconstructs itself:

You don’t discern → you leak energy through misalignment → you get exhausted from the leak → you use exhaustion as justification to not discern (”I can’t deal with this right now”) → more leaking → more exhaustion → more permission to stay blind.

The exhaustion becomes both the symptom AND the excuse. Self-perpetuating.

What we’re actually protecting isn’t our energy - we’re hemorrhaging that. We’re protecting ourselves from the consequences of clear seeing. Because once you see, you have to act. Once you name that the relationship is draining you, you have to change it. Once you admit you’ve been yes-ing your way into resentment, you have to stop.

Staying foggy lets us stay stuck while telling ourselves we’re “just being realistic about our capacity.”

The Slippery Part

But here’s where it gets genuinely confusing: discernment and avoidance can feel identical in the moment.

Both can say “this isn’t mine right now.” Both can look like self-preservation. Both involve not engaging with something that’s present.

The distinction isn’t in the action - it’s in what happens in your body when you make the choice.

Discernment feels clean. You know what you know. There might be sadness, there might be grief, but there’s no scrambling. No story-building about why you’re not engaging. No need to convince yourself or others. You can hold eye contact with the truth while choosing not to act on it yet. “I see this clearly AND I’m not available for it right now” - both halves are true simultaneously.

Avoidance has static. A kind of buzzing that says “don’t look don’t look don’t look.” You need reasons. You build cases. You feel the need to justify to yourself. There’s a tightness, a holding, a sense that if you let yourself really SEE, something will collapse. You can’t hold steady eye contact with it - your attention keeps sliding away.

The Trap

When we’re already exhausted, we’ve lost access to the sensory clarity that would tell us the difference. The body’s discernment capacity is compromised. So we guess. And guessing costs us more energy. Which makes us more exhausted. Which makes us less able to feel the difference.

Loop closes.

The Manufactured Fog

And then there’s this: we’re trying to practice discernment in a world that has industrialized confusion.

Deepfakes that look real. AI-generated content indistinguishable from human creation. News cycles designed not to inform but to trigger. Algorithms that feed us what will keep us scrolling, not what’s true. Information warfare where the goal isn’t to make you believe the lie - it’s to exhaust you so much that you stop trying to discern truth from fiction at all.

The fog isn’t just personal anymore. It’s systemic. Manufactured. Profitable.

We’re asked to discern what’s real in an environment where reality itself has become a contested category. Where “do your own research” has become a trap because research requires discernment capacity and the volume of information is designed to overwhelm that capacity. Where every truth claim comes with an equal and opposite counter-claim, each with its own “evidence.”

It’s exhausting by design.

And here’s the brilliant cruelty of it: when we’re exhausted, we default to whatever feels safest. Familiar narratives. Tribal certainties. Whatever requires the least energy to believe. We stop discerning and start selecting - choosing the version of reality that costs us the least to hold.

This is the environment we’re being asked to practice discernment in. Not some quiet monastery where truth reveals itself to the patient. A deliberate chaos where clarity itself is under attack.

No wonder we’re tired.

No wonder we want permission to not look, to not know, to just... stop trying to figure out what’s real.

And Yet

This is precisely why discernment isn’t optional anymore. It’s survival.

Because the alternative - outsourcing our knowing to whoever shouts loudest, to whatever algorithm decides what we see, to the narratives that require the least of us - that’s not rest. That’s dissolution.

The practice becomes: can you discern what’s yours to know? Not what’s true in some absolute sense - maybe that’s not even accessible anymore. But what resonates in your body as real. What you can hold steady eye contact with. What doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to believe.

Sometimes discernment in this landscape means saying “I don’t know” and being okay with that. Not collapsing into someone else’s certainty because uncertainty feels unbearable. Not reaching for the comfort of a clear narrative when clarity hasn’t actually arrived.

The fog is real. The manipulation is real. The exhaustion is real.

And your capacity to know what you know - that’s real too.

The Way Through

Sometimes you have to make a choice and then WATCH what happens.

Did that “no” create spaciousness or did it create more static? Did that “yes” feel like coming home or like abandoning yourself?

The body tells the truth, but only if you’re willing to listen after the fact.

