High achievers are often praised for their discipline, ambition, and ability to perform under pressure, yet many remain disconnected from the body carrying that success. Through her work in Pilates, embodiment, and nervous system awareness, Maira Flores Xavier explores why leaders can appear highly capable while still operating from patterns of tension, control, and survival. In this interview, Maira shares how survival identities influence leadership behaviour, why burnout is often a result of deeper patterns rather than simply too much work, and how reconnecting with the body can help leaders make more conscious choices and create sustainable success. Maira Flores Xavier, Embodiment Coach for Executives What first showed you that high achievers can be physically active yet still deeply disconnected from their bodies? This goes back to my early years working in Pilates. I kept working with high achievers who were extremely active in their minds but disconnected from their bodies: constant tension, racing thoughts all day, and no real sense that rest was even available to them, let alone chronic pain that stayed the same for years. From the outside, their lives looked more than fine – good income, good work, constant travel. On vacation, things would often ease. But as soon as they came back to the same routine, the same house, the same daily problems, everything returned with it. What changed my understanding was seeing the same pattern across very different people: successful, capable, physically active, and completely unaware of what their bodies were signalling until they broke down in some way. Some of them had the best training routines, the best diet, everything dialled in physically, and they still couldn't feel free or strong in their own bodies. They couldn't explain what was missing. That gap between physical activity and body awareness became the starting point for everything I do now. How do you recognise when a leadership strength is actually an old survival strategy still running the person? The clearest sign is what happens outside of work. Someone who can't stop thinking about work on holiday, who collapses or gets ill the moment they finally rest, or who feels tension and excitement building at the thought of going back, even pain in the body, is not resting on a strength. They're running a survival strategy that only knows how to operate. Underneath it, people are often chasing something they can't name. In ontological work, we see this constantly: someone spends years chasing money, but what they actually want is attention. They cycle through relationships, but what they want is to be seen. The chase repeats endlessly because the real need underneath someone’s focus was never achieved, only substituted. Practically, I look at delegation, trust, and boundaries. Someone who hands over responsibility but keeps checking, who can't trust their team, who can't set a boundary or stay present without slipping into the past or future, is showing survival, not leadership. So is snapping at people below them, or bringing work problems home. The body confirms it: tension, bracing, a shift in breath the moment the pattern is questioned. What does your Five Masks Quiz reveal that traditional mindset-based executive coaching can miss? Traditional mindset coaching works with the story a person tells about themselves, their goals, their blocks, their beliefs. The Five Masks framework works with something underneath that story: the nervous system pattern that built it in the first place. Each of the five masks formed in childhood, shaped by our environment and whatever we experienced as safe or unsafe. If someone grew up with controlling parents, perfectionism became the way to avoid being told off. That pattern doesn't disappear once they become a company president. Their nervous system is still waiting for a parent to walk in and criticise them, even though there's no parent there anymore, just their own conditioning running the show. Mindset coaching can miss this entirely because it works at the level of thought, not the level of the nervous system that generates the thought. The masks reveal how someone actually relates to life, not what they believe about themselves. They don't disappear. They form in childhood and stay with us for life. What changes isn't the mask itself; it's our relationship with it: whether it's still running us unconsciously, or whether we can recognise it and choose differently. Why do workplaces sometimes reward patterns like control, perfectionism, and over-responsibility until they become damaging? I have a joke I tell clients: in big business, we don't manage human beings; we manage nervous systems. Most workplace complaints aren't really about the work. It's about something underneath the work, something the environment is triggering. Our nervous systems are still largely running on primal wiring, built for a threat that hasn't existed in millions of years, yet still on alert. Modern workplaces, with their pressure to perform and their constant low-level threat to what we believe is safe or in our control, activate that same system. Control, perfectionism, and over-responsibility are the patterns that make someone look most capable of handling that threat. Someone who controls every detail looks reliable. Someone who's a perfectionist looks high-standard. Someone who over-functions looks dedicated. So these patterns get rewarded directly: promotions, praise, more responsibility, precisely because they're mistaken for competence instead of recognised as a nervous system in survival mode. It gets worse with long hours, poor food, no real rest, the same routine day after day. All of it keeps the system locked in survival, running the old story instead of actual judgment. Where do you think current conversations about burnout and resilience fail to address what is actually driving executive behaviour? Most burnout conversations treat it as a resourcing problem: too much work, not enough recovery, so the fix becomes more rest, better boundaries, a wellness stipend. Resilience gets framed the same way, as a skill to build so someone can withstand more pressure without breaking. Both miss the actual driver. Burnout isn't the problem. It's the output of a mind and body that have been wired to stay in survival for years, sometimes decades, often since childhood. Rest doesn't resolve that, because the pattern isn't about lacking recovery time; it's about not understanding what survival someone is actually living in. Give that person a vacation, and they'll come back to the same pattern, because nothing about the underlying relationship to survival has changed. Resilience training often makes this worse. It teaches people to tolerate more of the exact conditions activating that survival state, which delays the breakdown rather than preventing it. What's missing from these conversations is the recognition that once someone understands the survival they're living in, they stop letting it race ahead of them and run their life. They can start making different choices and relating to life differently, rather than just enduring more of the same pattern. What signals can tell someone that a familiar way of performing is no longer a conscious choice? The clearest signal is knowing you shouldn't be doing something, and doing it anyway, because you don't know how not to. There's a pull that feels impossible to stop, your whole mind and body pushing you into the same behaviour. Then, after the task, the conversation, the message is finished, comes the recognition: I've done it again. Another signal is the pattern of "fixing" itself. The same problem keeps returning, in different forms but with the same shape, and each time you try to solve it from the same place you've always solved it from. You get the same result, because you're using the same strategy that created the problem to try to fix it. That loop, trying to fix something with the very pattern that's causing it, is one of the strongest signs that what looks like a choice is actually automatic. When performing is a real choice, there's a pause available, a moment where you could do it differently and sometimes do. When it isn't, the behaviour happens first, and the awareness comes after, as recognition rather than decision. How can a leader begin using the body as information instead of overriding what it is communicating? Most leaders don't realise they're overriding their body, because they're already disconnected from it. So the beginning isn't a technique; it's a pause: before making a decision, before responding to an email, noticing what's actually present physically – tension, contraction, expansion, a tightening in the chest, a held breath. The next step is treating that sensation as data, not noise. Instead of pushing through a tight jaw or an uneasy stomach, a leader can ask what that sensation is responding to, then act on the decision anyway. This doesn't mean stopping every time the body signals something. It means building the habit of checking in first, so the body's input is part of the decision, not something the decision bypasses. Left unchecked, override eventually leads to numbness; the body stops signalling because nothing has ever changed in response. So starting early matters. The practice is small and repeatable: pause, notice, name what's there, then decide. Over time, that sequence becomes automatic, and the body becomes a working source of information instead of something managed around. How did your own shift from living mainly in your mind to becoming more embodied change the way you work with others? For most of my career, I was in physical contact with my own body through the work itself, at the studio, moving alongside clients. That made it easier to stay out of my head. That changed after the pandemic, when I moved to online sessions. Sitting still, facing another person through a screen, was when I discovered how unable I actually was to sustain that stillness. I'd shake my leg through entire sessions, thinking about the future, the past, and my son's shopping list, while a client worked through something deep. Seeing that in myself was uncomfortable, and it was also the beginning of real change. I couldn't keep guiding people toward embodiment while living almost entirely in my mind myself. So I did the work I now ask of my clients, not as theory, but as my own practice, my own discomfort, my own slow return to my body. That's the difference in how I show up now. I'm not offering a framework I learned and teach. I'm offering what I had to earn in myself first. When I read tension in someone's breath or a shift in their face before they've said a word, it's not a technique. It's a perspective built by someone who did this work on herself. What do you hope a high-performing leader starts noticing differently after understanding the survival identity behind their success? I hope they start noticing how much they've been bracing, how much tension they've been carrying as if it were simply normal, just part of being high-performing. I hope they see what they're actually chasing underneath the achievement, because once that becomes clear, performance doesn't drop. It sharpens. Without the constant undertow of an old survival strategy, energy and focus go directly toward what someone actually wants, instead of being split between the goal in front of them and whatever unmet need is quietly driving it. I want them to notice the moment before they'd normally react, a tight jaw before a sharp email, a held breath before agreeing to something they don't want, and find a beat of space there that wasn't available before. That space is where sharper decisions come from, clarity instead of urgency, and where peace becomes the baseline instead of the fear and tension they'd mistaken for drive. That's the shift I hope for: not a leader who performs less, but one who finally performs from a place that isn't costing them their body to sustain. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Maira Flores Xavier

