Written by Christina Carras, Leadership Coach Christina Carras is an ICF-accredited leadership coach based in Brisbane. She specialises in guiding leaders with compassion, collaboration, and practical experience. With 30 years of experience in senior management, she helps both emerging and established leaders build confidence, develop people skills, and gain clarity on their leadership journey. Real influence is not built on what you say, but on what others experience when you are present. This article explores how quiet attention, intentional listening, and everyday interactions can shape trust, belonging, and lasting leadership influence. The meeting that stayed with me early in my career I sat across from a senior leader in a meeting I had meticulously prepared for. I had my notes, my points, and my questions. Yet within minutes, something felt wrong. He nodded at the right moments and spoke the right words. But his attention was elsewhere. His phone kept lighting up. His eyes drifted. His responses arrived a little too quickly, as if he had already decided what I would say before I finished saying it. I left with everything I thought I needed on paper. Yet something essential was missing. I didn’t feel heard. I didn’t feel seen. And I certainly didn’t feel like I mattered. Have you ever walked away from a conversation with that same hollow feeling, everything technically covered, yet something vital absent? That meeting stayed with me not because of what was said, but because of how it felt. It taught me what no leadership book ever had: people don’t remember your brilliant points. They remember how fully you showed up, or how clearly you didn’t. Where leadership is truly experienced In my previous articles, I explored leadership as a discipline, something others feel rather than something we announce. Presence sits at the heart of that truth. It is leadership experienced in real time. While many define presence through confidence, eloquence, or executive polish, I’ve learned it is far simpler and more powerful: presence is what others experience when they are with you. It’s the subtle but unmistakable sense that they have your full attention. Redefining presence Presence is not charisma, authority, or the ability to command a room. It is not about speaking more, leading from the front, or being constantly available. At its core, presence is the disciplined choice of where your attention rests, and whom it serves. In a distracted world, this focused attention has become one of the rarest and most valuable acts of leadership. People know when you are not fully there. They feel it in the half listening, the rushed replies, the subtle glances at the screen, and the conversations that never go beneath the surface. They also feel when you are present: when you listen without interrupting, ask questions you don’t already know the answers to, remember details they shared weeks earlier, and hold space for what remains unsaid. These quiet signals say, “You matter. I see you. This moment deserves my full attention.” The practice of presence Presence is not a personality trait. It is a practice. Over years of coaching and leading, I’ve learned it shows up in small, deliberate choices: Placing your phone face down and out of reach during every one-to-one, and silencing notifications. Using the “last sentence” technique, pausing after someone speaks to reflect on their final point before responding. Conducting quick “presence audits” at the end of the day, noting three conversations and how fully you showed up. Listening even when pressure urges you to move faster or solve the problem immediately. Asking questions from genuine curiosity rather than obligation or performance. Remembering names, stories, challenges, and moments that matter to others. These may look like ordinary moments. They are not. They are where trust and belonging are quietly built, one interaction at a time. Where presence builds belonging When people feel truly seen, they stop competing for attention and start contributing more openly. Presence becomes an act of inclusion, an unspoken invitation to belong. In that space, trust deepens, psychological safety grows, innovation flows more freely, and culture shifts from transactional to relational. Teams become more engaged, more resilient, and more willing to bring their best thinking to the table. The discipline behind presence This kind of presence requires three quiet strengths: Restraint: Resisting the urge to interrupt, fix, or redirect. Awareness: Noticing when your mind drifts to the next meeting or unread email. Intention: Gently bringing your attention back to the person in front of you. Leadership is demanding. Emails, decisions, and deadlines will always pull at you. Presence asks a different question: not just what are you doing, but how are you showing up while you do it? The real work and legacy of leadership Long after people forget the content of a meeting or the details of a decision, they remember how they felt in your presence, acknowledged, included, and valued. Those accumulated feelings shape culture, influence retention, drive discretionary effort, and ultimately define the kind of leader you actually are. Presence cannot be demanded or declared. It can only be experienced. And in that experience, people begin to bring more of themselves to the work and to the relationship. Where presence meets voice Presence alone is not enough. Leadership also calls us to speak, to use our voice with clarity, intention, and courage. The next edge lies in learning when and how to move from deep presence into powerful expression. That is where presence becomes true influence. This week, choose one conversation, perhaps the one you’d usually rush through, and commit to being fully present. Notice what shifts, for them and for you. Follow me on LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Christina Carras Christina Carras, Leadership Coach With more than thirty years of leadership experience, Christina Carras is committed to helping individuals find the confidence to express their own voice. As a leadership coach, she collaborates with professionals to enhance self-belief, clarity, and authentic influence. Christina believes leadership is not defined by one's position but by service, courage, and the desire to uplift others. Her work centres on unlocking potential and cultivating leaders who inspire trust, foster growth, and drive positive change.

Written by Charron Monaye, Author, Playwright, and Book Publisher Charron Monaye is an award-winning author and playwright who has dedicated more than two decades to the art of storytelling. She is the founder of Pen Legacy, LLC, a multimedia enterprise specializing in book publishing, writing/author coaching, ghostwriting, and theater productions. In today’s performance-driven culture, achievement is no longer just a goal; it is an identity. Promotions, accolades, sold-out launches, viral posts, and packed calendars have become the currency of self-worth. But beneath the polished updates and public wins lies a quieter, more complicated truth, many high achievers are not just driven; they are addicted. I know this because I lived it. For years, I was addicted to the hustle. Not in the casual, hashtag way, but in a way that fundamentally shaped how I saw myself and measured my value. I was constantly chasing the next accomplishment as if it were my last opportunity to prove I belonged in the room. Finish one project? Immediately on to the next. Hit one milestone? Raise the bar before I even had time to process the win. There was no pause, no reflection, just momentum. From the outside, it looked like discipline, focus, and ambition, and in many ways, it was. But internally, it felt like pressure that never turned off. I was not celebrating success; I was surviving it. At its core, achievement addiction is the compulsive pursuit of success to validate self-worth. The dopamine hit from completing a goal, closing a deal, finishing a manuscript, or landing a feature becomes something you chase repeatedly. Over time, the bar moves, and what once felt extraordinary quickly becomes expected. I fell into that cycle without realising it, set a goal, achieve it, feel a brief moment of satisfaction, sometimes just hours, and then immediately shift to “What’s next?” It became automatic. Celebration felt like a delay tactic rather than a necessity. The truth is, when you never stop to acknowledge what you have done, nothing ever feels like enough. There was a moment, I cannot point to a specific day, but I remember the feeling, when I realised I had accomplished things I once prayed for and felt almost nothing. No joy. No pride. Just the quiet pressure of maintaining it. That is the part people do not talk about. Achievement addiction robs you of the very thing you are working for, fulfilment. You keep climbing, but you never arrive, because the goalpost keeps moving. For many high performers, entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives alike, the environments we operate in reinforce this cycle. Output is rewarded. Visibility is currency. Consistency is expected. But beneath that are deeper drivers, the need to prove something, the fear of falling behind, and the belief that rest equals irrelevance. I had internalised all of it. Slowing down felt dangerous. Pausing felt like losing. So, I kept going, even when I was exhausted. Living in that constant state of pursuit comes at a cost. Not always immediately, but inevitably. Burnout disguises itself as dedication. You become emotionally detached, moving from task to task without ever fully experiencing your life. Wins blur together. Milestones feel transactional. Somewhere along the way, you lose connection with who you are outside of what you produce. For me, the greatest loss was presence. I was so focused on building the next thing that I was not fully living in anything I had already built. But the day I realised this, something had to change. Breaking free from achievement addiction did not happen overnight. It required intentional and often uncomfortable shifts in how I approached both success and myself. I had to separate my identity from my output, which was harder than it sounds when you have spent years being “the one who gets things done.” I had to redefine what success actually meant to me, not what looked impressive, not what sounded good in headlines, but what felt aligned, sustainable, and real. One of the most transformative changes I made was learning to pause on purpose. After completing something meaningful, I made myself sit with it, acknowledge it, and let it register. At first, it felt unnatural. Over time, it became essential. Because celebration is not a distraction from success; it is part of it. Here is what helped me begin to overcome achievement addiction: Detach your identity from your output. You are not your résumé, your revenue, or your recognition. Start defining yourself by your values, not just your victories. Schedule intentional pauses. Build reflection time into your workflow. After major milestones, pause long enough to actually feel the accomplishment before moving on. Redefine what “success” means for you. Move beyond external validation. Ask yourself, "Does this feel aligned? Is it sustainable? Does it add to my life, or just my list?" Celebrate without conditions. Stop minimising your wins or rushing past them. Acknowledge progress, even if it is not perfect or complete. Watch your internal language. Replace “What’s next?” with “What did I just accomplish?” That shift alone begins to rewire the cycle. Recognise the signs of burnout early. Emotional detachment, constant fatigue, and lack of fulfilment are not badges of honour; they are signals to recalibrate. Practice grace daily. Give yourself permission to rest without earning it. Grace does not lower your standards; it sustains your ability to meet them. If there is one lesson that continues to reshape my approach to achievement, it is this, grace is essential. Not the kind of grace that lowers your standards, but the kind that humanises your journey. Giving yourself grace means understanding that you do not have to earn rest. It means recognising that your worth is not tied to constant output. It means allowing yourself to feel proud without immediately asking, “What’s next?” I had to unlearn the belief that slowing down would cost me everything and replace it with the truth, constantly speeding up was costing me more. Today, I still believe in ambition. I still set goals. I still create, build, and pursue excellence. But I no longer chase achievement at the expense of my well-being. Winning looks different now. It looks like having the capacity to enjoy what I have built. It looks like being present in the moments I once rushed through. It looks like measuring success not just by what I accomplish, but by how I feel while accomplishing it. Because the truth is, success you never stop experiencing will always feel incomplete. Ultimately, the most powerful shift you can make is not in how much you achieve, but in allowing yourself to finally feel it. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Charron Monaye Charron Monaye, Author, Playwright, and Book Publisher Charron Monaye is an American writer, playwright, publisher, and literary powerhouse with a career spanning more than two decades. She has authored 28 books, co‑authored over 100 titles, and published more than 175 authors across 15+ genres, generating over $1 million in global sales. Her acclaimed series, Get Out of Your Own Way, and The Adventures of Michelle, has inspired readers worldwide and earned recognition for its impact. Her storytelling has also been showcased on stages in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Hollywood & Off-Broadway. A recipient of the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award and an Honorary Doctorate, Charron’s work has been celebrated by the U.S. Department of Education, the United Nations, and numerous media outlets.

