✝️ Wishing those who celebrate it - a very Happy Easter✝️
Disclosure: February's newsletter exists. It is sitting in a folder, complete. I chose not to send it.
I was in the States during a snowstorm when the world shifted again. Immigration. Tariffs. The war. The unnecessary sacrifice of precious human lives felt both distant and devastating. I wrote five versions of that newsletter and not one of them had my heart in it. So I did what I always do when the stakes are real. I went quiet. I went inside. I waited until I had something worth saying. Regular scheduling will resume at the end of the month.
Before all of that, I was living my best life. In New York to close out Nasdaq’s Black History Month, getting a little stuck and then escaping to Jamaica for a writing retreat. I was in my element, feeling the grounding of being “home”. Then overnight, the wall kicked in. And I was navigating like the rest of you. From privilege. From uncertainty. From a place of genuinely not knowing what to say.
That is precisely where this edition begins.
Three things have been shaping my thinking this past month.
Power and who holds it.
What self-leadership actually looks like when the ground is moving.
And the structural, non-negotiable necessity of protecting your energy in times like these.
🌍 Lesson One: Power Is Not Neutral. Neither Is Silence.
On standing in your sphere of influence when the world makes it tempting to look away.
Power has been consuming me. Not in the abstract, but in the specific, daily, granular sense of: who holds it, how it moves, what it costs when wielded without accountability, and what it demands of those of us watching from the outside.
Over the past two months, I have spoken with leaders across six continents. The pattern I keep seeing is this. The leaders navigating this moment with any real integrity are not the ones with the best talking points.
They are the ones who came back to three things.
Who they are.
What they actually stand for.
Whether they are genuinely living it, or simply performing it at a safe distance.
Sound familiar? It should. 2020 asked us the same question. The difference now is that we have live footage. The human cost of global decisions streams directly into our pockets, in real time. Bystandership is no longer passive. It is a choice. And we are all making it, consciously or not.
Power is not just about who has it. It is about whether we understand how it moves, and whether we choose to influence it or simply observe it.
Here is what the research tells us. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries and found that seven in ten people are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values, background, or approach to life differs from their own. Globally, we are retreating. Narrowing our circles. Choosing familiarity over complexity.
And yet, in this same climate, employers have emerged as the most trusted institution globally. 78% of employees trust their employer to do what is right, outpacing government, media, and NGOs by a significant margin. For the first time, business is the only institution rated as both ethical and competent.
Organisations and the leaders within them have the ability to influence at a scale most politicians cannot reach right now. Edelman calls it trust brokering: the active work of facilitating connection across difference, surfacing common ground, and creating the conditions for people to engage with what they would otherwise avoid. This is not a nice-to-have leadership skill. In this climate, it is the skill.
Which brings me back to reverse mentoring. The entire premise is that truth needs a structured, safe channel into the room. The people with the most lived experience of the issues being discussed are often the furthest from the decisions being made about them. That is not just an inclusion problem. Right now, it is a governance problem. A risk problem. A survival problem.
More of us need to be around the decision-making table. Not as a diversity aspiration. As a structural necessity.
✨ Reflection Prompt
Where in your professional life are you observing rather than influencing?
What would it look like to move, even one deliberate step, from the sideline into the room where the decision is actually being made?
🔥 Lesson Two: Self-Leadership in Uncertainty Is Not a Strategy. It Is a Practice.
On what it actually takes to lead yourself when you do not have the answers.
The question I have been asked most often these past months is some version of: how do you stay grounded when everything is shifting?
My honest answer is that I do not always. But I have a practice for returning.
The first thing I do is acknowledge when I am not equipped. Not as a performance of humility. As a genuine assessment. Some conversations in this current climate can escalate fast because people are, rightfully, raw. Walking in with an answer already formed, with ego, with false certainty, is how leaders cause damage they spend months trying to repair. I have watched it happen this quarter. Clumsily handled conversations that turned psychologically safe spaces unsafe almost overnight. Not through bad intention. Through the prioritisation of being seen to say something over actually listening first.
Daring leadership does not mean saying the right thing. It means saying something real, with the willingness to be corrected
The second thing I do is step back and ask whether the plan I was executing is still the right one. The information you have now is different from the information you had when you made the original decision. Changing course when the evidence shifts is not weakness. It is intelligence responding to reality. And yet, particularly with women, I see a rigidity around this. A sense that changing your mind is a character flaw rather than a sign of good judgment. Men, broadly speaking, tend to pivot and move on. We could learn from that. Not the overconfidence. The self-permission.
The third thing, and this is the one that has taken me longest to master, is distinguishing between frustration and failure. Frustration is data. It tells you that your current reality and your future potential are not yet aligned. That gap is uncomfortable. It is also precisely where the growth happens. Sitting with it, without catastrophising, without abandoning ship, is one of the harder disciplines of building something genuinely new.
I found myself doing all three this quarter. Catching myself operating from fatigue. Over-giving. Wanting to prove my worth rather than own it. And course-correcting. Quietly, daily. Not for the outside world. For me.
✨ Reflection Prompt
What decision are you currently circling that requires deeper context rather than faster action?
And where might the frustration you are feeling right now be data rather than a verdict on your progress?
🌱 Lesson Three: Energy Is a Strategy. Treat It Like One.
On the structural decisions that protect your capacity to show up fully, for the work and the people that matter most.
