Everything you cultivated for yourself now becomes something you can share. You’ve looked ahead, you’ve let things go, you’ve looked at yourself and you’ve prepared to re-enter. Now what happens?

The typical approach would be to come back to work with a fake enthusiasm or a business-as-usual posture. But real leadership finds itself in a messier middle, and this is where the real work lives. Both nature and psychology have been trying to tell us the same thing about it.

Ecologically, the most alive place in any landscape is the ecotone or the ragged edge where two ecosystems meet and neither one fully wins. That’s where the most species live and where the most exchange happens. Re-entry isn’t the return to one world or the other. You are the ecotone now: part of what you were before, part of what the fallow season grew in you, and the friction between them is not a problem to solve. It’s your habitat where things grow.

Psychologically, this is the threshold or the liminal space that every rite of passage builds in on purpose. You’ve left, you’ve been changed, and now you stand at the doorway that isn’t quite the old room and isn’t quite a new one. The temptation to rush through it is enormous, because thresholds can be uncomfortable.

What you cultivated wants to be shared, not announced and sharing, in an ecosystem, isn’t a broadcast. It becomes like a mycorrhiza, mutually beneficial. It moves underground through the roots feeding the trees that need it without anyone watching. Real leadership in the turning looks less like standing on the mountain with news, and more like quietly rejoining the network with something to offer, and staying long enough for it to take root.

In the last week of The Turning, we explore 5 daily actions that can help you when you are bringing a team, direct reports or anyone else along with you. This is the stuff people remember about you more than anything else.

If you are looking for an option to extend this experience, I’m preparing for an April 2027 edition of The Field Trip Co. expeditions.

Pre-register to get on the list for this unique and transformative trip.

Here’s some scenes from this year’s cohort.

Week 5: Share the harvest

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You’ve named what you want to harvest. You’ve let go of things that you didn’t need to hang onto. You’ve taken a deep dive into better understanding yourself. Do you have a clearer picture? Did you take the time to map the things you wanted to harvest come November?

If you don’t have answers to these, it might be worth your time to inquire about them because week 4 is about the re-entry and how to protect the version of you that will come back to work. This only works if you’ve done a bit of planting.

Because you know what typically happens: The clarity you found this summer will evaporate within days of the inbox reopening. Re-entry isn’t a willpower problem, it’s a design problem and this is how to build the first two weeks so the you who returns is the one that stays.

Next week is the last week of The Turning. If you haven’t taken a moment to reflect on the earlier weeks, this is a great moment to pause, grab your coffee or tea and take a moment to define what matters most right now.

If you want to dive deeper into these topics with other leaders, consider getting yourself on the waitlist for our 2027 expedition.

Week 4: Get ready for the re-entry

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I’ve recently left a job and company I loved working for. I spent 13 years of my life fully invested in naming myself and naming that brand. I grew and changed in that soil unlike any other time in my life.

But now that I’m out of it, I can see how much of my identity was wrapped up in being known as the person who worked at that company. I even had some folks say to me, “Who will you be if you leave it?”

My answer? I’ll be me.

But who is this me now that I live without that extended tagline? It seems like a perfectly simple question to ask but in fact, the depths we can plumb are significant when we realise how much our identity shapes our living and leading. The way we move through the world depends on this inquiry.

Two weeks ago we cleared the ground to plant. Last week, we set down the weight we'd been carrying. Now the field is open, and you're lighter than you've been in months. But it’s equally important for us to not rush right past the next key question: Who is actually doing the planting? Our identity is what outlasts our job titles. It’s our core beliefs about ourselves that sustain us when the weather shifts or the world changes. Treat this week as one that requires a deeper investigation. Because the roots that run deep may need attending.

Here are your 5 days of pre-harvest preparation. Take 15 minutes each day to pause with these.

Week 3: The Identity Question

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I’ve taken on two significant pilgrimages in my life. They were amazing but each time, I would pack too much. You’d think I’d learn from the painful blisters that grew on my feet. Let’s just say it was a lesson in how the weight you carry can inform how you walk and how painful it can be if you don’t pack light. It’s become a powerful metaphor for me.

In the first week of August, we talked about planting and that August is the quiet window where the whole next season can be decided. But there’s a step most of us skip in our rush to begin: We forget that we can’t plant in crowded ground.

Starting fresh doesn’t begin by picking things up. It begins by putting things down.

We’ve been taught the opposite. When we want a new season, we usually reach for more: more goals, systems, and resolve. And then we wonder why we feel heavier every year or why the fresh start never quite feels fresh. It’s because we’re trying to plant a new life on top of everything we’re already carrying.

And we are carrying so much. The projects that outlived their purpose. The commitments we said yes to in a different season. The stories about who we are that stopped being true years ago. The invisible weight we’ve dragged since spring without ever setting it on the ground to look at it. Most of us have stopped noticing the load entirely. We just call it “being busy” and keep walking.

But you already know that somewhere under all that doing, is the stuff you’ve been carrying that isn’t yours to carry anymore. You’ve just never been given permission to put it down.

The Turning: Week 2

If you’ve already explored the first week, you should have a sense of the things you want to harvest this fall. This week offers 5 days of setting things down so you can travel lighter as you prepare to plant. A new season doesn’t begin with what you take on. It begins with what you’re finally willing to leave behind.

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Across much of Europe, August is the month that everything stops and people take their much deserved and desired holidays. While this may not be your reality, we can note that the light is already changing in many parts of the world as we start this month of August.

August comes from the Latin adjective augustus meaning venerable, majestic, consecrated, and worthy of reverence but its root is augēre which means to increase, to grow, and to nourish into being. That same root gives us augment, author, augur, and auction, which are all words about something growing and becoming more.

Before the current of fall pulls you under, this is the month to stand on the bank and choose how you enter. We don’t need January, and we shouldn’t wait until September.

Welcome to The Turning: A 5-week field trip for wild leaders

Almost every “fall reset” gets it backwards. They treat September as the starting line. The clean notebook with the sharpened focus ready for the great return. But a farmer would laugh at that because September isn’t when the work begins. It’s when you find out whether you did the work at all. September is the harvest. You reap in the fall exactly what went into the ground in the quieter weeks before it.

This makes August a decisive month. August is the planting window where the unglamorous and invisible determine the whole season. By the time you feel that back-to-school itch in September, the ground has already been set. You’ll be harvesting choices you either made or avoided making right now.

So the question for a leader in August isn’t how do I rest before it all starts again. It’s sharper than that. It becomes what am I putting in the ground, while it’s still quiet enough to plant?

