She later paraphrased that line to further inspire the heart of freedom in all of us:

Until All Are Free, None Are Free

Lazarus carried this call throughout her activism, which was later adopted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wove her message into many of his powerful speeches.

The heart of freedom has been eloquently expressed for centuries, and yet depending on what your algorithm shows you and what information and perspectives you consume, you may have moments when you feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and discouraged by the daunting task of securing freedom for all. It’s understandable if you forget, momentarily, that you were born for this time.

Whether we recognize it or not, we each have everything we need inside us, right at this moment.

I do not for a minute mean to imply that this work for freedom is easy. You’re facing tremendous challenges, I know. The economics are real. There are constant anxiety-provoking threats assaulting our feeds 24/7. Uncertainty is being normalized, but our nervous systems didn’t get to vote on that and they’re not on board. The systems we assumed we could rely on for basic care are being dismantled. It’s a lot, I know.

And yet: we have everything we need inside us, right at this moment. I’m not talking about you as an individual resolving global-level inequities or injustices. But we can increase freedom in our immediate environments and communities, and we can do that right now.

As Within, So Without

The Egyptian god of secret wisdom, Hermes Trismegistus, is credited with the saying “As within, so without,” which is one of the seven Hermetic Principles contained in the Law of Correspondence. It succinctly states the universal law of cause and effect. If you think of this universal law as a prism, you’ll find its wisdom repeated throughout historical writings, each appearing as a different lens into that sagely perspective: As above, so below; as the universe, so the soul; even Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying, most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be can be viewed as an aspect of that principle.

It is the law of mirroring, the principle that what we believe internally reflects in our external world.

I first ran into this concept in my early twenties when I racked up stacks and stacks of parking tickets throughout the Washington, DC metro area. I think I owed at least seven local governments years of parking violation fees. I felt the tickets were annoying at best, and completely unfair and unjust at worst. So instead of paying them, I stacked them up, taped them together to make coasters, and cut my cocaine on them. Needless to say, my car became booted, towed, and impounded multiple times as a result of my failure to comply with the law. Of course that complicated my transportation to and from work and exponentially increased emergent, unplanned spending to get my car back. Over and over. Outraged, I felt targeted.

By the time I got sober in my mid-twenties, I was still reaping the consequences of my past actions and inactions. One day I stopped by a bookstore and found a book: To Know Your Self: Essential Teachings of Swami Satchidananda. It was my first exposure to the idea of as within, so without. Realizing that most likely my car would continue to be towed or impounded every time I parked it, I paused the righteous anger that automatically rose in my chest and considered how I was truly feeling – about anything and everything. Above all, I felt victimized. In the back of my mind, I felt that life truly was unfair; that nothing would work out for me, no matter what I did. I felt like a failure. But the words of Swami Satchidananda guided me to an understanding that my feelings reflected what I believed was true for me. And if that was simply a belief, then I could change my mind.

As an experiment, I committed to paying attention to what I consumed in all forms for the next year. Beyond my daily food diet, I would also consider what came into my awareness from all my senses: what I heard, what I saw, what I touched, what I smelled. I would intentionally choose something “positive” over something “negative,” just for a year, and see what happened. I was a big Stephen King fan (still am), and in 1986 when I began this thought experiment, his novel It was on every book shelf. Grudgingly I put off reading it until my experiment was done. Off went the news. When friends or family complained to me, I changed the subject. I sought out healthier ways to settle my jacked-up nervous system: getting massages, spending time in nature.

Over time, my capacity to handle uncomfortable situations increased. I began the long, hard work of cleaning up the wreckage of my past, starting by calling each parking jurisdiction and making payment arrangements to settle owed fees.

And life seemed to “magically” work out. I realized my car was no longer in jeopardy; it had been months since I’d had to contend with an impoundment. I could park with assurance that my car would be right where I’d left it, sans boot, when I returned from my outings. I could reliably drive to work without having to figure out public transportation at the last minute. With my transportation issue becoming more reliable, I began experiencing more ease in my daily life. It was all in the form of small things, things most people take for granted, but the cumulative effect was in the ways my nervous system began to settle. Anxiety decreased, and I started to believe that things just might work out for me in ways I could not have foreseen.

A small experiment and a huge mind shift. My first conscious awareness about how my thoughts reflect not only my inner state, but what I think I’m allowed to experience in this life.

The more I change my mind, the more options and experiences open for me.

Which brings me back to this concept of freedom for all.

OK, So What Can I Do?

As an individual, no matter how much I might want to solve global oppression, I simply don’t have the power to solve the enormity of the challenges facing us. However, applying this law of mirroring, I can increase a sense of freedom in myself, which will then increase freedom in my environment and community.

I learned that how I treat myself directly affects how I treat others. My insides are visible on the outside. So notice, the next time you hear someone speaking harshly to a server in a restaurant. You can be assured that they are exponentially harsher to themselves in their inner dialog.

If you’re curious about exploring how this shows up in your life, you can try the following exercise. The only rule here is that this must be undertaken without judgment. Let curiosity be your guide. The goal is to step back without judgment and witness what’s within.

The Journal Prompts

Begin by asking yourself any number of opening questions. Write them out, by hand, and stay with the journaling until it’s done. Feel free to spend multiple sessions on these questions. Return to them from time to time, and see how the questions change, as well as what reveals itself to you in your answers.

• Where do I hold myself back?

• Where do I withhold permission from myself and from others?

• Who do I believe deserves to be free? From what?

• Do I think freedom is inherent to us as human beings, or is it something we must earn?

Allowing the time for this kind of introspection may be new to you. It might challenge your comfort zone, and may even feel like you’re falling off a ledge into unknown landscapes. But if you stay with this, you may find yourself flying to new heights of awareness, new perspectives, and new opportunities to see the multitude of freedoms available to you each and every day.

What’s Next

If you stay curious with this line of inquiry long enough, more questions and connections will arise. Your expanded awareness of how you experience and allow freedom for yourself and for those around you impact your world. For example, you may find that you feel distress or annoyance or aggravation when a family member feels frustrated over circumstances they’re in. Say they continuously lose their keys, and it drives them (and those around them!) a little nuts when they’re trying to get out the door on time. Your expanded awareness of freedom might connect at a deeper level with your experience of their distress. You may find yourself wanting to jump in with suggestions, an unsolicited solution (Have you tried putting an Air tag on your key ring? Do you have a place where you put your keys each night?). You may realize that your motivation for that response is to resolve the uncomfortable feeling in you, under the guise of “being helpful.”

Your expanded awareness of freedom may then bring a few questions to mind, such as:

Do I allow myself the freedom of feeling my feelings without trying to change them?

Do I allow others the freedom of experiencing their own circumstances without trying to solve it for them?

Letting a new sense of freedom guide you will increase your inner clarity, your capacity to experience reality without the desire to change circumstances or outcomes, and your compassion for your own human experience, along with others’ experiences. And this can reduce your mental load, soften your spirit, and allow you to move through the world with a lighter, freer touch.

Of course, this can be deep inner work, and so many of us are juggling kids’ schedules, our partner’s needs, work, finances, home management, all sorts of daily demands. None of us needs to do this work alone. We can call in allies, advisors, mentors, to walk alongside us on this journey. If you find yourself curious about what this type of support could look like, leave a comment or drop me a note.

What does freedom look like to you? Where are you free in your life?

Using The Rooted Woman deck in early July, The Bog appeared more than once, which matched my body’s desire for stillness, contemplation, and slow, intentional introspection.

I’ve always considered stagnation to be a “bad thing.” No one wants to feel like they’re stagnating! But the card’s write-up in the guidebook offered a new perspective. If you’re motionless long enough in a bog, it will reveal to you its subtle beauty; soft, muted colors and shapes and textures. You can reach down into the rich peat and find one or two things that have been preserved, seemingly waiting for your arrival, for your hands to reach into its treasures, for a slow examination of what’s found.

July emptied me out and left me with silence. And in that quiet space I found a deep richness of emotion, buried so deep I didn’t know it was there until I paused activity and drive and busy-ness. In that quiet space I met Anger, the fierce guardian to the entrance of a deeper place inside me. Often I stay with Anger, get swept up in her power, the power of righteousness, fueling the call for Justice. I see a lot of people staying with Anger, too, in the news and social media stories. It’s a familiar place, and in some ways strangely comforting. It feels good to be on what we think is the “right” side of Justice, and to forcefully call out for Justice. It’s a pattern the collective has followed for years and years and years.

But curiosity invited me to move past Anger and explore what was beyond her edges. In that deeper space I met Sadness, draped in swirling deep indigo scarves. I could have remained there, and I did stop there for a while. Sadness is a little uncomfortable for me. It feels quiet but has its own force, like a river current. I kept wanting to move, move away from her but she invited me to stay, sit alongside her river’s bank, and let her waters rise up in me, up my chest, up into my throat until she spilled out of my eyes. I haven’t cried like this in a long time, and I can’t pretend to know what the tears were about. They felt old, ancient even, and they cleansed me when I let them just be.

After the waters receded, I went further in, deeper down into myself, into the place I never really go. It’s a place inside I’ve been afraid to enter. Scared to look at it, scared at what I might find, scared I’ll get lost in it, and scared I won’t be able to find my way back. Scared that the act of sitting with it will make it real.

That place inside of me was the domain of Grief. Grief for all that’s been lost over the years, times when I grew up too fast, my simple childhood roaming tossed aside. Parts of me that were overpowered, where I lost agency, choice. Dreams unanswered, the juiciness of desire left outside my door, drying to dust in the hot sun. Anticipatory grief about people I know I’ll lose no matter what I do to prepare or avoid thinking about it or even if I savor every moment with them. Grief even over things I knew I wanted, intentional choices I made for my highest good; it’s astonishing how quickly I move to solve without understanding that even good choices must allow for grief to be seen and felt as I move from one thing to the next. Sometimes Grief rides shotgun to Joy. A small acknowledgement, a nod, is often all that’s needed to let her move on. And yet I refused to give even that.

So I found Grief to be patient, timeless. She sits and waits quietly for me to finally arrive and see her in her fullness. Now that I’ve spent time with her, I know she’s important. Necessary. Healing. Honorable. A master.

Sitting in this space with her, my breathing slows and gets deeper. I’m breathing into my core, down deep into my womb, deeper even into the soles of my feet, connecting with the earth beneath me. The stillness feels glorious, luxurious, sweet, so restful. It’s here that I can truly let go and feel what’s real.

July left me with these simple gifts. August opened with Lughnasadh and Lammas, with stormy heat, an incoming eclipse season, a promise of movement, and my increased capacity for stillness in the face of continuous and rapidly increasing change.

A quick note before this week’s essay: A lot of you just arrived from my Squarespace list, and I'm so glad you’re here. Sober Badassery is my space for inner work — presence, honesty, integration — and how it becomes the foundation from which we lead our own lives. Make yourself at home. (Not your thing? The unsubscribe link is right there at the bottom. No hard feelings, only gratitude for the time you spent taking a look.)

My friend’s granddaughter reached out this afternoon for career advice, and I was so delighted to give it. She is a year out of school, a master’s degree in hand, working in a local restaurant. She opened the way a lot of smart, scared young people open.

“I know you worked at Salesforce,” she said, “and I wanted to know how to build a network so my applications aren’t just rejected outright.”

She led with a credential of mine, and a tactic she wanted from it. She had a problem, her applications rejected outright, and she had already skipped past the problem to finding a solution. So naturally I didn’t begin with “solving.”

I asked her instead, “What do you love to do? What’s important to you?”

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“Community,” she said. “Building community.” And then she was off again, listing the places she’d already applied to and a few other doors she’d knocked on, focused on solving.

I stopped her. You’re already trying to fix what you think is the problem, I said, without taking the time to really explore what’s here. Let’s slow down and find out what you actually love first.

She’s not alone in this experience, and her approach isn’t limited to someone who’s starting out in their lives. This is so common! When we’re afraid, we begin trying to solve before we know exactly what we’re solving for. We reach for solving tactics because the tactic feels like motion, and motion feels like safety. Solving before you know what you’re solving for just creates activity, business, a sense of forward progress. But truly, without taking the time to understand what you really want to accomplish, you run the risk of creating extra steps without a clear destination. A lot of energy without a clear target.

You have to know what you’re advocating for before you can advocate for anything at all.

So she slowed down. And when she slowed down, here is what came out of her:

Building bridges to help people succeed, especially in higher education. Connecting students to things that made them feel part of the school. Helping people navigate a whole system so they’d actually make it through. Giving people the support they need.

That is not a list of jobs. That is a gift, fully formed, that she has been carrying the entire time.

Where do you feel that?

I asked her another question. “When you think of a time you built that bridge for someone, and it worked, it really helped them, where in your body do you feel it?”

“Huh,” she said. “I never thought of that.” A pause. “It’s in my chest.”

Yes. That’s it exactly, that’s your body’s inner knowing connecting with you.

Your body knows before your mind does. That feeling is the real work, the most accurate instrument you own. It’s your discernment, the thing that tells you what to walk toward and what to pass on by. Many people spend years building a career in the wrong direction because they never once stopped to feel into their own body what was warm; instead, they opted for what “makes sense” or what they’re “supposed to do.” So feel into it, I told her. Practice finding that feeling; notice when it comes up. The more you can access that signal on purpose, the more accurate your read will be on every decision.

She didn’t have to invent a unique thing to offer. She already has it. The work that benefitted her most in our conversation was about clearing away her panic long enough to take note of what was already true. The gift she found wasn’t earned and it wasn’t manufactured. It was uncovered.

When your brain freaks out

Now, I told her, your brain might freak out. (Yours might too, reading this.) The pressure to launch is real. Independence, your own place, rent, health insurance, some purchasing power of your own. Those things are real, and they are honest motivators. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I’m not speaking from a cushion. I have been twenty-three and broke and melting down with anxiety and comparison poison. I know exactly what that brain sounds like, how it keeps you up at night.

So let’s talk about our brains. Its only job is to keep us alive. That’s it. Which means when the stakes feel high, it will steer us toward the safest, lowest-risk, most familiar thing it can find, and it will present that fear as common sense. And when it does, it’s critical to ground ourselves in the here and now. Ask the real questions:

• Where am I right now?

• Am I safe?

• Do I have a place to sleep tonight?

• Do I have food?

If the answers are yes, breathe. Give yourself a moment.

And if the answers aren’t yes, if the fear is pointing at something real and urgent and imminent, that’s different, and that must come first, and there is no shame in it. But most of the time the survival brain is screaming about a future that hasn’t arrived while the present is, in fact, fine. That gap is where panic lives. The way out is not to win the argument with your fear or overpower it. It’s to fully come back to the moment you’re standing in, right now.

And remember, I told her, you are not the first person to stand in this spot. Millions are standing here with you right now. People have stood here in every generation before yours, each one convinced its own threshold was the worst one, and yet they found their way through in spite of it all. The way through has always been roughly the same. You’re in good and ancient company.

