I recently had a conversation with Kat Kibben on The Courage Effect, and a few things they shared have repeatedly resurfaced in my brain. Kat sold their house, bought a van, and spent three years running their business from the road. It sounds like a freedom story – but underneath, it’s a story about pressure.

One line I keep turning over: “It was the ultimate pressure test of every rule I ever made about working.” Most of us never seek that test out. We wait for the bad thing instead, the layoff, the diagnosis, the tree through the roof, to force the change we already knew we needed.

Kat doesn’t wait. When they wanted to get healthier at 30, they didn’t hire a trainer; Kat signed up for a Tough Mudder. The kind where you sign a death waiver. “I light the fire under me,” they said. The van was the same instinct, scaled up: a way to make seeking a way of living instead of a thing they were always waiting to do.

And here’s the thing: the leap isn’t the point – the landing is.

It got me thinking about how we absorb a new experience; or more honestly, how we don’t. We tend to treat new experiences like trophies. We have the trip, the role, the breakthrough, and then we file it away and go back to who we were. Kat’s whole argument is that the integration is the work. And it usually requires going backwards.

This is captured in a story Kat and I talked about (which is also included in their book The Bounce Back Factor). A few months into van life, a friend talked them down a narrow road in rural Idaho to record a podcast. The road got tighter, and the trees got lower. Eventually they hit a bridge too narrow to cross, and it was impossible to turn the van around. An hour of cutting down branches and thousand-point turns later, a man on an ATV pulled up, laughed, and said: “go backwards.”

So they drove a mile in reverse.

“Sometimes backwards is good enough,” they said, “but we are never told to go anywhere besides forward.”

We struggle with integrating new experiences because we’ve been conditioned to believe the only honest direction is ahead. Reverse feels like failure. Retreat feels like weakness. So we white-knuckle forward into a bridge we can’t cross.

Real integration asks for something subtler – urging us to notice the rule the experience just broke, and then to let that rule go. Kat calls this the emotional rewiring. The hard part of change isn’t observing that something doesn’t work. It’s the willingness to say I don’t like this and I’m willing to change. That’s the tipping point. Not the insight – the willingness.

I think this is where most of us stall. We collect the lesson without metabolizing it. We come back from the thing and slot it neatly beside all our old assumptions, which remain fully intact. Nothing rewires. As Kat put it: if nothing changes about you, nothing changes about your work.

So how do we do it differently?

Kat offers one approach: practice quitting. Not the job. The little quits. The half-read book on your nightstand you keep force-reading. The run you hate. “We need to practice little quits so we’re ready for big quits,” they said, “because big quits make room.” That word, room, is the one I’d underline. Integration isn’t only about what you take in. It’s about what you clear out. You can’t hold a new way of working in a life that’s still packed with the old one.

And then there was Kat’s reframe that quietly rearranged some mental furniture in my head. They’d seen a social post that asked: If you knew you were thirty failures away from your best idea, how quickly would you fail? “I’d fail the hell out of today,” Kat said. They’ve been trying to live with that energy, not because failing is fun, but because treating each attempt as a door to open – rather than a verdict to fear – is what lets an experience actually teach you something.

That’s the shift. We don’t integrate new experiences by extracting a tidy takeaway. We integrate them by letting them change the rules we live by, even when that means reversing down a road we were sure only went one way.

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So here’s what I’m sitting with, and what I’ll offer you:

What’s the new experience you’ve been treating as a trophy instead of a teacher? And what old rule is it quietly asking you to quit?

I’d love to hear. Drop it in the comments.

➡️ Listen to the podcast here (and please share, rate, and subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode!)

Stay courageous,

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from your own workload. It comes from absorbing everyone else’s.

Ask a team who holds them together, and they’ll name the same person without hesitating. Ask that person how they’re doing, and you’ll get a long pause. They’re the one people come to, the empathetic listener who also happens to be a sharp problem-solver. When something painful moves through the organization, a restructuring, a layoff, a leader behaving badly, they take it in, metabolize it, and help everyone else keep functioning.

Peter Frost and Sandra Robinson gave this person a name: the toxic handler. Since first hearing it about a decade ago, this phrase has stayed with me. I’ve seen it. And I’ve lived it. The organizational hero, and casualty. The hero, because they hold the team together. The casualty, because the holding has a cost; and it’s mostly paid by the handler alone.

In my coaching, it’s a pattern I experience in regular rotation. But lately it’s on overdrive.

Why Now?

Restructuring within organizations isn’t an event anymore, it’s a condition. AI has moved in. Uncertainty is the baseline. And here’s the thing about organizational pain: it permeates the system. It gets discharged downward, onto people. The capable ones catch it.

This moment carries a particular irony. We know that AI makes our human skills more valuable: the empathy, the connection, the judgment that automation can’t touch. But it also means we’re asking people to live in those human spaces more than ever; for longer stretches, with fewer colleagues to share the load. We’ve made the most depleting work more central, and we’ve done almost nothing to make it sustainable.

Toxic handlers step in and take on more than makes sense. They do work that isn’t theirs. They become the go-between, the place where the emotional residue collects. It can genuinely help the organization – problems get solved, people get supported, and shit gets done. But most handlers don’t have the toolkit that counselors, therapists, or coaches are trained in: how to let the residue pass through rather than it sticking. So they carry it. The weight compounds, and it becomes unsustainable.

I say this as someone who does this work professionally. Who sits in that space with someone. Helping them unpack their burden is part of my job. And I’ve had to learn (the hard way) what is mine and what is not mine. Knowing that line is the whole difference between sustaining this work and drowning in it, and most capable people in organizations were never shown where (or how) to draw it.

Where it Gets Dangerous

I recently coached a leader who recognized this tendency in himself. The first realization stung. The second, which surfaced in our 1:1s as he reflected more deeply, hit harder: he wasn’t only carrying this pattern, he was modeling it. His team members had started doing the same thing: actively absorbing, handling, and over-functioning, because he unconsciously shows them that’s what good work looks like within the doors of their company.

This was his aha moment, and it stung. The pattern he’d been trying to unlearn in himself was now cascading through his team. And if his team members pass it to theirs (or each other), toxic handling stops being an individual coping style and becomes the culture. Something that started from good intentions ends up poisoning the larger waters — reinforcing the very environment no one wanted.

So what does it cost us? More than it looks. Because we’re discharging emotional pain onto our most capable people and burning them out. That’s the tip of the iceberg. Think about what’s underneath the water line: real health risks, real attrition, real cost. There’s an ROI here, even if it resists easy measurement.

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From Handling to Systems

The solution? Here’s where I want to be careful. Because the easy answer is “more support,” and support is a response. It shows up after the damage. Yes, support is undoubtedly needed, but I’m more interested in being preventive.

The first step is the simplest and the hardest: waking up to it. Naming it. This is happening here. Once you can see the what, you can zoom out and ask the now-what.

And the now-what is structural. As humans, we’re good at this operationally. Think process improvement: we spot the problems, fix them, then build processes so they don’t recur. We rarely apply that same instinct to emotional load.

What if, when a real change hits an organization, we built in something deliberate: a structured way to name what’s going away and account for what it costs? It might look like a debrief that treats the emotional fallout of a reorg the way we’d treat any other risk: named, discussed, and owned by the group rather than absorbed by one person. Not a therapy session. A practice. A built-in channel so the team becomes its own shock absorber, rather than quietly assigning that role to whoever cares the most.

That’s the shift: from a handful of empaths absorbing the blast radius alone, to systems that let everyone process, discharge, and move through. We give people the toolkit and the permission to set boundaries. Because the most well-boundaried people often suffer least, and that’s not a coincidence.

The real challenge is this: how do we empower people without overburdening them? How do we honor the toxic handler’s gifts without relying on them until they break?

I don’t think we make toxic handlers more resilient. I think we make toxic handling obsolete.

🤔 Where does this live in your organization? Who’s the person everyone comes to? And what would it take to share that weight?

💬 I’d love to hear what you’re seeing. Drop a comment below.

I’ve been honing a speech called Scar Power. And in the process, a throughline I’ve been building toward for years finally has words.

Lead lived.

Not lead perfectly, or impressively. Not lead the way you think you’re supposed to — the polished version, the bulletproof version, the version that has it all together before walking into the room.

Lead lived. From what you’ve actually been through. From the decisions that didn’t go the way you planned. From the moments that marked you. From the version of yourself that’s been shaped by real experience; not staged for an audience.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after 20+ combined years of being a leader and partnering with them: the ones who create real, lasting change aren’t the most refined. They’re the most honest. And the gap between those two things — between performing leadership and actually living it — is where most leaders lose sight of themselves. And where the people around them feel it most.

