To the wisdom keepers, the CHROs, Chief People Officers, Chief Culture Officers, Team Leaders, and everyone quietly holding the human center of an organization together right now. Let’s talk about what it actually takes to stay clear, steady, and human while you're the one holding everyone else together. Through the pressure to shrink back to sameness. The AI disruption. The tightening budgets. The political noise. The exhaustion nobody's naming out loud. These live sessions are unfiltered. Unpremeditated. Just two women who've spent a lot of years in this work, bringing what we've heard behind closed doors, from podiums, from the actual mess of leading people right now. What wisdom over knowledge looks like today. And what becomes possible the moment you stop holding it alone.

If you are navigating a threshold moment and trying to find your voice, join us October 9-11. Let's sit in these complex spaces and learn to fly on our own accord.
https://www.eomega.org/workshops/reclaiming-wisdom

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As they reflected on those years, she said, many described their experience at Jennifer Brown Consulting as one of the most meaningful chapters of their professional lives.

As much as I would be inclined to just thank her for sharing this and move right along, I want to pause on it. This is my work. To let it all in, and reconsider it in the light of today.

The comment landed with particular force because I am standing in a very different place than I was when that company was thriving. Building and leading Jennifer Brown Consulting over two decades brought extraordinary opportunities, relationships, and purpose into my life. Looking back at that version of me, I really swung for the fences. I’m so impressed and almost shocked by the boldness, the courage, the audacity, the endless fire and commitment. I guess that’s what an all-consuming vision makes possible.

But the final years of this particular chapter were marked not only by significant financial consequences, but by something much larger: the unraveling of a field, a business model, a professional identity, and a vision of the future that many of us had devoted our careers to advancing. I can only describe it as heartbreak.

I watched political winds shift. I watched organizations retreat from commitments they had once championed publicly. I watched fear replace conviction in places where courage had once seemed possible. And alongside those broader forces, I found myself making some of the most difficult decisions of my professional life and dismantling a team I loved, letting go of structures we had spent years building, and ultimately attempting to preserve what I could through a sale of the business that carried its own emotional and financial costs before it, too, failed to become the solution I had hoped it might be.

It is difficult to explain to someone who has not lived it. There are losses that happen all at once, and there are losses that unfold slowly enough that you find yourself adapting to them before you fully understand what is disappearing - and the room that’s being made for whatever wants to emerge next.

As I sat with what my former colleague had shared, I found myself confronting a truth that feels both comforting and painful.

The organization cost me enormously. It gave many other people one of the most meaningful professional experiences of their lives.

Both things are true.

Perhaps this is one of the bittersweet realities of leadership. Founders and employees often inhabit the same organization while living entirely different experiences. Team members remember the camaraderie, the growth, the opportunities, the mission, the feeling of building something together. Founders remember those things too, but they also remember the machinery underneath it all—the payrolls, the cash flow, the difficult decisions, the responsibilities that cannot be delegated, and the constant awareness that other people’s livelihoods are connected to your choices.

For a long time, I unconsciously assumed that my perspective carried the most authority because I had seen every chapter. But distance has a way of softening certainty. Increasingly, I find myself wondering whether I have allowed the ending to occupy too much space in my interpretation of the story.

That question has emerged at precisely the same time that I have been reflecting on The Shape of Change, the book I released earlier this year. The book itself was written largely during 2025, shaped by the final stretch of my seven-year podcast journey and informed by hundreds of conversations about leadership, uncertainty, belonging, identity, resilience, and transformation, and by some very vulnerable personal episodes - of just me, talking, musing, wondering, and yes - grieving. Trying to find my bearings.

Looking back now, I realize that I was trying to make sense of something I could feel long before I could fully see it.

At the time, I was still inside the hallway, and its darkness. My senses were heightened, as they are in a dark unfamiliar passage. You pick up on different things when you’re deprived of your go-to tools.

I did not know exactly where any of it was leading. I only knew that something was ending. The world I had spent twenty years helping to build no longer felt stable. Assumptions that had guided my work were being challenged. Structures I had relied upon were disappearing. Identities that had once felt secure were becoming less certain.

What strikes me now is that many of the truths that emerged in the book arrived before I consciously understood them. The writing seemed to know what my analytical mind had not yet caught up to. The themes that surfaced again and again—seasons, surrender, identity, release, liminality, renewal, emergence—were not merely observations about change. They were clues.

The book was describing a transition I was still living through.

There is something deeply humbling about that realization.

Lately, I have found myself feeling as though the book is writing me at least as much as I wrote it. Not because the act of writing changes a person, though it certainly does, but because the ideas themselves have become companions through this chapter of my life. The concepts, frameworks, and insights that make up the book are helping me understand experiences that, for years, felt confusing, unfinished, or painful.

At times, the book feels wiser than I do.

I realize how strange that sounds. After all, I am the one who wrote it. Yet there are moments when I reread a passage and feel less like its author than its student. I slide back or away from its contents, back to an old self, often the smaller, scared one - only to return back to the light of it. The ideas seem to know something that I am still in the process of learning. They illuminate patterns I can only partially see. They point toward a way of understanding change that feels more evolved than my day-to-day capacity to embody it.

Perhaps that is because the book represents not who I am on my best day or my worst day, but the accumulated wisdom of decades of observation, reflection, conversations, mistakes, losses, reinventions, and growth. It is the most integrated perspective I have access to at this moment in my life. In that sense, the book is not ahead of me so much as it is inviting me forward. It describes the person I hope I am becoming—or perhaps the person I become whenever I stop resisting what life is trying to teach me.

One of the central ideas in The Shape of Change is that we do not move through change in a linear progression. We move through seasons. Some seasons ask us to build. Others ask us to sustain, to harvest, to release, or to begin again. Yet while we are living through those seasons, we rarely recognize them accurately. We judge ourselves for not being somewhere else. We interpret endings as failures. We cling to identities that have already completed their purpose.

Most of all, we forget that no single season tells the whole story.

A winter is not the definition of a forest.

And perhaps an ending is not the definition of a life, a company, a career, or a contribution.

As I revisit the last twenty years through this lens, I can see how often I evaluated the entire journey through the perspective of its final season. The grief was real. The losses were real. The disappointments were real. But so were the lives touched, the careers launched, the friendships formed, the confidence built, and the ideas that continue to ripple outward long after the organization itself has changed form.

The company did not survive in the way I once imagined it would.

Yet something survived.

Perhaps that is what my former colleagues were trying to remind me of.

As I continue to reflect on this chapter of my life, I find myself holding the last twenty years differently than I once did. I can honor the courage without romanticizing the cost. I can acknowledge the damage without allowing it to erase the value that was created. I can grieve what was lost while still feeling proud of what existed.

Most importantly, I am learning to stop allowing the final chapter to tell the whole story.

The farther I get from those years, the more I appreciate their totality. Some of it broke my heart. Some of it changed lives.

Both things are true.

And perhaps that is the difference between insight and wisdom.

Insight helps us name what is happening.

Wisdom arrives later, when life gives us an opportunity to embody what we already know.

Among those under 30, it’s closer to 1 in 3. This is not a small population operating at the edges of the workforce. That is a substantial share of every team, in every industry, navigating systems that were not built for the way their brains work.

Most of those people have learned, over time, to compensate. To build workarounds. To spend a portion of their cognitive and emotional energy every single day managing the gap between how they actually work and how the environment expects them to work.

That is what I call the invisible energy tax, and it is costing organizations far more than they know.

WHAT COQUAL’S RESEARCH REVEALS

I am a Founding Luminary at Coqual, a global nonprofit think tank that combines research, advisory work, and executive convening to help organizations navigate the evolving world of work and build cultures where people and business thrive. Their most recent study, The Neuroinclusion Imperative: Unlocking Untapped Potential, was led by neurodivergent researchers and grounded entirely in the lived experiences of neurodivergent professionals. It is the most clarifying piece of research I have encountered on this topic, and I want to share what it found.

Three statistics in particular are critical to understand:

83%

of neurodivergent professionals say aspects of their work style are repeatedly misperceived or misunderstood by neurotypical colleagues.

82%

say there are aspects of workplace culture or unspoken expectations that simply make no sense to them.

89%

say they possess unique strengths or abilities they rarely see displayed by others.

That last number is directly tied to so much of the work I’ve been focusing on for decades, namely, what we are not perceiving, and therefore enabling, in ourselves and those around us. Nearly nine in ten neurodivergent professionals are carrying strengths that are going unrealized, not because the talent isn’t there, but because the systems around them were not designed to see it.

Coqual documents what those unseen strengths look like in practice, and how often they are misunderstood. The colleague who asks a stream of questions may be seeing risks that others have missed. The person who switches off their camera may be listening more intently, not less. The employee whose feedback feels unusually direct may be prioritizing clarity over social convention. Time and again, strengths are mistaken for shortcomings: pattern recognition becomes negativity, hyperfocus becomes disengagement, and candor becomes insubordination.

These misreads, repeated across performance reviews, team dynamics, and promotion decisions, are quietly draining organizations of talent, trust, and competitive advantage every single day.

“Neuroinclusion cannot be reduced to accommodations. It requires a broader transformation in which workplaces adapt and expand to encompass the full range of human talent.” — Jennie Glazer, CEO of Coqual

The report identifies six strategic advantages that neuroinclusion unlocks: neutralized risks and inefficiencies, undiscovered synergies, output beyond expectation, seamless project execution, kindness that outperforms niceness, and next-level processing power. These are not feel-good benefits. They are performance benefits. They show up in the quality of the work, in the resilience of teams, and in the capacity for innovation under pressure.

