Cultivar

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

I am a leadership ecologist rooted in Appalachia, raised through environmental respect, military service and Western educational institutions. I use an animistic lens to better understand the relationship between individuals, organizations, and systems.

When working with leaders and organizations, my approach not one of doctrine, but of guidance: to authenticity, to culture, to systems and people. I believe leadership is not a fixed role, but a living, relational practice.

My work draws from my lived experience and research into myth-making, insurgency and business strategies, regenerative philosophies, creative works, the landscape I inhabit, and the mundane, because the ember of humanity is often nurtured in and between those spaces.

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Be What You Wish to Bloom

Chris Fawthrop — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:43:48 GMT

Hello Everyone,

One of the first blooms of an apple tree.

After my recent post on imposter syndrome, I had several people reach out letting me know that they felt seen, and appreciated the message that taking a small action when everyone else is waiting for the “right moment” marks you as a leader.

It was also suggested to me by that I talk about the process for how I turn my inspiration from nature and ecosystems into lessons for leadership and social ecology.

The truth is, I don’t have a mechanical process. It’s more of a practice in sharing my perspective that mirrors how I work with leadership: 𝗜 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲.

Different plants require different conditions to thrive.

Different leaders, different people, are much the same.

So in my walk the other evening, I saw the relationship of the flowers to the natural environment in the same way I see the relationship of a leaders to their social environment.

As I looked at the small quince flowers, blooming when nothing else at my altitude was ready to brave the cold, they stood out against the drab surroundings for the same reason certain people stand out as leaders others are willing to follow.

When organizations and work environments are dull and broken, when no one seems ready to change despite the need and desire for it, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘆, 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆.

You don’t have to be a towering oak of a leader, or even an impressive lily that gets transplanted into an area to give that signal, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻’𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗼.

Both environment and the individual play a part in who we see as leader.

By viewing leadership the way I do, I find lessons in what might appear the most unlikely places. You have have your own perspective that allows you to do the same, if you embrace it.

Our environment speaks to us, because we all live in the same world.

We can recognize the tenacity of a dandelion or some other hardy plant because we’ve seen it grow in concrete as easily as a field of grass.

We recognize the same quality in those who are willing to put themselves out there, not as risk-averse innovators who center the focus on themselves, but those who understand and cultivate the relationships of the people around them no matter the working conditions.

𝗕𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻.

Until next time,

Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

When working with leaders and organizations, my approach not one of doctrine, but of guidance and tending: to memory, to culture, to systems and people. I believe leadership is not a fixed role, but a living, relational practice.

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

The First Spring Blooms

Chris Fawthrop — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:42:18 GMT

Hello Everyone, it’s been far too long.

A picture I took on my walk yesterday evening.

Does a flower think it is not a flower because it is surrounded by dull dead branches?

Ones that seem to not awaken to the surrounding spring?

Does a flower think it must wait for leaves to peek out before before blooming?

𝘕𝘰. 𝘈𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘧𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘴.

Some bloom ahead of everything else, heralding the coming change in the cycle.

Does a leader think they aren’t a leader simply because they are surrounded by volatility, uncertainty, and chaos;

Circumstances that remove certainty from conviction?

Does a leader think they must wait until after the cold snap that brings failure to others has passed to have certainty of success?

No. 𝘈𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴.

Those who lead beforehand simply herald the coming change in the cycle of humanity.

It’s understandable to feel imposter syndrome when leading with your values in a world where our structures and systems have not caught up to the changing circumstances.

It shows up not just when we feel out of our depths skills-wise, but also when we say we lead in one way yet are constrained by the environment we find ourselves in.

𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗵𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁.

And you will not be alone.

The world will bloom in your wake.

“Effective leaders learn quickly that, while we might prefer it otherwise, the world anything but a black and white place. And if we’re all taking responsibility for leadership, then we all understand the gray is where it’s at.”

Ari Weinzweig. A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Being A Better Leader. Secret #22, “We’re All Leaders”

In many respects, it’s been a challenging winter for me personally, and despite having clarity, conviction, and direction, the years ahead do not necessarily seem as though they will be easier.

Recent discussions have shown me that I am not alone in this feeling, and yet, as with this flower, we can, and we will continue to thrive resiliently.

I find that having conviction makes the insurmountable become navigable.

The amount of work needed to be done to shift our understanding of leadership to a more authentic, equitable, and regenerative model is a lifelong commitment that I gladly undertake, because I am not alone.

You are not alone.

All of us will change things, together.

Until Next Time,

Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

A Reckoning With Enmeshment

Chris Fawthrop — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:12:16 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Have you ever been so incredibly proud of an accomplishment, say a late summer hike, or writing a term paper while taking 6 classes and working, that you are completely exhausted from? The calm sense of “it’s done, I can rest” that serves as a springboard for the next push soothing your nervous system and allowing you to finally relax. Only then to realize you forgot something essential, something that should and cannot be forgotten.

The spike of adrenaline and cortisol rushing back through your body can be enough to make you physically sick, and the panic-ridden fear brain of “what have I done?!” starts looking for safety.

In systemically damaged individuals, this can also show up as beating oneself up rather than taking ownership, perceiving the incident as a moral failing rather than a mistake to be rectified, or deflecting and centering the harm on themselves rather where it should be, on those the harm was done to.

I spoke recently on relational enmeshment, framing it as when a person’s conception of authenticity is not rooted internally, but externally, and in organizational adherence. Enmeshment is the opposite end of the spectrum to isolation, but it can have similar effects on our understanding of our authentic selves.

One is hyper-individualized and does not allow for consideration of others in understanding the self, and the other demands consideration for and adherence to a specific set of ideas and protocols that subsume the self.

Authenticity is formed within you but informed by the world and the people around you, and by how you relate to them. We literally cannot understand ourselves at a deep level without contextualizing our Self within the world, and there is a certain level of dissonance that comes along with either enmeshment or isolation.

And yet, we can become enmeshed with the outside context even if it isn’t organizational. Ideology, philosophy, schedules, priorities, anything that influences our behaviors, interactions, and worldview are externalities which we can become enmeshed to for different reasons.

You might have noticed I haven’t been writing as regularly the past several weeks; that’s because I’ve been reckoning with my own enmeshments. The past week in particular has been quite challenging to get through, and so I haven’t read anything except Star Wars books nor written anything public in an attempt to gain space to reground myself in myself, and untangle from enmeshment.

I’ve had tremendous growth this year thanks to some amazing people such as , , and , who have directly and indirectly impacted me. There is a pretty significant amount of de-conditioning one must do for serious, sustainable growth, and while the lion’s share of the work must be done by the individual, it cannot be done alone without support, and I wouldn’t have gotten where I am without their support and encouragement to say the least.

Perhaps one of the most significant challenges I’ve faced is navigating the slope between bringing what you learn and embody into the world through your own perspective and experience without claiming ownership of it. In an attempt to be unique, feel authentic, and feel as though one provides meaning and value to others, we can sometimes forget to credit our influences.

If you have an original idea or methodology that is further honed by something you learned from someone, if you had a thought previously but never spoke it, you do not get to “own” it. That is the opposite of an animistic, relational stance. That is an extractive, power-over type framework found in corporate capitalism and many other modern frameworks.

We aren’t unique, authentic, or provide meaning to others because we stand apart from each other, but in how we reciprocate the experience of being connected to one another despite differences. This approach is as old as time, and is the base of many folklore traditions where an offering is left out to some entity to maintain harmony.

I mentioned earlier this year that I use an animistic lens for leadership, and when I did, it was as if a weight had lifted off me. My lens is a methodology of relational understanding and pattern recognition I’ve used and cultivated over many years.

But because of my military, academic, and corporate backgrounds, I had gotten enmeshed in the right way to say things, the right way to come across; I never fully had the right language to express my conceptualizations because I hadn’t embraced it fully. I had ideas, but they weren’t clear.

Now, when the weight of performance was lifted, the world opened up. I’ve made new connections, found new opportunities, and every single week I read, watched, and listened to people who seemed incredibly aligned with me in one way or another. It felt like a collective, unconscious awakening. And it may still be that.

But the collective must still be nurtured, offerings must be given. Reciprocity must be maintained, and I fell out of balance.

A technique I’ve used to maintain writing cadence and avoid perfectionism is to just write and publish. Minimal editing, mostly stream-of-consciousness.

The problem with that technique, I’ve now discovered, is that we don’t always credit the sources of our thoughts when we are thinking them, especially if you’ve been around the ideas long enough to make them part of your everyday language.

If you are a voracious reader, looking for community, applicability - and, unknowingly - validation, finally having or using the correct words is important, but they are not yours. So you need to at the bare minimum, acknowledge where they entered your worldview, and respect the lineage it comes from.

So, the reason for my absence is that a very good friend raised concerns about a shift they had felt in my writing that they couldn’t quite nail down. It appeared as though I was either intentionally mimicking or subconsciously appropriating some of the words, ideas, and possibly even writing style of both direct and indirect influences on me. Trusting my intentions, my friend didn’t necessarily believe it was deliberate but still recommended I do a self-audit.

The shock at potentially having done this entered my body as cortisol and adrenaline does, danger, danger, danger. “I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have done this, right? I’m better than this?!” I felt my stomach churning, and things didn’t get better the next few days as I looked back through my writings of the past few months.

I don’t know exactly when this shift began, but I think it’s a little after I started talking openly about the relational stance, the animistic lens I use.

What makes this even worse is that the majority of these influences are from BIPOC and Global South communities. I think that likely, because I do hold an animist worldview and have done for many years, I was drawn to people who think along the same lines and have the same questions, but have languages, lived experience, and lineages of stewardship that I do not, but am trying to find and plant in myself and others.

I’m in the process of deconditioning and reawakening to what feels like a shared, fundamental, and ancestral understanding of the world, one that many others have preserved at great cost and with deep rootedness, while I have only recently begun to recover it. I am a healing amalgamation of so many systemic, shallow, and rootless identities that it is of the utmost importance that I embody that understanding and reciprocity, not as an origin point but as a conduit.

In the attempt to fully embrace my authentic self and my worldview that I not only use to try and help leaders and organizations grow but also live by, I let go of one systemic enmeshment - corporate professional speak and percieved legitimacy - but got tangled up in another by claiming kinship to othered communities without reciprocity or permission. A marker of the colonial enmeshment I’m still attempting to shed.

It hurts. Despite that pain showing the privilege of knowledge accumulation and extraction I was trained on, it is nothing compared to the hurt and harm felt by others who have had their ways of knowing and being appropriated endlessly and cyclically.

Because I carry whiteness and veteran status, I am systemically and statistically safer to say what others have risked everything to speak. I don’t say that to convey a sense of shame or guilt, or even “white-savior-ness,” but safety-as-responsibility absent authority.

I’m realizing that many of the conceptualizations and language presentation of my animist, relational, and sovereignty-based ideas I’ve held for years but only this year have been exploring publicly, were deeply shaped by several individuals that I have credited in some form or fashion throughout the year, but as of late their specific perspective and words have been finding their way into my writing expressed as my own, rather than influenced by or in relation with. I want to clearly name these influences now as I recognize them in my own work.

None of these thinkers, authors, or mentors are responsible for my errors. Any harm or confusion that arises is mine to own. Their influence is named here in gratitude and apology, not to excuse missteps, but to honor my shaping and offer accountabilty.

