She could name what she was feeling before most people in the room even knew they had feelings. She could read a tense conversation like a map, tracking the undercurrents, sensing what was unspoken. By every measure the research celebrates, her emotional intelligence was high. And yet, somewhere beneath all of that competence, something was […]
There were two easels in our house growing up, set at angles in the same room so neither parent blocked the other’s light. My mother worked in oils, slow and layered, sometimes returning to the same canvas for weeks until a shadow finally sat right. My father moved faster, looser, more willing to ruin a […]
On the three lies we’re sold about work, and what’s true instead. A woman sat across from me on a video call a few months ago, holding a coffee mug with her company’s logo on it up near her kitchen counter, turning it slowly between her palms the way you turn something you’re not sure […]
What Is Ours to Do: Six Years Inside the World’s EQ Family We were sitting at Josh Freedman’s table in California, there to do actual work on an idea that had started with us and Josh after a night in Italy when everything was stolen. That loss wasn’t metaphorical — it was the kind that […]
There is a picture my mother drew of my father in his studio. He is standing at the canvas with a brush in his hand, but he is not painting. He is looking. Just looking. My mother told me once that the hardest thing about being an artist is not the making — it is […]
A CONVERSATION WITH DR. DON AJENÉ WILCOXSON · PART THREE OF THREE When the Whisper Is Louder Than the Fear On racial injustice, the cost of standing up, and what he wants to say to everyone at the edge of the room There is a particular kind of courage that does not announce itself. It […]
A CONVERSATION WITH DR. DON AJENÉ WILCOXSON · PART TWO OF THREE A Man Who Stands in the Room On teaching, spiritual direction, and what it means to carry many callings at once There is a question I have wanted to ask Ajené for years, and as we continue our 3 part conversation I finally […]
Post One: The Garden He Grew From Formation, the village of mentors, and the name given by a king Post Two: A Man Who Stands in the Room Teaching, spiritual direction, EQ practice, and the soul-centered integrated life Post Three: When the Whisper Is Louder Than the Fear Racial injustice, the cost of speaking, grief, […]
When You Know Why You React, You Can Choose How You Respond What the Enneagram and emotional intelligence reveal about the space between trigger and response There is a photograph I keep coming back to in my mind — not an actual photograph, but the kind that forms over years of sitting across from people […]
There is a photograph I have carried in my memory for decades — not one taken on film, but one pressed into the body the way cold presses into bone. It is a winter morning in Detroit, still dark at six a.m., and I am standing at the kitchen window watching my mother mix paint […]