The question Coqual asks, and that I now ask in every room I walk into, is not whether neurodivergent professionals can succeed. The evidence is clear that they can, and do. The real question is how much creative energy, input, and ultimately people organizations lose when the environment fails to meet them where they are.

I want to share with you what that looks like up close, as I’ve had direct experience in my working relationships with this.

Amber Kidd has been my Director of Operations for four years. She is an important collaborator of mine in this work. She has walked alongside me the last few years as someone who has continued to reshape how I think, how I build content, and how I show up as a leader. She has been openly transparent about her neurodivergence for the entirety of our time together, and that transparency has taught me more than any framework could.

I asked her to co-author this piece because the argument I’m making lives in her experience. She is not an illustration of a point. She is the point.

I’ll let her tell it.

Amber Kidd
Director of Operations, Jennifer Brown Speaks

I have ADHD.

I was first diagnosed as a child. Then again, in my twenties. It wasn’t until I was sitting with my therapist in my thirties, sorting through what I felt like were continued shortcomings in my career journey and experience, that something finally clicked in a way it never had before. Not a new diagnosis. Just permission. Permission to actually believe it, and to stop spending so much energy trying to explain it away.

It is what I have been doing for a long time…

I tried Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, and the Clifton StrengthsFinder. Honestly, I took every personality assessment I could find. I checked my star chart (being a Virgo, I was really hoping this “organized” mindset would overtake me someday). I was looking for something that would help me make sense of the gap I kept feeling between how I knew I could perform and how I was actually showing up. I wanted a framework that would tell me I just needed to find the right tool, the right system, the right organizational method, and then I would finally be able to operate the way everyone else seemed to.

I built myself elaborate systems. I tried new apps, new workflows, and new ways of tracking tasks. I even adjusted my sleep schedule so I could be a part of the “5 am club”. I wont lie, some of these things helped, for a while. They gave me a framework and a way of approaching my life, but the thing I kept ignoring, the thing all those tools couldn’t fix, was that my brain simply wasn’t working like the brains of the people around me or those building these tools and processes. Accepting that I wasn’t broken, that I was different, was life-changing. I was exhausting myself trying to close a gap that wasn’t a deficit. It was just a difference.

I’ve always been capable. That was never the question. Most work tasks, I could figure out how to do them. What I struggled with was consistency in the way traditional support roles tend to define it… the same kind of output, produced the same way, every time. I could do brilliant work and then completely lose track of a routine task that should have taken five minutes. I could hyperfocus on a complex problem until I had it solved in a way no one else had thought to try, and then struggle to send a follow-up email. My brain has always been better at idealizing and strategizing than at executing the same repetitive motion over and over.

I’ve worked with some, not all, but some, who didn’t have the patience to see what I was actually capable of. I’d step into a role built around traditional support functions, and I was just not able to maintain it. Some roles genuinely needed steady, repeatable output above everything else, and that was simply not where I was strongest.

What I didn’t know for a long time was whether any of this was safe to name out loud at work. So I kept compensating. I kept building systems. I kept showing up and quietly underusing the parts of my brain that were genuinely extraordinary, because I hadn’t found a place yet where those parts were met with curiosity instead of confusion.

I’ve also been fortunate to work with people who were curious enough to follow the bouncing ball that is my brain. What they unlocked was something truly incredible. Those are the people who got the best of me, and made me more consistent and more sustainable in how I show up, because I finally had the conditions to build a way of functioning that actually worked.

Jennifer has been the prime example of this kind of aware, engaged, curious, and inclusive leader for me. Four years in, I can say without hesitation that she has done more to unlock what I’m actually capable of than anyone else I’ve worked with, not by lowering expectations, but by getting curious about how to meet them differently.

That is the invisible energy tax. Jennifer’s language for it is exactly right. I paid for it for years without having a name for it.

That changed with her. Not all at once, but steadily, in the way things shift when the conditions around you actually change instead of you just getting better at enduring them. Jennifer didn’t make a big thing of my ADHD. She didn’t treat it as a liability to manage or a risk to work around. She stayed curious about how I worked. She asked questions. She noticed what produced great output and adjusted toward that, instead of expecting me to conform to a structure that didn’t fit. When something wasn’t working, we could say so directly, without the undercurrent of anxiety that comes from not knowing whether you’re safe to be honest.

I found that I stopped covering…And what became possible when I stopped is genuinely hard to describe. I’ve grown in this role in ways I didn’t expect. I am better at my work than I have ever been. Not because I became a different person, but because I stopped spending so much energy pretending to be one.

I love the work itself. The building of content around leadership, belonging, and human experience. There is something that feels right about being both the person who helps shape the container and someone whose story lives inside it. I don’t position myself as an expert. I am a person who lives this, and who has found that bringing my whole self into this work has made me better at it, not despite my ADHD, but in no small part because of it.

If you are someone who has been quietly paying this tax for a long time, alone, it doesn’t have to work that way. The right environment changes everything. Not because you become someone different. Because you finally get to be who you already are.

— Amber Kidd

Hi, it’s me again - Jennifer.

Reading what Amber just wrote, I feel two things at once.

Gratitude first. Deep, specific gratitude. Not the kind you say in a closing paragraph, but the kind that comes from four years of watching someone show up fully and knowing that the conditions we built together made that possible. Amber is not just someone I work with. She is someone I have learned from, consistently and substantially, in ways that have made me a better practitioner of the very ideas I teach. I am better at this work because of her, full stop.

And underneath that, something closer to urgency. Because what Amber described, years of compensating, of rationing focus, of paying a tax that had no name, is not her story alone. It is the story of a significant portion of every workforce, happening invisibly, right now, inside organizations that would genuinely want to do something about it if they understood what was happening.

That is what this work is for. Not to perform awareness, but to actually change the conditions.

When we have co-facilitated recent trainings on this topic, the goal has never been to diagnose anyone or to turn a workplace conversation into a clinical one. We’ve endeavored to show what it looks like when a leader stays genuinely curious about the many different ways people think, process, and work, and builds a culture around that curiosity instead of around a single norm. That is inclusive leadership. It has always been inclusive leadership.

The questions are not as complicated as organizations sometimes make them. How do I recognize that neurodiversity may be a factor in how someone shows up? How do I begin that conversation? What adjustments can I make — not as formal policy, but as daily practice? The answer, more often than not, starts with something simpler than a program. It starts with a leader who is willing to ask, “Help me understand how you work best,” and then actually listens.

To the clinicians, coaches, and advocates doing the deeper individual work every day: this conversation sits alongside yours, not in place of it. My hope is simply to keep naming what lives below the waterline. To bring this into rooms where it hasn’t arrived yet. And to make it a little safer for the people who have been navigating this quietly and alone, to know that they don’t have to.

Amber didn’t have to write what she wrote. She chose to, because she believes, as I do, that naming this clearly is how the conditions actually start to change. That kind of trust is not something I take for granted, and it’s not something I’ll ever stop being grateful for.

IF YOUR ORGANIZATION IS READY TO OPEN THIS DOOR

This is a conversation I am bringing into more rooms. If your team is ready, not as a compliance exercise, not as a checkbox, but as a genuine investment in the full range of human talent in your organization, I want to be there with you.

We can design something that fits where your culture actually is. A keynote. A facilitated session. A conversation for your ERG leaders, people managers, or your whole organization. Something that meets people where they are and moves them somewhere new.

Reach out at info@jenniferbrownspeaks.com to start the conversation.

If you want to go deeper into the research grounding this work, Coqual’s full report, The Neuroinclusion Imperative: Unlocking Untapped Potential, is available at coqual.org. It is worth reading slowly.

A note of gratitude

This piece draws heavily on the groundbreaking work of Coqual and the team behind The Neuroinclusion Imperative: Unlocking Untapped Potential. We are deeply grateful to the researchers, experts, and neurodivergent professionals whose honesty and rigor made this report possible.

Special recognition to:

Jennie Glazer, CEO of Coqual, whose leadership drives this work forward and whose conviction that neuroinclusion is a business imperative — not a goodwill gesture — shapes everything in these pages.

Isis Fabian, Research Lead and Workplace Neurodiversity Expert, Fellow at Coqual’s Global Lab, who led this research as a neurodivergent professional herself. That inside perspective is what makes this report unlike anything else in the field.

Emilia Yu, Project Lead and Executive Director of Coqual’s Global Lab, whose stewardship brought the research to life.

And to the external experts whose voices run throughout the report: Dr. Victoria Verlezza, Racheal Pallares of the Neurodiversity Training Institute, Perry Knoppert of The Octopus Movement, Pasha Marlowe of Neurobelonging, and Kris Aakvik.

Most of all, to the 60 neurodivergent professionals who shared their stories with Coqual’s researchers. This work exists because they were willing to tell the truth about what it costs, and what becomes possible, when someone finally pays attention.

Something is different about this June we’re entering.

Not better. Not worse, exactly. Different.

A year ago, I wasn’t sure these rooms would still exist.

I mean that. There were real conversations in this community, among people who have dedicated their lives to this work, about whether Pride programming inside organizations would survive another year. Whether Pride ERGs would still be active. Whether anyone would still be gathering, still be saying: this month matters, this conversation is worth having, the people in this building deserve to be seen.

Last June was a raw one. A reality check. A moment where those of us who have been in this for a while had to sit with a question we hadn’t had to sit with before: what if the infrastructure we spent years building just... doesn’t make it?