We’ve built a world that rewards the performance. The “perfect” answer. The unflappable delivery. The leader who never lets them see you sweat. And somewhere along the way, a lot of us started to believe that that was the job (and are running ourselves ragged as a result). That leadership was something you got right, not something you grew into. That the goal was to project certainty, not to build trust through honesty.

That’s the performance. Not leadership.

The leaders I admire most — the ones people actually follow, the ones who build cultures worth being part of — aren’t performing anything. They’re leading from what they’ve lived. From the scar tissue and the self-awareness. From the hard-won clarity that only comes from having been in it.

Lead Lived is the root. The anchor. It’s what everything at Weller Collaboration is built around — the coaching, the speeches, the workshops, the conversations. It’s also what I’ve always believed. I just finally found the words for it.

Come lead lived with me.

Not from who you think you should be. From who you actually are — shaped by everything you’ve been through, everything that marked you, everything you learned the hard way.

I hope you’ll join me!

✨And before you go . . . here’s an invitation to lead lived with me in person!✨

I’m hosting an event in Seattle on June 24th called The Lead Lived Book Exchange. It’s a gathering built around a simple idea: the things that have shaped us are worth sharing.

Bring a book (wrapped) that helped you see yourself differently. That gave language to something you’d been carrying. That made you stop and think: that’s me. I’ve been there. Share why you chose this book, exchange it, and leave with another book (and story) from someone else. You’ll meet remarkable people and walk away with a new book and conversations you won’t forget.

📚 Find details and get your ticket on Eventbrite (the last book exchange I hosted sold out, so grab your spot!)

👉 In the meantime — I’m curious: what’s the thing that helped you lead lived? Reply or share in the comments below👇

The retrospective is everywhere — the debrief, the AAR, the lessons-learned sessions and docs.

In conference rooms, coaching conversations, and performance reviews, we’re all being invited to look back. What happened? What worked? What would we do differently? Start, stop, continue.

Personally, I'm a big fan. I've experienced retrospectives as a valuable practice with teams, and for myself. They work. Mostly. Here's what goes sideways: done poorly, a postmortem doesn't dissolve a story. It weaves it tighter.

I’ve been in enough of these conversations lately to notice a pattern. People come in armed — not curious. They’re not asking questions, they’re pressing charges. The postmortem becomes a prosecution, and the goal shifts from learning together to being right.

That’s when I started thinking about (of all things) fabric.

The difference between a knitting needle and a knife

Imagine a tightly woven piece of cloth. If you want to examine what it’s made of — how it holds together, whether it’s still serving its purpose — you have a choice in how you approach it.

You could take a knitting needle and gently open the weave. Widen the threads just enough to see inside, to invite light and air, to ask what’s working and what isn’t. The fabric stays intact. The investigation is curious and collaborative.

Or you could take a knife.

You could cut the threads entirely. Destroy the integrity of the structure in the name of finding out what’s wrong with it. That might sometimes be necessary; but a lot of the time, we’re not doing surgery. We’re just pulling threads.

I watched this play out recently with a leader I was coaching. She was so focused on proving her boss wrong — so committed to making sure her boss knew she was wrong — that her actual goal got lost. Her initial intention of co-creating a better way forward wasn’t even on the table anymore. It had been replaced by something smaller: winning.

I encouraged her to widen her focus. Not just to open her boss’s perspective, but to open her own. Because when we’re that dug in, we’re not looking for a new answer. We’re looking for validation of the old one.

We’re not looking for bad people

In Brené Brown’s most recent book Strong Ground (which I highly recommend for many “aha” moments and gems), she writes about her organization’s approach to retrospectives. Instead of calling them postmortems, they’re named Story Rumbles. And one of the intentions they set before every session is this: We’re not looking for bad people. We’re looking for bad systems.

Oof. So powerful in its brevity and humanity.

Because how often are our retrospectives actually about the system? And how often are they, underneath all the professional language, about finding someone to blame?

The same principle shows up in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: it’s not the person, it’s the behavior. Not the identity, the action. Not who they are, but what happened and why.

When we go in with a knife, we’re usually going after a person. When we go in with a knitting needle, we’re going after the problem.

The space where choice lives

I am notoriously impatient — and impatience, it turns out, is a knife.

When an email comes in, I want to respond immediately. When a text lands, I’m already typing. More often than not, part of that is genuine; because I care, I want to be helpful, I want people to know they’re not waiting on me. But if I’m honest? Some of it is ego. I want to be seen as responsive. Capable. On it.

And speed doesn’t leave room for nuance. A quick reply fired from a defensive place, or a frustrated one, or just a tired one — cuts through something before I’ve even stopped to ask whether cutting was what the moment needed. What I’ve learned is that I can mean well and still do damage. I can intend to move things forward and instead slice right through the fabric of a conversation I actually wanted to protect.

The magic (and real compassion) happens when I opt for the knitting needle. It requires a pause. Not a long one, but just enough to ask:

What am I actually trying to create here?

What is this conversation made of, and how do I want to handle it?

That small gap — between something landing and me reacting — is where choice lives. Where agency lives.

Most of us sprint past it, but the gap is always there. We just have to be willing to use it.

What you bring to the conversation shapes what you find

Poking holes matters. Challenging assumptions, disrupting narratives, questioning what we’ve quietly accepted — that’s courage. That’s also what moves things forward.

And how we poke holes changes everything. The tool matters. The intention matters. The question isn’t whether to investigate; it’s whether you’re going in to destroy or to discover.

So the next time you walk into a hard conversation, ask yourself: Am I holding a knife or a knitting needle?

💭 What is one conversation you’ve been approaching with the wrong tool — and what might shift if you put it down? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Stay courageous (and curious!),

Find more information about me and Weller Collaboration at wellercollaboration.com

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The Pull for More

I’ll admit it: I love to shop. Certain objects genuinely bring me joy. That feels complicated to admit right now, but I'm admitting it anyway.

But a trend I keep finding myself doing more and more over the past few years: looking around and thinking: what if there was just . . . less of this?

Less noise. Less friction. Less stuff that pulls me away from the things and the people that actually matter.

Turns out, I'm in good company.

A Threshold Moment

People I’m talking to — in work and in life — are arriving at a threshold. The model that got them here: more output, more hustle, more sacrifice. Most are done carrying it.

I’m hearing versions of the same sentences on repeat:

I’ve been loyal to this company and it has not loved me back.

I have a full calendar and an empty tank.

I had to lose something to remember what I wasn't protecting.

Repeated layoffs. Culture decks that promise one thing, but Monday mornings that deliver another. AI tools getting smarter, but the to-do list keeps getting longer. Somewhere along the way, the agreement they'd made with their careers got rewritten without their input.

So they’re taking inventory, and are asking different questions. Moving away from “how do I get more?” toward “what am I willing to give up to keep doing this?” And for a lot of them, the answer is: a lot less than I used to be.

The old arrangement isn’t holding. And the system with it.

The Beauty That’s Here Now OR The Buffer We Build

I’m a big fan of Ann Patchett’s writing. She named something in her 2021 essay How to Practice that I hark back to regularly — that she wanted to get rid of her possessions because possessions stood between her and death. Not because they protected her from it, but because they created a kind of buffer. A distraction from “what was coming and the beauty that was here now.”

“I found little things that had become important over time for no reason other than that I’d kept them for so long.” - Ann Patchett

She penned this during the pandemic, and revisiting the essay surfaces something different for me. It cuts deeper now that instability isn’t a moment — it’s become the climate.

Right now, every day brings some new weight to carry: geopolitical chaos, economic uncertainty, the relentless scroll of crisis and pain. It’s not just that we have too much stuff. It’s that we have too much everything. Too much input. Too much complexity. Too many things demanding our attention before we’ve had a chance to figure out what we actually believe. A new level of accumulation.

Ann Patchett wasn’t on a minimalist mission; she was practicing discernment. Separating what truly mattered from what had just accumulated. There’s a difference. And that distinction is exactly what I see so many of us – especially leaders – fumbling toward right now.

The Real Practice

Here’s the kicker: the desire for less isn’t actually about subtraction. It’s about presence.

When my parents were downsizing a few years back, I watched them say goodbye to decades of objects. At first it felt like loss; but what I came to see on the other side was clarity. Space. The freedom that comes when the things you’re holding onto don’t hold you back.

I’m in that process myself. Looking at what’s around me and asking: Does this serve the life I’m actually living? Or the life I thought I’d be living? The glasses that are gorgeous, but we never use. The commitments that no longer fit. The noise I’ve normalized.

Ann Patchett had a version of that question too. She kept what was beautiful, and what she used. She let go of what represented who she’d imagined she would become, but didn’t.