Written by DDL Smith, Author DDL Smith is a British novelist known for ‘Detective Dion’ and the eco-horror novel ‘Decay’. His independently published novels have attained global reach with his ‘think like a publisher’ mentality. Detective Dion Knight is a seasoned, sharp edged detective, relentless, emotionally guarded, and, by the third novel, an increasingly unwilling traveller. Last week, my new novel, Detective Dion: Grey Knight, reached shelves in the UK and US, completing the trilogy built around him. In this final novel, Dion’s battle with ADHD is confirmed outright, although many readers had already sensed it in the earlier books, in the way his mind moves, the way he follows instinct, the way he notices what others overlook, and the way he reaches the truth by routes that are not always conventional. His methods can seem unorthodox, sometimes chaotic. Yet, somehow, they remain elegant. Dion gets there in the end. Writing a series of novels with ADHD is not always quite so elegant. The third novel began its life almost immediately after the second book was completed, before that second instalment had even been released. Then, as many creative projects do, it sat for months, gathering digital dust on my desktop while other ideas, responsibilities, and distractions wandered in. Half a science fiction draft, a growing pile of ghostwriting projects, and programming work for a new game all marched in like they had booked the place. Finally, it came time to focus back on the novel before attention for it would be lost forever. Overcoming mental paralysis became the hardest part of the process. The restless mind behind the mystery Mystery fiction demands control. Turning a mystery trilogy into a thriller demands restraint. These are two qualities I admire enormously, usually from a safe distance. Readers must unveil clues and discover information in fragments. Writers may know the whole truth, but they are forced to reveal it in breadcrumbs. A twist in a novel should be surprising, yet upon reflection, inevitable. The genre is built on the tension between what is visible and what is true. Sometimes the most important clue is not the object on the floor, but the reason someone noticed it too quickly, ignored it too carefully, or mentioned it in the wrong way. That is where Dion and I began to overlap. Dion’s mind does not work like a neat filing cabinet. It is closer to a desk covered in photographs, notes, coffee stains, and one piece of evidence that nobody else thinks matters yet. He can be difficult, blunt, obsessive, and emotionally guarded. He can miss the obvious while fixating on something apparently irrelevant. But he is also capable of seeing through noise. He follows instinct, not because he is reckless, but because his brain is constantly testing patterns. Writing to him meant thinking carefully about ADHD, not as a label or a symptom of behaviour. Writing to him became a way to describe my way of experiencing the world. In Grey Knight, Dion travels with a fake passport. I should probably clarify that I do not. My crimes against international travel are limited to booking flights too late, packing too badly, and complaining at airport desks about missed connections that physics had already ruled impossible. But beneath the more dramatic elements of the novel, there is something honest in that impulse. I know the feeling of needing to escape to a new city just to complete work that could have been done at my desk. I know the strange logic of booking a flight while en route to an airport because the destination has become tied to an answer, even when that answer may be emotional rather than practical. To other people, it can look impulsive. To the person doing it, that feels like momentum. That became central to Dion’s character in the final book. His pursuit of Victor Stanton is not only about justice. It is about fixation, grief, and unfinished history. ADHD is often discussed in terms of distraction, yet hyperfocus can be just as defining. Sometimes the problem is not that the mind cannot pay attention. Sometimes the problem is that it cannot let go. That is where fiction becomes useful. It is a canvas for projection. It lets you exaggerate the emotional truth until it becomes visible. I have never chased a killer across Europe under a false identity, which is probably for the best and certainly better for my passport renewal prospects. But I do recognise the feeling of being pulled by a goal that seems completely logical inside your own mind, even if others cannot see the thread connecting it all together. In Grey Knight, Dion’s ADHD is not simply a trait added to his character. It shapes the rhythm of the story. It affects the way he investigates, the risks he takes, and the people he pushes away. His mind is restless, but the novel asks what happens when restlessness narrows into obsession. Writing Dion as a person, not a symptom That distinction became crucial, Dion had to be a person first, not a diagnosis wearing a detective’s coat. ADHD could not simply be a character note in the margin, something to be mentioned once for inclusivity, then never mentioned again. If it was going to be part of him, it had to be part of the whole man. The first two entries in the series touched upon this. For the last, it felt vital that this became apparent. There is always a risk, when writing any neurodivergent character, of reducing them to a recognisable set of behaviours. Restless. Impulsive. Blunt. Chaotic. Difficult. These traits may be familiar, but they are not a person. A real character needs contradictions. Dion can be sharp and careless, perceptive and emotionally blind, disciplined in one area and completely reckless in another. He can see the flaw in a witness statement, yet miss the damage he is doing to someone standing right in front of him. That, to me, felt more honest. I did not want his ADHD to become a convenient explanation for every flaw, nor a neat justification for every strength. People are not puzzles that can be solved by naming one part of them. Dion’s ADHD influences him, but it does not excuse him. It shapes his instincts, his urgency, his frustrations, and his ability to connect pieces of information at speed. But his choices are still his choices, and his mistakes still have consequences. The people around him still have to live with the impact of his behaviour. That balance became important across the series, especially in Grey Knight. By the third book, Dion is under pressure not only from the case but also from grief, history, obsession, and the slow erosion of the structures that usually keep him grounded. But Dion is not only his restlessness. He is also a detective shaped by loss. Unresolved family loss, the loss of his badge, and the loss of his friend. He had grown used to hiding vulnerability behind coldness. He became someone who often appears detached because detachment feels safer than admitting how deeply he is affected. One of the things I wanted to avoid was the familiar idea that ADHD is only valuable when it produces something useful. The brilliant deduction. The sudden insight. The burst of creativity. The impressive moment that makes everyone forgive the mess around it. Those moments can exist, but they are not the whole story. ADHD is not only interesting when it benefits other people. There are subtleties, too. There’s exhaustion after intensity. Guilt after impulsiveness. The frustration of being misunderstood after something he explained badly, or when a joke sounded mean and caused a negative response. Dion carries some of that, as do I, even when he would never describe it so openly himself. So the challenge was to let the reader see what Dion himself might not say. The hardest part wasn’t starting, it was staying Starting a novel is often the seductive part. There is a particular electricity at the beginning of a project, even when starting a new novel based on two before it. The world feels full of possibility. The plot has not yet been revealed in your head, so anything could happen. Every idea feels useful. Every idea could work with enough effort. For an ADHD mind, that beginning can be especially powerful. Novelty is fuel. A new idea sparks a million more, a wonderful, chaotic mess. It has atmosphere, voices, questions, danger, and jokes. But then there’s the task of organising strands of inspiration into something others will actually find cohesive. That part never comes easily. The real difficulty is not always beginning. It is returning. Returning to the same manuscript after the first rush has faded can almost feel like a chore. As pages fill up, ideas need to be more focused. Not everything will work or fit in anymore. Ideas have to be discarded, and other projects with more freedom feel more promising. That was one of the hardest parts of writing the Detective Dion trilogy. Ideas had been set in place. While that doesn’t limit creativity, it can feel like it limits freedom. Each book had its own demands, but the series as a whole required a longer kind of attention. While others may fear a blank page and the feeling that writing a whole novel is a monumental task, I find starting easy. But once the rush has worn off, continuing becomes the challenge. It was not enough to have one good idea. I had to remember what had already happened, what had been promised, what had changed, and what could not be contradicted. Notes became scattered across a desk, then the wall, then the floor. The chaos of changing, flowing ideas became unorganised, fixed chaos. A trilogy asks for continuity. ADHD often asks whether we might instead do something completely different for a while. The third book made that tension impossible to ignore. Grey Knight began almost immediately after the second novel was completed, before that second book had even reached readers. Then it got stuck in paralysis. Other projects arrived. Other responsibilities became more apparent. The manuscript sat on my desktop, gathering digital dust. As I started writing yet another unfinished novel, ideas for a video game expansion, and then a whole new video game project, the unfinished trilogy became just another item on a to do list I rarely got to. Coming back to it required more than inspiration. Inspiration is wonderful, but it is also unreliable. It arrives like the weather. You can welcome it, but you cannot build a house on it. What helped was structure. Notes, timelines, and details needed to be organised. Old drafts and lists of unresolved questions became a catalyst to dive back in, knowing what I needed to write next. Those systems became a second brain. They held the parts of the story that my own memory could not always be trusted to keep in order. Don’t get me wrong, my desk was still a colossal mess of unstapled papers and scribbled notes I couldn’t read. But small goals became visible and helpful reminders. In a way, writing Grey Knight mirrored Dion’s own journey. He is pulled by obsession, but he survives through persistence. He follows instinct, but he still has to face consequences. He moves through chaos, but the story only works if he eventually finds meaning inside it. Finishing the trilogy didn’t feel like conquering ADHD. That would be too neat, and life is rarely that generous with its metaphors. It felt more like learning how to work alongside it, to accept the bursts of intensity, to plan for the disappearances of focus, to forgive the delays, and to keep returning to the page anyway. That, more than starting, was the achievement. Final thought on the case Writing the Detective Dion trilogy taught me that creativity does not always look calm, organised, or graceful from the inside. Sometimes it looks like scattered notes, unfinished drafts, sudden ideas, late nights, long gaps, and the strange stubbornness of returning to something even after your attention has wandered elsewhere. Sometimes it looks like building a world while also fighting the part of your brain that keeps trying to run into another one. But it is still creativity. It is still craft. It still counts. Something I struggle with during creative projects is knowing when to stop. Ideas come and go constantly. There’s always something new and exciting to add. There’s always the urge to think one more idea could make the project so expansive that it will become a magnum opus and change the face of an industry. This is why it ends up feeling like every project lies unfinished. No project ever feels like it has truly come to fruition, despite the hundreds of hours of work, solid and expansive plans, and 90% of the work being complete. But a project never gets past a finish line because there can always be something else to add that doubles the workload once more. In Grey Knight, Dion’s journey across London, Berlin, and Malmö is not only a chase through physical places. It is also a chase through grief, memory, obsession, and identity. It asks what happens when a man who has built his life around solving other people’s mysteries is finally forced to confront the one that has shaped him most deeply. Then, not just confronting that mystery, but finishing it and laying it to rest. For me, finishing the book also meant confronting something personal, the fear that long projects are always at risk of slipping away. That the excitement will fade. That another idea will interrupt. That the story will become too tangled to finish. This trilogy ends with the third book completed. A huge undertaking of three novels. If I had told myself, when planning the first book, that I’d need to complete three entire novels within this world, plus another novel on the side, I would’ve deemed it impossible and found another fixation for a few months to take up my free time. But now that the third is complete, it’s safe to say the project is complete. So, as I close this article at a desk once again covered in photographs, notes, coffee stains, and papers I definitely organised two hours ago, forgetting how this article even started, I can say this, ADHD did not make writing the Detective Dion trilogy easy. It made the process messy, restless, impulsive, and often difficult to return to. But it also shaped the way I understood the main character, the way I followed the story, and the way I finally learned to finish it. The case is closed, and a project is fully complete. Detective Dion: Grey Knight is now available from Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Amazon. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from DDL Smith DDL Smith, Author DDL Smith is a London-based novelist whose cross-genre, contemporary fiction reflects issues and fears in modern society. His creative roots started from a young age with theatre and scriptwriting for online content. When transitioning to novels, his goal was to use marketing techniques to ‘think like a publisher’ while staying independent. A tactic that has his books available in book chains across the globe.

