Welcome to Staying Human — a gathering place for reflections, stories, and conversations at the edge of power, conflict, and purpose. Here you’ll find both blogs and vlogs — moments of clarity, questions still unfolding, and practices for leading in a way that keeps us grounded, embodied, and deeply human.
CIRCLE POWER: When Leadership Becomes an Act of Love
CIRCLE POWER: When Leadership Becomes an Act of Love
A Story of Power, Collapse, and What It Actually Takes to Lead
The most powerful thing a leader can do has nothing to do with authority, strategy, or skill. It has to do with whether you stay.
Not whether you fix. Not whether you lead the room back to safety or smooth the discomfort into something manageable. Whether you stay. Fully. In your body. Present with what is, even when everything in you wants to move, solve, or disappear.
Most leaders never discover what becomes possible in that moment. Because staying, truly staying, when someone breaks in front of you, when the room charges, when your own composure cracks, is the hardest thing a human being can do. And the most transformative.
This is a story about what a Japanese taiko (drumming) team taught me about power, collapse, and what becomes possible when people refuse to abandon the one who is struggling and choose to stay in the fire together until everyone gets to play.
What Catches Your Attention Is Not Random — It’s Leadership Data
Before leaders lose power, they usually lose something quieter: range of perception.
We decide what we’re seeing too quickly. That perception hardens. Power follows. Options narrow—often before we realize we’ve chosen.
I’ve been exploring how creative practice, embodied awareness, and attention itself shape leadership decisions before analysis and action take over.
I wrote more about this here:
Stop the Leadership Vomit: Transforming Triggers While Keeping Your Edge
If you are reading this sitting down and you are able to stand up, please stand up.
If you have snapped at anyone, gotten angry, felt irritated, judged someone, had an adult temper tantrum of some sort at work, at home, with friends or loved ones recently where your reaction was larger than the situation, please sit down.
At the opening of my keynote address, "Transforming Triggers: How Irritation Opened the Doorway to Discovery," at the 2025 Spring Conference of ICF Oregon, "Navigating Complex Change: Harnessing the Human Connection in Turbulent Times," yesterday, I had everyone stand up and asked the same question. All but one person sat down.
This simple exercise reveals what we all know intuitively - triggers are universal human experiences. We all have them - those moments when something happens that seems to bypass our rational mind and sends us straight into a reactive state, causing us to, as Dr. Dan Siegel says, "flip our lid."
What Do You Mean I'm Not in Grace-land Already?
There's a moment every leader experiences but few talk about: the moment you realize your power has made you numb.
Not numb to results or strategy or execution. You're likely excellent at those. Numb to your impact. To the wake you leave. To the trust that's unknowingly eroding while believing you're helping people grow.
I learned this lesson in a tutu three sizes too small, landing like an elephant in front of a room full of people, burning with humiliation. But the real lesson wasn't about grace or ballet or femininity. It was about what happens when someone with power over us – a boss, a mentor, a person we depend on – confuses their vision of who they think we should be with who we are actually becoming.
Twenty-five years ago, that moment catalyzed everything I now know about conscious leadership. But it started with a job ad in the Japan Times and was followed by eight years of learning what happens when we hold power without awareness.
This is that story.
What Else Might Be Possible?
The Opportunities Hidden in Your Seemingly “Impossible” Situations
With gratitude to the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples whose waters we visited; I share this story with humility and respect.