Does it ever feel like life is coming at you in waves?

Not the neat, Taoist metaphor where every descent is followed by an equal and opposite rise. You are probably most familiar with them embodied as the classic yin-yang symbol.

No, this time I’m talking about real waves. The ones that are messy and uneven and churning ceaselessly. The ones that threaten to drag you down and hold you under until you emerge thrashing for the surface, gasping for breath while you struggle to find sure footing.

Share

I’ll be honest, in this most recent season, it’s been these types of waves that have been more commonplace. And, for me, there are really only three things I can do when one begins to pull me under:

1. I can fight it. I can claw toward the surface, force the wave to retreat, strain to get back to fine. And when I do, the next time I fall even harder; the steep crash is always worse than a gentle descent would have been.

2. I can endure it. I can brace myself, armor up, grit my teeth, tell myself to be strong and to suffer through. This one is the trap, because it looks like strength. But the truth is that you’re still fighting, just with more armor.

3. I can accept it. Acceptance is not endurance. Accepting the wave does not mean gritting through the pain, romanticizing it, or making suffering noble. Acceptance is gentle. It is allowing. It is release.

The Two Arrows

Let’s revisit the Buddhist teaching about the two arrows. The first arrow is the pain itself. It’s the illness, the loss, the wave that pulls us under. That arrow flies on its own, released without our awareness. We don’t get to choose where it strikes, and it hurts.

But then most of us reach back and jab a second arrow straight into the very same, gaping wound. We do this with our own resistance, with fear of being afraid, with unanswerable questions like why is this happening to me, and with the idea that I should be handling this better than I am.

The first arrow is the injurious and often unavoidable pain. The second arrow is the suffering we add to it, and that one’s completely avoidable.

Subscribe now

Acceptance Not Endurance

When we are enduring, we are forcing that second arrow into our wound and calling it courage. I must be strong, I must not break, I must suffer… That line of thinking becomes its own kind of wound, thrust haphazardly on top of the one that was already there.

Acceptance means I notice what’s rising before it can begin to build its whole story. It means I let the feeling actually move through me instead of calling it into my core and making it a part of me. It means I reach out for help, for another set of eyes, for the people who can see what I cannot see on my own.

That is the whole difference. Enduring fires a second arrow. Acceptance lays the whole quiver down.

Making Space for Forgiveness

Acceptance makes space for forgiveness. For a gentler approach to what is happening. It allows me to forgive my own body. The body that is not betraying me, even when it feels that way sometimes. No, my body is carrying me through something hard. It’s doing the challenging and invisible work of remaking itself from the inside out. It deserves my tenderness, not my blame. It deserves my love and my appreciation for the hard work it is doing.

Finding acceptance allows me to forgive myself. To give myself grace on the mornings I fight back against the wave with all my might, and for the times I endure when I meant to accept.

With acceptance, I can let go of the frustration about how long all of this is taking. About how I have a new sense of normal that looks unlike anything I experienced for most of my life.

I used to meet those moments of recognition and endurance with a kind of scolding. I’m learning to meet them with compassion instead. Besides, the scolding was only ever a second arrow, aimed directly at my already fragile, wounded body. And forgiveness is how I finally put it down.

And in the end, acceptance means I get to choose the story I tell about all of it. Because the story we tell about our suffering is another chance for that second arrow to get fired, or when we finally get to set the bow down.

Mindful Minute: Are there stories you tell that are firing a second arrow into your already wounded self? Are there ways you can reframe those stories to protect yourself from the avoidable pain of the second arrow? Could forgiveness of self and others be a part of it? Share as much as you feel comfortable. I know that other people will benefit from your observations, and I love reading your comments.

Leave a comment

If you want to read more of the 5-part series on grief, start with denial here. And remember that we are touching on some emotionally sensitive topics. If any of this caused you to reconsider your own painful arrows and personal conflict, I encourage you to speak with a professional about it.

Share

You see, two of the three Sherpa guides who expertly led our group of intrepid explorers to Everest Base Camp — Avi and Ranjon — are both missing in the floods in Nepal. When it happened, they were guiding a group to Kailash Mansarobar Tibet, and they haven’t been heard from since.

I am struggling to find the words to write this.

I made that journey with three extraordinary Sherpa guides — Avi, Ranjon and Binod. They started out as expert guides, and along the way, we became close friends. With my hip injury, I honestly don’t know that I would have reached Everest Base Camp without their encouragement, patience, strength and care.

There were moments when I didn’t know if I could take another step. That’s when they were there for me. Cheering me on, helping me, and sometimes simply believing that I could do it, even when I wasn’t so sure myself.

Today, two of them — Avi and Ranjon — are still missing.

They are young. They are strong. They are kind. So deeply kind. And funny!

And we are holding on to hope.

When I was struggling on that mountain, they held hope for me.

Now, we hold hope for them. And maybe a few “bunny ears” when they finally make it home again.

I am sharing these photographs because I want to surround Avi and Ranjon, and everyone who loves them, with light and with every prayer, every blessing, every bit of love and hope we can send their way.

Please pray that they are safe.
Please pray that they come home. 🙏

Avi and Ranjon, we are holding you in our hearts. May you find your way home.

Leave a comment

Thank you to everyone who is lifting the Nepalese people up in prayer. May universal love and light guide them home.

If you’d like to make a financial contribution to help people in need, please donate to one of these organizations who are on the ground helping:

• Government of Nepal, Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund

• Red Cross of Nepal

She is describing Indian classical music — the ragas she has studied since childhood, the harmonium, and now the sitar she is learning in Seattle. She is talking about what the practice has taught her about leadership, and she says, “It’s not just what you are playing. It is understanding what is not being played.”

In a raga, she explains, the musician learns to hear the gaps between the beats. The silence between the notes. The space where the music breathes. A beginner plays the notes they have been given. A seasoned musician listens for what is missing and finds the music there.

Subscribe now

Rebel With a Cause

Shalaka spent two decades leading product at Amazon, GE, and Honeywell before founding CareGrid Health, an AI consulting company helping independent clinics reduce the administrative burden that suffocates both doctors and patients. She is an engineer by training, a musician at heart, and — by her own description — a rebel.

As you can imagine, the rebel part started early. Growing up in India, she was told explicitly what paths were available to women in technology. Still, she chose differently. Then she and her husband gave up their jobs, went to graduate school together, had a baby, and started over — moving from, as she put it, net negative to net positive. When she finished her first master’s degree, her infant was in her lap.

I asked her about that image. She smiled and said it wasn’t about defiance for its own sake. It was about something simpler: I cannot be put in a box. And so she kept walking through doors that weren’t supposed to be open to her because she genuinely could not see the walls others saw.

What strikes me about Shalaka’s story is that her rebellion was grounded in something deeper than just being a rebel for the sake of rebellion. It came from a systems thinker’s instinct, inherited from a father who liked to take apart VCRs to see how they worked, and a mother who taught her that every problem has inherent beauty. Engineering gave her the discipline to follow the signals. Music gave her the instinct to listen to what wasn’t being said.

Bridging Music & Engineering

When she describes her work as a product leader, she returns again and again to the music metaphor. A product team is an ensemble. The product manager is listening to every instrument at once, noticing when one is rushing, feeling when the rhythm is pulling apart, knowing when to bring the whole thing back together. This is not something you learn in a workshop, she says. It is a practice. It is built slowly, over years, through the accumulation of attention.

What she is describing — though she doesn’t use this language — is what researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett would call interoceptive awareness extended outward: the capacity to notice subtle signals, in yourself and in others, before they become crises. It’s a type of perception that comes from presence and from awareness.

Share

Play to the Music

The Bhagavad Gita offers a concept that Shalaka returned to at the end of our conversation. Focus on right action. Do not attach to outcomes. It is ancient wisdom that sounds, on the surface, like it might excuse passivity. But Shalaka’s life is its own argument against that reading. She has taken big risks — left stable careers, founded a company in a complex industry, committed herself to changing a healthcare system that has resisted change for decades. None of that is passive.

This is also, I realized listening to her, what the raga teaches. You learn the notes, you learn the constraints, and then acting within those constraints, you play with everything you have. You do not play to the outcome. You play to the music.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Shalaka what mindful leadership means to her. She paused before answering and said it is about building conviction in your team that you are moving in the right direction. This is done not by telling them what to do, but by helping them understand how they fit into the larger picture. It is about speaking your mission until it becomes the way your team thinks. It is about knowing that in ambiguous spaces you cannot promise outcomes. You can only promise the quality of your attention, the clarity of your values, and the willingness to learn like a beginner every time the situation changes.

Beginner’s Mind Leaves No Room for Ego

Learning a new raga, she told me, means starting from scratch, even if you already know ten others. The musician who arrives with past songs as luggage cannot hear the new music. The new leader who arrives with certainty cannot hear their team.

I left that conversation thinking about what I listen for in my own work. As a coach, as a writer, as someone who has spent decades practicing mindful attention — am I hearing what is being played? Or are there ways for me to hear what is missing, too?

