Welcome back, Conscious Leaders!

Welcome to our monthly newsletter, For the Love of Leadership, where we share practical tools to support your leadership journey.

A Note From Our Founder

Happy New Year.

Last month I invited you to rest—even when no one was offering you permission. I hope you gave it to yourself and rested anyway.

January is upon us, with the annual pressure to become a new, improved version of yourself. New goals, new habits, new you.

I'm just not interested in that. I like you a lot.

But I am interested in sitting with the different versions of you that already exist.

Because what I keep seeing—in our cohorts, in our client work, everywhere—are leaders who believe they need to know more, try harder, and somehow develop all kinds of new skills and abilities. Leaders who are sure that one more skill will be the difference between success and failure.

I've started calling this the Capacity Fallacy: the belief that intelligence, effort, new skills and abilities should be able to work magic, and somehow override conditions that exceed your capacity to perform at your best. They can't. 

You can know exactly what to do and still not be able to do it when your system is overwhelmed. That's not a character flaw; that's biology.

So instead of resolutions this year, we're offering a paradigm shift.

Throughout 2026, we'll unpack what we're calling The Four Imperatives: See differently. Be differently. Relate differently. Build differently. 

Q1 starts with the paradigm shift itself—understanding humans as biological systems within organizational systems. Because you can't lead systems you don't understand. And you can't be different until you see differently.

That’s why I just completed my trauma certification through Harvard Medical School: the deeper I dive into leadership and systems work, the more I desire to understand the biological underpinnings of leadership itself. Not to know more, but to see differently.

The science is clear: overriding our biology doesn’t work.

Our nervous systems shape decision-making; our regulation ripples through our teams; the systems we build either support human capacity or overwhelm it.

I wrote about this paradigm shift here.

What is 2026 asking of you? What paradigm shifts are you noticing? 

Hit reply. I read every one.

Here's to seeing differently,

Sharon

This Month’s Featured Piece

The 4 Leadership Imperatives for 2026

Leadership didn't fail in 2025 because leaders lacked skill. It failed because organizations demanded performance from nervous systems already overwhelmed—then blamed individuals when biology pushed back. → Read the framework (4 min)

Also This Month

Why Leadership Development Keeps Failing—And What Actually Works

The L&D industry operates on a foundational delusion: that knowing better leads to doing better. It doesn't. Leadership doesn't have a knowledge problem; it has a capacity problem. 

On Sharon’s Nightstand

10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

"2x thinking keeps you optimizing what you're already doing. 10x thinking forces you to let go of 80% of it and focus only on what creates transformation. For leaders exhausted by incremental improvements that never add up, this is permission to think differently about what's possible—and what you can finally stop doing."

— Sharon

I posted about this on LinkedIn yesterday. Join the conversation there.

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On the Horizon

Missed the inaugural TIL cohort? We'll open registration for the next Trauma-Informed Leadership in a World in Flux later this year. Join the waitlist to be first to know.

Our State of Conscious Leadership white paper drops Q2. Watch this space.

The leaders who thrive in 2026 and beyond won't be the ones who finally figure out how to push harder. They'll be the ones who stop trying to override their biology and start designing for it. 

Thanks for being here.

Stay bold and brave,