So when I tell you the rooms are still here - the global ones - the ones where someone at some level of an organization made a real decision to gather people together and say: Let’s talk about what it actually costs not to be seen at work - I want to share what that means to me.

The rooms are still here.

That is not nothing. That is, right now, feels like everything.

Things feel different than they did before. Less performance. More honesty. Less of the arrival energy we used to bring into Pride season. The banners, the declarations, the feeling that momentum was on our side, and we just had to keep going.

What’s there instead is quieter, and I think, more true.

People are asking different questions now.

Leaders who used to ask

“what’s our Pride activation” 

Are now asking

“how do I actually take care of the people on my team who are scared right now?” 

The ones who used to ask

“what’s our statement” 

Are asking

 “who in this building needs someone to notice them this month.”

That shift from performance to presence is the most important thing I’ve seen happen in this work in years. It didn’t happen because things got easier.

I’ve been doing this work for 25 years. I’ve stood in more rooms than I can count and made the case for why belonging matters. Why visibility matters. Why it costs people and organizations when we ask someone to bring only part of themselves to work.

I’m watching it happen right now, in those rooms. People are becoming less visible. Not dramatically. Quietly. A pronoun removed from an email signature. A partner who stops getting mentioned. A hand that doesn’t go up on the panel anymore. An identity that was out two years ago that is now held more carefully, because the air changed, and the person felt it.

Nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults report being less out somewhere in their lives over the last twelve months.

Less out. After everything.

That number lives in me. Because I know what it represents. Not a change of heart. A calculation. A person looking at the room, doing the math, and deciding that the math comes out differently than it used to.

And here is what I know about that calculation: it shifts. It shifts based on what people see around them. Based on who else is visible. Based on whether the people with more power, more protection, more runway are using what they have to make the room feel safer, or waiting for someone else to go first.

That is what I want to talk about this month.

What going first actually looks like.

In every session I do right now, someone asks me: what does allyship actually look like, not in the policy, not in the program, but on a random Tuesday, in a meeting, in the moment that doesn’t announce itself as a moment?

My answer is always the same… It looks like going first.

It looks like sharing something real about yourself before you ask anyone else to. Saying their name, your partner’s, your daughter’s, your colleague’s, in the room where it would have been easier not to. Using your pronouns so no one has to be the only one. Walking into the ERG event when no one required you to. Saying something when a comment lands wrong, even when you’re not sure you have the right words, even when the moment is uncomfortable.

None of that is a grand gesture. It is ordinary. It is normal Tuesday meeting activities for real leaders.

This leadership practice is being watched. Not in a threatening way, but in the way that has always been true: people look to the leaders around them for information about what is safe. Your presence sends a signal. Your silence sends one too.

The question I keep asking leaders in every room I’m in right now is this:

What signal are you sending?

For the LGBTQ+ leaders reading this.

I want to stay here for a moment, because there is a conversation inside the conversation that I don’t think gets said plainly enough. Your visibility, right now, in this season, in whatever room you are actually in, is a leadership act.

I know that it is complicated. I know the conditions have changed. I know the calculation is harder than it used to be, and that there are real and legitimate reasons to be careful about how much of yourself you put forward right now.

I also know this, from 25 years of watching what happens in organizations:

When an LGBTQ+ leader is visible, when they name the lived experience, when they mention their partner, when they show up to the event, when they are simply known, it changes the math for everyone around them.

The junior employee who hasn’t come out yet. The person in another country, where it is even less safe. The ally who was on the fence about speaking up. Your presence does something no program, no policy, no training can do.

You are proof that it can be done, and right now, proof is what people need most.

I am not asking you to be brave on behalf of an organization that hasn’t earned it. I am not asking you to make yourself a target. I am asking you to consider that staying visible in whatever way feels sustainable, in whatever room you are actually in is not just personal.

It is, in this moment, one of the most powerful things you can do. Homophobia and transphobia thrive in silence. They always have. The antidote has always been the same: I am here. You can see me. I am not going anywhere.

Think about someone you work with. Someone who might be spending real energy every day, adjusting and translating themselves just to be received in the room you share.

What is one thing you could do this week to make it a little safer for them not to have to?

It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be announced.

It just has to be real.

That is what allyship looks like right now. That is what this month is for.

And that is how cultures change — not in the declaration, but in the thousand small decisions made by people who decided that someone else’s belonging mattered.

The rooms are still here. You are still here. That is where we begin.

With pride, and with all of you.

Jennifer

If your organization is figuring out how to mark Pride in a way that’s connected to something real, not performative, not defensive, there are still openings in my June calendar. Reach out at info@jenniferbrownspeaks.com

Not the systems. Not the plans. Not the frameworks we built for a world that no longer quite fits. I mean the deeper thing. The internal architecture that lets a person say, even in the middle of dissolution: I know who I am. I know what I’m for. I know who I’m for. That’s still mine.

Erin Weed has spent her career helping people find that thing. Her new book, Just One Word, takes readers through a process she calls The Dig. A method for excavating your life’s experiences, identifying what has been true about you all along, and naming it. One word. Your word. The thread that runs through everything, whether you’ve been conscious of it or not.

My book, The Shape of Change, is about what happens after you find it. What happens when that word, that identity, that carefully built sense of self, meets real upheaval? When the field you’ve given your life to contracts. When the role disappears. When the world shifts beneath you, and you have to figure out how to hold onto who you are while everything else reforms.

We realized we were telling the same story from different angles. So we decided to tell it together.

On The Dig, and the word that changed everything for me

Jennifer:

I’ve known Erin for about fifteen years. I got to know her because I did a private session with her, back before I had any books or even a fully formed talk. I was a speaker trying to figure out what I was really saying. For the past 13 years she’s been a speaker coach for TEDxBoulder, one of the biggest TEDx events in the country. She spent her days preparing speakers who had been accepted but still needed help. Structure. Feedback. The courage to tell the true story underneath the polished one.

She understood the speaking world in a way very few people do. She understood what lands in a room and what doesn’t. She understood the gap between the message someone thinks they have and the message that’s actually alive in them, waiting.

Erin knows that before sharing a message, you first need to Dig.

During our many hours together, she had sticky notes and a sharpie and a big glass wall. I talked. She listened. She was writing things down the whole time. Little phrases, images, dates, moments I mentioned almost in passing. Soon that glass wall was covered with pieces of my life. And she began to put them in order. To show me the pattern I couldn’t see from inside it.

At the end, she gave me my word.

My word was power.

My first reaction was resistance. Power felt like a loaded word to me. I associated it with domination, with control, with everything I’d been working against. But as Erin walked me through what she’d heard, I couldn’t argue with it. Power had been the central tension of my entire life. Power wielded over me in ways I didn’t choose. Power withheld from people I loved and fought alongside. The whole arc of my work, every book, every talk, every question I’ve spent twenty years trying to answer, was right there in that one word. I just hadn’t named it.

Once you meet the word, you can’t unsee it. It’s in what you’re drawn to, in what frustrates you, in what you can’t stop talking about. It becomes the question underneath every question.

ERIN:

The Dig does something that most personal development work doesn’t. It doesn’t help you build a new identity. It helps you find the one you already have.

That’s a really important distinction. The word was never missing. It’s been running the show the whole time, quietly shaping every decision, every frustration, every thing you can’t stop caring about. The Dig just turns the lights on.

And when the lights come on, people have different reactions. Some people exhale. Their shoulders drop. There’s this quiet recognition, like, oh, there you are. But a lot of people push back, especially when the word holds real charge. That resistance? I’ve learned to love it. It’s usually the most reliable signal that we’ve found the right word.

With Jennifer, “Power” made her uncomfortable for a reason. She’d spent her career fighting against power structures, so the idea that her word was “Power” felt like a contradiction. But that discomfort was actually the data. The word holds both your greatest strength and your deepest struggle. It’s your superpower and your Achilles’ heel at the same time. If it only felt flattering, it probably wasn’t quite right.

I always invite people to stay with it a little longer when they resist. Because what’s on the other side of that resistance is almost always recognition. The body knows before the brain catches up.

Jennifer:

And here’s what I’ve come to believe, especially now: the word is most important not when things are going well. It’s most important when they aren’t.

On what happens when the word gets tested

Jennifer:

I spent over twenty years building a company in the DEI space. I watched the field grow from something niche into a genuine movement. Into boardrooms and C-suites, into the language organizations used to describe who they were and what they stood for. And then I watched it come under enormous pressure.

Companies that had committed to this work started pulling back. Initiatives were quietly dismantled. People who had built entire careers on this work found themselves suddenly unmoored. I was one of them.

There’s a lesson from nature that I study over and over again. Scientists call what happens inside a chrysalis histolysis. The caterpillar doesn’t just change shape. It dissolves. It becomes what biologists actually call bug soup. There is no bouncing back from bug soup. And if the caterpillar thinks in any way like a human, I’d imagine it would almost certainly believe that everything was lost.

But the ingredients don’t disappear. They’re reorganized. The decades of experience, the hard-won wisdom about how humans change and what trust requires and how to build across difference – none of that vanishes. It becomes something new. You just can’t see what yet.

What I had to hold onto during that time was my word. Power.

Not the power of a field or a title or a revenue line. The power I was genuinely trying to be in service of. The redistribution of it. The redefinition of it. That didn’t change just because the landscape did.

There’s a real difference. One is about force. The other is about trust. Trust that something is being built in the dark, even when you can’t see it.