Written by Prudence Hatchett, Leadership Resilience Strategist Prudence Hatchett is an award-winning entrepreneur, international speaker, bestselling author, and Leadership Resilience Strategist. She helps leaders transform burnout into sustainable influence and high performance. We have spent decades teaching leaders how to lead. Maybe it is time we spent more time teaching leaders how to be human while they lead. Organizations invest heavily in leadership development. We teach communication, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, strategic thinking, decision-making, change management, and countless other skills designed to create better leaders. Yet burnout remains high. Workplace disconnection continues. Leaders struggle under pressure. Teams lose trust. Talented people leave organizations because of leadership experiences that should have been preventable. So, perhaps we need to ask a different question. What if leadership development does not have a leadership skills problem? What if it has a human development problem? That distinction matters because leadership does not happen separately from the person doing the leading. The skill is only as effective as the human carrying it A leader can sit through an excellent communication training on Tuesday and still shut down during a difficult conversation on Thursday. They can understand conflict resolution and still become defensive when challenged. They can know the importance of empathy and still have very little emotional capacity left after months of chronic stress. They can learn how to delegate but continue holding onto everything because somewhere underneath the behavior is fear: What if it isn't done correctly? What if I lose control? What if their mistake reflects on me? This is where traditional leadership development can miss something important. We sometimes assume that once a leader knows better, they will automatically do better. Human behavior is not that simple. Knowing a leadership skill and being able to access that skill under stress are two very different things. When applying the idea of a certain skill without understanding the human behavior beneath it, the skill can get lost in translation. The leader becomes frustrated. The team becomes frustrated. Over time, exhaustion can turn into burnout, distrust, disconnection, or disengagement. The organization may continue teaching the same leadership principles, hoping eventually something will stick. "The work culture starts experiencing duplication, but not transformation™." We keep developing the role while neglecting the person Leadership development often focuses heavily on what the leader needs to do, such as communicating better, thinking strategically, increasing accountability, managing conflict, building trust, and leading through change. Yes, all these skills are important. But who is developing the human being responsible for implementing all those skills? Who is teaching the leader to recognize what happens internally when they feel challenged, rejected, overwhelmed, uncertain, embarrassed, threatened, or simply exhausted? Who is helping them understand why they react differently under pressure than when everything is going well? Who is helping them build the internal capacity required to carry increasing levels of responsibility without sacrificing themselves or negatively affecting everyone around them? This is where leadership development must become human development. Leadership behavior does not begin in the boardroom It begins internally. Before a leader responds to the employee, makes the decision, handles the conflict, delivers the presentation, or navigates the crisis, something is already happening inside of them. Their brain is interpreting information. Their nervous system is responding. Their emotions are creating signals. Their previous experiences may influence how they interpret what is happening now. Their level of stress is affecting how much internal capacity they have available. All of this can happen before they say a single word. That is why two leaders can receive the exact same information and respond completely differently. One becomes curious and another becomes defensive. One pauses and another reacts. One sees an opportunity to solve a problem and another experiences the same moment as a threat. The difference is not always leadership knowledge. Sometimes, the difference is human capacity. Stress can interrupt access to the leadership skills we already possess One of the ideas I continue to emphasize in my work is that sometimes the leader does not need another skill. Sometimes stress interferes with access to the skills they already have. Think about what happens when pressure increases. Patience can decrease. Listening can become harder. Decision-making can become more reactive. Communication can become shorter or sharper. Small problems suddenly feel much larger. The leader may technically know what to do, but their internal state is influencing how they do it. This is why I believe resilience must be developed beyond simply teaching people to “push through.” Resilience is not about becoming unaffected by pressure, external or internal stimuli. It is about developing the internal capacity to remain connected to yourself, your judgment, and your leadership when pressure arrives. That is human development. When humans develop, leadership has room to develop with them. The leader is the infrastructure™ Organizations often think about infrastructure in terms of systems, technology, processes, operations, and resources. But there is another form of infrastructure carrying all of it: human infrastructure. A strategy can be brilliant, but human beings must execute it. A culture statement can sound inspiring, but human beings must embody it. A change initiative can be well designed, but human beings must navigate the uncertainty that comes with it. Leadership development can provide excellent tools, but a human being must have the capacity to use them. This is the foundation behind one of my core principles: The Leader Is the Infrastructure™. When the leader expands their ability to understand themselves, regulate themselves, recover from pressure, recognize their patterns, remain curious, and respond intentionally, leadership development moves beyond information. It becomes transformation. Human development changes the questions we ask Instead of only asking, “What leadership skill does this person need?” we also begin asking: What happens internally when this leader is under pressure? What patterns appear when they feel threatened or uncertain? What is consuming their emotional capacity? What keeps them from accessing the skills they already possess? How quickly can they recognize their internal response before it becomes an external leadership problem? Do they have the resilience to carry the level of responsibility we are asking them to carry? Those questions take us beneath performance and into the human behavior creating it. That is where sustainable leadership development must go. Better leadership begins with a more developed human I am not suggesting that organizations stop teaching leadership skills. I am suggesting that skills alone are not enough. We have to develop the person who is being asked to use them. Because leaders do not leave their nervous systems, histories, emotions, stress responses, insecurities, fears, or humanity outside the conference room. They bring all of it with them. Sometimes what looks like a communication problem is a stress problem. What looks like resistance may be fear. What looks like poor decision-making may be overwhelm. What looks like a lack of leadership capability may be a leader whose internal capacity has been stretched beyond what they currently know how to manage. That does not remove accountability. It gives us a better place to begin. When leaders understand what is happening beneath their behavior, they gain more opportunity to choose what happens next. That is where resilience becomes more than recovery. It becomes a leadership capability. That is where leadership development becomes more than teaching people how to perform a role. It becomes the development of the human being who has to carry it. Perhaps the future of leadership development is not another competency model, another binder, or another list of skills to master. Perhaps the next evolution of leadership development begins by remembering something remarkably simple: "Before there was a leader, there was a human. Develop the human, and you change the way they lead." I have created a signature leadership executive experience called Evolutionary Resilience™: The Leader Is the Infrastructure™. To learn more, visit my website. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Prudence Hatchett Prudence Hatchett, Leadership Resilience Strategist Prudence Hatchett is an award-winning entrepreneur, international speaker, executive coach, Leadership Resilience Strategist, and bestselling author. With over 20 years of experience in mental health, education, and leadership development, she helps leaders eliminate burnout, strengthen resilience, and elevate their influence. As the founder of PH Counseling, LLC® and Learn with Prudence®, Prudence combines neuroscience, psychology, and leadership strategy to deliver transformative, actionable insights. Her engaging presentations empower audiences to lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose while creating psychologically safe, high-performing cultures that thrive in today's demanding environment.

Written by Andréa Gill, Influence Agility Expert Andréa Gill, founder of PINE Perspective, is a strategic influence specialist who helps leaders decode organizational dynamics to amplify their impact. Grounded in science, with 15+ years in leadership development and 10 in university teaching, she pairs analytical rigour with emotional intelligence to build leadership that inspires and mobilizes. Have you ever walked out of a difficult meeting certain that you were being honest, only to learn later that the room heard something completely different? Have you been told to just be yourself, then watched that advice quietly cost you the trust you were trying to build? Authentic leadership was supposed to rescue us from hollow values statements and polished scripts. In practice, it often leaves leaders exposed. Keep reading to find out why authenticity at work is less about how you feel and far more about what other people can reasonably conclude, and what to do about the gap. The unfulfilled promise of authentic leadership One of my clients, a senior leader, once said to me after a tense meeting, I was just being authentic. What they meant was straightforward. I said what I really think. But what several people in the room seemed to hear was something else entirely. I do not respect the room, I am not listening, and it may not be safe to disagree with me. That gap between what you intended and what others inferred is where most popular authentic leadership advice breaks down. My work has lived at the intersection of organizational behavior, strategy, and ethics for more than a decade, and I have watched the same pattern repeat across industries. Leaders do not lose trust because they are not themselves. They lose trust because their signals do not add up, especially when the stakes rise. That is why I was struck by a recent editorial marking 20 years of authentic leadership research, published in the Journal of Management and Organization. Andrei Lux and Kevin Lowe argue that the field sits at a critical juncture, and they propose a more operational definition grounded in signalling theory: concordant, values-based leader signalling of self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency. The short version is simple and confronting. In real organizations, authenticity is not only about inner alignment. It also lives in the observable signals other people have to work with. This is not an argument against authenticity. Quite the opposite. It argues for taking it seriously enough to make it workable. Because whether you like it or not, you are signalling all the time. At work, authenticity is a coordination problem At work, you rarely get credit for being authentic simply because you feel authentic. A more accurate and more useful question is this. What does my behavior allow other people to conclude about me? That question does not reduce leadership to spin. It forces leaders to take responsibility for the fact that organizational life runs on incomplete information. People infer intent from patterns: what you prioritize, what you protect, what you avoid, and what you do when it costs you something. This is the paradox many leaders miss. You can have perfectly sincere intent and still create confusion, fear, or cynicism because sincerity is private and leadership is public. At PINE Perspective, this is precisely the terrain we measure. Our research on influence agility looks at how leaders read a landscape, navigate relationships, and manage the authenticity others perceive in them, rather than the authenticity they feel on the inside. So, in practice, authenticity becomes a coordination mechanism. It helps people answer questions they are constantly asking under uncertainty: Can I predict this person? Will they be fair when tradeoffs get painful? Do they actually mean what they say? Is it safe to tell them something they do not want to hear? If you operate in a complex organization, those questions are not philosophical. They are operational. What authentic leadership was trying to solve Authentic leadership became popular for good reasons. Employees were tired of polished scripts and hollow values statements. Many leaders were tired too, tired of feeling like they had to perform a role rather than lead as a human being. In the research tradition, authentic leadership is generally framed as behavioral rather than as a fixed type of person. The most widely used measure in the field breaks it into four components: self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and an internalized moral perspective. A systematic review covering two decades of studies shows how contested that construct has become since. At its best, that model tries to prevent two predictable failures that destroy trust: The first is performative leadership, leaders who say what plays well while their decisions contradict it. The second is fragmented leadership, leaders who behave inconsistently across contexts, leaving people unsure what they stand for. Both failures create a workplace where people spend more time reading tea leaves than doing good work. So the aim of authentic leadership is legitimate. Reduce cynicism and increase trust. Where things get tricky is the simplified version of the concept, the one that turns authenticity into a slogan: just be yourself. Herminia Ibarra named this problem well in her work on the authenticity paradox, where sticking rigidly to a familiar self becomes the very thing that blocks a leader from growing into a bigger role. In reality, leaders do not operate in a void. They work within systems of constraints that are regulatory, budgetary, socioeconomic, and more. That complexity shapes their actions and, ultimately, how stakeholders perceive the authenticity of those actions. Authenticity is public inference, not private feeling In organizational life, authenticity is rarely experienced as an internal state you announce. It is more often experienced as an external judgment other people make. That is why authenticity functions like a signal. A signal is information embedded in behavior that others use to infer intent. Signalling is not automatically deception. It is what happens whenever information is incomplete, stakes are real, and people must decide whether to trust, support, oppose, or ignore. In that environment, you do not only communicate through what you say. You communicate through what you prioritize, what you tolerate, and what you choose to make legible. Signalling isn't limited to extroverted leaders or charismatic speakers. Silence is a signal. Avoiding conflict is a signal. Being too busy to follow through signals something. Changing direction without explaining the tradeoffs signals something. If you do not help the room interpret your actions, the room will interpret them for you. To keep this practical rather than philosophical, it helps to separate two things. Experienced authenticity is what feels aligned inside you. Perceived authenticity is what others infer from your behavior. Contemporary scholarship wrestles with that gap and treats authenticity as a dynamic process of identity and self regulation rather than a fixed state. A related distinction matters just as much. Relational transparency is not indiscriminate disclosure. No serious model of authentic leadership requires you to say everything you feel to everyone immediately. Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones made a similar point two decades ago when they described authenticity as something largely defined by what other people see in you. Some leaders hear that as cynical. I hear it as an invitation to grow up as a leader. Your colleagues do not have access to your internal narrative. They have access to your behavior, decisions, consistency, repair moves, and willingness to be held accountable. These distinctions protect leaders from the false choice between oversharing and being fake. A better definition: Disciplined coherence A more operational definition for leaders sounds like this. Authenticity is disciplined coherence between your values, your decisions, and your behaviors across contexts, such that other people can reliably infer what you are about. This definition is intentionally demanding. It asks leaders to be coherent, not merely expressive. It also avoids two common traps. The first is performative vulnerability, which confuses emotional disclosure with trust-building. The second is rigid consistency, which assumes that adapting to context is automatically fake. Coherence is not rigidity Coherence does not mean behaving the same way in every room. It means your principles and your decision logic stay stable enough that people can predict you, while your delivery adapts so the meaning lands. A simple practical test is to separate your nonnegotiables from your adaptables. Nonnegotiables are the values and decision rules you will not violate. Adaptables are tone, pacing, channel, sequencing, and level of disclosure. Leaders often reverse these. They protect the adaptables, saying things like, I will not change how I communicate, that is not me, while leaving the nonnegotiables unclear with phrases like, I will do what it takes. Disciplined coherence flips it. Protect the principles and adapt the delivery. A practical operating system: Signal, sense, adjust If authenticity is partly a perception problem, then leaders need a perception practice. Here is a loop I have seen work across industries without turning leaders into brand managers. Signal: what do you want others to infer? Not what you want to say. What do you want people to conclude? Useful inferences to engineer ethically sound like this: Disagreeing here is safe. We prioritize customer impact over internal convenience. We can move fast without being sloppy. Write the inference down before the meeting, then design the agenda, the sequencing, and the first three minutes around it. Sense: what are they actually inferring? You cannot introspect your way into this. You need data, and you can gather it lightly. Ask a peer what the room heard you say. Ask a direct report what felt unclear or risky. Watch behavior: do people escalate early, or do they wait until it is too late? Leader self-perception and follower perception diverge more often than leaders expect. Some research reframes authentic leadership as a legitimation process, where observers grant or withhold authenticity based on what they perceive in the leader's moral dimension and behavior. This is why we built a structured measure rather than a self-report checklist, and why the PINE assessment compares what a leader intends with what their environment actually reads. If you want to see how it works in practice, our team is easy to reach here. Adjust: what is the smallest behavior change that closes the gap? The goal is not to control perception. It is to reduce preventable misreads. Adjustments are usually tactical, not existential. Name the tradeoffs. Repeat the decision criteria. Pre-brief the stakeholders who will carry the message. Document the rationale. Repair quickly when a signal lands wrong. Run this loop weekly for a month, and you will typically improve perceived authenticity without any dramatic self-disclosure. Leadership coaches can run the same loop with clients through our coaching platform, and internal teams can deploy it across a leadership group through our enterprise solutions. Your team needs a reliable map, not an open book The just be yourself era of leadership has a transparency problem. It prioritizes the leader's comfort over the team's clarity. Real authenticity does not require you to be an open book. It requires you to be a reliable map. By moving from experienced authenticity to perceived coherence, you close the distance between your intent and their inference. Lead with your values, but deliver them with discipline. Your team does not need to see your internal narrative. They need to see a pattern they can trust. If you want to know what your own signals are telling people, start by measuring them. You can take the PINE assessment to see how your influence agility reads from the outside, learn more about how it works, or simply reach out to our team. Questions, partnership ideas, or a leadership challenge you are sitting on right now are all welcome here. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Andréa Gill Andréa Gill, Influence Agility Expert Andréa Gill is a strategic influence specialist and founder of PINE Perspective, helping leaders decode organizational dynamics to amplify their impact. Her guiding conviction: it's not about you. With 15+ years in leadership development and 10 in university teaching, she grounds her work in science, pairing analytical rigour with emotional intelligence to turn human complexity into a lever for performance. Her flagship publication, When Politics Meets Ethics: How Political Skill Helps Ethical Leaders Foster Organizational Citizenship Behaviors, appeared in the Journal of Managerial Issues. References: Bunjak, A., Lord, R. G., and Acton, B. P. (2024). Rethinking authentic leadership: An alternative approach based on dynamic processes of active identity, self-regulation, and ironic processes of mental control. Journal of Management and Organization, 30(6), 1669 to 1698. Gardner, W. L., Karam, E. P., Noghani, F., Cogliser, C. C., Gullifor, D. P., Mhatre, K., Ge, S., Bi, R., Yan, Z., and Dahunsi, D. (2024). Let's get real when we lead: A systematic review, critical assessment, and agenda for authentic leadership theory and research. Journal of Management and Organization, 30(6), 1 to 27. Lux, A. A., and Lowe, K. B. (2024). Authentic leadership: 20-year review editorial. Journal of Management and Organization, 30(6), 1634 to 1641. Goffee, R., and Jones, G. (2005). Managing authenticity: The paradox of great leadership. Harvard Business Review, 83(12), 86 to 94. Ibarra, H. (2015). The authenticity paradox. Harvard Business Review, 93(1-2), 52 to 59. Sidani, Y. M., and Rowe, W. G. (2018). A reconceptualization of authentic leadership: Leader legitimation via follower-centered assessment of the moral dimension. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(6), 623 to 636. Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., and Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89 to 126.

Written by Tere Beard, Health Coach Tere Beard is a Health Coach and helps professionals and executives improve their health and enhance their well-being. She specializes in techniques such as Brain Gym®, FDN®, Pranic Healing, and Functional Neurology, among others, to naturally and non-invasively balance the different systems of our body. 70% of chronic diseases are caused by stress, according to many studies published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Stress is not the only cause of these diseases, but it is the common denominator in conditions such as diabetes, arthritis, obesity, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression, insomnia and many more. How can you tell if stress will cause one of these conditions? Types of stress People usually think that there is only one type of stress, caused by being on the go, so busy. Many use the phrase “so much stress” whenever one has many chores and “stress-free” whenever things are flowing. The reality is that there are many kinds of stress and they are all equally dangerous. Physical stress Physical Stress is manifested in the body. Examples are poor sleep, chronic pain, inflammation, illness, over-exercising, toxins and hormonal imbalance. Some of the symptoms are fatigue, headaches, muscle tension and digestive issues. When poor sleep is not resolved, many complications can arise, such as brain fog, depression, or mental fatigue. Emotional stress Emotional stress occurs from feelings and emotional experiences. Examples are fear, grief, anger, relationship conflict, feeling unsupported and unresolved emotions. Some of the symptoms are mood swings, overwhelm, sadness, irritability and emotional fatigue. If a person is not supported at work, feelings of anger or fear can take over. In the case of work, nobody wants a team member who is constantly angry or scared to participate. Mental stress Mental stress is created by the mind’s workload and thoughts. Examples are overthinking, decision overload, multitasking, work pressure and constant problem‑solving. Some of the symptoms are racing thoughts, difficulty concentrating and mental exhaustion. People who are always solving problems at work and/or home will sooner or later get overloaded and, if not treated, may end up in a mental shutdown, such as panic attacks. Manifesting stress How will stress manifest in your body? It all depends on your emotional state. Is the following scenario familiar? Every day this person wakes up in a hurry, rushing to get the kids ready for school, make sure everyone has breakfast and get to school on time because she/he must get to the office on time to finish the report everyone is waiting for. While at work, many come to interrupt and claim they need support. Meanwhile, the report is due and this afternoon the kids have soccer practice, and this person still needs to make it to the supermarket to have dinner ready on time. Three possible scenarios Did she/he have any say in this matter? Was she/he able to let everyone know they had to wait? For the sake of this example, let’s say no, she/he did not fight back and held everything up. The stress for this person could manifest in thyroid problems, taking into consideration she/he tended to remain quiet in moments of stress. Holding back feelings and not communicating what makes you stressed will have an effect on the body. What if this person did yell back and tell everyone off? This person decided to eat junk food while working and cursing, expressing lots of complaints. In this case, stress might manifest with liver problems and high blood pressure, which are very common in persons who have anger issues. What if this scenario has been going on forever? Then the adrenal glands might be overworked and this person is gaining weight due to the hormonal imbalance created by the excess amount of cortisol secreted. Now we have an overweight person with no logical explanation since he/she has been following a healthy diet for years. As you can see, we have one scenario with three different ways that stress can manifest. Same cause, different outcomes. Why are there different outcomes? Simple, we are all different and react differently to every situation. Can you relate? The old approach So, what do you do? Typically, you go to a specialist, either an endocrinologist, a cardiologist, or even a psychiatrist and they all give you, after several tests, some magic pill, helping in the short run, but does it really help in the long run? I have seen people taking a second medication to deal with the side effects of the first medication. Is this what you really want? On the other hand, some doctors will say, "What you are feeling is caused by stress, there is nothing to do, just learn to live with it." Really? Not acceptable. A new approach What if instead, this person explores the emotional aspect of what and why makes him/her swallow emotions, or curse so much? Think about it! When we fall in love, we are so happy, nothing affects us, we are healthy, we are healed. The same principle applies, but on the opposite spectrum. If we are stressed, our bodies are going to explode somehow. It is time you allow yourself to measure how your emotions are impacting your nervous system and how it could be in the process of manifesting. Once we know this, then we can use one or more natural therapies and/or tools that help lower stress. I have been applying this approach for almost ten years with great results. I use software to measure your stress levels and how it is impacting all your organs. With the information gathered, I recommend an action to take. Migraines are gone in less than five minutes, panic attacks and anxiety vanish, and people start focusing on their goals rather than their physical or emotional pain. By understanding how you deal with your emotions, you can start making small but clever lifestyle changes that will help you heal and feel well. Isn’t it time you tried a new approach? Learn how to leave stress behind and go back to enjoying life. Let’s start by analyzing your stress levels and finding out how they are impacting your body. It only takes one hour, and it can change your life. You deserve it. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tere Beard Tere Beard, Health Coach As a passionate Health Coach, Tere specializes in helping people explore how stress is impacting their nervous system and establishing an all-natural approach to help them restore wellness into their lives. Her empathic approach and her corporate expertise allow her to understand and help professionals improve their productivity as well as their health.