Discernment isn’t the luxury we add after we’ve recovered. It’s the practice that prevents the depletion in the first place. It’s what preserves the resource.

Like water finding its path not by forcing but by knowing what it isn’t - rock.

Your capacity to hold frequency, to stay clear, to be the transmission you came here to be - all of that requires continuous micro-discernments. This is mine. That isn’t. Yes. No. Not yet. Never.

Discernment is resilience. Not what comes after it. Not what requires it. The thing itself.

What becomes possible when we stop apologizing for clear seeing?

The Practice

So what do we do with this? How do we practice discernment when we’re already exhausted, when the world is deliberately confusing, when even the act of trying to see clearly feels like one more thing demanding our energy?

We start small. Ruthlessly small.

One true thing. Before you get out of bed, before you check your phone, before you let the world tell you what to think about today: What do you know is true right now? Not what you should feel. Not what makes sense. What’s actually true in your body in this moment?

Maybe it’s just “I’m tired.” Maybe it’s “I don’t want to have that conversation today.” Maybe it’s “something about this doesn’t feel right and I don’t know why yet.”

That’s enough. That’s the practice.

Notice the static. Start tracking the difference between clean knowing and the buzzing of avoidance. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to immediately act on every truth you see. Just notice: does this choice create spaciousness or more noise?

The body is the instrument. Your nervous system knows the difference between alignment and abandonment even when your mind is too tired to sort it out. Trust that knowing even - especially - when you can’t articulate why yet.

Protect the resource. Self-care isn’t bubble baths and green smoothies (though sure, those too). Self-care is refusing to leak yourself through a thousand micro-abandonments. It’s saying “not this” even when you can’t yet articulate what “this” is instead. It’s letting some things stay undecided rather than forcing a yes that will cost you later.

Every act of discernment is an act of self-return. Every time you choose alignment over comfort, you’re practicing resilience.

The Hope

Here’s what I know: your clarity gives other people permission.

Not because you’re perfect at it. Not because you never get it wrong. But because when you practice seeing clearly - even imperfectly, even messily - you create a field where others can too.

Every time you name what’s actually happening instead of what we’re all pretending is happening, you weaken the spell. Every time you trust your knowing over the manufactured consensus, you remind someone else that their knowing matters too.

This isn’t about being strong enough to stand alone. It’s about being clear enough that others can find their own clarity near you.

The world needs people who can still discern. Who haven’t outsourced their knowing. Who can hold eye contact with truth even when it’s uncomfortable. Not because you have all the answers, but because you’re willing to keep asking real questions.

Your exhaustion is real. The manipulation is real. The confusion is real.

And so is your capacity to know what you know.

Start there. One true thing at a time.

The resilience we need isn’t the kind that powers through. It’s the kind that remembers how to return home to ourselves, again and again, even in the fog.

Especially in the fog.

Grace and Gratitude as Live Frequencies

In the beginning, I related to grace and gratitude the way most people do - as practices. Things I could do. Tools I could cultivate.

I made gratitude lists. I performed acts of grace. I tried to develop these qualities in myself.

And something did shift when I did these practices. Enough that I kept returning to them.

But here’s what I didn’t understand then: I wasn’t creating grace and gratitude. I was learning to recognize them as frequencies that were already broadcasting.

The practices weren’t generating anything. They were tuning me to what was already present.

The Practice of Touching Frequency

Over and over, I would touch these frequencies through practice - feel the shift in perspective, the opening, the relief - and then lose the signal. Back to relating to grace and gratitude as something I needed to generate.

I kept practicing. Not because I was disciplined, but because those moments when I could feel the frequency were undeniable. Real. More real than the story that I was broken and needed fixing.

Each time I practiced touching the frequency, the door opened. I could see differently. Feel differently. Know differently.

Then the door would close again.

Until one day it didn’t.

The Permanent Shift

The practice of touching the frequency over and over created the conditions for perspective to shift permanently. Not because I got better at the practice. Because the frequency reorganized how I see everything.

When you touch grace as a live frequency, you feel yourself held by something that was never not holding you.