ERIN:

The leaders who move through disruption with any real grace are the ones who have a stable interior when everything exterior is shifting. They’re not immune to the chaos. They just have a way to ground back into themselves.

I’ve worked with people who lost companies, survived betrayals, buried loved ones, and had to start completely over. The ones who land somewhere meaningful on the other side aren’t necessarily tougher or smarter. They just know who they are at the core.

That’s what a Dig word does in those moments. It gives you a north star to look up to. When you experience roadblocks or life stops making sense, you can ask yourself: is what I’m doing right now in alignment with who I actually am? If the answer is yes, you keep going. If the answer is no, that’s an invitation to pause, reflect and change direction.

Disruption reveals what’s real. And if you know your word, you’re never starting from zero.

On what leaders actually need right now

Jennifer:

We’re writing this at a strange moment. Leaders are being asked to navigate environments that don’t have a working map. The frameworks that served them for decades are losing resolution. And people are still looking to them for a kind of certainty that most leaders, if they’re honest, don’t have.

What I’ve learned, in my own life and from the leaders I work with, is that the capacity to navigate real disruption isn’t built from more information or better frameworks. It’s built from the kind of deep self-knowledge Erin is describing, combined with what I’d call the willingness to bend without breaking.

The leaders who matter right now are the ones willing to ask: who do I need to become? Not just: what do I need to know?

That’s not something you can fake. It comes from knowing yourself deeply enough that disruption doesn’t hollow you out. It comes from having a word.

ERIN:

The shift from personal insight to leadership tool happens when the word stops being something you know about yourself and starts being something you operate from every single day.

I worked with a leader named Jim whose word is “Love.” He’s a veteran, former national security, not exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to walk around talking about love. But his entire leadership philosophy is built on it. When things get tense, when stakes are high, when he feels himself going toward control or fear, his grounding question is “How can I approach this with love?” That one question changes the room.

That’s what I mean by a word becoming a tool. It’s not a mantra you cross-stitch on a pillow. It’s a real-time guidance system.

I also worked with a tech founder who brought The Dig into his entire company. Everyone’s word went on the org chart. And what happened in that organization was remarkable. Colleagues stopped taking each other personally. They started getting curious when things got spicy, thinking, “Oh, wait, is that just how your operating system works and I don’t need to take this personally?” Conflict didn’t disappear, but it became navigable. They had a shared language for understanding why people do what they do.

The leaders I’ve seen use it most effectively are the ones who don’t keep it private. They name their word to their teams. They make decisions out loud through it. They invite others to do the same. That’s when it stops being a personal development exercise and starts becoming a culture.

A note on why we wrote this together

Jennifer:

Erin is someone who understood, long before most people in the speaking and thought leadership world, that the message and the messenger are inseparable. She has a rare sense of what resonates in a room and what doesn’t, what changes people and what just fills time.

What she also carries is a genuine belief that every person has something worth excavating. That the word is there, waiting. That clarity is not a gift some people are born with. It’s the result of a process. And now that process is in a book that anyone can access.

I’ve sent many people to Erin over the years. I’m grateful she’s made the Dig available in a form that doesn’t require multiple hours and a glass wall, as meaningful as that experience was for me.

ERIN:

What I love about Jennifer is that she’s always asking what comes next. Not in an anxious way, but in the best possible way, with real curiosity and genuine courage. So when she reached out about doing this together, it felt exactly right.

Her book is about what happens when you have to hold onto yourself while everything around you reshapes. My book is about finding what’s worth holding onto. I think readers who encounter both will get something they couldn’t get from either one alone.

What I hope more than anything is that people walk away understanding that clarity is not a personality trait. It’s not something some people are born with and others aren’t. It’s the result of curiosity. You just need the willingness to look at your own life honestly and trust what you find there.

Your purpose is already in you. It’s in the stories you can’t stop telling, the problems you can’t stop solving, the values you can’t help defending even when it costs you something. The Dig just helps you name it.

And once you name it, as Jennifer will tell you, the real work begins.

Where to begin

If you’re a leader right now navigating a field in transition, a role that’s shifting, an identity that feels uncertain, we’d offer you two questions to sit with.

From Erin: What word, if you’re honest, has been the thread running through every chapter of your life, even the chapters you’d rather not include?

From Jennifer: When the form of your work or your identity has dissolved, and it will, what has remained? What are you made of underneath the role, the title, the recognition?

The answer to both questions might be the same thing. It probably is.

Find it. Name it. Then learn to carry it.

Erin Weed is the author of Just One Word (Hachette, May 19, 2026). Learn more and pre-order at erinweed.com

Jennifer Brown is the author of The Shape of Change. Learn more at jenniferbrownspeaks.com.

We are talking about the word that’s been following them both: radical sovereignty. What it means to reclaim your own clarity and groundedness when the world keeps pulling you outward. How purpose can become its own kind of porousness. And why community showing up, being present with others, has never felt more necessary or harder to make time for.

Want more? Join us live this Friday, May 8, at noon ET on LinkedIn.

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“Today I’m flying low, and I’m not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.” Mary Oliver

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This poem is always such a gentle reminder to me. I don’t want to stop moving. Honestly, do we ever, in this society? Are we somehow scared to? Socialized not to? Fueled by fear? So I return over and over again to how Mary Oliver writes about stillness, which, as she understood, isn’t absence. It’s a different kind of travel.

You can hardly move, and still cover a terrific distance.

For a long time, “flying high” wasn’t just a metaphor for me. It was an identity. Building a DEI firm. Publishing. Speaking. Adding my voice to a chorus of people who believed the arc of the workplace was bending, slowly but surely, toward something more just. I flew high on that belief. It was the voodoo that animated everything.

Inevitably, though, the weather changes. I, like so many, was stopped in my tracks.

The image that comes to mind is musical chairs (I always hated that game, by the way - 80’s childhood games were so cruel!) An entire generation of changemakers were left without a seat to take when the music stopped. Nowhere to sit, anymore.

That’s exactly what I was holding in my heart in my recent conversation with Michael O’Brien on his podcast, Whole Again: A Fresh Approach to Mindfulness and Resilience through Kintsugi Wisdom. Michael draws deeply on the metaphor of the tradition of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken things with gold, so that the fracture becomes part of the beauty.

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I’ve written about this before in this space, just in a different way. And I appreciated the opportunity to pull the threads of this metaphor with MIchael, because there is such beauty possible in the wreckage of something we may have thought to be so perfect. It’s just not the beauty we expect.

I’ve shared this before, but it’s stark enough to bear repeating, to understand the severity of the breakage. The term “DEI” fell 98% across Fortune 100 communications between 2023 and 2025. Not scaled back. Near-erased. I know how much that hurts. I know because I’ve now been sitting with it for almost two years, alongside so many who invested decades of effort, resources and heart, only to watch the avenues for our care to be given dissolve.

The grief of that is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged before we move through it. As I wrote in The Shape of Change:

“Grief is a testament to the depth of our caring, the significance of what’s been lost.”

If you are grieving right now, that grief is not weakness. It is evidence of how much you meant it.

With a bit of time and distance from the original shock of this, we’re now holding so much truth to the light… and it’s doing its job to disinfect, at least for me. We know for example that the organizations that scrubbed the language fastest were the ones that always treated inclusion as compliance, a “have to,” not a “who we are.” When the wind shifted, those structures blew over. And what’s left standing tells us something important about what was actually built - what was sustainable. And what we may need to build differently, next.

In Kintsugi, the broken pieces of the pottery lie on the ground, shattered. Each has its own new beauty - a new shape, a piece of a puzzle yet to be assembled. The curiosity this can spark is where we live now - what could this look like? Am I meant to reassemble the shape as it was? Am I meant to leave the pieces on the ground and get to know them, differently? What could they be, re-assembed?

We invested in the vocabulary of inclusion and underinvested in the humans who were supposed to carry it. We built too many containers and not enough capacity.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has spent years documenting this pattern on how each advance toward a more equitable society has been followed by retraction, a reassertion of old power. After Reconstruction. After the New Deal. After the civil rights movement. The rollback we’re living through is not new. What is new is the speed. And what this speed is forcing us to confront is a question we maybe avoided when things felt more stable:

Perhaps the breakage of our work, our careers in some cases, and certainly our hearts is making room for something newly beautiful to emerge.

Perhaps all the DEI structures and frameworks felt like progress. But the deeper work was calling.

This is the shift that kept surfacing in my conversation with Michael: we are moving from a knowledge economy to a wisdom economy. And those are not the same thing. And the good news is, wisdom comes from the breakage, from things not working out the way we planned, predicted, forecast, and systematized. It comes from a different place.

Consider how now, knowledge can be stored, and pattern matched. An algorithm can summarize my life’s work in three seconds. The frameworks that filled workshop agendas and leadership decks are, in a very real sense, now commoditized. Not worthless. Commoditized.

Wisdom is different. Wisdom is your lived understanding, digested over decades. It’s your capacity to read a room and know what’s being felt beneath what’s being said. It’s what legal scholar Kenji Yoshino was pointing at when he wrote about “covering”, the performance of self-erasure people engage in just to belong. The intuition about whether you’re safe or not, and what would create more safety. Organizations have been covering too. And now that the language is under threat, what’s left is the honest answer to whether inclusion was ever a conviction on the part of institutions, or an exercise.

The leaders who are navigating this with their integrity intact are the ones who never outsourced their conviction to a framework. They knew why, not just how. And because they knew why, when the how became contested, they didn’t lose the thread. They deepened their roots. They prepared for the storm.