Here’s how to use the weeks you have left. It’s called The Turning and you can expect 5 actionable posts to help you chart the path. This isn’t a reset read. Think of it as a field trip for your wild leader soul in a time of wild unknowns.

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There has never been a cheaper time to have an answer. You can type almost any question into a machine and get something fluent and confident back before you’ve finished forming the thought. It feels like a superpower. But something quietly gets trained out of us in the process: The willingness to sit with not knowing long enough for a real question to form.

We are becoming very good at retrieving answers and very out of practice at wondering.

I keep noticing this in the leaders I have been working with lately. It’s not a lack of intelligence. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. They are so fast, fluent, and used to being the ones who know, that curiosity has started to feel like a liability. To wonder out loud is to admit you don’t already have it handled and in most rooms, that admission costs you.

There is a shift worth paying attention to: in an age where answers are instant and infinite, the answer is no longer the scarce thing.

The good question is. When a machine can produce a plausible response to anything, the person who can ask the question no one else thought to ask is the one who finds the opening. Wonder isn’t a soft, childlike quality. In the age of the machine, it is the new edge.

What we lose when answers get cheap

It is widely known that children ask hundreds of questions a day, and that the number diminishes as we age. Somewhere between childhood and the corner office, we trade asking for knowing. We learn that questions signal ignorance and answers signal competence, and we optimise accordingly.

The problem is that the environments we’re now leading in reward the person with the most answers. They should be rewarding the person who can see the thing everyone else has stopped looking at, because you won’t see what you’ve stopped wondering about. Being the expert can increase your blind spots and blind spots can be bad for business.

The science of wonder

Wonder does measurable things to the brain.

When neuroscientists put people in a state of curiosity and then scanned them, they found that curiosity switches on the brain’s reward circuitry1 (the same system involved in pleasure and motivation) and that this state doesn’t just help you learn the thing you’re curious about. It primes the hippocampus so that you better remember incidental information you encountered while curious, even material you didn’t care about. This means that curiosity doesn’t narrow your attention into one answer. It opens a window through which everything nearby gets absorbed more richly.

Awe goes even further. Studies show that experiences of awe increase cognitive flexibility and openness. People become measurably more willing to revise their existing mental models to take in new information, and more creative in the tasks that follow. Awe interrupts the certainty that says, “I already know how this works.” That interruption is precisely the capacity a leader needs when the terrain keeps changing underneath them.

The business case is no longer speculative. A field study run through INSEAD found that a one-unit rise in curiosity was associated with 34% greater creativity. Curious teams make fewer decision-making errors, communicate better under pressure, and adapt faster. Yet in a survey of 3000 employees, only about a quarter said they felt curious in their jobs on a regular basis, and roughly 70% reported barriers to asking more questions at work.2 Most leaders say they value inquisitive minds but in practice, most organisations quietly stifle them because curiosity looks like risk and inefficiency in the short term.

This gap between what leaders claim to want and what their systems actually reward is the opportunity space. The leaders who close it get an advantage that is very hard to copy.

Why should we care about it now?

For most of the modern era, being useful meant knowing things and processing them quickly. That was the territory we competed on. It’s also the territory machines have increasingly taken over. Everything that can be retrieved, summarised, and answered will be retrieved, summarised, and answered faster than you can.

What can’t be automated is the wondering that comes before the question is even legible. It’s the noticing that something is off, the interest in a detail no one flagged, or the willingness to hold a problem open instead of rushing to close it. Wonder is the foundation of every good question, and questions are the one thing the machine can’t originate for you. It can answer anything you ask. It cannot decide what’s worth asking. That part is still yours, and it’s becoming the whole job.

You cannot manufacture wonder by trying harder or scheduling it into a sprint. But you can put yourself in the conditions where it tends to return and those conditions are almost always somewhere beyond your job.

A leader who competes on answers is competing with the machine. A leader who protects their capacity to wonder becomes the one thing automation makes more valuable, not less.

Ways to go wild this week (special content for paid subscribers)

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This past January, at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, the historian Yuval Noah Harari stood in front of a room full of the world’s most credentialed people and quietly dismantled the thing their credentials rest on.

His argument? Since Descartes, humans have defined themselves by their capacity to think. You’ve heard it before: ”I think, therefore I am.” We are not the fastest or strongest species but thinking has been our territory. And if thinking means putting words in order, AI is being touted to do it better than us. “Everything made of words will be taken over by AI,” he told the room. Whether humans still have a place, he argued, depends on what we do with everything that isn’t words.

He’s been circling this for years using this phrase: useless class. He named the fear back in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Elon University has since asked hundreds of experts what being human in 2035 will look like with a recurring prediction of widespread crises of purpose and meaning.

If you’re leading inside a system you can’t change, you don’t need me to tell you any of this. You’ve felt it in the meeting where your best thinking got flattened into a KPI metric or when the restructure started treating your team as capacity, not as people.

There is this quiet dread that our value is only as durable as our output.

Here’s the kicker: The crisis Harari describes isn’t really about jobs. It’s about our identity. Most of us have built who we are on being useful because that’s what our systems reward, and rewards are how systems teach us who to be. When your identity is anchored to output, losing a function doesn’t feel like a schedule change. It feels like a disappearing act.

Harari points to what remains: it isn’t smarter thinking, but rather what lives beneath the words. It’s feeling, presence and wisdom that can’t be tokenised. The good news is that these aren’t talents you either have or don’t. They’re capacities, and capacities grow where they’re practiced. The harder news: almost nothing in a leader’s calendar offers the space to practice them.

So where do you grow and nurture these capacities?

• They grow in conversations with no agenda. Not one-on-ones with talking points but actual conversations where you don’t know where it’s going and you’re not steering. Presence is mostly the discipline of not rushing to the next useful thing, and an agenda is a pre-commitment to rush.

• They grow wherever you’re a beginner. Learning something you’re bad at (a language, a craft, an instrument) returns you to the state where attention is all you have. Mastery lets you run on autopilot; being new at something makes autopilot impossible.

• They grow in the presence of difficulty you can’t fix. Sitting with a colleague in grief, a friend in crisis, or a parent in decline without solving anything is perhaps the purest training in being rather than doing. Nothing useful is possible. Only presence is required. Most leaders instinctively avoid these but in reality, they’re where the deepest capacity gets built.

• They grow through the body. Feeling is not an idea, and you can’t think your way back to it. Walking without a podcast, working with your hands, cooking, or swimming can return you to your senses and train the non-verbal knowing that Harari says machines can’t touch. Wisdom traditions figured this out long ago; it’s why every one of them involves the body, not just the book.

