Things I'm Thinking

The Work of Being Seen
The work doesn't always speak for itself. Sometimes we have to make it visible, document it, and make sure the right people see it. But when does making our work visible become something else? I started asking that question after three clients showed me different ways of managing how they're seen. Then I caught myself doing it, too. Read more...
Some Problems Are Not Hard. They Are Lonely.
People often assume that when someone can't make themselves begin, they need more discipline. But sometimes the task has become so loaded with shame and self-judgment that what’s missing isn't pressure. It's company. Read more...
When Consistency Feels Like Captivity
Consistency doesn’t guarantee the outcome. It guarantees you’ll find out. Sometimes the hardest part of repeating the thing isn’t the repetition itself. It’s what repetition eventually tells us. Read more...
The Body Votes First
Sometimes the body says no before the mind has found the words. The harder part isn't always hearing it. It's deciding whether you're willing to count your own vote—especially when someone else will be disappointed by what you choose. Read more...
A Little Fuss Over What Someone Loves
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we're not getting from other people—what isn't offered, what never quite arrives. What happens when we turn the question around? What am I giving? What am I helping make possible? On one birthday, three lives intersected with mine: a woman gearing up for the years when her children won't be at home, a woman looking at the life she's built and wishing her mother could see it, and a five-year-old cat in Fairbanks who had no idea any of this was... Read more...
What You Tolerate, You Teach
Sometimes we know exactly where the line is, and still cross it. A reflection about a song, a name, being polite, and the patterns we teach without realizing we're teaching them. Read more...
The Collar in My Hand
My friends' dog slipped his collar to chase a bunny along the river. When he came back, I realized the collar had never been what kept him near. Knowing he had chosen to come back felt very different from making sure he stayed. Read more...
Knowing Isn't Seeing
Sometimes knowing something well means we've stopped looking. And sometimes we're looking right at the road when something we could never have seen coming steps into our path. Read more...
What Becomes True Before Something Goes Wrong?
What Becomes True Before Something Goes Wrong? explores the changes that happen before a leadership problem, burnout, relationship rupture, or workplace crisis becomes visible. A reflection on noticing what people are carrying before “making it work” stops working. Read more...
The Coffee Next Door
A neighbor’s home-roasted coffee has me thinking about the strange ways we interrupt ourselves — and what happens when we don't. Read more...
When People Want to Give You Money, Let Them
What happens when someone has already said yes—and we still find a way to step between ourselves and receiving? Through sponsorships, coaching clients, and even backyard chicken eggs, I explore the interference that causes us to discount what others are freely choosing to offer. Maybe receiving is not taking. Maybe it is an offering of its own. Read more...
When Force Arrives Where Presence Was Needed
We often assume safety is something we can create for someone else — through intervention, certainty, authority, or control. But what if some of what we call safety is actually compliance? After watching several courtroom proceedings, I found myself noticing the same pattern in relationships, leadership, and coaching: force can create stillness, but presence creates the conditions for someone to return to themselves. Read more...
The Difference Between Making Something Happen and Letting Something Happen
Most people think helping means offering answers, asking better questions, or moving a conversation forward. But what if the moments that change us most are the ones where no one is trying to get anywhere? This post explores the difference between creating movement and making room for it—and why urgency to help may sometimes interrupt the very goodness we're trying to create. Read more...
Presence Is a Practice
We can perform competence, leadership, connection, and even happiness. But what happens when the effort to create an experience becomes a barrier to actually having it? A reflection on presence, self-abandonment, and the courage to stop performing. Read more...
The Guest Chair
My long-ago moment in an emergency room, and what it reveals about the roles we learn to inhabit before we realize we’ve been given them. Not about what happened between two people—but about how a person disappears inside a pattern and calls it normal. Read more...
The Exile Effect
A reflection on how quickly ambiguity gets translated into a sense of exclusion—often before there is any real information about what is actually happening. Through the “Exile Effect,” this piece looks at the subtle, almost automatic moment where uncertainty becomes interpreted as loss of belonging, and how that interpretation begins to organize behavior in leadership, relationships, and identity. It traces the gap between what is happening externally and what gets concluded internally, and what becomes possible when that gap is noticed—if only briefly—before the story takes hold. Read more...
All Pride. No Prejudice.
Most of us know how to spot arrogance. We are less skilled at recognizing the quieter prejudice beneath it: the habit of dismissing our own effort, mistrusting our own arrival, and calling earned things luck. This piece looks at usefulness, belonging, and what changes when you stop pre-judging the life you are already inside. Read more...
We Are Not Behind: How We Misread Timing and Meaning
We don’t usually experience life as it is happening. We experience it as we interpret its timing. A moment becomes “too late” or “just right” or “not enough” almost instantly—long before we have any real distance from it. This piece moves between a hotel room that was already ours, a conversation about leaving and staying, the miracle of a sunset, and petroglyphs from days gone by. What connects them is not timing itself, but the quiet way we turn timing into identity. We are not behind. We are often just... Read more...
The Strange Difficulty of Recognizing What We Already Have
We often misrecognize the lives we are already living because presence rarely arrives in the form we expect. Attention tends to orient toward absence and unresolved problems, while what is stable, working, and quietly sustaining us becomes invisible through familiarity. Through coaching, lived experience, and reflection, the piece shows how this creates the illusion that something is missing when much of what we long for is already present but unrecognized. The shift it points to is not about adding more to life, but learning to see what is already here... Read more...
Being Between
Most people think of limbo as a temporary space between two stable points in life. It is not exceptional. It is structural. It shows up whenever internal change outpaces external reality, leaving us to live inside the lag between what has shifted and what has arrived. Read more...
If Everything Is a Priority, Nothing Is
Overwhelm isn’t a workload problem—it’s a visibility problem. When teams lack shared clarity about priorities and non-priorities, communication breaks down and execution slows. This piece offers practical ways to restore alignment and focus. Read more...