Jim rolled over - the clock read 7:38 - in big red letters, last night felt like 3.

He looked in the far corner of the room, his brother rolled tight in a ball - his protector - in front of the door guarding the younger siblings from their father’s drunken tirade.

As he stumbled out of bed he realized it was his roommate, who had fallen asleep on the fall, drunk, after a night of partying.

Jim grew up fighting. Rest wasn’t in his protocol; he slept fists balled up ready to wake up swinging, which he often did.

Thanks to the covering of his older brother he got out of that mansion shaped trailer park he spent his childhood.

His father who was well-known, respected even - known for having the model family - showed his gratitude for his family in the pounding of fists to their chest, stomach, and back in lieu of their face.

Smile.

Aching from a night of college drinking - Jim awoke, aching reminiscent of a night following that of fatherly love.

He limped over to the door and told his roommate to get in the bed - reminded of the human moat that he and his brother would form to protect their younger siblings from the overpriced whisky-scented nights, that codified the occurrence.

It was rare enough to be brushed off as just a bad night. But often enough that the siblings developed strategies of protection, primarily that of their fathers, the next day.

Smile.

The siblings, four of them, poured into a room, and Jim and his older brother took turns between staying watch and sleeping.

A senior at Harvard, Jim had become the emotional brute he wished he could have met the seething wounds of his father on those ‘bad nights’. Now, a black rock was left long after fractured ribs and skin of purple and blue fused and faded.

He wore his self-hatred like a protective armor with teeth, blades, and claws projecting outward a radius of three feet from his 5’11 medium frame.

Anybody who came in proximity could get bitten, sliced, and more likely hooked and dragged along in his toxic mirage of good times.

Life taught him to fight, Harvard taught him to mold that fight into a strategy - kill or be killed - a normalized red ocean. The firm taught him he could fly.

None of it taught him that no amount of money, women, or prestige would fill the hole left by a father who showed his love in a platitude of well-placed fists blurred by the venom of his own self-hate with a hint of Macallan 18.

As Jim sat across from Taryn, her presence quietly intimidated him. He didn’t know it consciously just that he felt the need to dominate in her presence - more accurately, to dominate her.

Taryn, captivated by the spell of a society that craved to own her, felt the need to appease.

Both, though in vastly different ways, possessed by the same instinct - to survive.

—-

Alive in a world fueled by pain. As it plays out on the world stage - power, money, wealth - underneath a society run by wounded children.

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It was a quarter past eight, and after a long day Taryn had folded onto the couch with a glass of wine — the custom cream sofa, deep seats, wide arms — and pulled the brief she’d worked on all day back into her lap.

She began to reread what by now she nearly knew by heart, and her whole body tensed before she noticed it happening.

The brief was done. It had only confirmed what she’d been circling all day: the scope had grown, and she was going to have to go back to the client about the budget.

She opened her laptop. “Jim, Clarisse — can we do dinner tomorrow evening? 7 at The Grill, I’ll have my assistant make the arrangements.”

She pushed the laptop aside, irritated that she had to reopen a conversation about something she’d seen months ago and said nothing about.

Now she had to ask for another five hundred thousand dollars — because six months ago she said yes when she meant no.

Six months earlier. Winter, Manhattan, the deal closing.

They were settling the final details when something flagged her, something she knew would surface later. But Jim worked the deal in front of him and never the cost downstream; he was three moves ahead on the board, and he'd have called that being good at his job, not rushing. Closing fast wasn't a tactic to him — it was simply how you won. An open question, any open question, was a kind of exposure he couldn't sit in.

“There’s one thing that came up in my research,” Taryn said.

“Another thing? I thought you wrapped up your research weeks ago. We need to move on this.” Jim didn’t look up. “What could it possibly be now?”

“It’s fine, nothing,” coughed Taryn. She swallowed the resistance with the last sip of wine.

And now, the dead of summer, it was something after all. Like that winter, she swallowed the frustration.

Tonight it went down with a fresh-delivered cookie and a bottle of Cab.

When I sit with that swallowed “it’s fine, nothing,” I recognize the exact shape of it — maybe you do too.

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I hate myself — she heard the mutter at the top of her mind. Where did it come from? Every once in a while she had these intrusive thoughts, nowhere close to what she consciously felt or thought.

What was it?

She wondered if she was picking up the thoughts of others, if it was some form of self-hate deep in her psyche, or something else — something far darker than she wanted to imagine.

She pressed pause and set her phone aside and jumped back into the brief she was writing.

Life had been weird lately, serendipitous in a lot of ways — she was learning to see the good in it, and to let it in.

Then there were these dark moments that made her question it all.

The phone rang. “Taryn,” a familiar voice said as she answered.

“Taryn,” the voice repeated.