Written by Dr. Taylor Bryant, Forensic Psychology Consultant & Expert Dr. Taylor Bryant is a Forensic Psychology Consultant/Expert & Professor of forensics and criminology, specializing in the impacts of trauma on identity, delinquency, and interpersonal relationships. With extensive experience in trauma-focused treatment, Dr. Bryant provides clinical insight into behaviors, emotional functioning, resilience. I have spent the better part of a decade sitting across from people who have done terrible things. Murderers. Predators. Fraudsters. Domestic abusers and one of the most consistent things I have learned from those interviews and sessions is this, the most dangerous people are rarely the ones who look dangerous. That disconnect between reality and public perception is not an accident. It is, in many cases, a strategy. This article is not about making you paranoid. It is about making you informed. Understanding how offenders think, how they operate, and what they tell themselves is one of the most powerful tools we have for protection, accountability, and healing. So let me walk you through seven things offenders would rather you never figured out. 1. Most offenders don't look like criminals When most people imagine a predator or an abuser, they picture a stranger. Someone shifty, unkempt, and visibly threatening is what frequently comes to mind. The reality is almost the opposite. Ted Bundy was widely described as charming, good-looking, and intelligent. Women willingly approached him. He volunteered at a suicide hotline and studied law. He was, by all social appearances, someone you would trust and that was precisely the point. This is what I call social camouflage. Offenders who rely on manipulation rather than brute force understand, often intuitively, that likability is their greatest asset. In my clinical work with survivors of trauma and abuse, the most predatory individuals were often the ones their neighbors described as "the nicest guy." The ones who coached little league, the ones with successful careers, the ones volunteering at every community event. The ones everyone thought were joking when the charges were announced. Pop culture captures this occasionally and gets it right. The character of Joe Goldberg in the series You is written to be charming, self-aware, and devoted, all the traits we are conditioned to find attractive. The horror of that show works precisely because viewers catch themselves rooting for him before snapping back to reality. We are wired to equate charisma with trustworthiness. Offenders know this better than most therapists do. The gut feeling that something is "off" gets dismissed because everything on the surface looks fine. Learning to trust that internal signal, even when the surface looks clean, is one of the most important protective skills a person can develop. 2. Manipulation usually starts small Nobody wakes up one day and finds themselves in an abusive relationship. They find themselves in what started as the most attentive, caring connection they have ever experienced and then, very gradually, it shifts. This is the process known as grooming, and it does not apply only to child abuse. It applies to romantic partners, coworkers, family members, and friends. Grooming is about building trust, testing limits, and normalizing violation over time. The first stage is often what researchers and clinicians call love bombing. Think of how quickly some relationships escalate, daily declarations of love, constant contact, being treated like the most important person in the world. This is not necessarily romantic. It is often a strategy, whether conscious or not, to create emotional dependency before the manipulation begins in earnest. Then come the tests. A small put-down framed as a joke. An apology that comes with a lecture about what you did to cause their outburst. A request that feels slightly off but seems minor enough to let slide. Each one, individually, looks small. Taken together over months or years, they represent a systematic dismantling of the victim's sense of reality. This is what gaslighting actually is. Not just lying, but a sustained effort to make someone distrust their own perceptions. "That never happened." "You're too sensitive." "You're making things up again." Over time, many victims genuinely stop trusting themselves. In Maid, the Netflix series based on Stephanie Land's memoir, we watch this unfold in real time. Alex's partner, Sean, is never portrayed as a monster. He is charming and remorseful and, crucially, he never actually hits her for most of the series. The psychological abuse is quieter, more insidious, and far more effective. Many viewers found themselves wondering whether it "counted." That confusion is exactly what the manipulation is designed to produce. By the time most people recognize what has been happening to them, the conditioning has been in place for a very long time. 3. Power and control matter more than anger One of the most persistent myths about domestic violence and assault is that offenders "just lose control" or that it happens in the heat of the moment. If they could just manage their anger better, the abuse would stop. In my experience working with offenders and survivors, that narrative is almost always false, and it is a narrative that offenders themselves frequently promote because it is far more sympathetic than the truth. The truth is that most abuse is deliberate. It is about power and control. The Duluth Model of abusive behavior, developed in the 1980s and still used extensively in intervention work today, documents this clearly. Offenders use emotional intimidation, isolation, financial control, minimizing, and coercion as a coordinated system. Anger may be the delivery mechanism, but control is the goal. Consider the pattern, an abuser will often be perfectly capable of stopping mid-incident if a neighbor knocks on the door. If it were truly about loss of control, that interruption would not work. The fact that it does tells you everything. The character of Logan Roy in Succession is a useful, if extreme, cultural illustration. He does not abuse out of uncontrolled emotion. Every humiliation, every act of cruelty, is a calculated exercise in dominance. He maintains warm relationships when it suits him. He is entirely capable of charm. The abuse is a tool, not a symptom of incapacity. This matters enormously for how we think about intervention and accountability. Anger management alone does not address the underlying issue, which is a belief in the right to control other people. 4. Offenders almost always justify their behaviour I have never sat across from an offender or abuser who did not have an explanation. Not a single one. "She pushed my buttons." "He knew what he was doing." "I was drunk." "Everyone in that industry does it." "She came on to me." "I was having a rough time." "It wasn't that serious." These are not random rationalisations. In criminology, they have a name, neutralisation techniques, a concept introduced by sociologists Sykes and Matza in the 1950s and still remarkably applicable today. Offenders neutralise the moral weight of their actions through denial of injury, "no one really got hurt," denial of the victim, "they had it coming," condemnation of the condemners, "who are you to judge me," and appeals to higher loyalties, "I was protecting my family." These cognitive distortions serve a clear function. They allow the offender to maintain a positive self-image while continuing harmful behaviour. In practical terms, they make genuine accountability almost impossible until the distortion is directly confronted. Harvey Weinstein's public statements over the years illustrated this in vivid detail. Denial, reframing, appeals to his charitable work, and deflection to accusers' motives. The pattern is textbook, and it is deeply familiar to anyone who works with offenders in a therapeutic or forensic setting. What this means for those on the outside, an apology that comes packaged with an explanation of why you are partly to blame is not an apology. It is the continuation of the same pattern. 5. Trauma can explain behaviour without excusing it This is the one I have to be most careful with, because it is genuinely complicated and gets distorted in both directions. Yes, many offenders have significant trauma histories. Adverse childhood experiences, neglect, abuse, and exposure to violence are statistically over-represented in offender populations. The research on this is consistent and has been for decades. Understanding history matters, both clinically and in terms of designing effective rehabilitation. An important, urgent note, that understanding does not reduce the obligation of accountability. Not by one degree. I have sat with survivors who were told they should feel sorry for the person who hurt them because of that person's difficult past. I have watched that narrative weaponised to shift focus from the harm caused to the harm suffered by the perpetrator. That is a serious misuse of the science. The cycle of violence, the documented tendency for abuse to replicate across generations, is real. But it is a risk factor, not a sentence. The majority of people who experience childhood trauma do not go on to harm others. Those who do make choices, often many repeated choices, that lead to those outcomes. The series Mindhunter does something interesting with this. The FBI agents interviewing serial killers are clearly grappling with this exact tension. Understanding the developmental and psychological roots of extreme violence does not produce sympathy so much as it produces a more useful and accurate picture of how harm comes to exist in the world. Empathy and accountability are not opposites. In my clinical work, holding both at once is precisely what effective forensic psychology requires. 6. Victims are chosen carefully Random victimisation is less common than most people assume. Many offenders, particularly those engaged in predatory behaviour over time, are deliberate in how they identify and approach targets. What they are looking for is not weakness in the character flaw sense. They are looking for access, for emotional need, for isolation, and for a situation where their behaviour is less likely to be believed or reported. Intelligent, accomplished, emotionally aware people are victimised regularly, because those traits have nothing to do with the specific vulnerabilities that predators target. A person going through a divorce is more emotionally accessible. A person new to a job or community may lack an established support network. A person with a history of being disbelieved or dismissed may be less likely to report. These are access points, not character failures. Elizabeth Holmes, as a study in the other direction, is instructive here. As a predator in the world of financial fraud, she targeted investors whose desire to believe in a revolutionary medical technology outweighed their scepticism. She found and exploited a specific vulnerability, the desire to be part of something historic. The mechanism is structurally identical to how interpersonal predators operate. Grooming, in whatever context it occurs, is the systematic creation of trust in order to exploit it. The fact that it worked does not mean the victim was naive or foolish. It means the offender was practised and deliberate. 7. Your gut feeling is picking up more than you think This is the one I find myself returning to most often, both professionally and personally. Neuroscience and psychology have documented extensively that the human brain processes threat cues before conscious awareness catches up. The sensation people describe as "something felt off," or "I can't explain it, I just knew," is not mystical. It is the brain's pattern recognition system flagging behavioural inconsistencies, microexpressions, tonal shifts, contextual mismatches, and things that do not rise to the level of articulate concern but that the subconscious has already catalogued. The problem is that we are socially conditioned to override that signal. We are taught, especially those socialised as women, that being perceived as rude, suspicious, or unkind is a serious social failure. We apologise for being uncomfortable. We explain away unease to avoid awkwardness and offenders, whether by instinct or calculation, understand and exploit exactly that tendency. In Gavin de Becker's book The Gift of Fear, which I recommend to virtually every client I work with, he documents case after case where victims later identified the moment their gut flagged danger and the social pressure that led them to dismiss it. That dismissal is not stupidity. It is a predictable response to years of conditioning that prioritises social harmony over personal safety. The nonverbal cues that trigger this response are subtle, someone who maintains intense eye contact a beat too long, a person who asks questions but does not wait for the answers, or someone who is charming but whose charm has a slight quality of performance. The brain notices before the conscious mind names it. Trusting that signal is a skill, and like any skill, it can be cultivated. A final word Understanding offender psychology is not about viewing every person you meet with suspicion. It is about replacing naive trust with informed awareness. It is about knowing that danger rarely announces itself with flashing lights, that manipulation is most effective when it is invisible, and that the social conventions we use to maintain community can also be used against us. The most dangerous offenders are often not the easiest to spot. Which is exactly why this knowledge matters. Education, strong boundaries, and the willingness to trust your own perceptions are not paranoia. They are, in my clinical judgment, among the most important things a person can carry. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Taylor Bryant Dr. Taylor Bryant, Forensic Psychology Consultant & Expert Dr. Taylor Bryant is a professor, forensic psychology consultant and trauma expert with extensive experience in trauma-focused treatment and behavioral health. Her work specializes in examining how trauma impacts self-worth, delinquency, emotional regulation, and interpersonal relationships, particularly among female sex offenders, adolescents, and families. Dr. Bryant has worked extensively with justice-involved youth and individuals navigating complex trauma, family conflict, and maladaptive behavioral pattens. Through her clinical, academic, and consulting work, she provides insight into the long-term psychological effects of trauma and the pathways toward healing and resilience.

