I’ve gotten stuck in Maycember!

If you have a child in school, you already know. If you don’t, let me paint the picture: May is the month where the calendar, which seemed perfectly manageable in April, suddenly reveals that it has been lying to you. Field day. Spring concert. End of year awards. Promotion ceremony. Teacher gifts. (Oh, no! I forgot teacher gifts!). The last week of elementary school for my child, who is heading to junior high in the fall and all of the activities and emotions that go along with closing the chapter on this season.

Layered on top of that: a consulting trip, a busy coaching season, International Coaching Week, and the general sense that the world had collectively decided that May was the time to schedule everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.

In other words, I got caught in the whirlwind.1

Here is the part I find ironic: I coach people on this. I work with people who are so busy keeping everything running that they can’t find the time to do the things that would move them forward. There’s no margin. I know the pattern intimately, and this time, I caught myself in it.

But I remembered my resilience menu. I stopped trying to outrun chaos and made a few simple choices.

Simple choices like coffee and a YouTube rabbit trail on productivity systems, obviously. But also: fifteen minutes in the afternoon sun between calls. A quick LEGO build. Journaling. Sitting still long enough to notice what I’m actually feeling instead of just reacting to the next thing on the list.

It wasn’t flashy or dramatic, but it is helping to pull me out of the whirlwind. (Well, maybe the YouTube rabbit trail isn’t really helping with that.)

Recently, I’ve been working through the idea of a resilience menu, a short list of small, restorative things you decide on ahead of time so you don’t have to think when the pressure builds. Turns out I needed to use my own.

If you’re in Maycember too, I hope you find your fifteen minutes of sun.

Reflect: What’s your version of Maycember? When have you realized you were caught in the whirlwind? What was the first thing that slipped?

Act: Build your resilience menu. Write down five to eight small things that restore you, making sure that they vary in time, energy, and location. Keep it somewhere you’ll actually find it when you need it. (Mine is on a sticky note on my desktop.) Because you will need it. The whirlwind comes for us all eventually.

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When I started coaching, I told myself that the right credentials would bring the right clients. So I got certified. And then I got certified in something else. And then I started eyeing the next certification, the advanced training, the additional framework that would finally make me feel ready enough to be found.

It took longer than I’d like to admit to see the trap I was in.

In their book How Women Rise, Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith describe one of the most common patterns that holds women back in their careers: overvaluing expertise. It’s the belief that if you just keep getting better at what you do, the right people will eventually take notice; your work will speak for itself. Competence, accumulated in sufficient quantity, will open the doors that have stayed closed. But on its own, expertise will not do this for you.

Helgesen recounts a conversation with Ted Jenkins, the fourth person hired at Intel, in which he describes four distinct kinds of power available to anyone building a career:

The power of expertise - what you know and what you can do.

The power of connections - who you know and who knows you.

The power of personal authority or charisma - how you show up and how people experience you.

The power of position - the formal authority that comes with a title or role.

As Helgesen writes: “Expertise, connections, and personal authority are all non-positional kinds of power you can nurture and practice throughout your career. The more you develop these complementary powers, the more prepared you’ll be to assume positional power.”

The problem isn’t expertise. Expertise is a genuine and necessary kind of power. The problem is what happens when it becomes the only power you’re building.

The Path of Least Resistance

Expertise becomes the default because it is often the easiest power to develop. You can take a class from your couch. You can earn a credential on a schedule that fits around your existing job. You can read a book, complete a course, attend a workshop, and walk away with something measurable to show for your time. Expertise is concrete. It is within your control, and in a role where very little feels within your control, that matters more than most people admit.

The other three powers are harder.

Connections require other people’s time, cooperation, and reciprocity. You cannot manufacture a strong network the way you can complete a training module. Personal authority requires a different kind of work entirely: the slow, uncomfortable process of understanding how you come across, what you project, and whether the version of yourself you’re presenting to the room matches the leader you actually are. That’s not a class you can take. It’s a mirror you have to be willing to look into.

And position? Position requires someone else to say yes. You can prepare for it, advocate for it, make the case for it, but ultimately it is not yours to control. For women who have been conditioned to believe that hard work and competence are the primary currencies of advancement, that loss of control is deeply uncomfortable. So they go back to what they can control. They sign up for another certification.

This completely logical response to a system that has historically rewarded women for being excellent at their jobs while quietly failing to promote them for it is not a character flaw. The expertise trap isn’t a personal failing; it’s a pattern. And like most patterns, the first step out of it is simply seeing it clearly.

Indispensable Is Not a Compliment

Here is what the expertise trap looks like from the inside of a middle management role.

You are good at your job. Genuinely, measurably good. Your projects land well. Your team respects you. Your manager relies on you. You have become, in the language of How Women Rise, indispensable. And as it turns out, indispensable is a ceiling dressed up as a compliment.

When you are the person your team cannot function without, you become very difficult to promote. Moving you up means creating a gap that nobody knows how to fill. Your boss knows this. Somewhere, you probably know it too. But instead of addressing it directly by advocating for yourself, building the relationships that would make a transition possible, developing your team so they don’t need you quite so much, you do what feels productive. You add another skill. You take another course. You make yourself even more indispensable, and the expertise trap compounds.

This is where the four powers become useful not just as a career concept but as a diagnostic tool because the question isn’t whether or not you have expertise. You know you do. But rather, what have you been neglecting while you were busy accumulating it? Studies repeatedly show that women in the workplace are skilled at building relationships, so why isn’t the power of connection helping them advance their careers? There is a difference between being well-liked and being well-connected in the way that actually moves careers forward. One is about warmth. The other is about mutual advantage. Leveraging your relationships is the willingness to ask for what you need, offer what you have, and let relationships do the work they are capable of doing.

That distinction is uncomfortable for a lot of women. It can feel transactional. It can feel like using people. But leveraging a relationship for mutual advantage isn’t manipulation, it’s how power actually works. And refusing to do it, however virtuous it feels, keeps you exactly where you are.

The Honest Look

Before you can address the imbalance, you have to see it clearly. Consider the four powers and rate yourself honestly on each one. Where are you strong? Where are you growing? What have you overlooked?

The power of expertise - your knowledge, credentials, and technical skills.

The power of connections - not just the relationships you have, but your willingness to leverage them for mutual advantage.

The power of personal authority - how you show up, how people experience you, whether the version of yourself you present to the room matches the leader you actually are.

The power of position - the formal authority you currently hold and how intentionally you are using it.

Most women reading this will say that the power of expertise is their strongest power. That’s expected when it’s the power you’ve been building longest and most deliberately. The more useful question is this: Which one feels the most uncomfortable to consider honestly? That’s where the work is.