If you want to hear more from Shalaka, I encourage you to watch the conversation, check out her business CareGrid Health, and to connect with her on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

Mindful Minute: What is the one thing you consistently practice in your life that has most shaped how you lead? I’d love to hear it in the comments and I’m sure others would too!

For a long time, I kept waiting for this season of health challenges to end. I was impatiently more than ready to return to the version of myself who felt fine.

Lately I’ve been making peace with a new reality: I’m not here to go back. I’m here to go through. The goal is to come out of the experience feeling like more of myself, not less.

What I want to write about this week isn’t about a diagnosis, or unending hospital visits, alternative health modalities, or even any singular moment in this healthcare season.

I want to write about the shifts I’ve experienced underneath all of the outward interventions. No doubt, the fear still comes. Old thought spirals definitely still threaten to begin. But something has changed about how they unfold and in how long fear holds me in its grip.

Subscribe now

The Butterfly Fairy Tale

I keep returning to the imagery of a cocoon. The caterpillar tucks itself snugly away and, some time later, emerges completely transformed, as if it had simply gone to sleep one day and woken up with wings. But that’s a fairy tale and simply not what happens.

Inside a cocoon, the caterpillar literally comes apart. It dissolves. What was is unmade so that what will be can form anew. New connections, new architecture – a whole new body reorganizing itself from the inside out.

In no way is this metamorphosis rest. It is the most violent, most aggressive thing that will ever happen to it. And there is no version where it gets the wings without first completely falling apart.

That’s the part we tend to leave out when we say that growth is beautiful. The truth is, growth doesn’t come without pain. The reorganizing is the pain.

Share

No Going Back

This is a distinction that I’ve started to make that has helped me see that change is different from transformation. Change happens all the time. Plans are rearranged, routines are adjusted, expectations shift. Change is more surface-level, and usually it’s reversible. Water freezes into ice and melts back into water. Though the surface changes, the core is untouched. The molecular makeup remains the same.

Transformation is not change. There is no going back with transformation. The caterpillar doesn’t get to go back. It’s permanently reborn, and it pays a heavy price to take flight. I think that is one of the harder things this season has asked of me – not to simply change, but to allow myself to be transformed. To be made anew once more.

Slipping Into the Groove

For me, so much of this is happening in my body — in my nervous system, in the old grooves of fear that were indelibly carved so long ago I’d mistaken them for me. I’m learning that they aren’t me. They’re just patterns. The patterns keep showing up, but now they have nowhere to go.

I observe the patterns faster. When I feel fear beginning to rise within me, I name it before it can build and grow stronger. Fear arises, finds no purchase, and gently dissipates. Of course, sometimes this is easier said than done. On tough days, when I’m tired and hurting or even afraid, I can slip straight back into the old grooves as if I’d never left them.

The relief I’ve found even then is in noticing that I’ve slipped into the groove. The awareness itself is doing the work. I don’t have to fight the fear. I only have to observe it early and name it clearly enough so that it has nowhere to take root.

That moment of awareness, that observation, is enough. In fact, it’s everything.

Subscribe now

Building Awareness Together

Some mornings fear emerges before I’ve even opened my eyes, but the way I handle it is different now. I can shift through the fear faster. I’ve learned, with very practical applications, that recognizing fear and acknowledging it means that at least I can stop adding to my own pain. I can manage the fear before it manages me.

We are all somewhere on our individual journeys of transformation. Some of us are in the process of dissolving, others are still cooking in the cocoon, while some are almost ready to emerge shiny and new, wholly transformed from the inside out.

Mindful Minute: Are there tools or tips that you’ve found helpful to build awareness and mindfulness while on your own journey? Perhaps you have experience with exercises that interrupt your negative thought spirals. If you do, please share them with others in the comments.

Leave a comment

I know others will benefit from learning about the awareness you have gained, and I love reading every single comment!

I’d love your input.

This publication exists to help you become a more mindful and effective leader. As we plan the next season of content, I’d love to know what would be most valuable to you. Your answer will help shape what comes next. If you have something more specific in mind, please leave a comment!

Quick note: This essay touched on transition and the emotional terrain of significant change. If anything in here surfaced something for you, please don’t sit with it alone. Speaking with a trusted person or a mental health professional is always a good idea.

Read more

Not — will I lose my job. Not — will AI replace me. The harder question for both of us was: what happens to human intelligence itself if we keep outsourcing the actual effort of thinking?

Subscribe now

Ashish Singh is a technology leader with about seventeen years in the industry, including at Amazon. He speaks here in a personal capacity; his views are his own and not those of his employer. Lately, a lot of what he's been writing and thinking about is AI — what it's like to actually build with it, to teach his kids with it, to learn music with it, and what it means for how teams work. So, I expected him to have an answer ready for this one. Spoiler alert: he didn’t.

He told me this fear worries him more than anything else. The image he offered was blunt: if you keep making photocopies of photocopies of photocopies, eventually the copy isn’t legible anymore. That’s what happens, he said, when we stop doing the real, effortful thinking ourselves — and AI has made it very easy to stop.

There are no good answers to this question. At least not yet. Ashish said this is the fear he hasn’t solved for himself either.

What we landed on together, in the moment, was something simpler than a solution: we agreed that we should protect certain spaces — like ideation, first drafts, real conversation — as places AI doesn’t get to go first. Let humans generate the raw material. Then bring the tool in to sharpen it, research it, stress-test it. Credit to humans first, help from AI second.

Share

That was the one that stuck with me longest. But it wasn’t the only fear we sat with. I’d noticed this fear — in some form — in almost every conversation I’ve had lately, whether I'm coaching a senior leader at another company who's terrified for her team, or talking to a friend who doesn't know if the skill she spent fifteen years building even matters. So, I asked Ashish to go through the rest with me, one by one.

Here’s what we discussed.

1. What happens to us — to human intelligence itself? That one’s unresolved, and honestly it’s the most important question.

2. Will AI take my job?

This is usually the loudest fear, even if it isn’t the deepest one. Ashish's answer wasn't reassurance — it was a comparison. He pointed back to the arrival of computers in the workplace: that transition did displace people who weren't able to adapt to it. History says the fear isn't irrational, he told me, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What's different this time is the speed.

His answer to the fear wasn’t a five-year plan. It was: start small, start personal, start tonight. He told me about the bedtime stories he used to make up for his daughters — until he ran out of ideas. So on his own time, for his own family, he built a small app in a matter of hours where his daughters could pick their own characters and settings, and he could quietly slip in whatever lesson he wanted to teach that night. That’s it. That’s where his AI fluency began — with a bedtime story.

That same instinct led to something bigger: a song he and his daughter wrote and produced together for a local festival performance, something that would have taken a studio, connections, and thousands of dollars a few years ago. With the help of AI, it reached 5.4 million views. He was careful to say the hard work was still theirs — the tool didn’t replace the effort; but it did remove gatekeeping.

3. What happens to managers, coaches, leaders — do we even need them?

I asked this one for selfish reasons. I’m a coach. If AI can “coach,” what’s left for me?

Ashish’s answer reframed the question. He doesn’t think the role disappears — he thinks its shape changes. He talked about becoming a manager again in a way he hadn't been in years: able to prototype an idea the same evening he has it, instead of waiting weeks for something to come back through the usual channels. Leaders getting their hands dirty again, he said, is "the fun part."

And for coaches and solopreneurs specifically, his view was that AI is a scale tool, not a replacement. Everything a coach has learned over years of practice can now reach far more people than one-on-one sessions ever allowed.

All of this in service of reaching more people who need it. That’s a version of the fear I can actually sit with. It’s less about obsolescence and more about expanding the scope of usefulness.

4. AI could be used to harm people — scams, impersonation, worse

Ashish didn’t minimize this one either. Voice cloning is easy now. Easy enough that someone could call a loved one, sound exactly like their child or parent, and ask for money in a moment of manufactured panic. His advice was almost old-fashioned in its simplicity: if something urgent and emotional comes in asking you to act fast, hang up and call back through a number you already trust.

Don’t let urgency force you to abandon your judgment.

There is an upside to these new scams, though — every new way to cause harm creates new work to defend against it. That’s not comfort exactly, but it’s not nothing.

5. What does this mean for anything that requires real feeling — art, music, connection?

I asked Ashish about this one last, because I know this part of his life personally — he’s a devoted student of Hindustani classical music. He told me he built a tool that reviewed twenty of his recorded lessons and rated his progress: stability of his notes, how well he represented each raga. It did a genuinely good job.

But when he checked those ratings against his teacher’s actual feedback, his teacher told him the tool graded him more strictly than she would have. And that gap — between measurement and feeling — is where he thinks the real boundary is right now. AI can teach fundamentals. It cannot yet hear the intention behind a note, the life in a voice, the thing a teacher hears that a rubric can’t capture.

His closing line has stayed with me since we recorded this: human intelligence is still the supreme one — AI is a tool to enhance it, not replace it. As of today.

💬 Chances are, if you’re reading this post, you’ve wrestled with some of these fears about the use of AI. I’d love to hear some of the ones you have considered and the way you’ve worked through those fears too, if you have.

Anything you share will only help others.

Leave a comment

👉 The full conversation is posted up now. I think you’ll like it.