Use both sides of your brain, and in the right order

So use both parts of your brain, the right and the left sides, I suggested. Let your right brain play with imagination and curiosity. Let your left brain advocate for you and your needs. The body sets the direction; the mind carries it out. The common mistake most of us make at one time or another is leading with the strategist before we’ve heard from the source. The analytical mind is a brilliant servant and a terrible master. Put it second, on purpose, and watch how much better it works when it’s working in service to the source.

Then, and only then, deploy the tactics. I said, “Find two or three people leading in the fields your inner knowing pointed you toward: higher education, community, maybe technology. Get to know them, genuinely. Engage with their content on social media; follow their posts, read their articles, find out what they’re interested in. Comment and ask real questions. And then shoot your shot: invite them into a conversation.”

“Look for the places you can be of service. Find the industry organizations and the alumni groups in the worlds you actually want to work in. If it’s higher education, for example, then there is an association, there is a network, there is a door.”

And here is a potent question that opens more doors. Before ending any conversation, ask: Who comes to mind that you think I should talk to?

That’s it. That’s how a network grows; not by cold transactions, not by extraction, but from interest and curiosity about the other person. It comes from an intention of building a genuine connection. The strongest networks are generative, built from respect and a real wish to be useful. Scattershot applications get you rejected fast. Curiosity, offered to one real person at a time, compounds slowly. Slow is the strategy.

Build small bridges, starting with yourself

I want to leave her, and you, with the thing I noticed in our wonderful conversation.

Her gift is building bridges so other people find their way to success. That’s what lit her up, what she felt in her chest. That’s what she’s here to do.

So, I recommended, build a small bridge for yourself. Advocate for your own needs the way you’d advocate for a student who couldn’t yet see the path. Offer yourself the exact thing you were put here to offer everyone else. Trust the process you already trust in service to other people.

Joy was never on the far side of getting a better job. It was in her the whole time, waiting under the noise. It usually is.

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Lisha Mae Skeldon’s story struck her and she offered a reading of it late last week. Written by Lisha’s mother, it tells the story of a young woman who, at age 28, lost her life.

But that’s not her whole story.

Lisha’s mom was quick to introduce her as a daughter, sister, niece, aunt, and mother of three beautiful, strong children who did, in fact, lose her life to addiction. She goes on to tell us that

“Lisa was a beautiful, loud, often in trouble, but very smart woman … she lived life by her own set of rules and live it is what she did to the max … and was fluent in that dirty old sailor language … her favorite color was pink and she loved anything with rainbow … If you were to ask those who knew her I’m sure they’d describe Lisha in various ways … while some would claim she was intimidating crazy sneaky selfish or even a thief, at her core Lisha was smart-witted, sharp tongued, kind, beautiful, funny, generous, and loyal, all characteristics that define a true wild child.”

She goes on to remind us all that “addiction isn’t a word that should forever define or encapsulate Lisha.”

It’s been awhile since I’ve written directly about addiction, and this post reminded me about my story, the story of others, the stories we tell ourselves about the people around us and even about those closest to us.

I’m reminded of Cindy, the first woman who asked me to guide her through early recovery while I barely had two years of sobriety and clean time. Cindy was beautiful, just a few years older than me. She’d been struggling with relationships and relapse for years and years. She’d cycled through most of the women in the program where I was living at the time, all of whom warned me she was “a lost cause.” She’d start off strong, they’d say. Then she’d meet a man. A hopeless romantic, she would delight and then lose herself in that relationship before she’d had time to build a solid recovery foundation for herself. And you can just guess what happened next. She’d return to the rooms a few months later, a little more beaten down, carrying a heavier load of shame, visible by her slumped shoulders and lowered eyes.

Worried that I barely had what I would consider any kind of quality sobriety, I remembered what I was told when I first got clean: Find someone who has something you want. And then always, always give it away. So I agreed to meet with her and give her the best I could.

As certain as the next daybreak, Cindy met a man in the rooms. Dove straight in with her whole heart and fell in love. I could tell she was nervous about asking me if this would be “OK;” after all, she couldn’t deny her history.

I knew it wasn’t my job to tell her what to do; all I could do was pass on the wisdom and knowledge that had been passed to me. So I remember telling her, “You know, it’s your life. Just don’t pick up any drugs that aren’t medically prescribed, and don’t drink, and take it one day at a time.”

She and that man continued seeing each other, deepening their relationship with each other and their own sobriety. And a year later they were married and welcomed their new baby girl into the world as sober parents–right on the heels of a breast cancer diagnosis Cindy received during her pregnancy, which took her life a year later.

In the time I knew her, Cindy created the fullest life that she wanted for herself. She fell in love, got married, and even experienced motherhood with a beautiful child. She was an addict, for sure, but also a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend, and a beautifully joyful woman in recovery.

I’m reminded of a saying I picked up in Al-Anon: “As long as someone’s still breathing, there’s still hope.” I’ve taken that saying to heart and have also added my own twist to it, which is As long as I’m still breathing, I can make a different choice.

Both of these women’s stories remind me that none of us truly know, really, anything much. I don’t know what other people are carrying. I don’t know the depths of someone unless they chose to share that with me. I barely even know the depths of myself most days. But I do know people are more than the stories I tell myself for convenience, for shortcuts, or I’m too tired, or too scared to challenge the confines of my own assumptions, or because simply that’s just what I think and I’m rigidly committed to my own version of truth.

It’s been decades since I was granted grace from an alcoholic and drug-addicted bottom, and yet that young wild child is within me still. I feel her some days when life feels uncertain, scary; those big emotions rise up and suddenly I’m thrown back to 1976 in the midst of teenage overwhelm. Today I know I’m more than that story and thankfully I have so many more options to regulate my emotions. What’s worked most of all for me is to get to know all those pieces of myself. I’ve tried to follow the teaching of Rumi, in his poem The Guest House:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

— Jalaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks (The Essential Rumi)

Each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

We are more than a cursory label or a common story. What stories do you hold onto about yourself, your partner, your boss, your family members, your neighbors? What comes to your door, in the dark of the night?

You can hear the full post about Lisha here.

The details were absolutely relatable: too much on the calendar, not enough water, and a body sending signals she had been trained to treat as noise. She pushed through the meetings, the appearances, and the long list of people counting on her until pushing through stopped being a choice and became a medical event.

It will be retold as a story about hydration and the importance of self-care. But that’s not the whole story. It is more about a reflex.

It’s that reflex that reads your own limits as an obstacle to override instead of information to act on. High-achieving women learn this reflex early, and we are rewarded for it for years before it ever sends us the bill.

Override is not resilience. It is what we reach for when resilience has already run out.

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Two things that look identical

Endurance and self-erasure look the same from the outside. They produce the same picture: the same full calendar, the same colleagues so impressed with your consistent delivery they tell you they don’t know how you do it all. Yet from the inside, endurance and self-erasure are opposites. Endurance builds, and self-erasure spends down the very capacity the work depends on. We call that self-erasure pattern professional dedication.

When I teach the framework I call the Four C’s — Clarity, Coherence, Capacity, Contribution — Capacity is the one leaders ignore until the wheels come off. Capacity is not your energy level. It is your ability to hold complexity without collapsing into rigidity or panic. Capacity allows you to sit with a hard problem long enough and consider the entire picture so that you can make a good decision instead of a fast one. It allows you to be present with the human being in front of you when there is a fire in your inbox.

Override drains Capacity while impersonating Contribution, and that disguise is the whole reason it is so hard to catch in yourself. From the inside it does not register as depletion; rather, it registers as building. You are shipping the work, carrying the team, meeting the moment; every signal your environment returns tells you that you are contributing. And you are, right up until the line where the contribution is financed entirely by capacity you no longer have. Push past that line and you are no longer building. You are borrowing against the builder.

Override is the counterfeit at the center of the reflex. Real contribution adds to what you are. Override subtracts from it and books the loss as the cost of dedication. The four C’s are meant to hold one another up: Clarity feeding Coherence, Coherence drawing on Capacity, Capacity providing the foundation for Contribution.

Override breaks the circuit. It pours everything into the one C the world applauds and starves the one that makes it possible. By the time Contribution visibly stalls, Capacity has been gone for months. The stall is not the failure; it is the receipt.

It took me years to understand this: not all depletion is the same depletion.

Capacity drained by physical workload is restored by rest. Real sleep, real food, and days when no one needs anything from you. But capacity drained by something else, by the slow accumulation of decisions you would not make again, by the weight of overriding your own signals week after week, by unacknowledged emotional labor, is not restored by rest. You can take the vacation and come back to the same exhaustion, because the source was never about your hours.

I have a phrase for what that second kind of depletion actually is. Moral strain is what moral courage costs when it has nowhere to go.

The collapse, when it comes, is rarely a personal failing. It might be commitment — and it might be a system that has only ever learned to ask its most capable people for more, because they have never once told it to stop.

Why the advice about rest keeps failing you

This is why the standard advice fails the women I work with. They have already heard it, a thousand times over. Set boundaries! Make time for self-care! Take the weekend off and get outside! They try those things (which, by the way, are all good things to do). But when the exhaustion returns, they conclude there must be something wrong with them.

There is nothing wrong with them. But there is something they have not been allowed to name.

The Seven Tenets, the leadership framework foundational to all of my work, treats Rest as a discipline, and that definition matters here. Rest is a leadership discipline, not a withdrawal. It’s honoring natural cycles. It’s how you maintain the capacity to sense what is actually wanting to come forth. Alongside it sits Healing, which I define as the reunion of what has been split: intuition and intellect, effort and rest, self and community.

Note what that means. The override reflex is, at its root, a split: between the self that knows it is depleted and the role that refuses to act on that knowing. You cannot rest your way out of a split; you can only integrate your way out of it. While Rest is the discipline, Integration is the repair.

I know this reflex from my own hard-won experience. For years I treated my own depletion as a character test I could keep passing. It felt like proof that I was serious, proof I was not like the people who needed to stop. Stopping felt like a failure, and so I didn’t. The cost never showed up on a performance review, but it showed up everywhere a performance review doesn’t look.

Why this sharpens at the summit

There is a season when this reflex stops being merely expensive and becomes dangerous, and it is not the season you would expect. It is the years we think of as the summit.

For professional women, somewhere between forty and sixty, the structures start to move all at once. The career that defined you shifts, or is taken. The body changes the terms without asking. Children leave or need more; parents need more; the marriage gets renegotiated; the face in the mirror is not the one the reflex was built for. My co-author Donna Coxon-McCory and I call this The Third Curve, the passage after Becoming and Building, when everything you constructed starts to move and you have to decide who you are without the scaffolding.

The Third Curve arrives exactly when the Second-Curve engine, the way you built, proved, and overrode yourself, is running at full steam. The reflex that carried you to the summit is the least suited to the terrain on the other side. We meet the largest structural shift of our lives with the one tool that requires the structures to hold still and remain the same.

That is the moment the override reflex stops being a productivity pattern and becomes the thing that lands you in the ER.

What to do with this information

I am not going to tell you to rest. You’ve heard it before, and if rest alone were the answer then you would not be tired.

What I will say is this: The next time you catch yourself reaching for override, treat it as information rather than instruction. Ask which type of depletion you are actually in. Ask whether the exhaustion you’re feeling is asking for sleep, or for alignment. The two feel identical, and they are not, and the whole difference is in what you do next.

You don’t need to become a different person to lead through what you are leading through. You need to stop mistaking the ability to override yourself for strength.

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That version of you that emerges after a sustained period where you pushed yourself to adjust to a strain, maybe even a situation or demand that verged on moral strain that you didn’t feel you were in the position to address, well – that version of you that emerges is not quite the same as the version that went in.

Maybe something got clarified in that “temporary” push to get through to the end of that particular cycle. The system you returned to was built for the former version of yourself, calibrated to your tolerances, things you would have automatically agreed to, your willingness to normalize what you can no longer unsee. The organization will assume the previous defaults are those you agree to, in spite of what you may have just learned about what you need, what you require for energy management, what you are less comfortable delaying or giving up, and what’s growing in importance to you now.

When a leader spends a long time inside a system that asks them to act against their own discernment; to move faster than their judgment, to defend decisions they privately question, to keep everything running smoothly over their own quiet objection, something adapts. They build a “working” self, a version calibrated to survive the conditions, one that is competent and often quite successful. And it runs, increasingly, on a low-grade suppression of the part of them that knows better. (Have you seen Severance by any chance?)

That suppression has a compounding cost. I call it moral strain: the specific erosion that accumulates when you are asked, for too long, to override your own discernment and normalize what you know isn’t right inside a system you also genuinely value. A brownout cycle is what it looks like when you’ve been dealing with that particular strain long enough that your lights dim without going out, metaphorically speaking. You keep performing, hitting the metrics while underneath, access to your own clarity quietly narrows.

What happens when you can no longer not see the strain you’ve been managing and delivering around, the strain the system doesn’t want you to name? A leader at this threshold faces two very different paths, and has to learn to tell them apart.

The first is restoration: returning to the working self the system was built around — the version of you that learned to override its own discernment, to absorb the unreasonable ask, to keep moving the line of what it would tolerate. Rest, a vacation, a reorg that relieves the pressure, and the strain eases just enough that you slip back into the old, familiar way of operating. This is what the system wants, and it is the leadership advice you’ll be handed. Get the leader back online.

The second is emergence: not a return at all, but the arrival of a new sense of self. It’s no longer satisfying to return to that same pattern, that same “working self.” It’s like putting on a suit that just no longer fits. What comes forward now is the self that was underneath that version that was coping the whole time, the whole sense of self that kept the objection alive, that wouldn’t fully sign off, the version of you that you opted to suppress in order to keep functioning.

While both versions look like you’re getting better, only one of them can make real change.

Every incentive, every default, every well-meaning colleague who says it’s good to have you “back to normal” is pulling for the restoration version. Your old “yeses” were load-bearing and the organization built its expectations on them. If you are the leader who used to absorb an unreasonable ask and is now unwilling to absorb that ask, the organization does not view this new version of you as growth. The organization now experiences this version of you as a problem to manage.

So the emerging self meets resistance almost immediately, not because it is wrong, but because it is inconvenient to a system dependent upon the previous version of leadership to function. The resistance is constant and the emerging self is still new and may feel vulnerable, so the path of least resistance is to quietly re-suppress.

This is how thresholds close without anything actually changing, through a slow, reasonable-sounding return to the person the system was built for.

I know this stage from my own experience. When I left a role I had held for years, I thought clarity would feel empowering. For a long time it felt like exposure instead, like moving through the world without that version of a working self I’d spent years building before the new one had fully formed. I didn’t have language for it then. I now understand it as exactly this: the gap between the leader who was leaving and the one who was arriving. The discomfort I felt wasn’t a sign I’d made an incorrect choice; it was the sensation of old defaults that no longer fit.

I’m not going to tell you how to lead from a new emerging self, because the entire point is that it genuinely and uniquely belongs to you. But I can name what separates a threshold that stays open long enough to walk through from one that quietly closes.