Written by Tere Beard, Health Coach Tere Beard is a Health Coach and helps professionals and executives improve their health and enhance their well-being. She specializes in techniques such as Brain Gym®, FDN®, Pranic Healing, and Functional Neurology, among others, to naturally and non-invasively balance the different systems of our body. Calm is not simply something we think our way into. It also involves what is happening in our bodies: our breathing, our heartbeat, our digestion, and the signals traveling between the main organs and the brain. Understanding this connection offers a different way to approach everyday stress. Rather than demanding that we “just relax,” we can make room for habits that support recovery, comfort, and a greater sense of well-being. Meet the vagus nerve The vagus nerve extends from the brainstem into the body, connecting with organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, gallbladder, and digestive tract. It is a major component of the parasympathetic nervous system, often described as the “rest and digest” system. Many of its fibers carry information from the body toward the brain, making it an important pathway for two-way communication. The vagus nerve is like a switch that turns the alarm and recovery states on and off. During a stress response, the heart may beat faster, and breathing may become quicker. As that response settles, the body can return toward a state more compatible with rest and digestion. Although the nervous system is more complex than a single on-off switch, it is a simple way to understand that we need both activation and recovery. The goal is not to eliminate every stress response but to support flexibility between the demands of activity and the opportunity to rest. What does “vagal tone” mean? Vagal tone refers to the vagus nerve’s influence on bodily functions, particularly the heart and digestive system, and is associated with the idea of “bouncing back easily” after stress. It is not a single score for overall health or emotional resilience. Remember, since there are many organs connected to this nerve, two main areas are measured: the heart and lungs through heart rate variability (HRV), and the digestive system. HRV describes variation in the time between heartbeats. Certain HRV measurements can provide information about cardiac parasympathetic activity, but they are also affected by breathing, age, medications, health conditions, and measurement methods. A wearable reading should therefore be treated as one piece of information, not a diagnosis of an “underactive” vagus nerve or proof that a wellness practice is working. On the other hand, the digestive system’s overall performance can be measured by taking a spoonful of sesame seeds and waiting to see how many hours pass before seeing them in the stool. If the seeds pass within 12 to 24 hours, the system is performing well. Seeds that take more than 24 hours are indicative of slow vagal tone. Listen to symptoms without jumping to conclusions Feeling “wired but tired,” struggling to settle after a demanding day, digestive discomfort, and restless sleep are among the experiences that may be related to a vagus nerve that needs support. It is important to remind readers that these are symptoms; poor sleep does not necessarily mean that something is wrong with the vagus nerve. These symptoms can have many causes. Persistent, new, or worsening symptoms deserve assessment by a qualified healthcare professional rather than being attributed automatically to low vagal tone. When one supports vagus nerve function, positive outcomes may be expected. Start with small, repeatable practices Make supportive habits part of ordinary life. Start with one change, and slowly it will become a habit rather than a sacrifice. Make space for comfortable breathing. Try a few gentle, unforced breaths when you notice tension. Allow the exhale to lengthen slightly if that feels natural. Avoid straining or prolonged breath-holding, and return to normal breathing if you feel dizzy or uncomfortable. Breathing exercises are not to be confused with the way you breathe all day long. Move in ways you enjoy. A short walk, gentle stretching, yoga, or dancing can create a welcome break from a demanding day. Make connection a priority. An unhurried conversation, shared laughter, or time with someone you trust can be part of a restorative routine. Protect time to wind down. A quieter evening and a regular sleep schedule offer a practical foundation for well-being. These are supportive habits, not diagnostic tests or guaranteed ways to change vagal tone. The tools I offer and the goal behind them My goal is to help people build a more supportive relationship with their bodies and explore practical approaches to everyday well-being. I use noninvasive tools and therapies that have helped me and my clients in many ways. Alongside foundational habits, I provide tools such as Rezzimax®, BrainTap®, Brain Gym®, and AO Scan™ for people interested in complementary wellness approaches. These offerings are intended to support the vagus nerve and can be discussed in the context of your goals, preferences, and any relevant medical guidance. In my experience, migraines and sinus congestion are relieved when using Rezzimax®. BrainTap® allows the brain to vibrate at the proper frequencies, supporting overall wellness while lowering stress. Brain Gym® exercises are simple and effective when you need to focus and lower stress. AO Scan™, which can be used remotely, helps identify how emotions affect the body’s frequencies before conditions manifest in the physical body. Supporting your nervous system begins with informed choices, realistic expectations, and consistent care. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tere Beard Tere Beard, Health Coach As a passionate Health Coach, Tere specializes in helping people explore how stress is impacting their nervous system and establishing an all-natural approach to help them restore wellness to their lives. Her empathic approach and her corporate expertise allow her to understand and help professionals improve their productivity as well as their health. This article is for general education and does not replace individualized medical advice.

Written by Constanze Zientek, Women‘s Coach Constanze Zientek is a women's coach who works with highly sensitive women in their thirties, helping them to cultivate inner strength, embrace embodied leadership, and build an authentic, aligned life. Her approach blends emotional depth, clarity, and self-trust. Sometimes, change feels like relief. Especially when someone perceives it as positive, or if there has been a lot of tension built up before. In these cases, the change often takes a long time to begin on the outside, and when it finally does, it feels very welcome. In other cases, going through periods of change can require lots of inner processing. Especially when the change arrives quickly or in unexpected ways. Even if it is wanted. In these cases, change can pretty quickly feel like losing the ground beneath your feet. So what do you do when change comes knocking at the door, making you feel overwhelmed? To get to the bottom of that, we first have to take a look at why major life transitions can feel destabilizing. Reactions of the body It truly makes sense to take a look at what happens in the body the moment we go through big life changes. The body activates the sympathetic nervous system and releases adrenaline as well as noradrenaline, while the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis releases cortisol. Your body is scanning for risks, going into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. Concentration and memory can therefore feel less reliable because your mental resources are being directed toward the extraordinary circumstances your body is perceiving. This can also have an effect on sleeping and eating patterns. Irritability, numbness, tearfulness, or feeling easily overwhelmed are all signs of these processes happening in the body, not necessarily signs that you are coping badly, but signs that you are navigating unknown waters. So when these reactions occur in the body, it basically means that our bodies are scanning for problems in order to ensure our survival. Our brain and nervous system don’t care if the changes we are going through are actually leading to situations that might be better for us in the long run. They only care about keeping us safe within the environment and habits that we are already used to because, apparently, if they did not make us die, that is enough of a sign that they might work for us. Everything that is outside of this range is monitored as a potential threat in the first place. Just like that, we can spiral into fear of the unknown. Positive changes are still changes The thing about the spiral is that it also doesn’t stop at changes we perceive as purely positive. To be clear, not every change that is perceived as positive is hard for one to accept. Sometimes, it can simply feel liberating. Since even positive change can force you to change habits, your known environment, the people you engage with, and the way you approach all of them, it can still require lots of adjustments and the releasing of old attachments. The more deeply the old attachments were incorporated into your daily routines, the more challenging it can be to actually release them. It can also bring up much deeper fears of the unknown. The role of grief Something that cannot be emphasized enough is how much grief can actually be a part of change, even in cases where the change is welcome or chosen. Times of intense change also bring up the topic of endings in life. As you are changing, a part of your life up until this point might actually be over. That can bring up lots of grief as well. You might be releasing something from your life that may have been with you for a long time, whether that is a role, a person, a place, or a habit. It might even have been such a deep part of your life that letting go of it feels like releasing an actual part of yourself. The void and discomfort Feeling discomfort through times of change doesn’t mean that something has gone wrong. Change is part of discomfort just as much as discomfort is part of change. When we change, we move into new, unfamiliar territory. We have to start from the beginning and, therefore, many times we have no clue. We need to train our brains in new habits, explore new environments, and learn new ways of doing things. Sometimes, this can feel like a toddler learning to walk, and it can surely be a lot. So in case you’re going through change and feel discomfort, don’t necessarily take that as a sign that something has gone