A significant gap between your expertise and your connections is the most common pattern and the most costly one for women who want to move forward. But any gap between expertise and the other three is worth paying attention to. The goal isn’t to abandon what you’re good at. It’s to stop letting it be the only thing you’re building.

One Step in a New Direction

The certification you’re considering probably won’t hurt you. But before you sign up, it’s worth considering: is this actually the next thing I need, or is it just the most comfortable next thing available?

Expertise got you here. It is a real and necessary kind of power. But it has a ceiling, and you may already be bumping against it. The people who move forward are not always the most credentialed people in the room. They are the ones who figured out how to let their relationships do some of the work, who got comfortable being seen, who stopped waiting to feel ready enough and started asking for what they wanted. That shift doesn’t require a new certification. It requires a different kind of investment.

Reflect: Look back at your self-rating. Which power has the biggest gap from your expertise? What have you told yourself about why that power is harder to develop and is that story actually true?

Act: This week, take one step toward your most neglected power. If it’s connections, reach out to one person you’ve been meaning to contact and be specific about what you’re hoping to explore together. If it’s personal authority, say the thing in the room you’ve been keeping to yourself. If it’s position, have the conversation you’ve been avoiding about what comes next for you.

One step. Not a new curriculum. Just one step in a different direction.

Your EQ score (whether you’ve taken a formal assessment or just been paying attention to yourself through this series) is not a verdict on who you are as a leader. It is a snapshot of where you are right now. And the most important thing about a snapshot is that it can change.

EQ grows. Not automatically, and not without effort, but it grows. The research is clear on this: unlike IQ, which remains relatively stable across your lifetime, emotional intelligence is genuinely developable. Every time you catch yourself mid-spiral and choose a different response, every time you say “I don’t know” to a room full of people who expected you to have the answer, every time you ask a question instead of making a statement, you are building something. Slowly, quietly, and with compounding interest.

The second thing worth knowing is that your EQ subtraits don’t operate in isolation. They push and pull against each other in ways that create friction, and that friction is not a problem to eliminate. It is information. When your Optimism outruns your Reality Testing, you end up chasing a moving target and calling it leadership. When your Empathy is high but your Assertiveness is low, you understand everyone’s needs perfectly and advocate for none of them, including your own. When your Emotional Self-Awareness is strong but your Stress Tolerance is thin, you can name exactly what you’re feeling right before you lose your footing anyway.

The friction is the thing worth paying attention to.

Which brings us to the third thing: naming the rub is the beginning of resolving it. You cannot work on something you haven’t identified. The managers who grow their EQ over time are not the ones who scored highest on the assessment; they are the ones who get honest about where the friction lives and choose one thing to do about it.

Find Your Friction

Before you choose a solution, it helps to know where the friction actually lives in your actual week, not in theory.

Three questions. Pick the one that lands hardest.

• Do you find yourself absorbing everyone else’s chaos and calling it your job? You are the one who stays late to fix what shifted, who recalibrates the team when the direction changes, who carries the emotional weight of decisions that were never yours to make. You are competent and exhausted and quietly wondering if this is just what leadership feels like.

• Do you go quiet when you should speak, or speak when you should pause? Maybe you have the answer in the room but don’t say it. Maybe you say something in frustration and spend the next hour wishing you hadn’t. The gap between what you feel and what you do with it is where a lot of leadership energy gets lost.

• Does your team feel far away even when you’re all in the same room? You are present, you are available, and somehow the distance remains. Meetings are functional but not warm. People are productive but not connected. You’re not sure when the gap opened or how to close it.

If one of those landed; that’s your starting point. If all three landed, welcome to middle management. Pick the one that’s loudest right now and start there. The others will get their turn. If none of them quite fit, don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.

Put Down the Spreadsheet

Here is the trap most leaders fall into when they learn something new.

They make a list (or an entirely new, color-coded spreadsheet, if you’re me).

A long, ambitious, thorough list of every habit they want to build, every pattern they want to break, every EQ subtrait they want to strengthen. The list feels productive. It feels like momentum. And then Monday comes, and the list sits there, and the week runs them over anyway.

The research on habit formation is clear on this: the leaders who actually change are not the ones who overhaul everything at once. They are the ones who choose one thing, attach it to something they already do, and keep it small enough that skipping it would feel stranger than doing it.

One thing. For thirty days.

Not because one thing is all you’re capable of. Because one thing, done consistently, compounds. Because the goal right now is not transformation; it is traction. And traction comes from repetition.

So here is the menu. Find the option that matches where your friction lives. If none of them fit, there are three questions at the end to help you find your own.

When you feel like you’re losing yourself in the chaos:

After every meeting, before you open your email or pick up your phone, take sixty seconds to answer three questions. What am I feeling right now? What triggered it? How is this emotion influencing what I’m doing next? You aren’t analyzing; you’re just noticing. Attach it to the moment you close your laptop or push back your chair. Over time, the pattern does the work for you. You’ll start to see which meetings drain you, which energize you, which conversations leave a residue that follows you into the next one. That awareness is the beginning of everything else.

When you feel like you’re running on empty:

Build a reset menu. Not in the moment when you need it; that’s too late. Do it now, when you have the bandwidth to think clearly. Write down eight to ten activities that restore you, and make sure they vary. Some that take five minutes and some that take thirty. Some that require energy and some that don’t. Some you can do at your desk and some that get you outside. When the pressure builds and your instinct is to push through, you open the menu instead. You pick one thing. You do it. That small act of self-regulation, repeated often enough, becomes the difference between a leader who depletes and a leader who recovers.

When you feel disconnected from your team:

Once a week, identify one person who did something well and name it specifically. Not “great job” (that’s ephemeral; it lands and dissolves). Something more like: “I noticed you handled that conversation with a lot of patience, and it kept the meeting on track.” One person. One specific observation. Once a week. Attach it to your Friday wrap-up, or your weekly team meeting, or whatever already exists in your calendar. Specific appreciation builds trust in a way that general praise never does, and trust is what closes the distance.

If none of these quite fit:

Three questions to help you find your own. Where do you feel the most friction in your week? With yourself? With your team? Or with the pressure from above? What’s the one thing you already know you should be doing but keep skipping? What’s the smallest possible version of that thing? Start there. Attach it to something you already do. Do it for thirty days before you add anything else.

Your Move

You started this series standing at the edge of the river, trying to figure out why you kept getting swept downstream. You’ve spent four weeks learning to read the water: where it moves fast, where it pools, where the current is quieter than it looks.

That knowledge matters. But knowledge without action is just a very informed kind of stuck.