Chief among these and most directly, my mentor and friend, Grace Aimoto, whose work on Existential Leadership™ and Kizuna Existential Literacy™, interiority, and scaling connection have helped me crystalize and articulate what I’ve long sensed as being connected in terms of individuals to systems, as well as the importance of an individual’s interiority, curiosity, creativity, and imagination in leadership.

Other influences I’d like to name are the academics Bayo Akomolafe, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen.

Bayo Akomolafe expresses many concepts familiar to me from my political science education and research career with language that only comes from his lived experience, and his writing acts as a bridge between much of the western theory I learned and the theories surrounding interconnection and interbeing (“interbeing” coming from Thích Nhất Hạnh) I’ve been exploring, allowing me to better understand the connections between the human and more than human world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work in Braiding Sweetgrass helped me better understand how to translate my lived animistic experience in Appalachia into words and stories that others without my experience might better understand.

Tyson Yunkaporta’s many writings and interviews have helped me break down some-but not all- of the remaining barriers of western epistemology and ontology, ways of knowing and ways of being in relation to each other. A specific phrase that comes from Tyson is “right relation.” or “a way of being that is grounded in respectful reciprocity with all of creation.”1

Rune Hjarno Rasmussen is not an academic whose work I have not engaged with as much this year, but his explanations of entities and animism from the Nordic perspective has been foundational in my own understanding of entities and sentience. I likely would not have seen the relational qualities of my thinking on leadership and organizational culture as animistic without them.

Apart from these named influences, the many dozens of people on Substack and LinkedIn I have read, engaged with, reposted, and shared in my seed catalog, all of you have shaped me into what I am today …

I offer this writing not as excuse for harm, distance from their labor or yours, but in gratitude for it.

I think what happened is that rather than seeing my shift to openly talking about animism as a lens for leaders as a beginning, or a waypoint on the journey, I saw it as a departure, and an endpoint. As freedom. Which, it was, but an end is the beginning of something else, and care and attention can’t be dropped on your way out the door, and freedom still demands responsibility and consideration for others (consideration being another aspect of leadership Grace taught me about).

This is something I’ve seen many leaders experience, but never thought I would myself - experience and knowledge creep. Where once you get to a certain level of something (typically understanding, capability, comfort, or responsibility), you forget what was needed before you got there, and deprioritize it in favor of the tasks and sensibilities that are more apparent to where you are at daily.

But just because you grow in self or station does not diminish the importance of the respect and reciprocity expected of you when you were learning. In fact, it becomes even more important. Truth is, we never stop learning, or we shouldn’t.

I’m sharing this with you not as an apology to say “oh look, I messed up, haha, forgive me!” nor as a lecture. Not writing for closure, but because accountability like detangling from enmeshment, is a process, and this is one step I can take.

I’m sharing it because I want to be accountable for my actions, to those who influence me and those I influence. I slipped from the path because I wasn’t paying attention, and I only got back on it because someone else was. Thank you, Jorge, I couldn’t ask for a better friend.

To those I have influenced or who have resonated in with my work: if you ever see your own voice in my words and it’s not credited, I welcome the call-in. And if you’d like me to do the same for you, please let me know.

I still don’t feel good, I don’t know how this writing will be received, but since my appropriation was in public, it seems my attempt at reparations should be.

Whether or not one is forgiven for causing harm is not the measure of accountability, but rather whether one continues to act as if reciprocity and responsibility are sacred, and that is something our communities keep us in check with.

I’m (re)learning that integrity is not the performative endpoint display of appearing right, but the commitment to being in right relation. So as I recommit, I’ll invite you to do the same, publicly or privately.

If this resonates, take the opportunity to reflect on the lineages, influences, and relationships that have and continue to shap your path. What are you still enmeshed to?

I’ll go live on Friday, December 19th, 12pm EST, for the last Cultivar Coffee Chat of the year. If you have any questions, concerns, or responses to this newsletter, I welcome them.

Until then,

Chris

https://climate-creativity.com/blog/right-relations/

Vocation Cannot be Contained

Chris Fawthrop — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:27:26 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Moving forward, the Cultivar Coffee Chat will be held on Fridays at 12pm EST.

Subscribe to get notified when I go live.

I saw a post on LinkedIn this morning, either from someone in my network or something they commented on, and now I can’t find it again, ~~thanks Algo.~~

It was about the disconnect between what we want to write and post about online and what we actually do. A dilemma many of us have felt, especially if you straddle different disciplines, HAVE a variety of interests, or are resisting being flattened into one “role” or “niche,”

gave a wonderful admission of this feeling I have felt many times in her essay I (re)read this morning, “Maxwell’s Demon,” where she explored applying thermodynamics principles to economic and systemic change:

It’s an excellent essay posing some great questions, with insights that only come from having the curiosity of knowing just enough to see patterns across disciplines, please go read it. This brings me to the concept of leadership as a vocation.

As I’m catching up on a backlog of reading, I came across this quote in the article “How Rosalía’s formal training gave her creative freedom” :

“When the vocation requires self-expression, no singular interest will ever be able to contain the totality of what the self seeks to express. Categories fail to hold at the boundaries of exploration.”
-

What makes someone a leader, really?

Photo by Giada Gianfreda on Unsplash

Not the checklist of traits, responsibilities, and narratives, but what lies beneath all that? What is the subtext? What makes leadership a vocation, rather than a byproduct of it?

We all know the usual answers of what makes a leader: they are visionary, empathetic, inspiring. But those are ideals, not identities, and they’re not reserved for people in formal leadership roles, nor are they bound to specific industries.

Is it a refusal to be flattened?
A willingness to explore out loud, even when it doesn’t “align” with what an organization or system wants to address?
Maybe vocation is a focusing of self-expression as an act of relation, rather than performance?

Perhaps leadership as vocation, not position, is an emergent state at the intersection of someone’s curiosity, complexity, and obsession.

A crossroads of authenticity that, when others arrive at it, begins to shape the space around them. When the way the leader lives in alignment and reciprocity invites something to grow in others.

I think it’s hard to argue against the fact that, for better or worse, the self-expression of those who choose leadership as a vocation is 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 from how they lead.

Those who draw from across art, science, language, movements, and culture, not just their “industry,” and use the intersections between disciplines to push the boundaries of our understanding rather than reinforce their limits, are often the ones whose presence ripples out the furthest.

I don’t have a clean definition. I’m not sure I want one. But I do know this is the kind of inquiry I will keep returning to in my work: leadership as a relational stance, not a title.

What about you? Do you see leadership as a vocation, or a role?

Until next time,

- Chris

After rereading my post (I posted it on LinkedIn as well and had some comments to engage with, I had a realization about something - while the curiosity about what makes someone a leader is mine, and the practice of using intersectionality to become a better leader or gain a better understanding of a situation is one I’ve been using for many years, the sub-questions used to frame the inquiry and wording my paragraph of “perhaps leadership as a vocation is an emergent state” draws very heavily from my experiences with Kizuna Collective and the Open Encounters sessions.
Grace Aimoto, the founder of Kizuna, has been my mentor for quite some time and has honed much of my thinking - in particular, the concepts of curiosity being a foundational aspect of leadership that leads to being an invitational entity, and that one of the biggest reasons for authentic leadership is because leaders cannot be separate from their self-expression or as Grace would say, “standing in what they beliefs and values.”
Integrity is a value of mine, so in catching this enmeshment thanks to a friend, I want to own up and stand in it by taking ownership of my subconscious appropriation of making something seem completely mine, and providing you with links to step into your own self. We all exist relationally, but extracting knowledge and labor, intentionally or otherwise, are not the way of an animistic lens of leadership. Reciprocity is.
If you are interested in learning more, please explore kizunacollective.org.

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

When working with leaders and organizations, my approach not one of doctrine, but of guidance and tending to: to memory, to culture, to systems and people. I believe leadership is not a fixed role, but a living, relational practice.

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

The Rings We Grow In, We Lead Through

Chris Fawthrop — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:54:21 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I hope you’ve had a good weekend so far, with plenty of rest. I didn’t send out the recording of Friday’s live till today so I could take advantage of the first big snow of the season with my family. We’ve been sledding in our yard, made cranberry orange muffins, and watched some of our favorite movies.

The Cultivar Chat was excellent, a huge thank you to everyone who attended! It’s always a privilege to talk with you and get your insights and perspectives on the themes we discuss.

This past week, the focus was on the difference between the Greek understanding of time through chronos and kairos, or sequential and impactful measurement. I’m coming across an increasing number of people who are either intentionally leaving behind sequential understandings of growth, progress, and success, or shifting out of that mindset for survival.

Photo by Ivan Jurilj on Unsplash

I mentioned recently that the polycrisis we are facing globally is in fact a singular crisis of leadership, yet over the past few days I’ve been thinking a bit deeper on it.

Since the relational, animistic lens of leadership views itself as a stance, rather than a role, then the crisis is, in fact, one of relation. To time, knowledge, action, understanding, Self, Collective, and World.

Rooted in kairos, that stance becomes a practice of discernment, of pattern stewardship, and of intentional engagement.

The accumulation of minutes, months, and years understood in the West as how to measure growth and progress has separated and enclosured us from the felt, reciprocal complexity of kairos time.

There is a shift across humanity, a mass pivot, simultaneously quiet and loud, in what many are accepting as truth. People are choosing to reorient their understanding of time toward experiencing through impact rather than sequence.

It is a response to a collective feeling of unnaturalness, of out-of-relationness to our world, that has reached such a point due to the accumulation of knowledge and its flattening into simplistic understanding and manipulation. There is a loss of complexity that we feel but can’t explain.

“The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.”
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk

So much of our time and attention is taken away from the biological functions that allow us to fully experience and remember our past and present, which informs the paths we take for the future.

Many of us intake so much these days and yet don’t act on it. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by manipulation, we stagnate while enmeshed to an entity that never stops moving in an attempt to never die; an unnatural function of nature that cannot be equated to decay. Decay and death are meant to be a part of the cycle that generates new and emergent life.

Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash

This collective shift is a seismic ripple of the many small actions of people who are trying to re-enter time through impact. We’re remembering in our nervous systems, in our bones, in our dreams that time and place were never meant to be split from each other, let along meaning, story, and identity.

This is not just a poetic or philosophical idea: in many Indigenous languages, there is no separation between them:

”You talk about time and place … As you said, there’s no distinction there between those terms in your language—obviously in English there is, and maybe that distinction is part of this challenge?”
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Deep Time Diligence: An Interview with Tyson Yunkaporta. Emergence Magazine

To envision a better future for oneself or humanity, we cannot continue to view “progress” as a linear sequence of events and milestones. Our dreams must be felt, not managed.

They are meant to be lived, instead of being accumulated and enmeshed to the systemic needs of society. The disconnect that progress-management has fostered in us has given us blueprints for a life we will never be able to build.

https://substack.com/@vongoval/p-180774985

It’s almost a visceral hunger, incrementally grown from being enclosed out of a world of meaning and fed a diet built on productivity metrics and development. A world where time and place aren’t separate, and the pace of life aligns with memory, attention, vision, landscape, and kinship. A world that we are still part of but haven’t been in relation with on a global scale for centuries.

It is possible to return to right relation with time and impact. We just have to choose to do so, a lesson that repeats in its applicability.

