Returning With Clarity
The last two months were full in a way that asked me to set something down so I could show up where I was needed most. Now that the season has shifted, I can feel myself returning to the page with more steadiness, more presence, and a different kind of clarity. I’m not picking up where I left off. I’m beginning from who I am now.
The last two months asked more of me than usual. October and November were full in a way that didn’t leave much space around the edges. Work at Transy was in a heavy season — decisions, direction setting, steady leadership, the kind of days that require presence instead of performance. And woven through all of it was Haley’s wedding, with its joy, logistics, emotion, and its own quiet gravity.
Something had to rest.
I had to make a conscious decision to set writing down for a bit — not because I didn’t want to write, but because I didn’t have the energy to do it the way I want to do it: grounded, present, and true. Writing from depletion has never given me clarity. Writing from pressure has never given me my voice. So I put it gently on the shelf and focused on what needed me most.
Now that the season has shifted, I can feel myself coming back to the page differently. Not rushing. Not making up for lost time. Not performing creativity just to signal I’m still here.
I’m simply re-engaging with a clearer sense of who I am and what I need.
Clarity has been the quiet throughline in my life these past few months. Clarity about what’s mine to carry and what isn’t. Clarity about how I want to lead. Clarity about what fuels me, what drains me, and what I want my writing to be in this next era. Clarity about how I want to show up in my work, in my relationships, and in my own body.
So here’s what I know now:
I want my writing to feel like breath, not obligation.
I want it to be a reflection, not a performance.
I want it to come from presence, not pressure.
I want it to follow my timing, not a schedule built from old expectations.
And I want it to come from a steadier place in me — the same place I lead from, the same place I return to each morning when I ask for alignment before the day begins.
I’m not the same woman who last logged into this blog on November 7.
I’m clearer.
Calmer.
More grounded.
More honest about what I need.
This next season of writing will reflect that.
I’m here again, writing from the woman I’ve returned to.
I’m ready to share what clarity has been teaching me — slowly, steadily, and in a way that feels like coming home.
Stillness Isn’t Doing Nothing
We’ve been taught that slowing down is falling behind, that rest is a luxury earned after the work is done. But stillness isn’t the absence of motion. It’s the presence of meaning. It’s the moment you stop performing your life and start inhabiting it again.
There’s a lie most of us swallowed without realizing it. If you’re not producing, you’re falling behind.
It’s the whisper that says, Keep going. Stay busy. You can rest when it’s done.
Except “done” never comes. The list resets. The inbox refills. And we measure our worth in checkmarks instead of peace.
For years, I wore “busy” like armor. It made me feel capable, needed, safe. But underneath the accomplishment was exhaustion. Not the kind a weekend fixes. The kind that hums in your bones. The kind that makes joy feel like another task.
Then one morning, before the world woke up, I sat still. No to-do list. No agenda. Just breath and quiet.
And for the first time in a long time, I realized stillness wasn’t absence. It was access.
Stillness is the space where clarity speaks. It’s the moment your body catches up to what your mind already knows.
It isn’t doing nothing. It’s doing from the right place.
When I finally stopped rushing, I noticed how often my movement was driven by fear. Fear of being irrelevant, overlooked, or replaced. But peace doesn’t live in performance. It lives in alignment. And you can’t find alignment if you never stop long enough to listen.
So here’s the truth I’ve learned:
You don’t have to earn your pause.
You don’t have to apologize for breathing.
You don’t have to prove you’re worthy of rest.
Stillness isn’t a break from your purpose. It’s the doorway back to it.
Try it today. One quiet minute before you open your laptop. One breath before you say yes. One moment of stillness to remind yourself you’re allowed to be here, not just to do.
When you lead from stillness, you don’t lose momentum.
You gain meaning.
If this resonates, my book Lead Like You Mean It was written for moments exactly like this. For those who are tired of performing and ready to lead their lives from clarity and calm.
You can find it wherever you buy books, including Amazon: amzn.to/3yY2F8K
When Clarity Finds You
Clarity isn’t something to chase. It’s what finds you in the quiet moments between decisions, when you stop performing and start paying attention.
For most of my career, I treated clarity like something to chase.
I thought it lived at the end of long meetings, neatly organized spreadsheets, or project plans color coded by priority. Clarity, I believed, was the reward for discipline.
But lately, I’ve realized that clarity doesn’t always arrive on command. Sometimes it finds you in the quiet moments you weren’t planning to have. The pause between decisions. The space after a hard conversation. The early morning stillness when the world hasn’t asked for anything yet.