So before you close this tab and go back to your inbox, do one thing. Go back to the question that landed hardest in Find Your Friction, above. Sit with it for sixty seconds. Not to solve it; just to let it be true.

Then pick one item from the menu. Just one. Write it down somewhere you will actually see it. Attach it to something you already do. And give it thirty days before you decide whether it’s working.

That’s it. That’s the whole plan.

Not because simple means easy. But because simple means doable. And doable, done consistently, is what actually changes things.

Reflect: Which of the three felt-experience questions landed hardest for you? What does that tell you about where your EQ work needs to begin?

The Next Step Is Yours

If you’ve made it to the end of this series, you’ve done something most people don’t do. You’ve sat with hard questions about how you lead, how you show up under pressure, and what it actually costs you to keep absorbing more than your share. That’s not nothing.

But there’s a difference between reading about EQ and having someone in your corner who can help you see your own patterns in real time; someone who will ask the question you’ve been avoiding and sit with you while you find the answer.

That’s what coaching is. And if any part of this series made you think I need more of this, I’d love to talk.

I offer a free thirty-minute coaching conversation for leaders who are curious about what it would look like to work together. No pitch, no pressure. Just a real conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

When you’re ready, the button below will take you straight to my calendar.

Book Your Free Coaching Conversation

You know Debbie Downer. She showed up at the happiest place on Earth, Walt Disney World, and managed to work feline AIDS and mad cow disease into a family breakfast. The sad trombone played. Everyone grimaced. But she wasn’t wrong. The problems she was describing are real, but who wants to hear that when they’re on vacation?

If you are a middle manager working under a visionary leader, you know exactly how Debbie Downer felt. You are the one in the room asking “but how are we going to do that?” while everyone else is already mentally ordering the balloons for the launch party. You are the one tracking the deadline, the budget, and the team’s increasingly thin patience while your boss is already three pivots ahead, fully convinced the new direction is even better than the last one.

And somewhere along the way, the message you’ve absorbed is that your need for a plan is a personality flaw.

It isn’t.

In emotional intelligence terms, what your visionary leader has in abundance is Optimism, the ability to see the future as bright, possible, and essentially already done. It’s a genuine strength. Organizations need people who can see what isn’t yet real and believe in it anyway. But Optimism without its counterpart, Reality Testing, the ability to see the world as it actually is right now, is a ship with no navigation system. It looks great leaving the harbor. It’s the rocks you have to worry about.

And guess who’s been quietly doing the navigating?

You.

The problem isn’t your visionary leader’s Optimism. The problem is what happens to you and your team when Point B keeps moving and no one seems to notice the cost.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice. The team works for three weeks on a project. Leadership has a new idea. Point B moves. The team regroups, recalibrates, rebuilds. Four weeks in, Point B moves again. Nobody says it out loud, but everyone feels the fatigue that comes from putting your best work into something that’s going to get redirected anyway. Eventually, the team stops bringing their best. Why would they? They’ve learned that effort and outcome are not reliably connected. Researchers call this learned helplessness. Your team might just call it Tuesday.

Falling Into the Optimism Gap

When Point B keeps moving, something happens beneath the surface that has nothing to do with project management. The recalibrating, the rebuilding, the redirecting doesn’t just exhaust you. It starts to feel like evidence. Evidence that you aren’t good enough. That a more competent manager would have anticipated the pivot. That if you were really on top of things, the chaos wouldn’t land so hard.

That voice collecting evidence against you has a name. In Positive Intelligence, the coaching framework developed by Shirzad Chamine, it’s called the Judge. The Judge is the internalized critic that takes the raw material of a hard situation and spins it into a verdict about your worth. It’s fast, it’s convincing, and it is almost always working with bad data.

When your visionary leader pivots for the third time in six weeks, the Judge doesn’t say “that’s an organizational pattern worth naming.” It says: “If you were better at your job, you wouldn’t have to keep starting over.”

Let that land for a second.

You are absorbing the cost of someone else’s Optimism gap between what they enthusiastically believe is possible and what is actually, structurally, humanly doable, and your Judge is handing you the bill as if you wrote it.

This is the move that keeps middle managers stuck. Not the chaos itself, but the story the Judge tells about what the chaos means about you. As long as you believe that story, you will keep working harder to compensate for a problem that was never yours to solve.

The first step in silencing the Judge is simply noticing it. Not arguing with it or trying to ignore it, just recognizing its voice for what it is. A thought. Not a fact. Not a verdict. Just a very loud, very persuasive thought.

And once you can hear the Judge for what it is, something else becomes possible: you can start to hear the truth it’s been drowning out. That truth is found through Reality Testing.

The Other Lane

Let’s talk about what Reality Testing actually is, because chances are you’ve never heard it described as a strength. In the EQ-i 2.0 framework, Reality Testing is the ability to see the world as it actually is, to recognize when emotions, enthusiasm, or wishful thinking are coloring your perception of what’s true right now. It’s the internal voice that asks: is this actually working, or do I just want it to be working?

In a culture that celebrates vision and punishes hesitation, Reality Testing gets a bad reputation. It looks like resistance. It sounds like negativity. It gets a sad trombone and a grimace from everyone at the table.

But here is what Reality Testing actually is in practice: it is the skill that keeps the ship from hitting the rocks. It is the function that protects the organization’s resources: the time, the budget, the goodwill of a team that has been asked to rebuild for the fourth time. It is not the opposite of Optimism. It is the thing that makes Optimism useful.

Your visionary leader needs you. They may not know that yet, but they do.

This is the reframe that matters: your lane and your leader’s lane are not in conflict. They are complementary. His lane is the vision, the “what if,” the belief that something great is coming. Your lane is the execution, the team’s capacity, the structural integrity, the honest read on where things actually stand. Both lanes are necessary. The organization stalls without the vision. It crashes without the reality check.

The problem isn’t that you’re in different lanes. The problem is that nobody has named it that way. So instead of functioning as complementary forces, you’ve been quietly doing your job while absorbing the message that your job is the problem.

It isn’t. Your need for clarity is not a personality flaw or a failure of flexibility. It is a legitimate, valuable, organizational function, and it is time to start treating it like one.

Two Tools for the Middle

Knowing that your Reality Testing is a gift doesn’t make the moment any easier when Point B starts moving in real time. You’re sitting in the meeting, your leader’s eyes are lit up with the new direction, and you can feel the familiar cocktail of frustration, resignation, and Judge commentary rising up before you’ve even had a chance to process what just changed.

This is where the work gets practical.

In the Moment: The PQ Rep

Positive Intelligence uses the term “PQ Rep” to describe a brief, intentional practice of redirecting your attention to your senses (what you can feel, hear, or touch right now) for about thirty seconds or the length of a couple of deep breaths. It sounds almost insultingly simple. It isn’t.

