What Silence Taught Me About Leadership

I didn’t stop working.

I didn’t stop coaching.
I didn’t turn clients away.

I just stopped writing.
And I stopped talking publicly.

It was only supposed to be for a few months.

Coming off the surprising re-election of our current president, something in me went quiet. Not because I lacked opinions (I had them), but because I felt the ground shift beneath the work I’ve spent years teaching.

I found myself sitting with a question I couldn’t rush past:

What does humanized leadership mean in a moment when dominance, certainty, and disregard for impact are not only tolerated but rewarded?

This isn’t political for me.
It’s behavioral.
And it’s deeply developmental.

What unsettled me most wasn’t the man himself, but how familiar the pattern felt. I’ve seen versions of this leadership style play out in organizations, families, and teams for decades. And, if I’m honest, I’ve caught glimpses of it in myself under pressure. Leadership without self-regulation has a way of turning on the lights. It invites our shadows to the table. The cockroaches don’t emerge; they scatter. What we’ve preferred not to see suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.

This moment felt like a collective mirror. A revealing of what we tolerate, what we excuse, and what we’re willing to overlook when certainty feels safer than curiosity. Fear masquerading as strength. Bravado replacing accountability. Power untempered by reflection.

If you supported him, I’m not interested in changing your mind. But I am interested in what this moment might be asking us to notice about ourselves as leaders.

I realized I couldn’t keep writing from my old voice, the one that taught tools and tips without naming the deeper reckoning underneath them. Humanized leadership, at least as I understand it, if it’s going to mean anything in times like these, has to include our willingness to look at our own shadows and clean up what we may have become blind to.

Silence, for a time, felt like the most honest teacher I had.

What I didn’t know then was that 2025 would become a year of deep client work and even deeper inner quiet. A year of completions, alongside unfinished conversations, outdated habits, and beliefs that no longer fit the woman or the leader I am becoming.

That year also included a solo road trip across the country, from Chicago up the California coast and back again. I was alone, but never lonely. Friends appeared at just the right moments. I stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time. I hiked Sedona. I fell unexpectedly in love with Scottsdale, heat and all. I spent meaningful time with my youngest son, my favorite dog, and people I hadn’t seen in a few years.

There were other journeys too. Time with siblings. A trip to honor a life lost. And in November, an impromptu trip to Dublin with my son to visit one of his mentors, while there was still time.

That phrase stayed with me.
It still does.

Time, I’m learning, is far less solid than we think. More on that another day.

What may surprise you is that I wasn’t quiet in my business. We served 59 individual coaching clients and six organizational training clients that year, all alongside the travel. One of the privileges of a portable practice.

And I wasn’t quiet with my clients either.

The work was deep. Honest. Sometimes tender. Often confronting. As we navigated a choppy and uncertain year together, I kept having the same experience: the work unfolding in them mirrored what was unwinding in me.

I’ve come to call this the wisdom of the client.

If you’ve ever been truly coached, you know what I mean. There is something profoundly efficient, and surprisingly spiritual, about learning to see yourself through that lens.

I’ll be writing much more about that this year.

For now, this is simply a re-entry.
A breath.
A hello.

I’m here again, quieter, clearer, and more willing to let the work speak through me rather than from me.