• They grow in silence and in nature. These are two things that make no demands and generate no output. Ten unscheduled minutes before a hard conversation will change the conversation. Time under a big sky changes your sense of scale and what matters most.

• They grow when you go somewhere you haven’t been. New places strip away the roles we hold at home. That’s the field trip feeling and it’s less about distance than about arriving somewhere your title doesn’t matter.

You may not be able to change your system but you can change what you anchor to inside it. A leader anchored to output will defend output at any cost, including their people, and eventually themselves. A leader anchored to presence, curiosity, and care becomes the one thing automation makes more valuable, not less.

Ways to go wild this week (for paid subscribers)

I continue to have conversations with leaders and this essential topic keeps coming up.

There are frameworks for ambiguity and models for adaptive strategy. Workshops on systems thinking or sessions on how to be a better person who can make better decisions. All of it useful but almost none of it addresses the thing that actually determines whether a person can do any of it in the moment: the state of the nervous system.

In complex high-stakes environments, like the kind most of us are now leading inside of (whether that’s a company, a community, a family, or a day in the life), put the body under sustained threats. Uncertainty reads as danger to a nervous system, even when nothing is physically chasing you. A dysregulated nervous system doesn’t do nuance. It does defence and it narrows. It reaches for the fastest, most certain-feeling option, not the best one. It mistakes speed for clarity and control for safety. You can have the best strategic mind in the room and still make reactive, short-sighted calls if your body thinks it’s under attack.

The first move is more than a plan

Contrary to many bits of advice, the actual first move in leading through complexity isn’t a better plan. You first need a more regulated nervous system. I’m not talking about self-care or a nice-to-have bolted onto the “real” work as the operating condition that makes the real work possible. Stabilisation isn’t what happens in a retreat from leadership. It’s the precondition.

This is why I keep coming back to the wild as something other than an indulgence.

There’s a version of going to nature that can be considered escapism: a week off, a change of scenery, or a break from the noise before you go back to absorbing it the same way. That’s not what I’m pointing toward. What actually changes something is closer to a biological reset: enough time outside the built environment with a release of notifications and titles so the body can remember what “safe enough to soften” feels like. Cold plunges, physical exertion, unfamiliar terrain, and silence aren’t relaxing in the spa sense. They’re recalibrating in the physiological sense. They give the nervous system a different set of inputs than the ones that have been keeping it braced, and over a few days, something in the baseline actually shifts.

The numbers prove it

Companies already pay for nervous system dysregulation in leadership. It’s just not listed on an obvious line item. It shows up as turnover, disengaged teams, and reactive decisions in exactly the moments where judgment matters most. Recent research puts the cost at roughly $10,824 per manager and $20,683 per executive annually in the US. It scales with seniority: the more decision-making authority someone holds, the more expensive their dysregulation gets. The WHO estimates this costs the US economy $322 billion a year in lost productivity. Gallup estimates voluntary turnover costs US businesses about $1 trillion annually, with replacing a single employee running 50-200% of their salary.

What do these number tell us? A capacity-building intervention aimed at the leaders whose regulation cascades furthest is cheaper than the status quo of paying for the downstream damage after the fact, and it targets the highest-leverage people in the org rather than spreading thin as a general wellness benefit.

The science says so

Here’s the part I find genuinely surprising, and it’s not the “nature is calming” story you’d expect. Some of what’s happening isn’t psychological at all. It’s actually microbial. Researchers studying a soil-dwelling bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae have found that exposure to it activates serotonin-producing neurons in the brain and builds measurable resilience to future stress, in ways that don’t depend on the exposure feeling relaxing in the moment. It works through the immune system, not through the view. One researcher has called it a “stress vaccine” delivered by dirt.

When researchers have studied this in actual expeditions rather than labs, the pattern holds up. A UC Berkeley study followed military veterans and at-risk teenagers on whitewater rafting trips and found that awe (specifically the feeling of being small in the face of something vast, not just enjoyment) predicted lower levels of an inflammatory biomarker in participants’ blood, and a 30 percent drop in PTSD symptoms measured a week later. The people who felt the most awe were also the ones who came back reporting better relationships with the people in their lives. That’s the re-entry effect showing up in blood work.

I think this is part of what’s needed right now, and I don’t think it’s a fringe or soft claim. If the environments we’re leading in are only getting more complex, more ambiguous, more demanding of sustained good judgment under uncertainty, then the people trying to lead through them need somewhere to actually rebuild the physiological capacity for that.

Intentional expeditions into the wild are one of the more direct ways to do that work. Nature is one of the few remaining contexts that can actually interrupt a nervous system’s chronic bracing and give it evidence in the body that it’s allowed to stand down.

We’ve got the order of operations backwards. We keep trying to out-strategise our way through complexity while the instrument doing the strategising is running on fumes and adrenaline. Fix that first and everything downstream stands a chance to endure.

Ways to go wild this week

1. Get your hands in actual dirt for 10-15 minutes this week.
   Try gardening or lying on grass without a blanket underneath. The research suggests that it doesn’t matter whether it feels relaxing; the exposure itself does the work.

2. Read about how we can’t outrun our biology by Parneet Pal.

3. Read The Comfort Crisis. Highlights how mild, chosen discomfort in the wild builds the resilience that comfort erodes.

4. Take an awe walk.

5. Apply for our next leadership lab in the wild to reset yourself biologically.
   Get on the waitlist for April 2027.

I’m sitting at my family home in Canada as I type this. I am surrounded by forests that have been here long before I was. And sitting underneath them reminds me that there are two key ways to build things.

1. Build on demand. You can write a strategy over a weekend, bring in help by Friday, and ship a product under deadline pressure. This kind of urgency can sometimes even help you.

2. Build for the long game. There is a second category of things that refuses to be rushed. These are things like trust, inner steadiness, or a shared language between people who have to work and live together. These inner foundations that a person stands on when everything shakes don’t respond to deadlines. They accrue slowly, almost invisibly, and they can only be laid down in conditions of relative calm. When the storm arrives, you don’t build them. You spend them.

This is the uncomfortable part: the capacities you most need in a crisis are precisely the ones a crisis won’t let you create. The calm intervals that happen in the ordinary, unremarkable stretches are easy to treat as downtime. But they are not downtime at all. This is the building season.

The four things that won’t be hurried

• Trust is the what happens as a result of many small moments of reliability, observed over time. You cannot manufacture it in the moment you need it; you can only draw on a reservoir filled earlier, one kept promise at a time. In a crisis, people decide in seconds whether to follow you and that decision was largely made long before, by the version of you they watched in calmer days.