That’s the real practice.

What Would You Put Down?

I’m bringing two questions into my coaching conversations now, and I’m sitting with it myself:

Where in your life are you holding onto more (meetings, obligations, stuff, noise, etc.) in service of an identity that may no longer be yours?

And what would it feel like to put some of that down?

This isn’t a call to simplicity for simplicity’s sake. It’s a call to get honest about what actually steadies you. About what gives you the energy to keep going when the world keeps adding weight.

Less isn’t emptiness. Done with intention, less is room.

👋🏻 What would you let go of, if you let yourself? I’d love to hear.

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Flux is the new normal.

Let’s start with the word itself: flux means a state of continuous change; a condition where nothing is fixed, where movement is constant, and where the ground shifts before you’ve found your footing. In physics, it describes the flow of energy through space. And in our lives right now, it describes pretty much everything.

Work. Family. Health. Community. Government. It’s coming from every direction, and it doesn’t let up. And while we’re all navigating the same uncertain waters, each of us is dealing with our own particular version of it — the specific tensions, losses, and curveballs that make up the texture of your days.

What fascinates me is how differently people respond.

Some of us reach for control. We make lists (the high of checking off those boxes!), build routines, add structure wherever we can find it. Others do the opposite — they loosen their grip, embrace elasticity, and let the uncertainty move them. Both responses make complete sense. Both, taken too far, can leave you stuck.

I’ve been sitting in this stew a lot lately. Feeling the tension as I catch myself doing both.

My first instinct when things get chaotic has been to reach for process. But the years I spent in change management consulting — where I repeatedly iterated on questions like “What’s the current state? Desired state? Roadmap to get there?” — taught me that the process is ultimately a guide. A path with an intended route that’s likely going to diverge in some way, so alternatives were necessary. And with that flexibility, I found myself creating new processes to allow for the unexpected.

Yes, building in some slack along with the rigor is necessary. But I was operationalizing chaos. Creating structure to make what was uncertain manageable.

And over the last 6 months, I’ve been seriously questioning that reflex. Because a lot of my old processes just aren’t working the way they used to. And I’ve had to stop reading that as a failure and start reading it as information.

The world has changed. Which means the systems I built to navigate it probably need to change too.

And I’m not just talking about work — workflows, routines, the architecture of a business. I’m talking about the deeper systems. The processes of a life. How you take care of yourself. How you genuinely connect with people versus simply staying in touch. How you decide where your energy goes. What you’re still tolerating that no longer fits.

Those processes look different for everyone. For some, a new process might be as simple as a morning ritual that actually belongs to them — not borrowed from someone else’s playbook, but something intentional and personal. For others, it might mean changing how they connect — more walks, fewer screens, more honest conversation. Or something bigger: rethinking how you create, lead, or show up somewhere that’s been running on autopilot for too long.

The specific process matters less than the question behind it: what might a different approach make possible?

That’s the reframe I keep coming back to. Flux and process can feel like opposites: one is structure, the other is uncertainty. But I don’t think we have to choose between them. I want enough structure to move through the chaos without being flattened by it. And enough openness to let the chaos actually teach me something. I’m trying to inhabit the space of both/and.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured this out. I’m sorting it in real time.

What I’m working through is how I know if a process is helping me realize my goals or simply adding noise. And I think that’s worth sitting with.

So, I’m curious . . .

🤔 Where are you feeling the tension between flux and process right now?

⛓️‍💥 What old system are you holding onto that maybe no longer serves you?

💭 And if you could reimagine one process in your life — not just optimize it, but genuinely reimagine it — what might that open up?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments 💬

Some people call it a “treat.”

Every year, I’m invited to a creative retreat centered on collage. And when the anticipated weekend rolls around and I mention to people that I’m going, there’s occasionally a wistfulness in the response.

“That sounds amazing.”

“What a wonderful thing to do for yourself”.

Said with genuine warmth, and maybe a little longing. I hear it., and appreciate it. And I also want to reframe it: I don’t wait for life to slow down enough to allow this.

The Yes Comes First

When this invitation comes, I say yes before I know exactly what I’ll need from it. I schedule around it. I protect it on my calendar with the same seriousness I protect client work. I create space (before, during, and after) so that I can soak it in and actually be present for what it offers. That is a completely different thing than fitting something in when circumstances allow.

This kind of yes has become non-negotiable for me. Not because I have it all figured out, but because I’ve learned what happens when I stop creating this kind of space — and I don’t like who I become. So I choose it. Deliberately. Every year.

And this year, the timing turned out to be more important than I knew going in. I was walking toward some significant personal news within my family. I didn’t have the full picture yet — but I had this. A room full of people. Space to think. Permission to be somewhere other than in my own head, bracing for what was coming. The retreat didn’t just happen to fall at the right time. I had said yes to it months earlier, and that yes held me when I needed it most.

What the Mistakes Made

I spent a good chunk of the weekend surrounded by images, layering visuals, and wielding an X-acto knife – trimming things precisely, cleaning up rough edges, striving to make things fit just so. The clean edges created lovely work.

But the most beautiful things I made were the mistakes.

One image I cropped too short. It didn’t fit the card I was working on. And instead of scrapping it, I stopped to ask myself: Okay, what else could this be? What other options are here? Something happened in that forced pivot — a new possibility I wouldn’t have seen if I’d gotten it right the first time.

Here’s the reminder I repeatedly come back to: it’s when I make a mistake and feel like I need to recover that something more interesting often emerges. Either the mistake gets integrated into something richer, or the whole thing becomes something entirely different from the original intention. Something I never would have planned my way into.

There is possibility in errors. Beauty in what didn’t go “right.”

The X-acto Knife Shows Up at Work Too

There is possibility in errors. There is beauty in what didn’t go right.

I’ve been sitting with that. Not just as a creative principle, but as a leadership one. Because the same instinct that reached for the X-acto knife — the one that wants everything trimmed, clean, and presentable — shows up in how we lead, too. And I think it costs us more than we realize.

Flawed leadership isn’t a new idea for me (I played around with it in my Let Punk Provoke You piece last year, and the accompanying speech for Creative Mornings). It holds tension. That’s intentional. I love reclaiming the word “flaw”, because we’ve been taught to treat our flaws as problems to be managed, smoothed over, hidden behind competence and professionalism.

But what if the flaw is actually the thing?

I’ve wrestled for years with this idea of professionalism — this mold I’ve been handed and largely accepted. Show up a certain way. Keep the rough edges trimmed. And what I keep bumping into is that a lot of what we call professionalism is just conformity dressed up in business casual. It’s the polish factor. And polish, taken too far, stops being refinement and starts being erasure.

What I actually care about isn’t professionalism. It’s respect. Those are not the same thing. Respect is relational. It’s about how we actually see each other — not the version we’ve sanded down for public consumption.

Stay in the During

What intentional experiences keep teaching me is that transformation requires mess. You can’t move around the furniture and call it change. Real change asks you to be in the during. The liminal space. The threshold moment before you know what comes next.

You have to say yes to that discomfort before you know what it’s going to ask of you.

And then ( the essential piece!): you have to reflect. Not just move through the experience beginning to end and check the box. But circle back.

What does this mean?

What do I want to carry forward?

What does this tell me about how I lead, how I show up, how I live?

That’s the practice: Saying yes. Creating the space to actually receive it. Sitting in the mess. Stumbling forward. Integrating what you’ve been through into something generative.

Not just bringing your best self to everyone else — but actually becoming more because you chose to show up, let the mess happen, and trusted what it made you.

✨ If this post sparked something for you, I’d love for you to subscribe, leave a comment, or share Reimagine Growth with someone who could use some beautiful mess right now. And subscribe to get my “Powerful Dozen” of back pocket questions for FREE! ✨

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Not as a buzzword. As a pressure point. In a raw, urgent kind of way. Leaders telling me they don’t feel seen. Team members quietly disengaging. Whole organizations navigating layoffs and salary conversations — and underneath all of it, the same ache: I’m working so hard. Does anyone even notice?

They’re Not the Same Thing

We use these words interchangeably, but they land differently.

Recognition is concrete and formalized — the promotion, the award, the shout-out in the all-hands. It happens at a moment in time and signals: You’ve achieved something.

Appreciation is quieter and more continuous. The thank you that nobody else hears. The manager who remembers what you said last week and asks how it turned out. It signals: You matter here.

Gallup’s research has consistently found that one of the top drivers of employee disengagement is feeling like their work goes unnoticed. Not unpromoted. Unnoticed. Different problem. Different solution.

Recognition can be systematized, and appreciation has to be felt.