“Yes,” she answered, with curiosity and play. It was her baby brother. He was always rushing, never giving people time to respond.

“I thought you’d be here by now. I told you, Mommy needed us.”

He was well into his thirties and still called their mother Mommy. Taryn rarely called her at all.

“I’m not coming,” she said.

“You’re not coming? But Mommy said she wanted us all here.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? So you’re not— she’s going to be pissed.”

Taryn lowered the phone to her chest and took a deep breath.

I hate myself became I hate you became I hate her — an old loop she no longer wanted to play.

She still wasn’t sure of the source, but she knew it hadn’t begun with her. Yet she was convicted it would end here.

She thought of the podcast she recently pressed play on — it was about the ivory-tower-to-corporate-America pipeline and how it trained a lineage of women to give away their power in exchange for reward.

What that reward was, exactly, the piece never quite settled — the money, the perceived status, the sense of belonging that came with being in? Or maybe of being different, somehow: one of the ones who made it.

It drew on interviews with countless women from all over the country — ages twenty-five to sixty-five, every kind of socioeconomic background — all of them, however, college-educated, each from what would be deemed a top-ten school in her field.

One would assume the education thread meant similar circumstances. It didn’t. They all carried the same pipeline somewhere in their story, but their paths through it were wide and varied.

One woman — a corporate consultant, a top-three degree in her field — had been asked to think about the institutions: the big firm, the Ivy League, the consulting rooms, the boardrooms.

What had those power structures trained her to do with her intelligence, her ambition, her creative instincts?

Her words rang in Taryn’s head:

“They trained me to give away my intelligence and ambition for a relatively low price, and to use my creative instincts to hold them up and feed them. They rewarded me for overriding my own desires. They rewarded my rushing, my overgiving. They punished me for taking my time, for breathing, for enjoying myself — for letting things emerge on their own, for speaking my truth, for using my creativity and energy and focus on me.”

“It was never outright, she continued. “It was covert, subtle — in the small daily actions, the conversations, the energetic impulses. I learned to hide what I wanted — my deepest desires — even from myself.”

Even from myself. The words reverberated in Taryn’s mind.

What was she hiding?

She lifted the phone back to her ear and sent her love instead of folding.

“Alright,” said her brother, and they hung up.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that the power structures had been internalized — built into nervous systems, into culture, into the conditioning handed to little girls (and maybe boys too), from a very young age.

When I consider the power structures we move through and carry, I am reminded of cauliflower and its fractal nature.

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Lately, I’ll admit I’ve been giving myself some scrolling time on social media under the purview of an app that closes it after 15 minutes, and I have to choose whether or not to reopen.

After a recent scroll session, I put down my phone, processing everything I’d just seen.

My feed is curated in a way where it shows everything from influencers in the reality tv/celebrity sphere, the academics sharing insights on their research (neuroscience, sociology, quantum physics, you name it), cultural critiques (the fashion angle is my favorite), political influencers (conservative, libertarian, and liberal), the AI people (doomsday to the best thing on earth) and of course, the trending 50 Cent beef of the moment.

I love it, having varying points of view in my feed allows me to see what people are thinking across the gamut and feeds my critical mind.

As I engage, the only thing more baffling than the drastically different realities people live in is how quickly the comments section can escalate when the audience doesn’t see eye to eye with the content creator or each other.

I’m not immune to this - I came across an influencer last week who was targeting a native Brooklynite on a post.

She had his comment featured on her screen, picture and all – tearing him down because he commented that he didn’t want to pay for her event, as she declared that there was no such thing as a real New Yorker and that she was bringing the culture to Brooklyn.

I felt the anger rise within me, and the words of a well-formulated rage-filled retaliation began to form - thumb warriors were geared up and ready to go!

I paused and decided it would be more effective in terms of my time, energy, and potential impact to report it for what it was - hate speech.

The Ground Is Moving

Nonetheless, I was momentarily pulled into the vortex of hate and anger of her post. Fear unchecked and unprocessed is a dangerous emotion.

The one thread I see that runs through many of the various paradigms people are living in is fear, uncertainty, and mistrust over compassion, curiosity, and willingness.

In the world we live in today, there is so much change in various arenas all at once - political, technological, financial, cultural - the ground feels like it’s constantly moving underneath the pitter patter of feet too slow to keep up.

As we work to navigate these times, it is hard to know what and whom to trust.

The Manufactured Recession

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer lays out a three-layered model of how trust erodes: layer one polarization (e.g., red vs blue), layer two grievance (resentment towards a system rigged against you), and layer three insularity (reluctance to trust anyone different from you).

You can probably guess where, as a society, we are today.

The report calls the current moment “Trust Amid Insularity”.

In layman’s terms, many are calling it a ‘trust recession’. Unpacking the layers, it points to cues of how this all may have been quite deliberately manufactured.

