One of my favorite days of the year is Christmas Eve.

Not because of what comes after … Because of the not-knowing, the twinkly lights in the dark, the presents still wrapped, the anticipation of something that hasn’t quite taken shape yet. 

I love the mystery of it all. I love it more than the day itself. 

While talking with my good friend Kelly Myerson I realized that feeling is available anytime I don’t yet know something.

The in-between. The “I-can-feel-the-direction-but-I-can’t-yet-see-the-shape” time.

We’ve been taught to call that anxiety. What if it’s actually anticipation? 

What if leaning into that amoeba state is where our inner untamed leader gets her power?

One breadcrumb, one synchronicity, one next right step at a time: acting in response to the terrain we’re facing. 

Magic unfolds when we trust the pull more than the plan.

When we let something be shaped by the moment, by the people, by what’s actually emerging, it becomes exactly what it’s meant to be. Every time.

That’s Untamed Leadership in action.

Untamed doesn’t mean rabid or chaos for its own sake.

Untamed means intuitive. Wild means Organic. Our natural state is rhythmic, not controlled. An Untamed leader is one who trusts her one-in-eight-billion nature over the cookie-cutter, copy cat copy the world told her she had to be in order to fit in. 

Embracing the amoeba-like feeling of not-yet-knowing is one of the most important leadership traits in today’s world. 

For years I was the straight-A student: buttoned up and controlled. When a leadership program typed me as “eccentric,” I told them they must be talking about someone else. A few moments of leading through chaos taught me, that IS me. That’s where my power lives. Wild. Intuitive. Radiant. Responsive. Adaptable. Creative … Untamed. I was just so conditioned to see the conditioning as my personality.

As my friend Bridget Baker once said: That’s the first step of untaming. Naming the taming. 

As Kelly said, then we can untie the NOTs (the things that are not you.) The beliefs, the rules, the personas that were layered on top to protect our true nature.

Notice the taming. Choose the untaming. Follow your intuition. 

Three steps that work together. Again, and again. 

Because Untaming isn’t a single breakthrough moment. It’s an ongoing practice of returning to what’s actually ours: our innate gifts, our inner knowing, the direction our body has been pointing all along.

The Christmas Eve energy is always available. The not-knowing that feels like anticipation rather than dread. The sense that something is coming that you didn’t even put on the list.

That’s where untamed leadership lives. In staying present and at choice on the walk between what’s here in this moment and the future we know is possible. 

🎧 This piece grew from a conversation with Kelly Myerson on her Bridges and Beacons Podcast, recorded the evening before the first Untamed Leader Retreat. Listen to the full episode, Becoming an Untamed Leader: Creating from the Edge with Kelly Myerson, this summer on the Untamed Leader Podcast feed.