What I'm Sitting With

I am sitting, alone, in a completely empty and quiet house on a weekday, for the first time in over a month. Maybe all summer.

The kids are back in school. There are no construction workers at my house. The only sounds—beyond the clicking of my fingers on the keyboard— are from the clock in the hall, the dehumidifier in the basement, and the ebb and flow of cicada song outside my back door. It's particularly loud, now that I attune to it.

It is at once peaceful and unsettling. Like trying to inhale and exhale at the same time.

As my social media feeds fill with back to school photos between August and September, there's this sense of relief I get from parent friends and clients alike. Like everyone is simultaneously stretched thin, pulling from energy reserves, and on hold, waiting for routine to restart.

Were summers always this way? Or is this something new, driven by the pace of life and expectation lately. Like we set out to do less work in the summer because we have less synchronous time between vacations, business planning cycles, and days bookended by later camp drop-offs and earlier camp pick-ups…but then something or someone (ahem, looking in the mirror here) doesn't get the memo. You know, the one that said it's okay to be less busy or for the deliverables to take longer.

So then we're just caught in tension, wondering how we got here.

I'm sharing this with you because I don't think it's just a parent thing, or a leader thing, or a me thing. And I don't know that there's a single tidy answer. What I do know is that when the pressure is on, the least intuitive thing is to pour more of ourselves into someone else —not another deliverable— but that's the thing that makes it feel figureoutable. Maybe because we're no longer alone in it.

Looking back on the summer, and planning ahead for next summer, I find myself asking what structure would allow me to shift priorities to where attention is needed most, without feeling like I'm just throwing the juggling balls higher in the air.

I don't have that structure figured out yet. But I have a hunch it starts with the same shift as above: letting someone else hold part of the question with you, instead of carrying it alone.

Riverdrop Coaching News + Offerings

That's the hunch I want to test out loud on Thursday, with other people instead of just in my own head.

I'm leading a PopUpThinkTank on significance scarcity — the gnawing uncertainty about whether our work still matters, whether we're still adding value, and where we fit once the pace shifts. If you're also sitting in that unsettled quiet somewhere, wondering what to do with it, come hold the question with the rest of us.

📅 Thursday, August 27 | 12:00–1:30pm ET
📍 Zoom (cameras on, conversational — not performative)
🔗 Register here​

Can't make it, but know someone else who likes to get thinky with people? Feel free to forward this newsletter and invitation to them!

Coaching Compass

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.