Nonetheless, it is a lived experience of our times and feels very real.

In the spirit of alchemy – for those of us committed to envisioning a better future despite the current news feed – what if this moment of manufactured distrust was pointing to something greater?

The Messy Middle

What if we haven’t completely lost trust, but we’re finally withdrawing it from places it never belonged? And what we see is the messy middle - where we as a society have not yet found where to anchor ourselves.

In the midst of change, there are moments when the heat often required for transformation arises and makes things very uncomfortable. In these moments – often filled with fear and uncertainty of the known – it’s tempting to want to stop or turn around.

This is the exact place where alchemy occurs - if you keep going. Oddly enough, it requires an immense amount of trust.

But where does that come from?

The Muscle We Were Trained to Forget

For too long, many have accepted the status quo, the narratives we were fed, and lived by the scripts and positions given to us.

In a society that pushes hustle over restoration, consumerism over presence, and trends over discernment, it can be easy to get lost in the shuffle.

Relying on the rules, narratives, and scripts has often felt like the only way to stay afloat.

Taking the time to question has not only been deeply conditioned out of the typical, but it also has felt like a luxury when life is well life-ing. Hence the news cycle, designed to keep us in a frenzy while a deeper knowing grasps for our attention.

The muscle for inner authority got quieter. The channel for inner knowing narrowed.

And eventually, it became hard to remember it was ever there.

Now, we are at a point where everything we’ve been taught to trust in is being turned upside down and inside out. Core paradigms are being shaken; it’s hard to know what to believe or what frame of reference to anchor in.

Now the seeming luxury of inner guidance is more necessary than ever.

What if something deeper is seeking to emerge?

What the Cracks Are Actually Showing

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Introduction

On the first day of the Lunar New Year 2026, the year of the fire horse, I found myself tucked away in a corner of my favorite cafe, a stone’s throw away from Union Square, sipping my new drink of choice: matcha latte with almond milk.

During a brainstorming session, I was reminded of a report I had become accustomed to following, but admittedly hadn’t been all too familiar with as of late. I revisited.

As I read the report highlighting burnout rates, a struggling pipeline, and decreasing ambition – the summative text, then the data, back to the summary – there was a visceral agitation, an unmet craving for a statement of the obvious.

This wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling.

I’ve sat in rooms with executives, high-paid consultants, and subject matter experts, watching them rack their brains about issues – simultaneously doubting what was obvious to me and wondering why no one else could see it.

The Engineers that Wouldn’t

It flashed me back, almost two decades earlier – I sat in a steering committee meeting and looked around at stumped partners, senior managers on the consulting side, and senior executives sponsoring the project on the client side.

A recurring issue that arose weekly like the tide with the moon, yet again. There was a contingency of rebels holding up a company-wide transformation of a multi-billion dollar company. A small, yet profoundly pivotal to the business, group - Engineering.

They refused to accept the change fervently - they hadn’t signed off on documents, refused to attend change adoption or early training meetings, and essentially turned a blind eye to the transformation.

Besides being bewildered by the incessant confusion of this group of senior leaders - it was humorous to me - a very expected disgruntled engineer’s response.

The Junior Consultant That Could

A few months into these meetings, they asked me (a junior consultant at the time) to go to a remote site where the engineers were stationed and spend the week there.

My directive: get them to sign off on the business process documents.

Huh? Senior Managers and Partners had their hands on this as it was pivotal and holding up the project, and they asked me.

I had some success onsite getting resistant subject matter experts to sign off on documents, and they wanted to see if I could have the same success there.

Another consultant, far more senior than I, had already been out there for a couple of weeks, and it wasn’t going well.

I didn’t want to go.

I arrived at the very much off-the-beaten-path site, which, without giving too many details, was more like an industrial plant than a corporate office.

The ‘building’ was a trailer built on the grounds.

I walked into a room of exclusively middle-aged white males and my consultant counterpart, another woman.

I was at least happy that she was there, not to be the only woman in what felt like a hostile, abandoned yard to me.

I walked in with a friendly smile, “Hello.”

Blank stares.

I experienced the initial (disapproving) judgment of my arrival. I decided to play it cool and just sit at my desk and work, while observing.

“Is there somewhere I can sit?”, I questioned.

One of the engineers, whom I assumed was the leader, motioned toward an empty desk without looking at me.

I needed an in to understand the dynamics of the group, who they listen to, and what the actual resistance was.

My counterpart, a management-level consultant, had a slew of reasons and stories of why it would be hard to be there, all of which echoed the weekly meetings I was accustomed to attending.

I put her and the team back at corporate in one frame of mind. My goal that week was to figure out that of the engineers while simultaneously keeping at bay the constant anxiety of needing to perform and feeling very out of place in my current work conditions.