Written by Dr. Omosefe Christina, Medical Doctor, CEO and Founder Dr. Omosefe Christina is a Medical Doctor, Entrepreneur, and Founder of Elite Exams. She blends frontline clinical practice with medical education and community programmes to help International Medical Graduates (IMG) and African families flourish in their careers and communities in the UK. When I arrived in the UK, everyone talked about familiarising doctors with the system, workshops, inductions, conferences, and some structured support. Yet I noticed that expectations were subjective, left to each doctor to navigate. I began to understand that real change was not driven by better induction. It was driven by learning, by building habits and systems that actually allow people to adapt. Understanding the system for what it is The NHS is built on strong values. We talk about breaking barriers and driving innovation in patient care, but we actually reward predictability over curiosity. This is because mistakes in healthcare have consequences. To maintain clinical safety, healthcare systems rely on routines and protocols, sometimes seen as “the way we do things here.” When you reward predictability without considering flexibility, you create consequences for the person who does things differently, even when different works better. The IMG who approaches a case differently, the supervisor who questions a protocol, the team that tries an alternative pathway; they experience that as risk. Risk to their evaluation, their progression, their standing. The system does not need to explicitly punish deviation. It just does not reward it. In a system that moves fast, where trainees are constantly being assessed, withholding rewards has its own cost. People learn quickly: fit in, follow protocol, do not ask why. The person trained elsewhere learns it fastest, because for them, everything is already unfamiliar, and now conformity feels like the only safe choice. Yet the system is never just a set of programmes or policies. The NHS is made of relationships between people and colleagues, organisations and people who shape and influence decisions, and formal and informal rules that influence behaviour. To make lasting change, we have to understand the system’s true workings. We also need to recognise that what seems to be functioning as intended may actually be broken. There is an urgent need to address root causes for real improvement. The power hidden in measurement Every system reveals itself through what it chooses to measure. In healthcare, we count patient numbers and waiting times, while we recognise that measuring experiences, such as whether a patient felt heard, is difficult. Numbers help us feel like we understand a system. But they also let systems ignore what does not fit the metric. Job satisfaction, whether an IMG felt respected, whether the system actually learned from failure; these disappear from the data. This means institutions can claim they are making progress while people are actually leaving. Research from BMJ Open and the British Journal of General Practice (2024) found that even after accounting for knowledge and experience, internationally qualified doctors faced lower pass rates in postgraduate exams.[1][2] What the statistics hide is the accumulated weight of navigating a system that was not built with you in mind, and of performing at full capacity while learning an entirely new professional culture. The scale problem In many developing countries, professional relationships are strong. Learning is communal through departmental meetings, grand rounds, and bedside teaching sessions. Learning and adaptation were constant. We rarely worked in isolation. This is different in the UK. Structure, research, and governance are strong, but scaling up medical education can sometimes reduce the human closeness that supports learning. I have seen educational and health innovations work in one learning community but fail to take off in another. The ideas were not weak; they may even be similar. It is easier to replicate models, but changing a learner’s mindset is more challenging. In medical education, real scale is not about size. It is about how well leaders and learning platforms learn across boundaries, how well they adapt to challenges, and how they generate momentum through constant reflection and improvements. Establishing the leadership standard If we want different outcomes, we need different approaches. Create space for structured reflection and feedback, not just service delivery. IMGs need space for structured reflection, peer learning, and time to adapt. These are not niceties; we are building a sustainable workforce infrastructure. If you will not fund the right learning and support a doctor needs, you are saying: keep working at speed without understanding what you are doing. Share decision-making power with the people being assessed. There is no doubt that IMGs bring insight to the development of policies. IMGs should help design the standards they are judged by. If you are not doing that, you are measuring them against criteria you will not let them shape, or criteria they do not understand. Isolated policies on exams and workplace assessments can create systemic discrimination. Design systems for the people you actually have, not the people you wish you had hired. A huge percentage of the NHS workforce is internationally trained. There is a need for targeted induction programmes, workshops, assessments, and career and leadership pathways that align with that reality. We can no longer afford to design systems that cater to a few and expect everyone else to fit. Shift evaluation from proof to progress. Ask: What did we learn? Not just: What did we deliver? When we start understanding the differences in expectations and learning, we create real impact. Asking the right questions enhances our understanding of what is needed, since we cannot learn from data that does not ask the right questions. We all appreciate the value of simplified, actionable feedback, the kind that comes from a simple question, for example: “What surprised you about this?” This creates real-life learning through insight. Conversations remain honest. Learning becomes mutual. We then shift from box-checking to understanding. A practitioner’s toolkit for real change For those in the workplace, change starts with practice, not just strategy. Here are three everyday habits that sustain a learning culture in the workplace: Listen past comfort. In clinical teams, this means actively asking IMG colleagues how they would approach a case, and genuinely considering alternatives to how “we do it here.” The organisational or diagnostic approach they learned elsewhere might solve something your team has been stuck on. Make a reflection routine. If clinical debriefs are structured and regular, people start seeing patterns, not just checklists. Educators can have structured debriefs after significant decisions, or even encourage regular peer conversations about “what surprised you,” or take a bit more time to ask, “Why did this happen?” The exercise is about collective learning for all involved, not about performance management. Reward adaptation. Why do we not celebrate adjustment and integration? Celebrating teams that adjust when things do not work is a way to acknowledge what we learn from failure and improvement. The same goes for IMGs who learn and adapt. That is worth celebrating. Failure is a waste only when hidden. If a clinical pathway fails, most teams revert and move on. Better teams say: “This did not work. Here is what we are trying instead.” They are rewarded for that honesty, not punished. The same applies to supervision. If an IMG is not responding to one style of feedback, a supervisor who shifts approach, making it more direct, more written, or more collaborative, should be recognised as good practice, not seen as lowering standards. Hidden failures teach nothing. Visible adaptation teaches the system how to evolve. These practical changes, repeated often, are what really shift the cultures most IMGs face. Sustained, these small everyday actions provide a source of lasting transformation for everyone. Learning as survival In medicine, we learn that learning and early feedback save lives. Organisations and their workforce systems are no different. The NHS depends on internationally trained professionals, especially in tough times. The GMC Workforce Report 2025 states that IMGs account for 42% of the workforce, yet their success rate in specialisation applications is 23%, compared to 69% for UK-trained doctors. Success, or failure, is not simply about individual clinical skills; it depends on a myriad of factors, ones that good leaders would enable their workforce systems to learn from. The same applies to social innovation to support professionals who have migrated to the UK. Real change does not happen when key stakeholders sit on opposite sides of accountability. It happens when they learn together. The leadership we actually need As a physician and educator, I do not possess all the answers; who does? Real leadership is not about possessing all the answers, but about encouraging the right mindset to ask the right questions and creating the right environment, where insight and learning drive realistic change. It means asking better questions, creating space for uncomfortable truths about the real challenges IMGs face, and choosing humanity as a deliberate strategy. Systems do not transform through pressure. They evolve and survive through persistent learning. Consistent learning is necessary for system survival and renewal. Leaders must prioritise and model this approach for real progress. That statistic, 42% of the workforce and 23% application success, is a system failing at learning. This is not slow change; it is active failure. Systems that do not learn from 42% of their workforce will lose them. The choice is not between an optional learning culture and business as usual. It is between learning now or collapsing later, when the people you depend on have already left. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Omosefe Christina Dr. Omosefe Christina, Medical Doctor, CEO and Founder Dr. Omosefe Christina creates digital learning platforms that turn frontline experience into practical support for international doctors in the UK. She is the CEO of Elite Exams, which supports the medical education of international trained doctors aspiring to become independent GPs. She builds digital systems, courses, platforms, and automated learning pathways to support doctors who migrate to the UK. References: [1] Woolf K et al. Perceived causes of differential attainment in UK postgraduate medical training. BMJ Open. 2016. [2] Brown et al. Language of primary medical qualification and differential MRCGP exam attainment. BJGP. 2024. [3] GMC Fair Training Pathways for All. [4] GMC Workforce Report 2025, BMA summary. [5] Schwab Foundation & World Economic Forum. Why Collective Social Innovation is Future Philanthropy. 2025.