When I first stepped into leadership, I assumed my job was to have all the answers. The pressure to appear certain was constant, especially in rooms filled with people expecting direction. But certainty and clarity aren’t the same thing. Certainty says, I know the way. Clarity whispers, I can see where I am. There’s a big difference.
The best leaders I know aren’t the loudest voices in the room. They’re the ones who create space for others to breathe, think, and grow. They don’t chase productivity; they create clarity. And that clarity doesn’t come from endless motion. It comes from presence.
Last week, I had one of those humbling “I thought I knew better” moments. It started with a small miscommunication that spiraled into unnecessary tension. Everyone involved was acting in good faith, but somewhere along the way, the message got lost. My instinct was to fix it quickly, to call meetings and smooth edges. Instead, I stopped. I sat with it. I asked myself one question I’ve started using as a leadership reset: What is actually true here? Not what I want to be true. Not what I fear might be true. Just what is true right now. That simple question cut through the noise. It shifted the conversation from reaction to reflection, and we found our footing again.
Clarity doesn’t demand control. It invites honesty. As I launch Lead Like You Mean It, I keep returning to this idea: clarity is a gift, but it’s also a practice.
It’s the act of aligning who I am with what I say and how I lead. Some days that means admitting I don’t have it all figured out, but I’m willing to stay in the room until I do. Leadership, at its core, is a series of moments where we choose who to be. Every time I choose stillness over reaction, curiosity over certainty, and presence over performance, I feel a little closer to my True North. Clarity doesn’t need to be chased. It just needs space to emerge.
When the Quiet Voice Becomes Your Compass
The quiet voice inside you never rushes. It doesn’t compete for attention or demand certainty. It waits for you to stop performing calm long enough to hear it. When you do, it becomes your compass—steadier, wiser, and far more accurate than the noise around you.
There was a time when I believed the loudest voice in the room was the one that mattered most.
The voice that spoke first. The one that carried weight through confidence, data, and volume.
I mistook authority for noise and believed that leadership required projection.
But over the years, I’ve learned that the voice worth listening to is rarely the one commanding the most space. It’s the quiet one. The one that sits just beneath the surface. The one that speaks in tension, intuition, and knowing before words ever form.
The quiet voice doesn’t compete for attention. It doesn’t perform. It waits.
And when you learn to hear it, everything changes.
The Ache That Speaks in Whispers
There’s an ache that doesn’t hurt in the way pain usually does. It doesn’t arrive with crisis or collapse. It arrives softly. A hesitation before yes. A pause before you reply. A tightness in your chest when you convince yourself you’re fine.
I call it the whisper ache.
It’s the gap between what looks good on paper and what feels true in your body.
It’s the moment when achievement feels hollow or when a compliment lands but doesn’t stick.
It’s that flicker of misalignment that says, “This isn’t quite right,” even when you can’t name why.
That whisper is your body trying to speak before your mind rushes to reason.
And for a long time, I ignored it.
I filled the silence with yes after yes.
I mistook exhaustion for importance.
I built a life that looked steady but felt heavy.
The whisper kept tugging, quiet but insistent. It wanted me to stop. To listen. To return.
The Moment I Finally Heard It
I remember sitting in a meeting that should have felt like an accomplishment.
The kind where your name is on the agenda and everyone turns toward you when it’s your turn to speak.
I had my notes, my strategy, my data points. I had prepared for everything except the ache rising in my throat.
Halfway through my presentation, I caught my reflection in the conference room glass. I looked composed, collected, polished. But inside, I felt hollow.
I realized I was performing presence instead of living it.
I finished speaking. The group nodded, approved, and moved on.
And in the quiet after, my body whispered, “You’re here, but not here.”
That was the moment I understood that the quiet voice wasn’t weakness.
It was truth.
How the World Trains Us to Ignore Ourselves
We live in systems that reward performance and speed more than reflection.
Urgency becomes a form of validation. Busyness becomes a badge.
From a young age, we’re taught to value noise over knowing.
Speak up. Be decisive. Don’t pause too long or they’ll think you’re uncertain.
So we fill every space with words and every hour with movement.
We silence the subtle signals that might tell us to stop, to breathe, to think differently.
We call that silence inefficiency. But it’s actually wisdom.
Every system that benefits from your depletion depends on your disconnection from that wisdom.
The longer you ignore your body’s knowing, the easier it is to keep you rushing, agreeing, producing, and performing.
The quiet voice is the antidote to that system.
It is how you reclaim your rhythm in a world that profits from your imbalance.
Listening Is Not Passive
People often think listening to intuition is a soft skill, something mystical or passive. It isn’t. Listening is work. It’s an active discipline.