Why This Moment Is Different

Performance reviews. Compensation conversations. Layoffs rippling across industries. AI reshuffling who does what. Even people who aren’t directly affected are wondering if their contributions are still legible, still valued, still needed.

That existential undercurrent changes the stakes. It’s not just about feeling good at work anymore — for a lot of people, it’s about identity. And in that context, a go-to “great job” doesn’t land. People can feel the difference between appreciation that’s performed and appreciation that’s real.

Two Questions That Cut Through the Noise

If you’re a leader: How do you show appreciation — and does it match how the people around you actually receive it?

Some people feel it through words. Others through someone jumping in when the workload is crushing. Others through undivided attention in a conversation. The most underrated form? Listening — not to respond, but to understand. Giving someone space to say what they need instead of offering what you assume they need. That gap is often where disengagement quietly begins.

If you’re the one feeling unappreciated: Where is it really coming from?

Sometimes it’s simple — someone hasn’t said thank you in too long. But sometimes it’s burnout masquerading as a need for recognition. Or a values misalignment no amount of praise will fix. Spend time with that question before assuming it’s entirely about someone else’s failure to see you.

The Courage It Takes

Advocating for yourself when you feel unseen is hard. It requires naming something vulnerable — I need to feel that my work matters — in an environment that often rewards the appearance of not needing anything at all.

That’s courage. And so is appreciating someone else in a way that’s genuine rather than transactional.

We’re all navigating a lot right now. The least we can do is make sure the people around us know they’re not navigating it invisibly.

What’s showing up for you around appreciation right now — as a leader, or as someone feeling the absence of it? I’d love to hear . . .

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Lately, the conversations I’m having with clients, colleagues, and friends keep circling around similar anxieties: Will AI make my expertise obsolete? How am I supposed to keep up when everything keeps shifting? What if the skills I’ve spent years building no longer matter?

These fears are very real. And they’re leading many of us to grip even tighter to our plans, our timelines, our vision of how things should unfold.

But what if that grip is the problem?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves about the future. The narratives we’ve built about how things should unfold. The plans we’ve invested in. The outcomes we’re certain we need.

These are our darlings. And sometimes, they’re keeping us stuck.

The Trap of Certainty

Writers have a phrase for this: “kill your darlings.” It means cutting storylines, characters, or sentences you’ve worked hard to create — elements you may love, but that no longer fit where the story needs to go.

The same applies to the story you’ve written for your future.

We build narratives about how our lives should unfold. But sometimes, the story we’re clinging to — the career arc we mapped out, the timeline we’re forcing, the version of success we refuse to revise — prevents us from seeing better possibilities.

Amy Webb, futurist and founder of the Future Today Strategy Group, said something last year in her 2025 Emerging Tech Trend Report at SXSW that I keep harking back to:

“The goal of a scenario is not to get the future exactly right, it is to get your decisions right in the present.”

The goal isn’t certainty. It’s better decisions. Right now.

Scenarios as Experiments

Scenario planning isn’t about prediction. It’s about preparation.

It asks: “What if?” Not as anxiety, but as inquiry.

What if the market shifts? What if your role becomes obsolete? What if the plan you’re clinging to isn’t the one that gets you where you want to go?

This kind of thinking requires killing some darlings.

It means challenging your cherished beliefs — the assumptions you treat as facts. The stories you’ve been telling yourself about what has to happen for things to work out.

The thing we don’t want to hear, but need to: every cherished belief might also be a constraint.

Every Problem is a Puzzle

Amy Webb talks about every problem being a puzzle. I love this reframe.

Puzzles invite curiosity instead of despair. They suggest multiple approaches.

When we treat uncertainty as a puzzle, we open ourselves to experimentation. We test, adjust, and learn — not by waiting for clarity, but by moving forward with what we know now.

This is scenario planning in practice. Multiple pathways. Not certainty, but readiness.

The Courage to Choose

This work — mapping possible futures, releasing our grip on cherished beliefs, making decisions without perfect information — takes courage.

Courage to admit we might be wrong.
Courage to let go of what we thought we needed.
Courage to choose a path when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

Every decision is a doorway. You can walk through it toward something better, or you can stand in front of it, waiting for certainty that will never come.

The choice is yours.

We Have to Do This Together

Here’s what scenario planning makes clear: we don’t do this work alone.

The decisions we make ripple outward. They affect others. They’re shaped by others.

Pay attention to the signals around you. Listen to perspectives that challenge your assumptions. Invite people into the puzzle-solving with you.

What Are You Holding Too Tightly?

As we move deeper into 2026, I’m asking myself:

What story about my future am I treating as certainty?
Which cherished belief is actually limiting my options?
What decision am I avoiding because I’m waiting for perfect clarity?

Maybe you’re holding tight to a career trajectory that no longer fits. A relationship that’s run its course. A version of yourself you’ve outgrown.

Killing your darlings doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re paying attention. It means you’re willing to make better decisions in the present — even when the future remains uncertain.

It means you’re choosing the doorway that leads somewhere new, rather than standing still, waiting for certainty that will never come.

So what are you ready to release? What scenario are you ready to explore? What decision is waiting for you to walk through it?

The future isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something we create — just like we created the present we’re standing in — one choice at a time.

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A year ago, I quit Instagram.

Not a pause, or a detox. A full breakup with Meta.

I gathered and talked about it with other refugees on a livestream for The Courage Effect. I wrote posts processing it all. And then I just . . . left.

Here’s what that year taught me.

The Edge Came Off

The first thing I noticed? I’m calmer. More mentally sound.

There was this craving — this constant low-grade pull to check, scroll, consume. An urge I didn’t fully recognize until it was gone. Deleting Instagram smoothed down an edge I didn’t know was cutting into me. The challenge was (and still is) to not simply run toward another distraction. This takes rigor, which I don’t always (ok…rarely) want. But simply swapping out one undesirable thing for another only robs myself.

That mental quiet was worth everything that followed.

Presence Over Performance

Time opened up. Not just minutes or hours — though those add up faster than you think when you’re not doom-scrolling before bed — but mental space.

I’m more present now. More focused. More captive in the moment, moving around the world feeling “in it” instead of documenting it for an audience.

Connection isn’t about capturing the perfect shot. It’s about actually being there.

Here’s the trade-off: I have to work harder now to stay connected. A friend mentions their Iceland trip, and I realize — I didn’t see the photos. They weren’t performed for the algorithm. They were just lived.

So now I ask people to send me pictures, and I do the same. Curating them for the person, not the larger audience. I reach out deliberately. Quality over quantity. Intention over convenience.

Is it more work? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

What We Tolerate, What We Create

Leaving Instagram reinforced something bigger than social media strategy.

We don’t just exist in our environments. We create them.

Every action, every reaction, every choice about where we spend our attention — it all shapes what we experience and what we offer others. Instagram was feeding me anxiety, comparison, and things I didn’t need. It was pulling me toward a version of connection that ultimately felt hollow.

So I changed my environment. And in the process, I changed the environment for people around me.

They get a calmer, more present version of me. One who isn’t performing life but actually living it. One who chooses connection on my terms, not the platform’s.

Connection Starts Here

The most important relationship you have is with yourself.

Instagram wasn’t just affecting how I connected with others. It was degrading my relationship with myself — that constant comparison, that manufactured urgency, that sense I was always slightly behind.

Leaving created space for self-compassion. For clarity. For actually understanding what I need instead of being told what I should want.

Only then could I show up differently for others.

Because real connection isn’t one-sided. It’s co-created. It requires presence, honesty, and the capacity to actually see the person in front of you — not just curate content for them.

Why I Broke My Own Rule

Full transparency: I did return to WhatsApp last summer.

My gut reaction? “Ugh, no.” I’d decided to break up with Meta entirely. But as my family navigated sickness and long-distance caregiving, WhatsApp became indispensable. I couldn’t stay connected to people who mattered without it.

So I took inventory. I asked myself: What’s the real cost here? What am I actually protecting by staying rigid? And how can I use this tool in a way that works for me instead of against me?

I re-engaged on my terms. Limited notifications. Specific groups only. Just connection when it mattered most.

The Environment You Choose

Do I miss it? Only for the travel photos and easy updates.

What I don’t miss: the never-ending ads, rage-bait, and the feeling that I was supporting something fundamentally misaligned with my values. The toxicity disguised as community.

I’m not just opting out. I’m opting in — to environments that feel generative instead of degenerative. To relationships built on direct exchange, not algorithmic curation.

This is the work I’m anchoring for 2026: recognizing that we create the environments we inhabit. That our presence matters. That our choices ripple outward.

So here’s my question for you:

What environments are you creating? For yourself? For the people around you? Are they generative — or are you tolerating something that’s quietly depleting you?