When the Judge activates, it pulls you out of the present and into a story about your competence, about your leader’s dysfunction, or about how this is never going to change. The PQ Rep doesn’t argue with that story. It just interrupts it long enough to give you back your footing.

In practice, this might look like pressing your fingertips together under the table and focusing on the sensation of pressure. Or taking one slow breath and actually noticing the air moving. Or feeling the weight of your feet on the floor. Thirty seconds. That’s it. Not to suppress the frustration but to keep the Judge from driving the next thing that comes out of your mouth.

Because what comes next matters.

After the Moment: The Alignment Question

Most middle managers in this situation reach for one of two responses. The first is the handbrake: “We can’t do that, we’re already three weeks into the current plan.” Accurate. Completely ineffective. The second is silence that leads to absorbing the pivot, nodding along, and going back to the team with yet another redirect and no explanation. Neither of these serves you, your team, or your leader.

The third option is what we’ll call the Alignment Question. Instead of a handbrake or silence, you offer a question that moves the conversation forward while doing the work of Reality Testing out loud:

“I want this vision to be a reality. Here is where we are on the current path. How does this new direction align with our core mission, and what do you need us to stop doing to make room for it?”

Read that again. Notice what it does. It opens with alignment, not resistance. It states the current reality clearly and without apology. And then it asks the leader to do the work of Reality Testing with you by naming what gets deprioritized when something new gets added. That last piece is the most important. You are not asking permission to push back. You are inviting your leader to be a partner in the very function they’ve been leaving entirely to you.

This is not a soft move. It is a high-level EQ negotiation, and it reframes your need for clarity as a service to the organization rather than an obstacle to the vision.

Reflect and Act

You have been doing two jobs. Your own — the execution, the team management, the structural thinking, the reality checks that keep the organization from flying off the rails. And someone else’s — absorbing the emotional and organizational cost of an Optimism gap that was never yours to carry. That second job is optional even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

The Judge will tell you that the chaos is evidence of your inadequacy. Reality Testing will tell you something different: that you have been functioning as the navigator on a ship where the pilot keeps changing the destination, and you have been doing it well. The exhaustion you feel is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that you have been carrying more than your share for a long time.

That is worth naming. And then it is worth putting down.

Reflect: Think about the last time a shifting target made you question your own competence. What was the Judge telling you? Write down the actual words, as specifically as you can. Now ask yourself: is that a fact, or is it a story the Judge built from someone else’s chaos?

Act: The next time Point B moves, try the Alignment Question before you leave the room. Just once. Write down what happens: what you asked, how your leader responded, and what it felt like to name the reality out loud instead of absorbing it silently.

At one organization, we all had our own partners to manage. In this mission-driven non-profit, we all were aiming at a goal of high social impact, and we were all high-performers. But because each of us was responsible for our own specific area, we lived in parallel silos. We could troubleshoot or brainstorm with one another, but we couldn’t really share the load.

The result? Even in a room full of people, it could end up feeling incredibly lonely.

The Loneliness Epidemic at Work

We are currently living through what researchers call a Loneliness Epidemic, and virtual work has, in many ways, thinned the threads that connect us. It’s easy to feel like your silo is your entire world. But when we expect our workplace to solve 100% of our need for connection, we put an immense burden on our professional relationships.

One way to alleviate this is by looking at our social responsibility (our willingness to contribute to the welfare of others) both within our working roles and beyond the office walls. Whether it’s volunteering or joining a community group, contributing to life outside of your job makes you a more well-rounded person. It helps you see yourself as a single, important piece of a puzzle rather than the whole puzzle itself. By zooming out, you begin to build your empathy muscle as you are exposed to different perspectives, which you then bring back to your team.

From Silos to Shared Margin

Most of us want to move away from these silos. We long to be in places where each person brings their best and can trust the others to do the same. But relying on others is a hard bridge to build, especially in virtual environments.

In my experience, the bridge isn’t built by a bigger budget or a better project management tool. It’s built by intentionality and empathy. I saw this modeled extremely well by a Director that I worked under. He set up a weekly team call where the primary focus was hearing about each other’s weeks and what was going on with each person personally. People were free to share with whatever amount of vulnerability felt right to them. While we chatted about little things and big things, we were building our ability to empathize with one another and gaining trust. That empathy and trust created margin. Once we knew what someone was actually up against, we were able to stop giving simple advice and start stepping in to help carry the weight.

The Four Sentences That Build the Bridge

The biggest barrier to this kind of team is the pressure we feel as leaders to be flawless. We think we have to have every answer. But empathy requires a catalyst: vulnerability.

I’m reminded of Louise Penny’s character, Chief Inspector Gamache,1 who says there are four sentences that lead to wisdom:

I don’t know.

I need help.

I’m sorry.

I was wrong.

In your silo, “I need help” might feel okay, but “I don’t know” feels like a risk. Yet, when you say “I don’t know,” you aren’t showing weakness; you are creating an opening for someone else to bring their strength to the table. You are moving from the mentality that you have to do it all alone to prove your worth to doing it together.

Reflect and Act On It

Reflect: Think about your current team. Are you a group of people working in parallel, or are you creating margin for one another? Which of the Four Sentences feels the scariest for you to say out loud?

Act: This week, instead of jumping straight into the agenda of your next meeting, take 30 seconds to observe the room. Try to name the dominant emotion you sense from one or two people. Then, try one of the Four Sentences. If a project is confusing, say “I don’t know the best path here, what do you think?”. Watch how quickly that “silo” starts to open up.

Over the Christmas break, my family and I spent time in the Smoky Mountains. One of the things we did was wander through a mirror maze. It was dimly lit, and they gave us gloves to wear so we wouldn’t inadvertently smudge the glass as we muddled through.

It was disorienting. When we focused on the mirrors, we were quickly disoriented and couldn’t find the way through the maze. We were distracted by our reflections bouncing between mirrors; I realized that if I looked at the mirrors, I stayed lost. But if I looked down at the carpet, I could see the path. Even though the carpet pattern was just a jumble of scribbles on a dark background, it was enough to figure out what was real and what was a reflection.

Middle management is like being in a maze. Everyone expects something of you and you desperately want to find the right way to navigate through everyone else’s needs and demands. It isn’t uncommon to feel stuck, listening to the judge in your head tell you that you’re doing it all wrong.

To find the exit, we have to look at our Inner Foundation. This foundation has two sides: How you see yourself (Self-Perception) and How you show up in the world (Self-Expression).

Self-Perception

In the mirror maze, looking at the glass was a trap. The mirrors showed a version of the room that was distorted, multiplied, or showed me standing in a place I wasn’t actually standing.