***Remember, the views expressed by Ashish are his own and do not reflect those of his employer.

We have been spending a lot of time in the world of artificial intelligence lately. There is plenty to explore in that space, and we have some amazing thought leaders in that space that you will hear from soon.

But today, I want to pause and offer you something older than any technology. It’s a practice that has become the cornerstone of my own healing journey and one that I hope can help you too.

For the past year, I have been living with pain. My spine, my knee, my hips have been my teachers. I’ve sat in waiting rooms and on treatment tables for hours. I have iced, I have stretched, I have surrendered, and I have hoped.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I discovered that the most powerful medicine is not a pill, an injection, a supplement, or even a healing modality. For me, it has been attention. Specifically, a way of being with the pain rather than being at war with it.

Share

The Two Arrows

Buddha taught us about two arrows.

The first arrow is the pain itself. This is the sensation that’s raw and real. Something hurts when you move, and you wince through the pain.

The second arrow is everything else we mentally add to the physical pain. It’s questions like – What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get better? And statements like —It’s my fault. It’s their fault. The medical system is at fault.

The first arrow is unavoidable. The second arrow is the one we are firing at ourselves, again and again. And those are totally avoidable.

I know the second arrow very well. I watch it whizz by every time I worry about my aches and pains, blame myself or my circumstances, and when I haunt myself with worst-case scenarios — especially those that arrive in late-night ponderings.

I’ve noticed the impact that the second arrow has on me. I’ve gone into negative thought spirals. I’ve become contracted. I’ve shrunk from myself. From others. Lost connection with my own equilibrium… with my own soul. The one that surely knows how to be joyful in any circumstance!

Pain is a Messenger

There is another way.

The aching body is not the problem. Its nature is to be in touch with reality. It stays in the present moment. It feels what it feels, and it tells us the truth about it. It doesn’t hold back, and it can’t do anything else but be.

So, pain is not a malfunction or a misfire. It is a messenger that is begging us to listen. Beckoning us to be attended to, not abandoned, not numbed, and most definitely not ignored.

The more we ignore pain, the louder it speaks. Pain does not increase as a way to punish us. Pain escalates because no one is listening. No one is taking action to address it.

Pain can be a Portal

When I stopped opposing pain and started meeting it with curiosity, kindness, and space instead of dismissing or ignoring it, the pain became a portal — a doorway to a deeper presence and wholeness I had not known before it arrived.

I opened this portal to presence through a meditation I learned during mindfulness meditation teacher training. I never thought I would need this particular tool, but it has brought me relief nearly every single day these past months. I hope it brings you relief too.

Subscribe now

An important note before you go to meditation…

This practice is a companion to good medical care. It is not a replacement. Sometimes the message of the pain is to go see your doctor. When that happens, please do.

If at any time this practice feels like too much, let it go. It is not for today. You can always come back to it another day. Let there be gentleness and compassion for yourself.

And now, if you are ready, please find yourself a seat and click on the audio recording above to go deeper.

If something arose for you after listening, I’d love to hear about it! Please share. I read every comment!

Leave a comment

“You do not have any other competition in the world than yourself.”

That’s how my friend Mudita Nigam closed our conversation on our podcast.

I want you to sit with it for a moment before I say anything else about it, because I think it’s easy to hear a sentence like that and stash it away as just another pithy motivational quote.

Subscribe now

But coming from Mudita, it didn’t feel like just another hanging kitty poster. It felt impactful. Mudita is an engineer leading teams of teams at Amazon while moving — in her own words — at supersonic speed. In an industry that runs almost entirely on comparison with performance cycles, promotion committees, and stacked rankings – the next rung on the ladder is being climbed by the person next to you and there’s only one ladder. If anyone had reason to believe she was in a race against others, it was Mudita. But here she was telling us explicitly that she isn’t.

The Silent Comparison

Almost none of us think of ourselves as being particularly competitive in a basic sense. We don’t picture ourselves elbowing a rival or hurting someone’s shins before competition. But, comparison inevitably sneaks in anyway.

It shows up as the internal scorecard you keep against the peer who got promoted faster. It’s the team that seems to ship more, complain less, and burn out slower. Lately, it even shows up as comparison against machines and technology like AI.

In our discussion, we consider whether this comparison is even fair.

Crystal vs Rubber Balls

The only comparison that might serve us is knowing which things to prioritize and what can wait for later. Together, Mudita and I discussed a helpful framework for prioritization. That is, understanding the difference between the types of balls you are juggling is key.

Ask yourself – are they crystal balls or rubber balls? Some of what you’re juggling — like your physical and mental health, your closest relationships, and your own sense of who you are — is crystal. Drop that ball and it shatters. You’ll spend a long time picking up the pieces and it may never be recovered.

Other things like soft deadlines and deprioritized projects are rubber balls. They bounce. You can drop them and pick them back up when you have more time.

Share

Human First Leadership

Mudita talked about how she learned, as a young girl in a small town in India, that the “sub-caste” other kids kept asking her about didn’t apply to her. When she came home confused with questions, her father answered simply: you are human first.

And that was everything. This perspective formed the foundation of Mudita’s growth and development. Long before she ever walked into a workplace ripe with internal and external comparison, she’d already been taught that her worth was intrinsic.

That grounding belief shows up later in a skill often overlooked by today’s developing leaders, and that’s self-advocacy. Mudita talked about learning, sometimes the hard way, that your work doesn’t always speak for itself. Sometimes you have to speak for it.

Helping your management team understand the impact of your performance is key. Not necessarily because you are competing with the person next to you but because if you aren’t your own best advocate, no one else will be.

Consider the Crystal

So, is there a race you are running against a competitor who never actually was one? Is it a peer? A co-worker? Maybe even an earlier version of yourself that no longer is…

Because here’s the thing. You are replaceable at your job. Everyone is. You are not replaceable in your family or in your friendships. And isn’t that the whole point?

Your job — the fancy title, the varying promotion cycle, the stacked rank ratings — that was never the place of irreplacability. Your job is like a bouncing rubber ball that you will rebound from if it falls. Your family. Your friends. The people who love you. You are irreplaceable in that space. That’s the crystal ball that will shatter once you check out. Your presence is the glue that holds that crystal ball together.

So, this week when you’re moving at supersonic speeds again, observe moments when you catch yourself measuring your self-worth against someone else’s and ask yourself whether that race is even yours to run and whether the competition itself even serves you. Chances are, the answer will be a resounding “No!”.

If you’re open to it, share some of the ways in which you catch yourself in competition. Are there ways that this comparison can be reframed? I love catching up with you and I look forward to reading your insights.

Leave a comment

If this resonated, I’d encourage you to listen to the full conversation with Mudita. Her journey from a small town in India to leading engineering organizations and building teams of teams at Amazon is a perfect jumping-off point for exploring the role of AI in leadership and prioritizing humanity in a dynamic technological landscape.

While I was reflecting on it, a companion piece crossed my desk. KPMG’s Global AI Pulse is a survey of more than 2,000 senior executives distributed across 20 different countries.

Remarkably, 1/3 of these leaders cite a limited understanding of AI costs and economics as a barrier to deploying it. Nearly half say they have already scaled back AI agent deployments because the costs outweighed the benefits. And yet, roughly 75% indicate that AI will remain a top investment priority, even in a recession.

Share

So, basically, AI expense is increasing. Commitment to the technology is unwavering. Yet, the results are underwhelming.

What the Numbers Really Say

Here is what I have come to realize: this dynamic moment is not a story about machines or even technology. It’s a tale as old as time. A parable of minds and hearts.

Consider the conditions the survey describes. Leaders adopted AI before they understood it. They acted from a position of fear of being left behind rather than having a firm idea of where they were going. They believed that AI could be dropped into an organization like a coin into a vending machine, and progress would come tumbling out.

But reactivity is not strategy, and reactivity is expensive. The survey shows that expense in dollars, but dollars are the least of it. In my conversations with industry leaders, the real costs of AI show up somewhere else — in teams exhausted by shifting mandates and unclear focus, people wondering whether they are being stacked up against a computer, leaders who profess that they cannot always tell whether they are leading the AI revolution or being dragged along by it.

These are examples of fear just below the surface of all the decision-making.

The Perspective We Are Missing

The AI debate has plenty of lenses from which to view it. It has the technical lens, the financial lens, the competitive lens, the doom loop lens, and even the utopia lens, all clamoring for perspective.

What it is missing from the debate is the mindfulness lens. The innately human perspective.

Mindfulness is not just something you tack on as an afterthought. It is a fundamental foundation in approach. It’s something you carry with you into every moment. Because what mindfulness actually helps with is the capacity to pause between stimulus and response. To recognize the fear driving the decision, even before the decision is made.

Mindfulness helps you ask the right questions even in the middle of the moment when there’s a risk of being swept away. Mindfulness helps you regain control and consider: What is the objective? Who does this serve? What are we trying to accomplish?

In my talk with Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy last week, he gave us a sentence that centers this thought: intelligence is not consciousness. AI acts like it is intelligent. But acting as if isn’t real.