You don’t have to quit Instagram. But you do get to choose where and how you connect. What you feed your attention. What you allow to shape your mental landscape.

That choice? That’s where your power lives.

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My theme for 2026 is reframing. Not as a one-time exercise in positive thinking, but as a system. A filter for making decisions about where my time, energy, and attention actually go.

Here’s what I’m reframing: How I spend my time. The tools I’m using (personally and professionally). What success actually looks like — my version, not someone else’s or even one that I created six months ago.

This isn’t about adding more pressure. It’s about getting honest with what’s working, what’s not, and what I’m resisting — and why.

Check out the video above for the full breakdown of how I’m approaching this year, and I hope it gives you a moment to pause for yourself.

Now I’m curious: What are you reframing for 2026? Drop your theme, your word, or your goal in the comments. Let’s support each other through the year ahead.

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For my final post of 2025, I’m reflecting on what endures — and the combination of intention and courage it takes to nurture it.

Intentional Friendships as Practice

Much of life is lived as an experiment — testing how we show up, who we hold close, and what we choose to tend to when outcomes are unclear. Uncertainty feels especially present right now. When the waters feel uncharted, I’m steadied by relationships: with my husband, my family, and the friends who remain alongside me.

I was recently listening to a recent episode of Simon Sinek’s podcast A Bit of Optimism, where author Fredrik Backman reminds us that enduring friendships are rarely accidental. His decades-long bond with a close friend is sustained not by constant harmony, but by conscious, repeated choice: to show up, to adapt, and to allow each other to grow. They talk often. They vent. They celebrate. They allow change without interpreting it as betrayal.

Intentional friendships are practice in patience, honesty, and repair. They ask: Can I be known fully? Can I hold you as you change? Can we stay connected even when we disappoint one another? Over time, these repeated acts of care create permanence — not permanence of circumstance, but of commitment, trust, and presence.

Experimentation, Clarity, and Closure

Because lasting friendships are alive, they change and require adjustment. Growth brings new information, and with it, the need for closure — not as separation, but as discernment. Through experimentation — testing patience, setting boundaries, speaking truths — we learn what sustains connection and what quietly undermines it. Closure preserves what matters by letting go of what no longer fits.

I touch on ideas of clarity and closure in the recent season finale of The Courage Effect. Reflecting on 2025, I ask 2 questions:

What am I tolerating that I no longer want?

What am I waiting for permission to do?

These questions invite self-compassion, honesty, and permission over perfection — a reminder that relationships thrive when we act with care, clarity, and intentionality.

Closure is not always a conversation or a goodbye. Often it’s the moment we stop rehearsing an old role, stop tolerating a familiar discomfort, stop hoping something will return to what it once was. It honors what mattered while making room for what comes next.

Courage in Choosing What Endures

Permanence in friendship is an act of courage. Courage is not the spark that starts the experiment; it is the steady choice to honor what matters, to remain present where it counts, and to release what no longer gels — without erasing the value of what was shared. Intentional friendships give us continuity through change and show that human connection can endure when nurtured with honesty, care, and mutual respect.

2025 was a challenging year (for me personally, and for so many people in my immediate and extended universe). As it comes to a close, I’m sitting in deep gratitude for the people who have offered me support, perspective, partnership, and laughter — especially through the various (and many!) moments when I truly needed them. These relationships have steadied me, stretched me, and reminded me of who I am when things feel uncertain. To my amazing friends reading this: thank you. Sending a virtual hug to each of you 🤗

I also find myself reflecting on how I’ve shown up in return — as a friend, a family member, a partner, or a coach — and where I’ve been present, generous, and still learning.

Looking ahead to 2026, I’m anchoring on continued discernment. Making a deliberate commitment to tending these connections with care. Being attentive to what needs to be held close, what might be ready to hold onto less tightly, or potentially let go.

With appreciation for the friendships that endure, and hope for the growth still ahead, I wish you all peace, joy, and abundance in the new year.

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Last week, I sat at a table with 25 people I barely knew six months ago. We were laughing, telling stories, and I realized something that’s been screaming at me throughout this entire experience: community isn’t just about showing up. It’s about having the courage to be changed by it.

I’d just wrapped my last day of the GRAD program with the HEROIC Public Speaking community. Six and a half months. Three cross-country flights. Countless hours of writing, editing, performing, and standing in front of people exposing work that wasn’t ready yet. And here’s what’s sitting with me — every single person in that room did the same thing.

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We talk about community like it’s this warm, fuzzy thing you join. A place where you belong. Where you’re seen and supported. And sure, that’s part of it. But that’s not the courageous part.

The courageous part? Opening yourself up to being fundamentally different on the other side. And not knowing what that difference will look like.

Think about the last time you really let a community in. Not just showed up to meetings or stayed active in the group chat. I mean really let them into your creative process. Your messy, half-formed ideas. Your work that’s still being birthed. Your shitty first drafts and the tough days when you’re reaching to just show up.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about building meaningful community. It requires a kind of vulnerability that doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Especially those of us who’ve spent years being “the expert” in our field.

Here’s the kicker: at HEROIC we had so much varied expertise and background in the room. We had entrepreneurs, CPAs, attorneys, coaches, a former political prisoner from Iran, and someone who summited Everest after retirement. Every different walk of life you can imagine. But we all showed up with the same willingness — to be seen in the process of becoming something we weren’t yet.

And we gave each other grace when we couldn’t show up perfectly. When life happened. When capacity was limited. Because that’s how community works when it’s built on courage rather than performance.

I keep thinking about the trust involved. To write for months, work with editors, and then stand up in front of a room and deliver a speech that’s still evolving. To learn from and be coached by faculty. To invite people into your creative process before it’s polished. To ask for feedback (and actually be open to hearing it), and let your ideas be challenged and shaped by perspectives different from your own.

That’s bold. That’s rare. And it only works when everyone in the room is doing it too.

The people I started this journey with aren’t the people I’m walking away with. We’ve all been transformed. And isn’t that the sign of a remarkable journey?

And what’s front-of-mind for me right now: community doesn’t end when the formal program ends. The courage to build it is one thing, and the courage to maintain it is another. To keep showing up for people after you’ve scattered to your corners of the earth. To do the work of staying connected. To continue supporting each other’s evolution even when there’s no structure holding you together.

That’s where the real test begins.

So here are a few questions for you:

• What community have you been showing up for, but not really letting in?

• Where have you been playing it safe instead of letting people see you in the messy middle?

• And more importantly—what courage do you need to not just show up, but to show up unabashedly as yourself?

Because community only transforms us when we have the courage to let it. When we stop performing and start being present. When we allow ourselves to be changed by the people around us.

That’s the gift. That’s also the risk.

What are you willing to open yourself up to?

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On my wedding anniversary last month, a tree fell through our roof.

I wasn’t home when it happened. My husband Tom was, along with our dog, and thankfully neither was sitting at our dining room table — one of my favorite spots in the house — where the tree crashed through the skylight, sending glass and branches into the space where I drink my morning coffee. Tom said it sounded like a bomb going off.

The whole experience left me thinking about safety in ways I hadn’t before. What does it actually mean to feel secure? And how quickly can that sense of security shatter?

In my latest mini podcast episode of The Courage Effect, I explore these questions in real-time, processing a month that included not just the tree, but also the loss of my aunt to aggressive cancer. Two profound disruptions, reminding me that the structures we depend on — both literal and metaphorical — are far more fragile than we’d like to believe.

It reminds me of Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Created in 2018 as a way to understand our increasingly chaotic world, BANI describes how systems that appear solid can shatter suddenly and completely, much like that tree crashing through our shelter.

Brittleness is everywhere once you start looking. Something brittle gives the illusion of being solid and strong but is easily shattered, with no flexibility or capacity to absorb shock. My house looked safe until it wasn’t. My aunt seemed healthy until the diagnosis came, and then she was gone faster than any of us expected. These aren’t gradual declines — they’re sudden fractures.

The anxiety started to seep in as I sat under the tarp-covered ceiling a week later, and I’ve been feeling it’s undercurrent ever since. It’s not severe, but undeniably present. A lingering state of unease about what might come next. When the foundation of our security — whether it’s a roof, a relationship, or our health — proves vulnerable, how do we move forward without constantly waiting for the next blow?

But here’s what I’ve been learning for years, and this experience has solidified: maybe the point isn’t to rebuild the illusion of invulnerability. Maybe it’s about redefining what safety actually means.

Safety isn’t just shelter and structures. It’s the people who show up when the tree falls. It’s the capacity to be present even when everything feels uncertain. It’s prioritizing what matters — not what we think should matter, but what truly sustains us.