When you touch gratitude as a live frequency, you feel yourself in relationship with everything - and recognize relationship was never broken.

Together, these frequencies don’t create healing. They reveal that healing was looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

The gift of perspective brings with it the opportunity for healing, the why behind why, the shift was needed when it was there all along.

We weren’t broken. We were seeking what we already were. The perspective shift shows us we’ve been standing in what we were searching for.

Creating Containers for Frequency

Part of how this perspective shift happened for me was creating containers for the frequency to move through.

For over a decade, I’ve been creating the Gratitude 540 Journal series - not as products to sell, but because structuring the prompts, choosing the questions, building the frameworks taught me how to hold grace and gratitude as frequencies rather than concepts.

Creating something for others to use forced me to stop relating TO these frequencies and start BEING them. You can’t guide someone to touch a frequency you’re only performing. The journals became real when I stopped translating and started transmitting.

Each journal in the series holds space for the gratitude frequency to move through different contexts - basic practice, relationships, women’s leadership, Gene Keys activation (created with my daughter Liv). I also gathered a collection of short stories where people expressed gratitude for those who shaped them. All of this was part of learning to be what I’m about to describe.

From Bridge to Column

For years, I was a bridge.

Bridge-builders stand between worlds - translating mystical knowing into corporate language, making spiritual wisdom accessible, creating frameworks so people can access what feels unfamiliar.

Being a bridge served a purpose. It helped people cross from fear-based leadership into grace. It gave them permission structures to show up differently.

But bridges exist because of separation. They’re built on the assumption that two things aren’t connected and someone needs to create the connection.

It is interesting to note that all of this over all these years was happening and the following awareness for me is recent, over the past few years it has been refining itself. Glimpses emerging and receding until I was no longer experiencing being the bridge over the river, but the river itself. I also want to note that we each find our way into a version of this in our own unique way. This is a guide, perhaps, but not a set of directions for you to follow to come out the same place I have. Rather a sharing that may, if the timing is right for YOU, stir something inside you for exploration and play.

Column consciousness is different, NOT better, a shift.

The column doesn’t connect heaven and earth - it demonstrates they were never separate. Column consciousness is the full vertical axis embodied in one point. Feet rooted in earth, crown open to source, the entire spectrum held simultaneously in the same location.

When you operate as a column, you’re not translating frequencies - you’re transmitting them directly.

The shift looks like this:

Bridge asks: “How do I help them understand this?”
Column asks: “Am I holding the frequency clearly?”

Bridge creates tools and frameworks to make things accessible.
Column IS the frequency. Tools may emerge as artifacts of transmission, but they’re not the work itself.

Bridge tries to meet everyone where they are.
Column transmits clearly and trusts that when something resonates with your current frequency, you feel it immediately - like coming home to something you already knew. When it doesn’t match where you are right now, it just feels... not yours. Both responses are perfect. We’re all tuned to different frequencies at different times in our journey.

What’s Available Now

I’m in the middle of this shift myself - from bridge-builder to column. From translating grace for corporate consumption to transmitting the frequency directly and trusting people to recognize it or not.

The journals, the book, the consulting work - all of it was bridge-building. Creating structures so people could access grace without having to name it as spiritual work.

Now I’m learning to just BE the frequency. To trust that witnessing and supporting another soul’s sovereignty is a blessing and the reflection of each individual’s individual agency and unity at once.

Our relationship to anything is the joy of being human. Our desire and ability to understand who and how we are in relationship to anything.

When you practice touching grace and gratitude as live frequencies - not concepts, not tools, but actual currents you can feel and resonate with - perspective shifts. Not all at once, but gradually. Until one day you realize you’re not trying to heal anymore. You’re just here, held, in relationship with everything, recognizing you always were.

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

The Gratitude 540 Journal series (named for the frequency of joy/gratitude on Hawkins’ consciousness scale) is available here: Alexsys Thompson Amazon

The crisis in leadership today is displayed on so many stages for us all to witness. Many of us, no matter what side of the aisle (if you have chosen a side) are experiencing confusion, excitement, disbelief, and frustration. One of the amazing and wonderful experiences I am having amongst all of this chaos and change is that leaders are digging deep within to deploy the best version of themselves in their leadership roles. So often humanity finds some of its best traits under pressure and chaos. Here we are. Within the pressure the cracks have happened and from the cracks grace seems to be finding its place within and amongst us.