It is whether you can recognize the organizational resistance for what it is. When the system pushes to restore the old you—and it will, in language that sounds like care—the pressure you feel is not feedback that you’re doing something wrong. It is the predictable response of a structure encountering a type of leader it was not calibrated for. Read correctly, the resistance is confirmation that something new, something real is emerging. Read incorrectly, it becomes the reason you put the old self back on.

The leaders who step through this threshold are not the ones who feel certain – trust me on this. They are the ones who have built the capacity to tolerate the feeling of being exposed long enough for the emerging self to stabilize into something the next version of their leadership can actually be built on.

That tolerance is the most strategically consequential capacity a leader can build at this stage. Everything downstream: the decisions you’ll make, the culture you’ll set, the things you will finally refuse depends on whether the self making them is the one the system installed, or the one that emerged when the default version of yourself just stopped working.

What’s emerging in you is not a problem the organization needs to solve. It is the leader the next decade is going to need.

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Not fewer. None. You have so much financial abundance that you’ve become what Sarah Wynn-Williams describes as being “price insensitive” and “economically insensitive.” Total financial freedom. You move through the world with ease. If your life were a cup and saucer, you’d watch an unending flow of sweet, delectable tea overflow them both, warm, continuous, with no fear of it ever running dry. You are fully rested. Blissfully content. Filled with a joyful, uncomplicated gratitude.

Stay here with me; let’s not rush past this moment.

Say you take that abundance and do the responsible thing first. You secure your retirement, you guard against every misfortune you can imagine. That’s handled. Now I want you to think bigger, because all of your concerns and all of your needs are taken care of. What will you do with the overflow?

Where do you feel that question in your body? Does it feel safe, the idea of living with that much freedom, that much choice?

How would you live from that space? What would you do with your time? Would you share the excess, knowing with complete certainty that the flow to you would never stop? Would you feed people? House them? Educate them? Would you reach out and take some suffering out of the world, simply because you could?

What would you create, if you knew you could do anything at all?

This is the dream.

Here’s another part most of us skip right past. What would our world look like if every one of us knew we were free to be exactly who we are, free to do the one thing that lights us on fire?

This is our reality. Or it could be.

You are enough. Even if your bank statement and your lab results and your credit card balance whisper something that makes your stomach clench; in the face of all that I’m telling you right now that you have enough within you, exactly as you are, to do what you most deeply desire.

I’m not telling you to walk out of the job that stresses you more than you admit and run for the hills. That’s not the invitation.

The invitation is this: take a beat, and dream with me. Imagine your survival needs are fully met, and the only work left is to live in a way that is generative, to give something back, to build something beyond your own self-interest, because your self-interest is already taken care of.

I know you give, and you give generously. But what if you could give on a scale that blew your own mind?

What if, ten years from now, the binary has collapsed. No more “haves” and “have-nots.” What if the billionaire class had either passed on or had their own awakening, and the wealth flowed not toward bigger lifestyles and bigger inheritances but toward communal care? What if there was simply enough — enough that the work week dropped from five or six days to three or four? What if higher education was provided to anyone who wanted it? What if we paid teachers and childcare workers and the people who care for our aging and differently abled six figures, because we finally knew in our bones what that work is worth? What if everyone had excellent healthcare, available whenever they needed it? What if food insecurity went the way of smallpox and the bubonic plague? What if we grew our own food in communal gardens, rode public transit that was safe and reliable, and lived near ancient trees and water clean enough to swim in? What if we became balanced stewards of our land?

What if?

Now notice what just happened inside you.

Because the first time I let my imagination run like that, my brain nearly came apart. It protested, hard. That isn’t realistic. This is a waste of time. It’s irresponsible to dream like this. That’s crazy — it won’t happen, can’t happen.

Pay attention to what comes up the moment you allow yourself to imagine. That inner voice protesting is information you need.

I once worked with a woman who told me, plainly, that she did not let herself dream. About anything, ever. Her dreams had been shattered too many times as a child, and somewhere along the way she decided it was safer to shut the whole dream apparatus down. She wouldn’t entertain even the gentlest version of the question, not even “what did you want to be when you grew up?”

Her response was extreme. It is also deeply familiar. So many of us carry a quieter version of the same thing; a sense that dreaming is indulgent, frivolous, even a little dangerous. For some of us it is genuinely painful: too vulnerable, too exposed, too likely to end in disappointment.

All of that is judgment. And I want to ask you: what if we set the judgment down, just for a while, and gave ourselves permission to dream wildly anyway?

So take a breath, and come back to it. Can you let yourself imagine a life where everything was provided for? Where you felt complete security, protection, and love? Where abundance flowed so steadily that it became ordinary, the ground you walked on? No scarcity, no survival math running underneath everything?

What comes up when you actually feel that in your body?

Does it feel safe to receive without end? What is it to be given to — fully — without having first earned it?

For a great many of us, it is far easier to imagine scarcity, and the grind of barely scraping by, than it is to imagine overflowing abundance. That, all on its own, is worth noticing.

A friend of mine lives in one of the wealthiest counties in the country. She knows, clearly, that she has more than enough to design the life she wants from here. And she still gets gripped, periodically, by panic about the stock market. She asked me what I made of that. I told her the truth: my fears are attachments to what I place my security on.

I don’t find security in a number. It’s in my faith, and in my own ability to create opportunities. And if I’m truly honest with you, I am still learning how to receive fully. There’s a belief framework of earning my worth that I’m continuously learning about, seeing where that rises in my life, my perspectives, and the ways I approach the world.

When I let myself play at the edge of imagination, a few things happen. It strengthens my creativity. It shows me exactly where I resist, and what I resist. It becomes a portal into what I actually believe, and it challenges what I’ve decided is outrageous. It lets me trace a fear back to its origin story so I can decide, intentionally, whether that’s a story I want to keep, or one that I am finally ready to put down.

It is an expedition into the limits I’ve placed on myself. Where I grant myself permission, and where I quietly withhold it.

And that gap — the distance between what I can dream and what I will actually allow for myself — has a name. Last week I called it the Wasteland: the place where dreams go to die. It is where so many of us live without quite realizing it. Not because life is bad, but because somewhere along the way we stopped letting ourselves want more than we’d already been handed.

I’ve also come to understand that discomfort that rises from time to time, you know the one, that small, persistent voice of desire that whispers it really doesn’t have to be this way, does it? Well, that’s not a problem to manage. It is a summons. In the Heroine’s Journey, it is The Call: the moment the distance between your life and your longing grows loud enough that you can no longer pretend not to hear it.

The Call does not always arrive as a crisis. Sometimes it arrives as a daydream you won’t allow yourself to sink into.

And once you’ve heard it, you get to decide. You can live a little more, each day, inside the future you actually believe is possible, because belief is not passive. Your beliefs drive your decisions, and your decisions build your days.

So dream with me. The most unhinged, spectacular, generous, loving future you can possibly imagine. And then start watching for it. Start building it, right where you are. Start local. Be like my neighbor Christine, who loves to garden so much that she has quietly extended her care past her own yard into the shared corners of our neighborhood, turning the entrance to all our homes into something beautiful, simply because she can.

That is not a small thing. That is the future, arriving early, in one person who gave herself permission.

What’s your most unhinged desire?

Let’s begin dreaming together.

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Not the journey of the individual as a hero because those still happen, every day. I’m talking more about the cultural, collective story we’ve spent the last seventy years using as the foundation for progress.

The Hero’s Journey, popularized by Joseph Campbell, is a narrative structure that centers a singular hero on a quest of some kind with fantastical challenges to overcome and a decisive victory at the end. It’s a story that we’ve been telling ourselves as a society since Homer wrote The Odyssey. The hero (often a young man) leaves the ordinary world, crosses into the unknown, battles enemies, claims the prize, and returns home with some kind of great power. It is a story of conquest and individual triumph.

In modern times, though, we’ve turned this story into more than a fairy tale. We’ve made it the foundation of our entire worldview. Our companies are structured like Hero’s journeys. Our careers are. Our public narratives are. Our therapy. Our LinkedIn posts. Our self-help shelves and our origin stories and the structure of nearly every Hollywood movie released since Star Wars.

We have told the Hero’s Journey to completion.

What the Hero’s Journey gave the modern world was enormous. At its structural core, this is an acquisitive story. It assumes there is something out there to win, and that winning it is the point. It assumes the hero returns home intact, bearing the prize. It assumes the ordinary world is waiting to be improved by what the hero brings back. We used this narrative idea to build corporations, the venture capital model, and the way we talk about leadership, growth, transformation, and success. And it’s one of the reasons why we are just plain exhausted.

The assumptions of the Hero’s Journey no longer match the conditions we face in the current moment. Instead of leaders who serve as a lone hero (backed up by a crew of motley sidekicks, red shirts, and the princess-coded love interest) on a journey to win the prize of inventing the next big thing or starting the company to rule them all, we are finding that the work we do would be stronger with integration.

Heroes are good for a lot of things, but integration isn’t one of them.

This is the work of the Heroine.

I’m shifting to talk more about the Heroine’s Journey, because I believe it is the archetypal frame we’re now operating inside of, whether we recognize it or not. The Heroine precedes the Hero’s Journey by an order of magnitude. It has been written about by Maureen Murdock and by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, and it shows up in every wisdom tradition that pre-dates the conquest-coded modernity the Hero’s Journey was structured to serve.

The Hero’s Journey is external. The Heroine’s Journey is internal.

The Hero leaves home to fight a battle and find the prize. The Heroine also leaves home, but because something was taken from her and she is tasked with finding it. Her journey isn’t about winning, but being asked to look at what she has been carrying, what was lost, and what she’s asked to reclaim.

The Hero overcomes enemies through force or cleverness. The Heroine integrates what she has been split off from, the parts of herself she was told to abandon in order to gain status in a world that did not have a place for her whole self.

The Hero claims his identity through triumph. The Heroine releases the identity she was given and explores what is underneath.

The Hero returns to the ordinary world bearing gifts. The Heroine reconstructs the ordinary world from the inside out, because she has discovered that the world she was returning to was the very thing that wounded her.

The Hero’s Journey ends in victory. The Heroine’s Journey ends in wholeness.

These are not the same destination, and they were never meant to be. And one is not “better” than the other. They both are worthy journeys and both yield extraordinary results. They’re both necessary.

It’s been a gradual understanding for me to realize I’ve been on the Heroine’s journey my entire life.

I did not call it the Heroine’s Journey when I started; I didn’t have the language for it. But the structure is identical. I turned away from the false self the system had taught me to perform. I went through a spiritual (and nearly a physical) death. I reconnected with something larger than my own striving for approval and perfection. I integrated the parts of myself I had been told were unacceptable. I learned that asking for help was not weakness; it was what made it possible to continue the journey and where I found allies, guides, and communities.

I learned that the world I was returning to was not waiting for me to fix it. The world was not mine to fix; my fixation was simply a distraction. The integration had to happen inside me.

This is the journey we are all collectively on right now.

Conditions in 2026 have stopped supporting the Hero’s strategy. The conditions have been changing for some time now, but there’s a new collective awakening happening and it’s gaining momentum this year. People are not less effective than they used to be, but for many, the story they were running is no longer working. The “push-harder” script — the I-can-overcome-this script, the I-can-bring-the-prize-home script — has stopped producing the outcomes it used to. It’s no longer about winning anymore. The time for the Hero has passed, and that journey is complete.

There’s a growing awakening to turn around and see what you’ve been guarding against knowing. There are parts of life that most of us experience before embarking on the Heroine’s Journeys. Often those moments are marked by things just not working out the way you expected. Not necessarily in a bad way, per se, but just not quite as you expected. Say you got the job – congratulations! But a few months in, you find that it’s more than you realized it would be: the stress, the hours. Maybe someone got promoted up and there’s now a workflow gap you’re expected to temporarily fill.

Or, perhaps it’s not about work for you at all. Maybe it’s a relationship with a partner, or a family member, or a friend. And things take a turn, or you discover a small betrayal, even if it was unintentional.

You get the idea. Things just worked out differently than you expected. The knowledge that something is missing sets you on your own Heroine’s Journey, with some particular waypoints.

Perhaps you start off a little unsettled, a little frustrated, or wondering momentarily if you’d made the right choice. You may not have enough information yet to make a new decision, so you spend a little time (figuratively speaking) “rowing about” without a new clear destination. You’re just seeing what’s around you, what’s here; there may be a sense of resigning yourself to what is just for the moment. You find yourself undertaking a bit of time in an Immram, a moment of trusting what life is presenting to you without determining a clear path or a new destination. It’s simply surrendering to the moment.

At some point you may take a Pilgrimage. Perhaps you do the Camino de Santiago, or take a vacation to Shenandoah or Las Vegas or Yosemite or London. You go, and you find friends and allies along the way. You find new ways of seeing, new perspectives by getting out of your environments, your routines. You shake things up.

You may find yourself longing for quiet. Enter the Labyrinth. It’s the journey in, quiet, slow, winding and unwinding. Labyrinths teach that the journey is never a linear process but a circular winding road. You can’t see around corners. It’s always moving towards the center, toward the heart of the matter.

Maybe now you feel restored for a bit, and you return to the world as you know it. But again, over time, you find yourself questioning yourself, your life. You wonder is this all there is? The job, the dinner, the laundry, the gas prices, the shopping, the consumption, the streaming, even the workouts you loved, somehow you feel a little dry. Unfulfilled. Something’s gnawing at you at night, and maybe a bit of self-doubt won’t leave you alone. A worry, a growing sense of regret that you can’t quite define or resolve. You know you’re in a job that offers stability, a secure paycheck but it’s starting to cost you in ways that bother you more now. You’re in the Wasteland. It’s the place where dreams go to die.

This is where a lot of us live, our time weaving in and out of the Wasteland, the Immram, the Pilgrimage, the Labyrinth. But more and more of us are now hearing the call for something more. We’re waking up and seeing ourselves and the world with new eyes.

Welcome to the Heroine’s Journey. We’ll spend some time here over the next few weeks talking about this and how to navigate it with choice and agency and awareness and community and love.

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Almost everything we are told about leading through hard times is framed as character traits: grit, toughness, resilience, the capacity to absorb grueling change and keep moving. Character framing has a cruel logic built into it. If the ability to lead through a crisis is who you are, then struggling to lead through permacrisis is also who you are. The resulting exhaustion becomes an indictment of your worth.

Leading through permacrisis is a structural practice, not a personality trait.

Structures carry no inherent judgment; they aren’t verdicts or indictments. Structures are built, seen, rebuilt, and improved upon. That is the whole promise of the Four C’s. They create a structural framework to use when you find yourself straining from the pressure points impacting you every day.

Brownout or Burnout?

Clinically, burnout is a real collapse. The WHO defines it by three markers: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced performance.

Most leaders aren’t burning out. They’re browning out.

Browning out is the cycle underneath burnout. It’s a cycle of a significant, sustained energy loss that dips below your resourced baseline. You are most likely still functional, still delivering, just by an increasing force of will. From the outside, you look fine. “Fine” is the cover the cycle uses to keep running.

Inside the browning out, two different things are draining you, and they do not get repaired the same way.

