Hey Friend
As I record the final episode of The Dynamic Leader podcast for 2025, I’ve found myself doing what I regularly encourage leaders to do: pause, reflect, and notice the patterns.
When I kicked off Season 6, my intention was simple (and something I probably repeated more times than I can count): strong and kind is not a trade-off. One does not come at the expense of the other. In fact, the deeper the year unfolded, the clearer it became that the leaders who are truly effective are the ones willing to hold both.
A huge theme this year has been awareness. Awareness of where we’re making unsustainable trade-offs. Awareness of how busy has quietly become a default strategy. Awareness of how distracted many of us are - and what that’s costing us in energy, health, relationships, and clarity.
Again and again, through conversations on the podcast and in my coaching work, we came back to the same truth:
If your version of success isn’t sustainable for all of you - your body, your energy, your values, and the people you care about - then it’s not really success.
We talked about moving beyond productivity into effectiveness. About stillness, deep work, and high-value thinking. About leadership as a mirror, and the feedback our teams are constantly giving us - whether we’re listening or not. We explored performance and care, profit and sustainability, strength and humanity, and the tension that exists when we believe those things don’t belong together.
Burnout continues to sit underneath so many leadership conversations, across every industry. And I think 2025 asked us (sometimes gently, sometimes with force) to question some very outdated models. Bigger. Faster. Busier. Always on. Always available. Always pushing.