wrong. It is most likely a sign that you are still in the middle of navigating new waters. Another part of old roles and identities dissolving is that you may feel lost before you feel lighter again. When a role or identity that has been a big part of your reality wears out, it leaves a void that has to be replaced by something new. Feeling the void is not a sign that you have made the wrong choice. It’s the liminal space between who you were and who you are becoming. Assuming that it will be replaced with something new, maybe even better, can require lots of trust and effort. About outside opinions As you are navigating big changes in your life, don’t expect to be understood by everyone. While there may be many people who actually do understand and may help you with your transition, there can also be many people who don’t get the picture fully or at all. That is okay. Making decisions is about finding your own truth, and so is navigating changes. Whether you may have been the one who actively initiated a change or the one who just felt taken along by change, your actions and reactions are uniquely yours. People might have very different opinions about your situation and your actions due to different values, beliefs, and experiences. What really matters is that you face the changes you are going through according to the values and beliefs that resonate most deeply with you. Becoming opposed to old behaviors This is an interesting one because many times, change brings in more change. As you are navigating big changes, it can easily happen that old behavioral patterns simply stop working. You might have had a tendency toward people-pleasing, overworking, staying busy, controlling behavior, seeking reassurance, or intellectualizing feelings up until a certain point, but since change can make you more irritable and focused on yourself, you simply have less energy at your disposal. Therefore, maintaining ways of behaving that actually cost you lots of energy becomes increasingly difficult. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to change the pattern itself. The pressure to do so becomes increasingly higher. Reversible and irreversible decisions Changes are often dramatized as irreversible. Of course, there are decisions that are, in fact, not reversible, like bringing a child into the world. So an important way to approach irreversible changes can be the formation of an explicit desire. If an irreversible decision is backed up by a genuine desire, it becomes easier to release insecurities around it (“I really want this.”). Another important pillar is building self-trust (“I’ve really got this.”). Many times, however, even with big changes, there would, at least theoretically, be a way to go back or at least a possibility to change again. Think about a move or, in many cases, even quitting your job. If a decision is, in fact, reversible, it can be a lot easier to make once you bring to your awareness that you could always go back. It is then up to the new version of you to decide. 10 tips on how to navigate a phase of transition while staying true to yourself 1. Stop expecting yourself to feel certain Don’t ever wait for making a change to feel like you’re 100% ready for it. That moment may never come. In fact, many times, the feeling of readiness actually disappears before you really enter the process of leaping. The readiness might have shown up in glimpses along with the will to do something, but suddenly, when you're right before starting the thing, you notice that all you feel is doubt and nervousness. That is your body entering the conversation. It feels that things are suddenly about to get serious and therefore shows a physical reaction to potential threats. So how do you get back to feeling more ready? By repeatedly taking steps of action that suggest to your body that you are, in fact, in the driver's seat during the change you're navigating. The more you consciously take action, the more your inner state will switch from “I don’t feel ready” to “Wait, I am already in the middle of actually doing this.” 2. Permit yourself to be less productive Transition phases contain different stages. While some might be for boldly taking action, others simply require holding yourself through it all. As already mentioned above, your body is working overtime during transition phases as well. Truly showing up for yourself can simply mean lowering the expectations you put on yourself and focusing on recovery, even physically. You don’t have to make progress all the time. You are allowed to make mistakes and take steps back. Sometimes, you simply have to sit with yourself and take it all in. 3. Create small pockets of predictability Surely, navigating unknown waters becomes easier once there are elements of familiarity to it. So how can you build up a sense of knowing, even if you are in the middle of a situation you have never been in? Take inventory of all the positive habits and ways of acting that have gotten you further in other areas of life, especially during previous periods of change. The body loves repetition. Bring in useful habits, places, and people that are familiar to you. By creating a sense of familiarity, the unknown part of what you are going through can gradually become easier. 4. Think in terms of the next step, not the entire future I have seen this in myself and my clients so many times. One thing that actually keeps us from even trying out something new is that we think we need the perfect plan to achieve a goal. When that plan doesn’t seem to show up or work out, we get discouraged and often hold back from trying in the first place, but what if you wouldn’t even need a full plan? By that, I don’t mean to say you should just take directionless action. What I mean is that we often think we need a perfect plan in order to even start something, when this is just us wanting to control every single part of the process. By setting a goal, breaking it down into smaller parts, and leaving room for adjustments as you go, it becomes easier to focus on the next reasonable steps instead of feeling pressured by the whole big picture. The process becomes more tangible. Tasks become doable. Reactions to unforeseen circumstances become possible without moments of major crisis. Room for flexibility is created, and still, that doesn’t mean that you have to stop aiming at your big goal, or something even better, all along. 5. Reduce unnecessary noise People are creatures of habit. Of course, they will have different opinions about the things you should or shouldn’t do in your individual circumstances. These opinions are based on their own thoughts, environment, upbringing, and overall life experiences. Their own views don't have to be yours. Reducing interactions with people who make you feel incapable or unworthy of your desired outcome can have a big impact on the energy it takes you to make your own assumptions and act according to your own convictions. 6. Separate facts from fearful predictions When we don’t know what’s coming and we already feel very activated, it can be easy to take on a lot of fear. Your own insecurities, as well as those of other people around you, can quickly take over in these circumstances, leaving you feeling almost like you can’t make any more moves forward. In these moments, it is very important to separate facts from fearful predictions. Facts are circumstances that can either be proven or disproven. Ask yourself directly, “Is this a fact, or is that a fearful prediction? If so, how can this truly affect me?” More often than not, the mind makes up its own catastrophic, unhelpful assumptions. 7. Don’t make every uncomfortable feeling mean something As the feeling of discomfort rises up, ask yourself what you are actually making it mean. Does the discomfort really indicate that something is wrong with the direction you are taking? Be very honest with yourself. You can always consider making adjustments to the direction you are taking, but chances are high that the discomfort is actually just a sign that you are going through a growing process and will pass over time. 8. Remember that ambivalence is normal Speaking of different standpoints, it is actually crucial to realize that ambivalence is pretty normal during significant times of change. You can deeply desire to leave a place and still be sad that it is happening. You can feel relieved and frightened about a situation at the same time. Many times, this happens because one part of you is moving toward new possibilities, while another part of you is still in touch with the old. 9. Let your identity remain unfinished You don’t always have to figure out who you are and to what degree, especially when you find yourself in a phase of deep transformation. If you were always the “one who x/y/z” and suddenly you don’t even know where you stand anymore, let it be. Sometimes, we only arrive at figuring out who we are by deciding who we are not. Even that takes time. Not every part of life continuously needs a standpoint. 10. Treat yourself like a person in transition Treating yourself like a person in transition means that you give yourself credit for the fact that a part of you is busy processing uncertainty, releasing an old identity, and adapting to what has not yet become familiar. It means accepting that your energy is most likely more fluctuating than usual, reducing unnecessary pressure, allowing yourself to grieve, and making decisions from deeper values instead of the desire to avoid discomfort. It also means trusting that after the “work in progress” phase, a beautiful new version of you will emerge. Clarity doesn’t always come from thinking harder Sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do during a major life transition is to stop trying to navigate it entirely on your own. The right support can help you separate fear from intuition, reconnect with your own voice, and move forward with greater clarity. Let's work together to create your next chapter with intention and perspective on a stable foundation. Follow me on Instagram for more info! Read more from Constanze Zientek Constanze Zientek, Women‘s Coach Constanze Zientek is a women's coach working with highly sensitive women in their thirties. She supports them in cultivating inner strength, embodied leadership, and an authentic, aligned life. Her approach blends emotional depth, clarity, and self-trust. She furthermore practices as a lawyer with over ten years of work experience, specializing in inheritance law. Her work with clients in emotionally complex transitions, combined with her own journey through her thirties, led her to coaching. Today, she integrates structure and intuition to offer clear, deeply human guidance.