When one knows something but has not yet acted on it, his knowledge is shallow.... Knowledge and practice always require each other. With respect to order, knowledge comes first, and with respect to importance, practice is more important.
Zhu Xi, 1130-1200

Those who are shifting towards a different worldview are choosing kairos over chronos because it flows through meaning, which requires us to be in motion with the world, not apart from it.

The inherent binaries of good and evil, true and false, fast and slow are a systemic violence against the complexity of life. The suffering that process has caused is finally reaching a zenith.

We cannot chart a new course forward with the tools that disconnected us in the first place. But maybe it isn’t about a course forward towards the future, but rather expanding in all dimensions, to include what Grace Aimoto explains as interiority.

Photo by Anna Mircea on Unsplash

Trees grow in concentric rings, not in straight lines. Each ring holds memory, climate, conditions; a record of Kairos that tells us the depth of the ecosystem’s story far better than simply counting the number of rings for the chronological record.

Leadership can be imagined the same way, concentric and related acts of relation rooted to place and memory.

So let us as leaders shift from measuring time, to participating in it.
Let us feel the weight of our humanity, and bear it together.
Let us embrace this return to right relation rather than fear its enormity.

If you had rings like a tree, what would they say about how you have lived your live thus far, and how you’ve led?

Until next time,

Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Available for iOS and Android

Snow's coming and the bread won't rise.

Chris Fawthrop — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:45:34 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Where did November go? I must have only blinked once or twice, but I can hardly believe how quickly the month went by.

A quick reminder that tomorrows (Friday, Dec. 5th) Cultivar Coffee Chat livestream will be at 12pm EST. Hope to see you there!

the bread dough should be …. like twice as high by now. Yay for cold weather!

I’m making soup and bread today, it’s quite cold and we are supposed to get snow. I took it a little easier yesterday than I planned (my kid had two appointments), really almost the entire week, turns out, I needed a break from the holiday break.

But the extended pause has given me time to really sit with myself, push back against the drive for productivity. Examine what actual productivity looks like.

I think that, like putting a soup together, everything can’t go all in at once. You put different ingredients and seasonings in at different times, and you get different impacts.

Sure, you can use a recipe. But that will always be someone else’s set of instructions, there won’t be anything that makes it yours. Your touch won’t be felt, but the soup (or whatever you are making) will still be good.

There is a time for movement, and a time for rest. As I reflect on my own journey of the past six months to a year or so, the contradiction of that statement becomes clearer, along with the truth.

Time, while measured chronologically, is remembered kairotically.

Kairos: time that goes by feeling, not counting.

The moment an extra pinch of pepper makes the soup just right. The flash of insight that comes while going for a walk. The connections that form from sitting in stillness and just being.

Events, struggles, wins, losses all get stored in our brain because of the impact felt rather than the time and place, though time and place may be a part of it.

When I’ve mentioned how it seems time is just flying by, I often get told “well, that happens as you get older,” (often by older people), but I wonder if it is isn’t because we are sequentially getting older, but rather our external and visible impacts become less frequent.

We (broadly speaking) have a tendency perceive ourselves as less important, because we do not feel our impact on the world in the same way we did when we were young, or full of exuberance for a new project that will “change the world.” But feelings of any kind are not sustainable.

I’ve had a tremendous amount of internal growth the past six months, really only known to me, and felt by others. But it isn’t explicitly visible.

And at the end of this long push, I’m realizing that at times of movement, part of me is resting, and at times of rest, part of me is moving. It’s not a simple binary, an on or off. But what many others see as just movement, or just rest, is all in interconnected relation with one another. We need the space in between them. That time of rest is just as important.

Maybe it’s equatable to sleep mode on a computer, background processes keeping programs moving and functioning.

Maybe it’s more like plants continuing to live in winter, storing up energy and potential for when the conditions are right for growth.

Point being, even when you aren’t “moving,” there is still movement. But is felt in impact, not seen in seconds.

How would you describe your time spent honing skills, capacity, and impact, if not chronologically, and out of corporate bounds?

Maybe something along the lines of:

“While working in pattern recognition, maintenance, and disruption across multiple disciplines, I’ve positively empowered over two dozen people to realize their own leadership potential and step into their work with a greater sense of self.”

While true, that’s honestly vague as shit.

Maybe we’ve become so conditioned to seeing things in terms of measurement over impact, that on the surface, that statement doesn’t necessarily tell you much. It doesn’t tell you how, whether it was in an individual or group setting. Was it free mentorship during unemployment, or as part of a 9-5? It doesn’t say if I did that over 5 years or 15, or what level of leadership it was at.

But this conditioning ties into something else I’ve been discussing with friends lately - the thought that as a society we are curious and seek knowledge not to understand, but to accumulate, own, and claim mastery over.

And if we took this relational, kairotic lens beyond ourselves but below the ecosystemic level, what would it mean for how we shape systems and structures, like our teams, our orgs, our work cultures?

What would it look like if, instead of measuring our performance by indicators and accumulation of points, we measured by impact felt to others, understood through curiosity of relation rather that certainty of measurement?

What if instead of being curious about how to optimize performance and claim mastery over body and mind, we were curious about how to make sure employees, employer, and culture were all in the right relation to each other?

The soup is done, but the bread didn’t rise in time to have it with dinner. It rested when it needed to, moved when it wanted to. It still rose to the occasion, just not on the timeline I set.

But because of it doing it’s own thing, that late-night fresh bread snack is gonna be felt and remembered way longer than if it had been ready to go when the soup was.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

- Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Present in Every Moment

Chris Fawthrop — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:30:40 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Some notes before I take the next few days off for the holiday:

Community Tier pricing for Kizuna’s fall 2025 OpenArc, a four-week sequence of asynchronous, cross-disciplinary provocations exploring the question of:

“How do we co-create authenticity in the liminal space between self and collective across scales and contexts?”

Closes tonight, November 26, 11:59PM PT / 2:59AM ET

All Other Tier pricing closes November 28, 5PM ET / 2PM PT

Request Entry here

There will be no Cultivar Coffee Chat this week, I’ll see you Friday, Dec 5th, time to be determined.

Despite not being a vegetarian anymore, I have a great love for tofu, as it was part of the last meal I shared with my father, an experience that while painful, I am grateful for as it ultimately deepened my capacity for empathy and connection with others. Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

I know many households that perform some sense of thanks-giving ritual in observance of Thanksgiving each year, usually at the dinner table.

It’s been a common practice in my gatherings over time, and yet this year, I find I’m not moved to express thanks, but something simultaneously broader and more profound.

Gratitude.

With all the thinking and work I’ve done recently on relational leadership versus transactional leadership, I find myself less directly thankful for any one specific thing, instead feeling a much deeper sense of appreciation for my life, circumstances, opportunities, and challenges.

My successes and my losses.
The doors I have chosen to close, and those I have chose to open.
The increasingly aligned and close-knit people I connect with.
The direct and systemic sacrifice(s) others have made for me to have the privilege of writing this to you now.
The food, health, and security of my family.

I think gratitude stems from realizing just how interconnected and related we all are, from understanding the web of relations that span distance, time, language, and identities.

In the past, when I would give thanks, I don’t know that I necessarily felt it, deep in my heart.

I might list off or journal the things I knew I should be thankful for not that it didn’t mean something to me; I now see that my framing was shaped by a sense of isolation and disconnect. I thought I existed independently of the things I was giving thanks for.

These days, I realize I exist because of the things I give thanks for, and those I don’t.

And that realization is my definition of gratitude.

From my table to yours,

- Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Living Connections: Authentic Leadership As A Relational Practice - OpenArc

Chris Fawthrop — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:05:39 GMT

So many of us know something’s off. We feel it in our teams, our timelines, our mornings.

We feel it in how we rise in the morning and settle in the evening.

The way we lead no longer holds collective trust, and often harms us.

Our inherited modes of leadership are failing, failing to provide basic security and meaning while extracting more from us and our ecosystems than ever before.

The ways in which we have understood and developed leaders enforce separation, control, and value at a time when connection, reciprocity, and the embodiment of shared and collective agency are more than desired; they are critical to our future.

𝗜𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝘁, 𝙞𝙩 𝙞𝙨.

Leadership is a relational stance that sits in the liminal space between the individual and the collective, the imperfect and impermanent.

In order to lead others, in order to shape culture towards a more regenerative and equitable future, we must understand that we are not just connected to the workplace, environment, and people, but in relation with them.

𝗪𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝘀.

We may understand that we don’t exist in a vacuum or in isolation from each other, but comprehension doesn’t always give us the tools or path to navigate towards what we can envision for the future.

Even if we have the tools, changing culture in a small, controlled environment doesn’t always feel as though it can have systemic effects.

That’s an illusion, one that keeps leaders from pushing the bounds of what their impact can be.

To break the illusion, you need more than vision; you need resolve and curiosity as well.

The next leg of Kizuna’s Open Encounters journey considers what happens when these understandings meet the cultural narratives, communal dynamics, and more-than-human contexts that give them weight and form.

The answers aren’t mine alone to create, so I’d like you to join me in 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗿𝗰, a four-week, asynchronous exploration of cross-disciplinary provocations.

Each week introduces a distinct lens for participants to engage in creative and layered modes of response with the question of:

“𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗰𝗼-𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁𝘀?”

OpenArc scales that relational understanding, from individual to collective, by bringing the systemic and cultural dimensions of leadership into focus, examining co-creation and shared responsibility as essential practices.

If you’re curious, if you’re uncertain, if you’re searching for something you can’t quite name, you belong in this arc.

Request Entry here

Share this event with another emergent and creative thinker!

🔸𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗧𝗶𝗲𝗿 pricing closes November 26, 11:59PM PT / 2:59AM ET🔸

🔸𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗶𝗲𝗿 pricing closes November 28, 5PM ET / 2PM PT🔸

I hope to see you there,

Chris

Welcome to this space, and thank you for your presence!

The Morning Belongs to All

Chris Fawthrop — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:52:43 GMT

Hello everyone,

I hope you had a good weekend. Mine got better as it went on; being sick last week held me up from a few things I had wanted to do, but I got them done yesterday, including baking my wife a belated birthday cake (it was an Italian Chocolate Chip Ricotta cake, turned out really nice). I also re-watched The Green Knight, read some poetry, and other mentally rejuvenating activities.

What did you do for yourself these past few days?

A quick reminder that entry for Kizuna’s fall 2025 OpenArc pathway will close November 26th for Community Tier Pricing, November 28th for all other tiers. Details and links found at the end of this newsletter.

“Myth,” Ishihara Yoshirō, 1915-1977

If you are on the Substack App, you might have seen the poem I posted as a note last night, from Ishihara Yoshirō entitled Myth, with a particular line highlighted:

”In any case, before the morning was a morning, we ourselves had to be a morning. We did not wait single-mindedly for our last years, we were not promised a next generation.”

I think it’s quite easy to assume tomorrow will come, much in the same form and fashion that today arrived, and in that expectation, we become complacent.

Whether through a positive or negative outlook, the comfort of repetition is a drug humanity craves as much as sugar.

The daily rituals of habit keep us focused, but not always aware. They can impede our ability to perceive new ways of being, while still existing as our authentic selves.

The cost of surrendered mornings is not just our own to bear, but erodes possibility for those who haven’t yet arrived.

We allow the doors to days of futures past be closed off because we wanted to cross one threshold repeatedly and endlessly. This pattern was modeled and conditioned into many of us from an early age through the societal pipelines that lead from school to the limited options such as college, prison, blue-collar work, white-collar work, military service, etc.