Over the past four or five months I made a deliberate commitment. When I am in the country, my evenings and weekends are held for the people who matter most. Not as a wellness gesture. Not as self-care branding. As a strategic decision about where my best self shows up, and who gets access to it.
I had been leaking energy for years in the way that is very easy to justify when you are building something. Every networking event felt necessary. Every evening engagement felt like an investment. And perhaps some of it was. But I had stopped asking the more important question: at what cost?
I spend significant time now in nature. By the sea. In the countryside. It is not indulgence. It is maintenance. The quality of my client work is directly connected to the quality of my recovery. These are not competing priorities. They are the same priority.
Then last week, the universe enforced its own rest stop. I dropped a weight on my foot. Spent half of Sunday in A&E. Nothing broken. Required to elevate and rest for four days while three workshops were on the schedule. Thank God for remote delivery. And thank God, also, for being made to stop. (Just. 😉)
No dancing this Easter weekend, which I am still quietly devastated about. But the lesson was received. Surrendering to enforced rest is its own kind of practice. Leaders who treat energy as infinite will eventually find out, usually at the worst possible moment, that it is not.
If you have been in the room with me this quarter and we spent real, quality time together, know that you are very deliberately chosen and deeply valued.
✨ Reflection Prompt
Where is your energy leaking right now, and is the return genuinely worth the cost?
What is one structural commitment, not a habit, an actual commitment, that would protect the version of you that does your best work?
📌 What I Have Been Up To
In the past month alone, I reached six of seven continents. That sentence still stops me when I say it out loud.
✶ I led interactive workshops that touched over 300 people, which was both humbling and deeply energising.
✶ I delivered in-person sessions for senior women from across the Caribbean, returned to the Airline community to run a session with senior women across the SkyTeam Alliance, and ran a session here in the UK with Anthropy last week. The breadth of sectors, cultures, and conversations in a single month has genuinely expanded my thinking in ways I am still processing.
✶ I am currently writing a new programme going deeper on the intersection of culture and high performance. The market has been consistent and clear about what it needs. I am listening.
✶ I had my second article featured in Psychologies Magazine, focused on how to welcome and harness the Fire Horse Energy.
✶✶✶ I was honoured by Nasdaq for the partnership we have had, despite not being able to deliver it in person due to the snowstorm. I had this wonderful gift, which is most definitely a career highlight - Just Wow!
Thank you, Globe Team, for the recognition - I look forward to meeting you all in person!
📓 Your April Practice
Reflection without action is just a thought with good intentions. Here is your invitation to do something with this month's lessons.
1.Locate your sphere of influence and act inside it
Not everywhere. Not in the abstract. Identify one specific decision, conversation, or policy discussion where you have more influence than you are currently using. Show up with your actual perspective. Not the safe version of it.
2.Have the conversation you have been avoiding
Identify one exchange you have been deferring because you are afraid of getting it wrong. Have it this month. Imperfectly. Humanly. With the willingness to be corrected.
3.Audit your energy, not your diary
Look at the past thirty days. Where did your best self show up? Where were you running on empty and hoping no one noticed? Name one thing you are going to stop giving energy to. Name one thing you are going to protect more fiercely.
4.Reframe your frustration
Choose one area of your professional life where frustration is present. Write down what it is telling you about the gap between where you are and where you are headed. Then identify one action, however small, that closes that gap.
🔗 What I Am Watching, Reading and Listening To
🎧 Brené Brown and Adam Grant's new podcast, The Curiosity Shop
Essential. On the hard work of building values-led leadership and their banter is really funny. Do not wait.
📖 Moral Ambition - How to Find your Purpose, recommended at Anthropy and I am already gettting into it. Helping me with language reframe on the “morality” that is required for us to all collecctively tap into right now.
What Does the Future of Work Look Like? The wonderful Alexandra Lunn pulled together some of the sharpest minds in workplace trends this year, and I am proud to be among them. The 2026 Workplace Trend Report is essential reading. Fair warning to my international readers: it is UK-focused, but the themes travel.
Required reading. Nearly 34,000 people, 28 countries. The data behind the mandate for leaders to act as trust brokers.
🎙️ Emma Grede - On the use of AI - some real simple gems in here
Fascinating and necessary. If you are not actively learning about AI's implications for your sector, start here.
💭 Final Reflections
The world is burning and blooming at the same time. Democracy and all that upholds it is burning, but at the same time, some beautiful conversations, community, and dare I say it- collective resistance- is building. That is not a contradiction to resolve. It is a tension to hold.
The leaders this moment was made for are not the ones with the most polished response. They are the ones willing to stay present in the discomfort. To speak truthfully even when the words feel insufficient. To protect their energy with the same conviction they bring to their ambition. And to use whatever seat they already hold, however big or small, to move something.
If any of this has landed close to home, and you are ready to think about what Executive Coaching could do for your organisation right now, I would love to hear from you. The conversations I am having with leaders at the moment are some of the most urgent and important of my career. There is room for one or two more. You can reach me directly at [email protected].
Bystandership is no longer neutral. That is your seat. Take it.
That, my friends, is how we elevate.
With Peace, Love and Flow
I will be honest with you. I crossed a line this month.
A short-term assignment. One of the world's most exciting AI companies, working at the intersection of culture and high performance from the inside. The kind of work that reminds you why you do this. Spaces like this are rare.
If you are wondering whether a version of it exists for you, let's talk.
