The Unburdened Leader

Do you have a relationship with play? Do you integrate time to play into your life around work and rest? Or does play feel elusive or like a luxury? If it does, you’re not alone. So many of us are weary and weighed down, trying to stay afloat while keeping up with life, work, and being engaged citizens. And we live in a culture that continues to prioritize work and productivity over play and rest....

Have you ever wondered if you are too much or too needy?  We carry a lot of baggage around our needs, others’ needs, and the many mixed messages about having needs but doing everything possible to not be seen as ‘being needy’. The result? A relentless pursuit to keep our needs hidden, fueling feelings of scarcity, shame, and worry. But needs are an inherent part of being human. In a society that h...

Inclusion. It’s a word that evokes strong emotions and reactions for many people. Some see it as a polarizing issue that elicits extreme rhetoric, while others recognize the need for us to confront discomfort and take responsibility for the impact of our leadership. We have to consider what inclusion means to us, what it feels like, and how it shows up in our work and personal lives. Because all t...

Are you a safe person?  Do you cultivate and lead spaces that are safe?  And how do you know the difference between lack of safety and discomfort?  The hard truth is that we can never declare a person or a space “safe.” We can do all we can to cultivate safety within ourselves and we can be intentional about doing our best to be safe but we cannot name a space or a person safe. That is for others...

Conflict and discomfort are inevitable–in all areas of our work and life.  Now, most of us carry some kind of relational or betrayal trauma. And these burdens impact how we lead and move through conflict, discomfort, and difference.  So when a rupture happens, there is often a rush to find comfort with some kind of a bid for repair. But if we do not do the work to reflect on our own systems’ needs...

Your past experiences and relationships inform how you lead and run your business today, whether you are aware of it or not. Overworking, perfectionism, fear of failure, crappy boundaries due to people pleasing or micro-managing can all stem from our relational history.  One of the more insidious aspects of trauma that can impact leaders and entrepreneurs is relational trauma, which can be difficu...

Do you consider yourself a sensitive person when it comes to sounds, smells, physical sensations, or taste? Do you judge this kind of sensitivity in yourself or others?  Many people feel caught in the vice grip of having a nervous system that responds strongly to various kinds of sensory stimulation while also feeling judged and deeply misunderstood for being sensitive to things that others appear...

What does it mean to you to be broken? To be normal? And who gets to decide what it means to be broken or whole? We live in a culture obsessed with fixing anything deemed broken - from stuff to people. We need to create spaces where we do not see difference as broken. And we do this by not settling for our current ways of navigating our discomfort with difference while pushing back on the burdened...

When you see a need or have a vision for something, what do you do? Especially when there is a lot going on in your life and in the world. Do you jump in and take action or do you get in your head with all the what-ifs and to-do lists so much so that you do not even start to explore or take action? Many of us do both. But there are folks who take action and do something that supports the greater g...

“Do you respect yourself when you look back on the hard times in your life?” Do you look back on your hard times and feel good about how you led yourself and others? And when you go through a perfect storm of events in your life, what are the certainty anchors and relationships that helped you stay afloat when it felt hard to keep breathing? Taking the time to honestly reflect on how we feel about...

Psychedelics are having a mainstream moment.  They continue to gain a bigger presence in our cultural awareness beyond their druggy stereotype over the last several decades.  Psychedelics also continue to grow as an approach to treating certain mental health conditions leading many people to rethink the role of these drugs from solely being dangerous to possible catalysts of healing. Over the last...

Rugged individualism occupies the heart of American mythology. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We ignore structural inequality and rely on our “can do” attitudes. We take on the personal shame of job loss or bankruptcy or health struggles.  And we unquestionably accept that to make it in America, all we need to do is work hard. Are we happier and is our society stronger for all our self-re...

How we talk about health matters. Conversations about health are pervasive–when we get to know each other, when we play catch up, at kid pick-ups, and in between calls or meetings.  Many of us see these conversations as benign since they are so commonplace and seem universal in their relatability. Yet, these conversations matter because so many of our beliefs around health are connected to a more...

We need to talk about power. Like, get into the nitty gritty details on what we believe about power, how we move around power, and how we see ourselves in relationship to power.  We need to get really clear on how we define it so we can truly understand the impact that our definitions of power have on our beliefs and actions.  There are too many examples of people in power who still have a dated a...

When we ignore our collective losses and tragedies, we only compound the pain they generate.  And when we feel like our pain is ignored or we cannot share it, remembering can become complicated. And how we lead can become toxic.  No matter your age, you have moments in your life that are embedded in your nervous system–the time, the place, who you were with–when something significant happened in y...

Today I am bringing back my annual debrief to the podcast.  Looking back on 2022 has been fruitful and offered a lot of data collecting. You know I love to collect data and review what choices, behaviors, and commitments were kept and which of them were not honored.   But looking back has not always been a practice or something I enjoyed. In fact, it felt counterintuitive to me. I know many busine...

We all connect with the power of vulnerability in ourselves and in others.  And vulnerability continues to be misunderstood and misappropriated in marketing businesses and services, political campaigns, legislative agendas, and leadership, to name a few.  These days, discerning between true vulnerability and what today’s guest calls #vulnerability can become a real challenge. When vulnerability is...

One of the biggest challenges to self-care is that it means different things to different people.  Is it bubble baths and facials? Nice vacations and or buying a coveted outfit or pair of shoes? Or is it advocating for reasonable wages and safe working conditions?  For some, self-care is a justification to splurge or just take a dang day off when a justification sadly should not be needed. For oth...

Conscious consumption is one of the hottest trends in retail marketing.  We shop to make a difference, have an impact, build a better world.  But many of the businesses that claim to be doing good are running on business models or operating principles that are hardly disruptive.  Instead, they're counting on consumers' desire to both have their cake and eat it too.  The more companies can convince...

The mental load we all carry right now is next level. But just because this load is invisible does not make it any less important.   Kids, pets, aging family members, school, work, the economy, democracy, access to safe and affordable health care, chronic health issues - the list goes on and on, and feels like it keeps piling on without relief or end in sight.  On top of this, we carry past pains...

There is a difference between nice and kind. Niceness is appeasing and complacent. Kindness is loving and generous. Niceness, in IFS terms, can be experienced as a strong protector shielding us from vulnerability and risk by over-accommodating others. True kindness, on the other hand, connects us to our compassion and our values. We sacrifice our integrity to play nice, to go along to get along. W...

We all carry pain. All of us.  We navigate the vice grip of the pains from our past along with the pains from the present while trying to keep it all together.  And when things break, we often carry the blame and responsibility for our pain because we’ve absorbed the messages that our struggles are our sole responsibility; neglecting to see the systems, the business practices, and the cultural nor...

Quick-fix solutions abound for mental health challenges.  As leaders, we’re fed the same advice over and over again. Generic one-size-fits-all “thought work” designed to alleviate our gloom and get us back on the road to success. But that generic advice comes up short. And much of it further stigmatizes mental health struggles, failure, and doubt to the point where people fake it until they make i...

We often look at the results of quizzes and personality assessments for language to help describe ourselves to others. And to better understand ourselves.  These assessments can help us manage how we hire, date, and even want others perceive us.  The language of these tests can fuel connection and belonging within and with others–to an extent. But it can also be used to sort, judge, or even shame...

How you talk to yourself often reflects how you lead and how you talk with others.  The harshness of your inner conversations seeps through into your conversations with others.  The vice grip of judgment, resentment, and out of aligned expectations you’re holding combined with the burdens from difficult life experiences make it loud between the ears.  We navigate our internal conversations while s...