• Relationships work the same way. The old proverb says to dig the well before you’re thirsty. The network of people who will take your call, vouch for you, tell you the hard truth, or simply pick up the other end of the rope is the web that is woven in unhurried times, when there’s no pressing reason to invest in it. By the moment you need it, it is too late to build it.

• Shared language is the most underrated of the four. Teams that perform under pressure usually aren’t smarter. They share mental models, vocabulary, and rehearsed ways of coordinating, so that in the heat of the moment they can move together without stopping to explain. We can learn a lot from a surgical team, a flight crew, or a set of firefighters. Their way of working together was earned in the drills and ordinary days. Coordination at speed runs on a shared language built in advance.

• The inner foundations are the clarified values, the steady habits, and the sense of who you are that doesn’t depend on the weather. People discover under pressure what they built in private. The composure that looks like a gift in a hard moment is almost always the dividend of work done quietly, long before.

Nature has solved the problem already

Watch a tree. In the good seasons, where long days and ample water are provided, it does something that pays off nowhere immediately: it grows roots and stores sugars deep in its tissues. Roots are slow, dark, and invisible, returning nothing in the moment. But when drought, winter, or wind come, the tree lives on what it built when conditions were easy. No tree grows roots during a storm. It survives the storm on roots grown years before.

Beneath the forest floor, the same logic runs through the soil. In stable conditions, trees link through vast underground fungal networks sharing nutrients and even chemical warnings. That connection isn’t improvised in the emergency; it’s the standing infrastructure that makes any coordinated response to emergency possible at all.

Resilience, a word we borrowed straight from ecology, was first defined as an ecosystem’s capacity to absorb a shock and reorganize without collapsing. That capacity is never a single heroic trait. It is the slow accumulation of structure, diversity, and connection during the quiet years.

Nature offers one more lesson, and it’s a corrective. When scientists grew trees inside the sealed, weatherless world of Biosphere 2, the trees shot up fast and then toppled before maturing. Without wind to stress them, they never grew the dense reaction wood that lets a tree stand. Perfect calm turned out to be its own kind of fragility. For leaders, the aim isn’t to remove every challenge but to build deep structure while conditions still allow it and to keep enough honest stress in the system that what you build can actually bear weight.

What should a leader build?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is by doing things that look unnecessary right now:

• Investing in a relationship with no immediate payoff

• Spending an afternoon building a shared framework the team doesn’t yet need

• Running the pre-mortem, the scenario, the drill while nothing is wrong, so the language of coordination exists before it’s tested

• Pushing authority and judgment downward in calm, so people have practiced deciding before the day decisions can’t wait

• Telling the truth in small matters, repeatedly, so trust is in the account when a large withdrawal comes due

It also means resisting a particular temptation of stable times: the urge to optimise away all slack, redundancy, and friction in the name of efficiency. The leaner and smoother you make the system in calm, the less it can absorb when the weather turns.

It also means tending your own foundations. This isn’t about self-indulgence. This is the self-essential work. The clarity you reach about what you stand for, the practices that keep you steady, and the people who hold you up: these are your infrastructure.

The time is now

The hard part is that none of this announces its importance. Roots make no sound. The work of the calm interval is, by design, the work whose value stays invisible until the moment you can no longer do it. That is exactly why it gets deferred and why deferring it is the most expensive choice available.

We rarely get to choose when to do this work, which means it is on us to make an intentional choice. The things that can only be built in stability have to be built in a moment of stability. This means they have to be built now. The tree you’ll need is the one you’re growing now.

Ways to go wild this week

1. Map your summer break with some moments to focus on what you stand for so you can define your roots.

2. Write yourself a letter with hopes and dreams for the summer. Don’t open it until September 01. See what happens without overthinking it.

3. Go be in the forest. Observe its roots. Ask yourself how your own that have been built and strengthened.

4. Register to join other wise ones at The Modern Campfire in Vancouver (last call for the few spots left).

5. Re-read some of the early posts from The Dispatch that you didn’t read when they came into your busy inbox. Here’s one of my favourites. If you like what you are reading, a like, a share or a comment is always appreciated.

I posted this quote on my Threads account a few days ago.

I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy.

—Gus Speth, former dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale

I’ve never had such a reaction to a post before. 15k+ views at the time of writing this. The likes and reposts suggests there is a resonance but I couldn’t shake how this quote both inspired me and still made me feel stuck.

The path often follows that if the real problem is selfishness, greed, and apathy, then the real work must be inner: change hearts, raise consciousness, and transform the human spirit. In short, go deeper.

It’s not wrong.
But I think it is only half of the answer.

Speth is right that our deepest problems can be found in our selfishness, greed, and apathy. But the craving for change that I felt when I read these words was actually shedding light on why inner transformation alone will never be enough (as much as I might wish it to be).

Why? My two cents is that it’s because we can’t namaste our way out of greed at scale.

Selfishness, greed, and apathy are not things for which we can easily workshop a solution; they are the default settings of systems built to reward them.

A leader who has done all the inner work in the world and changed nothing structural has definitely become a more conscious person but still lives inside a machine that runs on the old incentives. The honest response isn't to go deeper. It's go deeper and build the defaults that make better behaviour happen whether or not anyone has had their personal awakening. This was a hard epiphany for me to swallow but once simplified, I began to sit with it more honestly:

The inner work sees the greed and apathy clearly.
The structural work shapes the system rewarding it.

I’m trying to make sure we live in a healthy rotation of both through The Field Trip Co.
Spend time in the wild to invest sacred time for the inner work while also planning for the structural changes you need to put in place once you are back in your daily routine.

If you’ve done the inner work then what are these structural changes?
Here are 7 lessons I’ve learned after 15+ years working with Fortune 500 leaders.

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When I think of summer, I can’t help but go back in time to when I went to week-long summer camps in the woods of British Columbia. I have vivid memories of sleeping under the stars, swimming in lakes, playing silly games and having crushes on boys with whom I would never have a proper conversation.

Of late, I have been having repeated dreams about summer camp. In these dreams, I’m no longer a camper. I’m now working at it. I am walking amongst the cabins and forests and having all types of conversations with all sorts of people.

Because it’s repeated, I got curious: Why am I dreaming about this? I’ve had a few “AI as therapist” conversations to help me unpack it. Without going deep into all the things, one question it prompted my way was: Where in your waking life do you still believe you must be less playful in order to be taken seriously?

This was a great thought starter so I’ve started to take stock of it. Sometimes being yourself while being a leader means you become a bit more hall monitor than camp counsellor. So what can I do to keep that playful side alive in the midst of a serious world?