In leadership, Self-Perception is your carpet. It’s the internal data that tells you what is real, regardless of the critical emails, the silence from your leader, or that nagging voice of imposter syndrome. When your self-perception is working well, you aren’t guessing your value based on the other’s actions. You have a quiet, steady awareness of your own strengths and your smudges (the weaknesses we all have) without judging yourself for them.

When you’re overworked and overlooked, you stop looking at the carpet. You start believing the blurry, never-enough version of yourself reflected in the glass. You lose sight of what you’re actually capable of and start chasing goals that belong to everyone else but you. To find the exit, you have to stop asking the mirrors who you are and start trusting the ground beneath your feet.

Self-Expression

Knowing where the path is on the carpet is only half the battle. You can see the exit perfectly, but if you don’t move your feet, you’re still stuck. This is Self-Expression; it’s how the “inner you” becomes visible to the rest of the world.

If Self-Perception is your internal map, Self-Expression is the movement. It’s the courage to be honest about what you’re seeing and the backbone to lead the way, even when the rest of the group is still pointing in different directions. This isn’t about being the loudest person in the maze; it’s about the internal GPS that says, “I know the way,” the legs that actually take the step, and the hands that guide your team along.

If you’re waiting for a nod of approval before you move, you’ll stay paralyzed. You’ll find yourself asking for permission to be right or waiting for someone else to validate your direction. But you don’t find the exit by following a reflection. You find it by trusting yourself and having the confidence to say, “Follow me.”

Reflect and Act On It

Reflect: Think about a mirror you’ve been staring at lately (ex: a critical email or difficult conversation). How has that reflection distorted how you see your actual strengths this week?

Act: This week, we’re cleaning the glass.

1. Identify the Smudge: Write down one area where burnout is making you feel “less than.”

2. Look at the Carpet: Write down three strengths that are true, regardless of how you feel right now.

3. Take One Step: Find one small moment this week to be assertive. Ask for what you need or say “no” to a task that doesn’t align with your goals.

Don’t worry about the reflections. Just look down, trust your feet, and move.

Living there, I thought a lot about water - where it will come from, how it will get to my house, how much I could spare for daily tasks. During the rainy season, the normally dry riverbed on the edge of town would become a rushing torrent with the power to knock over semis as they tried to drive across.

I think about that river a lot and how it would be there one day but not the next. It was totally unpredictable in its power and even its existence. You never knew what you would get until you drove down to the bank to have a look.

People are a lot like that river. We all know that colleague (or maybe we are that colleague) who is usually steady and easy to get along with. But if you press them too hard, or hit just the right nerve, they suddenly shut down or worse, snap. Our behavior is never just about what is happening in front of us. It’s about the hidden watershed happening inside.

The Hidden Watershed

When a deadline hits or you are faced with a difficult/stressful situation, your brain doesn’t just react to the event. It runs that event through a series of filters in less than a blink of an eye.

• Your Core Values. Often unseen, these values determine everything that flows from you.

• Your Emotions and Personality. These rise up quickly to protect you when your core values are tested.

• Your Emotional Intelligence and Skills. These are the visible actions and reactions that people around you see.

If we only try to manage the raging river (our outward skills) without looking at the source spring (our values and emotions), we often fail to change our actual behavior. We might know the “right” way to handle conflict, but in the heat of the moment, the river floods and our head knowledge gets swept downstream.

What is Emotional Intelligence, Really?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is simply the way you understand and manage your emotions, connect with others, and make decisions.

Unlike your IQ, which stays pretty stable throughout your life, your EQ is flexible. It’s a set of skills you can learn, practice, and measurably improve.

Incidentally, the river in Chad now has a bridge over it. Travel is predictable. Life is easier.

Emotional Intelligence can be that bridge for you. It connects who you are with how you want to lead, making your impact steady rather than unpredictable.

Building the Bridge

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be helping you build your bridge using the EQ-i 2.0 framework. Here is where we’re headed:

• Part 1: The Inner Foundation. We’ll look at Self-Perception and Self-Expression. This is about clearing the imposter fog and finding your authentic voice.

• Part 2: The Relationship Lens. We’ll dive into the Interpersonal side of leadership. This is where we build the trust and empathy that keeps a team together.

• Part 3: The Under-Pressure Pair. We’ll tackle Stress Management and Decision Making. This is how you stay steady and choose wisely when the flash floods of work life hit.

• Part 4: The Power of One. We’ll wrap up with a plan to take one small, consistent action that actually changes your leadership for the long haul.

Reflect and Act On It

Reflect: Think back to the last time you reacted in a way that surprised you (maybe you snapped at a teammate or stayed silent when you should have spoken up). Looking back, what do you think triggered that flood of emotion?

Act: This week, we’re just building awareness. Set a timer on your phone for three times today. When it goes off, take 60 seconds to ask yourself:

1. What am I feeling right now?

2. What triggered this?

3. How is this emotion influencing what I’m doing?

That’s it. You aren’t trying to cross the river yet; you’re just learning to read the water levels.

I’ve been struggling this week with what to write about in this newsletter. I have several drafts started, but none of them seem to meet the heavy moment that many of us are finding ourselves in right now. When I look at the brokenness in our communities and world, I often wonder how the work we do actually helps to alleviate such a depth of suffering.

So, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry by Ted Loder in his collection Guerrillas of Grace. This week, the poem that I keep reading over and over again is Sometimes It Just Seems to Be Too Much. I hope that it speaks to your soul and helps you as it has helped me.

Sometimes, Lord,
It just seems to be too much:
	too much violence, too much fear;
	too much of demands and problems;
	too much of broken dreams and broken lives;
	too much of war and slums and dying;
	too much of greed and squishy fatness
		and the sounds of people
			devouring each other
				and the earth;
	too much of stale routines and quarrels,
		unpaid bills and dead ends;
	too much of words lobbed in to explode
		and leaving shredded hearts and lacerated souls;
	too much of turned-away backs and yellow silence,
		red rage and the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth.
Sometimes the very air seems scorched
	by threats and rejection and decay
		until there is nothing
			but to inhale pain
				and exhale confusion.
Too much of darkness, Lord, 
	too much of cruelty
		and selfishness
			and indifference…

Too much, Lord, 
	too much,
		too bloody,
			bruising,
				brain-washing much.

Or is it too little,
	too little of compassion,
too little of courage,
	of daring,
		of persistence,
			of sacrifice;
too little of music
	and laughter
		and celebration?

O God, 
make of me some nourishment
	for these starved times,
Some food for my brothers and sisters
	who are hungry for gladness and hope,
that, being bread for them,
	I may also be fed
		and be full.