Physical depletion is what happens when you have been working harder than your body can sustain. The repair for physical depletion is rest — real sleep, real food, days when no one needs anything from you. Take a week off, you come back restored.

Moral strain is different. Moral strain is what accumulates when the work you are doing is misaligned with what you believe is right. It is the quiet weight of decisions you made that you would not make again, of sitting in rooms where the truth that needs saying keeps getting calculated against the cost of saying it. Moral strain does not resolve with rest. You can take a month off and return to the exact same misalignment, and the exhaustion is waiting for you, because its cause was never the number of hours of hard work. It was a misalignment.

Two different drains with two different repairs. Most of the leaders I work with have been treating moral strain with physical-burnout remedies for years, and then naturally concluding there must be something wrong with them when the vacations and workouts just don’t restore them the way they used to.

A Structure That Sustains

The Four C’s is the structure for addressing the root cause of the strain you’re experiencing. It gives you the ability to see where it lives, and where you can change it. Clarity. Coherence. Capacity. Contribution.

Clarity is the capacity to name what is actually happening — in your business, in your team, in yourself — without the distortion of your role, your habits, or what last quarter trained you to expect.

Most leaders do not have a clarity problem in calm conditions but it shows up under load. When you’re feeling the fire of a crisis, what used to be an accurate read of the room quietly becomes a story you are telling yourself to get through the next hour. The story is a load-bearing fiction that’s used to hold something up, until it doesn’t.

A founder tells himself his two strongest people are fine because they are still showing up, still delivering. They have already updated their LinkedIn profiles.

A small business owner determines the slow quarter is seasonal when the pattern in the numbers is structural.

Neither read is careless; each serves as a story they tell themselves at night so they can sleep, which is where the danger lies.

There is another type of clarity most of us actively work around: clarity about our own moral strain. What is your exhaustion telling you that you have trained yourself not to fully examine, at the root cause? Sometimes the most important thing you are unclear about is the thing you have been managing around for years.

Clarity is not a trait you have or lack. It is a practice, done on a schedule. Once a week; I recommend on a Friday, before you close the laptop. Ask yourself three questions:

What am I telling myself is true that I am not positively sure is true?

What does my team know that I have not yet let myself know?

What is the one piece of data I have been avoiding looking at clearly and fully?

You don’t need to immediately act on the answers. The goal is to see them. Writing them down is the practice. Clarity is the foundation the other three C’s are built on, and it is the one that erodes first, because under pressure, the story that gets you through the hour is so much cheaper, accessible, easier than the truth that asks something of you.

That is the first C. In the coming weeks we’ll deep dive into Coherence, Capacity, and Contribution the same way. Together these four create a structure you can see, build, and rebuild.

The Four C’s will make you more sustainable inside the work you are doing. They will not, in and of themselves, tell you whether the work you are doing is the work you should still be doing. Underneath the structure is a quieter inquiry:

Are you building something you can stand behind?

For some of you the answer is yes, and the structure you have intact is enough. For some of you the exhaustion has not lifted through years of effort because that question remains unasked or unanswered.

In Resilience Is the Wrong Frame, I wrote that the question worth asking is no longer How do I survive this? Rather, the question is What does this require me to become? And is this something I am willing to undertake? The Four C’s is how you begin to answer it by becoming someone who can see the structure clearly enough to know which part is asking to be rebuilt.

Start with Clarity. Start today.

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I received word this weekend that the audiobook version, produced by Twin Flames Studios and narrated by the remarkable Katie Boothe, is the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards Gold winner in the category 2025 Best Audiobook — Nonfiction. This is a stunning and remarkable recognition!

This award comes on top of It being named as a 2025 Book Excellence Awards finalist in the category of Addiction and Recovery last year.

The act of writing this book was a huge step for me to reclaim parts of myself, including some big dreams that I’d forgotten about. Recovery never stops, even 40+ years down the road. My earliest and biggest dream was to be an author, but it took decades for me to give myself the permission I needed to put pen to paper. When I did, this was the story that demanded to be told. I never wrote it for the market; I wrote in service of the story and for other women like myself. While this book may not be a bestseller, the reviews are remarkable and I’m so blown away by the stories readers share with me.

This book also inspired me to launch other efforts beyond writing alone in my condo. It gave me the courage and the motivation to open an online women’s writing community. (Bold PSA: the next one starts 6/1—sign up here!) I’m passionate about women getting their voices and stories out in the world! And so the spirit of this book continues to grow.

While this message started as an update (and frankly, maybe a touch of humble brag), the bigger story is in what happens when you allow yourself to do the things that are burning inside you. That passion for something that never quite goes away. What I experienced is what all my spiritual teachers point to:

• That I came here complete (not broken, not perfect, not fully developed yet, but complete)

• There’s a promise, a purpose inside me that I’m here to fulfill

• I have everything inside me that I need

• Usually the biggest obstacle in my life is me

• The world receives me so beautifully when I show up fully as myself

• The job at hand is for me to undo all the BS I tell myself about myself, the inherited stories/beliefs that no longer work for my highest good

• When I show up fully as myself, it strengthens the whole, and gives others the courage to show up fully as themselves

When I really get scared about going “all in” on anything (a dream, an aspiration, a task that challenges me deeply) here’s the truth of what I tell myself:

We’re all going to die in the end, and in the end, most people won’t even remember this thing I’m so afraid of.

Write the book. Send that letter. Tell the truth. Make that cold call. Meet that person. Shoot your shot.

Ask. Receive. Play. Allow yourself to rest.

This is what my book gave to me, this lived wisdom. It was the antithesis of everything I thought about what it took to be successful. And it redefined success.

This book is not a bestseller. But it changes lives. It changed mine.

Before you go, I just want to take a moment to tell you a little bit more, to send you off on your week in good spirits:

You’ve got everything inside you that you need.

You are complete.You are beautiful.

What you bring is so important.

You matter.Your voice matters.Your work matters.Your presence matters.

You come from love, you are made of love, and you can share love.

What do you need to give yourself permission to do? To be? What you do doesn’t have to be a bestseller to matter to someone, so get out there and do it.

And they are absolutely exhausted.

They tell me they’ve been doing all the right things: showing up for their teams, regulating their emotions, and taking the long view. They’re well aware that this is a time of tremendous transformation in the tech industry, although they’re also aware that the disruptions aren’t at all limited to tech. They’re maintaining their regular health regimens, working out, watching their nutrition, and staying on top of their numbers.

But their tried and true practices just aren’t working anymore. The practices they’ve relied on for years no longer yield the kind of relief, rest, rejuvenation they used to, and some of the people I met are questioning their own resilience.

When I ask what they mean by “what used to work isn’t working anymore,” they describe some version of the same thing: the more they advocate for the direction they believe will deliver the best outcomes, the more elusive getting buy-in from executive leadership becomes. Their teams are pivoting hard and fast but losing momentum, some feeling further and further behind with each passing week. Leaders are answering emails at midnight, revamping or scrapping and reinventing plans, holding their composure in meetings that no longer make sense to them, and watching their own reserves drain faster than they’re being refilled.

What’s worse, they tell me they feel a mounting frustration for not being able to move forward with meaningful, impactful, smart innovations that will position their products and company on the cutting edge of this AI revolution. And at the same time, they know the projects they’re working on will ultimately take away jobs from people they know and respect.

They’ve been told their whole career that resilience is what gets you through. So if they’re struggling, the natural assumption is that they’re not resilient enough.

Resilience is a fine answer when the disruption is temporary. The word, at its root, describes a material returning to its original shape after stress. A rubber band stretches and snaps back; a tree bends in the wind and rights itself. The metaphor depends entirely on the assumption that there’s a baseline to return to, and that the stress is the variable.

What we’re inside of right now isn’t a stress that passes. It’s a permacrisis.

The federal contracting workforce is being structurally reduced. AI is consolidating roles faster than industries can absorb the shift. Tariffs are reshaping cost structures quarterly. Customers across categories are tightening discretionary spend in ways they haven’t since 2008. The technology industry that promised to absorb every laid-off knowledge worker has stopped hiring at scale and in fact removing entire functions within the foreseeable future.

These aren’t temporary shocks waiting for the storm to pass. They’re the new operating conditions.

Resilience was built for temporary conditions. When you apply resilience to chronic conditions, you don’t get an ability to sustain yourself over increasingly challenging, nonstop change. You get a deep exhaustion that nothing seems to resolve. The rubber band snapping back works for one stretch. It does not work for sustained tension. Eventually the rubber band loses its elasticity and snaps.

This is what most of the leaders I’m talking with are experiencing: not a failure of resilience, but the predictable end-state of applying a temporary-disruption tactic to a permanent-disruption condition.

So what works instead?

This isn’t a case of not having enough endurance, a better mindset, stronger boundaries, and god help me, it’s not more morning routines.

What sustains, in conditions that don’t reset, is structural clarity.

You need clarity about what you’re optimizing for when the metrics shift quarterly. The old metrics no longer measure what’s true, and continuing to optimize against them is how you exhaust yourself while moving backward.

You’re served by clarity about what you’re cutting that you used to think was core. In this climate, what was core in the old world is dead weight in the new one, and the work of identifying it is harder than the work of executing once you know.

It’s crucial to have clarity about your own capacity, and what it costs to spend it on the wrong thing. Your own state is the strategic resource that everything else depends on, and that state has limits the leaders I work with rarely acknowledge until they’re already past them.

This is the work of structural diagnosis.

My friends, colleagues, and leaders I’m seeing who are maintaining a sense of sanity, whose blood pressure feels even, and who are moving forward with a bit of ease right now are not necessarily the most resilient. They’re the most clear. They’ve stopped trying to push harder and started looking with more precision at what the work actually is in this new climate. They’ve stopped asking “how do I survive this?” That’s a question that simply exhausts you. Instead, they’re asking themselves “what does this require me to become, and am I willing?” This question, which can be hard to answer, is the one that invites sustainability.

In fact, this is the discussion I’m bringing to the Arlington Chamber of Commerce Small Business Roundtable on Wednesday, May 20 — to a room of small business owners and operators in the DMV who are inside this climate of constant change, doing harder work than most acknowledges. If you’re in the area and want to be in the room, the event is open to the public.

For those of you who’ve been reading my work and feel some version of “harder-and-harder-and-still-not-working” — what I want you to know is that what you’re feeling is structurally accurate. The advice about resilience you’ve received over the years was built for a different climate. The fact that it’s no longer producing results is not a failure of your effort, it’s a failure of the frame.

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Through page after page I traveled to mystical, furious, magical, and enchanted places. My world grew through the stories of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and Seuss. Before I began school I’d already lived lifetimes of challenges and conquests and victories, all within my imagination. And by the time I entered kindergarten, I knew, without a doubt, that I wanted to be a writer. I could not think of anything more important than sharing stories with the world. Because stories are what saved me.

I shyly asked a wonderful neighbor, a Capitol Hill journalist, for advice about writing. Teachers offered enthusiastic encouragement when I turned in writing assignments. In my home, though, we focused on the stock market, the mastery of business. And I learned. I learned to call writing a hobby, then a luxury, then nothing. I learned to put my dream down without ceremony, the way many women learn to put down most of what they truly want.

I pivoted to striving for things I thought would bring me security. I became an astute student of business, built that career spanning multiple industries, watched tech blossom from the day my IBM Selectric Typewriter was given the boot and an IBM PC appeared on my desk, and built that retirement fund. I was on a path that I’d watched my father travel with great success and accolades, and expected nothing less than the same. And I thought I was OK, doing what I was supposed to do; putting in my time and awaiting the rewards at the end of my career.

But while I was following the system’s messages and the lure of a robust 401k, I was also building. Quietly. In small acts that did not look like writing, that did not look like creation, that did not look like anything important enough to defend.

I built without permission. And I did not know, for forty years, that the building I was doing had a name: Creation.

Stories are more important than ever. This past month I have been writing through a specific structural frame, with a particular diagnostic lens. I’ve talked about tech’s addiction to power, the systems it uses to keep the addiction churning, and the cost we all pay. With that backdrop, I’m talking about what’s been true the whole time. The old systems are collapsing. New ones are being built. The people building them do not yet realize they are the architects of what comes next. Like me. Through the wasteland and the call and the recovery and the long building since.

Throughout my career in tech, I noticed I didn’t fit within the system as easily as it seemed others did. I felt different. I could see harmful patterns and it was difficult for me to not challenge them out loud. I called it clear honesty. I figured I wasn’t politically savvy and reveled in my rebelliousness. The system called it courageous communication, then later, counseled me on my communication style.

All those terms fell short of accuracy. What I was actually doing was Creation. I was building. What the system was doing was failing to recognize the construction because the architecture I was assembling did not yet exist anywhere it could be measured.

There’s a milestone in the Heroine’s Journey where you are presented with “the Call.” It can be a knock on the door that, if answered, opens to an Initiation, where you go through an enormous process of changing into a new way of relating to the world. I’ve had a few calls of this nature in my life. Some, like when I bottomed out with addiction to alcohol, I answered. It was quite literally a call from outside of me. Unbeknownst to me, my manager at my workplace was a woman with long-term sobriety. Within a few weeks of my hire date, she saw how obviously I was falling apart and called me into her office, inviting me to a new way of life. It felt like I was losing everything. It felt humiliating. It required full surrender. And it was as if someone reached down, plucked me out of a no-win life, and gave me the most robust way forward, far exceeding what I knew I could do on my own.

A few years later, I worked at the University of Maryland Hospital for the youngest doctor to run a cath lab on the East Coast. He was brash and precise from the moment he walked into his office to the clear instructions he gave everyone around him. He was not “nice.” He didn’t spend an iota of energy that wasn’t critical to the task at hand. I saw firsthand how critical Alignment is, in thought, motion, and communication, and what the real costs are of working in unsustainable, misaligned patterns and systems.

A few years ago, a friend called with a clear challenge: “Karen, when are you going to write that book?” I wasn’t feeling it. The childhood dream felt too distant to pick back up. She suggested I attend a writers retreat, and I found one in Lamu, Kenya of all places. When asked at the retreat, I introduced myself to the group and explained that I had come here to finally answer this life-long question: Can I write well enough to publish, or not? After all, I told myself, if my writing is truly as bad as I suspect it is, I’ll never have to see these people again. I leaned in. I gave myself permission to write, to enjoy the writing, to experiment, to play. I learned to let go of the most restrictive constraints I’d placed on myself for so long, and give in to the playful purpose to Create.

Still another Call came just a few years ago when I left my corporate life. I answered that call because the distance between who I was becoming and who the role needed me to be had gotten wide enough that I couldn’t close it anymore. (This was a wonderful reminder that the calls never end; there are always opportunities to deepen, evolve, grow.)

A new framework came together as I considered the paths I chose, the skills I developed, and the communities I’ve been a part of. When I considered leaving my corporate role, I Venn-diagrammed out who I am now in business and what I have to offer, how I can be of service. I’m a woman in tech. I’m a woman with long-term recovery. And what came out of that analysis was the framework I now call the Seven Tenets.