The Fracturing of Traditional Leadership

Traditional leadership models are failing us precisely when we need them most. For decades, we've cultivated a model of leadership defined by dominance rather than wisdom, by force rather than influence, and by position rather than purpose. In today's complex environment, these approaches are not merely ineffective—they've become actively harmful. We see this live on daily basis during these changing times.

Several critical factors have exposed the limitations of conventional leadership approaches:

Unprecedented complexity. Today's leaders face challenges that cross boundaries of geography, culture, industry, and expertise. No single individual can possess all the knowledge needed to navigate this complexity through command-and-control leadership.

Increased transparency. The digital age has eliminated the barriers that once shielded leadership decisions from scrutiny. Today's workforce expects—and can easily discover—authenticity, consistency, and ethical clarity from their leaders.

Shifting workforce values. Emerging generations seek meaning, purpose, and growth in their work lives. They aren't motivated by traditional hierarchical authority but by leaders who inspire, develop, and care for their people.

Accelerating change. The pace of technological, social, and economic change has rendered traditional top-down decision-making obsolete. By the time information travels up and down a hierarchy, the situation has already evolved.

Global interconnection. Our world's profound interconnections mean that decisions made in one context ripple through countless others—often with unintended consequences. Leaders who fail to appreciate these connections create damage far beyond their immediate sphere.

These shifts haven't merely challenged traditional leadership—they've revealed its fundamental inadequacy. The leaders who succeed in this new reality aren't those who cling to outdated models of control and authority, but those who embrace a fundamentally different approach: leading with grace.

A New Framework: The Six Tenets of Graceful Leadership

In "The Power of a Graceful Leader," I introduce a new leadership paradigm built on six essential tenets that together transform how leaders think, act, and influence others. This isn't merely a refinement of traditional leadership—it's a fundamentally different approach grounded in authenticity, wholeness, and conscious impact.

Let's explore how these tenets transform leadership effectiveness for our complex world:

Tenet #1: Integrating Mind, Body and Soul

The first tenet of graceful leadership begins with wholeness. Traditional leadership has asked us to fragment ourselves—to leave our emotions, intuition, and deeper wisdom at the door in favor of purely rational, analytical approaches. This fragmentation has led to leaders who are disconnected from themselves and, consequently, from those they lead.

Graceful leaders intentionally integrate all aspects of themselves—mind, body, and soul—into their leadership approach. This integration transforms leadership effectiveness in several critical ways:

Enhanced decision-making. When leaders access their full range of intelligence—intellectual, emotional, somatic, and intuitive—they make more holistic decisions. They see patterns that purely analytical approaches miss and anticipate impacts that spreadsheets cannot capture.

Authentic presence. Leaders who have integrated mind, body, and soul show up with a palpable presence that inspires trust. Their words align with their actions because both flow from an integrated core rather than compartmentalized thinking.

Sustainable energy. Integration prevents the burnout that plagues fragmented leaders. By honoring their whole selves, graceful leaders maintain the energy and resilience needed for long-term effectiveness rather than cycling through depletion and recovery.

Deeper connection. When leaders bring their whole selves to their role, they create space for others to do the same. This fosters environments where people feel seen and valued in their entirety, dramatically increasing engagement and commitment.

One executive I worked with, VP of Engineering of a rapidly growing Aerospace company, had built his career on brilliant analytical thinking while suppressing his intuition and emotional intelligence. As his company faced increasingly complex challenges, his narrow approach began failing him and his team. Through intentional practice in integrating all aspects of himself—including meditation, strengths work, and emotional awareness training—he transformed his leadership. His team reported that decisions became not just smarter but wiser, addressing dimensions of problems they had previously overlooked.

Tenet #2: Evolving - Alignment of Self and Soul

The second tenet recognizes that graceful leadership requires ongoing evolution—a continuous alignment of our outer actions (self) with our inner wisdom and purpose (soul). This alignment isn't a destination but a journey of growth and integration.