An organization can act as though it has a strategy, but, as the KPMG survey suggests, very few act in alignment with that strategy.

What I Hear in the Thick of It

Consider the engineering leader who told me her team had been handed five AI tools in one quarter plus a target for “adoption metrics” but there was no conversation, not one, about the objective of these tools.

I think of the executive who admitted the AI mandate came from the Board of Directors and that he was translating panic downward while calling it vision. And then there’s the nagging question still being asked by mid-career technologists — will AI replace me?

Every one of these is a person experiencing reactivity. But here’s what I know from my training and research into mindfulness over the years: you cannot think your way out of reactivity. You’ve got to pause your way out.

The moment of pause is one where the plural intelligences Sandeep spoke of come into play. It’s the intuitive intelligence that senses something is off. It’s the relational intelligence that notices the team is scared, not just resistant. It’s the moral intelligence that asks not can we do it but should we. These are exactly the intelligent capacities that reactivity shuts down, and exactly the ones the moment requires.

Artificial intelligence is singular. The wisdom to deploy it well is plural. And this ability is something that only humans can offer.

It’s Both-And, As Always

I am taking courses to learn more about AI. To be honest, AI even helped with this essay, suggesting plenty of edits. But I kept my discernment close, taking only the suggestions that served the writing and releasing the rest. Ironically, that is the practice at its core. It is about embracing AI while remaining anchored in the humanity of who you are. Both, together.

The invitation is to stop choosing between rushing and resisting – the only two options the current conversation seems to offer, and to stubbornly stand in a third place while remaining engaged, curious, and awake. Stay present so that you can adopt AI with intention. Stay grounded enough to know when pausing is wisdom and discerning enough to remain focused on the goal of the tool and objective of its use.

The executives in that KPMG survey are no dummies. They are reporting on the outcome of moving fast without intention.

And that’s just one of the reasons that I > AI. Not because we are faster or more precise but because we can be more mindful. We can pause mid-momentum and choose differently. No system can do that.

And Sandeep, since I know you will read this, consider this essay my half of a conversation that is clearly not finished. You gave us the concept of AI as the neighbor’s boy. The data is starting to roll in on AI effectiveness and implementation outcomes. There is more here for us to explore.

So here is my question for my audience this week: Where are you in your relationship with AI? Are you adopting it, resisting it, or learning about it? Are you reacting to it, or responding mindfully?

Leave a comment

I hope to hear from you. I appreciate the insights that we can share together and enjoy reading every comment.

🎧 If you missed my conversation with Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy — listen here.

Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse Survey. Full quarterly reports at kpmg.com/aipulse.

Maybe it wasn’t a boy in your house. Maybe it was a girl, a cousin, a neighbor three doors down. But if you grew up in an Indian household, you know exactly who I mean. He got the best marks. He got into the good college. And every auntie, every uncle, every well-meaning relative at every family gathering would eventually turn to you and ask some version of: why can’t you be more like him?

Subscribe now

I hadn’t thought about that boy in years. But, in a conversation with my dear friend Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Dean of the College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona, a person who has spent his whole career thinking about intelligence, technology, and what makes us human — he said “Today, AI is that boy.”

I was struck when he said it, because he's right, isn't he? AI writes faster. It never gets tired, never has a bad day, never needs a weekend. (It does, famously, make things up with total confidence — but then, so did the neighbor's boy.) Somewhere underneath all our talk about productivity and career disruption, a niggling voice has started asking the same question our aunties used to ask: why can't you be more like AI?

Unfair Comparison

Here’s the thing about the neighbor’s boy: he was only one kind of smart. He could ace an exam. He probably could not have told you why you were crying, or noticed when you needed someone to simply sit with you and say nothing at all.

Sandeep named the deeper problem in a single line:

“Artificial intelligence is singular. Human intelligences are plural.”

Artificial intelligence is, by its nature, built to produce whatever answer is most likely to satisfy you in the moment. But human intelligence was never singular. It’s plural. It’s the friend who can perform two hours of Shakespeare from memory. It’s the leader who walks into a room and somehow makes everyone in it feel more at ease. It’s the person who notices, before you’ve even said a word, that something in you feels off.

You cannot hold the same ruler up to that kind of variety and call the measurement meaningful. It wasn’t fair to compare you to the neighbor’s boy, and it isn’t a fair comparison now.

Intelligence, Not Consciousness

There's a second distinction hiding underneath the first. Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. Sandeep put it simply: AI acts as though it's intelligent. It performs understanding. It does not hold what he called, in Sanskrit, the jivatma — the living presence, the animating spark that enlivens us all.

No AI has ever made you feel instantly at ease the moment it walked into a room. No AI has ever made you feel truly seen and loved in an unconditional way. That is not insignificant. In fact, it might be the whole shebang.

This is Not a Competition

You don’t have to compete with the neighbor’s boy. You never did. That burden wasn’t yours to bear then, and it’s not yours to carry now.

So notice the places where your humanness — not your productive output — is the thing that actually matters. Lean into it. Be the one who sits with a struggling friend instead of rushing to fix them. Savor the moments when you are simply, fully present with another person, in a way no algorithm could ever be.

Sandeep left me with a phrase I haven’t been able to put down, and I’ll leave it with you:

I > AI.

The human is greater. Not your output. Not your speed. You — the whole, plural, conscious human that no system, however magnificent, can act its way into becoming.

Share

So I'll leave you with a question, and I genuinely want your answers: What is one human quality you will never outsource — the thing you'll lean into as this world keeps changing? Share it in the comments. I have a feeling we'll learn more from each other's answers than from any algorithm.

Leave a comment

If I > AI resonates with you, Sandeep and I go much deeper in the full conversation — what AI really means for your career, and why he believes artificial intimacy may prove more dangerous than artificial intelligence. Check it out!

It often feels like relief. Like setting something down that you didn’t realize you’d been carrying.

Share

Interoception: Sensing the Signals

Neuroscientists call the underlying mechanism beneath this phenomenon interoception — the brain’s ability to sense signals arising from inside the body. When we deliberately tune into physical sensations like the weight of our bones or the pounding of our blood, we activate the insular cortex, a region associated with self-awareness, emotional regulation, and — most importantly — a sense of safety.

Most of us spend our days with our attention turned outwardly. To our inbox, to the next thing on our calendar, to other people’s demands. Our bodies become tools rather than a safe place we embody holistically.

An Invitation to Reset

This meditation is an invitation back to sensation. Rooted in ancient frameworks around the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air — it helps draw the connections you need to stay present.

The calcium in your bones is the same mineral found in mountain stone. Seventy percent of your body is water that once moved through glaciers, rivers, living creatures long before you. The heat your cells generate is energy that began in the sun, traveled 93 million miles, and found its way into you through everything you’ve ever eaten. You are one with the earth and the elements that comprise it.

When we start to understand this, the perceived boundary between oneself and the outside world beyond begins to weaken.

You are Part of Something Larger

Research on awe shows that this kind of perception of vastness downregulates the default mode network, the part of the brain that generates our most anxious thoughts. This downregulation is key to achieving deep focus, present-moment engagement and emotional relief.

When you realize that you’re a part of something larger than yourself, you don’t shrink smaller by comparison — you grow in scale and connection in real ways that can help you regulate your emotions and become more mindful.

This guided meditation practice is about 7 minutes long. Find a comfortable seat, close your eyes if that feels right, and meet the meditation wherever you are.

What came up for you? I’d love to know — hit reply and tell me which element landed most deeply.

Leave a comment

Not only is it my birthday, but since 2014, when the United Nations declared it International Yoga Day, it has become something else entirely. For me, this declaration from the UN was a sort of cosmic validation that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, practicing exactly what I was intended to learn.

For years, I marked the day with yogic discipline. I hosted large gatherings and led community yoga sessions. I offered 108 surya namaskaras. These are sun salutations repeated over and over until the body becomes pure. It was joyful and rigorous and uplifting.

This year is different. Those of you who have been with me through these past few months know a bit about why. And what I can tell you is that this change has really opened my eyes and helped me return to some of the fundamental yogic teachings.

It’s been a reminder that the postures and shapes we make with our bodies — that physical tradition is only a few hundred years old. Yoga itself is ancient, and it was never intended for the body alone.

Share

Yoga is a Union

It’s the union of the I — mind, body, and spirit together as one. The union of the We — our connection to the human beings around us, to shared hopes and even grief. And the union of the Us — that humbling, expanding awareness that we are each a speck in the grand universe and a part of something more.

I, We, Us is a mindfulness framework I have taught and continue to return to again and again. I recently led a meditation for the Healing Circle. It touched upon these three unions — I, We, Us — and felt like something you might like to hear about, too.

So, I hope you’ll settle in, close your eyes if that feels right, and let it wash over you.

When you’re done, I’d genuinely love to know – is this how you want to hear from me? Does video feel right? Reply and tell me. I enjoy reading every comment.

Leave a comment

Share

So today, I’m sharing something a little different. It’s a guided meditation on loving kindness. Loving kindness is not about pretending things are fine when they aren’t or even faking it until you make it. It’s about reconnecting with the capacity to love that you already have. We’ll focus on the ability to extend care outwardly and to receive love, too.