It takes strength to stop mid-motion and ask, “Is this true?”
It takes courage to pause when everything around you screams for urgency.
Listening means you allow the discomfort of not having the answer yet.
It means you wait until clarity arrives instead of forcing certainty.
For me, this looks like small daily practices.
I pause before responding.
I breathe before deciding.
I write before reacting.
I let silence fill the space that used to be occupied by over-explanation.
The quiet voice does not rush. It moves at the pace of integrity.
And once you start listening, it becomes impossible to return to the noise without noticing the cost.
When Stillness Starts to Feel Unnatural
In the beginning, stillness feels wrong.
If you’ve built your life on urgency, pausing can feel like failure.
You might reach for your phone just to prove to yourself that you’re still relevant.
You might open your inbox just to feel needed.
You might fill the silence because it feels too honest.
That discomfort isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s the withdrawal from performance.
Stillness is a detox from noise. It’s a recalibration of pace.
It’s the space where clarity starts to form.
Your nervous system has to learn that safety exists even when you’re not responding, performing, or pleasing.
When you stop mistaking motion for meaning, you create room for alignment.
What Happens When You Follow the Quiet Voice
At first, you will disappoint people.
You will say no to things that once made you feel important.
You will let go of opportunities that don’t feel aligned.
The world will keep asking for more, and you will learn to answer less.
You’ll speak slower, but your words will carry more weight.
You’ll work with more focus but less frenzy.
You’ll stop rehearsing conversations in your head before you have them.
And one morning, you’ll notice that the ache has softened.
Not because the world changed, but because you did.
You stopped outsourcing your direction to noise.
You started listening to your compass instead.
The Compass Inside You
The quiet voice doesn’t tell you what to do next. It tells you when something isn’t true.
It’s less about direction and more about discernment.
It won’t always make sense to others. Sometimes it won’t even make sense to you.
But clarity doesn’t need consensus. It needs courage.
You will know you’re following your compass when peace replaces certainty.
When you stop seeking permission.
When you stop explaining your intuition to those who need proof before they believe it.
Trusting that inner compass doesn’t mean you ignore logic. It means you let wisdom lead logic, not the other way around.
Your body holds intelligence that your mind has been taught to question.
The more you listen, the more you remember that leadership begins with self-trust.
How I Practice Returning
Listening to my quiet voice is not a single decision. It’s a rhythm.
A daily returning.
When the world feels loud, I do three small things:
1. I breathe before I respond.
That one pause often changes everything. It gives clarity a chance to arrive before words do.
2. I ask, “What’s true right now?”
Not what’s pleasing. Not what’s safe. Not what others expect. Just what’s true.
3. I let silence do some of the talking.
I’ve learned that the truth doesn’t need defending. It simply needs space to land.
These aren’t rules. They’re reminders.
They bring me back when I drift into noise.
And I drift often. But I always return.
When the Whisper Becomes the Guide
You will know the quiet voice is guiding you when your choices stop being about control and start being about congruence.
You’ll stop chasing the life that looks perfect and start building the one that feels peaceful.
You’ll stop needing everyone to understand you and start needing only yourself to believe you.
And slowly, that whisper that once felt like doubt will become the most trustworthy part of you.
The quiet voice becomes your compass when you stop treating it like an interruption and start honoring it as direction.
A Few Things I Know Now
The quiet voice never rushes you.
It always invites you to slow down.
It never speaks in panic. It speaks in presence.
It doesn’t ask for permission. It asks for truth.
And when you ignore it long enough, it won’t punish you.
It will wait.
Because your intuition is patient. It knows you’ll come back when you’re ready.
And when you do, it will be there, steady and clear, whispering what it’s been saying all along:
You already know.
A Question to Carry
Where in your life is the whisper asking to be heard?
What truth have you been softening to make it more acceptable?
You don’t need to broadcast the answer.
You don’t need to turn it into a plan.
You only need to pause long enough to listen.
That quiet voice is your compass.
And when you follow it, you’ll find your way home every time.
When Clarity Crosses a Line
Clarity is one of my greatest gifts—but offered without permission, it can feel like intrusion. I learned that the hard way recently when my words landed as force instead of support. The recoil I saw wasn’t about malice or arrogance, it was about timing and respect. Every gift has a shadow. The work of leadership isn’t to stop using our gifts, but to wield them with more care. Influence isn’t just about what you know—it’s about how, when, and whether others are ready to hear it.