The focus of my work now, what I truly offer, incorporates all of where I’ve been, all of who I’ve become at every stage of my life. Emory Hall has a poem called I’ve Been A Thousand Different Women. The closing lines echo what I feel in my bones:

For they are the bones

Of the temple

You sit in now

For they are

The rivers

Of wisdom

Leading you toward

The sea

If those lines moved you, the full poem is worth a read.

None of my life was wasted time, and neither is yours. The paths you have traveled have led to where you stand right now, in a process of Creation.

If you are leading through AI transformation, through moral strain and excitement, through the daily pressure of trying to balance personal integrity against what the business is asking of you, what you have been calling difficulty has a name. It is construction. The architecture of the next system goes up one act at a time, in your office, in your team, in the meetings you walk out of, unsure of what just happened.

I built a leadership tool for leaders doing this work without yet knowing what to call it. It’s a Structural Clarity Audit. It takes no more than ten minutes. You may find you are further along your own heroine’s journey than you have been giving yourself credit for.

• • •

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What he was describing was beyond burnout. It’s what happens to people after extractive work systems take everything.

Jon’s experience is not an anomaly; it’s a pattern. The system deployed by the disease of more did not just consume his resources and years. It suppressed his specific capacities, the skills and talents that, had they been left intact, would have interrupted the extractive pattern before it led to the moment he questioned whether he was fully alive.

Jon’s capacities surfaced naturally when life made room for them. That’s the part I want you to hold as you read the rest of this piece: what was suppressed is not gone. It is waiting. The capacities the system trained you to set down — empathy, intuition, moral courage, relational intelligence, somatic knowing — remain within you, underneath the noise, underneath the performance. When your inner knowing returns, you will wonder how you ever led without it. You have the courage to recognize these capacities for what they are. That means you can change everything.

Suppressed Capacities

The five capacities Jon re-discovered are ones our current system tries very hard to suppress. They are:

Empathy. The disciplined act of allowing another person’s reality to reshape your calculus. Inside a system optimized for more, empathy slows progress and introduces variables the growth model cannot quantify. It invites questions the quarterly plan cannot answer.

Intuition. The body’s capacity to process patterns faster than the conscious mind, the gut knowing that has been telling you for months that the strategy is misaligned. Inside a data-driven culture, intuition was rebranded as bias. You learned to override your inner knowing, which was in fact correct, in favor of the metric.

Moral courage. The willingness to name what you see, even when the system has made naming it expensive. Addicted systems interpret the pause moral courage invites as an existential threat.

Relational intelligence. The ability to read a room, sense what is not being said, hold “yes/and/both” complexity in human dynamics. The system reduced this to “people skills” and never accepted responsibility for cultivating it.

Somatic knowing. The intelligence that lives in your nervous system, like the tightness before a meeting where you know you’ll be asked to perform alignment you do not feel. The system’s response to your body’s signals was not to listen, but to pathologize. Meditation apps. Wellness stipends. Resilience training. The message: Your body’s warnings are a management problem. Manage them better.

These five capacities are not separate skills. They are facets of a single integrated intelligence. The disease of more suppressed them because an integrated human can see what the system cannot afford to be visible.

The Language of Pathologizing

The system did not suppress these capacities with force. It gave them a label: soft skills.

Two words that conditioned you to set them down voluntarily. If empathy is soft, then it is optional. If intuition is soft, then it is unreliable. If moral courage is soft, then it is a luxury the business cannot afford this quarter.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk said on a podcast:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

The most powerful technologist on the planet naming empathy, not as a skill, not as a faculty, but as a weakness civilization must overcome to survive. That is the disease of more speaking out loud.

Now hold that next to what Satya Nadella said about empathy at Microsoft:

“Empathy is not a soft skill. In fact, it’s the hardest skill we learn — to relate to the world, to relate to people that matter the most to us.”

Same industry. Same decade. Two leaders, opposite diagnoses. One sees weakness. The other sees the hardest, most essential form of intelligence.

The question for you, doing your own inventory, is not which diagnosis appears on your company’s careers page. It’s which one does your company reward, and which one does it penalize.

The Pattern Made Visible

If you want to see what a system truly values, watch what happens to the people who exercise the capacities it claims to support.

Timnit Gebru at Google. Frances Haugen at Facebook. Leopold Aschenbrenner at OpenAI. Three companies, three years, three people who exercised exactly the capacities the system called soft — and all three were removed. Not because they were wrong, but because they were inconvenient. Their integrated intelligence would have produced friction in the addicted system, and friction is the one thing addiction cannot tolerate.

You watched it happen. And I’m certain that somewhere in the back of your mind, you did the quiet math that every person inside an addicted system does: you calculated what it would cost you to do something similar. What the price might be for voicing an honest question or concern. That calculation is the suppression working as designed.

What Other Fields Know

In emergency medicine, clinical intuition is treated as diagnostic data, not a soft skill. In NASA’s astronaut program, empathy and relational intelligence are selection criteria, not preferences. In military doctrine, intuition is a trained combat skill because overriding the body’s signals in the field gets people killed.

Three different fields, stakes as high as stakes get, all arriving at the same conclusion: the capacities the technology industry labels “soft” are the infrastructure of sound judgment under pressure. The only industry that pathologizes them is the one addicted to a system that cannot afford for those same skills to fully function.

The Restoration

What was suppressed can be restored. Not easily, and not quickly. But the capacities the system trained you to ignore are not gone. They are waiting in the same place your own knowing has been waiting, underneath the noise, underneath the fear, underneath the performance of alignment.

I have watched this restoration happen enough times now to trust the pattern.

A tech executive peaked with burnout when he pushed back against aggressive AI rollouts that violated his ethics. His crisis showed up in his body as a stress-induced injury. His moral courage came back online, then his intuition, and he left his role to build an ethical AI tool for small business owners, using his reclaimed empathy, intuition, and relational intelligence to make something that solves real human problems. “I had no idea how much the stress of managing moral strain was killing me,” he told me, with a long exhale. “If I hadn’t left I would have ended up in the hospital.”

Moral strain is what moral courage costs when it has nowhere to go. What his exhale released was the pressure of carrying a knowing he was not allowed to speak. That exhale was his immune response coming back online.

What people are discovering is something the disease of more could never offer them: coherence. The alignment of what they believe with how they operate. The state in which their values, their decisions, and their daily actions tell the same story.

That is what is on the other side of the suppression all along: wholeness.

Expanding the Restoration

Individual restoration is a beginning, but it’s not enough to shift the system.

The system you operate inside was not built for integrated humans. It was built for compliant ones. You can recover your empathy, your intuition, your moral courage, and you will still walk back into a Monday morning leadership meeting inside a structure architected to override every one of those capacities.

This tension is where individual recovery becomes collective redesign. Most leaders I know are not leaving the system; they cannot and often should not. They are inside legacy organizations built on assumptions they no longer share. The question they are living with is not How do I escape? It is: How do I lead with integrity inside a system that was not designed for integrity?

The answer begins with the same capacities you’ve just reclaimed, used now not only for your own coherence, but for the coherence of the team you serve. Empathic leaders ask out loud who this decision impacts. Intuitive leaders discuss what feels misaligned, even when the numbers say otherwise. Morally courageous leaders refuse to perform an alignment they do not feel. That is what leading from reclaimed capacities actually looks like. A way of being that, once restored, changes what is possible on the other side of the conference room table.

The capacities the system called soft are not gone. They are waiting. When you listen to that inner knowing again, you will wonder how you ever led without your unique, innate skills. Reclaim your full capacities, and then build something extraordinary with them.

• • •

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Why am I working?

You know the practical answer. You are working because the mortgage exists and the health insurance is tied to the role and your children are in schools that cost what schools cost. Those answers are real. They are also not what the question is truly asking, which is:

Am I working to create something I believe in, or am I working inside a system whose appetite I have mistaken for my own ambition?

That question is a signal. If you have felt it even once, this essay is for you.

• • •

The Inventory

In recovery, there is a step that separates the people who get sober from the people who stay sober: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

That step is not about guilt and it’s definitely not about creating a list of all the ways you’ve gone astray; it’s not a confession. It is about seeing. It is the practice of looking unflinchingly, without the anesthesia of denial, at the full reality of actions, patterns, and the beliefs that drive them.

In this step, an addict asks themselves “What did my actions—and inactions—actually cost, and what is the impact?” Not “What did I intend” or “What did the system tell me to think about it.” What did it actually cost me, the people around me, or the thing I said I cared about? What was the impact? And then, what are the underlying motivations behind those actions?

We cannot change what we cannot see.

Last week I named the technology industry’s relationship to power as addiction, structurally, not metaphorically. The Disease of More, that compulsion that cannot be satisfied. The fear underneath all of it.

This week is about taking inventory. Not the industry’s, but ours. Because the disease of more does not only consume markets and margins. It consumes the people who show up every day to operate the machinery. And so while the addiction is the industry’s, the first step toward recovery is recognizing our individual role in the system with a willingness to take a hard look at what it is taking from us.

• • •

The System’s Fear Is Not Your Fear

You told yourself it was ambition. You told yourself compromises were necessary. More than once, you’ve said to yourself this is just how things work here.

The system creates its own type of fear. When you work inside it long enough, the system’s fear starts running as your background noise.

The system’s fear says: If you slow down, someone will replace you. If you ask the uncomfortable question, you will be labeled difficult. If the growth curve flattens on your watch, your career flattens with it. If you stop performing alignment, the system will stop performing your relevance.

That fear is real, but it is not truly yours. It belongs to the architecture. It is the fear that drives the disease of more, distributed across every person in the system until individuals cannot distinguish the system’s anxiety from their own.

I spent decades mistaking someone else’s urgency for my own purpose. In the tech organizations where I built my career, the pace was so constant and the expectations so consuming that I genuinely could not tell whether I was driven by my own ambition or by the system’s terror of stillness. My nervous system matched the culture and the demand. It was only when I stepped far enough outside the system to hear my own signal—quiet, steady, nothing like the volume the system constantly required—that I could tell the difference between what was generated by the organization’s system and my own nervous system.

Your signal is telling you something. The system’s fear says stopping will destroy your career and your future and your family’s well-being. Your signal says not stopping is destroying you. These are opposite messages. And the fact that you can hear your own signal through the system’s noise is not a weakness. It is the starting place for your inventory.

• • •

What the Addiction Costs

The first thing the addiction costs you is coherence. Coherence is the alignment between what you believe and how you operate. It is the state in which your values, your decisions, and your daily actions reflect the same story. Inside a system running on the disease of more, coherence is the first casualty, because the system requires you to optimize for its priorities, and its priorities are not yours.

You know this cost intimately if you have ever left a meeting where you advocated for a position you did not believe in. Not because you were dishonest, but because the system made advocacy for its priorities the price of your seat at the table, and you paid it.

The second cost is moral strain. This is different from burnout, though it often gets diagnosed as burnout. Burnout is exhaustion from overwork. Moral strain is exhaustion from performing alignment you do not feel. It is the weight of showing up every day inside a system that is optimizing for something you no longer believe in and acting as though you do. The body keeps score, even when the performance review does not.

The third cost is the slow erosion of your own judgment. When you spend enough time inside a compulsive system, the system’s metrics begin to replace your own discernment. You stop asking “is this right?” and start asking “will this ship?” You stop asking “who does this serve?” and start asking “what does the dashboard say?” The disease of more does not just consume resources. It consumes the internal compass of the people who operate inside it.

And the fourth cost, the one that gets named the least, is time. The irreplaceable years spent building inside a system that was using your talent to feed its compulsion. The leaders I talk to do not regret the work itself. They regret the moment they realized the system had been borrowing their purpose to fuel its appetite, and that transaction had been running for years before they noticed.

• • •

End-Stage Capitalism as End-Stage Addiction

I am going to say something that may feel large, but I believe it is precise.

What we are witnessing in the technology industry, and increasingly across the economy, is end-stage capitalism operating with the behavioral profile of end-stage addiction.

In end-stage addiction, the organism has reorganized itself entirely around the substance. Every system serves the compulsion. The relationships, the health, the work, the daily structure, all of it has been hollowed out and repurposed to maintain the supply. The addict may still be functional. They may even be high-performing. But the architecture of their life is no longer theirs. It belongs to the disease.

Map that pattern onto the systems many of you work inside. The stated mission exists, but the actual operating logic serves a single variable: growth. Not growth toward something. Just growth. The talent strategy, the product road map, the quarterly plan, all of it has been hollowed out and repurposed to maintain the acceleration. The company may still be functional. It may even be high-performing. But the architecture is no longer serving its people. It is serving the addiction.

The mass layoffs of 2023 and 2024, hundreds of thousands of people across the industry, were not strategic recalibrations. They were the system expelling the resources it no longer needed to maintain its supply. The people were not the point. The growth was the point. The humans were the medium.

If you worked inside one of those systems—if you survived a layoff, or didn’t—you already know what I am describing. Not as theory. As the moment when you went to Slack your PM and saw the word deactivated next to their grayed-out name just as the next product update was posted by someone you’ve never heard of before.

That is what end-stage looks like from the inside.

• • •

The Prism, Not the Binary

Last week, after I published The Disease of More, someone pushed back. The argument was direct: calling it an addiction is a cop-out. It gives people an excuse. It’s just greed. Name it as greed and hold them accountable.

I want to engage with that, because it deserves engagement, and because I think the tension it surfaces is one of the most important conversations we can have.

The pushback assumes a binary: either this is a disease, which excuses the behavior, or it is a moral failing, which demands accountability. One or the other. Pick a side.

I want to offer another possibility: It is a multifaceted problem that looks different depending on which face of the prism you are looking through. And the addiction framework is one face; not the only face, but a necessary one, because it illuminates a pattern that individual accountability alone cannot explain.

When an entire industry exhibits the same addictive behavior across companies, across decades, across leadership changes, at some point we have to ask: is this a collection of individual bad actors, or is there something in the architecture that produces the behavior? The answer, of course, is yes/and. Both. The individuals bear responsibility. And the system that shaped, incentivized, and rewarded the behavior also bears responsibility. These are not competing claims. They are different faces of the same reality.

Here is what I know from recovery: taking a searching and fearless moral inventory does not exonerate anyone. It is the opposite of a cop-out. It demands that you look at what you did, what it cost, and what beliefs drove it. It does not say “it was not your fault because you were sick.” It says: “Look at what happened. All of it. Without flinching. I did that.” That is the most rigorous form of accountability I have ever encountered. It begins with seeing the pattern clearly—not to excuse it, but to interrupt it.

The question is not whether individuals who have harmed others through greed and exploitation bear responsibility. Of course they do. The reckoning is not optional; it is assured, as part of the natural order of consequences. The question is whether assigning blame to individuals is sufficient to change the system that will produce the next set of individuals exhibiting the same behavior. If we only name the greed and never name the architecture that selects for greed, we will be having this conversation again in ten years with different names attached.

And there is something else worth examining here. The impulse to reduce a complex problem to two positions—guilty or excused, system or individual, right or wrong—is itself a product of the system I am describing. The algorithms that now mediate so much of our thinking were designed to flatten nuance into engagement. The soundbite culture, the hot take, the binary frame, these are the cognitive habits of a system optimized for more: more clicks, more reactions, more division. Binary thinking is the intellectual equivalent of the disease of more. It gives us the feeling of clarity without the substance of it.