This meditation runs just over 8 minutes long. You don’t need experience with meditation or even the perfect conditions to practice. You just need to press play and listen as the words tumble over you.

I have more of these on my YouTube channel, but this is the first time I’m bringing this kind of offering to you. I’d love to know what you think. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Press play when you’re ready.

Leave a comment

If you’d prefer to read rather than listen, the full transcript is also available.

TRANSCRIPT

Let’s practice loving kindness meditation together. Take a moment to arrive here. Doesn’t matter where you were a moment ago, you’re here and now.

Bring your awareness to where you are sitting, the surface in contact with your body, and your pressure against it, becoming aware of your body in this moment, bring awareness to your breath through some conscious inhales and exhales.

Let’s do it together, a deep inhale in and exhale through the mouth. Ah, we do this together again, inhale, and now let the breath breathe itself. No effort on your part, the way the body naturally knows how to breathe, you’re just being present with it, and as you settle now, bring to your awareness someone you can love easily, you know, your heart becomes larger when you think of them, that love is unconditional, flowing all the time for them.

Hold them gently in your heart and silently we’re going to whisper some phrases for them, taking a deep breath in and holding them in your heart, and saying, may you be safe, may you be safe, may you be protected, may you be happy, and may you live with ease.

Let’s again repeat these phrases for someone you have unconditional love for, and these phrases will come easily for them. May you be safe, may you be protected, may you be happy, may you live with ease, and just sit here and let them absorb this. Imagine as if these wishes are flowing right into them, and they can experience your well wishes, they can experience that safety, they are protected from inner and outer harm, they find happiness, and they are at ease.

And as you sit with this, you imagine that they are extending the same wishes to you, you can now see them in your awareness, and they are saying the same phrases that you extended to them. They’re saying, May you be safe, may you be protected, may you be happy, may you live with ease, and they extend these, you receive them wholeheartedly, opening your heart up and taking in the wishes that are directed to you, and you hear them again, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you be happy, may you live with ease, place one hand on your heart, if that feels right. And now offer these wishes to yourself. May I be safe, may I be protected, may I be happy. Be may I live with ease. If this feels difficult for you, because it’s hard to extend love and compassion to ourselves, it’s not a problem. You can even whisper, may this also be held with loving kindness. The fact that it’s hard for me to love myself.

Now bring to your mind somebody who has cared for you, a teacher, a parent, a mentor, a friend, somebody who has showed up for you in times of difficulty, and now we’re going to extend these phrases to them, bring them to your awareness as if they are present right here, right now, and let’s extend some phrases to them, may you be safe, may you be protected, may you be happy, may you live with ease. Say it again one more time with utmost sincerity, may you be safe, may you be protected, may you be happy, may you live with ease, and now we’re going to extend the circle even more, let your awareness expand in all directions, beings you will never meet, those who are struggling tonight, those who are grieving, those who are newly born into this world, all of them like you wanting to be safe, all of them like you wanting to be loved, all of them like you wanting to live with ease. Let’s extend our wishes to them, may all beings be safe, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be happy, may all beings live with ease.

Let’s rest here for a moment in this vast open heart, no boundary between yourself and the world. This is loving kindness. This is the innate quality of a human heart, the ability to love with abundance unconditionally. It’s not a feeling you have to manufacture. It is a capacity that’s always within you, something to nurture and carry with you when you’re ready. Let’s take a deep breath in, and with exhale, spread that kindness around.

And one more thing important to remember – these stages don’t necessarily arrive in order, one after the other. Instead, they circle. They overlap. They recede. They return. Even as I write about Stage Three, I am not writing from the other side. I’m still right here, with you, in the messy middle. And remember, if you are struggling with something, there are people who can help you. Seek professional assistance when you need it.

I was reading a passage from Parker Palmer recently. He wrote: I am a person of hope and one prone to depression. My wholeness depends on accepting that I am both-and.

I read it and was struck because I am both-and too.

I am someone who teaches presence, while also being one who spent years negotiating with her own body’s pain rather than listening to it. In that Mumbai hotel room, I was someone who writes about mindfulness while desperately trying to will myself into a different reality.

Wholeness, Palmer reminds us, has nothing to do with perfection. It means embracing the broken parts as integral — not despite them, but with them.

I am still learning that lesson.

Too Late to Say Goodbye

The first time I was depressed, I was 22. My father died suddenly from a massive heart attack at 3am. I felt it before I knew it. I’d awakened from a deep sleep, gasping, unable to catch my breath. Something felt broken inside me. That was hours before my sister called. By the time I reached home, it was too late to say goodbye.

I hated being in that state. Hated feeling the oppressive overwhelm of sadness. The kind that sticks with you. That moves with and through you. That makes the world around me feel like it is happening to someone else, and I’m just an observer.

Like most everything else in my life, I wanted to manage my grief. To minimize and outrun it. So, I did what many of us do. I smiled.

It wasn’t a performative smile. In fact, it was something more insidious than that. I genuinely attempted to feel what I projected.

You push the corners of your lips up, and you think: surely my body will follow. If I look like someone who is holding it together, I will become someone who is managing.

There is science behind it. The facial muscles send a signal to the brain — dopamine begins to flow. The neurochemistry does shift a little when you smile, even a forced smile. So, I kept doing it.

What I didn’t realize was that I was also building something else: a reputation. Anu is so positive. Anu is so full of light. It was a story that others began to tell about me, and that I eventually began to tell about myself.

By the time this most recent round of grief had arrived in my body — the one about my knee, my spine, my physical freedom, my mobility, my independence — I had been “the positive one” for decades. I didn’t choose this moniker, exactly. But it had become an expectation. Mine as much as anyone else’s.

The Question is Progress

My sister saw through it. Years ago, during the bad months, she said to me: your smiles are fake these days. Fake like something is missing. The lightness isn’t there.

Nobody else had noticed. But she did because she knew what joy looked like for me, and this wasn’t it.

I’ve thought about that a lot this year. So I started doing the mirror test. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I ask myself: Anu, are you really smiling? Or are you sad behind this face?

Some mornings, the answer is clear. Some mornings I am not sure. And some mornings, I realize that the question itself is progress because for a long time, I hadn’t even asked.

Don’t Lose Perspective

When I came back to Seattle after the diagnosis, I didn’t adjust well. The weather felt like it was a reflection of my personal health. The cold, grey chill settled into my bones.

I couldn’t walk the way I used to, couldn’t get outside the way I always had, no matter the weather. I couldn’t even practice yoga anymore. These were the things I had built my sense of self around — my physical strength, my ability to move through the world, to hike, to stand sure on the mat, to be the one who laced up her shoes and went outside anyway, even in Seattle grey.

People around me, people who love me, said: look at everything you have. You have so much to be grateful for. Don’t lose perspective.

They weren’t wrong. And it didn’t help at all.

Because what I was doing was grieving. I was mourning the loss of a self I had known for half a century. Loss of being the one who could move through the world freely.

But I had become the positive one. And the positive one doesn’t get to say: I am depressed. I am sad. Something has been taken from me and I don’t know who I am without it.

So instead, I practiced a BIG smile while grief lingered just below the surface.

The Trap: A Mask of Courage

This mask, I’ve learned, is its own kind of courage — and its own kind of trap.

Courage is keeping on showing up, not letting the darkness win every morning. There is something real in the discipline of showing up anyway, even when it's hard.

The trap is when the smile becomes the story. When the performance becomes so practiced that even you start to believe it.

Women know this trap especially well. We are permitted a narrow emotional range. Not too angry. Not too sad. Not too much. The moment we step outside that range, we are labeled as difficult, fragile, or too emotional. Men carry their own limitations — stoicism as armor and strength as silence. Different cages. Same result. So we mask. All of us.

We mask depression because we don’t know what else to do with it. Because the world keeps moving, and we are expected to move too.

The Discomfort and Beauty of Both-And

Here is what I want you to hear, if you are dealing with some tough emotions right now: depression is not a character flaw and it’s not about being ungrateful for what you have. Depression is not failure. It is simply how we process what cannot be processed any other way.

The stages of grief, Kübler-Ross taught us are not a ladder. They are more like waves that come and go. Or concentric circles that resonate together, amplifying one another.

And if I'm honest with you, there are days when I'm still in it. There are times when I stand at that mirror and the answer is no — I am not really smiling. And there are days when I offer the smile anyway, knowing it's hollow. I try to be kind with myself about that, too.

It’s the discomfort and beauty of both-and.

Mindful Minute: This week, try the mirror question. Just stare at yourself in the mirror or while taking a selfie and ask: Am I really smiling? Or is something hurting behind this face?

You don’t have to answer out loud. You don’t even have to do anything with what you find. Just practice the honesty of asking, observing, and reflecting.

If this resonates and you want perspective on some of the other stages of grief within the context of mindfulness, you’ll find Stage One: Denial and Stage Two: Anger here.

If this piece touched something raw, I want to gently say: please don’t navigate it alone. I write from my own experience and from my coaching practice, but I am not a therapist, and this is not a substitute for professional support. If you’re navigating grief, a health crisis, or a season that feels unmanageable, a licensed counselor or therapist can offer support.