Reflect On It

When there is “too much” violence and “too little” persistence, the weight can feel paralyzing. What is one tiny, daring act of compassion you can offer someone else today as a first step towards lightening the weight pressing on you?

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The Band-Aid covers up the wound and hopes no one will notice.

The Pain Pill swoops in to solve the crisis.

The Vitamin Leader plans ahead to prevent problems or to enable themselves to respond with flexibility.

We talked about how easy it is to get addicted to being the “Pain Pill” leader. It feels good to save the day! But today, I want to show you exactly what this looks like on a global scale.

We’re going to look at two polar explorers who faced the exact same freezing conditions but led in two very different ways. One is a household name; the other is largely forgotten.

Martin Gutmann has an excellent TEDxBerlin talk called “Why do we celebrate incompetent leaders?” It’s worth a watch. In it, he draws a comparison between two polar explorers, Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen. After watching his talk, I did some research on each of the explorers, especially Amundsen who I had not heard of before.

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The Vitamin Leader: Roald Amundsen

Amundsen was the first explorer to reach the South Pole, the North Pole, and the first to navigate the Northwest Passage (the passage in the Arctic Ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific). During his Northwest Passage expedition, Amundsen and his crew spent two winters on king William Island, part of the Arcitic Archipelago in northern Canada. His time there was not wasted. He spent both winters learning arctic survival techniques from the Netsilik Inuit. He and his crew learne to use sled dogs and how to dress for the freezing, wet climate (using animal skins instead of wool). These skills proved vital to his successful exploration of the South Pole.1

Amundsen was a vitamin leader because he didn’t wait for an emergency to figure out how to survive. He looked ahead, learned from the people closest to the ground, the Netsilik Inuit, (today, we would call them subject matter experts), and put systems in place to prepare for the unknown. Because of his intense preparation, his expeditions were marked by speed and efficiency.

The Pain Pill Leader: Ernest Shackleton

I certainly don’t want to disparage Shackleton. He is widely celebrated as a role model for leadership in extreme circumstances, for good reason. When his ship was trapped and crushed by ice, he managed to lead his men to safety against impossible odds. He is the ultimate Pain Pill. When things go terribly wrong, he is exactly who you want in charge.

One of Shackleton contemporaries, Sir Raymond Priestley, summed it up perfectly: “Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency, but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

But being a Pain Pill leader only works if there is pain.

Shackleton’s life was restless and unfulfilled. These are great traits for an explorer, but in the absence of an expedition and without a crisis to solve, he launched business ventures that failed and ultimately died heavily in debt.2

When we rely on “Pain Pill Mode” at work, we can easily fall into this same trap. We become really good at putting out fires and being the hero in extreme circumstances. But without a disaster, we feel restless, unfulfilled, or unsure of our value. We might even accidentally let small problems become big fires just so we have a crisis to manage.

A Time for Each Leader

After reading about Amundsen, you might think the goal is to never be a Pain Pill, but that’s not real life. You can’t be just one of these types of leaders. You have to be able to be all three, depending on the situation. If you cut off an arm, I’m not going to hand you a Vitamin C tablet. You need a tourniquet, a very strong pain pill, and a trip to the ER.

There are always true emergencies in the non-profit world. Funding falls through at the last minute, a key team member leaves unexpectedly, you can’t get a visa to get into the country where your project is taking place. In those moments, you have to be the pain pill by calling on your inner Shackleton and moving through the crisis.

The problem isn’t that we visit “Pain Pill Mode.” The problem is that we live there. We treat every planning meeting like a survival situation. The goal isn’t to eliminate the Bandaid or Pain Pill Leader. The goal is to make sure that you aren’t camped out there. When we camp out in one of these positions, we’re often leading from exhaustion, driven by our inner Judge who tells us we either have to hide our flaws or play the hero to be valuable. By taking steps to shift into Vitamin mode, we can start to lead from a grounded, emotionally healthy place. We can equip our teams to build resiliency, so that when a real crisis happens, you actually have the energy to handle it.

Reflect & Act on It

Amundsen didn’t become a Vitamin leader overnight; he spent years preparing. That sounds daunting. What’s the first small step you can take today?

Look at your calendar or to-do list for the coming week.

• Where are you currently functioning as a Band-aid or a Pain Pill? Are you doing it out of true necessity, or is it just a comfortable default habit?

• Pick one area where you are constantly putting out fires, and ask yourself: What is one vitamin I can take today to make this easier next week/month?
  Maybe it’s scheduling a 15-minute buffer between meetings so you can breathe. Maybe it’s letting a team member solve a problem on their own instead of jumping in to rescue them. Or maybe it’s finally having that uncomfortable conversation you’ve been putting off.

A bigger step to consider and move toward: Pick a chronic frustration on your team. Do not try to fix it today. Instead, schedule one hour on your calendar next week titled “Vitamin Time.” Use that hour to think about a system, a checklist, or a conversation that could prevent that frustration from happening next month. Be boring. Be prepared. Become a Vitamin.

Band-Aid

A negative situation comes up, and you rush to cover it up as quickly as possible so that no one can see the wound. Sometimes, the Band-aid helps the wound heal, but sometimes, it covers a wound that is getting infected without your knowledge.

Where do you see yourself acting as a Band-aid? Maybe you think, “If I cover this mistake up, no one will know that I don’t know what I’m doing.” Your inner Judge is feeding you lies about being an imposter.

When we rush to cover things up, to repair our image, it’s a slippery slope to toxic culture or resentment because a leader was too afraid to have a hard conversation. Since middle managers carry the culture of our organizations1, the way we handle our mistakes sets the tone for the entire organization. Is fear the culture that we want to build?

As a new leader, I often found myself in Band-aid Mode. I wanted to look like I knew what I was doing, especially as a woman leading a team of men (all of whom were older than I). One team member was particularly gracious in helping me to see this default and the way it was shutting down conversation and preventing group troubleshooting.

If you find yourself defaulting to Band-aid Mode, call it out. Your inner Judge is trying to protect you, but in the long run, it causes harm and limits growth. Is there one person on your team or a peer that can help you talk through the latest situation to find a different approach?

Pain Pill

A negative situation comes up, and you figure out how to solve it. This is the most common thing that we see in leadership examples and books. A crisis comes and the leader rises to meet it.

This is the most seductive way to lead. You solve a crisis, and you get immediate praise. You feel valuable and important. But the thing is, there isn’t always a crisis to solve. Without a crisis, how do you get noticed or affirmed?