We’ve heard it a million times: inclusive teams make better decisions. If people cannot bring their whole selves to work, that is not a values problem, it is a risk. Awake leaders don’t need a framework to arrive at that. They pay careful attention to what actually happens in rooms where people feel safe, and rooms where they don’t.

That is wisdom. That is the new infrastructure.

And it lives in people, not in documents. And certainly not in the AI platforms we’re increasingly turning to.

So what does flying low look like right now, practically? I think it looks like this:

Stop leading with the architecture and start leading with yourself. Get honest about what you actually believe, separate from what you were trained to say.

We talk about imaginal cells, those specialized, dormant cells inside a caterpillar that carry the genetic blueprint for the adult butterfly. Find the imaginal cells, the people in your organization doing this work without permission, without fanfare, because they cannot do otherwise. They contain powerful ingredients for the changes ahead. We all do. And we don’t need a favorable political climate to find each other. The imaginal cells work together to create the next form, unimaginable by the caterpillar.

And this miraculous process takes time. We must give it time. As Mary Oliver wrote: “Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”

Flying low isn’t defeat. It’s discernment. It’s letting the voodoo of ambition sleep long enough to hear what you actually think. And then building from that — from the human, not the framework — so that the next thing you build doesn’t blow over the next time the wind shifts.

The Shape of Change was written for exactly this moment — not as a roadmap, but as a companion. → [Get The Shape of Change]

Ready to bring this conversation to your organization or leadership space → jennifer@jenniferbrownspeaks.com

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Going deeper:

• Michael O’Brien, Whole Again podcast — our full conversation on Kintsugi, flying low, and leading through dissolution

• Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American — the historical arc behind the current moment

• Kenji Yoshino, Covering — on the hidden cost of self-erasure at work

• Amy Edmondson on psychological safety — the research beneath the buzzword

Ninety-eight percent.

Not scaled back. Not reframed. Near-erased from public statements, annual reports, and brand messaging within two years.

And yet. On a Tuesday evening in late January, in the middle of one of the coldest weeks New York had seen all winter, a room filled. It was 14 degrees outside. Paul Maley, transitioning from interim CEO to his next chapter, joked about the freezing temperature on the stage. We laughed, but the subtext was clear: the “chill” wasn’t just outside.

Leaders from Deutsche Bank had gathered from both coasts – including members of the Black Leadership Forum and a coalition of employee resource groups, alongside a new CEO of the Americas, Lisa McGeough, who was, remarkably, on her very first day. They didn’t show up because an HR mandate told them to. They showed up because they wanted to figure out, together, how to lead when the map has been set on fire.

What followed was one of the most honest, tender, and necessary conversations I’ve had on a stage in twenty years of this work. This post is for the people who weren’t in that room. Because I think what surfaced there belongs to all of us right now.

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We Don’t Have the Map Anymore

In this room, I shared something I’ve been sitting with for a while:

I couldn’t write another how-to book. Not this time.

For twenty years, I taught organizations how to build inclusion. I gave “key takeaways”. I handed people frameworks. And then I watched the certainty that animated all of that start to dissolve, in the external environment, yes, but also inside myself.

The question that arrived in that dissolution was a clarifying one:

What is my unique value when knowledge has been commoditized?

If an algorithm can summarize my life’s work in three seconds, I have to ask: what’s left?

The Shape of Change is my attempt to write from that place. Not from expertise. From wisdom. From the hard-won knowing that comes from having been in this work when it was gaining altitude, and from sitting inside its dissolution now.

We Are Living in BANI Times

There is a concept I discovered, originated by futurist Jamais Cascio, that’s helped me name the sense I have of these times we’re in. It started as an intellectual framework. It has become something I feel in my body.

You may remember VUCA—Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Ambiguous. It came from military doctrine thirty years ago and was adopted widely by corporate leaders as a way to describe the increasingly chaotic environment. Well, we blew past it years ago.

Here is the new framework: BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible). The distance between VUCA and BANI isn’t a semantic upgrade, but a different altitude entirely.

• Brittle means things look strong until they break catastrophically.

• Anxious means the baseline has shifted: not situational stress, but structural unease that employees now carry into every meeting.

• Nonlinear means cause and effect no longer follow the logic we were trained to trust.

• Incomprehensible means some of what is happening right now simply cannot be fully understood.

I was recently reading about the birth of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1869. The Second Industrial Revolution was moving at a speed that, as one historian put it, “the human body simply wasn’t built to match.” To keep society from splintering, we started counting. We tracked hours and wages to try to see clearly and remain fair.

We are in a different collision now.

McKinsey estimates that today’s technology could automate approximately 57% of current U.S. work hours. Goldman Sachs has said plainly that “the big story in 2026 in labor will be AI.” Nearly 55,000 job cuts were directly attributed to AI in 2025 alone. Since early 2025, companies have been navigating executive orders and a shifting political landscape at a pace that leaves little room to breathe.

Counting is no longer enough to save us.

In the middle of all of it, real people. Real employees. Real leaders who are trying to figure out how to show up.

Which brings me to the question I asked from the stage that night at Deutsche Bank:

The leaders who will navigate this are not the ones with the best strategy decks. Remember, to quote one of my favorites from Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” They are the ones with the deepest wells of human wisdom—empathy, discernment, the ability to hold ambiguity without collapsing under its weight.

The Chrysalis: What I Actually Believe Is Happening

I want to offer you a different frame for this moment. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, its immune system attacks its own body. The old self is identified as foreign, so the new self can emerge. Scientists call this histolysis. Informally (and I love that biologists actually use this term), they call it “bug soup”.

The caterpillar doesn’t gradually become a butterfly. It dissolves. And if the caterpillar has a thought in that moment, I am almost certain it would think: all is lost.

I want to share the very important lesson, though that we think we can skip, about life: The form is lost. But the ingredients are still there. And the ingredients become something unimaginable to the former self.

Post-humanist philosopher and psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe, shares this way to think about our evolution:

I believe we are in the bug soup right now. The shape of the work, the momentum we built, the language we developed, the commitments that felt like permanent progress – that shape is dissolving. It’s not behaving as we expect it to.

I’ll be honest, my first instinct was to fight to keep the old shape. I had to sit in that and learn something (I’m still learning):

Defending the old form is not the same as becoming the new one. In fact, it prevents it, by taking up space in our imagination and in our hearts. This is not my work, now, to wish for the past to return.

The work now is urgent: to be deeply present to what wants to grow next.

It’s given me great comfort personally to remind myself that the ingredients don’t disappear in the soup. Thirty years of hard-won understanding about how humans change does not vanish because an acronym became politically contested. It is being reorganized.

We are being reorganized … inside. And what exactly are we being reorganized for? That’s when it gets interesting.

What the Rollback Is Actually Revealing

About 80% of DEI-related corporate changes happened within weeks of the January 2025 executive orders. When the wind shifted, the structures blew over. That tells us something important: those organizations had built inclusion as a compliance exercise, not a cultural one.

The companies that scrubbed their DEI language the fastest were the ones that treated inclusion as a compliance exercise. It was a “have to,” not a “who we are.”

In that room at Deutsche Bank, I said something that needs to be said more honestly: we made some strategic miscalculations. We moved fast and expected others to keep up. We invested heavily in bonding capital, finding our communities, and we underinvested in bridging capital: the harder, slower work of crossing between groups.

Our friend Kenji Yoshino puts it this way: bonding capital is what you use within your own community. Bridging capital is what you use to cross between groups. If we’re honest, we spent most of our energy bonding. We left too many conversations unheld with people who felt the ground shifting under them, too.

The Organizations That Are Staying

Not everyone ran. Lisa, the new CEO at Deutsche Bank Americas, knows from 37 years of experience that inclusive teams always make better decisions. To her, if people cannot bring their whole selves to work, that is not just a values problem. It is a risk. At the end of our fireside chat, she definitively stated:

“The only way we achieve the financial results we aspire to is if everyone is operating at their best.”

That reframe, from “the right thing to do” to “the smart thing to do”, is exactly what this moment requires. In a BANI world, the organizations that survive are the ones that can genuinely think better, adapt faster, and trust more deeply across differences. That’s not a DEI argument. That’s a competitive one.

What This Demands of Leaders: Stillness and Wisdom

Employee engagement is at historic lows. AI is introducing new layers of anxiety. Leaders are being asked to hold steady without a map. Which is why what Paul Malley said in our fireside chat hit home. He described himself as someone who is terrible at stillness—knowing this is a weakness, not a strength. My thought in response to this was:

Stillness doesn’t make us passive. It makes us permeable. We absorb more. Sense more. Reflect instead of react. We hear the voice beneath the noise.

In high-performing cultures, stillness feels like falling behind. But panicked decisions and strategies that shatter under pressure are the costs of a culture that mistakes motion for meaning.

And the stillness, the pause - the hallway that feels like a disorienting, liminal space - this is the place where, if we’re a little bit lucky, and pretty disciplined, we can begin to hear something deeper in ourselves. Something that, in the rush of more and more productivity and demands to do “more with less”, we can’t normally access.

As I mentioned, this concept of moving from a knowledge economy to a wisdom economy is critical to unpack. Knowledge can be stored and commoditized. AI can already summarize my books and produce training modules on demand. Knowledge is just the modern version of “counting.” It’s the data.