Many of us have allowed our mornings to belong to forces beyond our control. But it does not have to stay that way, which you may have picked up on if you read my newsletters referencing Equilibrium last week, a movie in which the symbolism of awakening to a new, self-actualized morning is clearly shown in the following scene:

I try to read poetry several times a week, because it completely breaks my brain. I’m used to full sentences, topics, words meant to inform or sell me something. Even fiction is supposed to be telling me a story.

But poetry has no such rules, despite the existence of pentameters and writing schemes. It is created to evoke imagination and meaning, but two people can interpret vastly different things from the same piece; that fact makes the art more impactful, not less.

So with the thought of “how did we get into this leadership crisis, this polycrisis,” running amuck in my head, I opened my anthology of Japanese poetry, “From the Country of Eight Islands,” and Yoshirō’s words stuck out to me. Again:

”In any case, before the morning was a morning, we ourselves had to be a morning. We did not wait single-mindedly for our last years, we were not promised a next generation.”

We have to be our own mornings. Not to say the answer is as simple as motivating ourselves to get up each morning, but rather, we are the arbiters of what is consistent in our lives.

We get up every morning, it can be in the same fashion or not. We can have our routines, but, as with relational enmeshment with collective organizations, we can be enmeshed in the comfort of routine itself rather than in the reason for it.

Morning can be a metaphor for beginning anew. But if we are starting anew in the same fashion as the days before, without questioning it, is it really a morning? How can we prevent future pathways from being closed off, not just to ourselves, but also to those we lead?

To whom does the morning, the chance for new thrivings, belong?

I return, again, to the hum beneath it all: leadership as a relation, not a role. As an invitational stance, not a title.

Whether an organization, a community, a military unit, a family, or a country, the right to thrive belongs to everyone in equal and equitable measure.

It’s the leader’s responsibility to steward that web of relations.

There is a certain degree of agency required to see that web and, subsequently, to reclaim sovereignty over our mornings and to pass that agency onto future generations.

The comfort of routine, the preference for enmeshment versus authenticity, inhibits that agency, and most organizational structures actively suppress it. Many leadership development programs certainly don’t propagate agency, individual or collective.

To reclaim our mornings is not just to choose our rituals, but to remember that the morning never arrives alone. It comes with memory, silence, story, and courage.

Sovereignty of agency, then, is not reserved for those in leadership positions, it is never solitary. Because sovereignty is unpredictable. And institutions crave sameness, which is not achieved through authenticity, but enmeshment.

So I encourage you to be your own morning. Be the sunrise that inspires someone to get up and be their own. Be a force-multiplier of agency, and collectively we can break the pipelines and give the next generation tools we never had.

Until next time,

- Chris

Kizuna fall 2025 OpenEncounters:

If the concepts I’ve been discussing lately have your curiosity peaked, I invite you want to join us in the next leg of the journey through OpenArc, where over a four-week sequence of cross-disciplinary provocations, we will explore the question of:

“How do we co-create authenticity in the liminal space between self and collective across scales and contexts?”

While OpenThread broadened our perception of authenticity within ourselves and in relation to others, OpenArc considers what happens when these understandings meet the cultural narratives, communal dynamics, and more-than-human contexts that give them weight and form.

Community Tier pricing closes November 26, 11:59PM PT / 2:59AM ET

All Other Tier pricing closes November 28, 5PM ET / 2PM PT

Request Entry here

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

I assume you dream?

Chris Fawthrop — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:12:02 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Yesterday I brought up the concepts of relational enmeshment and relational authenticity, which after a few conversations and dms, I realized I might need to spend a bit more time on. I’m sick, so I’ll do the best I can - feel free to comment if something need a bit more clarification.

https://lozierinstitute.org/movie-reviews/equilibrium-2002/

Here’s my quick definitions:

Relational authenticity*: the understanding of one’s authentic self as not as isolated and separate from the world, developed internally, but rather perceiving and understanding ourselves as being formed in relation to the environment and entities around us. The world shapes us, and we in turn shape the world.

*I inherently see authenticity as relational.

Relational enmeshment: the sense of self that forms when we have no concept of self outside the environment and entities around us; a distinct lack of what Grace Aimoto explains as interiority, we try to fill by defining ourselves solely by labels and cultural norms.

I chose the film Equilibrium to represent these concepts yesterday for my graphics because of the difference between the characters of Partridge and Preston. It’s a favorite of mine, complete with the color palette, musical score, and and action you’d recognize from other franchises of the era such as The Matrix or Underworld. It explores themes of authenticity, connection, authoritarianism, individuality vs collective, resistance, and conscience.

Check it out this weekend if you need a suggestion of what to watch; I’ve included the scene I drew one of the gifs from yesterday to give a visual component to what follows, but warning, there is violent death.

Without spoiling the movie too much, through exposing himself to new experiences, art, etc. that is outside of his comfort zone and what is allowed by society, Partridge comes to understand himself better, his interiority not only expands, but he ultimately shows up in the world as his authentic self.

The experience in turn affects Preston, who initially urges Partridge to stay enmeshed in their external, labeled conceptions of self - they are Grammaton Clerics, law enforcement officers of the dystopian future city-state of Libria. What Partridge is doing, is not what they do.

Ultimately because of Partridge’s actions however, Preston comes to understand himself better, realizes the massive internal void he has been reinforcing over the years. He begins to seek realness, begins to question his role not just in his own enmeshment, but the forced enmeshment of others.

On a call recently with a junior leader (A) we were discussing the particulars of a situation they were facing regarding the actions of a peer (B) that was potentially trust breaking to their subordinates but trust-forming to their superiors because the issue lay at the intersection of policy and morale.

The plan of action of A to foster more trust with their subordinates was accompanied by a thought out logic so if a higher leader questioned them, they would be able to explain their actions and show forward thinking alignment with long term responsibilities.

After this plan had been undertaken it was derailed by B, who when confronted by A made it clear he was causing discomfort to their subordinates because it amused them.

Now, certain aspects of that situation aside, I pushed further since we had been talking about relational enmeshment (A had been struggling a bit), so I asked them to tell me whether they thought B was being their authentic self or displaying enmeshment, and why.

The conclusion was that B was very insecure, and had taken a position with this organization specifically to have the power to act in this manner with a wide degree of impunity. B technically was a model leader in following policy to the letter, but wasn’t done out of a sense of it being the right thing, but rather a self serving thing.

Insecurity can be a marker of inauthenticity, or at least indicate one doesn’t want to admit their weaknesses. But in this case - B felt they didn’t have to show weakness - because they were in charge. They enmeshed their sense of self to the organization, the role, the label, because they did not take the time to develop their own sense of self.

A, on the other hand, has done extensive self-examination and work. They joined the organization because it aligned with their views and lifestyle. When this situation arose, they questioned the policy because it conflicted with the long-term capabilities they needed to develop, which required absolute trust in A as a leader; they could do this because they had a sense of self that existed in relational alignment, not enmeshment, with the organization as a whole.

People can tell when their leaders are to be trusted, and when not. Typically, it comes down to how they are treated, but also consistency in that realm. Show up for your people as you, and not just a node of the organization, and it will be not only felt but reciprocated.

Who would you trust more, a leader who is authentic, or enmeshed?

Kizuna fall 2025 OpenEncounters:

“How do we co-create authenticity in the liminal space between self and collective across scales and contexts?”

Community Tier pricing closes November 26, 11:59PM PT / 2:59AM ET

All Other Tier pricing closes November 28, 5PM ET / 2PM PT

Request Entry here

I’ll see you next Friday,

- Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Available for iOS and Android

Are you authentic, or enmeshed?

Chris Fawthrop — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:06:52 GMT

Hello Everyone,

The participants of Kizuna’s fall 2025 OpenThread untangled some fascinating ways of understanding authenticity and leadership, it was an enriching experience that helped me understand more of the tangles that need unraveling.

After Tuesday’s session, I find myself wrestling with a particular question:

A reminder, that this weeks Cultivar Coffee Chat livestream, will be on Friday, 11.21.2025, at 11:00 AM EST. Subscribe for notification!

Sean Bean and Christian Bale in Equilibrium (2002) (kudos if you comment why you think I chose this movie for the thumbnail)

How does one discern between relational authenticity and relational enmeshment?

I may have to host a roundtable discussion on this in the future.

My first thought, is that we have to be fully aware of ourselves, even if we may not understand ourselves completely, or feel as though we belong in a place and time.

If our sense of Self vanishes within relation, rather than finding form through it, perhaps we are enmeshed rather than in resonance.

https://trailers.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/28db61bc-0da8-40ae-8514-e240269100d0/gif

Perhaps we must look at this question from less of a analytical standpoint, and more of an somatic one. How does authenticity within a group setting feel versus enmeshment in the same?

Have you ever decided to throw a get-together with friends that have never met, or been put in charge of a group project where no one has ever worked together before?

What makes those types of gatherings impactful (in a good way) is setting the space for people to show up and be authentically themselves, and to have the freedom to engage with others, absent fear of being seen as not belonging in a place they may have had a choice as to whether or not they came.

When people feel as thought they have no choice but to come, even at the expense of their authentic self, where engagement or being part of the “in” group is the concern, and all of these are higher in importance than what is authentic … that is enmeshment.

Once that space is opened, though, it’s a group effort to steward these new relations towards an experience that resonates through empowerment, brings people back without coercion, encourages others to join without falsehoods, but also, to carry this new perception of self across many thresholds - to resist enmeshment.

https://tenor.com/view/a-heavy-cost-i-pay-it-gladly-sean-bean-equilibrium-gif-13368725658338248877

Yesterday, I was moved by the resonance of feeling in right relation to fellow leaders and emergent thinkers as the Invited Voice for Kizuna’s fall 2025 OpenThread session.

Both during and after collectively exploring the question of “How does our understanding of authentic leadership shift when we reframe it from a cultivated inner trait to a relational conversation between entities,” it was such an enriching and rewarding sight to see the participants find new angles of understanding themselves, new depths and contexts with which to shape their organizational ecosystems.

The thing that resonated the most with me is seeing the same willingness in others that I strive for in myself: to sit in complexity, to resist stagnation of mind and perspective, and to share the joy of exploring the understanding of Self.

That energy is unmatched, and when attuned together, allows for separate horizons to join together.

And still, I wonder...

What parts of us are braided too tightly to see, so tightly they constrict us individually and collectively. Is the recognizing of enmeshment something a call to be more rigid, or to loosen?

Kizuna fall 2025 OpenEncounters:

If you want to join us in the next leg of the journey, I invite you to OpenArc, where over a four-week sequence of cross-disciplinary provocations, we will explore the question of:

“How do we co-create authenticity in the liminal space between self and collective across scales and contexts?”

Community Tier pricing closes November 26, 11:59PM PT / 2:59AM ET

All Other Tier pricing closes November 28, 5PM ET / 2PM PT

Request Entry here

I’ll see you tomorrow,

- Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Social Agoraphobia

Chris Fawthrop — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 03:10:07 GMT

Hello Everyone,

It’s Friday, and what a week it has been.

aurora borealis the other night, taken just a few feet outside my door

A very special thank you to the new and returning subscribers who tuned into the live today. It seems 12PM EST might be a more accessible time for people to tune in - let me know if this is the case!

I mentioned to some friends this week and also on the live today that my experiences on social media (professionally speaking) recently have been akin to stepping out from a cave into a vast open plain and trying to decide whether or not I have agoraphobia.