Christophe Zoghbi is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ZAKA, an artificial intelligence (AI) education and consulting company helping organizations and professionals across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region turn artificial intelligence into practical capability. In this interview, he explains how leaders can identify the right AI opportunities, choose between automation and agents, build culturally relevant solutions, and create adoption that delivers measurable and lasting value. Christophe Zoghbi, Founder & CEO of ZAKA What first drew you to building ZAKA around practical AI adoption rather than technology for its own sake? My background is technical, but the more I worked with organizations and professionals, the clearer it became that the biggest gap was rarely access to technology. It was the ability to understand it, apply it, and connect it to a real need. I saw talented people across the MENA region who wanted to participate in AI but lacked practical pathways and opportunities to build practical experience. I also saw companies attracted to AI because it was new, without a clear view of what problem they were trying to solve. That shaped ZAKA from the beginning. We did not want to teach AI as an abstract subject or build technology simply to demonstrate that it could be built. We wanted people to leave a program able to do something they could not do before, and companies to invest in solutions that improved an actual outcome. I believe technology matters when it expands human capability, improves decisions, or removes friction. Practical adoption is where AI moves from an impressive idea to meaningful progress. When you assess a company, what tells you that AI is actually the right answer? AI is the right answer when the nature of the problem genuinely benefits from capabilities such as interpretation, prediction, generation, or decision support. We first look for a clear business outcome and a workflow where people are spending significant time processing information, handling variation, or making repeatable judgments. Then we examine whether the required data exists, whether the output can be evaluated, and whether the value justifies the complexity and risk. Equally important, we try to disprove the need for AI. If a rule, form, integration, process redesign, or conventional automation can solve the problem reliably, that is often the better choice. Many companies arrive with a solution already in mind, such as a chatbot or an agent. Our responsibility is to step back and understand the underlying need. Sometimes AI is central to the answer, sometimes it is only one component, and sometimes it is unnecessary. A good assessment does not maximize the amount of AI used. It identifies the simplest responsible solution that can produce measurable value. Why do you examine strategy, workflows, data, and governance before discussing AI solutions? Because an AI solution does not operate in isolation. Strategy tells us which outcomes matter and whether the initiative deserves attention. Workflows reveal how work actually happens, including the handoffs, delays, exceptions, and informal practices that may not appear in a process document. Data determines what the system can know and how confidently it can act. Governance is where most leaders expect friction, but done well, it's the opposite, it's what lets an organization move faster with confidence. Clear guardrails mean teams don't have to relitigate the same risk questions on every project, who's accountable, what data can be used, which decisions need human review, and how performance gets monitored are settled once, up front, so execution doesn't stall later. Organizations that treat governance as a brake usually end up slower because every new initiative reopens the same unresolved questions. Organizations that build it in early move faster because the guardrails are already there when the next opportunity shows up. If we skip these layers, we risk creating an impressive prototype that cannot be trusted, adopted, integrated, or scaled. We may also automate a broken process and make the problem move faster. We use our MAP Framework at ZAKA, which begins by Mapping the organization and its workflows, then Advising on suitable solutions, and finally Prioritizing opportunities into a realistic roadmap. This sequence keeps the conversation grounded in business reality. The AI comes after the understanding because the quality of the solution depends on the quality of the questions asked before it is designed. What will it take for MENA to become a builder of AI capability rather than only a consumer of global tools? The region needs to develop capability at several levels at the same time. We need more people who can use AI confidently, more specialists who can build and adapt systems, more leaders who can make informed investment decisions, and stronger governance that enables innovation responsibly. Education is part of this, but it must extend beyond awareness. Learners need practical projects, local use cases, mentorship, and routes into meaningful work. Organizations also need to move from isolated experiments toward owning their AI roadmaps, data foundations, operating models, and intellectual property. At a regional level, collaboration matters. Universities, governments, companies, startups, and communities should not work as separate islands. They can share challenges, create test environments, support Arabic research, and open opportunities for local talent to solve real problems. MENA does not need to reproduce every layer of the global AI stack to become a builder. It needs the confidence and competence to shape technology around its own priorities, develop solutions for its markets, and contribute original knowledge and products to the wider world. Why does culturally relevant AI matter for Arabic-speaking and MENA markets? Language is the visible layer, but the real risk is trust. A system can technically support Arabic and still misread how people actually communicate in a workplace, classroom, or customer interaction. When that happens, leaders lose confidence in the tool faster than they gained it. I've seen organizations adopt a solution that worked well in a pilot, then watch adoption stall because it didn't reflect how their people actually think, decide, or phrase things. This is a governance and adoption issue as much as a technical one. If a solution is built for another market and simply translated, the errors it produces won't be random, they'll cluster around the assumptions that don't transfer, and some groups will be affected more than others. That's a real business risk, not just a quality issue. Getting this right means involving people who understand the environment the system will operate in, testing against real regional data, and designing for local regulations and institutional norms from the start, not patching a global product after the fact. It isn't about isolating the region from global technology. It's about making sure the technology actually earns the trust it needs to be adopted. When should a company use an AI agent, and when is simpler automation the better choice? A company should consider an AI agent when the work involves a goal rather than a single instruction, requires several steps, and depends on interpreting changing information along the way. For example, an agent may retrieve information from different systems, compare options, prepare an output, and request approval before taking a final action. It is most useful when the path cannot be fully predetermined, but the objective, tools, permissions, and evaluation criteria can be clearly defined. Simpler automation is better when the process is stable and rules-based, when this happens, move that file, send this notification, update that field. Traditional automation is usually cheaper, faster, easier to test, and more predictable. Companies should not add autonomy merely because agents are receiving attention. The more freedom a system has, the more important controls, observability, exception handling, and human oversight become. My rule is to use the minimum level of intelligence and autonomy required. Begin with a reliable workflow, introduce AI where interpretation is needed, and only use an agent when multi-step reasoning and tool use create enough additional value to justify the risk. What is one workflow leaders should examine first if they want measurable value from AI? I would start with a high-volume internal workflow that employees already find repetitive and frustrating, especially one involving documents, requests, or information retrieval. A good example is the journey from receiving a request to preparing the first useful response. In many organizations, an employee must search several folders or systems, review previous cases, extract key details, draft a response, and route it for approval. That creates visible measures, turnaround time, hours spent, rework, response quality, and employee satisfaction. It is also usually safer than beginning with a fully autonomous customer-facing process. The specific workflow matters less than the selection criteria. It should occur often enough to matter, have a clear owner, contain a manageable level of risk, and produce an output that can be evaluated. Leaders should document the current baseline before introducing AI, then run a focused pilot and compare results. This prevents vague claims about productivity. The best first use case is not necessarily the most exciting one. It is the one that can prove value, teach the organization how adoption works, and build confidence for what comes next. What principle helps you stay grounded when the pace and hype around AI keep accelerating? I keep returning to one question, "What has meaningfully improved for the person or organization using this?" The AI field moves so quickly that it is easy to confuse novelty with progress. A new model, feature, or agent can be impressive, but that does not automatically make it valuable. I try to separate what is newly possible from what is currently useful, reliable, and responsible. Staying close to learners, teams, and business problems helps because reality gives immediate feedback. Did people adopt the tool after the demonstration? Did it save time without creating more review work? Did it improve a decision, expand access, or help someone develop a real capability? I also accept that being grounded does not mean being slow. We should experiment actively, but with clear hypotheses, limited exposure, and honest evaluation. Not every experiment must become a deployment. Curiosity should push us to explore, while evidence determines what we keep. That balance allows us to remain ambitious about AI without letting the speed of the market dictate decisions that should be driven by purpose. What should leaders get right now if they want AI adoption to create lasting value? Leaders should treat AI adoption as an organizational transformation, not a software purchase. The first priority is clarity, which business outcomes matter, which workflows could improve, and how success will be measured. The second is people. Employees need more than tool access, they need role-relevant training, permission to experiment, clear expectations, and confidence that AI is being introduced to strengthen their work rather than simply reduce headcount. The third is a foundation for responsible scale, including data access, security, governance, ownership, and a process for monitoring quality. Leaders should then build a portfolio of initiatives instead of betting everything on one large project. Start with a few high-value use cases, learn quickly, document what works, and expand based on evidence. Most importantly, leadership must remain engaged after the pilot. Lasting value comes from changing how decisions are made and how work is designed. Companies that succeed will not be those that adopted the most tools. They will be those that built the capability to identify, implement, govern, and continuously improve the right AI solutions. Follow me on LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Christophe Zoghbi

I think a lot of people choose an agency backward. They pick based on the pitch, then find out how the agency actually works months later, once the money's already spent. Here's the moment that taught me this. I was in a client's quarterly review, three months into a retainer, and the founder asked one question: how much of our pipeline came from this? The account lead talked about impressions and engagement for a full minute and never answered, because nobody had connected the work to a single closed deal. Ninety days and a full retainer, gone, with no warning from the pitch that it was coming. That silence is what you're really trying to avoid, and it's the one thing a polished deck can't show you. What separates a real partner from a good presentation The job is to stop evaluating the performance and start evaluating the operation. You want to know how an agency behaves on an ordinary working day, not how it presents in a boardroom, because the ordinary working day is what you're actually buying. Team size, client logos, and star ratings are easy to see, and none of them predict whether the partnership holds up. What predicts it is slower and quieter: how quickly they turn work around, whether someone responds when you need them, and how many layers a simple decision has to pass through. A shop where a small edit takes two weeks to approve will cost you far more than one with a shorter client list, and you won't feel it until you're already inside the contract. Before you get seduced by a portfolio, you're really checking for three things. Fit The first is whether they understand your world. Not marketing in general, but your kind of business, your channels, and your buyer. An agency that already knows your sector starts contributing early instead of learning the basics on your dime. A good way to test this is to ask how many times they've actually done the specific thing they're pitching, rather than whether they offer it. Everyone offers everything. Far fewer have done it more than once. A good way to test this is to ask how many times they've actually done the specific thing they're pitching, rather than whether they offer it. If B2B social media marketing is core to your plan, ask how many campaigns they've run in it, not whether it's on their service list. Everyone offers everything. Far fewer have done it more than once. Ownership The second is who does the work. Senior people run the pitch, then hand your account to a junior once you've signed. That's fine for routine tasks and a real problem when performance dips and you need someone who understands why your deals stall. Ask for names, ask how many other clients those same people handle, and ask to speak with them directly. If the agency gets uncomfortable letting you meet the team that will run your account, that discomfort is your answer. Visibility The third is whether they'll show you the numbers in real time. Reluctance to give you live access to your own data usually means there's reporting they'd rather you didn't examine closely. You want to see performance as it happens, and you want a simple monthly rhythm: what they did, what it produced, and what they're changing next. That's the whole reporting relationship, and it's not much to ask for. Enterprise buying is why this matters. A serious B2B purchase gets decided over months by a committee, and research from Gartner found those buyers spend only about 17% of the process actually talking to suppliers. The rest of the deciding happens where you can't watch it, which is exactly why your tracking has to be solid and connected to your real sales system, so you can see which marketing is quietly moving deals forward. Where the money deals go wrong Talk about money early, because it saves everyone a month of circling. Good agencies charge well and won't promise a firm price before they've looked at your business, and that's reasonable. A fixed rate quoted before they've seen anything is the warning sign, since it means they're selling hours instead of results. Pilots Start small before you commit to a year. A short paid trial of thirty to sixty days shows you how a team really thinks and moves, and any agency pushing you straight into a long lock-up is telling you what it's worried about. Pay for the trial, since asking an agency to prove itself for free tends to sour the relationship before it starts, and let it tell you the truth a pitch never could. Exit terms Read the exit terms carefully, because that's where your leverage lives. Some strategies genuinely need six to twelve months to show results, which is fair. A multi-year contract with no performance conditions attached is not, and those trapped retainers tend to collapse around month nine anyway, since no team does its best work for a client it has cornered. Roughly ninety days is the honest window to tell whether things are working. Anyone promising a faster miracle is selling activity dressed up as progress. Red flags The hardest problems to catch rarely announce themselves. A brilliant pitch deserves some suspicion, since the skill that wins the room and the skill that runs your account are different skills. When a conversation leaves you more confused than when you walked in, the complexity is often hiding the fact that there's no real plan underneath. Watch what happens when you ask for references, for detailed reporting, for the names of the people on your account. Good agencies simply hand it over. So before you sign, sit with three questions. Not for the agency, for yourself. Can they point to one real deal their work actually closed, or only to numbers that went up? If you left in a year, would you keep everything, your accounts, your data, your history, or would you be starting over? And when you asked what happens the first time something breaks, did they give you a straight answer or a smooth one? That's what choosing an agency comes down to. Not the boardroom, but the ordinary Tuesday. A great pitch is easy to produce, and a great working relationship shows up in how an agency operates when nobody's performing.