The real inventory requires holding more than two things at once. The system is addicted. And individuals within it bear responsibility. And the architecture that produced both the addiction and the individuals needs to be named and restructured. And the work of restructuring begins with seeing all of it, not just the face of the prism that confirms what you already believe.

• • •

What Keeps the Inventory Suppressed

The question “why am I working?” is dangerous inside a compulsive system, not because the answer is unknowable, but because the system cannot afford for you to find it.

Last week I named the authoritarian architecture that enables the disease of more, the structures that concentrate decision-making, suppress dissent, and demand compliance as the price of belonging. This week I want to name what that architecture does to the inventory itself.

It prevents it. The inventory step requires honesty. Authoritarian systems are structurally incompatible with honesty, because honesty would interrupt the compulsion for more. The question “Why am I working?” marks you as uncommitted inside an authoritarian system. It signals that the system’s fear has failed to override your discernment. And authoritarian systems do not tolerate discernment that operates outside their control.

So the question waits. It waits through the performance cycle that rewards output and never asks about meaning. It waits through the all-hands where the CEO’s energy is supposed to substitute for your own motivation. It waits through the team offsite where alignment is manufactured in breakout sessions and documented in shared decks.

The question waits until the fear’s volume drops low enough for the signal to be heard. Sometimes that happens because of a layoff. Sometimes a health crisis. Sometimes it is smaller than that: your child asks you what you do for work, and for the first time, you cannot answer in a way that feels true.

However it surfaces, the question is the beginning of the inventory. And the inventory is the beginning of everything that comes after.

• • •

What the Inventory Makes Possible

Recovery does not end with the inventory. The inventory is what clears your vision so you can finally see what you want to build.

When I got sober, the first thing I had to do was stop pretending the substance was working. I had to tell the truth: this is not giving me what I thought it was giving me. When I questioned why I was working in my last corporate job, I had to tell the truth, again. And I realized that my career, the pace, the performance, none of it was delivering the meaning it had promised. And the cost of maintaining the pretense was higher than the cost of honesty.

The same is true for what you are carrying. You do not need to have your next move figured out. You do not need to quit your job. You do not need to burn anything down. You need to stop pretending the system is working for you when it is not. That is enough. That is the first act of inventory.

After the inventory begins, when you allow yourself to see clearly, the question changes. It shifts from why am I working? to what would I build if I weren’t afraid?

Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian astronaut on the Artemis II crew, a man who last week literally traveled farther from Earth than any human being has ever gone, was asked about purpose. His answer—from space!— was not about achievement or discovery or even exploration. He said: “Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy… and lifting each other up by creating solutions together instead of destroying.”

Read that again. A man whose career is built on the most ambitious engineering project of our generation, and his answer to “why?” is joy. Lifting each other up. Creating together instead of destroying.

That is what lives on the other side of the inventory. Not more. Not faster. Not the next quarter’s growth target. Joy. Creation. The work of lifting each other up. The disease of more cannot offer that, because the disease of more is incapable of satisfaction. It can only offer the next hit. Hansen’s answer comes from somewhere the addiction cannot reach, from a person who is clear about why he is working, and whose answer has nothing to do with fear.

That is what the inventory makes possible. Not a different job, necessarily. Not a dramatic exit. A different relationship to the question. A clarity about what you are building and why, a clarity that the disease of more spent years obscuring.

The question “why am I working?” is not a crisis. It is your own signal breaking through the system’s noise. We cannot change what we cannot see, and the fact that you can see it means the fear is losing its grip.

Do not numb it. Follow it.

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I spent decades inside the technology industry, and it’s an industry I love. I admire the brilliance of the people who build inside it. And I am telling you, with the calm certainty of someone who has lived on both sides of the issue: the technology industry is exhibiting the behavioral patterns of an unfettered addiction to power.

• • •

The Diagnostic

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) is the clinical standard for identifying addictive behavior. You may be surprised to know that the manual doesn’t require any specific substance to identify addiction; instead it identifies addiction through patterns: compulsive use despite harm, escalating tolerance, inability to stop, continued engagement even as consequences mount.

Map those criteria onto the technology industry as a system and the alignment is not metaphorical. If we diagnosis the tech industry according to these parameters, we see:

Continued engagement even with mounting consequences. How many billions is enough? That question is not rhetorical. It is diagnostic. For someone addicted to a substance, it might be someone drinking even though they have multiple DUIs.

In the tech industry, it’s the compulsion for more revenue, more market share, more dominance that does not satisfy at any number. It cannot, because the drive was never about the number. The number is the substance. The addiction is to the feeling of accumulation itself. Like every addiction, there’s a reduced payoff over time, so the dose must increase.

Escalation of tolerance. There’s a saying in recovery rooms: “One is too many and a thousand is never enough.” ​​In addiction, the first drink loosens the edges, but six months later it takes half a bottle just to feel normal, and what once began as relief becomes necessary for daily functioning.

In the tech industry, what was unacceptable five years ago is now standard practice. Bending the knee to unprincipled government leadership in exchange for unchecked market access. Deploying surveillance technology without guardrails.

As an example, Apple complies with 98% of the Chinese government’s app takedown requests. Over 10,800 apps are missing from China’s App Store, nearly a third related to human rights topics. What started as narrow compliance with local law became wholesale cooperation with a censorship and surveillance regime, all to maintain access to 800 million internet users.

Each boundary crossed resets the threshold. What once felt extreme becomes policy. What felt like policy becomes the floor.

Continued use despite harm. In addiction, it shows up as continued substance use even with degrading health metrics, such as increased heart rate, high blood pressure, liver damage, GERD, and decreased cognitive function, not to mention the damage to relationships and the evaporation of honesty, with self and others.

In the tech industry, it’s the environmental cost of data centers expanding without restraint. The human rights cost of surveillance technology weaponized against vulnerable communities. The societal cost of algorithms designed to divide because division drives engagement and engagement drives revenue.

The harm is visible, documented, and ongoing and it does not deter the behavior.

Inability to stop. No matter how many times a partner may discuss their concerns with the addict in their home; no matter how many consequences mount up; no matter how many times an addict might say to themselves “I’m not going to smoke tonight”— an addict is unable to stop using on their own volition.

For anyone familiar with addiction, you know this pattern and you can see it reflected in the tech industry. This is the one that should unsettle every board member, every regulator, every leader inside these organizations. The system has no internal brake.

U.S. analysts expect capital expenditure on AI to exceed $600 billion this year alone. Companies keep pouring money into a technology that is not yet making a profit because acceleration is its own justification. Slowing down means ceding ground. The “arms race” framing isn’t metaphorical; it has been deliberately deployed by industry actors to insulate themselves from regulation, arguing that any friction is a threat to national security. There is no mechanism by which the industry, left to its own devices, says: this is enough. Stopping feels like failure; it feels like dying.

If you have ever worked inside a system that operated this way, where the appetite grew with every success, where the metrics kept moving, where “more” was the only strategic direction anyone could articulate, then you have felt this pattern in your body before you had a word for it.

The word is addiction. And addiction, clinically, is a voracious disease of more.

• • •

The Disease of More

The phrase “the disease of more,” commonly discussed in 12-step recovery rooms, is the one I want you to consider.

Addiction is not a failure of willpower. It is a compulsive drive for MORE under the delusion that when you get enough, the thing driving you will finally be satisfied. Except it never is. There is no amount of market dominance, profit, political influence, or control that quiets the compulsion. Hunger is the condition. Feeding it is not the cure; feeding it is the pattern made visible. Fear is the disease.

I have watched this dynamic play out in my own life, in the lives of people I love, and in the rooms where recovery happens one honest conversation at a time. The mechanism is always the same. An alcoholic believes the next drink will be the one that makes the irritable restlessness stop. It never does. And the collateral damage accumulates while they chase that feeling.

Examine for a moment how this dynamic plays out at an industry level.

The industry that bent toward a president it once publicly opposed, not because its values changed, but because the access was too valuable to refuse. The platforms that knew their algorithms were amplifying harm and chose growth over correction. The AI deployments racing forward without governance, without guardrails, without anyone inside the system willing to ask the question the system cannot tolerate: What if we paused?

This pattern identification is not intended to focus on individuals. Some of the most brilliant, ethical, generous people I’ve ever encountered work in technology. This pattern examination focuses on a system that has organized itself around a compulsion, and the compulsion is driving the strategy. When the disease of more is running the show, every decision filters through one question: does this give us more?

Not… Is this strategy right?

Not … Who does this product serve?

Not … What will this rollout cost, and who will bear that cost?

Just: more.

If that framing sounds familiar to you, whether from the industry you work in or the organization you lead, it is because the pattern scales. It operates at the level of a single team, a single company, and an entire sector. The disease of more does not discriminate by org chart.

• • •

What’s Underneath

Here is what forty years of recovery taught me that the diagnostic manuals leave out: the underlying driver of every addiction is fear.

Not the useful kind, like the fear that tells you to step back from a ledge. The kind of fear that lies. The fear that whispers you are not enough. That if you stop accumulating, you will be revealed as unremarkable. That if the growth curve flattens, you will lose the only thing that makes you matter. Fear tells you that the moment you pause, someone else will take what you have built.

This is the fear that lives underneath the disease of more. It is not rational. It is not even conscious, most of the time. But it is the engine. The compulsion for more power, more market share, more dominance is not grounded in ambition. It is grounded in a terror of what happens when the accumulation stops.

I know this fear intimately. Every person in recovery does. The substance was never the point. The substance was the thing that kept the fear at a manageable volume. Take the substance away and the fear is still there—raw, loud, unbearable—until you learn to face it. Until you discover that the thing you were running from was never as dangerous as what the running cost you.

The technology industry has not faced its fear yet. It is still running. And systems that run on fear do predictable things: they hoard, they control, they eliminate anything that threatens the supply. They call it strategy. In recovery, we call it what it is: being scared.

• • •

What Keeps It Running

An addicted system seeks out and depends on an enabling structure, something that protects the compulsion from being interrupted. In a family, it is the web of silence and accommodation that forms around the addict. In an industry, it is something larger.

It is authoritarianism.

I want to be precise here, because the word carries baggage that can obscure the structural point. Authoritarianism is not just a political arrangement. It is any system that concentrates decision-making power, suppresses dissent, and demands compliance as the price of belonging. It is the organizational structure that ensures the addiction runs unopposed.

Watch how it works. The industry’s compulsion for more requires that no one inside the system has the standing to say “enough.” So the system builds cultures where questioning the growth mandate is career-ending. It builds incentive structures that reward acceleration and punish restraint. It builds hierarchies where information flows up filtered and directives flow down absolute. It partners with political power that shares its appetite for control—not because the values align, but because the enabling is mutual.

None of this is incidental. It is architecture. Authoritarian structures are the natural habitat of addiction, because addiction cannot survive transparency, accountability, or the distributed exercise of power. It needs concentration. It needs compliance. It needs the people inside the system to believe that the cost of speaking is higher than the cost of silence.

And it needs fear. The authoritarianism feeds the fear, and the fear feeds the addiction, and the addiction demands more authoritarianism to sustain itself. It is a cycle. And like every addictive cycle, it will continue until something intervenes or breaks it.

• • •

What the Pattern Costs

What I have learned from forty years of watching addiction and recovery is that the alcoholic/addict is not the only one who pays. Everyone in the system pays. The family reorganizes itself around the addict’s behavior. The colleagues learn to compensate. The culture shifts to accommodate what cannot afford to be named, because no one can imagine the alternative.

Inside tech organizations driven by the disease of more, the cost shows up in specific ways that leaders at every level will recognize.

The best people go quiet. They see the pattern, and they make the rational calculation that calling it out will cost them more than simply going along. And so they absorb: the impossible timelines, the moving targets, the ethical compromises framed as pragmatism. They do not leave immediately. They erode. Slowly, and then all at once.

Innovation narrows. When more is the only direction, the system stops asking what to build and starts asking only how fast to ship. Exploration gives way to extraction. The questions that produce genuinely new thinking (Who does this serve? What does this make possible? What are we not seeing?) get replaced by the only questions the compulsion can tolerate: How do we grow, and how fast can we go?

Trust disappears. Not in a dramatic collapse, but in the slow, steady accumulation of moments where people watched the system choose appetite over integrity. Each moment is survivable, but the accumulated effect is not.

If you are reading this and recognizing your own organization, not as a tech giant, maybe, but as a system that has its own version of the disease of more, I want you to know: the recognition is not the problem. That recognition is the beginning of something else entirely.

• • •

The Reframe

When I got sober, the thing that saved me was not abstinence. Abstinence was necessary as a starting point, but it was not the medicine. The medicine was connection. It was learning that the hunger I had been trying to feed with substances was actually a hunger for something the substances could never provide: an honest relationship with myself, with others, and with a purpose larger than my own survival.

I believe the same is true for the systems we have built.

If fear is what lives underneath addiction, then the antidote is not fearlessness. It is love. And I do not mean the word the way it gets used in corporate wellness programs or motivational keynotes; drained of force, reduced to a feeling. I mean love as a disciplined, generative, structural force. The force that tells the truth when systems reach their limit. The force that builds toward the highest good of all, not just the next quarter.

The opposite of addiction is not regulation, though regulation matters. It is not disruption, though the old patterns need to break. The opposite of a system organized around fear and compulsion is a system organized around love and creation. And that is not a soft idea. It is the hardest thing I have ever seen a leader do.

I learned something in recovery that the tech industry has not yet discovered: the thing you were chasing was never out there. The insatiability was never a resource problem. It was a design problem: a system built on fear, protected by authoritarian structures, sustained by the disease of more. Design problems have solutions, but only if you are willing to stop long enough to see what you have actually been building.

• • •

If you have felt the pull of more in your own leadership, the metric that keeps moving, the strategic plan that is never enough, the quiet voice inside you that says this system is optimizing for something I no longer believe in, you are not failing or deficient. Your sight is clear.

The fact that you can see it means you are ready for what comes next.

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They are not in the employee handbook or on the values wall in the lobby. They live in the space between what the company says it rewards and what it actually penalizes. People learn about them in the stories they’re told during their first week, and in the silence that follows when someone says the true thing in a meeting where truth was not supposed to be said out loud.

These norms are architectural. They determine who gets promoted and who gets managed out; what gets built and what gets buried; which leaders thrive and which leaders spend their energy surviving. If you are reading this and already thinking of a specific norm in your own organization, one you can see clearly and have never once heard anyone name out loud, then you already know what this essay is about.

The most dangerous norms are not the ones that people defend, but the ones people do not notice.

• • •

A story surfaced recently that made this structural reality unusually visible.

Fast Company reported on the professional workplace culture inside one of Jeffrey Epstein’s organizations; not the trafficking itself, but the layer around it: the office, the employees, the day-to-day operations of a system in which intelligent, capable people showed up to work inside an architecture designed to protect one man’s access at the expense of everyone else’s safety. The reporting revealed that noticing didn’t matter. You could see it but you could not afford to name it.