Written by Kellie Winzinowich and Kelly Whelan-Enns, Active Embodiment Coaches Kellie and Kelly are the founders of the Academy of Embodiment Arts and hosts of the Soul Discovery podcast. They combine Qigong with meditation and energy mastery to guide people to embody new frequency through transmutation and transformation for lasting change. Self-mastery of our physical bodies is important in our evolutionary process. It is critical to have a basic understanding of our physical bodies, the chemical and energetic processes, and how thoughts and emotions affect these processes. In our course, Introduction to Self-Mastery, we begin by discussing our physical bodies on an electronic level and the energy produced by our mitochondria. Every cell of our body contains mitochondria. Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells. Every cell in our bodies produces 10,000 times more energy than the surface of the sun. Pause for a moment and envision harnessing that power. How do we go about doing that? When we connect to our spirit, our mitochondria operate optimally. This ensures that deuterium depleted water is produced at the fourth step of the electron transport chain. This water is often referred to as fourth phase water, or Exclusion Zone (EZ) water. You can learn more about this by following the work of Gerald Pollack and Dr. Catherine Clinton, to name two of the leading voices in this field of work. The electron transport chain is a series of protein complexes and other molecules that transfer electrons from electron donors to electron acceptors. When this is working properly, structured water surrounds each and every biomolecule of our body, including proteins, DNA, hormones, enzymes, and receptors. This hydration shell surrounds the DNA and gives a specific sequence fingerprint, which facilitates DNA transcription. This transcription gives it shape and resonance. It will adjust according to frequency inputs from both EMFs and nnEMFs, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, music, light, thoughts, emotions, and more. The EMF spectrum is a spectrum of sound vibration. Sound is light, and everything in the universe vibrates at a subatomic level. All vibration exists at a frequency and carries information. Frequency information creates shape, and the shape of each biomolecule then determines its resonance, along with how it interacts with surrounding molecules. This facilitates human physiology using communication that can be faster than the speed of light. How do we affect our body on the subatomic level? To begin the process of self-mastery, you must understand how your environment, thoughts, and emotions affect your physical body, every cell, and the energy produced by the mitochondria. Emotions cause chemical reactions in the body. This is why we can be triggered in similar situations, because our body has a physical reaction to the same or similar stimuli. It takes practice to recognize our emotional triggers and observe them. Thoughts can keep us in a certain emotional state because looping or repeating thoughts continually bring up the emotion, thus creating the same chemical reactions in the body over and over. To stop the cycle, we must stop those thoughts and create new ones, thereby giving our body new information. In order to do that, we must understand our ego and shadow. Ego is defined in a number of ways: A feeling of inflated pride and/or superiority to others The masks we take on when in public or social circles, i.e., roles we take on in this life A symptom of your shadow and its accumulated stories Shadow: The unconscious mind, survival, and the parts of yourself you repress or suppress to hide from yourself A reflection of our emotional survival mechanisms that combine to impulse us with mental, emotional, and physical motivations to hide from being aware of our ego stories and programming Be aware that we all have a shadow and ego side, as well as carrying the light. It is a product of being born on the earth at this time. We were all born into separation from our Higher Selves and Source. The ultimate act of Self-Love is putting the mental fragments of yourself back together. These mental fragments are caused by the repeating thought patterns we subconsciously hold onto. Shadow and ego reflect your doubts, worries, fears, and more. Being able to trust your intuition means you have to make a choice between Love, from your Heart, or fear, from ego and shadow. The contrast of duality is important because we learn to discern what our intuition feels like when we’ve made a decision from a place of fear and when it is out of Love. Sometimes we don’t know until we’ve made a decision. For example, we can take a job out of desperation for money. While we need that money to survive financially, it may have been out of fear for our survival, rather than a love for the type of work. Eventually, we will make a choice that is out of love and not fear, even in situations where we need financial stability. The contrast in how you feel and the subsequent thoughts you have tell you the difference. The need to survive also means we love ourselves enough to do what is necessary to be okay. We have to watch what our mind does with that information. It can be easy to keep ourselves down because of what we’ve come to believe about our situation. However, our situation changes second to second when we choose to believe new information about ourselves. Every decision we make affects every cell of our body. Fostering a deep connection to your body means that, in those instances where you are uncertain, you can step out of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze to help foster the element of discernment and choose a course of action that is right for you. So, how can you develop that? Take note of your physical reactions in the body when you feel emotions. Where do these physical sensations take place? How does it make that particular area of the body feel? How long does it last? When emotions arise, what thoughts are associated? Are there stories or patterns you observe that are trying to replay themselves in your life? Trauma, for example, and the associated emotions, trigger physical reactions in our bodies. Knowing the difference between an emotional trigger and trauma requires us to stop our thoughts so we can discern whether we are being traumatized again or experiencing a similar situation that triggers those emotions. When we realize it’s a trigger, we can inform our body that it is not a trauma, that we are okay, and that the feeling will pass. It’s easy to get carried away with runaway thoughts and the subsequent stories they conjure in our minds. It is key to notice when this happens and redirect yourself. A physical tool paired with a breathwork practice can help tremendously in this instance. Earth Marrow Washing is a Qigong breathwork technique we share with our students all the time. Here’s a brief explanation of how to do it. Rest back in your chair and close your eyes. Sit with your feet flat on the floor and place your hands on your thighs. As you inhale, visualize the breath coming up from Mother Earth into your left foot, all the way up your left leg to your left hip. Then see it rise up your abdomen and chest, crossing over to your right shoulder. As you exhale, visualize the breath moving across to your left shoulder, then crossing and travelling down the chest and abdomen to your right hip. Watch it travel down your right leg and out into Mother Earth through your right foot. Note: This is a figure 8. Repeat for 10 to 20 breaths. Allow any thoughts to enter and leave. You can also do this from anywhere, at any time, and while standing. Always remember to reach for the Earth. Remember, you are a spiritual being having a physical experience. Tending to your body on all levels is key to maintaining good health. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Kellie Winzinowich and Kelly Whelan-Enns Kellie Winzinowich and Kelly Whelan-Enns, Active Embodiment Coaches Kelly Whelan-Enns is a master of Shaolin Qi Healing, Qigong, and the internal art of Baguazhang. Plagued by asthma and hypoglycemic in his youth, Kelly's journey of healing and self-mastery has spanned over 35 years, training with master teachers, and studying Taoist, Zen Buddhist, and Tibetan meditation, teaching many along the way. Kellie Winzinowich is a former elite gymnast whose journey brought her to Qigong and the study of internal alchemy. Now a Certified Hypnotherapist, she helps others navigate personal transformation. Together, Kellie and Kelly guide others to embody lasting change through physical, emotional, and spiritual self-mastery.

Written by Daniela Aneva, Executive and Team Coach Daniela Aneva is widely recognized for helping leaders and teams perform at their best. She’s an executive and team coach, an OD consultant, and a small business owner, known for practical, people-centered work that drives real behavior change and measurable results. No team is an island. A sales team that closes deals without coordinating with operations creates fulfillment chaos. A product team building features without aligning with customer success generates churn. A finance function optimizing for cost reduction while the business development arm pursues growth creates organizational whiplash. The dysfunction we routinely attribute to individual performance or poor leadership often has a different root: the system itself is broken. Systemic team coaching offers a powerful answer, not by fixing individuals, or even individual teams, but by attending to the living, complex web of relationships, interdependencies, and flows that constitute how an organization actually functions. Beyond the team as unit Traditional coaching focuses on individuals. Even team coaching, in its conventional form, treats the team as a bounded unit, working on its internal dynamics, communication, and performance. This is valuable. But it misses something critical. In any mid-sized or large organization, teams do not perform in isolation. They exist within a broader ecosystem, connected to other teams through shared goals, competing priorities, resource dependencies, information flows, and cultural norms that span departments. The real performance bottlenecks, the persistent miscommunications, the recurring conflicts between streams, these do not live inside any single team. They live in the white space between teams. Systemic team coaching, as developed and articulated by practitioners like Peter Hawkins, shifts the unit of analysis from the team to the system in which the team is embedded. It asks not only, "How is this team performing?" but "How is this team serving its stakeholders, and how is it functioning as one node in the larger organizational network?" This distinction is not semantic. It is architecturally transformative. What systemic team coaching actually does At its core, systemic team coaching operates across five interconnected disciplines: commissioning and clarifying the team's mandate within the organizational system; co-creating and building the team's internal capacity; connecting the team to all its key stakeholders; core learning through reflection and adaptation; and deepening the team's collective leadership presence over time. In large and mid-sized organizations, where multiple teams, departments, and workstreams must coordinate, this approach creates tangible impact at several levels. First, it surfaces hidden interdependencies. Many organizations suffer not from poor strategy, but from poor translation of strategy across team boundaries. Systemic team coaching creates the conditions in which teams can see, often for the first time, how their behaviors and decisions ripple across the organization. A technology team discovers that its sprint planning cycle inadvertently creates bottlenecks for three downstream departments. A marketing team recognizes that its campaign launch timelines are built on assumptions the supply chain team has never been consulted to validate. Visibility transforms the conversation. Second, it builds lateral intelligence. Vertical accountability, up and down the hierarchy, is well-developed in most organizations. Lateral accountability, the mutual commitments teams make to each other, is typically fragile. Systemic team coaching strengthens this horizontal architecture. Teams develop shared language, agreed protocols, and genuine relational trust with the functions they depend on and the functions that depend on them. The result is collaboration that does not require constant escalation. Third, it aligns purpose across levels. One of the most destabilizing forces in complex organizations is purpose fragmentation, where each team optimizes for its own KPIs in ways that are locally rational but systemically incoherent. A systemic coaching intervention works with leadership teams to articulate organizational purpose clearly, then helps each team understand how its specific contribution serves that larger purpose. This is not a communications exercise. It is a meaning-making process that fundamentally changes how teams prioritize, negotiate, and make decisions under pressure. The multi-team system challenge Mid-sized organizations, typically those with 200 to 2,000 employees, face a particular version of this challenge. They are too large for the informal coordination that works in startups, yet not large enough to afford the elaborate systems integration mechanisms of the enterprise. Teams proliferate. Streams multiply. Coordination costs rise. Leaders find themselves spending increasing amounts of time managing conflict between functions rather than driving strategy. Systemic team coaching at this scale typically works at three levels simultaneously. At the senior leadership team level, the coaching creates clarity of organizational purpose, stakeholder priorities, and cross-functional accountabilities. At the department or function level, it builds each team's understanding of its role within the wider system and strengthens its capacity to operate as a high-performing collective. At the inter-team level, it facilitates structured dialogue across team boundaries, surfacing tensions, negotiating interdependencies, and building the connective tissue that allows a complex system to move coherently. In large enterprises, organizations with thousands of employees, multiple business units, and geographically distributed operations, the challenge is scale and fragmentation. Business units develop distinct subcultures. Centers of excellence operate in silos. Shared services are perpetually caught between competing demands. Systemic team coaching in this context is less about individual team performance and more about organizational coherence. It becomes a vehicle for building what might be called institutional agility: the capacity of a large, complex organization to act with the coordination and responsiveness of something much smaller. Communication, collaboration, and the space between Two of the most commonly cited organizational problems, poor communication and poor collaboration, are typically treated as behavioral issues. People need to communicate better. Teams need to collaborate more. Training is provided. Values are posted on walls. The problems persist. Systemic team coaching reframes these challenges structurally. Poor communication between teams is rarely the result of individual communicators failing. It is the result of inadequate feedback loops, unclear role boundaries, misaligned incentives, and the absence of legitimate forums for cross-team dialogue. When a systemic coaching approach creates those structures, regular inter-team conversations with clear purpose, shared accountability frameworks, visible dependency maps, communication improves not because people try harder, but because the system makes communication possible. The same principle applies to collaboration. Collaboration does not emerge from goodwill alone. It requires shared goals, mutually understood constraints, trust that others will honor their commitments, and a psychological safety that allows teams to acknowledge difficulties rather than managing appearances. Systemic team coaching builds the conditions in which genuine collaboration becomes rational, where it is in each team's enlightened self-interest to coordinate, because they can see clearly how their success depends on the success of the system. The leadership imperative None of this works without leadership teams who are willing to be coached systemically themselves. The senior leadership team is the most important team in any systemic coaching engagement, because its dynamics, its silos, its unspoken conflicts, and its blind spots are faithfully reproduced throughout the organization. A leadership team that operates as a collection of functional representatives rather than a genuine collective will generate fragmentation at every level below it. Systemic team coaching holds up a mirror to that leadership team. It asks: are you modeling the cross-functional collaboration you are asking the rest of the organization to demonstrate? Are you providing clarity of purpose that enables your teams to make aligned decisions without constant escalation? Are you attending to your external stakeholders, customers, partners, board, community, as a collective, or handling each relationship in your own functional lane? These are uncomfortable questions. They are also the most important questions in organizational life. From intervention to capability The deepest value of systemic team coaching is not what it accomplishes in any single engagement. It is what it builds over time: the organizational capability to self-regulate, to surface and address systemic tensions before they become crises, and to continuously evolve how teams work together as the organization's context changes. Organizations that develop this capability, call it systemic intelligence, become genuinely adaptive. They do not just respond to disruption; they see it coming earlier, distribute the response more effectively, and emerge from it stronger than their less systemically aware competitors. In a landscape defined by complexity, interdependence, and accelerating change, systemic team coaching is not a luxury. It is a strategic necessity. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Daniela Aneva Daniela Aneva, Executive and Team Coach Daniela Aneva is an international executive and team coach, coaching supervisor, professional speaker, and author. With over 25 years of executive experience in multinational organizations, Daniela has supported the growth of more than 5,000 leaders and teams across the globe. She is a council member at Forbes, a mentor at Rice University’s Doerr Institute, and has co-authored books with Brian Tracy, Jonathan Passmore, and contributed to Team of Teams by Peter Hawkins and Catherine Carr.