It’s the summer solstice for the northern hemisphere so this seems like the perfect day to reflect and have a chance to reset how we view where we are right now. If you are reading from the southern hemisphere, winter solstice can be equally powerful. For me, it will involve this question of play but you may have something else on your radar.

Here’s some things to try:

1. Write down where you are. Capture a snapshot of your life right now. This is less about goals and more about an honest description of your current state. Where you live, what you’re worried about, what you’re hoping for, who matters to you, or what a normal day looks like. Seal it in an envelope and read it in six months at the winter solstice, or in a year at the next summer solstice. The value comes from getting an unfiltered record of who you were, which memory will otherwise quietly rewrite or repeat. Doing this every solstice builds a narrative of your life.

2. Plant something. Plant something that will visibly mark the passage of time. This could be a tree, a perennial or even herbs on a windowsill. The point is to have a living thing whose growth you can date to “on this solstice I decided X.” It externalizes the turning point. Every time you see it you’re reminded of the moment, and it grows on roughly the same seasonal clock you’re tracking yourself against.

3. Create a start/stop. We often think this is a New Year practice but solstice is the perfect moment to pick one thing to begin and one to end. When you tie them explicitly to the solstice, the date does the remembering for you. The framing matters. Instead of writing “I should move more,” you declare “as of the longest day, I do long walks on Mondays.” You can do the same for what you will stop doing. Anchoring a behaviour change to a memorable, meaningful date measurably improves follow-through.

Some other ways to go wild this summer

I polled our wild leaders who have joined the expeditions and here are some of their recommendations. Drop a comment if you have more ideas!

1. Catch up on some podcasts

   The Nature Of

   The Good Hang with Amy Poehler

   Break Fake Rules

   The Science of Happiness

2. Read or listen to some books
   The Lion Women of Tehran

   The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

   Intentional: How to finish what you started

   Rooted: Life at the crossroads of science, nature and spirit

   If Women Rose Rooted

   The Women Who Run with Wolves

   Emergent Strategy

3. Watch a film that inspires or challenges you

   Time and Water

   Landback
   Jeremiah Johnson

   Land
   Moonrise Kingdom

4. Approach your work wildly

   Hold "office hours" where anyone can drop in to talk about their wild ideas

   Mentor or sponsor one person quietly and meaningfully over the summer

   Start a small ritual that outlasts summer

5. Rest and reset

   Indulge boredom
   Observe the little things
   Try a do-nothing morning
   Model that rest is allowed by not taking calls that aren’t truly urgent

   Understand the difference between important and urgent

   ---

   A reminder to Vancouver readers that there are a few spots remaining for The Modern Campfire on August 17. It will be a night spent with founders, designers, and others who are leading teams through real change. Join a guided, unhurried conversation about what comes next for you and your work.

   Save me a seat at the fire

   

I got this bird tattooed on my arm as soon as I knew I was leaving the company. As much as I loved my role, my team, and the work, I could see something changing in my soul and through my leadership. I retreated, hid my true colours and kept quiet. I noticed how I was living in survival mode and not trusting my instincts in the same way. This was caged behaviour and it did not feel good. I had been taming myself.

This mark represents a bird out of its cage, free to fly. Getting this tattoo was a declaration and physical manifestation to signal to myself that it was okay to leave the cage and use my voice again. Getting to this place was no small undertaking and it is easy to comment on it once it’s “done” so I have taken stock of what I did (or did not do) to come out of the cage. You don’t need to get a tattoo to make your declaration.

I’ve developed a practice to explore what leadership can look like when you leave the cage but also what you might do if you are still in one. What does it look like when growth is no longer the only goal, or when freedom must be practiced within constraint? My hope is that this guide can help leaders navigating institutions, systems, and cultures that feel increasingly brittle, while also sensing that something wilder is waiting to emerge. My hope is that it will also help you recognise when others are in a cage and may need your help to open the door.

P.S. Big thanks to those of you who have recently become paid subscribers. I am beyond grateful for your support.

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A job ends, a company reduces its labour force, or an industry shifts its focus. The certainty we’d built our life around quietly dissolves. When the ground moves, the instinct is to scramble back to stable footing. But here’s a thought: What if the disorientation is actually an invitation? Instead of going into a panic, what would it look like to ask a better question: Where do I best spend my time now? I don’t say this lightly or tritely but just to imagine what might happen to shift from a worry to a what if?

I’ve been thinking about this through six “playing fields” that have been adapted from a systems thinker1 who maps them as the great fronts of our changing era. He frames them as civilisational work but I want to offer them as something more personal: six places to stand when you’re not sure where to put your feet. This isn’t a to-do list but rather a way of contemplating where your particular gifts, hours, and attention could land in a time of unpredictability.

When they are read from a personal view, you can discover that you’ve likely been standing in one all along but just didn't have a name for it, or the permission to take it seriously. One of the six is likely to peak your interest. It will feel less like a suggestion and more like a recognition, the quiet acknowledgement of something you keep knowing deep inside. And once you can name it, the question stops being "what do I do now?" and becomes "how do I do this well?" That shift from drift to direction is the whole point. The six fields are where we take that work deeper: what each one actually asks of you, the kinds of people and skills it needs, and how to find your specific foothold in it. If you're ready to stop wondering where your time should go and start placing it somewhere that matters, these six fields offer a framing for you.

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Today was my last day as VP of Regenerative Design at frog. Oh, the journey it has been!

Thirteen years of my life spent on work that was fulfilling and creating with people who challenged me in the best possible way. I would choose it again. But I also know that you can love something and still let it go. I’m not leaving because there wasn’t more I could do.

I’m letting go because it’s time to graft.

In horticulture, grafting is what you do when you want two living things to become one. You take a cutting from a plant (the scion) and you bind it, carefully, to the rootstock of another. The rootstock gives strength and depth. The scion gives the future. Done well, the join becomes invisible, and the tree that grows is something neither plant could have become alone.

Regenerative design is my scion. I’m not leaving it behind. I couldn’t if I tried. It’s the deep, established system that everything next will draw from. What I’m doing now is binding it to something new.

I’ve started calling what comes next my grafting years.

This is the season where you stop trying to grow taller in one direction and start binding what you’ve become to what wants to grow next. For me, the first graft is The Field Trip Co. and my other grafts will begin to take shape on my professional site.

You don’t need to be standing where I am to think this way. Grafting can become your way of being especially if you know a change or shift is needed. Here’s how to start.

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There is so much to say about this trip but I’ll keep it simple: we went to the edge. To the edge ourselves, our work and of the land. To see more pictures, follow us on IG.