Outside, the city did what Mumbai always does — it refuses to sleep. But inside that room, I was caught in a loop I could not escape.

How did I miss this?

How did I not know?

I have practiced yoga for twenty-five years.

I have even taught it.

I know what it means to embody attention — to know the difference between effort and strain, between allowing and forcing.

I’ve sat in Vipassana meditation and experienced its mental purification through self-observation. No movement, no music, no escape from your thoughts. Just watching. Just noticing. Just observing what is happening inside you, moment by moment.

I have done all of this. For years. Earnestly. With commitment and conviction.

And yet, somehow, I still ended up here — alone in a hotel room in Mumbai, staring at MRI results I could barely absorb, a 21-day cancelled retreat, and a doctor telling me I needed surgery. Immediately.

How did my body betray me?

Subscribe now

3am Questions

Anger, for me, arrived as frustration. As a relentless, circular interrogation that played on repeat throughout every sleepless night.

I had been so present. So committed to the practice.

I kept asking myself – if all of this practice is supposed to make you more attuned, more aware, more awake, and more mindful — how did I end up here?

You can listen carefully, practice diligently, live with genuine intention, and still miss things. Still override what you know to be true in your gut. Choosing, again and again, to keep moving when it might be better for you to pause.

Likely, I had noticed them.

Maybe, the signals were coming through loud and clear.

Probably, I just didn’t want to listen.

What My Body Was Saying

I had piriformis syndrome, a meniscus tear in my knee, and a full ACL rupture. There was also spinal stenosis – where your spinal canal narrows and begins to press on the nerves that run through it. There were bone cysts. Compression. Degeneration.

And my body had been announcing all of this, in the only language bodies have – with feeling and sensations.

I couldn’t walk down the stairs. Couldn’t climb up them either. Sitting for any length of time sent pain shooting through me. Standing hurt. Walking hurt. Sleeping brought no relief — just a different configuration of pain. Muscle spasms I could neither predict nor control happened in places I didn’t even know could spasm. Spinal compression was impacting my digestive system, causing problems with the most fundamental of biological processes.

Tingling in my leg began. And with it, sensation started to leave. It didn’t happen all at once, but feeling was withdrawing the way light does at the end of a long day. Slowly and surely, I was losing the ability to feel my own body.

Share

Overall Fine

I started with a physiotherapist. Not because someone sent me, but because that’s how I operate. I identify the problem, I find the solution, and I get to work.

PT strengthened both sides of my leg. They were consistent, disciplined sessions. What nobody knew — because nobody had looked inside — was that we were strengthening a structure that was collapsing from within.

When I finally went to the doctor, they took X-rays. But X-rays show bone. They don’t show soft tissue. They don’t show what is happening inside a joint or what is pressing on a nerve. The doctor looked at the images and said: things look good.

I told them…Something is wrong.

They looked at their X-rays and dismissively said: looks overall, fine.

A part of me, and this is the part that belongs to the previous stage, to denial, accepted it. Accepting “overall fine” meant I could keep going.

And keeping going was what I knew how to do, so I was appeased for a while.

Eventually, knowing something was wrong, I pushed for an MRI. I insisted. By the time anyone actually looked inside, my meniscus was destroyed. My ACL was damaged. My spine was compressed in ways that were affecting my nervous system.

Months. I’d spent months strengthening a body that was falling apart from the inside out.

In that Mumbai hotel room, anger raged in every direction. I was furious at the healthcare system, yes — for not looking sooner. Mad at the doctor who minimized my pain. Frustrated with the health insurance requirements in the US that make receiving authorization for advanced medical imaging almost as rare as winning the lottery.

But I was also angry at myself. I’d been making choices too. I’d accepted fine when every instinct was telling me otherwise. I’d participated in my own form of denial, and that made me angry too.

Questions Without Answers

And so the 3am questions came. Night after endless night.

How many times did my body remind me? I’ve spent twenty-five years learning to listen. I’ve sat in silence for hours learning to notice. How did I not hear this?

And then the question that cut deepest of all — the one that felt almost too painful to consider:

How did the universe not guide me? Why did the divine choose to lead me here - to this room, to these results, to this reckoning?

I had no answer. I still don’t, entirely.

But I have learned that anger doesn’t just look for someone to blame, it searches for the truth. And the truth here was complicated. The healthcare system could have looked sooner. I could have stopped sooner. Denial had been a choice I made, over and over, at every trail and every airport and every PT session.

Anger wanted someone to blame — a single moment, a single choice, a single person responsible. Grief refused to give me that.

It doesn't move in a straight line. It circles back. It sits with you in the mess.

What Anger Can Look Like

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross named this stage anger. But, we often imagine anger as something loud. A slammed door. A raised voice. Unmistakable and undeniable.

This didn’t feel like that.

The way I experienced anger felt like lying awake in a hotel room in a city that wasn’t mine, while replaying every hike, every PT session, every decision, searching for the moment I could have changed the outcome.

It was frustration turned inward and sharpened into something harder.

Anger is not always something we project outward towards others. Sometimes it sounds like, why didn’t I know better? Sometimes it shifts towards the heavens and pleads, why did you let this happen to me? Anger tries to find someone or something to hold responsible because holding yourself completely responsible is more than you can bear.

All of it is anger. All of it is valid. All of it deserves to be named and examined.

I’d spent decades learning to feel everything, and now I was having to feel this.

There was a terrible irony in that.

The Taxi Was Still Running

Downstairs, I finally sent the taxi away. The three-week retreat was canceled. Next steps were still being formulated.

But before any of that could be faced, there was this. This cold, soulless hotel room. The warm, sleepless nights. Outside, the Arabian Sea gently lapped the shore, eternal and indifferent.

Kübler-Ross mapped these stages, but she never promised they would arrive once and leave cleanly. Anger came back when I thought I had moved past it. Denial returned when I thought I had made peace. The stages are real. The sequence is not.

Grief has its own timeline. Anger manifests distinctly. The most mindful thing you can do is not to rush past either one. You can’t perform your way through anger or pretend it doesn’t exist. You can’t negotiate with it until it agrees to disappear.

Just stay. Just feel it. Just let it be.

As complicated, as contradictory, and unresolved as it is.

That, I have come to understand, is the work.

Leave a comment

Mindful Minute: Have you ever had your body speak to you so clearly yet found yourself not ready to listen? And if you’re willing — share it in the comments. Someone else is lying awake. Your words might be exactly what they need to read.

This is the second in a five-part series exploring the stages of grief through a personal lens. If this resonated, please share it with someone who needs it. And if you missed Stage One — Denial — you can find it here.

If this piece touched something raw, I want to gently say: please don’t navigate it alone. I write from my own experience and from my coaching practice, but I am not a therapist, and this is not a substitute for professional support. If you’re navigating grief, a health crisis, or a season that feels unmanageable, a licensed counselor or therapist can offer support.

Just the day before, I’d been hiking Mt. Elbert - one of the highest peaks in Colorado at over 14k feet, very nearly reaching the summit. But that was when something in my hip just kind of snapped.

Something Snapped

The descent was filled with pain; my hip felt like it was on fire. But I made it down on sheer will and determination. So, throughout the flight, I shifted from one side to the other, unable to find relief. I could barely endure being seated.

Of course, I consulted with a doctor right away, and the diagnosis was clear. Piriformis syndrome – no hiking for at least six weeks. Well, this wouldn’t work!

The Math Doesn’t Math

I was leaving for Kathmandu at the end of the month. The trek to Everest Base Camp, a lifelong dream, was about to start in just seven short weeks. The team I’d been training with for months was counting on me. The time away from important employment-related activities had been carefully negotiated.

I nodded politely at the doctor, while mentally packing my bag, calculating altitude breaks, staging timelines, remaining PT appointments, while considering whether pain could be made to disappear entirely… if only the need was strong enough.

I did reach my goal. I made it to Everest Base Camp.

But, every day, every step, every breath was a negotiation. At the time, I called it resilience. Looking back, I wonder if it was denial. Denial is, of course, Stage One.

Share

A Familiar Negotiation

Years later, after another intensely eventful season of life, we’d planned a ten-day trip through Utah’s Mighty 5.

By now, pain management had become familiar. Daily negotiations normalized. In Zion, I was not only negotiating with my body but with the strikingly majestic scenery. There was reverence. Spirituality. Cathedrals sheltering the pilgrim – gods to be encountered — found in the red rock rising from the burnt umber desert floor. Sandstone cliffs, millions of years old, beckoned to me, inviting me into their embrace — it was all too much to resist.

We tackled Angel’s Landing, a strenuous hike rising 1,500 vertical feet along a narrow ridge equipped with a chain rail for safety.

At Arches National Park, we hiked through Devil’s Garden, scrambling gingerly over sandstone bridges. I remember pausing on one of those ancient spans, looking out over the vast alien landscape, and feeling a mix of awe and stubbornness — willing myself to go on. That stubbornness is what got me out of the garden.