Written by Kirsty Marie Denny, Kinesiologist and Neurodivergence Specialist Kirsty Marie Denny specialises in trauma, neurodivergence, and sensitivity, empowering her clients to transform their lives through energetic kinesiology. Her focus is on each individual’s unique gifts and challenges and the root causes of distressing symptoms. When we become parents, naturally our focus shifts heavily from self to other and this is part of the beauty of raising a child. However, this focus can sometimes lead us to deny or not fully process our emotions, including the experience of grief, whether or not anybody has died. What is grief? Grief can be defined as the intense pain or distress that accompanies loss. In the case of parents, the most obvious cause of grief is the death of a baby or child, including miscarriage at any stage of pregnancy. This kind of loss is, of course, a terrible pain to bear. Parents who have lost a child often report total shock, as if the world is crumbling around them, a deep sense of the injustice of losing someone so young, and a profound longing to see and hold their child again. This type of grief is deep and wide and can’t be circumnavigated without serious consequences. Grief is, as many would say, love with nowhere to go, and this energy of love is a powerful force. Until recently, miscarriage or stillbirth was often not spoken of much publicly, and friends and family of those experiencing it were unsure whether to acknowledge it. Fortunately, the tide is turning on this, and many parents of babies miscarried or stillborn are choosing to publicly acknowledge their loss and commemorate their babies in beautiful ways. Acknowledging loss I haven’t personally experienced the death of a child, but what stands out to me about people’s reports is their desire not to have their pain sanitised or swept aside. They wish to have their children acknowledged and for people to continue speaking their names and telling their stories. They don’t want to forget, love and pain want somewhere to go. In this way, we are moving towards a healthier recognition of grief, particularly in the West, where there is often less tradition and more discomfort around death and dying. There is growing awareness that ignoring grief, tucking it away into a dark corner of our soul, is not healthy other than as a very short term survival strategy, for example, in the very early days after a loss when we’re in shock and must organise logistics, or if we’re in an unsafe situation and need to save the full force of our grief for later. The stages of grief Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously described five stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She later added an initial shock phase and a testing phase between depression and acceptance, where a person will begin to re engage in life in new ways. Read more about the seven stages of grief here. These stages are certainly a useful reference, but it is widely recognised that not everyone goes through all these stages, certainly not in a specific order, and that the experience of grief is deeply personal and dynamic. Grief without bereavement But what about the kind of grief where nobody died? Is this real grief? There can be a sense of not being entitled to name and feel this type of loss. Kenneth Doka came up with the term disenfranchised grief in his 1989 book about hidden sorrow to describe this type of often unacknowledged loss. The pain of grief isn’t a competition, it doesn’t bend to the laws of logic, and just as in the case of a bereavement, it doesn’t go away because of a reluctance to feel or process it. This type of grief may also be referred to as non death, ambiguous, or nonfinite loss in different contexts. Types of non-death parenting grief There are many types of disenfranchised grief that can arise for parents. Often, these are related to situations where the reality is in stark contrast to how they imagined parenthood and their child’s life would be. Birth trauma and grief Trauma and grief can be interconnected in complex ways, and one of the most common types of grief is that related to a traumatic birth, or simply one that didn’t align with the parents’ vision. This can involve a mixture of factors such as physical pain, injury, and fear, or feeling disempowered and even bullied into unwanted interventions by medical providers, usually well meaning. With or without significant trauma, a birth that was difficult or not aligned with the parents’ hopes for themselves and their baby can create an intense feeling of loss. This grief can be compounded by separation from the baby if they require medical care in a neonatal unit. What’s more, grief over a traumatic birth tends to be eclipsed by the immediate need to intensely care for a new life. Many new mothers will have heard the phrase, ‘the important thing is that you have a healthy baby’, or similar, and wondered at the conflicted feelings they have about this statement. Naturally, they agree that their baby’s welfare is the most important thing. This conflict isn’t selfishness, but the sense of being subtly gaslit, of being told that their experience simply doesn’t matter. Breastfeeding grief This one is personal for me, so I’ll recount some of my story by way of illustration. Of course, whether breastfeeding is felt as a loss is personal to each individual. For me, breastfeeding was a huge part of my vision of motherhood and how I would bond with my baby. I expected it to come fairly naturally. Then my first son was born and everything just felt hard. He had significant feeding problems, tongue tie, reflux, torticollis, gut issues, and he cried and cried and cried. My dream of how motherhood would be was miles apart from the reality, creating a real sense of loss. I felt like I was letting my baby down as he was so unsettled, and breastfeeding was by far the most painful aspect of this ‘failure’ for me. It elicited the type of grief that feels like a gaping wound with jagged edges despite the fact that nobody died. Of course, things could have been much worse, my baby was growing well, but people’s assurances that he was basically fine and that I should focus on this didn’t help, quite the opposite, in fact. Breastfeeding grief can also be related to women feeling betrayed by their own bodies, or by a lack of support or healthcare around breastfeeding. There can also be a feeling of being judged or excluded due to the way they feed their babies. Other common sources of parenting grief include, but are not limited to: Babies being preterm or having health problems requiring separation from parents and hospital stays. Having a medically complex or high needs baby, or children being diagnosed with chronic illnesses or disabilities at any age. Loss of your old life, body, or career. Loss of the pre baby relationship with your partner or other changes in relationships. Grief that is not directly related to parenting, for example, the death of a friend or wider family member, or the end of a relationship, may also be complicated or prolonged due to the intensity of caring for children, especially in the early years. In the case of new mothers, feelings of grief can be intensified or complicated by the huge hormonal changes that occur and the risk of postpartum depression. Don’t compare or trivialise Of course, the specific scenarios that trigger a grief response and its intensity are individual to each parent. Having a child with a life threatening long term disability, for example, is a different scenario from breastfeeding grief or having had an unplanned C section. However, the truth is that comparing or rationalising our pain doesn’t erase it, and it’s important to allow ourselves to feel what we feel and to acknowledge and navigate our grief rather than trying to skirt around the edges. None of the above causes of grief, or any other, is a reason to feel guilty, even if the loss seems trivial or self centred, for example, the loss of your old identity or way of life. Unacknowledged grief can lead to depression, low self esteem, resentment, physical ailments, and an overall reduction in the ability to be present and move forward with life. In my personal experience of breastfeeding grief, the advice I would give to my postpartum self would be to get more support with processing the stress and loss. I did have a little bit of counselling, but frankly I was more focused on fixing and coping at the time. With the schedule of pumping, sterilising, trying to feed, trying to settle, and hoping that the next day would be the day it magically got better, there wasn’t much room for feeling my feelings in a healthy way. Ways to work with parenting grief As previously mentioned, try to allow your grief, making space for it and not minimising it through comparison with the grief of others. Often it is therapeutic to find someone to deeply listen and be present with you in your pain, whether this is a counsellor, psychologist, healer, or simply a friend or family member who has this capacity. In addition to talking to a trusted person, find ways to move and express the energy of grief without shutting it down. Activities that may help you to process include exercise, dance, visual arts, music, journaling, meditation, or energy work. Grief as a catalyst Any type of dramatic change or emotional upheaval, including grief, can reveal existing wounds, pain points, and limiting beliefs. Grief is a process in and of itself in response to loss, but additionally can point us to deeper truths about ourselves and our subconscious conditioning. Even when there is no particular grief involved, parenting is itself a masterclass in becoming aware of our own stressors and pain points through the way we are triggered by our children’s behaviour and challenges. When we can be conscious of our emotional responses as parents, for example, we feel angry or overwhelmed when our child is angry because we were not allowed to express anger as children, this can initiate a process of reflecting on some of the less optimal facets of our own childhoods, and another type of grief. In my case, breastfeeding grief, and the many other ways my parenting experience didn’t align with what I imagined, exposed much deeper levels of my own subconscious beliefs. These included a sense of not being good enough, needing to be perfect, and being helpless in the face of suffering. The process of illuminating these beliefs and patterns and working through them was painful, but ultimately transformative. Grief as a vision quest In many cases, once we’ve navigated the initial stages, the experience of grief can be a catalyst for finding deeper purpose in our lives. Loss naturally leads us to turn inwards and to consider what is of true importance to us in life and perhaps, how we can alchemise an experience of pain to be of service to others. Honour your own individual journey. Remember that babies and children are incredibly perceptive and if you are harbouring grief and hurt, they will feel it, even if they are unaware of exactly what it is they are feeling. By addressing your pain, you are creating a much clearer emotional space for your children as well as yourself. There is timeless wisdom in the saying, associated with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and other Indigenous traditions, that healing yourself affects seven generations forward and back, or more. The inner work you do creates profound and sometimes unexpected ripples of healing and transformation in the world. Pathways towards integration Grief isn’t necessarily something we completely move on from, particularly in the case of a bereavement. Many prefer the idea of growing your life around the grief, as in Lois Tonkin’s Jar Model of grief, read more about this here, or integrating it such that though the grief still exists, so does joy and meaning in life. There are many ways to work with grief, and what works for you may not be what works for another. Explore your options, perhaps counselling of various types, working somatically with the body, addressing the realms of subtle energy and intuition, or any combination thereof. Kinesiology is a powerful yet gentle way to work with grief, including the stages, the way it’s stored in the energetic body, the way it links to past grief, and our subconscious beliefs about ourselves and the world. This type of work can also provide powerful assistance with reconnecting to a sense of purpose and meaning in life. It’s always a deep honour for me to hold someone in courageous acknowledgement of their grief, whatever type it is. Kinesiology sessions are available online worldwide, or get in touch for an in person session in Auckland, New Zealand, by appointment. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kirsty Marie Denny Kirsty Marie Denny, Kinesiologist and Neurodivergence Specialist Kirsty Marie is an energetic kinesiologist who believes in each human’s capacity to thrive as their unique and authentic self. Kirsty navigated chronic health challenges in her 20s and an intensely stressful early parenthood experience. Having transformed her own life as well as her children’s, she is on a mission to empower others. She specialises in supporting those who are highly sensitive, neurodivergent, or who have experienced trauma. Her approach is truly holistic, incorporating practical lifestyle coaching as well as energetic processes for balancing the brain and body and transmuting emotional stress.