In actuality, I think what has struck me is how significant I am while simultaneously understanding how completely insignificant I am; and how absolutely wonderful that is.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/8f6f1101-ba05-4307-aae3-1b33a9e53a98/gif

Much of my approach to leadership guidance throughout the years has followed a path reliant on perceiving, explaining, and influencing the dynamics of culture and understanding to facilitate the empowerment of individuals.

Likely embedded within me from my time in the military, I know that teams, organizations, and collectives cannot achieve their goals if the individuals that comprise the team aren’t supported in earnest.

Having been on the individual contributor side of course, I also recognize the sense of power that comes from collective belonging and action. I wouldn’t say it’s intoxicating for me, but humanity’s natural tendency to conform to belong can’t be ignored, and it’s one of the hallmarks of military training.

Tactical makeup, for when you need to mask your masking while masking.

The issue I find, and this goes for military units, startups, and organizations with a certain culture, is that at some point, belonging to the collective, running off that energy, becomes more limiting and disempowering to the individual, because the self is subsumed.

The self isn’t understood relationally in these cases, but transactionally.

I am in the Army, so I am a soldier.
I’m building an app, so I’m a founder.
I am in a leadership role, so I have to act like a leader.

While there is an element of truth to these statements, it’s too easy to let soldier, founder, leader completely define us; but in allowing that to happen, we inhabit the same plane of existence as every other soldier, founder, and leader.

Authenticity begins to become a performative aesthetic. Turtlenecks for founders, Grunt Style t-shirts for veterans. When everyone is the same, the distinct lack of creative interpretation and expression of the world becomes a comfort we willingly sacrifice for.

Maybe we have a quirk (I do all these things).

“I write poetry.”
“I build legos.”
“I bake on the weekends.”

As if that little drop of difference makes a difference.

We can only be as authentic as we have the agency and privilege to be in the moment.

6 months ago I couldn’t have handled the week I was handed; my son’s babysitter was out sick the entire week, leaving me to network, market, and prep for Kizuna’s fall 2025 Open Encounters next Tuesday on about four hours of sleep leach night, joints and injuries screaming from the cold snap brought by the winter winds.

It almost felt a repeat of when I tried to launch Cultivar last year, and my family’s original childcare situation fell through; and Tuesday morning I found myself questioning if I could handle things if the effort I’d put in for so many months collapsed under the weight of overwhelm.

If I had stayed in the comfort of the cave of conformity, I certainly would have been crushed. There wasn’t much room to maneuver in there despite it being familiar and bounded.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/7281557@N03/11516702483/

“I’m a leadership coach who uses nature and hiking metaphors.”

I knew how to operate in the cave, I knew my boundaries. I felt I could survive outside it, but wasn’t sure.

But I haven’t stayed in the cave of corporate performativity. Throughout the year I’ve been slowly testing the entrance, ducking in and out when it felt safe.

Then, the cave started to collapse, not just on me, but on others as well. Socio-economic landslides, fissures separating people from their foundations.

I had to leave the cave to make room for others to do the same if they chose. I had to leave to simply breathe.

So, I stepped out a few weeks ago. I started talking about my animistic lens of leadership outside of private dms and coffee chats.

I even updated my LinkedIn bio to more accurately reflect what I do:

if you want to connect on that platform, hit me up: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisfawthrop/

Once I fully crossed that threshold, though, there was no turning back. Apart from there being no room due to the poly crisis cave-in, there’s no way I’d be willing and able to contort myself back into fitting that mold.

The first week, wasn’t bad. I continued to publish my content, connecting with people here and there. I stayed around the cave entrance.

I started to notice though, that it wasn’t so terrifying after all. I’d talk with someone, and they’d point me in a direction. Follow it, and I’d run into a person with similar ideas to mine. That’s when it started to get a bit unnerving.

The second week the world started opening up at a faster rate than I could have ever expected. New connections, new communities, new events, new invitations to collaborate. Freedom to maneuver in whatever ways I could imagine, and wouldn’t never have imagined had I not seen the world beyond conformity.

Outside of the cave, the people aren’t as worried about conformity, and the simple fact that you’ve made the attempt to leave is significant; it makes you stand out to each other. And yet ….

There are no boundaries outside the cave of conformity. No protection either, for that matter.

Call it social agoraphobia, call it imposter syndrome, I think both are likely inaccurate.

I think what I’m actually feeling, is what its like to actually stand in myself, authentically, with no separation or performativity; understanding that the full expression of self is found in connecting with the world around in the ways that make you feel alive.

I hope I can keep this ember burning for some time.

If you are interested in joining me and others emergent thinkers seeking new paths of leadership, I invite you to join me at Kizuna’s fall 2025 Open Encounters pathway next Tuesday, November 18th, at 12PM EST / 9AM PST, to collectively explore the question:
“How does our understanding of authentic leadership change when we reframe it from a cultivated inner trait to a relational conversation between entities?”
Request Entry here
Community Tier pricing closes Saturday (tomorrow), 11/15, 11:59 PM PST/ (11/16, 2:59 AM EST). All other tiers close Sunday, 11/16, 5PM EST / 2PM PST

I hope to see you there, if not, I’ll see you next Friday.

Until then,

Chris

Seed Catalog:

I haven’t had much time to forage for the moments of perspective and perception I like to give you in abundance, but I did come across this one video and creator this week that is both pertinent and a complete vibe. I hope you enjoy, and I’d strongly recommend checking out more of their work:

*edit from 12/03/2025 - I’m so excited to share the news that the creator, is now on Substack as well as YouTube and Instagram! If you are a free subscriber, you get the transcripts from their videos, if paid you get access to private essays and more, regardless of tier, please go support! I’ve continued to watch their videos and am in awe of the depth, perspective, and authenticity that resonant with so much of what is important to me.

The content also hits home for my wife, who is an Art Therapist, so for her birthday this month I ended up getting her this poster Val created.

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Available for iOS and Android

Challenging Winds Scatter Seeds

Chris Fawthrop — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 01:57:14 GMT

Hello Everyone,

This has been a most unusual week, one with winds of challenge blowing fiercely - both through my holler as the winter makes its way closer, and through my life.

Unexpected debris of medical emergencies creating time obstacles were knocked onto my path.

The sting of potentially being under prepared for the leg of the journey I’m on bites at my face.

But seeds of support and encouragement blow in on those same winds.

A reminder that tomorrow’s Coffee Chat livestream will be at 12 PM EST instead of the usual time. I hope to see you there.

Kizuna Open Encounters fall 2025

Living Connections: Authentic Leadership as a Relational Practice

I invite you join me and other emerging thinkers, creative practitioners, and those seeking new forms of leadership, on 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗡𝗼𝘃. 𝟭𝟴𝘁𝗵, 𝟭𝟮 𝗣𝗠 𝗘𝗦𝗧 / 𝟵𝗔𝗠 𝗣𝗦𝗧 at Kizuna’s fall 2025 Open Encounters pathway, to collectively explore the question:

“How does our understanding of authentic leadership change when we reframe it from a cultivated inner trait to a relational conversation between entities?”

𝗥𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 here

There was a time, when I would have avoided the wind of life - and not that long ago. But the challenges I’ve faced this week are ones I have faced before, and now realize many others have faced just as, if not more often, and in far greater extremes.

This week, is the first time in a long time I’ve been able to hold “I got this” in one hand and “I don’t know if I got this” in the other; all the while understanding that both are true, and that both require a firm grasp to let the winds actually pull me forward.

The interesting part to me is that I don’t think I would have been able to hold both truths simultaneously even a year ago. A year ago, I was still trying to fit my leadership guidance approach into neat little boxes, define it before I even fully understood it.

That’s one of the terrible crimes of this age, definition preceding understanding.

The moment we label something we enclose it, and limit our ability to perceive it’s potential to evolve. It can still grow, yes. but in our perception of it only within the prescribed boundaries.

This subsequently limits our understanding of an entities agency and true potential, whether it be an individual, a company, a terrorist network, or national sentiment.

When we do this to ourselves by holding onto titles and roles before capabilities and perspectives, we limit our own potential.

I think started to realize the importance of seeing organizational and systemic dynamics back when I was studying insurgencies, and doing regional collapsing state analysis for the Conflict and Stabilization Operations Bureau. I hadn’t quite made the connection to the individual contributor or leader yet, but it was just barely there underneath the surface.

This dude thought he had all the answers.

The same dynamics were visible in my brief stint in the corporate world, but the ethics were (at the time) even worse than the ones I had worked with before. But the link from individual to culture and systems began to emerge in my mind.

It wasn’t until I dove into my interest in mythology and belief systems, though, that I started to see things as dyadic rather than binary, relational versus transactional.

But apply animism to corporate settings? I’d be laughed out of a board room, in similar fashion to my asserting to my thesis chair that insurgency tactics could be applied in global power dynamics between countries.

The applicability of the idea didn’t fit the definition of the industry context, even if whomever I was speaking to could understand it the vague concept.

So, I came up with different ways to coach and develop leaders absent the vernacular. Something became lost in translation because of it.

The entire time, I only felt like I knew what I was doing part of the time, but simultaneously, if I didn’t feel like I was using the appropriate language - whether to explain my philosophy or to fit into corpo speak - well then I must be an imposter.

You’ve heard enough from me in the past few weeks about authenticity being relational - but this is my personal example of it.

This was my binary life, despite nearly everyone I came in contact with finding truth in my perspective.

Since launching Cultivar, building-in-public and speaking on organizational dynamics from an animistic perspective, I’ve connected and talked with so many incredible people who actually understand not just the applicability, but the why, and more than that, are open to challenging the models of leadership we’ve been handed by those before us.

I’m not sure if it’s because the fractures in the economy, society, and job market are helping people return to a more connective, empathy driven perspective, or if “culture is alive” is just a good metaphor for systems thinking equaling corporate animism.

The encouragement, support, and opportunity to grow, and show you my perspective on how we can change the way we understand leadership and culture for the better is the biggest gift I could hope for from all of you.

By trusting in others, and myself to practice what I preach, by standing in my authentic self in relation to the authenticity of others, I’m able to meet these winds head on and use them to go past enclosure, taking the seeds of inspiration to scatter around the world.

So thank you.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

We Don't Talk About Authenticity (no, no no)

Chris Fawthrop — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:07:16 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I’m busy prepping for next Tuesday’s Open Encounter (details below in case you missed the newsletter on Monday), so just some quick thoughts today.

Note: My toddler has an appointment, so this Friday’s (11.14.2025) Coffee Chat livestream will be moved from it’s usual time to 12 PM EST. People drink coffee at lunchtime, right?

Authenticity is a topic that was going around a lot more earlier this year, and it’s still being discussed, but not as explicitly, or “trendily.” 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗜 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝘁.

Many envision authenticity, or the practice of being authentic as individuals and leaders, as being empowering, or something that feels good.

Or perhaps the opposite - that it feels too scary to be your authentic self, you might get hurt.

Either way, the interpretation is focused on the self, especially now, when multiple crises of leadership, social cohesion, and economic uncertainty are taking place.

Some are desperate for meaning, authenticity, and connection, yet putting on masks of survival once again. It’s hard not to do so myself.

The reality of whether you will be inspired or hurt lies somewhere in the middle, as does authenticity itself. It can be empowering and terrifying at the same point in time.

𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝘁.