The BANI framework suggests we need resilience, empathy, and adaptability to navigate chaos. In practical terms, that means asking ourselves: Who are the people we need to call? What are the relationships we’ve been putting off tending? What false securities have we been clinging to that might actually be keeping us from building something more sustainable?

As we head into year’s end, I’m not suggesting you fix everything or solve the brittleness of our world. I’m asking you to look at what’s around you — those structures, those people, those assumptions about safety — and recognize both their fragility and their value. To be present. To prioritize. To have the courage to tend to what truly matters before the next disruption comes.

Because the tree will fall. The question is: what foundation will we have built to catch us when it does?

🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Courage Effect where I share more about navigating loss, disruption, and what it means to stay courageous when everything feels uncertain.

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Here’s a paradox I keep coming back to: We’re in the middle of an AI revolution that’s automating technical work at lightning speed, and yet most of us are still relying on the expertise we’ve spent decades building. We’re clinging to what we know when what we really need is the ability to evolve.

New research is revealing something crucial. While we polish our specialized knowledge and deepen our technical competence, the data tells a different story. Foundational skills — collaboration, adaptability, the capacity to think systemically — matter far more for sustained relevance than expertise ever will. And here’s the kicker: these aren’t the “soft skills” we can afford to treat as nice-to-haves anymore. They’re the core competencies that determine whether you’ll still be relevant five years from now. And for those of us already in the market? They’re the skills we need to actively rebuild.

The Difference Between Building Your Library and Expanding Your Vision

The metaphor I keep coming back to when I think about professional development: the difference between horizontal and vertical growth.

Horizontal development is like adding books to your library. You’re collecting knowledge, learning new concepts, picking up techniques and skills from experts. It’s what you think — the content of your expertise. And listen, this matters. We need to know things.

But vertical development? That’s about expanding your capacity to understand what you’re reading in the first place. It’s about how you think — your ability to handle complexity, to see multiple perspectives simultaneously, to feel and act in increasingly adaptable ways. It’s the difference between knowing what to do and being able to navigate situations you’ve never encountered before.

And here’s what the research on adult development tells us: most of us stopped growing vertically once we hit adulthood. We assumed we were done, that growth had ended. But the leaders who thrive — the ones who can handle the chaos and uncertainty that defines our current moment—they’re the ones who kept expanding their capacity to think in more complex, systemic, and interdependent ways. They’re the ones who recognized that the expertise that got them here won’t be enough to keep them relevant.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Our workplaces are changing faster than our expertise can keep up. By the time we’ve mastered what we thought was our competitive advantage, there’s a decent chance AI has gotten pretty good at it too. The skills that can’t be automated — the ones that make us irreplaceable — are the ones that require us to grow as human beings, not just as subject matter experts.

Think about what collaboration actually requires at this stage of our careers. It’s not just about working nicely with others — we’ve all mastered the basics of playing well in the sandbox. It’s about our ability to hold multiple conflicting perspectives without needing to immediately resolve them. To sit in the discomfort of not having the answer when we’ve built entire careers on being the expert. To recognize that our hard-won way of seeing the world isn’t the only way, and to genuinely be curious about perspectives that challenge decades of our own accumulated wisdom.

Or adaptability. Real adaptability isn’t just being flexible when a deadline is changed. It’s your capacity to reconfigure your values and beliefs when you’re confronted with experiences that don’t fit your existing mental models. It’s being able to step back to gain a broader perspective (what we, as coaches, like to call “going up to the balcony”) and make sense of what’s happening below, to extract new lessons.

The Heat You Need to Seek

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The kind of growth that actually matters—the vertical development that expands your capacity — doesn’t happen in comfortable situations. It happens when we invite some heat.

“Heat experiences” have specific criteria. They’re first-time experiences where the results really matter and there’s a genuine chance of failure. People are watching. And it’s awkward. Your ideas clash with others in productive ways. You’re connecting with people outside your normal network who think fundamentally differently than you do.

Most leaders think they have a lot of heat in their lives, but what they actually have is a lot of work. There’s a difference. Work keeps you busy. Heat forces you to evolve.

The Practice of Getting Uncomfortable

So what does this mean practically? It means we need to stop optimizing for expertise and start optimizing for growth.

Stop surrounding yourself only with people who think like you do. Build an open network, not a closed one — connect with people across functions, locations, and industries who will challenge your assumptions.

Seek out experiences that put you in situations where you don’t have all the answers. Rather than delegating tasks, ask your team: “What activities do you see me doing that you would like to take on or learn how to do?” Let others step into their heat while you step into yours.

And here’s the thing that really matters: reflection. Growth experiences won’t stick if you don’t take time to get on the balcony and make sense of what you’re experiencing. To reconfigure. And learn new lessons from novel situations.

The truth is, in a world being reshaped by technology, the skills that will sustain your career aren’t the ones you can learn from an expert. They’re the ones you develop by continuously expanding your capacity to think, feel, and act in more refined ways.

By interrupting ourselves – and choosing discomfort over comfort.

By recognizing that you’re not done growing – you’re a work in progress.

And that’s not soft. That’s the hardest work there is.

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What am I not talking about that I need to be talking about?

And who do I need to be having the conversation with?

These questions bubbled up frequently for me when I read ’s book The Manicurist’s Daughter. And they lodged themselves into my brain more deeply when I recently interviewed her for The Courage Effect.

Susan talks about her mother’s death — a tragic, preventable loss from a botched tummy tuck surgery when Susan was just eleven years old. But the real tragedy, she says, isn’t what happened. It’s what came after: three decades of silence. Three decades of a family that simply stopped talking about the woman who had been the center of their universe.

“This is a story of how my mom tragically died,” Susan tells me. “But the real tragedy is that my family has never spoken about her or what happened to this day.”

As she shares this, I realize Susan has become something extraordinary: a broker of secrets. Not just her family’s secrets, but the secrets that strangers tell her every week. “I don’t know if it’s the whites in my eyes,” she laughs. “But there is something about the human spirit’s desire to be understood.”

When Everyone Holds Their Own Truth

Here’s what fascinates me about Susan’s journey: she thought she was eleven when her mother died. She thought her mom was in a coma for two weeks. She believed these things for years — until she started asking questions and discovered she was actually twelve, and it was five days (not two weeks).

Her older brother (who was nineteen at the time) translated between the doctors and their father. He made the decision to remove life support. But even her sister didn’t know this truth until she watched Susan’s theatrical show decades later and leaned over to ask: “Is that really true?“

Thirteen people living in a four-bedroom house. The same family. The same tragedy. And yet, “layers and layers of the secrets that we hold, even though we are all in the same family.”

This is what we don’t talk about enough: how the same experience can fragment into completely different truths depending on who’s holding them. How trauma doesn’t just hurt us — it isolates us into our own separate realities.

The Cost of Keeping Quiet

Susan’s father and aunts would shut her down whenever she asked questions. “You’re living in the past,“ they’d say. “What’s wrong with you? Move on. We all did.“

But here’s what I’ve learned from this conversation and from my own work with courageous leaders: we don’t actually move on from unspoken trauma. We just carry it differently. We freeze people in time — the way Susan froze her father as “high school dad,” the guy who criticized her, never allowing him to evolve as a human being.

Susan’s family came from staggering circumstances. Her parents were Vietnamese boat people who attempted to escape five times before finally making it to a Malaysian refugee camp. Her mother ran through the jungle with two toddlers on her hips, licking leaves to survive, her feet black with thorns and blood.

“They didn’t know the language here. They didn’t know how this place operated,” Susan explains. “No one had access to counseling. No one has these tools around ‘I feel’ statements. It was more like, wow, ‘yeah, there was a lot of trauma. So you move on’.”

But that survival mechanism — the one that helped them escape war and rebuild in a new country — became its own kind of prison.

Becoming the Distiller of Secrets

Susan never intended to tell her family’s story. She wasn’t even allowed to talk about it within her own family. But when she got married and faced pressure to have children, she confronted an impossible question: “How do I become a mother if I never knew my own?“

So she did something radical. She stopped accepting silence as an answer.

She tracked down the lawyers from the malpractice case. She interviewed family members repeatedly. She created a solo theatrical show where she played fifteen characters in sixty-five minutes: her father, her mother, her siblings, her aunts. She literally embodied them to understand them.

“It was in deep understanding with him and his trauma that I can have closure with mine,” she says about her father. “I cannot know me without knowing him.”

And here’s where the story cracks open: Susan had to freeze them in time before she could let them thaw. She had to become a character in her own family’s story before she could see them as full human beings.

The Question We’re All Avoiding

People tell Susan their secrets. She writes about them in her Substack. She performs them on stage. She archives them in her memoir.

And I keep thinking about what she said: “There is something about the human spirit’s desire to be understood.”