Ranking on Google used to mean chasing just one thing: your website link at the top of the first page (or at least in the top results). That has been the case for the better part of two decades. Business owners in Sydney and pretty much everywhere understood the game well. You optimise your website, build good backlinks, publish content, and wait for Google to reward your efforts; that’s how it worked. That’s still how things run, but not entirely. Search behaviour has fundamentally changed. Google’s AI Overviews now answer most queries directly on the results page, even before those blue links appear. That means when someone asks, “Which is the best SEO company in Sydney?", they’ll find an answer even before scrolling down to Google Maps listings or the site links. AI is often the first touchpoint for customers now, and LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini are where they actively seek recommendations. Why traditional rankings don’t tell the whole story anymore Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can rank well and still lose clicks. When an AI Overview answers the searcher’s query directly and cites a competitor’s page as its source, that competitor gets credibility and the click. Your listing might sit above theirs on SERPs, but that won’t matter when they are winning the visibility game. Moreover, the customer journey now increasingly starts and ends inside AI-generated summaries. Many users prefer these summaries as their main source instead of visiting a brand’s website or scouring review forums. McKinsey’s AI Discovery Survey shows the same trend, noting that 44% of web users already rely on Google’s AI Mode or Overviews, alongside tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT. As such, businesses now need forward-thinking SEO strategies that go beyond keyword rankings and towards entity optimisation. The goal isn’t just to rank anymore but to become a source AI systems can trust enough to cite. That doesn’t mean you have to overhaul your SEO overnight; you just need to reinforce your practices and work with the right professionals who understand how this new search environment works. The technicalities to focus on Winning search discovery now requires an entirely different technical foundation. Schema markup and structured data deserve more attention than they got even a few years ago. These two are critical to how well AI crawlers and search engines can interpret what your content means. Clear topical authority built through comprehensive content that genuinely answers queries matters more than ever. So do E-E-A-T signals, as they’re now a key ranking and citation factor, particularly in high-stakes sectors like health, finance, and consumer services. Indexability and crawlability still sit beneath it all. If Google’s own crawlers or an AI system like ChatGPT cannot properly access your site’s architecture, none of its content will matter. In the new SEO picture, this shift means focusing on two essential areas: answer engine optimisation (AEO), so Google and AI systems can easily comprehend and cite your expertise, and generative engine optimisation (GEO), which focuses on building the authority and credibility needed to drive real visibility. Mobile performance, website speed, and relevant internal linking, while far from glamorous, also matter. They help the more visible parts of your SEO strategy get seen and surfaced. The business case, not just the technical one If your customers are asking AI tools questions you can answer, but your brand isn’t in those responses, you’re losing pipeline you don’t even know you’re missing. There’s no bounce rate, no impression count, no obvious red flag you can look out for, because the lead simply goes to the business the AI decided to mention. As leaders, you don’t have to become SEO specialists to respond well here. You need to ask sharper questions related to visibility: are we building the kind of backlink profile and digital PR that signals real authority? Is our content structured well enough for AI systems to parse accurately? Is our Google Business Profile optimised for the intent-driven, local searches AI Overviews might pull from? Getting ahead instead of catching up The fundamentals of strong SEO and comprehensive AI visibility overlap significantly. Useful content tied to search intent, clean technical architecture, and authoritative backlink profiles still form the backbone of any serious strategy. What’s changed is the sophistication and urgency required to execute it well. So, for business leaders, the takeaway is simple: visibility isn’t a done-and-forgotten practice. It’s a compounding asset that needs deliberate investment, especially in the kind of people who understand what’s changed and why. None of this means traditional SEO is worthless. It just means that organic growth now runs on two paths simultaneously, earning a place in both traditional search results and AI-generated citations.

Michael Galileo wrote Where Time Comes From: A Handbook for Humans and created the Real Time Earth Clock. His work explores time, movement, consciousness, choice, and the ever-evolving reality we live in. In this interview, Galileo explains why he began questioning our conventional understanding of time, what his Earth Clock is designed to reveal, and how recognizing the relationship between possibility and choice can change the way we navigate our lives. Michael Galileo, Author, Inventor & Founder of Galileo Real Time What first led you to question the way we usually understand time? For most of my life, I never questioned it. Nobody does. We look at a clock, see the hands moving, and assume we're looking at time. Then one day I asked myself a very simple question: "What exactly is the clock measuring?" That question changed everything. A clock doesn't create time. It measures the repetition of something, usually the movement of the Earth, and gives us a system for keeping track of it. Then I started looking at the Earth itself. We're standing on a planet that's spinning and traveling through space, yet our clocks make us feel as though we're standing still while some invisible thing called “time” moves past us. I began wondering if we'd simply gotten used to looking at reality from the wrong perspective. The more I investigated, the more I saw that what we call time is really our experience of an evolving reality, one moment becoming the next. Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. What does the Real Time Earth Clock reveal that a conventional clock cannot? A conventional clock tells you what time humans have agreed it is. My clock is intended to show you where you are. There's a big difference. The Earth isn't sitting still while time passes. We're moving with it. We're rotating, we're traveling around the Sun, and we're moving through space at roughly 18.5 miles every second. But look at a conventional clock. It doesn't show you any of that. It gives you a little circle of numbers and makes the world feel stationary. I wanted to change that. The Real Time Earth Clock puts the Earth at the center and makes our relationship to its movement visible. It also moves counterclockwise because I wanted the clock's movement to match how we're actually moving on Earth, rather than simply repeating a convention we've inherited. So it's a clock, but it's also a reminder: You're not standing still. Neither is the Earth. How did decades of independent inquiry shape the ideas behind Where Time Comes From? I didn't set out to write a book about time. I set out to understand things. I've always been curious about how things work, and that curiosity took me into science, mathematics, philosophy, spirituality, consciousness, and human behavior. I kept following questions wherever they led. One thing raised another question, and eventually I began seeing the same pattern in very different places: things aren't simply what they are. They're continuously becoming what they will become. That led me to the question of choice. If every moment becomes the next, what determines what the next moment becomes? That's where my central idea came from: reality = possibility + choice. Where Time Comes From is really my attempt to put that puzzle together and make it understandable to another human being. It's not meant to be something you simply read and put back on the shelf. It's an invitation to look at the world again. Where do you draw the line between scientific explanation, philosophical interpretation, and metaphor in your work? I think it's important to know the difference. Science deals with what we can observe, measure, and test. Philosophy asks what those observations might mean. Metaphor helps us understand an idea by connecting it to something we already know. I use all three. If I say the Earth is moving through space, that's a physical reality. If I ask what that movement means for our understanding of time, I'm entering philosophical territory. When I compare life to a river, that's a metaphor. I'm not interested in pretending they're all the same thing. What interests me is what happens when you put them side by side and start asking questions. Sometimes a metaphor can make you see something you've looked at a thousand times without actually seeing it. That's really what I'm trying to do with my work. I'm not asking people to believe me. I'm asking them to look. Why do you think questions about consciousness and human choice are becoming more important in conversations about reality? Because we've gotten very good at studying the universe outside ourselves, but we're still trying to understand the person doing the looking. We can examine galaxies. We can look inside atoms. We can study the brain. But then there's this extraordinary thing called human consciousness sitting in the middle of it all, experiencing reality and making choices. That can't be ignored. I'm fascinated by the relationship between possibility and choice because possibilities are constantly presenting themselves to us, but they don't become our experience until something happens, usually a choice. That's why I keep coming back to: reality = possibility + choice. I'm not saying we control everything that happens to us. We obviously don't. But we do have influence over what happens next. I think recognizing that is enormously empowering. What does it mean in practical terms to say that our choices help shape the next moment? Think about driving a car. You didn't build the road. You don't control the weather. You don't control the other cars. But you constantly look ahead and make choices based on what you see. Life is much the same. Every choice becomes part of the circumstances that shape the next choice. A conversation changes a relationship. A decision changes a career. An action creates a consequence, and that consequence becomes part of the next moment. That's why I think of life as a river. You didn't create the river. You don't control the current. You don't know everything that's around the next bend. But you're in the boat, and you have a paddle. That's choice. The trick is to pay attention to what's coming while you still have time to act. How can someone use your idea of “The Code” when facing uncertainty or an important decision? The Code is really about recognizing the pattern by which one moment becomes the next. When we're uncertain, we often want to know exactly what will happen before we make a decision. But that's impossible. The future hasn't happened yet. So I suggest starting with what's actually in front of you: What are the possibilities? What are the circumstances? What choices are available? Then ask yourself: Which choice best aligns with the reality I want to create? You don't have to control the whole river. You just have to navigate the part of the river you're in. There's another important part of this: pay attention to truth. If you knowingly make a choice based on something you know isn't true, you're building your next moment on a false foundation. The Code isn't complicated. See what's real. Recognize what's possible. Make your choice. Then pay attention to what becomes next. What has your attempt to reconcile science and spirituality taught you about how you personally see the world? It's taught me that I don't have to choose between them. Science gives us an extraordinary way to investigate how the physical universe works. Spirituality asks some very different questions: Why are we here? What matters? How should we live? What does our existence mean? For me, those questions don't have to be enemies. In fact, I think they're two different ways of looking at the same extraordinary mystery. I've also learned to become comfortable with not knowing. The universe is enormously larger and more complicated than any one human being can comprehend. That doesn't discourage me. It makes me curious. My job isn't to have every answer. My job is to keep asking better questions. One of the most important things I've learned is that reality doesn't have to conform to what I was taught it was. Sometimes we have to drop the illusion before we can see what's actually there. What is the one idea about time you hope readers carry with them after encountering your work? I'd like them to stop thinking of time as something that's simply being taken away from them. We say we're “running out of time,” “wasting time,” “saving time,” or “losing time.” But time isn't a substance sitting somewhere that we can put in a jar. We're moving. The Earth is moving. Circumstances are changing. Possibilities are appearing. Every moment is becoming the next. So I would encourage people to stop looking only at where they've been and start paying attention to where they're going. Ask yourself: What is this becoming? Then look at the possibilities and choose. Because life really is just one thing after another, and that's the good news. Follow me on Facebook and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michael Galileo