This tenet transforms team performance by creating environments where evolution is not just permitted but expected:

Cultural transformation. Teams led by those actively aligning self and soul develop cultures where continuous growth is valued over perfection. This creates psychological safety that fuels innovation and adaptation.

Authentic development. When leaders model their own evolution, team members feel empowered to pursue development paths aligned with their unique strengths rather than conforming to standardized expectations.

Collective wisdom. Teams whose leaders embrace this tenet learn to integrate diverse perspectives rather than seeking false consensus. They develop the capacity to hold creative tension that leads to breakthrough thinking.

Adaptive resilience. As leaders align self and soul, they develop deeper reserves of resilience that ripple throughout their teams. This creates organizations that bend but don't break under pressure.

An SVP of Finance I worked with struggled with disconnection between her stated values and her leadership behaviors. Though she spoke of collaboration and empowerment, she micromanaged decisions and avoided vulnerability. As she committed to the journey of aligning her leadership self with her deeper values, her team's performance transformed. Within a year, employee turnover reduced by 70%,revenue metrics doubled, and the division exceeded revenue targets that had previously seemed unreachable.

Tenet #3: Transparency - Self and Others

The third tenet of graceful leadership centers on transparency—creating cultures of openness, honesty, and vulnerability that build trust and enable authentic connection. In traditional leadership models, information was power to be hoarded and vulnerability was weakness to be hidden. Graceful leaders take a radically different approach.

This tenet transforms leadership in several profound ways:

Trust acceleration. When leaders practice appropriate transparency about decisions, challenges, and even mistakes, they rapidly build trust that typically takes years to develop. This trust becomes the foundation for everything from innovation to change management.

Collective intelligence. Transparent environments allow information to flow freely, enabling teams to tap into their collective wisdom rather than being limited by what filters through hierarchical channels. This leads to better solutions and faster adaptation.

Psychological safety. When leaders model transparency, including admitting what they don't know, they create environments where others feel safe to share ideas, raise concerns, and take calculated risks without fear of punishment.

Congruent cultures. Transparency eliminates the gap between the stated values on the wall and the lived experience of the organization. This congruence creates energizing clarity that drives engagement and retention.

An SVP in the Energy Sector transformed his region by embracing transparency of self and then modeling it for his organization. He went from being described as unavailable and unknowable to a great guy and someone the people in his care trusted. This happened through using video media and storytelling. He was able to meet his teams with a vulnerability and passion that they had not previously felt they had access to. As we rise it often feels impossible to connect, but with some technology and willingness the gap can be bridged and the transformation for everyone sustainable.

Tenet #4: Connecting - Self and Others

The fourth tenet recognizes that leadership is fundamentally relational. Graceful leaders prioritize deep, authentic connection—first with themselves and then with those they lead. This stands in stark contrast to traditional leadership models that emphasized professional distance and emotional detachment.

This tenet enhances leadership effectiveness through:

Emotional intelligence. Leaders who connect with their own emotions develop the capacity to understand and respond appropriately to others' emotional states. This emotional intelligence becomes a critical leadership asset for navigating complex human dynamics.

Inclusive belonging. Connection-oriented leaders create environments where people feel they truly belong, not despite their differences but because of the unique value those differences bring. This sense of belonging drives engagement, innovation, and retention.

Bridge building. Graceful leaders excel at connecting across differences—whether departmental silos, cultural perspectives, or ideological divides. This skill becomes increasingly valuable in our polarized world.

Feedback fluency. When connection is strong, feedback flows naturally in all directions. Leaders receive the input they need to grow, and team members get the guidance required for development.

A Physician Administrator I coached had built his career on technical excellence but struggled with the human dimension of leadership. As he embraced practices to strengthen connection—from one-on-one coffee conversations to team vulnerability exercises—his leadership impact soared and his division became known throughout the system as the place where talented people wanted to work.

Tenet #5: Co-Creative - Innovative

The fifth tenet embraces the power of co-creation—the ability to innovate collaboratively rather than driving change from the top down. Graceful leaders understand that the complexity of today's challenges requires diverse perspectives and collective creativity.