Our 4 days in the north of Scotland followed the arc of an expedition. Moving from basecamp, approach and ascent to a summit and descent, we mapped the realities of wild leadership for self, team and organisation. We did this through thought and movement, and treat them as connected things. A question asked sitting still is a different question once you’ve carried it up a mountain. The land does something to your thinking. It strips it back and refuses your usual shortcuts.

I walk away from this with a deeper of conviction of why this work is not a luxury. It is not the thing you’ll get to once the important things are handled. For a leader, this is one of the important things you can do and it is what everything else rests on. The cost of leading from depletion, of building without knowing why, of mistaking motion for direction, is never paid by you alone. It is paid by everyone who follows you. Clarity at the top is not self-indulgence. It is the most generous thing you can offer the people who depend on your judgement.

The invitation. Because the edge is where the real work happens.

We’re already forecasting for the next one so if you read this and know the wild is calling you, now is the time to register to hold a spot. Why? Because anyone who goes on an expedition knows it is critical to prepare before they arrive. Holding your spot starts that intention.

Apply to join

Vancouver readers: If you want to save your seat at the Modern Campfire on August 17, be sure to register in advance. 25 spots only.

Count me in!

It is 9am on a Tuesday and Quinn is sitting at their kitchen counter. The coffee is cold. Their partner left for work an hour ago. Yesterday, they ran a 600-person division of a company. This morning the calendar is empty in a way they have never seen a calendar be empty in their adult life.

They are composing a LinkedIn post in their head. After an 17 incredible years, I have decided it is time for my next chapter. They know everyone will see through it and press like anyway. They do not know what they are supposed to do for the next four hours, let alone the next four years.

This is how a major life transition happens in our culture in 2026. Alone, in a kitchen, with a LinkedIn post and a cold cup of coffee. There is no ceremony, no community, no elder to give wisdom. There is no marking of the threshold.

We call it being between jobs. The poverty of the phrase tells you everything.

Every human society has built structured passages for the moments when a person’s identity changes. The arrival of adulthood, the taking of a partner, the birth of a baby or the end of a life. They are the foundations by which a person transfers from one identity to the next in the presence of witnesses, marked in the body, held by people who had crossed before, and closed with ceremony so the old self could be properly released and the new one could begin.

The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (who influenced Joseph Campbell’s work) carved out the structure most cultures share:

• Separation: the person is removed from their old life.

• Liminality: a period of in-between, where the old identity has been stripped and the new one has not yet formed.

• Reincorporation: they are welcomed back, witnessed, named, given a place.

We haven’t stopped needing these passages. We have stopped being given them. The need persists but the architecture has been dismantled. The transitions keep happening, but now they are private, painful, without witness, and often without closure. We pay the bill in depression, addiction, and the strange brittleness of high-functioning people who do not know what to do with themselves when the role goes away. Notably, a similar ache is rising in the new generation who can’t get their foot in the door for their first post-graduate post.

Without separation, there is no clean break. The person keeps performing the old identity past its expiration, haunted by the self they were not permitted to bury. Without liminality, they skip the gap and grab the first thing offered, carrying the old self into a shape that cannot hold it, which is why so many second acts feel hollow. Without reincorporation, the new identity has no social reality. They stand in the threshold for months or years, neither here nor there.

The midlife crisis, the displaced executive, the burned-out partner, the bewildered retiree are not separate phenomena. They are the same, just dressed differently. We pathologise the individuals when we should be pathologising the culture.

The rites did not disappear by accident. The professionalisation of life stages replaced communal ceremonies with institutional ones. The rise of the autonomous individual freed us from the village that used to do the holding. Multi-generational community collapsed, taking the elders with it. Secularisation dismantled the religious infrastructure that had carried some of this work, without building anything to take its place.

In the meantime, the work of transition keeps happening, and people go through it alone. I have spent the past year in conversation with displaced senior leaders. Spouses or partners cannot carry it; the marriages were often built on the role being intact. Former colleagues cannot hold it; they are competitors now. The executive coach supports a piece of it, but cannot often sit in the deepest part.

So they perform: post the gratitude reflection or tell their friends it is about exploring options. But the phrase that keeps recurring is: I don’t know who I am right now. In any culture with functioning rites, this sentence would be the moment the elders lean forward. In ours, it is met with a recommendation to update the resume or re-skill.

I believe the work of rebuilding rites of passage for modern life needs to be done in smaller pockets. Small, because real holding does not scale. I believe it should include nature because the wilderness offers the space and freedom that the indoors can’t. We should mark it with ceremony, because the body needs to be told, in something other than words, that the threshold has been crossed.

The number of people about to make this crossing is large and growing. AI is coming for more layers than we have admitted. The bundled executive career is ending. The kitchen counters are filling up with people staring at empty calendars.

We are paying the price of the absence already. The only question is whether we keep paying it, or finally do something serious about rebuilding what we have lost.

Ways to go wild this week

1. Create a rite of passage (see below for a guide)

2. Read The Meaning of Your Life

3. Listen to Make Uncertainty Part of the Process

4. Take stock of your wild leader ways

5. Follow us to watch some of the 2026 Expedition unfold

How to build a rite of passage: A guide for paid subscribers

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I’ve had a few conversations this week about the exhaustion of hustle culture. It’s not always blatant but it can manifest itself with feelings that creep in and take the form of comparing yourself to others, holding some false metrics of worth and an overall dissatisfaction in life.

As you can imagine, my curiosity found me searching for an example in nature where hustle was the norm. Short answer? Most of what looks like hustle in the animal kingdom is bounded by something we humans have managed to escape: the notion of being satisfied.

A squirrel caches nuts until its cache is full and beaver builds until the dam works. Ants and bees look frantic, but they’re filling a role, not climbing a ladder. Because the colony has a stopping mechanism built in. After a lion eats, it sleeps. When the season ends, the bowerbird stops decorating. There’s almost always a “good enough” signal that fires, and the animal world listens to it.

Human hustle is strange because that signal is seemingly uncoupled. We chase money, status, legacy, and productivity: abstractions that don’t fill us up the way a stomach or a nut cache does. It has become a search for more reputation, more savings, and more output. Our signals seem to trigger a general desire for more of anything. So we keep going because it seems that we are the creature that is challenged to be satisfied. Hustle seems to be something we do to ourselves.

Why do we do it?

We have a capacity that other animals seem to lack: we can hold our own life as an object and ask “is this it?” This question doesn’t have a satisfaction-shaped answer and no amount of acquiring resolves it. Because it isn’t really a resource question. It’s closer to what the contemplative traditions have always pointed at: the ache isn’t a sign you need more, it’s a sign you’re the kind of creature that aches. Some traditions treat that ache as the problem to be dissolved (Buddhism); some treat it as the engine of meaning (existentialism); some treat it as a homing signal pointing somewhere transcendent (most religions). They may disagree about the cure but they agree on the diagnosis: the dissatisfaction is structural, not circumstantial.

