By day, I'm a leadership and organization development consultant. Outside of that role, I'm an interfaith minister. In both roles, I help people feel a greater sense of connectedness to themselves and the world around them, and find greater purpose and meaning in their work and life.

There is a particular kind of leader I have had the privilege of working with over the years — not the most decorated, not always the most senior, but unmistakably the most generative.

You know them when you walk into a room they've shaped. Something is different. People are more themselves. There is less performance, less guardedness, more of the particular aliveness that emerges when people feel genuinely safe, genuinely seen, and genuinely part of something that matters.

When leaders first encounter the word "empowered," most of them think inward.

Confidence. Self-belief. The ability to make decisions without second-guessing themselves into paralysis. And yes — all of that is part of it. But in two decades of working with leaders, I've found that the leaders who feel most genuinely empowered are not necessarily the most self-assured in a room. They are the ones who know how to be in relationship.

I've worked with a lot of leaders who feel quietly guilty about purpose.

Not because they lack it. But because they're not sure they've found it — at least not in the way they were told they would. No lightning-bolt moment. No singular calling that reorganized everything. Just a persistent, underlying sense that what they're doing matters, interrupted regularly by doubt, fatigue, and the ordinary friction of a complex life.

I want to suggest that this is not a failure of purpose. This is what purpose actually looks like.

Early in my coaching career, I sat with a man who had built something remarkable — a team, a culture, a reputation for integrity and results that others pointed to as a model. By every external measure, he was thriving.

And yet the first thing he said to me, quietly, almost as an aside, was: "I'm not sure any of them would still respect me if they really knew me."

We talk extensively about mental burnout. We talk about emotional exhaustion. We talk far less about what I'd call somatic disconnection — the gradual erosion of our relationship with our own physical experience. And yet the body is not separate from our leadership. It is the ground from which everything else grows.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that high-achieving leaders know well. It isn't the tired that comes from too many hours or too little sleep. It's something subtler — a depletion that sets in when you've been working against yourself, pushing hard in a direction that doesn't feel natural, wondering somewhere underneath it all whether you're actually built for this.