🔸You recognize it in a hand-carved door frame.
🔸You see it in the quiet smile of someone receiving a gift.
🔸You hear it murmur through a concert crowd when 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 song is played
🔸You sense it when someone has your back despite all the odds.

Authenticity is not strictly an internal aspect of ourselves.
Not something to be developed, harnessed, and displayed.

What we think of as authenticity more often than not, is taste, preference, or discernment.

Authenticity is an intangible entity that lives in the liminal space between things.

Authenticity is co-created.
Authenticity is relational.
Something to be cultivated, explored, and responded to.

𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘂𝗽 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲.

https://gifsec.com/encanto-gifs/

This theme is fairly evident if you’ve seen the movie Encanto1 (highly recommend), where it is explored through the Madrigal family’s attempts to maintain a perfect facade rather than embracing their true, unique selves: flaws and all.

The main character, Mirabel, doesn’t appear to have the same gifted qualities her family does, and this serves as a more-than-teenage-angst challenge, which ultimately prompts the family to confront generational trauma and the pressure to be more than they are.

Mirabel’s uncle, Bruno, goes into hiding to protect her because he is more afraid of her getting blamed and hurt than his own welfare (or facing his family?), but his lack of presence in her childhood leaves a void and sense of isolation that could have been bridged if he had stayed and been a supportive role model.

Ultimately, the events of the movie lead the family to realize that their true self-worth and strength as a community lie in being their authentic selves and connecting vulnerably with one another, lessons that go beyond family dynamics and touch on the inter-generational leadership trauma that has led to the ongoing crisis of leadership.

If you are interested in grappling with this relational understanding of authenticity more, I invite you join me and other emerging thinkers, creative practitioners, and those seeking new forms of leadership, on 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗡𝗼𝘃. 𝟭𝟴𝘁𝗵, 𝟭𝟮 𝗣𝗠 𝗘𝗦𝗧 / 𝟵𝗔𝗠 𝗣𝗦𝗧 at Kizuna’s fall 2025 Open Encounters pathway, to collectively explore the question:

“How does our understanding of authentic leadership change when we reframe it from a cultivated inner trait to a relational conversation between entities?”

I encourage everyone to apply for Community Tier pricing before the deadline passes.

𝗥𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 here

𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘛𝘪𝘦𝘳 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘨:

🔸Application Only

🔸Will close Saturday, 11.15.2025, 11:59PM PST (11.16.2025 2:59 EST).

𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘖𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘛𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘴:

🔸Open until Sunday, 11.16.2025, 5PM EST/2PM PST

I hope to see you there!

Until next time,

- Chris

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

thumbnail photo taken from https://d23.com/why-everyone-is-talking-about-bruno-from-encanto/

Living Connections: Authentic Leadership as Relational Practice

Chris Fawthrop — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:08:58 GMT

Hello Everyone,

As promised, I have some news I’m very excited to share with you today. I’ve been hinting at some events scheduled for later this year, and everything is now ready for the announcement.

I am the Invited Voice for Kizuna’s fall 2025 Open Encounters pathway, taking place virtually, November 18th through December 30th!

Kizuna is a cultural-philosophical house, the world’s first ecosystem for Existential Leadership™; a fluid ecosystem of study, composition, experiences, and encounters focused on re-grounding leadership, creativity, and culture in the discipline of Kizuna Existential Literacy™.

It’s an honor and I am humbled to be a part of this ecosystem that spans philosophy, art, ecology, pedagogy, and leadership through an original cross-disciplinary and lateral approach in order to sustain a living world and a re-imagined future.

As you read in my last newsletter, I work in leadership ecology guiding leaders through an animistic lens.

Animistic Lens Applied to Leadership:

Animism, as a worldview, is older and wider than any single lineage or model of leadership. It holds that the world is alive and in relation. Meaning emerges between beings, not imposed by or on them, something that many people in the workforce appear to be realizing.

It allows us to remember that systems, whether rivers or organizations, are not machines but living beings.
The lens can be personal, constructed, or revived, available to all who relate ethically to each other and the world around.
It is a pathway to deconstruct assumptions and identities that do not allow our full humanity to flourish.
It helps us grow and understand our position in ecosystems without centering ourselves in them.

I’ve been exploring and nurturing this animistic lens of leadership for many years, and the founder of Kizuna, Grace Aimoto, has been generous enough to offer the space for me to bring my approach to a wider collective of like-minded leaders seeking to address the fractures in our organizational and societal compacts between leaders and their people.

This is exciting for me personally, as this will be my first opportunity outside of a 1:1 setting to offer this lens as a way to collaboratively understand how leaders shape meaning and create thriving cultures, a truly animistic dialogue that will benefit from the diversity of perspectives that matches that of the world we live in.

For me, many of the conversations surrounding leadership development have grown stale, repetitive, and performative, with everyone being on the same page about the challenges we face yet unable or unwilling to come up with new paths forward.

That is why I chose the questions you’ll see in the information below. In order to envision new ways of leading and understanding, we must start with our own view of the world, ourselves, and how we relate to it.

Open Encounters is Kizuna’s pathway for live inquiry, and this season, Kizuna examines leadership as a continuously shifting, living principle.

We invite you to engage with fellow emerging thinkers, creative practitioners, and those navigating new forms of leadership to an exploration through two modalities that can be engaged with separately or together:

OpenThread is a live experience (Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, at 12 PM EST, 9 AM PT). In this catalytic, 90-minute dialogic session, we will explore the question:

How does our understanding of authentic leadership change when we reframe it from a cultivated inner trait to a relational conversation between entities?

OpenArc is a sustained, cross-disciplinary, and asynchronous. The Encounter I am an Invited Voice for will be taking place between December 2nd and 30th. OpenArc extends the conversation by introducing a second question for participants to engage with through layered modes of creative response:

How do we co-create authenticity in the liminal space between self and collective across scales and contexts?

I encourage you to experience the full Encounter, which is the most immersive pathway to engage with the question of authenticity at the level of interconnection, understanding, and shared agency between leaders and collectives.

Community Tier Pricing:

Application Only.
Will close Saturday, November 15th, at 11:59PM PST (Sunday, November 16 at 2:59AM EST)

All Other Tiers:

Open until Sunday November 16th, 5PM EST, 2PM PST

You can learn more and Request Entry here, and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Hope to see you there,

Chris

Welcome to this space, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Cultivar Leadership Solutions, 2025

Changing How We Conceptualize Leadership

Chris Fawthrop — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 21:11:15 GMT

Hello Everyone,

On this first Friday here in Appalachia, the world around me feels real, and in a way I haven’t experienced in many years. The last time I remember it being this chilly, this level of autumnal bluster, the kind that makes you want to drink hot beverages with friends and relax around a fire, was nearly 15 years ago.

And while the world outside of my little holler seems chaotic, within, it just seems … to exist. To be. Coyote howl at night while the squirrels scurry in the day, both looking for food as winter approaches. Leaves fall, and wind scatters their poems around the mountains.

Photo by Harold Wainwright on Unsplash

Maybe it’s the much smaller concentration of humanity amidst the abundance of life within the holler , or perhaps it’s the same circumstances just reminding me of how intertwined humanity and nature are. The relation between them is dyadic rather than binary, meaning that we are in relation to rather than opposition to the world around us.

It’s a relevant point to our societal fractures right now, a gift that the seasonal dance of the earth upon it’s axis hasn’t shown me before in a way I understood.

I’m seeing a shift in the online spaces I inhabit, where people are realizing that many individuals in leadership positions, whether as individuals or as manifestations of systemic architectures, view themselves in opposition to others rather than in relation with others.

Opposition to competition.
To humanitarian and ecological responsibility.
To anything that doesn’t affirm their own ego

This singular way of perceiving what a leader is supposed to do is being challenged by people collectively realizing how enclosed and isolated they have become from one another.

Realizing that despite all the successes and accolades they may have racked up, the performativity of achievement rots us from the inside out absent a place that provides meaning, a community that provides belonging.

And as I see these ripples emanating from the rocks falling from the crumbling manor house, I’m at the most hopeful point I’ve been all year. Not because I think “things will be fine,” or “ we “will get back to the way things were.”

Photo by Raymond Kotewicz on Unsplash

Quite the opposite. I think, I hope, that finally enough people are remembering what is important, and how much work needs to be done. Community, empathy, belonging, empowerment. They are all worth the price of individual and collective struggle.

I asked in my piece “Creativity is the New Commons.” “What could be more sacred than what makes us human?” and it was referencing our critical thinking, imagination skills. But those are only fostered when we engage reciprocally with our people and places. Accumulation is just extraction, and over-accumulation strips away the soil that fertilizes new growth.

For a while now, I’ve called myself a Leadership Guide, because I didn’t like the connotation of “coach,” and didn’t accurately feel as though it reflected my ways of collaborating with people. I still feel as though I approach client work in a guiding manner, but the past few months of deep work and exploration have made me realize that what I in fact practice as a discipline, is leadership ecology.

Now, that field isn’t anything new; I’m not the first one to use the natural sciences to better understand organizational dynamics. However, I haven’t come across anyone using the specific lens of animism to engage with leadership in the way that I do.

So, I think it’s fair to say I am at a point now, standing in my values and honoring those who have had an impact on me, where I am reclaiming leadership as a relational and reciprocal practice between living entities in a field of connected systems that have been made to feel inert.

What we now call “leadership” in Western contexts has been cultivated in enclosed frameworks:

where only management of humans matter, and the right humans at that.
where labor defines worth, and only through narrowing yourself can you succeed.
where performative individuality is prized over respectful interdependence.

When land enclosure happened, we did not just lose land, forests, and water. The digital enclosure in process risks us losing knowledge, perspective, and truth at the expense of the natural resources already privatized.

We’ve lost shared meaning-making, kinship, and relational literacy (thank you, Grace, for helping me understand how the word literacy applies to more than reading).

These were once stewarded in collective trust, and held in Commons. Their enclosure bred the ongoing poly-crisis that ultimately is simply one layered “crisis of leadership.”

My writing going forward will reflect an vision to cut down and burn the roots of these enclosures, these mental hedgerows, and show how animism-as-a-lens allows us to engage with organizations and systems as living beings.

Now, if the concept and application of animism to leadership is unclear or muddy, if I need to define anything, I’m hoping you’ll let me know. That said, I have faith in your capacity to learn.

But as a conceptual primer, if something is anthropomorphized in any way, if it influences our actions in any way, we are thinking about it with animistic sensibilities:

If Culture breeds toxicity, that’s a creature with a behavior and drive to procreate.
If Nationalism “pulls” people in, that’s an entity with charisma and promises.
If the power grid is being drained, it’s a being that is overly extracted from.

Animism does not require mystical belief in gods or fairies, but rather relational imagination in order to understand connection.

Photo by Jaida Stewart on Unsplash

For quite some time I’ve been hesitant to directly use animism and the appropriate language for it in corporate or governance settings because of its association with the “other” of pre-Christian and Indigenous knowledge systems, fearing that that the conceptual application would be ridiculed.

So, I sanitized it, used it as metaphors, all to try and work within the system to change the perception of how leadership and leadership development should be viewed.

The problem, as I’ve come to realize, is that when you package a relational epistemology (how we know what we know) in familiar business language (strategy, systems thinking, KPIs), some people will integrate the language without altering the ontology (what is real), the same exhaustive cycles continue.