A Life of Negotiation

I was not simply hiking through Utah’s Mighty 5. I was hiking through a whole, lifelong negotiation with myself. One about worthiness, personal strength, and the realization that perhaps, I didn’t know how to stop.

Early conditioning taught me that endurance was a virtue. That stopping was a weakness. That strong people pushed through. And I was resilient. I was one of the strong ones. So many self-help books had taught me that resilience was built from discipline and self-denial.

At the time, I believed the lesson was about courage. I even wrote a Substack post about it. Instead, I think I had become very good at denial.

It was…always minimized…

Just inflammation.

Just overtraining.

Just my age.

Just temporary.

Just something to negotiate.

Just something to manage as I continued my passion for hiking and exploration.

The Last Straw

When I returned from Utah last fall, it was obvious my condition had worsened. Even going up stairs required a strategy. Sitting too long hurt. Standing and walking hurt, too. Relief wasn’t even possible when sleeping. I was having muscle spasms in places I could neither predict nor control. My body was stripping away every illusion of functionality.

So, I did what I knew best — more research, more discipline, more adaptation, more mindfulness. I stretched more, strengthened more, recovered better, and pushed myself. I found the right experts. I advocated for my health. I navigated healthcare systems in two different countries and health insurance in the hardest one of all. Yes, part of me still believed this was a problem I could solve.

Remembering How to Heal

I had booked a yoga and ayurveda retreat on the Indian coast many months ago for the turn of the year. Determined to keep this commitment to myself, I just knew it would propel me back into better health. I told myself that through slow, gentle grace, with kind pampering, rejuvenating daily massages, and conditioned mental reset, that I would be healed. I reassured myself that if I could just get there, if I could just make it to the retreat, that my body would remember how to heal itself once again.

The Results Came

Before leaving for India, I got an MRI to get a better sense of the problem, but without serious consideration for any implications of the outcome, I flew to India before the results had even arrived.

If I’m being honest, the 18-hour journey there was brutal. I sat on hot water bottles, generously provided by caring flight attendants, trying to dull the sharp, shooting pain with little relief.

Just a few days later, I walked ever-so-slowly along Juhu Beach in Mumbai, inviting the New Year and all that was to come with eagerness and open arms.

And then, the MRI results came.

Everything Shifted

I remember exactly where I was when I got them. I opened the report on my phone in the hotel room the morning I was supposed to leave for my special retreat.

Suddenly, everything shifted. The taxi that was supposed to take me to the 21-day Ayurvedic and yogic retreat was downstairs with its engine running. The retreat was supposed to begin in just a few short hours.

As I read through the MRI report, the medical terms sort of seemed to jump out at me.

Degeneration. Compression. Bone cysts. Impingement. Spinal stenosis. Complex meniscus tears. ACL damage in the knee.

Time Will Tell

I stared at the screen for a while before calling the doctor at the retreat center. The conversation went a little something like this:

Could I still come? No. I wrote it down. Taking notes, as if the act of writing it would make the facts of the matter less painful to bear.

Would the program help? Not when you’re injured. Of course not. Of course not. I thanked him and kept on with my line of questions.

Should I rest instead? Yes. Rest. Hmmm… I had never been very good at rest. I knew the importance of operationalizing pause. Wrote and taught about it even. But I still wasn’t very good at it.

Could it even be healed? Time will tell. I held the phone in my hand for a moment after we hung up. The room was still. Downstairs, the taxi driver was still running the meter.

Even when presented with undeniable evidence, a part of me clung to denial. Denial that anything was really all that wrong. Denial that I wouldn’t be able to heal myself with a focused and restorative retreat.

Mindfulness in the Messy Middle

I kept the taxi driver waiting for over two hours(!) while I negotiated with myself. I was holding onto dreams that no longer matched my reality. I stubbornly believed that I could will myself back into the life and into the healthy body I had before. And that was the beginning of my latest journey with grief.

In this five-part series, we’re going to explore how a medical diagnosis can shift perspective. We’ll consider how this experience mirrors the Kubler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief, and together we will explore ways to practice mindfulness, even while still in the messy middle.

Mindful Minute: Have you seen denial show up in your life or in that of your loved one? Comment below to share your experience – someone else might benefit from your reflection.

Leave a comment

p.s. This post is the first in a series of five as we explore the stages of grief together and learn how they can impact our lives. Stay tuned for another post next week. If this resonated with you, please share it with a friend!

If this piece touched something raw, I want to gently say: please don’t navigate it alone. I write from my own experience and from my coaching practice, but I am not a therapist, and this is not a substitute for professional support. If you’re navigating grief, a health crisis, or a season that feels unmanageable, a licensed counselor or therapist can offer support.

The answers tend to cluster around the same themes. Upskilling. Digital fluency. Change agility. Learning to work alongside LLMs. All of it is reasonable. Thing is, most of it is missing the point.

I recently spoke with Nandini Chawla, CEO of TV Rao Learning Systems. With 25 years in leadership development, as a PCC-certified coach, and one of the most grounded thinkers I’ve encountered on what actually makes organizations work, Nandini’s answer to the question of how to prepare leaders in the AI era really surprised me.

Go back to basics, she said. The most fundamental of all is: how can we be more human?

Subscribe now

The Case for Connection

As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in the fabric of organizational life — inserted into the tools we use, used to help drive the decisions we make, developing the processes we run — the one thing it cannot replicate is genuine human connection.

And connection is important. People know when they are faced with inauthenticity. And they reject it. They don’t engage with it. No matter how seamless the interface or how sophisticated the system, people can feel the difference — and they respond accordingly.

Nandini made an observation that really made me think. She said we are in a moment of collective fragility. After the emergent period of the pandemic, people came back to work still burdened by things they hadn’t fully processed during that time.

These unprocessed feelings are still helping foment the uncertainty that people are experiencing in an AI-disrupted economy. The implied contract — not to mention the psychological contract — between organizations and their people is more fragile than it was even just five years ago.

Add to that mix businesses that are doubling down on automation with their foot on the gas for maximum velocity, hurtling into a brave new world. One that’s simultaneously pulling back on real-world human infrastructure. The pressure to move fast is real. But so is the cost of moving fast without strong direction and trusted leadership.

Leaders Who Matter Navigate

The leaders who will matter most in the next decade are not the ones who understand AI the best. They are the ones whose teams trust them enough to believe in what’s actually happening and to believe in their ability to navigate uncertainty together.

That kind of trust is something built slowly through consistent behavior over time – through difficult conversations handled with care, the admissions of not-knowing everything, and decisions made with enough transparency that people feel included rather than subject to outcomes beyond their control.

Prioritizing Gratitude

Finding your way when the road ahead is unclear demands emotional stability and mindfulness. Nandini’s firm, TV Rao Learning Systems, is now including elements of gratitude in its 360-degree feedback tools. When you embed gratitude into the systems people actually use, you invite them to slow down and genuinely reflect on it. When something as seemingly intangible as gratitude can turn into a measurable data point, it’s a signal that an organization actually values the full humanity of its workforce, not just their output.

Share

The Deeper Challenge

We’ve spent decades making the case that soft skills are, in fact, hard skills — and that something like emotional intelligence has real, demonstrable ROI. We’ve emphasized the importance of company culture as a key driver of performance, not just a byproduct of it. And we’ve done that work knowing we were always swimming against a tide that favors what’s measurable over what matters.

But what we’re seeing now is that when things get crunchy and uncertain, organizations are still cutting their investment in human infrastructure first — coaching, training, development programs, the reflective time that leaders and leadership teams are given to aspire and inspire.

A Strategic Miscalculation

The instinct to make budget by cutting headcount is understandable, but it’s also increasingly a strategic miscalculation.

The irony is that AI should be making it easier for us to develop leaders, not harder. The more we automate the transactional, the more we can focus on the qualities and conditions of leadership that can make a real and lasting contribution to the organization. We should be gaining time, space and bandwidth for deep organizational development — not losing the will to invest in it.

When the technological playing field levels out — which it inevitably will — organizations will be competing on the quality of their leaders and in their ability to navigate uncertainty. The differentiator won’t be who adopted the best tools the fastest. It will be those who built the most trusted and capable leaders.

Leaders who stay intentionally, intuitively, and stubbornly focused on workforce development are not behind the curve. They are ahead of it.

If you’re ready to hear more about what Nandini had to say about leadership development in the world of AI, download my podcast at your favorite place to catch up like Apple or YouTube.

Mindful Minute: What are you seeing in your own organization? Is the investment in human leadership infrastructure holding strong or is training and development the first thing on the chopping block? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

Leave a comment

Nandini has been part of the company for 25 of those years, growing from a young facilitator once too afraid to be taken seriously to a PCC-certified coach and CEO who has shaped leaders across some of India's and the world's largest organizations.

Their conversation weaves together Nandini's personal journey — from engineering to sales to marketing to discovering her calling in leadership development — with remarkably practical wisdom that leaders at every stage can apply today.

Here's what you'll hear in this episode:

• The 360° feedback myth: Why this powerful tool is most often misunderstood, misused, or feared — and what a truly holistic 360 looks like, including why Nandini's firm invites family members into the process.