Written by KeKe Chanel, Author, Host, and Certified Life and Book Coach KeKe Chanel is an award-winning author, certified life and book coach, and host of Kickin' It With KeKe Podcast. KeKe is also the owner of KeKe Chanel LLC and Nineteen Lifestyle Magazine. June feels different. Maybe it's because we're halfway through the year. Maybe it's because summer has a way of making us slow down long enough to hear ourselves think, or maybe it's because the little version of you, the one who still lives somewhere beneath the responsibilities, deadlines, heartbreaks, and expectations is asking for your attention. Not your perfection. Your attention. Many of us spend years trying to fix our mindset without ever addressing the child who helped create it. The child who learned that love had to be earned. The child who became the peacemaker because conflict felt unsafe. The child who learned to shrink because being seen attracted criticism. The child who decided, "If I do everything right, maybe nobody will leave." That child grew up. But many of those beliefs grew up too. The beautiful thing about mindset is that it isn't a life sentence. It's a collection of thoughts, experiences, interpretations, and stories that can be rewritten. It weeds out the noise of tradition and chaotic cycles, opening new paths of possibilities we don’t think we deserve. This June, instead of chasing a better life, consider introducing your inner child to a better story. Mindset shift 1: Stop asking "What's wrong with me?", ask "What happened to me?" This question changes everything. When something triggers you, disappoints you, or causes you to react in ways you don't understand, don't immediately criticize yourself. Give yourself grace. Get curious. Get intentional. Your inner child isn't looking for punishment. It’s looking for understanding. For permission to move differently, to use your imagination and push past barriers that create tunnel vision or comfort. The next time you find yourself spiraling, ask "What experience taught me to think this way?" You'll be surprised how many adult struggles are simply childhood lessons that were never updated. Mindset shift 2: Become the adult you needed Most people spend years searching for someone to give them what they missed. Validation. Protection. Encouragement. Consistency. What if June became the month you stopped outsourcing those needs? What if June was the turning point you overlooked, holding on to "Grandma said this way is best" or "Mama did it that way." Every morning ask yourself "What would the younger version of me need to hear today?" Then say it. Out loud. Not because it's cheesy. Because it's healing. Healing isn’t designed to be pretty. It’s messy, it’s necessary. It’s access to a new normal that challenges you to want more. Why? Because you deserve more. Mindset shift 3: Create a "proof folder" Your inner child remembers every rejection. Your adult self needs help remembering every victory. Create a digital folder called Proof. Save screenshots of compliments. Messages that encouraged you. Photos of accomplishments. Moments when you showed courage. On difficult days, review the evidence. Not your fears. The evidence. No matter how uncomfortable some of those things are, take them in and allow them to fuel you. Mindset shifts happen when facts become louder than insecurities. Mindset shift 4: Celebrate tiny wins like a child would Children celebrate everything. A drawing. A cartwheel. Finding a cool rock. Seeing a bug on a window. Adults wait until they achieve something massive before feeling proud. What if June became the month you celebrated differently? Finished the workout? Celebrate. Had the difficult conversation? Celebrate. Rested without guilt? Celebrate. Growth responds to acknowledgment. If the small wins matter, reward yourself. Post it. Tell anyone who listens. Mindset shift 5: Replace self criticism with self conversation Your inner child is always listening. Imagine speaking to a seven-year-old version of yourself the way you speak to yourself after making a mistake. Would they feel encouraged? Or defeated? This month, challenge yourself to respond differently. Instead of, "I messed everything up." Try, "I didn't get the outcome I wanted, but I'm learning." One creates shame. The other creates growth. No more negative self talk moving forward. Let that go. Mindset shift 6: Give yourself permission to outgrow old identities Sometimes the biggest mindset shift isn't learning something new. It's releasing something old. You are allowed to outgrow the identity of: The people pleaser. The fixer. The overachiever. The one who always has it together. The person everyone depends on. Your inner child may have created those roles for survival, but your adult self gets to choose whether they still fit. Here’s a challenge for you: A June challenge for your inner child Every day this month, write down one belief that no longer serves you. Then write a replacement belief beneath it. For example: "I have to earn love." Becomes, "I am worthy of love because I exist." "I always mess things up." Becomes, "I am learning, growing, and improving every day." By the end of June, you'll have a collection of mindset shifts that prove you are not the same person who entered the month. Final thoughts Dear Inner Child, Thank you for doing your best with what you knew. Thank you for protecting me when you thought you had to. Thank you for carrying dreams, hopes, and possibilities that adulthood sometimes forgot. This June, I’m not abandoning you. I’m taking your hand. I’m updating the story. I’m choosing new beliefs. Together, we're becoming someone neither of us has met yet. Someone healed. Someone whole. Someone free. The best version of me. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from KeKe Chanel KeKe Chanel, Author, Host, and Certified Life and Book Coach KeKe Chanel is an award-winning author, certified life coach, and host of Kickin’ It With KeKe: Life, Love, and All That Other SH&T Podcast. KeKe is the proud owner and CEO of P.U.S.H. Life Coaching & KeKe Chanel LLC. At PUSH, KeKe helps individuals unpack their mental packages to create a new mindset through positive personal growth. Her hobbies include reading, watching horror movies, and spending time with people who recharge her in a positive way. KeKe recently founded Kickin’ It With KeKe Media and launched her lifestyle magazine, Nineteen, in January of 2024. KeKe resides in Louisiana with her family.

Written by Laura Cole, Solution-Focused Coach, Speaker & Professor Laura Cole is a Solution-Focused practitioner working with organizations to build resilient and empowered cultures during times of change. She is the founder of Your Latitude, and the creator of innovative leadership tools including Watson’s Rule: 3 Essentials to Empower Action. We have all said it. People don’t like change. It is such a common phrase associated with change management that both leaders and team members use it as a blanket phrase to explain away the tension and frustration they are feeling in times of change. In over 20 years of corporate change management, I have heard this phrase uttered countless times and every time it is with the same defeated tone, a resignation that this tension is inevitable and hopeless. But that doesn’t need to be the case. This article will unpack what’s behind this cliché and show you how to use it to generate hope in times of change. People don’t like change? Let’s first sit with all the assumptions and unspoken rules that seem to come with the empty cliché, people don’t like change. This phrase has been dissected and discussed in so many ways it is almost treated like a riddle that holds the magic key to understanding change management. There was even a leadership trend for a while where we treated this phrase like a myth arguing the opposite in an attempt to convince everyone that people did like change. You remember the trend where examples would be given of change people did enjoy, like vacations or buying a car, with the hope this comparison would make the current change more palatable. Unfortunately, the trend of comparing a vacation to a corporate restructure doesn’t work. But what this focus and ongoing debate did do was uncover a very important relationship between change management and hope. The purpose of hope in change management When leaders and team members say people don’t like change, they are saying more than simply an empty cliché, they are signally that they have lost hope. For example, “The team isn’t onboard with the new process and there is nothing I can do about that because people don’t like change.” The defeated tone is unmistakable and signals a sense of hopelessness that this experience could be different for the leader or the team. In over 20 years of corporate change management, I have witnessed the turning point of hopelessness lead to the same outcomes of blame, suspicion and mistrust from leaders and team members. At a time when collaboration is more important than ever hopelessness creates a divide that seems inevitable and permanent. Finding ways to generate hope in change management should be more important than debating whether people like change, and the impact has the possibility to create collaboration, creativity and a sense of empowerment. Start here, at the beginning The problem isn’t whether people do or don’t like change, it is understandable that people may not like change, hopelessness shows up when this phrase is used as an ending, instead of a beginning. For example, “The team isn’t onboard with the new process because people don’t like change. The end.” Or, “I’m having a hard time with this new structure because people don’t like change. The end.” Honouring that people don’t like change can be hopeful if used as a beginning instead of an ending. For example, “People don’t like change, so resistance to this new process should be expected and isn’t a sign of failure or lack of team spirit, but rather something we should plan for. What would that look like?” Or, “People don’t like change, so it makes sense that I am feeling frustrated today and that doesn’t mean that my leader is untrustworthy or incompetent. What do I need to move forward?” So, what if the focus of change management was not on the likability of the change, but on the presence of hope? If the same empty cliché could be used to generate hope instead of dismissing the possibility, what difference would that make? Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Laura Cole Laura Cole, Solution-Focused Coach, Speaker & Professor Laura Cole is a Solution-Focused leadership and communication coach, and the creator of tools and frameworks designed to empower action, transform conflict and build collaboration in times of change. She is the creator of Watson’s Rule: 3 Essentials to Empower Action, an innovative leadership tool inspired by Equine Assisted Learning. Laura is a professor, facilitator, executive coach and international keynote speaker with a degree in Communication and MBA in Innovation.