This tenet transforms organizational innovation through:

Distributed creativity. Rather than positioning themselves as the source of vision and ideas, co-creative leaders tap into the creative potential throughout their organizations. This multiplies innovative capacity exponentially.

Ownership and implementation. When people co-create solutions, they develop deep ownership that accelerates implementation. Change becomes something done "through us" rather than "to us."

Adaptive responses. Co-creative processes generate more diverse ideas, leading to solutions that address multiple dimensions of complex problems rather than just the aspects visible from the top.

Creative conflict. Graceful leaders use co-creation to harness the productive energy of diverse perspectives, transforming what might be destructive conflict into creative tension that drives innovation. (Check out Graceful Conversations for more on this)

A manufacturing leader facing disruptive industry changes exemplified this tenet by convening cross-functional innovation teams that included frontline workers alongside executives. Instead of imposing a transformation strategy, she created the conditions for co-creative innovation. The resulting solutions not only addressed market challenges but also improved operational efficiency and employee experience simultaneously—a trifecta that wouldn't have emerged from traditional top-down planning.

Tenet #6: Compassionately Powerful - In All Things

The final tenet reconciles what traditional leadership models treated as opposites: compassion and power. Graceful leaders understand that true power doesn't come from dominance or control but from the ability to combine deep care for others with decisive action.

This integration transforms leadership through:

Balanced decision-making. Compassionately powerful leaders make decisions that consider both business outcomes and human impacts, finding creative solutions that address both rather than sacrificing one for the other.

Courageous compassion. These leaders have difficult conversations that others avoid, understanding that true compassion sometimes requires challenging others' limitations rather than just accommodating them. (Check out Graceful Conversations for more on this)

Resilient organizations. When compassion and power work together, organizations develop the capacity to face difficult truths while maintaining the supportive relationships needed for resilience.

Sustainable impact. Unlike the burn-and-churn approach of power without compassion, or the ineffectuality of compassion without power, this integrated approach creates sustainable impact over time.

A healthcare executive demonstrated this tenet when her organization needed significant restructuring to remain viable. Rather than implementing layoffs with cold efficiency (power without compassion) or avoiding necessary changes (compassion without power), she approached the challenge with compassionate power. She involved those affected in planning the transition, provided generous support for those leaving, and redesigned roles to leverage the strengths of those who remained. The result was not just improved financial performance but a strengthened culture of trust during a challenging transition.

The Interconnected Whole: How the Tenets Work Together

These six tenets don't operate in isolation but form an interconnected system where each strengthens the others. A leader who integrates mind, body, and soul (Tenet 1) naturally becomes more able to align self and soul (Tenet 2). This alignment enables authentic transparency (Tenet 3) and deepens connection (Tenet 4). Strong connections create the trust required for co-creative innovation (Tenet 5), while integration and alignment provide the foundation for compassionate power (Tenet 6).

Together, these tenets create a virtuous cycle that continually reinforces and deepens graceful leadership capacity. Leaders don't master these tenets once and for all but develop an ongoing practice of embodying them more fully over time.

The Future of Leadership Is Graceful

As our global challenges grow increasingly complex and interconnected, the need for graceful leadership becomes not just desirable but essential. The leaders who will navigate our organizations, communities, and world through these turbulent times will not be those who cling to outdated models of dominance and control, but those who embrace the integrated wisdom of graceful leadership.

This shift is already underway. Throughout organizations of all sizes and across all sectors, we're witnessing the emergence of leaders who embody these tenets—not perfectly, but intentionally. They're creating workplaces where people bring their full selves, where growth is continuous, where transparency builds trust, where connection flourishes, where innovation is co-created, and where compassion and power work together.

The results speak for themselves: greater innovation, deeper engagement, more sustainable performance, and cultures where people thrive rather than merely survive. In my work with leaders across industries, I've witnessed transformations that once would have seemed impossible—divisions moving from conflict to collaboration, organizations shifting from stagnation to growth, and leaders evolving from depletion to sustainable impact.

