When the World Tilts

I can’t control the pace of change. I can control what I build around people.

Jan 04, 2026

Publishing Date: January 4, 2026

The First Draft explores systems, institutions, technology, and the human realities of living inside them. Essays, field notes, and practical frameworks from the intersection of work, identity, and change.

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This essay belongs to the 3 - Leading through change without breaking trust pathway.

I had a completely different post planned for today.

I’m an elder millennial, which means I can name a dozen moments in my lifetime where it felt like the world would never be the same again. Not just globally -personally, professionally, culturally. Moments where it felt like there was a clear “before” and “after.”

Today was one of those days.

I wasn’t feeling well on Friday evening, so I fell asleep without setting an alarm and woke up late Saturday morning. A friend woke me up with a message, so I spent a bit of time helping him and waking up.

And then I saw the news.

I’ve lived through many of the same big changes everyone else has. Private ones, professional ones, and the big worldwide ones we can all name. Some come on suddenly, and some arrive in slow motion.

This one feels worth pausing for, respecting, and paying attention to. We cannot minimize the impact of change at this scale.

My mind went immediately goes to:

If the world is different now, what changes?

What changes in my daily life, in the life of the students I support, in the life of my team, and in the future we’re all trying to plan?

Over the holidays, I took time to soften, settle, and ground myself before the winter semester starts.

Winter semester is an entirely different beast for my team because of how our work flows. It’s like the last half of a marathon. January is tough, February gets more difficult, and March is that sprint you’re not sure you can get through without a few bruises, but you do it anyway.

It gets more complicated when the world is changing as quickly as it is right now.

So I’m going back to basics.

I’m going to keep meditating, moving my body, prepping food for the week, and keeping my schedule as focused and lean as possible.

I get a lot done in a day, which means I’m always tempted to fill my calendar more than I want to. And eventually it starts to wear at me. I know that pattern well enough now to interrupt it before it becomes a problem.

My life is busy enough that I’ve already burned a lot of boats – I don’t watch televised news (I read it so I can engage selectively), I don’t really watch tv, I’m careful about who has time in my schedule, and I’m disciplined about adding things that bring joy to my daily life. Sometimes this is a cup of coffee, a book, a long bath, or a chat with a good friend, even if it’s while buying groceries together.

I’m also thinking about how to support my team.

I’m the kind of leader who encourages gentleness, after a career where this was the medicine I needed all along. I try to keep expectations clear, measurable, and predictable. Predictable environments have been shown to increase trust and promote psychological safety, and this pays dividends in team cohesion and performance. The world may change, and work may surge, but your job shouldn’t feel like emotional whiplash on a daily or weekly basis.

We all take scheduled breaks together and honour having quiet time. I work hard not to lead them to work outside of work hours, and we’ve built a culture together where they love what they do, often to the point that I have to ask them not to work outside of hours. If nothing else, I know I’ve done my best to make sure we’re all as rested as possible before the marathon begins again.

Maybe I’ll write more about building trust on a team another time. That’s a future post.

For now, I’m thinking about students.

In the last year, students have shown a different kind of anxiety than I’ve seen before.

I started in post-secondary as my city returned to full-time in-person learning during COVID. Even then, I was surprised by how much it had shifted since I finished my own undergraduate degree as a mature student. There’s a generational and cultural change, with a higher baseline stress level, greater uncertainty, and an often-perceptible anxiety.

Students are more worried this year about what generative AI means for their careers. They’re watching junior-level roles shrink in some disciplines, especially in technology. They’re facing increasing systemic adversity while still learning to exist as adults.

I remind my team of this constantly: undergrads are just learning how to exist in the world.

We all think we’re fully formed in our 20s, but in retrospect, everything about us is in flux.

One of my colleagues once said that the difference between first-year and fourth-year undergraduates is like the difference between species. He is completely correct.

I’m going to double down on what I can actually offer students: clarity, certainty, and safety (while knowing that no environment can ever be truly, completely safe for everyone all the time.)

Clear expectations, clear timelines, and clear information about what’s coming in the next few months, so they can plan. We often forget how many balls they are juggling and that they need to plan as well. Many students will get more done during this period of their lives than at any other time, but at the same time, they will be facing some of the biggest challenges they may ever confront.

I believe in universal design for learning, but we’re still early in that journey. I’m still learning, and implementation is a long game when you’re a small team. Still, some basics matter more than people want to admit.

If students know what’s expected, when it’s expected, and how to prepare for it, it goes a long way in setting students up for success.

Over the last two years, I’ve also added more grounding and somatic supports in our programs. I’ve integrated these practices into my personal life, and as someone who doesn’t identify as a “joiner” I was skeptical but found they made a huge difference to my level of regulation and overall resilience.

We’ve integrated simple grounding practices at the beginning of sessions to help students shift gears and settle. Everything is optional and consent-based, but we find it makes a difference. After a scheduled break, we use an activation practice to help keep the energy up, build community, and introduce some play. It’s amazing how much including games and play in facilitation creates community and changes the energy of a room.

Our sessions are active, collaborative, and usually flipped-classroom instead of lectures. Students are doing a lot in the room, socially and cognitively.

I’ve found that a little intentionality changes the whole program experience. I like to think it helps students understand that their well-being matters to us, and that we’re in this with them.

I’m taking that with me into my coaching practice too.

I coach from a capacity-building and resourcing perspective. Undergraduates are coming up against things they’ve never had to navigate before. They need help seeing what they already know, how to resource themselves, and what options exist when they don’t know what to do next.

This matters even more in entrepreneurship, where the choices seem endless, the information asymmetry seems insurmountable, and the thought of taking the wrong next step can be paralyzing.

I’m curious what others are noticing and implementing right now.

What are you doing to steady yourself, and what are you doing to steady the people who rely on you?

We have no control over sudden changes on a worldwide scale, but we have a sphere of control for ourselves and the people around us.

We can show up kinder, gentler, and in more intentional ways, for both ourselves and others.

Take care of yourself this week. At the end of the day, we are all we have.

Next Step: A Way to Practice This in Your Life

Steadying the System

Let’s identify where stability, clarity, and care already exist in your life and where they might be gently strengthened.

Spend some time freely journaling about:

Areas of life that currently feel predictable
Areas that feel volatile or uncertain (Don’t skip this! Naming your fears on paper helps enormously!)
Personal practices that support regulation (What have you used in past? What works? What have you been meaning to try?)
Practices that support those around you without pushing yourself past capacity

Review your notes and pick one practice in each of the last two categories to try this week. Keep them small, easy, and implementable.

PS: If you want to support this work: restack it, share it, or drop a quick comment. It helps more than you’d think, and it keeps me writing and helping other changemakers. (This one’s public—feel free to send it on.)

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