Wisdom is something else entirely. Wisdom is your lived experience, digested over time. It is your capacity for discernment; to perceive complexity and to read a room to know what is actually being felt beneath what is being said.

The question isn’t whether your experience is valuable. The question is:

What is the nature of your wisdom?

The Question I Ask Daily

Winter is not the end of the growing season. It is where the invisible work happens. What looks like a full stop in the external landscape of inclusion work is, I believe, the precursor to something more deeply rooted and resilient, something more creative and timely to meet the unfolding of this moment in time.

But only if we are willing to sit in the soup a little longer. To grieve what has ended, genuinely and honestly. To stop defending the old form. And to ask, with real curiosity:

What part of you, your work, or your identity is asking to dissolve? Not in defeat, but in trust?

The Shape of Change was written for exactly this moment. Not as a roadmap, but as a companion.

→ Get The Shape of Change

Bring this conversation to your organization. Conversations like the one at Deutsche Bank don’t happen by accident. If you’re ready to bring this work into your team or leadership summit, I’d love to explore that with you. → [info@jenniferbrownspeaks.com]

And one last thing: What is the nature of your wisdom right now? I mean that as a real question. Reply and tell me. I read every one.

But there’s a part of its story I can’t stop thinking about.

After a 2020 retrofit designed to make the bridge more resilient in high winds, something unexpected happened. The bridge started singing. The new railings were so precisely engineered that when wind hit them at the right angle, the entire structure hummed a low, haunting tone that carried for miles across the Bay.

The bridge wasn’t broken. It wasn’t unsafe. It was simply more sensitive than before. More responsive.

But that sound disrupted everything. Residents complained, so engineers redesigned the railings and silenced it.

Every time this story surfaces for me, it pulls me straight into the heart of what I write about in The Shape of Change: resonance and bridging.

Photo by Martha Bergmann on Unsplash

Resonance: When You Finally Hear Your Own Truth

Resonance happens when something aligns so deeply with who we are that it vibrates through our entire system. It’s the moment we hear our own truth. Sometimes it’s just a whisper, other times it’s unmistakable.

I see this constantly in my work: Someone says a sentence they didn’t plan. They name something they’ve been circling for years. And suddenly, the room shifts.

There’s clarity. Courage. A frequency that refuses to be ignored.

In most workplaces - and in most of our lives - that inner sound can feel inconvenient. Too much. Too honest. Too alive.

So we muffle it. We make ourselves easier to absorb. We take up a little less space.

Just like the bridge.

Bridging: Staying Connected Without Losing Yourself

Bridging is what comes after the truth inside us starts ringing.

It asks, “ How do we stay connected to others without abandoning ourselves? How do we move through change while honoring the parts of us that finally came alive? How do we build relationships and workplaces that can actually hold the sound of who we’re becoming?”

Bridging is to expand with intention and to stay grounded while reaching across.

When the Wind Hits Just Right

Maybe you’re in that season right now. Where something feels off, but not wrong. Where you’re catching glimpses of clarity or noticing a quiet hum of truth beginning to form.

Follow it.

It’s not a warning. It’s an invitation.

The Golden Gate Bridge only sang when conditions aligned perfectly. The wind had hit it in a way no one anticipated.

Our lives work like that too. Sometimes the wind catches us just right, and something inside starts to resonate.

But our work isn’t to silence it. Our work is to listen. To honor it. And then to build the bridges - the relationships, boundaries, practices, communities - that let our sound carry into the world.

Because when we do that, we transform ourselves and the systems around us.

And maybe we help the world become a little more ready for the sound we were always meant to make.

Questions to sit with:

Where in your life or work are you beginning to hear something true, even if it feels faint or inconvenient? What is that inner sound trying to tell you?

What parts of yourself have you learned to quiet or hold back in order to fit into a system, relationship, or role? What would it look like to let a little more of that truth come through?

Who are the people or communities where your full self feels welcomed, rather than managed or minimized? How might you deepen your connection with them?

When have you experienced a moment of unexpected clarity, a moment when things lined up and made sense? What conditions helped that clarity surface?

What bridge do you need to build right now that lets you stay connected to others while staying true to yourself? What is one step you can take this week to move toward that alignment?

The Shape of Change is now available for preorder! Head over to ShapeOfChangeBook.com to grab your copy!

Get in touch with me at info@jenniferbrownspeaks.com if you feel intrigued or motivated to explore this - and how your next move towards a bigger platform … a stage, a book, a product or offering … might begin to amplify you in a whole new way.

Our conversation reminded me how easy it is to forget that leadership is profoundly emotional work. We spend so much time optimizing (systems, strategies, technologies) and so little time strengthening the thing that makes all those systems work in the first place:

Our capacity to be human with one another.

When Empathy Becomes a Catalyst

Claude said something I’ve been carrying with me all week:

“Empathy creates speed.”

It’s counterintuitive, especially in organizations conditioned to treat feelings as inefficiencies. But empathy isn’t the slowdown. It’s the solvent. It clears out the fear, second-guessing, and self-protective silence that erode momentum.

When people don’t have to scan for psychological safety, they can redirect that energy toward creativity, contribution, and courage.

Empathy doesn’t make work easier. It makes it possible.

The Human Skills That Technology Can’t Touch

We talked about AI (of course!) but what struck me was Claude’s clarity:

We can automate process. We can’t automate presence.
We can replicate knowledge. We can’t replicate wisdom.

And yet, organizations still treat emotional skills as “nice-to-have” rather than as the architecture that allows everything else to stand.

At the World Business Forum, I noticed that the sessions on belonging, trust, and courage were standing-room only. The rooms focused solely on technology were half-full. Something in the collective psyche is shifting. Leaders are waking up to the truth that the most future-proof skills are not technical. They’re relational.

Claude put it simply: Be the thermostat, not the temperature.

In a chaotic world, emotional regulation is strategic.

The Archetypes We Evolve Through

Claude and I reflected on the archetypes we embody as change agents.

Early in my career, I felt like a firefighter sprinting into burning buildings, trying to rescue people who weren’t always ready to be rescued. Later, I became a Trojan horse. I was translating the language of inclusion for rooms that didn’t yet understand it.

But over time, I’ve come to see myself as more of a lighthouse: grounded, steady, casting light for those who are ready to find their way. And there are probably more archetypes on the way, as I embrace whatever transition I’m likely in, as we speak.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Claude shared that she began as a triage surgeon — stabilizing crises, tending to emotional emergencies. Now, her mantra is gentler, clearer, more sustainable:

“I’ve got you. And, you’ve got this.”

It’s a shift from carrying the work on our backs to holding the work with open hands. From rescuing to guiding. From urgency to presence.

Sustainability Is a Leadership Skill

We also talked honestly about burnout, and not the dramatic fall, but the quiet version that sneaks up on anyone who cares deeply.

Claude said she notices much sooner now when she’s getting “crispy.” She doesn’t wait for depletion to turn into disappearance.

This is a lesson I’ve had to learn too. Self-abandonment is not a leadership strategy.
Exhaustion is not a badge of honor. And martyrdom is not impact.

We cannot help people feel seen when we ourselves have gone invisible.

In a world that feels more brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible by the day, boundaries are lifelines. They keep us buoyant enough to lead with integrity.

To the Quiet Carriers of Culture

One of my favorite moments in our conversation was this:

Not every company can hire a Chief Heart Officer. But every company needs one. And some of you are already doing the job, you just don’t have the title yet.

I felt that land.
Because I know so many of you reading this are ….

The person people confide in.
The one who senses tension before others do.
The one who tracks the emotional weather of your team.
The one who holds the unseen responsibilities that make the visible work possible.

If no one has told you lately:

Your work matters. Your presence changes rooms.
Your courage creates conditions for other people to breathe.

And we need you in every industry, every function, every level of leadership.

Because no matter how advanced our tools become, the thing that will always move people…the thing that builds trust, belonging, and possibility, is the quiet, steady work of human connection.

That’s the work I will never stop believing in.

Did this resonate with you? If so, I’d love for you to explore the full conversation with Claude on LinkedIn or YouTube!

I’ve been sitting with the word legacy.

It’s one of those words that feels both too big and too far away, like something we only get to name in hindsight, after the dust has settled. But what if legacy is more intimate than that? What if it isn’t something we leave behind, but something we practice becoming?

Christopher shared a reflection from Dr. Tunde Okewale OBE about “outgrowing a room you once belonged to.” And I felt that in my bones. Because I’ve been in that room. The one that once felt like home.

The one whose walls you helped build, where your name might still echo but the air feels different now. Thinner, somehow.

You look around and realize that what once fit now feels too tight.
And here’s the truth: that isn’t failure. It’s growth.
And growth is uncomfortable as hell.

That’s the quiet, aching truth of leadership.

We are constantly asked to become someone our past selves could barely imagine. And yet, we dig our heels in. We hesitate because belonging feels safer than becoming, even when the belonging has gotten too small. We hesitate because we’ve been taught that loyalty means staying put. We hesitate because growth doesn’t send a formal invitation. Instead it just quietly opens a door and waits to see if we’re brave enough to walk through.

But here’s what I’m learning:

We can honor the rooms that built us without letting them define us. We can bless a space and still outgrow it.
We can hold gratitude for what was while stepping, scared and steady, toward what’s calling us forward.

That’s legacy.

Photo by kasia on Unsplash

Not the title. Not the building with your name on it or the policies that bear your fingerprints.

Legacy is the practice of evolving, even when people are watching. Especially when people are watching.