We all carry secrets. Some are ours. Some belong to our families. Some we’ve inherited without even knowing their origin. And we carry them because we think silence protects us — or protects others.

But what if the silence is actually the wound?

Your Turn: What Are You Not Saying?

So here’s my question for you, and I invite you to sit with it:

What have you been keeping quiet about that’s taking up more space inside you than speaking it ever would?

Maybe it’s not a family tragedy. Maybe it’s something smaller — or something that feels too awkward to wrangle. Maybe it’s a story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are, based on something someone said when you were young. Maybe it’s a truth about your career, or your dreams.

What are you carrying?

Here’s what I know from hearing Susan’s journey: speaking the unspeakable doesn’t guarantee everything will be okay. Members of her family still don’t fully embrace her story. Some relationships fractured. Some things can’t be repaired.

But she’s no longer frozen. She’s no longer living in everyone else’s silence.

And neither should you.

Take One Small Step

You don’t need to write a memoir or perform a one-woman show. You don’t need to confront everyone who hurt you or solve every family mystery.

But you do need to take one small step toward your own truth.

Maybe that’s:

• Writing it down in a journal

• Saying it out loud to yourself

• Telling one trusted friend

• Finding a therapist who can hold space for what you’ve been carrying

• Simply acknowledging to yourself: “This thing happened, and it mattered”

Because here’s what Susan teaches us: “We have this desire to belong in our own families, in our communities, and in our own bodies. That desire is so deep and unfortunately no one else can give us that.”

The belonging you’re seeking? It starts with being honest with yourself about what you’re no longer willing to keep quiet.

What’s one thing you need to say out loud — even if it’s just to yourself?

Stay courageous,

Want to watch or hear the full conversation with Susan Lieu? Soak in our episode on The Courage Effect podcast.

I’d love to hear from you. Share in the comments or send me a DM. Your story matters — and so does your courage to speak it.

Leave a comment

Curious to learn more?
✨ Check out Susan on Substack (Live Like You’re Mortal) and on Linkedin.

📖 Pick up Susan’s stunning memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter — it’s an Apple Book Pick of the Month and named one of 2024’s best books by Smithsonian, NPR, and Elle Magazine.

🌱 For more about me and Weller Collaboration, check out what my clients say on our website.

P.S. If this conversation sparked something for you, I’d love for you to subscribe, leave a review, or share The Courage Effect with someone who could use a little extra courage right now.

Check out The Courage Effect

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I had an energizing conversation recently with Lisa Z. Fain, CEO of the Center for Mentoring Excellence on The Courage Effect podcast, about something that's been on my mind a lot lately: how we learn from the people in our lives.

Here's what struck me: We throw around words like "mentor" and "networking" constantly, but how often do we get intentional about what we're actually trying to give and receive in these relationships?

Lisa challenges the traditional mentoring model in ways that shift traditional thinking. Developmental relationships aren't one-size-fits-all. They don't have to follow some prescribed hierarchy where the "senior" person imparts wisdom to the "junior" person. They can happen peer-to-peer, in groups, across industries, across generations.

The Structure Behind the Magic

What I love about Lisa's approach is that she doesn't romanticize mentoring as some mystical connection that just "happens." Successful developmental relationships take work, structure, and clear expectations. Both people need to be learning and gaining from the experience.

Lisa talks about having a "kitchen cabinet" of people who challenge your ideas and give you new ways of thinking. I love this metaphor because it suggests intimacy, accessibility, and diversity of perspectives all at once.

Our conversation was a timely reminder – one I think we could all use right about now in our highly-polarized world. Lisa doesn't just talk about finding people who will affirm what we already think. She pushes us to seek out uncomfortable conversations. The ones where someone might push back on our thinking or offer a perspective that makes us squirm a little.

Flipping the Script on Learning

Lisa also advocates for something I’ve seen work repeatedly with consistent success when done effectively: reverse mentoring. The idea that learning doesn't always flow from senior to junior. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from flipping that script entirely.

Reverse mentoring programs – where younger employees are given the opportunity to mentor senior executives – not only increase employee retention but allow them to thrive. This isn't just about technology transfer. It's about executives getting fresh perspectives on strategic issues while employees gain insight into how things work from the top down. The learning truly goes both ways. And it challenges our assumptions about who has something to teach and who has something to learn.

Impact Does Happen Alone

Here's what I keep coming back to from our conversation: We cannot succeed on our own. We need other people to help us realize what we're capable of and what's possible in the broader world around us.

But that means being honest with ourselves about:

• What do we actually want to learn?

• Who has the perspectives we need to hear — especially the uncomfortable ones?

• How do we invite people into our world intentionally?

• What value are we bringing to these relationships?

• How do we stay in relationship even when we disagree?

As Lisa puts it (which you’ll hear in the clip below):

"You can be your own worst enemy by just trying to slog through and do it yourself. …The more we connect with one another, the more innovative we can become and the greater the impact we can build."

The Never-Ending Learning Project

One thing I never want to stop doing is learning. And that means I never want to stop cultivating learning relationships.

Think about your current "kitchen cabinet." Who's in there? Who's missing? What conversations are you having? What conversations do you need to be having?

Lisa reminds us that mentoring isn't just about career advancement — it's about expanding our view of what's possible. It's about having people in our lives who see things we can't see, who challenge assumptions we didn't even know we were making.

The beautiful thing about developmental relationships is that they're dynamic. They change as we change. They serve different purposes at different times in our lives. And sometimes, you might find yourself in the unusual position of being the "junior" person who has something valuable to teach someone more senior.

That's the power of developmental networks — they're not bound by traditional hierarchies or assumptions about who knows what.

The question isn't whether you need these relationships — you do. The question is whether you're being intentional enough about cultivating them.

What learning relationships are you cultivating? I'd love to hear about your "kitchen cabinet" and how you're thinking about developmental relationships in your own life and work.

Leave a comment

If you want to hear more about developmental networks, check out our conversation:

🎧 Listen here: https://suzannenweller.podbean.com/e/lisa-fain-building-developmental-networks-the-courage-to-ask-for-help/

👀 Watch here:

💡 Curious to learn more about me and Weller Collaboration? Check out what our clients say on our website.

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I've been thinking a lot about community lately — partly because I'm wrapping up our current Outsight <> Insight mastermind cohort (and planning the next one for January 2026), and partly because I’m doing some serious inventory around the communities I’m a part of based on my larger personal and professional priorities.

But ultimately, it's because community has always been an essential thing for me, and I'm realizing how complex and nuanced it actually is.

The Beautiful Tension

Here's what I've come to understand: community exists in this beautiful tension between connection and autonomy, between being seen and maintaining some anonymity, between giving and receiving. It's not just about collaboration versus independence — it's deeper than that.

Community allows me to better understand myself through the process of understanding other people. There's something about connection that gives me a feeling of wholeness. I feel like I'm part of something larger while simultaneously being able to contribute something uniquely mine. But here's the catch, as talks about in her empowering book Overwhelmed and Over It: there's a real danger of over-connecting, of spending so much time with other people that you lose track of yourself.

So the question becomes: In any given moment, do you want to be part of something collective? What does that give you? What do you give to it? And when you're in that more autonomous space, what are you giving and receiving from yourself?

Tending the Garden

My mind keeps coming back to the garden analogy because it feels so right. Communities are like gardens — full of different plants, different living things that we cultivate over time. There are seasons where they bear fruit, times when we need to fertilize them, and times when we need to weed.

I actually think it's valuable to weed the garden of relationships and communities. Some were amazing in the past but aren't serving me anymore. They've taken up precious space where something else could bloom. Sometimes it's about seasonality — they've had their moment and now they're dormant, and that's okay.

But this requires intentionality. When I invest my three most precious resources — time, energy, and attention — into a community, it needs to be additive to my life. In that season. And "additive" can mean both giving and receiving.

The Real Questions We Should Be Asking

Before joining any community, I've learned to take inventory:

What are my best interests right now? Not six months ago, not where I hope to be next year, but right now.

What do I actually want from this community? Connection? Challenge? Support? Advocacy? Accountability? Different communities serve different purposes, and that's both honest and realistic.

Do I have the capacity to truly invest? Can I give this community what it truly needs based on what I’m able to dedicate to it? And at the same time, will I be able to receive what I need?