What is this structure? We are three things all at once.

1. A social creature trapped in a world of unbounded comparison

2. A person living with material pressures and needs

3. A self-aware being that can step outside its own life and notice it

All of these layers have to quiet down for satisfaction to land and we know that unless we are intentional about it, they rarely do.

The people who seem to manage it usually aren’t the ones who got more. They’re the ones who narrowed the frame deliberately, who do something that absorbs them enough to pause the meta-questions, and who have made some kind of peace, be it religious or philosophical, with the fact that the ache doesn’t fully go away. Satisfaction seems to be less a destination and more a practice of repeatedly choosing to stop counting.

Because I’m working on some reframes myself, my mantra for this season has become: What is meant for you will find you. When I repeat this to myself, I get a deep feeling of release and it reminds me that hustle culture isn’t where I want to be.

Ways to go wild this week (without the hustle)

1. Build in stopping conditions. Nature’s efficiency comes from knowing when enough is enough. Teams without a “we’re done” signal tend to work longer, and this means the quality of work degrades. Define what good looks like, and let people stop when they hit it. A team that hits its goal on Thursday should not be punished with more work on Friday. Give yourself the same grace.

2. Treat rest as the feature, not a glitch. The reason a lion sleeps after eating isn’t because it’s lazy; it’s that recovery is part of the hunt. Humans treat rest as the opposite of work, but biologically it’s the same system. Leaders who normalise rest get more out of themselves and others, with the more being more meaningful.

3. Watch what you’re actually rewarding. If promotion, praise, and visibility all flow to the person who stays latest and answers Slack on Sunday, you’ve created an environment where hustle is the only winning move, regardless of whether it produces better outcomes. People respond to incentives, not mission statements. If you want sustainable effort, reward sustainable effort, not hustle theatre.

4. Distinguish hustle from progress. A lot of organisational “hustle” is about motion that’s decoupled from the outcome it was originally meant to serve. Periodically ask: what is this effort actually for, and is it still tracking with what we are working on?

5. Let go of the abstractions that don’t fill us up. Revenue, growth, and market share are uncapped by design, which is useful for a company but corrosive for a person. A leader’s job is partly to translate those uncapped metrics back into bounded human goals so people aren’t grinding against infinity.

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Vancouver readers: If you are thinking about joining the Modern Campfire on August 17, be sure to register in advance to hold your spot! 25 spots only.

Put me on the list

I’ve never thought about my mental health more than I have in the past 18 months. Losing a sibling, leaving a company I loved and witnessing the world in its current form has put me through the wringer.

I know I’m not alone in this.

There is a particular feeling in the air right now. You can feel it on the train, in the office, in the group chat, or in your social media feed. People are tired in a way that cannot be fully articulated. Some feel more on edge, less tolerant of others and more protective of their part of the world. Everyone seems to be holding something they can’t put down.

Most of the leaders I meet are carrying more than one thing too. A team that needs more of them or a pace that has not eased up. For some, it is the loss of work that has caused an identity altering reality they couldn’t have seen coming. The Field Trip Co. exists, in part, because I keep arriving at the same conviction: the answer tends to live beyond the logic and in the body, the landscape, the company of a few good folks. This doesn’t mean there aren’t other factors at play but when we get still and quiet, we get to the deeper (and sometimes uncomfortable) realities that can ultimately set us free. So in a season this heavy, I want to propose some actions for leaders so they can protect themselves1.

Where we actually are

The data is sobering. The WHO European Region reports that 1 in 6 people lives with a mental health condition, and depression and anxiety among young people have risen by an estimated 25% since the pandemic.

A 2023 survey in Europe found that 46% of EU residents had experienced an emotional or psychosocial issue in the previous year. Globally, the WHO now counts more than one billion people living with a mental health condition, with anxiety and depression the most common.

These numbers tell us something: if you have felt brittle this year, you are not alone.

What “protecting your mental health” actually means

The phrase gets thrown around so often it has lost some of its meaning. Protecting our mental health is bigger than a candle and a bath or a spa day, lovely as those are. It is often a set of small, mostly unglamorous practices that compound over time.

Here are a few I keep coming back to, not because I’ve perfected them but because I see a difference when I explore them. They will likely not surprise you.

1. Build a consumption diet the way you would a food diet. Choose your inputs the way you choose ingredients. Time-box the news or mute the accounts that leave you feeling heavy. Follow people who make you laugh. I deleted some streaming services and put some books near my couch to enable a different kind of consumption.

2. Move your body to keep your mind. This could be a walk before lunch, a swim on the way home, or ten minutes of stretching while the kettle boils. Physical activity is one of the most consistently evidenced protective factors for mood, and the NHS (UK’s National Health Service) treats it as a frontline recommendation for mild-to-moderate depression. I booked a few sessions with a personal trainer to keep me accountable.

3. Protect sleep with the seriousness of a medical appointment. Insufficient sleep remains one of the most modifiable risk factors for anxiety and depression. Most of us already know this and still ignore it. I started taking magnesium at night. Still working on getting the phone out of the bedroom.

4. Make plans you cannot easily cancel. Loneliness is one of the strongest predictors of poor mental health in Europe right now. Try standing dinners, walking partners, reading groups, or Sunday calls with your chosen family. The structure does the work that your willpower cannot. The Field Trip Co. Expedition is one thing I’ve obviously put as a marker but will also ask my neighbour to go for a coffee.

5. Notice early. If you find yourself with some lingering irritability or experience a flatness around things you used to love, these could be signals worth taking seriously while they are still small. I’m tracking my mood using The Mood app and find the simple colour selection to be an easy way to address complex feelings.

6. Get outside, then go further outside. A walk is medicine. A weekend out of the city is even more medicine. A few days where night sky is our only screen changes something in us. The body knows things that only nature can teach it. If you’ve been reading The Dispatch for a while, you know this is key for me.

Making mental health matter

Over the coming weeks, Europe and the UK will host mental health weeks. This year’s European theme is Stronger Together. We know that individual practices matter. But they are also a thin defence against systemic pressure on their own. Working conditions, housing costs, economic precarity, climate anxiety, and political instability all show up in the body.

Leaders carry an extended version of this. Your team is watching how you hold the weight of these times. When a manager takes a real lunch break, leaves at a reasonable hour, or names their own limits out loud, the permission travels outward. Modelling care is itself a leadership act, and one of the most quietly powerful tools you have.