The Fast Company article is not about bad people; it doesn’t even focus on individuals. That article and this essay is about what happens when norms inside a system protect someone’s power at the expense of everyone else’s integrity. It’s about what happens when the cost of naming a problem is higher than the cost of absorbing it, and the cage gets built not by a single decision but by a thousand small agreements to look the other way.

The reason this story matters beyond its specifics is that the structural pattern it reveals is not unique to criminal enterprises. It operates, in diluted but recognizable form, inside organizations that consider themselves ethical.

• • •

How Norms Become Cages

A norm becomes a cage through a specific sequence. It is worth naming precisely, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it in your own organization.

First, a behavior that benefits someone with power becomes tolerated. Not endorsed, but tolerated. The distinction matters because tolerance feels like pragmatism. It feels like: this is how things work here. It feels like the cost of doing business.

In the recent Fast Company article cited above, Nilofer Merchant describes a pattern they call “the monologue”: a leader walks into a meeting with a shared agenda and simply takes over — a rambling story, a stray thought — and the room allows it. Everyone tolerates the behavior. The article argues that these monologues aren’t quirks; they’re quiet power seizures. Each time a room absorbs one, it teaches everyone present that only one voice matters, that dissent is risky, and that the job of everyone else is to compress themselves into whatever space is left.

— Adapted from Fast Company

The tolerance becomes structural. People who challenge the behavior are managed differently than people who absorb it. The challengers are labeled difficult, not aligned, lacking political savvy. The absorbers are promoted. The system has now begun selecting for compliance, and it is doing so without anyone making a conscious decision to select for compliance.

Then the structure becomes invisible. Enough time passes, enough people cycle through, that the norm is no longer recognized as a norm. It is recognized as reality. “This is just how it works here.” The cage is complete. The bars are made of assumed consensus.

What makes this sequence particularly costly is that at no point does anyone feel like they are building a cage. Everyone is making reasonable local decisions. The architect of the cage is the system itself, the accumulation of a thousand individual choices to tolerate, absorb, and adapt.

If you just read that sequence and recognize your own organization at every stage, I want you to know that the recognition itself is not the problem. The fact that you can see the cage is what separates you from the people who have stopped looking. What costs you is the distance between seeing it and being able to change it. That distance is real, and it is not your fault.

• • •

The Specific Cost to Leaders

I’ve watched this pattern operate for decades inside technology companies, and the cost is not abstract. It is specific, and it accumulates in the bodies and careers of the people absorbing it.

The leader who stopped raising a concern because the last three times she raised it, the response was a performance review about her “communication style.” The VP who knows the product is not ready to ship but approves the timeline because the CEO’s enthusiasm has been reframed as “vision” and challenging vision is not something this system rewards. The director who watches a peer get edged out for the same observation she made privately and decides, with the clarity of self-preservation, that her observation will stay private.

I know some of you who are reading this essay, not by name necessarily, but I know what you are carrying. I know you have made that calculation. I know it was not cowardice; rather, it was clarity about what the system would do with your honesty. And I know that the weight of choosing silence, when you know exactly what needs to be said, does not go away just because you made the rational choice.

None of these leaders including you have done anything wrong. All of them are navigating a structure that has made the cost of honesty higher than the cost of silence. The cage is the organization’s norm, not a reflection of an individual’s character.

The moral strain of living inside that cage, of knowing what you know and performing what the system requires, is not burnout. It is the slow erosion of coherence between who you are and how you lead.

• • •

Structure Versus Individual Choice

There is a persistent and comforting narrative that says: if you don’t like the culture, change it. Speak up. Be the change! Lead differently.

This narrative is not wrong, but it’s woefully incomplete. The “incompleteness” serves the system, because it places the problem in the individual rather than in the architecture.

A leader can speak up. The system can absorb that speech without changing anything. The meeting happens and the concern is noted. The follow-up email goes out. The behavior continues. The leader has now spent political capital and accomplished nothing except the documentation which serves as her own expendability.

Structural change requires structural intervention. It requires changing what the system rewards, not just what it says. It requires making the cost of the norm visible; not to the people absorbing it (they already know the cost intimately) but to the people benefiting from it, who have been insulated from the cost by the very structure the norm created.

This is the hardest work in organizational leadership: naming the norm that protects power and building the architecture that makes a different norm possible. It is harder than strategy, execution, or any restructuring. The people who have the power to change the norm are, by definition, the people the norm is currently serving.

• • •

The Bridge

This month I have been writing about Play, Creation, and Giving, three of the Seven Tenets that, taken together, describe what integrated leadership looks like in practice. This essay is the bridge; naming the structural force that makes integrated leadership so difficult to sustain.

You can have the values. You can see clearly. You can know exactly what kind of leader you want to be. Yet the norms of the system you operate inside can make that leadership functionally impossible, not because you lack courage, but because courage without structural support is just a faster route to exhaustion.

Next month, the writing turns to power, the kind that comes from coherence: the alignment between what you believe, what you build, and what you are willing to dismantle when those two things are no longer the same.

If you have read this far and felt something tighten in your chest, a feeling that’s part recognition and part grief for the years you spent inside a cage you could see but could not name, I want you to know that doesn’t indicate weakness or failure or anything to regret. It is the beginning of the structural clarity that makes change possible. You are not late; you’re ready for what comes next.

The cage we built is real. And the people who built it are not the ones who will take it apart. That work belongs to the leaders who can see the bars.

• • •

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I have watched this pattern in myself and in the leaders I work with for long enough now to name it precisely: values without capacity produce paralysis. The leader sees clearly. They know what matters. They can articulate the problem with devastating accuracy. And yet they cannot move. Seeing the problem and having the internal resources to act on what you see are two entirely different capacities, and most leadership development treats them as one.

Leadership doesn’t fail from lack of values. It fails from lack of capacity.

That sentence landed on me this month with a weight I was not expecting, because it reframed the entire problem. The leaders I see quietly struggling while holding tight to a prescribed outward appearance, the ones navigating moral strain, managing the distance between what they believe and how the system asks them to operate are not deficient in character. They are depleted in capacity. Their values are intact, but the energy to act on them is not.

What Capacity Actually Means

Capacity is not productivity. It is not bandwidth or time management or the ability to absorb more. Capacity, in the context of the Seven Tenets, is the internal architecture that allows a leader to hold complexity without collapsing into either rigidity or paralysis.

Think of it structurally. A bridge that can hold ten thousand pounds is not a better bridge than one that holds five thousand. It is a bridge with a different architecture: wider footings, deeper anchors, more distributed load. The weight capacity did not come from “trying harder;” rather, it came from building differently.

When I wrote about Play a few weeks ago, I was writing about one dimension of architecture, the capacity to experiment without needing to control the outcome. When I wrote about Creation, I was writing about another: the capacity to build toward something you cannot yet fully see. When I wrote about Giving, I was writing about a third: the capacity to orient your work toward something larger than your own role or your individual success.

None of these capacities are cognitive and they are not primarily strategic. They are structural. They live in the nervous system, in the patterns of recovery and engagement that a leader has built or failed to build over time, in the degree to which a leader’s external decisions are aligned with their internal values. A leader who is spending significant energy managing that misalignment, who is performing one set of values while privately navigating another, does not have capacity available for the kinds of creation and contribution that the current moment requires. They’ve allocated their capacity to managing that misalignment within a system that creates continuous dissonance.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a structural observation that changes how you approach everything.

What Expansion Feels Like

My writing this month did not go the way I planned it. I’ve been writing about the Seven Tenets of Integrated Leadership, not as a framework to be studied but as a sequence to be lived and I had the time and thematic arc mapped. Play, then Creation, then Giving, then this synthesis. Clean, sequential; the kind of progression that makes sense on a content calendar and satisfies the part of me that wants intellectual order.

What actually happened was messier. The Play essay opened something I was not expecting: a looseness, an irreverence, a willingness to write the thing I did not know I was going to write. The Creation essay hit a nerve, not because I said something new but because I said the thing I had been circling for months and finally stopped circling: that speed without discernment is vandalism. The Giving essay moved me in a way I did not anticipate because legacy is a word I have begun to personally consider.

That progression, beginning with loosening, then building, then releasing, was not a content strategy. It was what resulted when I followed the framework I’ve been teaching and let it do what it was designed to do.

And my leadership changed; not my ideas about leadership, but my actual leadership. It showed up in my conversations with clients, the questions I asked, the things I had the capacity and the willingness to hold without resolution. The things I was willing to say that I had previously calibrated out of my language because they felt too direct or too structural or too much.

That is what expanded capacity feels like. It didn’t feel like more energy, more hours, or more effort. It feels cleaner, quieter; it has a wider base. I’m carrying the same load, but it’s distributed differently. Expanded capacity gives me spaciousness to act where there used to be only room to see.

The Earned Lightness

There is also a quality I have been watching for in the leaders I work with that I have not been able to name precisely until now. It is not confidence, projected when you know the answer. It’s also not limited to resilience, which is what you draw on when the answer collapses.

This quality is lighter than either of those things. It shows up as a steadiness that is not performed, a willingness to hold uncertainty without anxiety. It’s the capacity to say “I don’t know yet” and have it sound like authority rather than evasion.

I am calling it earned lightness. It is the specific quality that arrives when a leader has done the work of aligning their internal values with their external decisions, has restored enough capacity to act on what they see, and has stopped spending energy on the performance of leadership in order to actually lead. It’s a state of ease.

Earned lightness is what the Tenets produce when they are not studied but inhabited. It is not the absence of weight. It is the evidence that the weight has been properly distributed.

What Stays

A settling happened in me this week, the kind that happens when the ground beneath a structure stops shifting and starts holding steady. You stop bracing and start building. The posture changes before the strategy does.

I do not yet know what April will ask of this work. The theme shifts to power, which is a word I have considered carefully for a long time. Power is what most of the leaders I work with have in abundance and feel conflicted in some ways about using. It is the resource they are most afraid of misusing and least equipped to deploy with integrity. That is the next territory.

Before moving into it, though, I want to reiterate what I am taking with me from this month:

Capacity is not a ceiling you are born under. It is an architecture you build.

The Tenets are not seven separate disciplines. They are one practice, viewed from seven angles.

The leaders who will navigate this moment: the AI acceleration, the moral complexity, the structural pressure, are not the ones with the strongest convictions., but they are the ones with the broadest foundations.

For me, something changes in the writing, in the thinking, in the actual experience of leading, when I stop performing the work and let the work perform me. It makes me ready to build. What does it look like for you?

• • •

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What are you building that will outlast your role?

The silence that follows is almost always longer than you would expect from someone who runs a two-hundred-person engineering org or sits on an executive team navigating a billion-dollar product line and is used to answering complex questions at speed.

This question does something particular. It interrupts the operating logic that most senior leaders have internalized so deeply they no longer notice it: that leadership is measured by what you extract, from systems, from teams, from markets, from yourself — not by what you leave behind when the extraction stops.

The Extraction Default

Most leadership cultures are organized around a single, unspoken assumption: the role exists to produce. Revenue, growth, efficiency, competitive advantage; the leader’s value is a function of what they deliver, and delivery is measured in units that can be captured, reported, and compared to forecast.

There is nothing inherently wrong with production. Organizations need it. Markets reward it. Careers are built on it.

The problem is what happens when production becomes the only orientation, when the entire architecture of a leader’s attention, energy, and decision-making is organized around what can be taken from the system rather than what can be contributed to it. When extraction becomes the default, the system starts consuming what it was built to sustain. That erosion is not dramatic. It is incremental, structural, and almost invisible until the cost becomes undeniable.

It shows up as the senior leader who has optimized their team’s output so effectively that no one on the team is developing their skills. As the founder who has scaled the product but hollowed out the culture that made the product possible. As the VP who delivers every quarter and leaves behind an organization that cannot function without them.

That last one is often celebrated. It should not be. A system that depends entirely on the person who built it is not a legacy. It is a liability dressed in loyalty.

Giving as Architecture

The fourth tenet of the Integrated Leadership framework is Giving: Love Beyond the Self. It is the most structurally misunderstood of the seven.

Giving, in common leadership language, tends to signal self-sacrifice: the leader who works the longest hours, absorbs the most pressure, shields the team from organizational dysfunction by taking it all on personally. This kind of giving is not generosity. It is erosion with a halo. It burns through leaders at exactly the rate their organizations pretend not to notice.

Structural giving is different. It asks: What am I building that strengthens the system beyond my presence in it?

This is the question that separates legacy from performance. Performance asks what you can deliver while you are in the role. Legacy asks what continues to function, what continues to grow, to create, to serve, after you leave it.

The leaders I have seen build genuinely lasting things did not set out to build a legacy. They set out to build conditions. Conditions where talent develops without depending on one mentor. Where the culture holds its values under pressure rather than abandoning them the moment the founder steps back. Where the architecture of the organization can carry the weight of its own growth.

That kind of building is not extraction. It is contribution. It requires a fundamentally different orientation than the one most leadership cultures reward.

What Extraction Actually Costs

The cost of extraction-oriented leadership is not theoretical. It is measurable in the specific ways organizations deteriorate when the logic of taking governs the logic of building.

Teams led by extractive leaders develop a particular pattern: high output in the short term, high attrition over time, and a hollowing out of institutional knowledge that only becomes visible when the leader transitions and the system they held together by force of will quietly collapses. The collapse is never attributed to the leader who left. It is attributed to the people who remain. That misattribution is part of the structure.

Extraction also compounds. A leader who optimizes for their own metrics teaches their direct reports to optimize for theirs. The VP who hoards information to maintain influence creates directors who do the same. The system doesn’t just tolerate extraction: it replicates it, level by level, until the entire organization is organized around protection rather than contribution.

This is the structural dynamic underneath many of the culture problems that organizations spend millions trying to fix with engagement surveys and team offsites. The problem is not that people are disengaged. The problem is that the system is designed to reward extraction, and engagement is the first thing extraction consumes.

• • •

I worked with a leader last year who had spent a decade building one of the most respected engineering organizations in her company. When she told me she was considering leaving, the first thing she said was not about the next opportunity. It was this: “I want to make sure it holds strong when I’m gone.”

That sentence is the difference between performance and legacy. Not what I built while I was here, but what holds when I leave.

Giving, in the structural sense, is not about depleting yourself for the system. It is about building something into the system that is stronger than your presence in it. It is about orienting your leadership toward what outlasts the role, not because the role doesn’t matter, but because the role was never the point.

A system is only successful if it strengthens the whole. That is not an aspiration. It is an architectural decision. And it is available to every leader willing to ask the question that the extraction default was designed to make invisible:

What are you building that will outlast your role?

Not long ago, I would have written about organizations that had forgotten how to create, companies trapped in pure optimization mode, recycling or refining what already existed because they had lost the capacity to imagine something new. That was the prevailing drift of the late corporate era: institutions so devoted to efficiency that they had squeezed out the space where genuine creation happens.