It’s the willingness to lead from the inside out, to stop performing and start belonging to yourself, and in doing so, to give others permission to do the same. Even if it means they eventually outgrow you, too.

The leaders who will shape what comes next aren’t the ones white-knuckling control. They’re the ones tending possibility. They’re not gatekeepers, they’re gardeners.

So maybe the question isn’t what legacy will I leave, but how am I living it, right now, in this moment?

What are you planting today? Curiosity? Compassion? The kind of courage that trembles but doesn’t turn back?

Are you tending the soil so others can take root and reach?

Belonging doesn’t end when you leave the room. It just shifts.

It becomes something you carry inside. A knowing that wherever you go, you’re bringing the lessons forward, planting something new, leaving the ground a little more fertile than you found it.

That’s the kind of leadership worth the work.

That’s the garden I want to tend.

Questions to Sit With

1. Where might you be holding onto a room you’ve outgrown?
   

2. What version of you needs to end so the next can begin?
   

3. How can you tend possibility, in yourself, your team, or your organization, right now?
   

4. What would it look like to lead your legacy, not just leave it?

“How is your heart today?”

That’s how I began my last reflection, and it feels right to begin this one the same way. Because this, too, is about the heart, the part of leadership we rarely name, the part that lives in the tension between what was and what’s next.

Fall is such a special season. It’s brilliant and bittersweet all at once. The light softens,…

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How is your heart today?

Fall is here. In nature, the season is dazzling and sobering at once. Leaves blaze with color before letting go, harvest is gathered, and soil begins its quiet work of repair.

What if leadership and our movements are the same?

Over the last few years, many of us have been holding on tightly to programs, roles, language, and even identities that once served us but may no longer serve us now. I’ve been reflecting on how much energy we spend trying to “doctor” what is fading, when the true work of fall is to compost.

Composting isn’t a failure. It’s a transformation. Everything that falls away becomes fuel for what’s next. And it takes trust. You can’t always see the nutrients forming, but you know they’re there.

For almost 20 years, I poured my heart into Jennifer Brown Consulting. It was a season of flourishing. Teams, clients, frameworks, impact. But like all seasons, it had its cycle. This year, I released that identity. I am no longer the CEO of JBC.

Letting go was painful. It was familiar, it was safe, it was who I was.

But clinging to it would have meant starving what wants to emerge now: Jennifer Brown. Still me, but something new. Something that feels different. My voice and a new way of walking alongside movements in this season.

This transition has felt very much like fall. The colors are vibrant, the harvest is real, but the leaves must still let go. What once was full of life returns to the soil to become nourishment for the next cycle. That’s how it feels to release JBC. Not a loss, but compost.

And I know many of you are experiencing something similar. Perhaps the events of this year have forced you to let go of cherished initiatives. Perhaps you’ve had to rethink your strategies, your budgets, or even your role in the movement.

Fall teaches us about harvest and release. It reminds us that both are necessary. Gather the fruits of your labor. Celebrate what you’ve built. Honor the people who contributed. But then, courageously let go of what’s complete.

Composting is an act of trust. You don’t immediately see the nutrients forming beneath the surface. The work of decomposition is slow and unseen. But you trust the process, because every gardener knows that yesterday’s leaves will become tomorrow’s soil.

Leadership is no different.

In movements and organizations, fall work is leadership work. Leaders who cling to what has run its course eventually exhaust themselves and the people around them. But leaders who compost make space for the new. They accept that the brilliance of one season was never meant to last forever. They understand that fall isn’t failure; it’s preparation.

The work of fall is courageous leadership: celebrating what was, grieving what’s done, and trusting that the letting go is not an ending, but the beginning of something richer.

A Micro-Commitment Challenge
This month, I invite you to reflect:
- What’s one accomplishment you need to pause and celebrate?

- What’s one project, habit, or tactic you can lovingly compost — trusting it has already given what it needed to give?

Share your reflections in the comments. I’d love to hear how you’re navigating your own “fall season.”

These cycles of emergence, abundance, release, and renewal are the heart of my new book, The Shape of Change. In it, I explore how leaders can honor each season, including fall, without rushing to the next. If these reflections resonate, you can learn more about the book

Remember: fall is not the end. It’s compost. It’s fuel. It’s the quiet work of transformation.

Movements don’t die in fall. They prepare for spring.

Later this week, I’ll be sharing more about what happens after the letting go, when the soil goes quiet, and leadership asks something different of us.

“Uncertainty is not a weakness. It’s wisdom in motion.” — Maggie Jackson

In today’s climate of sweeping change, ongoing disruption, and DEI backlash, I’ve been sitting with a particular question: What if the very thing we fear—uncertainty—is also our greatest teacher?

In a recent episode of The Will to Change, I had the opportunity to explore this with award-winning author Maggie Jackson, whose book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure makes a powerful case for rethinking everything we’ve been taught about not knowing.

Maggie argues (and I wholeheartedly agree) that we’ve been sold a myth: that certainty equals strength, and that great leaders always have the answers. But what if the opposite is true?

Uncertainty Is Not the Problem—Our Fear of It Is

As Maggie shared, uncertainty itself isn’t the issue. It’s our attitude toward it. Our resistance to not knowing can keep us rigid, reactive, and disconnected from innovation. Especially in DEI work, uncertainty is a constant companion:

• Do I belong here?

• What if I say the wrong thing?

• How will this conversation land?

When we avoid these liminal spaces, we stall progress. When we enter them bravely, we unlock transformation.

Strategic Uncertainty: A Skill, Not a Flaw

Maggie introduced the concept of strategic uncertainty. A skillful way to navigate ambiguity with intention. Leaders who can pause, reflect, and hold space for complexity are not indecisive—they’re adaptive experts. They’re more curious, collaborative, and ultimately more inclusive.

Research backs this: those who can tolerate and work with uncertainty outperform those who cling to premature certainty.

Photo by Red Zeppelin on Unsplash

The Case for “Maybe”: Language That Invites Inclusion

One surprising takeaway from our conversation was that “hedge words”—terms like maybe, I wonder, or it’s possible—don’t weaken leadership. In fact, research shows they enhance psychological safety. Leaders who use them are seen as more approachable, open to feedback, and better collaborators.

But here’s where I want to add something personal. Something I’ve reflected on deeply since the interview….

A Thought I Keep Returning To…

Whether or not I mentioned it in the conversation with Maggie (and I truly can’t remember if I did!), I’ve been turning over a critical tension: for women and members of underrepresented communities, uncertainty doesn’t always land as a strength. “Maybe” language, expressing doubt, or admitting we don’t know, can be read not as openness, but as incompetence.

We’ve all felt it. We know we have to show up 150% just to be invited to the table. We anticipate being underestimated. We carry the invisible labor of constant self-editing and over-preparing to preempt bias. It's not imagined—it's the cost of leadership for too many of us. And it’s a double standard that tracks tightly along gender, race, and power lines.

So What’s the Advice?

This is where it gets complex. Yes, we need to shift the collective narrative around uncertainty. We must normalize and celebrate not-knowing as part of learning, growth, and inclusive leadership.

But at the same time, we need to hold space for the uneven terrain. If you're navigating a workplace or culture that penalizes vulnerability in marginalized bodies, you may need to be strategic in how you communicate uncertainty. That might mean:

• Naming your inquiry as strength: “I’m exploring a few promising possibilities.”

• Framing ambiguity as care: “I want to make the best decision, and that requires hearing more voices.”

• Using ‘maybe’ with purpose: “This is evolving, and I want to stay responsive rather than reactive.”

And for those in positions of power: modeling uncertainty and explicitly valuing it when others show it creates the conditions for equity. Don’t just tell your team it’s okay to say “I don’t know”—show them by doing it yourself.

What new space are you trying to break into? And more importantly, are you ready to pay your dues to play the long game?

From the Stage to the Boardroom: What Singing Taught Me About Uncertainty

This conversation also brought me back to a place that shaped my relationship with uncertainty long before I was a DEI practitioner: the stage.

As a trained performer and singer, I know what it feels like to be suspended in the present moment—fully alive, deeply connected, and without a script. Every performance holds the possibility of magic and of imperfection. And you cannot control how it lands. You just show up, vulnerable and awake.

That presence is a muscle I continue to build—not just on stages, but in boardrooms, with clients, and in conversations like this one. It’s the same lesson Maggie draws from her daily open-water swims: there is no certainty, only practice. Only presence. Only choosing to return again and again to the now.

Uncertainty as a Path to Belonging

Ultimately, the inclusive leader is not the one with all the answers, but the one who creates space for others to help shape them.

When a leader says, “I’m still learning. What do you think?” they’re doing something powerful: building trust through honesty. And as Maggie beautifully put it, “Uncertainty is a form of honesty—an admission of the world’s dynamism.”

That honesty builds bridges. It fosters belonging, even in the absence of certainty. And perhaps that’s the most radical thing we can do right now… not pretend we know, but model how to move forward together, even when we don’t.

She had recently spoken at a women’s industry event in the Midwest. Her talk included a timeline of key milestones for women’s rights in the U.S., and she noted, with pride, that women gained the right to vote in 1920.

But after the event, she realized something: she hadn’t said white women. She hadn’t even known, until recently, that Black women were largely disenfranchised until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It wasn’t just an oversight. It was a revelation and a reminder that silence is never neutral.

The Wake-Up Moment

This moment of waking up, stumbling, and regrouping is familiar to many of us. Especially those of us who hold identities that often go unexamined: White. Cisgender. Able-bodied. Straight.