I’ve always known what my strongest gifts are: clarity, vision, and truth. They’re the things I’ve leaned on most of my life. They’ve opened doors, built trust, and helped me make sense of complex, often chaotic situations. They’re also the gifts I’ve been praised for—over and over again.
But gifts always come with edges. And when you lean too hard on them, or wield them without care, they can cut both ways.
This post is about one of those times.
The Misstep
Recently, I overstepped. Not in a dramatic or malicious way. But in a subtle, very human way: I spoke truth when I hadn’t been invited to. I offered vision without asking if it was wanted.
I said something that landed as intrusion rather than support. In my head, I was being helpful, practical, even protective. But in reality, my words carried an unintended sharpness.
The response was immediate: a recoil. A pulling back.
That moment told me everything I needed to know. Even without words, I could see the line I’d crossed. And while grace was extended, the truth is still the truth—I had stepped into someone else’s space without permission.
What It Felt Like
If you’ve ever had one of those moments, you know the sinking feeling. The quick flash of Oh no. That wasn’t right.
For me, it landed as both guilt and self-awareness. Guilt, because I had caused harm, even unintentionally. Awareness, because I could suddenly see the shadow side of my gift in action.
Clarity offered without invitation can feel like intrusion.
Vision spoken without context can feel like dismissal.
Truth carried without gentleness can feel like force.
What I intended as support felt to the other person like something else entirely.
The Shadow Side of Gifts
I’ve always believed our strengths come with shadows. Leadership especially is filled with these paradoxes. The things that make you most effective can also make you most dangerous when used without awareness.
My clarity has carried me far. It cuts through noise and confusion, makes things simple, helps people see a path forward. But unchecked, that same clarity can bulldoze nuance, flatten someone else’s lived experience, or make me sound like I’ve got all the answers.
That’s not who I want to be. And yet, that’s how it landed in this moment.
What I Learned
The lesson is both simple and difficult: permission matters.
It’s not enough to have a clear vision or a sharp truth to offer. The question is, has anyone asked for it? If not, then even the best insight may come across as arrogance, intrusion, or dismissal.
This is where timing and pace come in. Influence isn’t about the speed of your clarity, it’s about the rhythm of your presence. You breathe. You pause. You listen. You feel the moment and the people in it. Only then do you speak—and even then, gently, as an offering.
That’s what I missed.
The Temptation to Retreat
After a misstep like this, my instinct is to retreat. To fold inward with guilt and self-doubt. To replay the moment in my head until I’m convinced I shouldn’t speak at all.
But retreat isn’t growth. Retreat is hiding.
This time, I decided to do something different. Instead of spiraling into self-criticism, I treated the moment as a teacher. It wasn’t a reprimand, it was care. It wasn’t condemnation, it was feedback.
And feedback is a gift, even when it stings. Especially when it stings.
The Work Ahead
So here’s what I’m practicing:
Pausing before I speak. A breath, a beat, a check-in. Do I have permission?
Asking instead of telling. “Would it be helpful if I shared an observation?” creates space for consent.
Letting timing do the work. Sometimes the most powerful thing is to wait until someone is ready to hear it.
Softening the delivery. Not everything has to land like a final word. Sometimes clarity should arrive like a suggestion, not a verdict.
Respecting lived experience. My truth doesn’t override someone else’s background, history, or skillset. We sit at the table together.
This is the work of stewardship—holding my gifts with enough care that they help rather than harm.
Why This Matters
Leadership isn’t about never messing up. It’s about what you do when you inevitably do.
For me, this moment was a reminder that my desire to influence for good doesn’t exempt me from the responsibility of how that influence lands. I can’t assume good intent is enough. I have to practice timing, tone, and permission.
Because otherwise, clarity becomes a weapon instead of a light.
What I Hope You Take Away
Maybe you don’t share my particular gifts. Maybe your edge is different—patience that turns into passivity, decisiveness that slides into control, or empathy that spills over into burnout.
Whatever it is, here’s what I want to remind both of us:
Every gift has a shadow.
Awareness is the first step to managing it.
Feedback, even painful, is often an act of care.
The goal isn’t to stop using your gifts—it’s to learn how to wield them with wisdom.
We’re not called to perfection. We’re called to growth.
Closing Reflection
I don’t share this story because I want to paint myself as wise or evolved. I share it because it was messy and uncomfortable and still raw. It showed me the exact places I need to keep working.
That’s leadership. It’s not polished or packaged. It’s a practice. A rhythm. A cycle of learning, adjusting, and moving forward.
So, the next time I feel clarity rising on my tongue, I’ll pause. I’ll breathe. I’ll ask. And if the answer is silence, I’ll respect it.
Because silence, too, is an answer.