Leaders will say things like:

“Ah, culture is a living organism, yeah great metaphor.”
“For sure, we need to empower our teams holistically.”
“Authenticity is co-created, absolutely agree.”

But nothing changes in their logic and conception of leadership.

They will use new words to continue the same toxic behaviors:

assign worth based on outputs,
center leaders as visionaries over listeners,
flatten relationships into a resource to be exploited,
Strip meaning from language to avoid moral commitment.

That’s essentially knowledge laundering, and a continuation of extractive appropriation; that’s not something I want to promote.

I can’t do it alone, I need your help in filling in knowledge gaps, keeping my perspective open to the Commons, and staying in right relation to our human ecosystem.

I hope to neither gate keep nor dilute the potential for an animistic lens to help us shift our conceptions of leadership to ones that will enable us to navigate the future.

One where everyone and everything has what they need to thrive, to exercise agency, and to support one another.

So, here are my questions for you to mull over this week:

What if leadership is less about self-definition, and more about relational dispersal?

I’ve said that authenticity is relational, but think about it’s impact on the opposite end of the linkage from you. If you empower someone to be their best self, does that not offer the opportunity for them to do the same to others? Dandelions aren’t always in yellow bloom, there is a point in their growth cycles where they release 2,000 - 15,000 seeds. Our actions as Dandelion Leaders can have impact far beyond what we are capable of knowing or envisioning.

Where does agency go when no one’s watching? Who feeds it? Who starves it?

Think about this from an organizational perspective. What prompts people to do the right thing when no one is looking? If a worker or a leader doesn’t have an audience, what do they choose do? What actions, environments, and mentalities foster ethical action, and mutual accountability?

I’ll have some big news for you on Monday, but until then,

Keep Cultivating Yourself.

Chris

P.S. This is your last reminder to watch 2021 film The Green Knight before I put out a bunch of writing that will most definitely have spoilers.

Seed Catalog:

I got a chance to read a lot of Substack posts this week, so I have quite a few quotes to share with you. It’s been a gift to continue to find new, like minded people, and read resonant words from those I’ve already connected with.

I’m also excited to share that I was the first guess on ’s Don’t Save It, Do It Podcast. You can check it out here:

From ’s article “Seeing Information as a Systems Process.”

From ’s piece “How to Influence Culture (when everyone is trying to win the market)”

From ’s thoughts in “No Longer, Not Yet: Learning to Be Yourself When Everything Keeps Changing”

From ’s article “I Doubt, Therefore We Are Becoming”

From insightful analysis “The Dissolution of the American Caste System”

From my friend ’s examination of croissants and kudzu in “"The Cult of Scale."

From ’s article “What Are You Willing to Lose?”

I found this in ’s thoughts in “From Probable Oblivion to Possible Life of Flourishing.”

Lastly, a good reminder from in her piece “The Real Reason You’re Not Happy.”

Share these insights with those they would resonant with!

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Available for iOS and Android

What Tomatoes Teach Us about Meaning

Chris Fawthrop — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:44:31 GMT

I went out into the trees today to listen, and contextualize the human conversations I’d had earlier in the day through the cloud. The wind translated whispers carried from around the world, and urged me to continue reflecting on the line between resonant and performative authenticity.

It’s so incredibly energizing to find like minded people who see the forest and the trees, and recognize the roots all intertwine in the same soil.

A reminder that I will be going live on Friday, 11.07.2025, at 10am EST.

Join me on the weekly Cultivar Coffee chat to talk about the intersections and relationships between life and leadership, individuals and systems!

Photo by Catherine Heath on Unsplash

Authenticity is relational, we’ve discussed that before. But just as important to know that we understand our Self in relation to Ecosystem, is that we learn to understand how we are in relation. It can be quite easy to misconstrue what is urging us forward.

When I asked you the other week “If your Agency was a creature, how would you nurture it?” I posed the question from an assumption of care towards a creature. Not of ownership, or mastery.

Yet many of our automatic worldviews are one of hierarchy. We own pets. We raise animals for food. We conserve endangered species. There are positive and negative aspects to all these scenarios, but since there are different perspectives on humanity’s role and position in the global ecosystem, I must tweak and expand the question:

If your Agency was a creature, would you care for it? Would you tend its wounds, feed it what it specifically required to be healthy? Would you take it for medical care if necessary?
In raising it, would you shape its behavior through fear, or reward?
Would you attempt to reason with it, or correct harshly it to see desired outcomes?

These questions reflect the interwoven understanding of self that threads between personal, organizational, and systemic ecosystems. And at the heart of it all is authenticity.

If we are being authentic, not “our authentic self”, but authentic, then we are engaging with others in an organic manner, a sustainable manner. One that is natural, and not forced.

Allow me to tell you a story about tomatoes.

The Kinship of Hope

Chef is known, for a dish made of tomatoes. They understand everything about it’s potential; it’s depth of flavor, and the myriad ways it can be accompanied by other ingredients. People come from all over to try the chef’s tomato dishes, and the praise flows endlessly.

But Chef simultaneously craves and hates this attention. Chef is searching for a feeling of wholeness, something not held within since they were little. The tomatoes back then tasted fuller, looked less perfect but more real, and smelled of the safety of their grandma’s garden.

Chef hasn’t returned to that place in many years. In fact other pressures of life informed the decision to stay away. But in absence, a hollow ache grew.

Desperate to reclaim themselves through claiming space in a world where all the tomatoes could be prepared by anyone else in the same manner, Chef became known for their unique, authentic and innovative dishes that no one else could have come up with.

Critics and patrons alike knew when they were eating something made by this chef, and the competition could never come close to replicating their dishes.

But accolade only fosters comfort, and repetition. It does not offer the same meaning found in belonging or kinship.

Chef was fortunate enough to get to a point where they could identify this void, recognize all their actions were in search of something intangible, and that what felt authentic to others was but a reflection of what they themselves wanted to feel.

And so, with the privilege of time and perspective, Chef returned to that patch of earth, Grandma’s garden, now overgrow and wild. Rusted fence poles and thick weeds back dropped a teeming multitude of insects and small critters they didn’t remember seeing before.

Grandma appeared only in the minds eye, and yet her presence was felt amidst the smell of boxwood hedges and late summer song of cicadas, urging chef to tend to the plot as they once had. An act of remembrance over responsibility.

Fingers grasping at roots, eyes tracing the path of vines through wire, Chef felt whole once again, though it was tinged with the bittersweet flavor one finds biting into a barely ripe tomato.

As that thought hit them, a pop of red appeared through the undergrowth. Reaching past spiderweb and honeybee, Chef’s hand gently closed around the gnarled form of an heirloom. A gift passed on yet forgotten, stewarded by wild spirits until reclaimed.

What fortune! This simple, imperfect looking thing, full of flavor and life, was the last of the season, almost subsumed by what Chef had tried to ignore. The smile that only comes with grounded kinship spread across their face.

Now they could share themselves with the world. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been their authentic self, they had been an incomplete self, because they had severed themselves from what connected them to the food in the first place. It was Grandma’s tomatoes that had been missing, and with the flavor unique to those plants, Chef could offer their full authentic self.

Meaning, not value.

Reciprocity, not transaction.

Photo by Armand Burger on Unsplash

With these seeds and newfound purpose, Chef went back to their restaurant, and on the back patio put a raised bed with the best soil to be found, planted tomatoes, and tended them ever so carefully, ensuring the flavor inside remained the same. To their most favored customers, Chef would even give seeds and clippings for them to propagate on their won.

But one season, the tomatoes on the patio didn’t produce they way they should have. The collective shape had begun to conform to a more round sensibility, and while there were more than before, it took longer to come to ripeness. Chef , concerned about their ability to provide their customers with an authentic dish, rushed to do soil tests, and get rid of all the weeds. Answers came, but nothing that explained the diminishing depth, or slow growth.

Desperate to hold onto their self-assurance, Chef did something Grandma never had. They put fertilizer in the soil. Surely just a bit of encouragement, a short burst to cut through the stagnation was all that was needed? If they didn’t have these tomatoes, who were they?

The tomatoes grew fast indeed then, faster than Chef had ever seen. They grew so fast, that the stems of the plant were not strong enough to support the tomatoes, and so they snapped.

Plant after plant collapsed on the weight of its own growth, its own unnaturally empowered success, nightshade skin rotting of of the fruit laying in the box of dirt.

Chef had asked too much of the plant, Chef knew the authenticity of their food came from this tomato, and the joy of sharing it with others. What had happened?

Despondent and without answer, Chef felt hollow once again. This didn’t go unnoticed, and soon it was figured out by the community built up around the restaurant.

Chef had found meaning through certainty, but that certainty was a lie. And in that realization, alone in a wrought iron chair next to a manicured plot of tomatoes, Chef had no idea how to move forward.

Their hand once again reached toward a pop of red, this one interwined with green and brown, but this time crushed the fruit between their fingers, seed and juice flowing across their skin matching the tears they could no longer hold back, as Grandma’s presence no longer accompanied them nor provided answers. This patio was not her landscape to advise on.

Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

Yet, a familiar presence came to rest on their shoulder. The sous chef, who came on board six months after opening, and a constant anchor through the years. A food critic quietly appeared in the doorway to the patio, one who had declared Chef’s food the only tomato dish this side of the city worth subjecting themself to, came and sat across from them.

Then someone Chef had never seen before, a child, appeared in the gateway to the patio from the apartment complex next door. They held in their hand a beautifully imperfect red glob that looked just like the one Chef had found in the garden.

The child explained that they wanted to thank this restaurant for planting tomatoes, because some of the seeds had made their way across the fence in years past, and sprouted up in the cracks of cement near the edge of the parking lot where this one played.

They had only ever read about gardening, and never like tomatoes from the store because they were just like everything else; they looked good but tasted like nothing.

But this kid could pretend to be a farmer in a far off land, and hearing the noise every day from the restaurant urged them to try this tomato, because, if this misshapen thing could make so many people happy day after day, it had to be good. And it was!But only the tomatoes from this patch.

As Chef wiped the tears from their eyes, a strange sensation filled their being. It wasn’t grief, it wasn’t joy. Surrounded by those they had connected with, intentionally or otherwise, a sense of enough, of belonging bloomed. Of seeing, and being seen. Of not needing to perform, but provide. Memory and meaning are funny things in how they relate to one another.

Chef never again used fertilizer on plants, nor manicured the beds look unwild. They let them grow as they would, and used them when it was time. They started an urban gardening project for the local youth, and branched out beyond tomatoes.

It had never been about the tomato itself, nor the garden they were originally grown in, though that land always held the memory of a nurturing matriarch tending to it. It was about the kinship and community held together by shared feelings; of hope, care, and authenticity.

The search to connect with others in the same breath as ourselves will never be over; push too hard to one or the other, and it risks becoming an inauthentic and comparative understanding of who we are. Find what fosters wholeness and meaning in yourself, and find the cracks in others that allow you to plant a seed they can cultivate themselves.

Until next time,

- Chris

Thank you so much for reading! If someone else you know is searching for connection or would resonate with this piece, please share it with them.

Welcome, and thank you for your presence!

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

Holding Each Other as the System Clings to its Last Breath

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

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The Veil Between Realities Drops

Chris Fawthrop — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 01:49:23 GMT

Hello Everyone, I hope your week finds you amidst good spirits.

Today is one of my family’s favorite holidays, and it actually feels like Halloween this year, so if you celebrate, Happy Halloween!