The path to graceful leadership isn't always easy. It requires courage to challenge conventional wisdom, discipline to integrate rather than fragment, and humility to evolve continuously. Yet for those willing to embark on this journey, the rewards are profound—not just in organizational outcomes, but in the lived experience of leadership itself.

In a world hungry for a new kind of leadership, grace offers the way forward. The future belongs to those brave enough to lead not through force and fear, but through integration, evolution, transparency, connection, co-creation, and compassionate power. The future of leadership is graceful.

I am humbled, honored and excited to share a new podcast which explores each of the six tenets of The Power of a Graceful Leader.   The journey to being able to share this email with you, has been creative, humbling, and so much fun.  Let me share a bit of the back story with you.  When I shared this book with the world in 2020 it was one of the most exciting times of my life and soon after it was released people were emailing me asking if I would do a podcast to go with it.  I was hesitant to say yes as I was not sure I wanted to take on that challenge and commit to the learning curve. A month or so later Voice of America reached out and asked if I would like to host a podcast on their platform, oddly this took away the resistance to the learning curve, as they took all the production on themselves.  I just needed to find amazing humans to interview and record.  So, I took the challenge on and committed that I would move forward if Richard Rudd, Gene Keys- Founder, said yes.  This is one way I test flow and synchronicity and love the experience no matter the response. I drafted an email to Richard asking him if he would consider being my first guest on the podcast and within a couple of days, I received an email saying yes, he would love to.  I remember siting there in disbelief as I didn’t even really expect the email to get to him, much less such a rapid response and a yes. So the first podcast was born.

As I was looking for guests to explore grace with Truett Tate was recommended by Gian Power of TLC Lions and once the introduction was the made it was any easy “hell yeah”.  After we recorded our interview, I received an email with feedback that he enjoyed our time and that he had an idea to help get all 6 tenets out into the world and was I interested.  I responded I too enjoyed my time and at this time had a lot of balls in the air and would ponder it. 

PAR T of the email I received.

On Sat, Sep 24, 2022 at 10:05 AM Truett Tate :

Good morning, Alexsys!

I’ve been reflecting on our chat the other morning, and am still beaming!

I really enjoyed it…..and hope you did as well!

It got me thinking!

If you think that it went well, too……I think that it could be interesting if, in your introduction, you mention that this is the first of a series wherein each successive 30 minutes, you and I will explore another of your tenets!

Life was moving so fast at this time in all areas of my life in a promptly forgotten about this generous invitation.  Fast forward to earlier this year, I awoke from a deep sleep with the call to reach out to Truett and see if he still had any energy around this idea.  I remember writing in my journal how confused I was that this memory would just resurface with no prior inquiry or recent connection with Truett. Also, I felt a bit odd reaching out two years later unsure how to approach this and guessing he had probably forgotten as well.   However, I answered the call and sent the email only to receive a very enthusiastic YES.  So here I am excited to share with you that this was a blast, and I have grown so much through the whole experience. I remain so grateful for the journeys this book has and continues to take me on. 

For the next 7 Tuesdays I will release a podcast here through my substack and inside each one we will explore one of the 6 tenets and a bonus episode. The approach is very conversational and relatable, and we kept it to 30 minutes so you can take it all in with ease and joy.   It has been an immense pleasure to work with Truett and explore grace in leadership with him.  Please share this podcast and comment as that helps us not feel alone. 

In grace and the YES, Lexy

Tears came in and a deep feeling of gratitude for this man reaching out to me with this message.  I remembered when I began writing The Power of a Graceful Leader, that resources about Grace in Leadership were scarce, without a religious slant. The fact that my book is a resource for him and future authors makes my heart sing with joy.   It makes all the work I have been doing over the last seven years around grace and leadership so worth it. Pioneering can be a lonely place.

I then had the experience of this this man, single handedly, lifting the gag I had placed upon myself to play small in an area where I had done the work.   So many of the “when this happens” I will begin to speak or share more writing came sliding in and I realized I was hiding under some heavy limiting beliefs.  The reality was many of those measures have come to fruition- Amazon best seller, multiple emails a month thanking me for writing this book, course work to share with others so they can teach, relationships that have come in and many more amazing things. Following you will see the limiting beliefs I pulled into full awareness and the reframe I have created to make sure they are no longer binding on me. So, NO MORE, I am coming into a tighter alignment with my work in a way that allows celebration around the impact this book is having.

