The Unburdened Leader

How many times have you talked yourself out of pursuing an opportunity, telling yourself it wasn't for you, that you weren’t ready, or you weren’t qualified? What if that hesitation wasn't self-awareness but a script you internalized? Many women have a complicated relationship with their ambitions for greater leadership and greater wealth. And it isn’t because women are somehow inherently less sui...

Say the word ambition, especially around women, and it brings up a complicated mix of emotions and beliefs. If you're not succeeding, you're not ambitious enough. If you are succeeding, wanting a lot, and going for it, you're too ambitious, and you get penalized or punished. It happens at work, at home, and in the communities we move through every day. There are so many mixed messages about ambiti...

Some words and experiences come with a lot of baggage, conjuring up fear, stigma, and shame. But being afraid or ashamed doesn’t protect us from those experiences or those words. It just keeps us from really understanding them or being able to talk about them. And what we can’t process for ourselves, we can’t help those we love and lead with either. In the clinical space, dissociation is one of th...

Every system we move through runs on norms: rules and agreements that are both explicit and implicit. And nowhere are they more powerful–or more invisible–than in how we lead and how we build our businesses.  In fact, sociologists have consistently found that norms don’t announce themselves.  They travel through families, schools, workplaces, and entire cultures through repetition and imitation, o...

It is hard to be human. And right now, it is even harder to be humane, to ourselves and to others. And so many high-achieving, deeply caring leaders are under pressure to stay regulated, calm, and adaptable, no matter what they’re facing. They look serene on the outside, but internally? They feel like a hot mess.  They mask what they’re feeling and push through so they can try to be the person, fr...

The way you relate to power is the way you relate to everything around and within you–your work, your people, your sense of what's possible. And most of us have never actually examined that relationship. And in this season we are in, when everything is changing so quickly, any unexamined beliefs we hold will quietly run the show. They will shape the risks we take, the rooms we walk into, and the m...

You have probably heard of the concept of psychological safety and what it takes to foster it on your team and in spaces you lead. Maybe you’ve read books or taken trainings.  Here’s the tricky thing: psychological safety is an emergent quality of the group environment, shaped by leadership behaviors and team norms. You, as the leader, are a key variable.  So when you walk into a high-stakes meeti...

When you think of networking, do you feel discomfort or even dread? Most of us learned that “networking” is fundamentally transactional, asking for and doling out favors in order to further our aims. Maybe you or someone you know is the type to be constantly trying to connect people to prove their own worth, or counting themselves out because they feel like they have nothing to offer. That’s the k...

Story is our brain’s first language. And our minds fill in a story’s blanks long before the facts catch up. Before we consciously interpret an event, our nervous system has already scanned for threat and sent that information to our brains, which in turn builds a narrative about what it means. We’re constantly interpreting events, and not always accurately.  Research has shown that negative inform...

Most of us know about the “fight, flight, freeze” responses to trauma. But there is another concept that has been steadily gaining awareness over the last several years, in large part due to pop psychology on social media: Fawning. You might have heard it described as akin to extreme people-pleasing, over-accommodating, over-functioning, and fundamentally a problem in the person doing the fawning....

There is a well-known cognitive phenomenon that we are all susceptible to, and even more so when we’re stressed. And we’re all at least a little stressed and overwhelmed right now. The illusory truth effect catches us when we repeatedly hear statements and begin to assume they are true through repetition and familiarity. Things feel true, even if they couldn’t be further from it. Research has show...

If it feels like you’ve lived a year inside of a month right now, you’re not alone. The cycle of our times is relentless and demands more of our attention and emotional capacity than we were ever meant to carry. This disorientation makes us more prone to disengagement, burnout, cynicism, and the lure of certainty. We also risk what social psychologists call moral narrowing, where our moral attenti...

Our nervous systems form the foundation of how we move through the world. It is the filter for our thoughts, behaviors, and interpretations. And when our nervous systems are dysregulated, it impacts how we show up for ourselves, our loved ones, and those we lead. Emotional regulation isn’t as simple as a human equivalent of turning your computer off and on again. But it is an essential practice to...

How do we stay awake and aware without constantly being outraged? Or, perhaps even worse, normalizing what should be utterly unacceptable? Staying human is hard in this environment. So many leaders are trying to hold onto their boundaries and values against pressure to act contrary to them, to stay compassionate and curious when so many forces benefit from and encourage our outrage. Anger, rage, a...

Every day, we’re flooded with information–headlines, opinions, advice, noise. And beneath that deluge of input, we carry stories that tell us how we stay safe and what asking questions will cost us. Certainty too often feels like safety. So we rush to respond before we understand and defend before we discern. We don’t pause to reflect or to question the loudest voices in the room–proverbial or oth...

Leaders carry the weight of more than their current roles. We receive messages from the generations before us about our worth, work, and belonging that shape how we show up–for better or worse. This is just as true in our working lives as it is in our families. If we want to change the narratives, we have to become aware of the legacy burdens–personal, familial, cultural, systemic–that have been p...

What does it mean to be good? It’s a little word that carries a lot of weight for many of us. Be a good girl. Be a good friend. Be a good leader. Do good. Good can sound like praise, but become a cage of expectations and shoulds, a performance that chips away at our authenticity. Good is no longer something we are, but is how others see us. It leads us to people please and keep the peace at all co...

We live in an age where truth twists into confusion, opinion drowns out data, and it’s increasingly difficult to figure out whose expertise we can trust. Where did our mistrust in expertise come from? Its roots stretch back to deliberate misinformation campaigns beginning in the 1950s spread by the likes of Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and conservative church movements. Then social media poured gasoline...

Have you ever thought of being an amateur as a good thing? Many of us learned from an early age that our worth was tied to excelling at what we do and turning it into something productive. And many leaders carry the belief that they must be certain, skilled, and polished at all times. But what if the exact opposite were true? When we allow ourselves to dabble, to be amateurs, to be just okay at th...

We’ve all had bad bosses. We might have even been one. At the very least, we’ve probably let people down who counted on us. We all carry burdens from our past that show up in how we lead. And we’re all confronting systems that foster toxic workplace cultures where overwork and blurred boundaries are the norm, spaces that don’t feel safe or generative, and where there is little to no accountability...

How we care for ourselves is inextricably connected to how we lead. In a culture where we moralize health and sell wellness as a symbol of worth, where we’re obsessed with productivity and optimization, our relationships with food and our bodies go beyond personal struggles. They shape how we lead, how we show up for others, and how we define success. When leaders model extreme routines, restricti...

What does it take to lead when your story becomes the story, and the stakes are survival and justice? When you’ve experienced relational trauma or institutional betrayal, as Judith Herman wrote in Trauma and Recovery , “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.”  But silence protects systems, not survivors. When we do speak up, at best we’re often told to move on, a...

What do you care about these days?  Caring is the currency of leadership, but here’s the paradox: when we care too much about too many things, we can lose sight of the things that truly matter.  So the question is: How do you direct your energy toward what you value, without becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things you could care about?  The most effective leaders are those who can conne...

We persist for what matters most—for the people we lead, and the people we love. But persistence can start to feel like just another weight to carry, another demand that drains us.  And people are tired. So many of us are balancing caregiving, leadership, advocacy, a constant firehose of urgent crises, and maybe sneaking in some rest. So sure, persistence sounds good, but how do we keep going with...

How do we lead in the face of fear, when the stakes feel sky high and relentlessly personal? The realities of political violence, hostility, and burnout shape how we show up. And they can chip away at your generous heart, opening the path for cynicism and doubt. But if we can focus on what matters most, feel through our emotions–and help others do the same–and orient our gaze forward to the vision...