If you are the only person able to solve a crisis, you’re training your team that YOU are the only person who can find a solution in an emergency. Not only does this dis-empower those you lead, it causes you to run from fire to fire, doing your best to put them all out, until you burn out.

Vitamin

Taking vitamins is boring; it doesn’t feel heroic. It’s just a quiet habit that you do every day (or most days, if you’re me.) The vitamin leader looks ahead and sees potential pitfalls. They listen to their team members who are closer to the ground. They prepare as best as they can but also stay flexible to be able to meet challenges head on.

Leadership can be boring, routine. But consistency builds trust. Clear communication, stated expectations, consistently enforced boundaries. Each of these is a rung in the ladder to trust. The vitamin leader prevents the crisis, so you don’t need the pain pill.

What does vitamin leadership look like in the non-profit world?

One colleague has set up guidelines around the various communication tools at our disposal. We all know that an email to him will be answered in 1 business day, a slack message within 1-2 hours, and a text message immediately. Knowing this helps us to use our judgment in the urgency of our requests.

What does it look like for you in your role? Do you need to be more consistent about sending meeting agendas? Or maybe you want to get into the habit of sharing notes from leadership meetings with your team? What small behavior can you add to your routine that will be a step towards trust?

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Reflect & Act on It

We can’t change what we don’t notice. Your only job this week is to observe yourself without judgment (tell your Inner Judge to take a hike).

Look at your last three stressful moments at work.

Did you hide the problem? (Band-Aid)

Did you swoop in to fix it yourself? (Pain Pill)

Or did you prep for it ahead of time? (Vitamin)

Recent data shows that building confidence is the #1 challenge for middle managers.2 Often, we default to Pain Pill mode because fixing a crisis gives us a quick hit of confidence. This week, when you feel the urge to jump in and save the day, just pause. Ask yourself: “Am I doing this because it’s necessary, or because I want to feel useful?”

Coming Up Next Week

Now that you know the three types of leaders, you might be asking yourself:

Is it always bad to be a Pain Pill? Don’t we need crisis management sometimes?

Next week, I’ll share the tale of two explorers. One explorer was the ultimate Pain Pill and the other the ultimate Vitamin. One is famous for a heroic rescue; the other is famous for steadiness. We’ll look at why we celebrate the one while overlooking the other, and how to start exploring your own leadership style.

As I’ve been working on building my coaching business, I’ve had to learn how to talk to people about myself. Yikes. First, I had to overcome my inner Judge who says things like, “No one will care about your perspective. Who would come to you for coaching? People are going to laugh at your ideas.”

To start to overcome my inner Judge, I had to learn how to hear its voice and catch those comments. Now, when I hear that voice whispering in my ear, I can pause and say, “Oh, that’s the Judge talking. I’m choosing not to listen.” Naming the voice gives me breathing room. It reminds me that I am more than my negative thoughts, so that I can focus on the person in front of me instead of my fear.

Second, I had to figure out what to say to people. Usually, my mind goes blank when someone asks me a question about myself. How can I get around that? A colleague recommended Better Small Talk by patrick King. In it, he presents the idea of the conversational resume. As a leader, you make decisions all day long. By the time you get to a networking event, you have decision fatigue. A conversational resume protects your energy so you don’t have to scramble for something to say when your brain is already tired.

Preparing a conversational resume before going to different events has been a game changer. It has helped me build confidence and given me something practiced to say when my mind goes blank.

Before We Dive In:

I created ERA Coaching & Consulting for leaders who want to lead with Emotional Intelligence and confidence, so they can experience a transformation from feeling constantly overwhelmed to leading from a healthy, sustainable place.

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How do you create a conversational resume?

Start by thinking about the questions that you hear the most often. How was your weekend? Did you catch (insert sports event here)? Tell me more about your work.

Then, start brainstorming ways to answer them. Wherever possible, you want the answer to be lighthearted and funny so that you will be remembered. Consider these examples based on my weekend:

• The generic approach: Oh, this weekend, I went to a farm with my family.

• The Conversational Resume Approach: This weekend, I was chased by an emu while a goat tried to eat my shirt!

image by: Carlos Delgado; CC-BY-SA

The first example shuts down conversation or forces your conversation partner to draw information out of you. The second example invites people into your story. It shows that you’re human, you’re approachable, and you don’t take yourself too seriously. We’re drawn to this type of person.

Of course, people can ask about a number of different things, so I try to think through these questions so that I have answers at the ready.

• What do you do outside of work? (hobby, volunteer)

• What is something that you recently read or a show you watched that has made you think?

• Describe your life motto in 6 words.

• What is a topic you could give a 5-minute presentation on right now with zero preparation?

Flip the Script

Remember, networking is a two-way street. If you are feeling nervous, the person across from you probably is too. The greatest gift you can give them is a good question that lets them drop the mask. (Make sure you can answer these, too, in case your conversation partner asks you the same thing!)

• What is the best thing that happened to you this week, no matter how small?

• What is the most interesting thing you’re working on right now?

• How did you get connected to this event/organization?

• I’m always looking for recommendations; have you read or watched anything good lately?

Act on It

Set a timer for 5 minutes today. Pick just one of the questions above and draft your “emu story.” Write it down, say it out loud to your cat, or practice it in the car on your way to a networking event. The next time you walk into a room, you’ll have one tool ready in your back pocket.

What have you done to make networking easier? Let me know in the comments!

This quote from the book is the one that keeps coming to my mind:

‘There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.’

“‘So God just leaves?’ John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. ‘Abandons creation? You’re on your own, apes. Good luck!’

“‘No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.’

“‘Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,’ Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. ‘ ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ’

“‘But the sparrow still falls,’ Felipe said.”

I think about this when I read about detention centers, children with measles, ICE raids, people dying here and around the world because of a misguided hunger for power. We see the sparrow falling all around us, every day, and what is our response? What should it be?

image by: Charles J. Sharp; CC-SA

Sitting with Discomfort

In The Sparrow, the response was to sit with discomfort and tension. Sit with the person who had experienced tragedy and bear witness, even when they didn’t want someone near them. It wasn’t platitudes or “look at this good thing that came out of your pain.” It was sitting with suffering, in solidarity, even when you don’t understand all of it.

I’ve heard this called “getting in the well” with someone instead of coming in, motivational quotes in hand, trying to fix it all. When we try to “just fix it,” we are actually focusing our own discomfort. We fix it so we can stop feeling bad about their pain. To learn to sit with discomfort is a radical act of rebellion against a world that demands quick fixes. It is how we keep our humanity intact.

But what does that look like, really? Does it look one way with your closest friend and another way with those at work or across the ocean? Sitting in the well will look different in every situation, but the heart posture is the same. Sometimes, you can share tears with a friend or listen to a colleague’s experience without interrupting. You can educate yourself on events around the world; you can see people where others see statistics.

