What I'm Sitting With

Happy anniversary, newsletter!

When I started writing this newsletter, my intent was to surface themes from my life and the lives of my clients as they pertain to life and leadership.

Now that I’m a year in, it’s been an interesting exercise to see what the meta themes are, and if we can make any inferences about what leadership is asking of us lately. It’s basically the newsletter equivalent of a clip show. I hope you enjoy, and hope that you’ll share what is resonating for you, too.

AI & human creativity: While AI is effective for efficiency and task management, leaders must lean into their humanness to avoid becoming sterile or robotic. Leadership requires knowing when to use AI and when to prioritize human presence for strategic insight.

Navigating Complexity through Systems Thinking: Leadership is increasingly viewed as a role within a system rather than a fixed identity. Burnout often occurs when leaders stay locked into a single function, so effective leaders must practice shifting functions—moving from directive to collaborative, or from “in the weeds” to strategic—based on the system’s current needs.

Community as the antidote to scarcity: Leadership is rarely accomplished in isolation. Building community and belonging is a leadership imperative to counter the scarcity thinking and the isolation inherent in high-level roles; vulnerability within these communities is seen as a source of strength.

Embodiment and Presence as Leadership Tools: Leadership is an embodied practice. Rather than relying solely on cognitive insight or strategy, leaders are encouraged to cultivate somatic awareness and the ability to stay grounded, regulated, and present. This “instrument” of the self is what allows leaders to handle the complexity and reactivity of their environments to stay sturdy in turbulent moments.

Reframing Power from Authority to Authorship: There is a strong movement away from traditional, title-based “power over” dynamics toward “power as authorship.” This involves moving beyond external measures of success to create a sense of agency and purpose. It suggests that leaders must intentionally interrupt the pattern of their habits to ensure they are leading from choice rather than auto-pilot.

Which brings me to my reflection this week, returning once again to the role scarcity can play in how we perceive the world around us.

Many of you know that I live in Howard County, Maryland, right down the street from Columbia, Maryland. I didn’t realize until very recently that I had actually studied Columbia, many many years before moving here, as part of my freshman year architecture studies. That architecture class, taught by the Bobs at Wash U, was my first introduction into community design. We peeked into socioeconomic disparities, systemic racism in city landscape, urban deserts, and gentrification.

It was also one of my first introductions into systems thinking, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, and the complexity of all of these interconnected aspects of city and community design. The capstone for the class was a 48-hour (including overnights) large group project to design and build a model of the perfect city-as-community. Our group was the first to break into two groups based on what we thought were differing beliefs.

My memory is a little fuzzy on what those differing beliefs were (and the differences ended up not being as large as we initially thought), but we ended up with a city very much like Columbia: founded on the principles that all types of people deserved belonging in a city and access to grocery stores, transportation, and high-quality education, regardless of the type of housing they were in (apartment, townhome, single family home) and whether they used housing vouchers to pay for it.

I sat down with a colleague last week and some of these things came up. Columbia isn’t very old—it was founded in 1967—and we live in a very different world than the one that created it. What struck me about our conversation was that the interconnectedness of the systems remains, but as the area has grown and developed, the reality of the world today has tested those foundational beliefs. Scarcity—in both time and resources—has caused people to hunker down. Instead of thinking about the systems, they think about their most local piece of the system. It creates a focus on what is lacking instead of what is possible.

Running parallel to this conversation was another idea that’s been percolating through my work lately: our innate human need to have significance. We’ve always needed other people, and the systems we build together, to tell us we matter—that’s not new. But when those systems are already operating from scarcity, people lose the very mechanisms they need to make meaning and determine significance. The thing people do in response—narrowing their focus down to what’s immediately theirs—is exactly the thing that deprives them of the larger meaning they’re looking for.

This connects to leadership because of our roles in helping people construct meaning. But I think it connects even more because of our role in helping others know that they matter.

A year ago I started this newsletter to surface what leadership is really asking of us. Turns out, a lot of it comes down to this: helping people believe they matter. It’s a throughline I didn’t know I was writing toward.

Riverdrop Coaching News + Offerings

One lesson this past year has reinforced for me is that none of us ever "arrive" as leaders. We keep learning so we can see ourselves—and others—more clearly. This summer, I'm investing deeply in my own development so I can continue showing up well for the leaders I serve.

I'm expanding my work to become a stronger mentor coach and coaching evaluator, studying practical approaches to emotional regulation, and continuing to develop my Early Warning System for individual leaders. Each of those is, in its own way, about helping people reconnect with what matters (and how they matter!) before they lose themselves in the work.

If any of those conversations intersect with where you are right now, I'd love to hear from you. Just hit reply.

Coaching Compass

(You can hit reply if you want to unpack it—I read every message—or you can set up a time to connect with me here.)

P.S. A lot of what I explore in these newsletters comes back to the leadership patterns that emerge under pressure. The way you lead in those moments isn’t random. If you’re curious which pattern you tend to default to, you can take the diagnostic here.