If you are doing well right now, this week is a good moment to be the person who texts first, who suggests the walk, who says out loud at the team meeting that mental health is part of how we get our work done. If you are not doing well, this week is a good moment to share it with someone. Just one person. Even if it is imperfect.

A small assignment

It is one thing to prioritise and quite another to take action. So here is a suggestion for all of us this week.

Send a message you have been meaning to send. Ask the question you have been avoiding. Be the small thing that interrupts someone’s loneliness, including your own.

I take leaders into wild places because I believe people think more clearly there, and they remember more of who they actually are. But you do not need an expedition to begin. We can protect our minds and the minds of others in quiet, ordinary ways.

The Highlands are calling

We are 2 weeks away from our one and only 2026 expedition! I’m excited to drive north through the magical landscapes, cosy up at the lodge with views of Ben Loyal, sit by a crackling fire in the forest and take some intentional time away with others. We’ll be a mixed crew of impact leaders, communication specialists, coaches, business strategists and designers. I know we’ll enjoy what the environment offers us but I’m also excited to use it as a moment to reorient my mind and body for this next season.

I’ve been working on a revised workbook for the attendees who join. I’ve made a major overhaul to the first one and this book is the anchor to the experience. It offers content that participants can work with while on the expedition but more importantly take home to keep oriented to the foundations started in Scotland.

If you know you need something like this to be part of your 2026, there is a spot waiting for you. thefieldtrip.co/scotland

If you want to follow along, check out our Instagram.

The Modern Campfire: Coming to Vancouver on August 17

The Modern Campfire is a small, unhurried gathering for 25 leaders who are thinking seriously about what comes next for their organisations, their industries, and for themselves. The location will be revealed to fully registered guests. In a world of screens, it’s time to gather meaningfully again.

Register here

Let me start with the fact that I’m not against retreats. In fact, I ventured to Iceland last week to join a wonderful crew who'd chosen to step away from the noise and examine where their attention was focused. We mapped our narratives and moved our bodies through extraordinary nature. I came home with good things. I also returned with a curiosity about why and how we retreat.

As I worked through my narrative, I couldn’t help but notice how the weight of the world was shaping how I processed my work and wellbeing. Between global crises and personal challenges, my modern life is overflowing with things to worry about including many issues that feel too big to even address. My ability to influence these problems and how much I worry about them are not equal to each other and I know that getting lost in thoughts of anxiety can reduce my ability to act. That tension between the scale of what I’m facing and the limits of my agency is shaping how I work, how I make decisions, and how much capacity I have left at the end of the day.

The question isn't whether I and other leaders should be protected from this reality. We can't and probably shouldn't be. The question is whether we are being equipped to carry it and to remain functional, clear-headed, and relationally present under conditions of genuine, prolonged uncertainty. That is a different kind of preparation that most wellness frameworks don’t currently offer.

So instead of talking about wellbeing, we need to talk about risk.

The real liabilities quietly eroding organisational performance aren’t just market conditions or supply chain disruptions. They’re cognitive fatigue, stress-driven errors, burnout and the slow, grinding recovery time after every intense and unpredictable sprint. These are repeated, compounding, and quietly costly.

The conversations most organisations are having about this as it relates to wellbeing are still largely calibrated to a different era where stress was something produced by a difficult quarter, recoverable with the right programme or a week off.

This means we need a reframe: Wellness is no longer a benefit line item. It’s critical infrastructure.

In this reframe, when you take time away like this, you are not taking a vacation from leadership. You are making an investment in it. Time in a low-stimulation, high-intention environment allows a nervous system to reset, a perspective to expand, and to return with the kind of clarity that a quarterly offsite can’t produce.

If we’re going to have a budget conversation it needs to be about how we translate rest, recovery, and regulation into risk mitigation. The company isn’t getting a retreat. It gets organisational resilience.

Notably, the travel industry is responding to this need. 2026 has seen a rise in mental health programming, sleep science, longevity medicine, and nature immersion. Instead of the spa day, we see structured, science-informed tools for mental and physical recovery.

There is also evidence that doing this type of experience with strangers shows an increase in oxytocin, the neurochemical linked to empathy and trust. When we are free from the existing dynamics, hierarchies, and performance pressures of our usual network, we are more likely to speak honestly, be received without judgement, and be given permission to shift.

In your leadership journey, it’s likely time to stop waiting for burnout to declare itself. It’s time to build recovery into the calendar the same way you build in strategy sessions. This is where wellness becomes strategy and where the right retreat becomes the most important meeting of the year.

Ways to go wild this week

1. Do a narrative audit alone before any retreat. Before you step away, spend an hour writing down what’s actually shaping your thinking right now. This isn’t about your goals or your strategy. It’s about your narrative: What assumptions are you operating from? What externalities are you absorbing without naming them? Who are key people in your inner circle right now? Take time for some honest pre-work. Most of us skip this sacred time entirely.

2. Read or listen to one systems thinker outside your industry this month. Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics or On Being with Krista Tippett are a few I’ve taken in. The point isn’t to become an expert. It’s to deliberately expose your mental models to a wider frame. Leaders who only consume industry content are, by design, blind to the structural forces shaping their context.

3. Find one gathering this year with people who don’t already know your professional identity. Instead of a conference or networking event, try something intentional where the room has no existing hierarchy or shared experience as the entry point. Based on the research, the stranger dynamic is the feature, not the bug. Let it work. We have an option for that.

4. Schedule recovery the way you schedule performance. Block time in your calendar for genuine decompression. This is not admin catch-up or passive scrolling and you should treat it with the same non-negotiability as a client call, team meeting or work out. If your decision-making quality is a consequential variable, then what degrades it is a risk management issue. Start treating it like one.

5. Have one honest conversation with your team about the weight in the room. This is not a wellbeing survey. It is a real conversation about what the current external environment is doing to how people are thinking, deciding, and recovering. Name the metacrisis or at least name the ambient pressure, and watch what shifts when it’s no longer the unspoken thing everyone is managing alone.

Hello dear reader. As this writing thing takes a certain amount of time, energy and investment, I’m going to start producing some paid posts. I understand that you have a lot of content coming at you, so if what you find here is of value to you, I am grateful for your support.

I listened to a podcast where the host described a personal turning point. Prompted by the accelerating geopolitical fracture, he argued that continuing to describe the crisis without a map for response has become a category error.

His thinking has helped me keep somewhat sane in a world filled with disruption. What I appreciated most was his guidance on what to do first. We need these actions if we are to know what to do next.

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