However, you can’t sit in the well with someone else if you are scared of the dark yourself. If we haven’t learned to tolerate our own discomfort, grief, or anger, we will inevitably try to rush others through theirs. We will offer platitudes because we need the tension to end.

So, the work of empathy begins with emotional self-awareness. We have to learn our own internal landscape - the valleys and hills, the twists and turns. We need to learn to observe our own emotions with curiosity instead of judgment and name what is happening inside us.

“Inviting our thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them.”

― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

When we ignore our feelings, we let them take the wheel. When we name them, we take back control. In the coaching world, we often say, “You have to name it to tame it.” The better you get at identifying your own emotional nuance, the higher your capacity becomes to sit with the complexity of someone else’s experience. You are building the emotional muscle required to sit in the well with others.

Act on it

Next time you feel a “sparrow falling” moment (in the news or in your day-to-day life) don’t fix it immediately. Grab a pen. Write it down. Name the emotion. Then decide how to move forward.

So, it was only natural that I was drawn to , A Notebook to Save Your Mind. His methodology changed my notebook from a nice cover and great paper to a tool to help me work through the ERA framework: Equip, Reflect, Act.

Equip: Gather your data. What are you equipped to do, and where do you need support to delve deeper?

Many leaders come into coaching feeling overwhelmed or facing imposter syndrome. Their equipping journey begins with the EQ-i 2.0 assessment. This assessment shows a snapshot of your emotional intelligence. Unlike IQ which is unchanging over the course of your life, your EQ can be grown. But like a plant, you need to provide water, good soil, and sunlight.

Emotional intelligence starts with self-awareness. As a manager and as a coach, noticing how my emotions shape the way I interact with people is an ongoing practice. I can’t change what I don’t notice.

So, I started a new habit based on Ryder Carroll’s method: recording a one-line Event and a one-line Feeling in a small notebook. The goal is to make emotional awareness second nature, not write a full journal entry or novel.

Here are the symbols that I use in my notebook:

◯ event

= Feeling or mood

- thought or note to remember

⏺ actions

+ something positive

🟋 gratitude

Reflect: Looking for Patterns. Now that I have some data, I can move to the second step in the ERA Framework - Reflect.

This is where the work put into practicing starts to bear fruit. When you are constantly busy or distracted, you rarely stop to look at how you are managing activities and emotions. When I look back on the day, the week or the month (and I try to do all three), I ask myself:

• What patterns are showing up? You might notice that you come out of 1:1 meetings feeling inadequate or overwhelmed. Or you might notice that team meetings leave you feeling energized and confident.

• When was I showing up as my full self? What interactions or events made you feel most like yourself, where you were leading from a healthy space?

• When was I holding part of myself back? What interactions or events made you feel least energized, like you were just going through the motions?

Act: Charting the Course. Data without action is just trivia. After reflecting on the data, I can chart a course of action.

Based on what you saw in your notebook, pick one small thing to take action on.

• What do I want to do differently next week? For example, I will take 1 minute before zoom calls to practice deep breathing so that the emotions of the last call don’t impact this one.

• What could get in the way of making that change?

• What can I do today to make it more likely that I will make that change?

• What will it look like when I succeed in making this change?

Start Small - if you are feeling overwhelmed right now, the idea of adding journaling to your to-do list might sound terrible. I get it. But this method takes about 30 seconds at a time. It’s not about perfection; it’s about pausing just long enough to see yourself clearly.

I’d love to hear from you: How do you currently practice emotional self-awareness in the middle of a busy workday? Do you have a method for “checking in” with yourself, or does the day just run you over? Let me know in the comments; I’d love to hear what works for you.

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often quoted a 19th century abolitionist, Theodore Parker, who stated

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.1

When I read this and think through history, I find myself wondering if it’s true - are we really getting closer to justice? Or are we falling into the trap of “Justice for me, but not for thee?” And if justice is selective, where is the hope for those that aren’t among the chosen to receive it? What is our - or even just my - response to injustice? Where do you find hope for the future when the present feels oppressively heavy?

Reading through my inbox, it sounds like many of us are feeling that way.

“I’ll admit it doesn’t feel like a good year, but I’ll also say that it’s up to all of us to make it one.” - Rebecca Ringquist

“I feel like I am rowing upstream through mud. […] I’m grieved and distracted, worn-out and often disoriented just like you are.” - Emily P. Freeman

“There will be many hard ways that we work toward a more perfect union this year. […] In the midst of all this, there is the necessity of building community, enjoying the benefits of citizenship, maintaining an active and disciplined hope.” - Beth Silvers

An active and disciplined hope. That phrase stuck out to me. Active hope is not certainty that things will turn out the way I think they should. Active hope is a choice to not look away, to not distract myself with one more reel or one more show. Maybe active hope is choosing to show up for my neighbor and trust God to manage the arc of the moral universe and give me the wisdom to know the next right step in the arc of my life.

“Hope is a discipline. It’s less about ‘how you feel,’ and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning… It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling… you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world…” - Mariame Kaba

If the arc of the moral universe is too long for us to see the end of, maybe our job isn’t to calculate the curve. Maybe our job is just to make sure that we are bending things toward kindness and truth - in a word, justice.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t snap my fingers and fix the world, but I can be a safe harbor for the people around me while the storm rages outside, and while also making sure that safe harbors aren’t necessary anymore. Or as one user on Threads puts it:

If we try to bring about change, at least there’s a chance. Even if we’re not successful, I’d rather go down trying to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice. (Threads user @ameliaZW)

That’s where this newsletter comes in.

I write about:

• Battling Imposter Syndrome: Quieting the inner critic so you can actually lead.

• Building Boundaries: Learning to say “no” so your “yes” actually means something.

• Emotional Intelligence: Using the science of EQ to navigate team dynamics and your own stress.

• The E.R.A. Framework: How to Equip yourself with tools, Reflect on what’s working, and Act with intention.

Who is this for?

This publication is for the person who:

• Feels constantly overworked and frequently overlooked.

• Wants to grow professionally but isn’t finding the way forward.

• Cares deeply about being a “good” leader but fears they are burning out.

• Is ready to move from emotionally reactive to emotionally healthy.

Why Subscribe?

Because you shouldn’t have to figure this out alone.

When you subscribe, you get a partner in your corner. I’m an ICF-credentialed coach, trained in Positive Intelligence, and a certified EQ-i 2.0 practitioner. I founded E.R.A. Coaching and Consulting because I believe you can be a high-impact leader without sacrificing your well-being.

Let’s get you equipped, help you reflect, and get you ready to act.