We’re taught to lead with universals. But real inclusion requires us to name the particulars.

She told me how, during her talk, a woman asked how the challenges she was describing applied to women of color. Her answer, while well-meaning, was defensive:

“We only had time to focus on gender.”

Afterward, she knew that wasn’t enough.

What Inclusive Leaders Do Differently

Here’s what I told her and what I remind myself every day:

If you have the mic, you have a responsibility. Not to be perfect. Not to speak for everyone. But to create space. To name what’s missing. To make visible what’s been invisibilized.

And to speak not just about women, but about which women.

We do a disservice when we pretend gender is a singular experience. The realities faced by Black and Brown women, by LGBTQ+ women, by disabled women, by immigrant women, these aren’t footnotes to the gender equity conversation. They’re central to it.

When I speak to largely white, largely cisgender audiences—especially in industries like finance or tech—I make it explicit:

“We’re not all in the same boat. We’re in the same storm, yes—but our vessels vary widely, based on race, class, sexual orientation, disability, and more.”

“When we talk about challenges for women, we have to be clear: not all women experience the workplace the same way. Black and Latina women face the steepest drop-offs in promotion. LGBTQ+ women are more likely to code-switch or stay closeted. Women with disabilities navigate environments not built with their needs in mind. These are not sidebars. These are the realities we must center.”

“I’m a white, cisgender, queer woman. I benefit from white privilege. I face different risks and decisions because of my LGBTQ+ identity. I haven’t lived the experience of being a woman of color, or being disabled, or being a trans woman. But I listen. I study. I lift up the data. And I work to ensure those experiences are not left out.”

Photo by Nathália Arantes on Unsplash

Why Language Matters

That’s what being an inclusive leader sounds like.

It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about asking better questions. Preparing ourselves to speak not just from our own experience, but with awareness of who’s not in the room—and what it costs them to be there when they are.

When we don’t name the barriers faced by others, we reinforce them. When we don’t call out the missing narratives, we risk replicating them. And when we don’t take the time to learn, we abdicate our role as allies.

So yes, include the statistics about pay gaps—and disaggregate them by race and gender identity. Yes, reflect on the first time you realized not all women felt safe at the Women’s March. Yes, acknowledge that LGBTQ+ women, especially trans women, still face erasure even in conversations about “diversity.”

And don’t forget: you don’t have to represent every experience to be a bridge. But you do need to show that you know the bridge exists—and that you’re committed to building it wider, stronger, and with humility.

Because we’re not just trying to make the workplace better for women who look like us. We’re trying to make it better for all of us.

That starts with what we choose to say. And what we refuse to leave unsaid.

Are you ready?

The question I'm getting asked most often these days: "How do I move into a new space and build my visibility there?" Here's the strategy that built my platform over 20 years... and yes, it involves some calculated risk-taking.

When someone asks me how I built broad awareness of my work across multiple industries, I tell them it wasn't magic. It was strategic hustle, wrapped in genuine generosity.

For years, I followed a specific playbook for entering new spaces and establishing credibility. It's not glamorous, it often means paying my own way, and it requires stepping out on a limb before you're 100% ready. But it works.

The Foundation: Multiple Angles of Attack

When I want to break into a new industry or association, I never submit just one proposal. I study their ecosystem like I'm writing a research paper:

• Who spoke last year? What were their credentials versus their actual message?

• What's the stated mission versus what's actually happening on stage?

• Who are the corporate sponsors, and are they in the audience?

• What conversations are missing from their programming?

Then I craft 3-4 different ways I could serve that audience. Not because I want to overwhelm them, but because I want to increase my odds of them saying "yes" to something.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Free Speaking

Here's what most people won't tell you: I paid my own way to speak for free for years. I demanded registration lists. I passed around cups for business cards. I literally hustled in hallways.

Yes, it's frustrating when organizations preach empowerment but don't pay speakers. But visibility beats no visibility. The key is making it worth your while through strategic pre, during, and post-conference activities.

The Real Strategy: Becoming the Connector

The most successful move I learned was positioning myself not just as a speaker, but as someone who could bring other valuable people to the stage. I'd propose panels and fireside chats, offering to "design the conversation" and moderate.

Conference organizers love this because you're solving their puzzle for them. You're not just asking for stage time. You're making their job easier while positioning yourself as someone with a valuable network.

The Long Game

Building visibility in a new space isn't about one perfect keynote. It's about becoming someone people in that industry recognize and remember. It's about having your elevator pitch ready for hallway conversations. It's about following up relentlessly but authentically.

Most importantly, it's about understanding that you're not just building awareness for today's offering. You're building the foundation for opportunities you can't even see yet.

The Leap of Faith Moment

There comes a point in every expansion where you have to step out before you're completely ready. You submit the proposal for the panel before you've confirmed every participant. You position yourself as an authority on something you're still learning about.

This isn't about being inauthentic—it's about believing in your ability to rise to the occasion and deliver value, even when you're operating at the edge of your current expertise.

The details of how to research associations, craft multiple submissions, and leverage AI for proposal writing? That's where the real tactical work begins. But first, you have to be willing to take that calculated leap.

What new space are you trying to break into? And more importantly, are you ready to pay your dues to play the long game?

Having diverse representation is just the first step. Creating an environment where all voices are truly heard and valued? That's where the real work begins.

The Confidence Gap at the Top

Here's what I feel really gets to the heart of the issue:

The data backs this up. While 34.4% of S&P 500 directors are women, only 10.6% of board chairs are women. When you're already in the minority, and the power structure above you doesn't reflect your identity, it creates psychological barriers that go beyond individual confidence. It's about navigating systems that weren't designed with you in mind.

The Newer Director Dilemma

I've seen this pattern repeatedly: newer directors, especially those from underrepresented groups, often hold back because "they don't want to be known as the one that's going to come in hot and police the group."

This hesitation isn't about capability. It's about reading the room and anticipating that being "the difficult one" could have career implications, particularly when you're already standing out due to your own diversity of identity.

Leadership Sets the Tone

The solution isn't just about individual courage. It's about systemic change from the top.

This means board chairs and lead directors need to actively create space for dissenting views, not just passively allow them. It's the difference between tolerance and true inclusion.

The Accountability Question

But here's what really keeps me up at night:

Boards are responsible for overseeing organizations that need healthy, inclusive cultures. But if the board itself struggles with inclusion, how can they effectively govern companies on these critical issues?

What Boards Can Do Right Now

1. Add an inclusion lens to evaluations. Ask the hard questions: Are dissenting views welcomed? Are we tapping all directors' insights? What's our actual dynamic beyond the surface?

2. Rotate leadership positions. This isn't just about fairness. It's about "challenging the way the board interacts" and breaking up entrenched power dynamics.

3. Create psychological safety intentionally. This doesn't happen by accident. It requires deliberate action from leadership to ensure every voice is heard and valued.

The Bigger Picture

Boards have enormous responsibility, not just for financial performance, but for setting the tone for organizational culture. When boards model inclusive decision-making, it ripples throughout the entire organization.

The goal isn't just diverse representation (though that's important). It's creating environments where that diversity translates into better decision-making, more innovative thinking, and stronger governance.

Because at the end of the day, if we can't get inclusion right in the boardroom, how can we expect to get it right anywhere else?

What's your experience with boardroom dynamics? Have you observed similar patterns in your organization? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Source material from the FT - June 2025

Lindsay Frost article from Agenda.

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View this full article below on their website.
Some Directors Feel Stifled in the Boardroom

In Part 1, I shared some of my power origin story: how perfectionism, people-pleasing, and protection shaped me into someone both strategic and exhausted.

Now, I want to speak to what’s emerging on the other side of that story. A movement I can only describe as the slow laying down of the sword.

Coming Out Wasn’t Just About Love

When I came out, it wasn’t just about sexual liberation (though that mattered deeply). It was a much broader defiance of someone else’s worldview.
A breaking of the inherited scripts.
A declaration:

I will live my truth.

Loving a woman cracked something open in me—a deeper sovereignty, a different kind of agency. It wasn’t about rebellion anymore. It was about alignment.
And yet… even in that new space, I carried the old fight.

Because let’s be honest:
Even queer liberation movements are soaked in battle-readiness.
Even self-authored lives carry the muscle memory of having to defend that self, again and again.

The Grief of Always Fighting

There is a particular grief that comes with realizing:

I have organized my life around adversaries for far too long.

The scarcity of power became a source of pride. It made me resilient. Gritty. Capable.
But it also made me suspicious, rigid, unable to soften—even when I wanted to.
I’ve built a beautiful life. But sometimes it still runs on the fumes of survival. And I don’t want that anymore.

What If Power Doesn’t Require a Fight?

There’s a quieter truth rising in me now:

I no longer want to fight just because I can.
I no longer want to teach from vigilance.
I want to teach from trust. From resonance. From presence.

Not because the world is suddenly safe. It’s not.
But because I am ready to anchor into a different rhythm.

To explore what it means to be powerful without an adversary.
To love without bracing.
To lead without armor.
To be without proving.

I’m not there yet. But I’m turning toward it.
And it feels like relief.

An Invitation (and a question)

This journey began in a course on power with a dear friend. But it’s really part of a much larger turning, one I think many of us are feeling.

So I’ll end with this:

• Where do you feel tired of fighting?

• What might your power feel like if it didn’t have to react anymore?

• What becomes possible when we trust that we are already enough?

Thanks for walking with me through this edge.

With all my heart,
Jennifer