Limiting beliefs I am upgrading:

-          This book is not less than because it doesn’t have a “real” publisher- reminder they wouldn’t take the book with the word Grace in the title at the time.

o   REFRAME:  Reminder of the huge impact PGL has had with little to no marketing and the courses that support this body of work are equally having deep measurable impact.  The testimonials and transformations are the evidence.

-          Who am I to speak to as an authority without my PHD, etc.?   

o   REFRAME: I have been doing this work deeply on both a personal and professional level for 25 years and am still evolving.  I am walking my talk.

-          If I share the wins and my voice I will be bragging and criticized for doing so (experienced this already)

o   REFRAME: Creating conversation and pioneering change can be uncomfortable for all parties.  It is not personal and sharing the wins offers others insight and hope for their sacred work and their way of being in the world.  This work is worth being comfortable.  Remember active participation not perfection.

-          There are enough voices/noise in this space, so why bother?

o   REFRAME: We each carry a vibration within us that some people will be drawn to. Let your intuition be your guide on when and where to share and be brave enough to answer the call. If I do not speak, I cannot be of service. I am willing to be seen and am proud of my work.

Celebration is a very important part of all our processes as we move through life.    When we do the work and master things as we evolve, we can integrate celebration as deeply as the learning and recovery that goes with the mastering process.

So, today I am celebrating the positive impact PGL is having in the world at large.  Here are a few data points I am excited to share.

• August 2024 sold the most books since the book was published and in large quantities.  This leads me to believe more teams are taking part in the work together and this has a huge positive impact on all parties. 

• There was a large spike in purchases in India this year

• Another author used my book in their research to expand on grace in leadership

• I completed a new series of podcasts with a friend and mentor Truett Tate where we have fun exploring each tenet.  It was his idea to do this, and I feel so supported by him in this work.  The podcast will launch here on Substack first in Oct.

Thank you for celebrating with me.  I wish for you to embrace celebrating your wins more openly and consistently, in this way we can shift our collective “play small framework “ and all be working and seen in our genius.

In celebration , Lex

What if followers got to choose? What would be required for this process to be in play in a way that had a positive impact on our society and the world at large?  There are three key things that seem to come up as I turn this idea around for exploration.

1)  As followers we would need to be aware, clear, and aligned with our values. This would create space for a deeper level of aligned discernment and action.  Can you imagine the impact we could all have with this one simple action?  For a current example we could look to Europe and the Farmers there that are in action and making positive change around their (our) food source.  As humans we have many examples of this rise up and fall away.  What if it was sustainable and simply how we lived rather than only behaving this way in times of stress?

2)  As followers we would tune up our listening skills to a superhuman level.  We would seek to listen to explore and be with others that have ideas and ways of being that are different than our own.  This high level of listening would also allow us to hear things that were previously unheard due to the hum of our cities, our busyness, and “to do” lists.  Can you imagine walking in the park and hearing the flap of a birds’ wings, the sound of a honeybee across the field, maybe just maybe the whisper of a tree? This new experience of listening would create more pause in our day, more wonder and yes more magic.  Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it?

3) As followers we would be clear of what our boundaries are and communicate them with a grace and clarity that most of us are not able to do today.  This ability would create instant consent and make us quickly aware of when consent wasn’t in place. Yes, that is right so much war, stress, and internal shame simply falls away.  Imagine boundaries being sexy!!

When we live our values with clarity and respect, listen with our superhuman ability, and communicate boundaries that support ourselves and others we literally create a New World.  We don’t need spaceships, fancy deep watercraft, or to even leave the earth’s surface, we simply relate to Gaia and each other in new and wonder filled ways. We chose to co-create this New World with a fervent commitment to all that is, we would literally be living in Heaven on Earth.

I pray this inquiry plants a seed within your that sprouts up for consideration and at the right time exploration.  I know the garden that is growing in my life because of this simple inquiry is yielding a bountiful harvest.

In deep curiosity, Lex