Between Flow and Design

On Leadership, Friction, and the Futures We Shape

I’m writing a book about leadership.

Leadership that shapes space.

That listens. That curates. That composes.

Leadership through presence, care, and the quiet choices that shift what becomes possible.

This way of seeing has grown through years inside systems and stories.

Years spent moving resources toward what insists on blooming—even under pressure, even in crisis.

Years spent with people who carry clarity through chaos and build coherence inside uncertainty.

A few months ago, my coach gave me a prompt:

Picture yourself at 88.

Let her guide your decisions.

Design your life with her in mind.

I could see her clearly—calm, radiant, soft around the eyes.

But something in me pulled away.

I wanted to live from now.

To feel what was alive and follow it.

To allow the day, the rhythm, the current to shape the path.

I’ve built a life by listening deeply to what arrives.

To the body. To timing. To encounter.

To the wind that moves before words do.

So I resisted the exercise from a sense of reverence for the unknown.

Not because I lacked vision—but because something essential lives in what remains unwritten.

And then, one heat-drenched afternoon in Montmartre, over coffee, my friend Julien said something that shifted everything:

“Be with the present when you choose—and choose for your future self.”

It landed with force and clarity.

As if both parts of me—the one who floats and the one who shapes—suddenly recognized each other.

For a long time, I felt torn.

Between surrender and structure.

Between intuition and intention.

Between the version of me who dances with the moment, and the one who plants things that last.

One flowed. One planned.

One opened. One organized.

But that day, the tension between them changed shape.

Presence carries truth.

It tunes us to what matters.

It invites contact—with sensation, with place, with each other.

It brings rhythm and something real you can feel.

And choosing with the future in view creates its own kind of magic.

It stretches time.

It builds continuity across days.

It invites a deeper kind of care.

My 88-year-old self feels close now—

less like a distant figure, more like a steady presence.

She moves more slowly. She listens more than she speaks.

She stays loyal to what holds, even when it asks more.

Her way of being has started to shape mine—steadily.

Leadership, I’ve come to see, lives in this space—between who we are and who we’re becoming.

Between presence and aspiration.

Between the moment we’re in, and the future taking shape through us.

It asks for both pause and motion.

Both breath and direction.

To stand inside the now, while shaping what comes next—this is the rhythm I’m learning to follow.

I’m releasing the search for resolution in the old form.

I choose to live and lead inside the tension—with breath, with awareness, with grace.

I’m practicing easing the grip on getting it right.

Instead I am choosing to live and lead with a North Star in heart—a future self I trust, an aspiration I pursue—even as the shape shifts.

The weight eases when I stay aligned—when I hold the moment, and carry the vision.

The path bends and rises, yet the direction stays true.

I hold this life with lightness—and shape it like it matters.