What Communities Can Actually Do for You

When they're working well, communities can:

• Expand your world: your relationships, your network, your perspective, your business opportunities, your understanding of your own needs as a human

• Help you grow: you learn simply by being in the presence of amazing, talented people

• Support you: celebrating successes, being there during hardships, offering perspective when you need it

• Challenge you: asking hard questions, giving feedback, coaching you (when you’re proactively asking for perspective)

• Advocate for you: getting you into other rooms, helping you meet people you want to meet, speaking to who you are when you're not there

• Hold you accountable: helping you stay on track with your goals (though not all communities are appropriate for this)

The Ongoing Work

But here's the thing — communities are dynamic. Your needs change depending on what chapter you’re seeking, who's in your life, where you are professionally and personally. What worked for you a year ago might not work now. And what you need six months from now might be completely different from where you are today.

So I'm constantly reassessing: What pools am I swimming in? What gardens am I tending? Are these the right rooms for me now? How are they going to serve me not just today, but six months from now, a year from now?

The Bottom Line

Community is powerful because it's truly symbiotic. It feeds us as we feed it. But like any living system, it requires attention, intention, and sometimes difficult decisions about what stays and what goes.

The questions I keep coming back to are these:

How do we figure out what we give and what we receive at various moments?

How often are we taking inventory?

And how do we know if something is giving us what we need it to give us?

These aren't questions with easy answers, but are worth asking. Because when we get community right — when we find that balance between giving and receiving, between connection and autonomy — it becomes one of the most powerful forces for growth, support, and joy in our lives.

🌿 What communities are you tending in your garden right now? What might need weeding, and what might be ready to bloom? 🌱

Curious about our 2026 Outsight <> Insight mastermind cohort? Looking for new or other ways to tap into the collective to amplify your leadership? Please reach out!

Find more information about me and Weller Collaboration at wellercollaboration.com

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I've been sitting with a story from Rob Smith at Formidable that keeps circling back in my mind, demanding attention like an important conversation I'm not quite ready to have. It's about courage, leadership, and the kind of bold action that our world desperately needs — but isn't always ready to recognize.

The Paradox That Pisses Me Off

For every dollar of funding, women-led startups (over a five-year period) generated 78 cents for every dollar of funding. Male-founded startups generated just 31 cents. Yet women founders received 14% less VC funding than their male counterparts despite identical pitches.

Let that sink in for a moment. Higher returns. Identical pitches. Less funding.

Layering more icing on the frustration cake, Smith writes “women tend to receive more pushback from investors because of perceptions that they don’t possess enough technical knowledge.” He also he quotes Eva Ho (general partner at Los Angeles-based Fika Ventures) from another recent Formidable article speaking to this uphill funding battle, telling women “you may have to try 20% harder than a man sitting next to you,” since many VC firms “are retreating back to the comfort zone and not taking risks with emerging managers.”

This isn't just about numbers — it's about the stories we tell ourselves about who gets to be brave, who deserves investment, and what courage actually looks like in practice.

And when I read Ranjay Gulati's research on courage in uncertain times a few days later (which shows that the old adage is true: fortune favors the brave, not the cautious), here's what struck me: the most successful women founders aren't just brave — they're demonstrating the five specific strategies that courageous leaders use to drive bold action.

They create positive narratives that guide them through chaos, often recasting their work as a moral quest. When women tend to receive more pushback from investors because of perceptions that they don't possess enough technical knowledge, they're not just defending their expertise — they're defending their right to reshape entire industries. The Harvard Center for International Development found that women-founded enterprises tend to have broader social impact, benefiting families and communities.

They build confidence through preparation and focus on what they can control.

What Keeps Me Energized

Despite systemic bias, women-led companies also enjoyed their highest level of VC exits last year — 24% — the fourth consecutive year of growth.

The leaders succeeding in today's volatile environment aren't the ones with the most resources or the perfect pedigree. They're the ones willing to act boldly even when the data suggests they shouldn't have to work harder.

In the face of political, economic, and technological uncertainty, business leaders are often reluctant to take bold action. Some freeze, too overwhelmed to make decisions. Many hunker down, hoping to wait out the chaos. But the women founders generating higher returns? They're not waiting for permission or perfect conditions. They're betting on solutions the world needs, even when traditional systems can't see their value yet.

The courage to build forward isn't about taking reckless risks — it's about expanding your arsenal of mental tools, surrounding yourself with people who believe in your vision, and refusing to let other people's limitations become your own.

The Uncomfortable Truth

We're living through a time when the old playbooks are breaking down. Boston Consulting Group urges VC firms and other investors to "be aware of structural biases built into funding decisions," noting that it's "critically important" that VC firms involve women in investment strategies. But real change won't come from waiting for systems to recognize what the data already proves.

It will come from the leaders brave enough to act on what they know to be true, even when — especially when — the path forward requires rewriting the rules entirely.

The question isn't whether you have enough experience, funding, or certainty to act boldly. The question is: what story are you telling yourself about what's possible, and are you brave enough to prove it right?

What narratives are guiding you through uncertainty? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment

🎧 If you want to hear more stories about women founders — and those helping to champion their courageous efforts — give a listen to the conversation I had with Kate Isler on The Courage Effect podcast last year: Feminine Fortitude: Kate Isler’s Impact on Entrepreneurship and Gender Equity.

And if you’re not already a subscriber, please come aboard to stay up to speed on new content/ideas/offerings and get “The Powerful Dozen: Suzanne’s Back Pocket Questions” for FREE!

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When your own country starts to resemble the conflict zones you’ve spent a career documenting — what do you do? That was the thread we followed in my recent conversation with Ashley Gilbertson on The Courage Effect. It’s a conversation that’s lingered with me — not just for what Ash has seen, but for the weight he chooses to carry.

Ashley is an award-winning photojournalist whose work has taken him from war-torn cities in Iraq and Afghanistan, across Europe and the US covering refugee crises, to the eerily familiar chaos of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. He’s captured headlines. History. But what strikes me most about our conversation wasn't just the gravity of what he's witnessed, but his unwavering commitment to showing us what we might prefer not to see.

Finding Magic in the Darkness

When Ashley talks about photography, he calls it "black magic" — that inexplicable moment when a single image captures something far greater than what's in the frame. He discovered this magic at 13, wanting to photograph himself skateboarding in Australia, only to realize he needed to turn the camera outward. That instinct — curiosity paired with deep empathy — has fueled his work ever since.

"The harder the work is, the better the work will be," he told me, reflecting on his devastating project Bedrooms of the Fallen — intimate portraits of the preserved bedrooms of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's work that still brings him to tears, but also work that reaches people in ways traditional war photography cannot.

When Heroes Stand Alone

We talked about January 6th, 2021. About how Ashley found himself among the first people to breach the U.S. Capitol. In that chaos, he witnessed something extraordinary: Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, alone, facing down a mob wielding Confederate flags.

“One man holds them up for long enough to save the Vice President of America, Nancy Pelosi, and senators” Ashley recounted.

Goodman's restraint — his decision not to draw his weapon — may have prevented a massacre that could have fundamentally altered our democracy. Goodman didn’t reach for his weapon. His restraint — his presence — might have prevented catastrophe. It was courage, embodied. And Ashley’s camera didn’t flinch. He documented it not knowing how the narrative might shift with time, only that the truth needed to be preserved.

Reimagining How We See

What fascinates me about Ashley's approach is his constant evolution as a storyteller. When photography begins feeling repetitive, he finds new ways to personalize it and make it impossible to ignore. So he’s shifting — playing with vertical formats, aligning his work to where we’re actually looking: our phones. It's not a gimmick. It’s evolution. It’s about meeting people where they are, and refusing to let the stories that matter get lost in the scroll.

The Everyday Work of Not Looking Away

Living in New York, Ashley continues documenting change — neighborhoods transforming, communities evolving, the constant churn of a city that never stops moving. His lens finds quieter moments. But don’t mistake quiet for easy. He’s noticing. Documenting. Staying present. Having the courage to pay attention when it would be easier to look away.

As we wrapped our conversation, Ashley mentioned wanting to promote "common sense." Said as a joke, but landing with surprising weight. In a time when we're "considering things with our hearts" more than our heads, his call for rational thought feels both radical and necessary.

Our Responsibility as Witnesses

What stays with me most from our conversation is Ashley's reminder that in a democracy, we all hold the responsibility of bearing witness. We don’t get to outsource the hard stuff. Whether it’s the brutal reality of war, the fragility of peace, or the quieter cracks in our communities — we are all part of the story.

And in the end, “the photographs will stand”, as Ashley said. The real question? What will we do with what they show us?

Curious to learn more?

🔵 See more of Ashley Gilbertson's work here and follow him on Instagram

🔵 Ashley’s work for of January 6th at the United States Capitol for The New York Times

🔵 Ashley’s books Whisky Tango Foxtrot and Bedrooms of the Fallen

🔵 Learn more about VII Foundation

For more information about me and Weller Collaboration, check out what my clients say on our website.

What thoughts are bubbling up for you? Share in comments below.👇

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