Punta Gorda, Fla., September 2026 – Leadership coach, former global finance leader, and COMMAND™ creator Yann Dang will publicly unveil elements of her leadership methodology for the first time on September 24 at 12 p.m. ET during a free live masterclass, “How to Be Heard in a Room Full of Men.” At the center of the methodology is a distinction Dang believes is often missed in conversations about women and leadership: what appears to be a confidence gap may actually be a calibration gap. Dang uses the term to describe what can happen when an accomplished woman who is confident, capable, and experienced suddenly finds herself overexplaining, softening her position, overpreparing, second-guessing herself, or managing the room more carefully when power, pressure, or uncertainty increases. “These women are not necessarily lacking confidence,” said Dang. “They lead teams, make consequential decisions and know their subject inside out. The more useful question is: what happens to your relationship with your own authority when the stakes rise?” The September 24 virtual masterclass will introduce Dang’s Survival Masks and COMMAND States, work she has historically reserved for women inside her paid workshops and leadership programs. Dang developed the concept of Survival Masks to describe protective leadership responses she has repeatedly observed among accomplished women under pressure. The six Survival Masks in her methodology are the Ghost, Good Girl, Lone Wolf, Fixer, Ball-Buster, and Ice Queen. Rather than defining women by these behaviors, Dang’s methodology treats them as protective responses. Strategies such as overpreparing, fixing, pleasing, withdrawing, or hardening may have contributed to a woman’s success, yet can begin influencing her leadership choices as her responsibility, visibility, and exposure increase. “The strategy worked, until the strategy started making decisions for you,” said Dang. “The goal isn’t to judge the response. It’s to recognize it early enough that you have a choice about what happens next.” COMMAND States represent the intentional leadership state a woman can return to after recognizing that a protective response has been activated. The methodology emphasizes awareness, pause, discernment, and intentional action rather than prescribing a single “correct” leadership response. Sometimes intentional leadership means speaking. At other times, it may mean listening, holding a boundary, asking for help, acknowledging uncertainty, or taking a calculated risk before feeling completely ready. Dang’s work challenges conventional approaches to women’s leadership development that focus heavily on visible skills such as confidence, communication, influence, visibility, and executive presence. Dang argues that those capabilities matter, but they are only part of the equation. “You can build all the visible skills of leadership, but pressure reveals what they’re built on,” said Dang. “The next level of leadership doesn’t just require the courage to step into your power. It requires the capacity to stay there.” Her inside-out approach focuses on strengthening the foundation beneath visible leadership, including self-trust, emotional capacity, boundaries, self-awareness, discernment, courage, and inner authority. The methodology is practiced more deeply inside COMMAND™, Dang’s six-month leadership accelerator for accomplished women. The program is designed to strengthen the internal capacity beneath how women lead, then bring that work into the high-stakes rooms, relationships and career decisions where it matters. For Dang, this distinction becomes increasingly important as women move into positions carrying greater visibility, ambiguity, responsibility and consequence. Rather than asking women to become louder, harder or less emotional, her work focuses on developing the capacity to remain connected to their own authority when the conditions around them become more demanding. “How to Be Heard in a Room Full of Men” marks the first time Dang will teach these frameworks publicly in this format. The free virtual masterclass will take place on September 24, 2026, at 12 p.m. ET. Everyone who registers will receive access to the replay. Registration is available here. About Yann Dang Yann Dang is a leadership coach, former global finance leader, TEDx speaker, and creator of COMMAND™, a six-month leadership accelerator for accomplished women. Drawing on her experience in global finance and her work coaching hundreds of women, Dang focuses on the intersection of power, self-trust, emotional capacity, and the hidden dynamics that shape how accomplished women lead when the stakes rise. Her work challenges women to spend less of their power proving, pleasing, and managing perception, and more of it creating the influence, impact, and leadership they want. Media contact Yann Dang Leadership Coach and Creator of COMMAND™ Email Website

Written by Monique Newton, Yoga Therapist-C-IAYT & Mind-Body Conflict Coach Monique Newton is a Yoga Therapist, C-IAYT, Mind-Body Coach, and Conflict Coach. As a trauma-informed somatic practitioner, Monique works with the embodiment of our individual and collective lived experience. “I don’t care.” This is often the response I have heard from an elderly parent. It might be in response to a question about what they would like for dinner, where they would like to go for a walk, or whether they would like to sit inside or outside. Or it could be in response to something related to their healthcare, discussions about weight loss, or talking with a doctor about the results of a computed tomography (CT) scan. Experiencing my elderly mother’s increasing apathy after a heart attack, I have felt a mixture of grief, confusion, worry, and frustration. I try to make sense of the contradictions between her wanting to address a health concern or have more social interaction with friends and, in the same moment, disdaining any suggestions about well-being and even declining invitations from friends. At a doctor’s appointment, she may suddenly minimize or shrug off symptoms that she had earlier highlighted and complained of to me. I have learned that what can feel like challenging and frustrating behaviour from my perspective may be experienced by my elderly parent as something else. As health declines in older adults, they may have overwhelming physiological experiences that are better understood through the lens of chronic health conditions and declining well-being. Elderly parents are not just being difficult! Physiological patterns and symptoms create real barriers for elderly people. For example: Fatigue due to chronic conditions such as COPD, heart disease, or moderate kidney dysfunction can create a barrier to doing things. Dismissing friends or ideas for going out might mask a deep inner exhaustion. Declining mobility can also present a misunderstood barrier. Avoiding activity that requires movement may show up as not wanting to pay for parking or dismissing a medical appointment as being “a waste of time.” Saying “I’m fine” or minimizing symptoms in front of a doctor may be a way of hiding fear about health changes or shame about not being able to cope anymore. Apathy in aging adults can be a sign of early neurodegenerative decline or disease.[1] Experiencing a change in health status is challenging for anyone. An elderly person’s living situation can change quickly after an incident or fall. After my Mum fell and broke her hip, she had to move out of her house. Pointing out that she is safer in an apartment with no stairs is not very helpful. Now I practice pausing and reflecting on what it means for her to lose the agency to sit in her own garden and enjoy the afternoon sun. I have learned to reflect differently every time I hear “I don’t care.” I make different choices about my presence and how I show up for my mother, instead of trying to understand for myself, I navigate conversations with her in ways that focus on her self-determination. Here are four key practices that I have found supportive: Ask open-ended questions: When the doctor expresses concern about her weight loss, and she says “I don’t care,” Instead of saying “Your weight is important, Mum” or “Eating is good for you,” I ask, “What would make food more interesting to you?” or “How can I help you eat more regularly?” In this way, empathy looks more like genuine interest rather than an admonishment about what should be done. Encourage agency: I purposefully wait until my Mum asks me for my opinion before I offer it. If I do feel it is important to give advice, I first ask her, “May I make a suggestion?” or “Can I offer a thought about this?" Validating her views about her experiences is also important. For example, when she says she is fed up with going to see the cardiologist or taking her medication, I acknowledge her frustration: “That makes sense, it is no fun to keep going to medical appointments!” Instead of saying, “All this medication is keeping you alive,” I might say something like, “It is a lot of medication, and I really admire the way you have organized it and how you continue to take it.” Prepare for medical appointments: Medical appointments can be disempowering. To support empowerment, I encourage my Mum to create a list of what she wants to address with the doctor. Then I ask how I can support her during the appointment. Because my Mum tends to downplay her symptoms once she is in front of the doctor, I also make sure I have her permission to make a point or add information when we are with the doctor. Focus on relationship: After two hospital stays and many medical appointments, I noticed myself in a pattern of being task oriented when I am supporting my Mum. I became accustomed to the lists of tasks she had for me whenever I visit, so I forgot we could also have conversations unrelated to her healthcare or her apartment. I started intentionally making time when I didn't bring up anything related to healthcare. Just hanging out together in a park or sharing more about my life and work is a welcome respite for both of us. These beautiful lines from Mark Nepo’s poem, Yes, We Can Talk, remind me of the preciousness of this moment in life: No longer trying to make sense of pain, / but trying to be a soft and sturdy home in which real things can land… And we can churn at all that goes wrong / but then we must lay all distractions down, / and water every living seed.[2] Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Monique Newton Monique Newton, Yoga Therapist-C-IAYT & Mind-Body Conflict Coach Monique Newton is a Yoga Therapist, C-IAYT, Mind-Body Coach, and Conflict Coach. Monique believes in the generative power of somatic awareness for social justice, conflict resolution, and personal transformation. She has dedicated her own healing journey to becoming more self-aware, decolonizing her presence and body, and living with humility. Monique supports individuals and teams with intrapersonal and interpersonal conflict and working through change. In providing services and support, Monique focuses on trauma-informed approaches and emotional and mental well-being. References: [1] Masud Husain, 2025, “Apathy in older age: why it might signal neurodegeneration” in Brain, Volume 148, Issue 12, December 2025, Pages 4143–4144 See also The Cleveland Clinic See also Alzheimer’s UK, “Apathy and dementia” [2] Mark Nepo - spiritual writer, poet, philosopher, leaning arts teacher, cancer survivor. (n.d.).