• The workshop moment that changed everything: How Nandini learned the most important lesson in facilitation — and in leadership — by throwing away her agenda and simply listening.

• Insecurity as preparation fuel: How Nandini channeled her early self-doubt about youth and experience into deep, relentless preparation that became her greatest professional strength.

• Humanity in the age of AI: Why the rise of artificial intelligence makes being genuinely human the most strategic leadership skill you can build right now.

• Gratitude as a system, not a practice: How TV Rao Learning Systems is embedding gratitude directly into 360 instruments — and why building it into process is more powerful than leaving it to intention.

• The two habits every aspiring leader needs: Reflection and continuous learning — and how to access both even when you believe you have no time.

Nandini closes with a beautiful invitation: everything can be a source of learning, from the dinner table conversation about Friends characters to observing how a senior leader handles a difficult moment. Leadership development doesn't have to be formal. It has to be intentional.

_______________________________

Learn more about Nandini Chawla, CEO TVRLS: An ICF Accredited PCC coach, Nandini has 29 years of rich cross-cultural work experience in the areas of Leadership Development and Organisation Development. She is the CEO and Co-Founder of T V Rao Learning Systems and Perfect Professional.

An Electrical Engineer and a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration from NMIMS Mumbai, she started her career with Titan Industries Limited in the areas of Sales and Marketing.

Nandini brings to the table a live business exposure as a successful line manager, having interacted, managed & dealt with sales professionals, subordinates, peers, senior management and above all Customers.

She is a life member at the NHRD network and was a member of the Executive Committee for the NHRD Network Bangalore chapter for two consecutive terms. In addition to presenting papers in conferences, she has authored many Articles and co-edited the book on 360-Degree Feedback and Performance Management Systems Volume 2, 360 Degree Feedback and Assessment Development Centers Volume 3, Life after 360 and ADCs Volume 4.

______________________

#LeadershipDevelopment #360Feedback #TalentDevelopment #MindfulLeadership #TVRaoLearningSystems #LifelongLearning #HumanLeadership

Something in me answered right away – I would be love.

It took just a split second to arrive.

I am love. I almost said it out loud - pure love.

Not dependent or independent of the pain or the problem.

Just … love.

But, even I began to have nagging doubts. Could I hold onto love without knowing just how the month will unfold for me? Can I hold onto love when my body aches? When the night stretches on without relief? When my mind returns to its familiar patterns? But again, what do I have to lose?

Subscribe now

So I Choose Love

So perhaps I was willing to experiment with the idea. With what love means. With what it looks like. With how it makes itself known.

And, in the perfect response to my expanding vibration of love, that’s when I was introduced to love on a wholly different level.

A love that knows no bounds. Pure and unconditional.

You see, our son and daughter-in-law shared that they are expecting a baby. A baby! I’m going to be a grandmother!

Suddenly, this practice of love, being love, and being in love, feels less abstract. It has somewhere to go. It has someone to meet!

Poetry Returns

I wrote to my newest inspiration almost right away, poetry easily returning to me:

I see you everywhere, my little one.

In the cherry blossoms, peeking through soft pink petals.

In the river flowing around the rocks.

In the bright blue sky, with streaks of white—

as if you are writing something just for me.

The Thread that Binds

Feeling the love bursting forth, I began writing letters to this little one waiting to be born. It became a way for me to stay connected to this concept of love in its purest form.

Then, in April, on my mother’s birthday, I was caught a bit off-guard. She would have been 100 this year.

So, I think about her. I write about her. About how strong she was. About how unconditionally she loved me. How remarkable she was. About what she might have felt, knowing this new life is coming forth.

I write to my little one. In loving memory of my mother. Of their great-grandmother. Of something that feels like a thread connecting all of us.

Share

Expansion of Love

Little one, you are teaching me to love again. New love. Love for the first time. It’s truly remarkable. I can love this little being I have not yet seen with such ease. With no expectations. Without fear. Without condition. Without restraint.

Which makes me wonder….

If I can love someone I haven’t met with such openness, can I love the people already in my life more openly? Can I soften the sharp edges of expectation? Can I love them without limit too?

Taking this idea further – can I include myself in this vibration of love? What about my struggles? My limitations? Can I love the whole package of me? Can I love who I’ve become?

There are ways that we invite love into our lives. There are ways we restrict the current of love from flowing.

Love is Regenerative

Love, in its purest form, does not require history, track record, evidence, or even proof of worthiness. I know this, because I am in love with someone I have never met — and there is not a single condition attached to it. Not one.

So, what would it mean to bring even a tiny bit of that unconditional love to the people already with me? To my friends navigating their own struggles. To the leader in my coaching practice who is harder on themselves than they would ever be on anyone else. To the version of myself that is still trying to figure things out.

What if my grandchild has not only given me someone to love — but has shown me how? Love isn’t a finite resource. It’s not something we can run out of.

Love is never-ending.

Mindful Minute: Are there ways that you have remained open to receiving and giving love? Small ways? Big ways? Feel free to share. Your perspectives could shift something for someone else.

Leave a comment

Last week, on a bright, unusually sunny spring morning in Seattle, I had the pleasure of presenting a session called, Finding Your North Star: What Coaching Really Is (And Isn’t).

Subscribe now

As the room began to fill, I let my eyes drift across the faces looking back at us. These were early-career women in tech. Curious. Capable. Educated. Enthusiastic. And working in the often unforgiving workforce of modern technology.

I could see them trying to take it in: the norms no one had bothered to tell them about, the codes of conduct they were still deciphering, the invisible ladders that others seemed to climb with ease. They were looking for sure footing. They were looking for a roadmap.

In That Moment, I Was Transported Back In Time

My first day at Microsoft was not the first day of my career. But, it was the first day of my career in a new country.

I arrived with what I can only describe as stars in my eyes. I was full of ambition, optimism, and an unshakeable certainty that if I worked hard enough, success would follow. Wasn’t that the American Dream?

I was a go-getter, and I knew it.

But, very quickly, I discovered something that no one tells you at orientation. Working hard is not enough. It is necessary. It is foundational. But it is not enough.

There is a whole subtext to professional life. The security of networks, the importance of advocacy, the courage to ask for what you want, the wisdom to know what you’re worth… and I didn’t speak that language yet.

Then, Microsoft sponsored me to attend a conference in the Bay area.

My World Opened Up

I sat in the audience, exactly where the women in front of me were sitting now.

I remember the feeling of my world expanding, session by session. People were talking about speaking up. About understanding your own strengths. About having clarity on your career path rather than just following wherever the current takes you. It was about finding mentors, building networks, and lifting other women around you as you rose.

My optimism, which had grown dim and diffuse in the grinding reality of figuring things out alone, began to come back. Not in the same way. I didn’t just feel hopeful again. I felt empowered.

What Followed Was Nothing Short Of Magic

I met Eddie Pate, the Diversity PM at Microsoft at the time, and asked him what I thought was a simple, innocent question: Why doesn’t Microsoft have its own women’s conference?

That question became a proposal. The proposal found its way to Charles Stevens, former VP of our division. He agreed to sponsor it. He gave us a small budget and a great deal of faith, and we built something that outlasted all of us – the first Microsoft Women’s Conference, putting women’s development at the forefront.

Share

Make the Invisible, Visible

I also found my mentors during this time period. Patrick Copeland and Shoshaana Budzionowski are people whose paths I could see ahead of mine and who were generous enough to share the inside view. They gave me not just inspiration but also information. They helped make the invisible, visible.

That is what this kind of investment does. That is what happens when someone with more experience says: here is what I can see that you cannot yet. Let me show you.

So, as I looked at the faces of the women in front of me last week, I felt that familiar swell of recognition and hope.

And, then I was struck.

The Room Was Half Empty

I have presented at this conference for years. I have seen rooms packed with standing-room-only audiences, humming with the energy of women hungry to grow. This time, the seats were pretty empty.

The organizers told me why: organizations are no longer sponsoring these kinds of workshops. They don’t see it as essential. Companies are in survival mode. They are placing their bets, and increasingly, they are betting on artificial intelligence over human development.

Failure to Invest is Fiscally Irresponsible

The thing is, there is no artificial intelligence in the world that can replace the learning, growth, and wisdom that come from the lived human experience. From trying and failing. From being in a room full of other people who have stumbled, then found their footing and turned to extend their hand to help someone else.

When we fail to invest in the full development of half our population, we are not making a fiscally conservative choice, we are making an extraordinarily costly one. We are leaving future potential on the table. Wisdom untapped and disavowed.

The women in that room were ready. I saw it in how they leaned forward. In their engagement. In the questions they asked. In the hunger that I saw in their eyes, because I’ve been hungry too.

They are not asking anyone to do the work for them. They are asking for what I once asked for, for what every person at the beginning of their journey hopes for — for someone further along to turn around, recognize the need to assist, and let them know that they’ve been exactly where you are. To say, “I understand how you feel. Now, let me show you what I’ve learned along the way.”

We owe them that room. That conference. That space and time for connection. We owe them that investment. In their future, and in ours.

Mindful Minute: What has been a turning point in your own career? Please share your story in the comments. Someone else might need to hear it.

Leave a comment