The Self-Transforming Mind: The Leadership Skill Hiding in Plain Sight

At the time, I knew one of my gifts as a young consultant was getting people on board, converting a historically resistant groups to project champions.

I didn’t exactly know how I was doing it at the time - I figured it was because of my cross-functional approach being an EECS in a Human Capital role.

While that may have had something to do with it, I now realize something way deeper and intrinsic to my way of being was at play - a core survival skill.

A well-known Harvard professor, Robert Kegan, has done decades of research on behavioral change and has coined a concept: the self-transforming mind. An ability and capacity to observe and see your mental processes or lens, and adapt and choose one that would be most effective and aligned with your goal.

Kegan and his team spent decades studying this capacity and consider it a rare skill and the most advanced stage of adult development.

It was a way of life for me, a lens through which I navigated the world in the vastly different environments I found myself in.

By the end of the week, the documents were updated with necessary changes, signed, and the room of the previously obstinate engineering group was buzzing with excitement about the changes to come.

They had not only been heard, but with their suggestions integrated into the design, they realized their jobs would become easier and previous gripes about the process would become a non-issue.

I was successful in my mission, and it only took a week!

I was exhausted from holding three to four frames of reference in my mind and shifting between all of them to communicate effectively, manage competing agendas, and work to stay physically and psychologically safe in a place that did not feel so.

My success was met with a conspicuously underwhelming level of gratitude for the money, time, and value I now know I saved and created. I am sure someone far more senior than I received the accolade.

Nonetheless, I was happy. It was the weekend, and I could go back to my main hotel.

Through my twenty-something lens - I knew if it hadn’t been completed, I risked having to return to this remote location and stay in a local hotel far too outside of the city for the taste of my social life at the time.

Double Consciousness and the Inherited Operating System

When I first learned of Kegan’s concept of the ‘self-transforming mind’, I immediately thought of W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’.

I first learned of Du Bois’ work in my late teens during my tenure at a university, W.E.B. Du Bois, himself, once taught at Howard University. But it wasn’t until my time at Cal that I more fully understood the necessary coping skill and revisited his work.

Double consciousness is a concept the Du Bois puts forth, that people of a non-dominant group, when in a dominant setting, “...are forced to view themselves through both their own eyes and the devaluing lens of a racist white society.”

Du Bois wrote this in 1903 and, similar to Kegan’s work almost a century later, also spoke of the evolving nature of this experience.

Anyone who has ever been accused of ‘code-switching’ or has had to strategically maneuver micro-aggressions or mansplaining while staying regulated and still needing to perform at their job has lived double consciousness.

It is a skill that any Black American, interacting with American institutions, systems, or racism with any level of success (translate as surviving) has had to develop, whether consciously or not.

It is a psychological and emotional tax that, while DuBois was primarily speaking of Black Americans, in his famed work The Souls of Black Folk, I am sure it extends to anyone who has ever been an other, especially in an environment that does not mirror or value their reality.

What’s Seeking to Emerge

While the self-transforming mind is considered an advanced and rare skill for leaders today, it is a basic survival skill for people who live in bodies that resemble mine, stemming from the double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of.

By this point in my career, I’d moved through two Fortune 50 companies, a graduate degree, and landed at Big IV consulting firm.

As a Black woman, you don’t maneuver or transition those spaces without what I see as ‘evolving the intrinsic double consciousness’ that comes with being an ‘other’ in environments that have historically harmed people that look like you, without developing the mental complexity of the self-transforming mind.

I learned that holding the lens through which others see you, while working to develop your own positive self-view, and simultaneously doing the work required to be a star (because that is all that feels acceptable) – is a mandatory skill for someone like me, not a nice-to-have in the executive ranks.

And as echoed through my body while reading burnout rates amongst women and even higher for Black women, it is exhausting.

Data that flashed me back to my twenty-something self and her journey of holding all of this at once. A visceral reminder of something I’ve long come to know – this system does not allow for the full self-actualization of me.

And this isn’t only about race or gender. The inherited operating system constrains everyone.

But it fails loudest for the people carrying the most complexity with the least support.

The ones who’ve been running the self-transforming mind since childhood aren’t behind.

We are ahead.

Yet at capacity, because the system demands advanced complexity as a core survival mechanism.

There’s something else seeking to emerge.

I decided that what was needed was an architecture that can hold, develop, nurture, and support my capacity. It was time for a REWRITE.

Before you can rewrite the code, you have to see it running.

See what’s been running underneath. Take the Capacity Quiz — A 3-minute diagnostic that surfaces the pattern your inherited operating system defaults to under pressure — and why optimization keeps failing to reach it.

Introduction

In today's fast-paced and complex world, effective leadership requires more than just technical skills and strategic thinking. It demands a deep understanding of people, their motivations, and the underlying dynamics that shape organizational behavior.

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