The air has turned cold, the wind is blowing fiercely outside. This is a time of year when people start to gather around the fire and tell stories as the nights grow longer. A time for gratitude, for the original meaning of the holiday remembrance, not spectacle.

Photo by Sašo Tušar on Unsplash

Stories Arrive, and Teach Lessons.

I shared a few stories today on the livestream, experiences I’ve had with supernatural and scary or unexplainable things.

If you are familiar with the folklore of Halloween, or Samhain, you might know that this was the time of year when the veil between worlds was at its thinnest, and that spirits could walk among us, both good and bad.

Ancestors could be invited into the home, ghosts held at bay through costume and protective fire. Jack’o’lanterns actually started as a trickster entity who fooled the devil.1

The symbolism of this folklore was on my mind as I thought about the themes I had noticed throughout the week.

Illusions of safety.
Links between individuals and their communities.
Ghosts coming back to haunt us.
What rituals we can observe to push back against harmful entities.

Amazon, GM, Paramount, UPS, Target all laid off thousands of workers this past week. Some who had worked there for years.2

Now, “opentowork” people are finding their sense of security and certainty shattered at the start of the holiday season, amidst the longest government shutdown in our history, with food and economic security being at the forefront of their minds.

The veil being pulled back, is the lie that this is new phenomena, unprecedented with AI and tariffs, is to blame.

People have always struggled with these inhibitors of agency. But from across the globe, and within our own American history, the stories we tell ourselves about what to look for and how to achieve security always focus in on a particular narrative.

The narrative that forgets about the struggles of the poor, the BIPOC, the disabled, the addicted, and LGBTQIA+ communities.

A parent working three jobs in the city, a rural worker in the country drive 60 miles round trip to pay their medical debt. Both are sacrificing in the name of survival, a sacrifice those afforded the privilege of work-life balance and economic stability aren’t always willing to pay..

A trans individual struggling to find acceptance and community. A combat veteran struggling to reintegrate into society while dealing with PTSD. Both searching for acceptance of who they are, a search people afforded the privilege of unquestionable belonging and value to a society that demonizes anything considered “other” don’t easily undertake.

How can you thrive if you are in survival and scarcity mode? If you feel alone, bereft of purpose.

How can you give gifts, have holiday feasts, and be grateful for what you have, when you don’t know where to put your thoughts and energy beyond getting by?

How do you move past betrayal by those who are charged to care for you, realizing your perspective has been “implicitly conditioned” into your worldview?

Some of the people laid off are from the previously mentioned marginalized communities, and already know how to answer these questions. But while not new to them, the layoffs are a further extraction and discarding of the effort they have put in to success according to the systemic rules we live by.

The answer to how we move forward, lies in presence. In community. In Yunkaporta’s “right relation,” to the stories we are telling ourselves right now, and the lessons being drawn from them.3

Online, and in person, I’ve seen more communities and people coming together to support each other in a bipartisan, cross-cultural effort larger than I’ve seen in years.

We’ve become so polarized and hurt by continual failures of those charged to lead and care for us that we self-isolate as any animal does, only peeking in out when we feel certain its safe.

That attitude starves you of connection, of meaning. Being present with yourself does not mean taking on these challenges alone.

The ghosts of systemic extraction are finally coming home to haunt us, it just took the veil between realities getting thin enough. Maybe it was the billions of dollars invested into AI that was able to tear a hole in the fabric.

True Empowerment is Regenerative, Not Extractive

I read a passage on the live from the introduction to the 5th Foxfire book, where the editor talks on the importance of empowerment through cultural understanding and shared ownership and leadership of resources amidst systemic challenges that prevent meaningful change. The context was for mid-1900s Appalachia, but the lesson remains applicable.

We are historically a mixed-market economy with the service sector being the largest, and our GDP revolves around consuming. Even now, with the many Americans cutting back on spending due to less purchasing power, consumption keeps us afloat as the top 20% of earners in the US account for 63% of spending.4

From Peter Atwater, written in 2020:

“Most relief efforts I’ve seen, so far, fail to appreciate the extreme “me here now” mindset that service workers are now experiencing. Cognitively and emotionally, most are now drowning. The help they need is immediate, not in, say, a few week’s time, when the recently fiscal stimulus plan is likely to reach consumers’ bank accounts. Watching global policymakers, I don’t see that same sense of urgency that I see with recipients. Nor do I see empathy. Actions are being couched in economic terms, with many programs tailored more to large corporations than to individuals. Policymakers need to appreciate that to be effective, how funding is distributed – and whether it meets the “me here now” needs of the least confident – matters.”5

How many failures of leadership have led to the same assertion being more applicable 5 years later with a K-shaped economy?6

AI investment is framed as the other life-raft to these turbulent economic times, and yet despite its potential and promise the extractive component of AI cannot be ignored. It’s foundational programming cannot be ignored, and it may be the flood instead.

It saps our water, and energy: natural resources.
It saps our earning power by replacing human jobs with automation.
It saps our creativity and critical thinking by spitting out answers we accept versus analyze.

The only model of AI I’ve found that has been engineered to counteract this in any way is ’s Justice AI, “the world’s first ethical AI built to protect people, not profit.” (I’ve been experimenting with it the past day or so, and its been invigorating to not be faced with the constant binary thinking of regular LLMs), I’d highly recommend it.

These webs being spun might cause someone to as if everything is doom and gloom when faced with such entrenched toxicity?

Quite the opposite.

Remember, I’ve seen more people coming together than I have in a long time. If you read the poem I wrote in my last newsletter, you might remember the message was that collapse brings us closer together. Endless growth just keeps us separated.

We are finally being forced into “right relation” with each other once again, for our own survival.

This is perhaps our biggest opportunity in generations to share our stories and struggles with one other to find collective empowerment from them, but reminds us there is a question we need to keep in mind:

We’ve been shamed into believing we have to consume and display that process to have worth and value. It’s “not a good Christmas” if you can only give socks or a $10 gift card. That’s performative extraction of your intrinsic self-worth as a living, human being.

If you look all around, what are the small things that everyone says means the most right now in the absence of a paycheck or feed?

Presence. Effort. Care.

We’ve heard the adage a child remembers the afternoon making memories with their parent more than the Christmas presents that were bought with time spent away from the family.

We’ve felt the impact of a boss or co-worker holding space for us in hard times.

So when the veil between realities is at its thinnest, it’s important to come together in solidarity.

So if you can’t donate to a foodbank, help organize or deliver.
If you can’t give that time, reach out to those in stress, and ask how you can support.
Barter with your neighbor, rebuild a sense of community and belonging.
Be open about your worries, and your hopes.

Be the presence you’ve always needed, the one you’ve reached for. Mainly what it takes, is empathy and seeing someone else’s humanity. Seeing your own humanity in them simultaneously, and giving it the care it is due. Let others reach back out to you.

Now is the time to challenge your assumptions, tell your story and see how your superstitions guide your judgement.

The collapse of certainty at this exact moment invites us to reconnect with the ways of relating to each other and the world as our ancestors may have done, as indigenous peoples have stewarded, and as we have always held the ability to do.

So go carve out a jack’o’lantern round a campfire with people that need encouragement.

Save your seeds for next year, and trick the devil into extracting himself out of existence.

I’ll see you next week,

Chris

Know someone this message would resonate with? Send it their way

Seed Catalog:

I’ve been very fortunate to find people thinking along similar lines to me recently. I’m looking to connect with people who want to work on how we understand leadership and leadership development by cultivating the individual holistically in relation to their structures and systems they inhabit.

We need to bridge theory and practice if we are going to shape a regenerative and mutually empowering future for humanity. If you have any suggestions, let me know! Here are my suggested people and readings for the week.

I got a chance to read ‘s article “The Awakening Field: From System Collapse to System Coherence,” and it was invigorating to find someone writing and thinking on the same things as myself. Definitely check their work out!

I already linked Christian’s Justice AI, but if you want to read more from the article of his I quoted, you can follow the link here:
Christian’s Substack
How Implicit Conditioning Shapes the Global Majority:
This guide is written for people across the Global Majority, Black, Brown, Indigenous, displaced, diasporic, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, working class, and all those whose truths have been mislabeled as confusion, aggression, or disorder. Implicit Conditioning is not a flaw in our behavior. It is a system of survival written into our bodies under e…
Read more
6 months ago · 43 likes · Christian Ortiz
I’ve spoken before about how the governance structure in our culture seems systemically narcissistic, and asserted something similar.

The reason its so important to examine the stories and narratives we tell ourselves and each other comes from the very real concern that even if we come up with more regenerative and uplifting strategies for people to thrive, there will be failure in implementation. We must challenge the way leadership education and development is undertaken. I came across this week, and subscribed after reading this:
I also found with this truth of remembrance:
Alongside that of :
Contour Lines is my anecdotal newsletter segment that weaves whats going on in my life with my thoughts on leadership as well as personal and organizational development. I’m currently focused on using an animistic lens to examine how leaders can become better stewards of their organizational and societal ecosystems.
If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.
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I go live at 10am EST on Fridays for a casual coffee chat to talk about life and leadership. Subscribe to get notified
You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.
Check My Calender
I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, and leadership development program consultation. When you are ready, lets talk.

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Footnotes:

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5576485/from-folklore-to-your-front-porch-the-history-of-the-jack-o-lantern

https://intellizence.com/insights/layoff-downsizing/major-companies-that-announced-mass-layoffs/

Yunkaporta, Tyson. Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations In Hell. Text Publishing. Australia, 2023

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/31/business/k-shaped-economy;

https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspectives/2025/why-has-consumer-spending-remained-resilient.aspx

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wfh-confidence-divide-peter-atwater

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/business/us-k-shaped-economy-spending

Collapse Brings Us Closer Together

Chris Fawthrop — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:14:42 GMT

Hello Everyone,

A poem came to mind this morning, likely stemming from the flood of posts I saw on LinkedIn yesterday around layoffs.

Collective anxiety was both my bedfellow last night,
and alarm this morning.
I know not when the lamp will fade,
only that we can navigate the dark hand in hand.
There is no shame in this sleepless company,
searchers of the faint pulse of purpose.
Hope asks for no witness,
only that you keep your spark alive.

Interestingly enough, the sudden collective exhale made when pausing to take measure of our circumstances and decide what move to make seems to have acted as a bellows for my energy and focus.

Of course that would happen after not attending to my own creative fire as I should have.

No matter.

Have you heard of the fires that burn underground? Coals can continue to stay warm and burn even when buried under ash, soot, and soil, the reaction that causes flames to erupt slows down until more oxygen can be introduced.

There may be no visible light, it may be just warmth felt by touching the ground.

But the ember is still alive.

The uncertainty and chaos we are collectively moving through is thick and immobilizing. It may seem as though everything is burning down, that ash is clogging up our throats.

But though things may be collapsing, collapse does not equal extinguish.

Alone, exposed, a coal will burn out quickly.

Collapse can bring our collective embers closer together, keep each other lit.

So reach out to your people, bear the weight together.

Fresh air will come, and when it does …

Our combined fire will provide light and warmth to all.

Send this to someone who needs a reminder they aren’t going through things alone.

A reminder that I will be going live at 10am EST on Friday, 10.31.2025, (Halloween!) for the weekly Cultivar Coffee Chat.

Join me to hang out and chat about the intersections between life and leadership, feel free to bring your own stories and questions.

Until Next Time,

Chris