That drift has not disappeared. But in the current AI gold rush, the problem is not that organizations cannot create. It is that they are creating frantically, recklessly, and often without asking the most basic question creation demands: should this product exist?

Products are shipped before the use case has been validated. AI features are being bolted onto platforms not because users need them but because the market expects them. Speed to delivery overruns security and guardrails. User experience is treated as something to refine later, after the land grab. And leaders across the industry are making build decisions driven not by a cohesive vision but by the fear of being left behind.

This type of building is not creation. It’s panic cosplaying innovation.

The Distinction That Still Matters

More consequential now than it was a year ago is the distinction between creation and optimization.

Optimization asks: how do we do this better? Creation asks: should we be doing this at all?

In a stable environment, both questions have their place. Right now, though, we are not in a stable environment. We are in a moment where the tools for building have gotten so powerful, so fast, that the capacity to create has outpaced the wisdom to discern what is worth creating. In the absence of that wisdom, something else fills the gap: speed, market pressure, and fear.

The organizations I see right now are not struggling with the old problem of too much optimization and not enough creation. They are struggling with a new problem: too much creation and not enough discernment. They are building because they can, because their competitors are, because the board expects an AI strategy by next quarter. They’re not building because they have done the harder work of asking what their customers actually need, what their organization is structurally capable of delivering with integrity, and what the long-term cost of shipping something without truly understanding the impacts of it will be.

The symptom is specific: an organization in panic-creation mode cannot distinguish between a genuine strategic opportunity and a fear-driven response to market pressure. It builds, it ships, and it finishes nothing well. It exhausts its people in the process, because panic-creation doesn’t ask whether the work matters, whether it will survive, or what it costs the world to exist. It only asks: are you finished yet?

Why Control Increases as Trust Decreases

Genuine creation, the kind that produces things worth building, requires a capacity to tolerate a specific kind of discomfort: not knowing exactly where you are going.

This discomfort isn’t caused by vagueness or lack of strategy. It is the honest acknowledgment that genuine creation moves through territory that has not been mapped yet. Destinations can’t be fully specified in advance, and some of the most important decisions will be made in response to what you discover along the way rather than according to a plan you made before you started.

Most organizational cultures are not built to tolerate a process that reveals itself one step at a time. They are built to reduce uncertainty, to create predictability, to produce outcomes that can be measured and reported and compared to forecast.

What I have observed, and what the current moment makes painfully visible, is that when trust inside an organization is low, leaders respond to uncertainty in one of two ways. Some increase control: approvals lengthen, decisions move up the hierarchy, and the space for genuine creation disappears. Others do the opposite: they abandon discernment entirely and build everything as fast as possible, because speed feels like progress even when it is not. Both are fear responses. One looks like paralysis and the other looks like momentum. Neither is creation.

Trust is the operating condition for creation. Control is what fills the void when trust is absent. Reckless speed is what fills the void when both trust and courage are absent: the courage to say not yet in a market that only rewards right now.

The Intelligence That Speed Excludes

There is a particular kind of knowing that cannot be forced, scheduled, or produced on demand, and without a doubt, you have experienced it. The solution that arrived on a walk when you’d stopped trying to solve the problem. The direction that became clear during a conversation you hadn’t planned to have.

This type of knowing is complex cognition. The brain continues processing after the conscious mind has moved on. Pattern recognition happens below the level of deliberate thought. Connections form that linear analysis can’t reach. When there is space available, if the pressure to produce has lifted enough, breakthroughs surface.

Most organizational cultures are designed to eliminate that space, and the current AI race for market dominance has made it worse. When every competitor is shipping weekly, the internal pressure to produce visible output becomes relentless. The white space where genuine insight forms, that space where a leader might realize that the product the team is building is solving the wrong problem, or that the architecture needs to be rethought before scaling, or that the fastest path to market is also the fastest path to a trust-destroying security failure, is the first thing sacrificed.

The intelligence that solves complex problems is not the same intelligence that created them. It requires different conditions to function, conditions that the current obsession with speed is systematically destroying.

What Creation Actually Asks of a Leader in This Moment

Something I think most leadership development content obscures is that the hardest act of creation in the current environment is not building; rather, it’s choosing what not to build.

The leaders I work with are not struggling with a lack of ideas or a lack of tools or a lack of market opportunity. They are drowning in all three. The AI moment has produced a paradox of possibility: so many things can be built that the act of choosing what should be built has become the most strategically important and most undervalued leadership skill in the industry.

Saying “we are not going to build that” requires more courage right now than saying “let’s ship it.”

It requires the willingness to look like you are moving slowly when your competitors are moving fast; trusting that disciplined creation will outlast frantic production; an organizational culture where the question “should we?” is considered as strategically important as “can we?”

What this moment in tech actually offers beneath the noise, beneath the pressure, beneath the race to ship is a genuinely rare architectural opportunity. It’s a chance to build systems that don’t just move fast, but think well. Systems where “I don’t know” is a signal to lean in, not a liability to manage. The founders who recognize this opportunity right now, who are willing to do the harder design work of building trust into the structure before the structure calcifies are the ones who will look back on this era and know they built something that lasted. This is the moment to build foundations based on trust. Not later. Now.

The leaders I have watched build genuinely valuable things, not features rushed to market, not AI wrappers bolted onto existing products, but things that actually shifted what was possible for their customers, have almost all described the experience in similar terms. Uncertainty that didn’t resolve and periods of apparent regression. No lack of a strong temptation to collapse back into what was already known, because at least that felt like forward motion. Most importantly, they have the discipline to resist the market’s demand that they build faster when what the work actually needed was to build slower and with more integrity.

What allowed them to stay in the creative process was not confidence that their idea would work. It was something more like coherence, a deep alignment between who they were and what they were building. The uncertainty of the outcome didn’t threaten their sense of themselves. They could be wrong about the product and still be right about the direction. They could not yet know where they were going and still trust that the going was worth it.

This is why I argue that the capacity for creation is not primarily a cognitive skill. It is a function of integrity, of the degree to which a leader’s external work is aligned with their internal values. Leaders who are navigating moral strain, who are spending significant energy managing the distance between what they believe and how they act, do not have that capacity available. They cannot afford the vulnerability of not knowing. They need the certainty that either control or speed provides even when both are exactly what’s preventing the creation they’re supposed to be leading.

When Speed Becomes Vandalism

Vision without execution is hallucination, execution without vision is drift, and speed without discernment is vandalism.

That last point is not hyperbole. Vandalism is not incompetence or malice. Vandalism is the act of moving through something of value without the craft, the care, or the judgment to leave it better than you found it. We have all seen what it looks like in practice: an AI feature shipped to millions of users before the edge cases were understood, a platform scaled before the trust infrastructure was ready, a product that worked in the demo and fractured in the wild. When something goes wrong with a product, the team isn’t the problem, it’s the pace that drove them.

The integration that genuine creation requires is not mysterious, but it is demanding.

It requires the capacity to receive what is not yet formed, to sense the direction before the destination is visible, to feel into the future that wants to be built rather than only the future that can be planned. This is the intuitive dimension that most organizational cultures have trained leaders to distrust, and that most leadership development programs studiously avoid.

Creation requires the capacity to build fully, translating vision into decisions, decisions into action, and action into reality. Creation demands rigor, the execution, the ability to hold people accountable and maintain standards and make difficult choices when the work requires it.

And creation now requires a third capacity that the current moment has made non-negotiable: the willingness to say no. To look at something the team can build, that the market seems to want, that the board is asking for, and to say, with authority and conviction, that building it right matters more than building it first. The cost of shipping something without guardrails, without a clear use case, without adequate security, is not just a technical debt to be managed later. It is a trust debt, which compounds faster than any other kind.

A system that rewards vision without execution produces charisma without consequence: compelling, energizing, and ultimately unable to build anything that outlasts the enthusiasm of the person at the front of the room. Style over substance. A system that rewards execution without vision produces precision in the wrong direction: valuable when the environment is stable, catastrophically misplaced when it isn’t. A system that rewards both vision and execution but has engineered out discernment is the system we have right now. It is producing brilliant, fast, relentless leaders who will spend the next decade doing the slow, expensive, trust-destroying work of cleaning up the vandalism they are currently shipping. The system is not broken; it is working exactly as designed. That is the problem.

What the current moment requires is not a new kind of leader. It requires a new kind of system, one that makes a new kind of leadership possible, not exceptional. A system that creates the conditions for vision and execution to coexist with discernment. A system that tolerates the productive discomfort of not-yet-knowing without collapsing it into a false resolution of control or the momentum of speed. A system that rewards leaders who can be wrong about the specifics and right about the direction and know the difference. We have spent decades building systems that optimize for the first two and quietly eliminate the third. The cost of that design decision is coming due.

Everyone is building right now. But building is not the same as creating, and that difference is not a philosophical nicety. It is the difference between a product worth building and one that will need to be rebuilt, recalled, or apologized for. The difference between a system designed for discernment and one that has mistaken panic for momentum.

The organizations that get this right will not be the ones that built the most or shipped the fastest. They will be the ones that asked, early and seriously and at the level where systems are designed: Should this exist? Can we build it with integrity? What does it cost the world to exist?

That is not a question a single leader can answer alone, inside a system that was never designed to hold it. It is a structural decision, determining what gets built, how fast, and at what cost, and this decision has to be made by the people with the power to build differently.

The question is not whether a different system is possible. It is whether the people with the power to build it right now will choose to.

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Your zone of interest is what you care about. Your zone of impact is what you can actually influence.

Most of us have been conditioned to believe these zones are identical—that we should focus our energy only on what directly affects us, that attempting to influence anything beyond our immediate sphere is naive idealism or virtue signaling. This is perhaps the most successful psychological operation ever conducted: convincing the majority that we are powerless to affect change beyond our immediate circumstances.

But this is a lie big tech designed to keep us docile.

Your zone of impact is vastly larger than you’ve been led to believe. Every conversation you have, every dollar you spend, every vote you cast, every social media post you share or don’t share, every time you choose to speak up or stay silent—these are all exercises of power. Big tech has spent billions convincing you otherwise, shrinking your sense of agency so you’ll keep feeding their platforms, buying their products, and staying silent while they dismantle democracy. The question is whether you’re exercising that power consciously and strategically, or letting them profit from your paralysis.

The civil rights movement wasn’t won by people staying in their zones of interest. It happened when activists used every tool available, including strategic boycotts that targeted the economic power structures keeping oppression in place. Labor rights weren’t secured by workers who only cared about their individual paychecks; they organized collective action that forced entire industries to change. Women’s suffrage wasn’t achieved by women who limited their concerns to their own households; they built networks that challenged the systems designed to silence them. LGBTQ+ rights weren’t advanced by people who only advocated for themselves. They created visibility and community that shifted culture itself.

Today’s power structures look different. Tech platforms control information flow, algorithms shape what you see and think, and digital monopolies extract wealth from every transaction, but the principles of resistance remain the same.

Every significant social advance in human history has required people to expand beyond their zones of interest into their zones of impact, risking their comfort, their security, their social standing for the benefit of people they would never meet, for future generations they would never see.

Living in the Modern Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 Zone of Interest exposes the most terrifying truth about evil: it doesn’t require monsters. It requires ordinary people who perfect the art of not seeing, not hearing, not knowing what happens just beyond their manicured lawns. The film shows us a family living their comfortable domestic life: garden parties, bedtime stories, morning coffee, while systematic murder unfolds mere yards away. With a few modern adjustments to the settings, it could be any upper middle class home in 2025 America.

We’re living in that moment now. While Palestinians face systematic extermination funded by your tax dollars, while immigrant families are terrorized in communities across America, while democracy itself hangs by a thread, most Americans remain focused on mortgage rates, school districts, and whether their 401k will survive the next market correction.

This willful blindness isn’t accidental. It’s engineered by those who profit from your paralysis.

How the Broligarchy Manufactured Your Powerlessness

What investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr termed the “broligarchy,” a predominantly male tech elite, has perfected the art of keeping you compliant while they dismantle democracy. They’ve made your comfort contingent on your silence.

Your Netflix subscription keeps you entertained while democracy crumbles. Your Amazon Prime delivery arrives while genocide unfolds with your tax dollars. Your social media algorithm feeds you just enough socially appropriate outrage to feel informed but not enough truth to demand action. Every convenience has been designed to make resistance feel impossible while participation feels uncomfortably unavoidable.

But here’s what they don’t want you to know: their entire system collapses the moment you stop feeding it.

Consider the power you’re exercising right now without realizing it. Where you bank determines which projects get funding. What you buy shapes which companies thrive. Which platforms you use dictates which voices get amplified. Whether you speak up or stay silent at work, at school, in your community—all of this creates the culture that either enables authoritarianism or builds resistance.

The broligarchy has spent billions convincing you that these choices don’t matter, that you’re just one person, that real change requires political connections you don’t have. They need you to believe this lie because the truth terrifies them: when ordinary people recognize their collective power and start using it strategically, systems change fast.

Your Power in Action

Every major social movement in American history started with people like you making choices that felt small but created unstoppable momentum. Rosa Parks wasn’t a politician; she was a seamstress who refused to give up her seat. The lunch counter sit-ins weren’t organized by celebrities; they were started by college students who decided they’d had enough.

Today’s resistance looks different but requires the same courage. Move your money from banks funding fossil fuels and weapons manufacturers to credit unions that invest in community development. Cancel subscriptions to platforms that amplify hate and misinformation. Shop local and buy from worker-owned cooperatives when possible. Use your voice in meetings, at dinner tables, in community spaces to name what’s happening and what you’re choosing to do differently.

None of these actions alone will topple fascism, but together they create the economic and social pressure that forces systems to change. The broligarchy is counting on you to stay isolated, to believe you’re the only one who feels this way, to think everyone else has made peace with genocide and authoritarianism.

But look around. The discomfort is everywhere. People are hungry for permission to act, for proof that resistance is possible, for community with others who refuse to accept the unacceptable.

Build the Community That Sustains Resistance

Your power multiplies when you connect with others who share your values and your commitment to action. Find one local organization working on an issue you care about: immigrant rights, environmental justice, economic equality, democracy reform. Show up. Not just with money, but with your presence, your skills, your voice.

Join or create mutual aid networks in your community. Attend city council meetings. Get involved in local politics where your vote and voice carry the most weight. Build relationships with neighbors who can support each other through what’s coming.

The broligarchy thrives on your isolation and despair and overwhelm. Community is the energized antidote to both.

The Choice Before Us

When fear takes hold, it’s human to narrow the scope of what you care about to your immediate survival. But the tech billionaires running American policy are the most frightened people on earth, and their fear is creating the very conditions that threaten everyone’s survival—including yours.

You can continue feeding the machine that’s destroying democracy, or you can starve it while building the alternative. You can stay isolated in your zone of interest, or you can step into your zone of impact and discover how much power you actually have.

The civil rights activists, suffragettes, and labor organizers who came before us didn’t wait for perfect conditions or guaranteed outcomes. They acted because action was the only moral choice available, and their courage created the freedoms we still enjoy today.

Your moment is now. Your power is real. Your community is waiting.

What will you choose?