Written by Litra Simms, Real Estate Broker, Author & Speaker Litra Simms is a seasoned real estate broker, author, and speaker with over 20 years of experience helping entrepreneurs, investors, and professionals harmonize success in business and life through strategy, balance, and growth. May is a powerful month. It’s the bridge between intention and execution. The moment where spring energy meets real results. By now, the excitement of a new year has settled. The goals you set in January are either in motion or quietly collecting dust. If you’re honest, you may be feeling a mix of pressure, fatigue, or even doubt. But here’s the truth is you’re not behind, you’re being realigned. May is not about starting over. It’s about moving forward with intention. From burnout to breakthrough Many high achievers enter May running on low energy, the push from Q1, the reset of April, the ongoing demands of life, business, and leadership, and what often follows is a silent question, “Can I keep going at this pace?” The answer is not like this. After more than 20 years in real estate, managing multiple businesses, and leading with purpose, I’ve learned that momentum without alignment leads to burnout. That realization is what inspired my book, Harmonizing Success, and my podcast of the same name, creating a space for leaders to learn how to build success without sacrificing themselves in the process. Because success isn’t just about acceleration. It’s about sustainability. The power of may the month of movement May represents motion. Nature is no longer preparing, it’s producing. Seeds planted earlier are beginning to grow. In your life, this is the moment to ask, "What’s working?" "What needs adjusting?" "What am I holding onto that’s slowing me down?" This is where many people either gain traction or lose momentum entirely. The difference? Intentional action. 4 ways to reignite your momentum this may 1. Reconnect with your “Why” When motivation fades, purpose fuels you forward. Why did you start your business? Why did you set those goals? Who are you becoming through this journey? When your “why” is clear, your “how” becomes easier. In Harmonizing Success, I emphasize that alignment begins with clarity. You don’t need more motivation, you need deeper meaning. 2. Shift from overworking to strategic execution More effort does not always equal more results. Many professionals stay busy, but not productive. May is the time to shift from: Doing everything → doing what matters Reacting → leading Hustling → executing Ask yourself, "What are the top 3 actions that will actually move my life or business forward this month?" Focus there. 3. Protect your energy like it’s an asset, because it is Your energy is your most valuable resource. Without it, your ideas stall. Your leadership weakens. Your results suffer. This month, commit to setting boundaries without guilt, prioritizing rest as part of your strategy, and eliminating energy drains in your schedule. In my podcast, I often say, “You can’t create a powerful life from a depleted place.” It’s true. 4. Celebrate progress, not just outcomes One of the biggest reasons people lose momentum is because they only celebrate the finish line. But success is built in the small wins. Showing up when it’s hard. Making the call. Taking the step. Choosing discipline over distraction. Momentum grows when progress is acknowledged. So pause this month and ask, "What have I done right?" That awareness fuels confidence, and confidence fuels consistency. Stop waiting for perfect conditions Too many people are waiting. Waiting for clarity. Waiting for motivation. Waiting for the “right time.” But May is your reminder that progress doesn’t require perfection, it requires movement. You don’t need to have everything figured out. You just need to take the next aligned step. Your may momentum plan If you’re ready to move forward with clarity and confidence, start here: Revisit your goals and refine, not abandon, them Identify one area where you’ve been stuck and take action Block out time for strategy, not just execution Recommit to your well being as part of your success plan Most importantly, dive into Harmonizing Success for a deeper framework on aligning ambition, wellness, and wealth. Tune into the Harmonizing Success Podcast for real, practical conversations on building a life that works The life you’re building requires you at your best At Simms and Associates, every transaction represents more than a deal, it represents a life, a family, a future. The same is true for you. Every decision you make this month is shaping your next season. So don’t move in chaos. Move with clarity. Don’t operate from pressure. Operate from purpose. Don’t just chase success. Harmonize it. Final thought May is not asking you to do more. It’s asking you to do what matters better. So take the step. Make the shift. Reclaim your energy. Step into the momentum that’s already waiting for you. This is your season to move. Move with intention. Move with power. Move with purpose. Most importantly, move in harmony. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or visit my website for more info! Read more from Litra Simms Litra Simms, Real Estate Broker, Author & Speaker Litra Simms, Broker and Owner of Simms and Associates, is a real estate expert, author, and speaker who helps clients and entrepreneurs harmonize success in business and life through real estate, leadership, and community impact.

Written by Carla Madeleine Kupe, Executive Leadership Advisor Carla Madeleine is an attorney, executive leader, and advisor who guides executives in integrating unexamined inner aspects so their leadership becomes examined rather than reactive. Her work bridges authority, authenticity, and inner transformation, particularly during moments of personal and organizational transition. Many leaders genuinely believe they are fostering accountability, high standards, and strong performance, yet some of the behaviors they rely on may be quietly communicating something very different. This article explores how distrust can become embedded in leadership practices and organizational systems, often limiting the very ownership, initiative, and innovation leaders hope to inspire. Let’s play a round of “Have I Ever?” Give yourself one point for each behavior described that you embodied within the last 10 days. Here we go: Have you ever rewritten work that was already good because it was not done the way you would have done it? Have you ever added another approval step "just to be safe"? Have you ever asked for input while already knowing which answer you wanted? Have you ever struggled to delegate something because doing it yourself felt faster, easier, or less risky? Have you ever said you wanted initiative from your team, then felt uneasy when people exercised independent judgment? Have you ever monitored people more closely during moments of uncertainty, pressure, or change? Have you ever interpreted a mistake as evidence that tighter control was needed? How did you do? No one I have supported has ever scored less than 1. Heck, based on the last 10 days, I scored a 4. The undercurrent beneath the behavior Many of these behavior patterns are often framed as diligence, high standards, accountability, or leadership rigor. Sure, sometimes they are. But often they are something else, distrust. Not necessarily malicious distrust. Not even conscious distrust. But distrust nonetheless. Modern leadership culture has become increasingly fluent in the language of "empowerment" while simultaneously designing systems rooted in control. Organizations ask people to innovate, take ownership, move quickly, and think creatively while surrounding them with layers of monitoring, approvals, over measurement, excessive meetings, and decision bottlenecks that quietly communicate the opposite. We often speak about trust as though it is a soft cultural value rather than a structural force. But distrust shapes behavior. It shapes systems. It shapes how people show up in rooms, how quickly decisions move, how much initiative employees take, and whether people feel safe enough to think, risk, challenge, create, or tell the truth. In many workplaces, distrust has become normalized. Sometimes it looks like leaders constantly checking work that does not actually require checking. Sometimes it looks like over engineered reporting structures designed to soothe leadership anxiety more than support meaningful outcomes. Other times it looks like endless approval chains that slow decisions to a crawl. Sometimes it looks like leaders unintentionally training teams to seek permission for everything because independent thinking feels risky. The result is not stronger organizations. The result is tension. When distrust quietly shapes leadership culture, organizations become slower, more brittle, and more dependent. Employees stop exercising judgment because they learn that judgment is not actually trusted. Innovation declines because experimentation becomes emotionally expensive. Initiative shrinks because people begin optimizing for safety rather than contribution. Over time, cultures shaped by chronic distrust train people to disengage from their own intelligence. This matters because many organizations are operating in conditions of immense uncertainty right now. Economic instability, rapid technological shifts, public scrutiny, political polarization, and ongoing workforce transformation have created increasing pressure for leaders. Given those dynamics, control can feel comforting. Monitoring can feel responsible. Tightening oversight can feel like protection. But leadership anxiety does not become wisdom simply because it is institutionalized. Control and accountability are not the same thing. Discernment and surveillance are not the same thing. Trust does not mean the absence of standards, feedback, responsibility, or consequences. Healthy leadership requires accountability. But accountability rooted in trust looks different from accountability rooted in fear. One expands capacity. The other narrows it. One cultivates stewardship. The other cultivates dependence. One strengthens discernment. The other trains compliance. The cost of distrust over time Over time, this erosion becomes expensive in ways many organizations fail to measure. People stop bringing forward early concerns because they no longer believe honesty is truly welcome. Teams become performative rather than collaborative, spending more energy managing perception than solving problems. Resentment quietly accumulates beneath professionalism. High capacity employees either leave, emotionally withdraw, or shrink themselves to fit the limits of the system. Leaders, often without realizing it, become increasingly isolated from the very truth, creativity, and relational feedback needed to navigate complexity well. The true question Perhaps the deeper question is not whether leaders trust their employees. Perhaps the deeper question is whether leaders trust themselves enough to lead without trying to control every variable. Because underneath many control oriented leadership behaviors is often an unspoken fear, fear of mistakes, fear of unpredictability, fear of reputational harm, fear of losing authority, fear of uncertainty, fear of what might emerge without constant oversight, or fear of becoming obsolete or replaceable. But people can feel when systems do not trust them. Even when the language says otherwise. Eventually, cultures built on distrust produce exactly what they fear most, disengagement, passivity, fragility, and diminished ownership. The future will not belong to organizations that perfect surveillance. It will belong to organizations capable of cultivating discernment, relational trust, adaptability, and shared stewardship strong enough to withstand uncertainty. So perhaps the invitation is not simply to ask whether your organization values trust. Perhaps the invitation is to ask: Where in your leadership are you calling control by the name of accountability? What behaviors might your systems actually be training in the people around you? Where has pressure or uncertainty narrowed your capacity to trust? Are your employees spending more energy managing leadership anxiety than exercising their own judgment? What would become possible if your organization cultivated discernment instead of dependence? What kind of leadership becomes available when trust is treated not as a slogan, but as a practice? What realizations come up for you? Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Carla Madeleine Kupe Carla Madeleine Kupe, Executive Leadership Advisor Carla Madeleine is an attorney, executive leader, and trusted advisor who works with leaders navigating power, responsibility, and transition. With a background in law, executive leadership, and organizational change, she helps individuals identify and integrate unexamined inner patterns that quietly shape decision-making, authority, and trust, particularly during periods of uncertainty, contraction, and reimagination. Carla writes at the intersection of leadership, inner work, and change, offering grounded insight for those shaping the future.