There’s a phrase I keep coming back to.

Presence begins where primal and purpose meet.

It took me years to land on that sentence. It couldn’t be rushed. It had to be lived—through every coaching session, every stage, every moment I watched someone step into their voice and felt something shift in the room.

That sentence is also part of the inner GPS that guided me to shift (back) from focusing exclusively on helping people speak soulfully, to helping change-makers lead untamed. The shift that led me to rename my podcast. 

Season 3 of Untamed Leader starts with a question from Brian Perry:

“You’ve talked about this shift as an expansion—but also a return home. Tell me about the return home.”

And I had to stop and actually answer it.

What I Found at the Beginning

When I walked into my first coaching class at the CoActive Training Institute, I was maybe fifteen minutes in before I turned to the person next to me and said, I think I’ve just found the final piece of what I’m here to do.

She asked what that was.

I couldn’t answer with my left brain … yet.

That’s the thing about homecoming—it can arrive before the words do. We feel it in the body before we can explain it to anyone. Before we can put it on a website or a slide deck or a podcast description.

What I see now is this: the kind of coaching that class introduced, combined with the voice work I’d been devoted to, and a deep hunger to serve leaders who are committed to changing something—those weren’t separate things. They were three threads woven together to create one thing. I’d just been living in pieces of it.

Untamed Leader is me living into the whole calling.

What “Untamed” Actually Means

Here’s what I’ve come to believe:

Untaming is what happens when we start asking: which of the things I’m doing, and the way I’m doing them, are things I actually chose?

The shoulds are everywhere. And they’re sneaky. I’ve been surprised by a few  of my own I didn’t know I had—operating quietly in the background, shaping decisions I thought I was making freely.

Invisible, until something makes them visible.

It’s hard to lead in a tamed world that tells you there are only certain options available.

It’s hard to create something genuinely new from inside a box you don’t know you’re living in.

Real leadership — the kind that moves something in the world — requires that all the options be back on the table. Not just the approved ones. Not just the ones that fit the model we inherited.

All of them.

The Spreadsheet Problem

The hardest place for me to untame isn’t on a stage.

It’s sitting alone at my desk, making a decision.

That’s where the spreadsheets take over. The pros and cons lists. The voice that shouts there’s a right answer, and if you just analyze long enough, you’ll find it and be safe!

What I’ve learned — slowly, imperfectly — is that the answers I trust most don’t come from more thinking. They come when I get out of my head and back into my body. When peripheral vision returns. When something arrives with that particular energy — not a conclusion I reasoned my way to, but a full body yes that I recognize.

That’s not mystical. It’s a different kind of intelligence.

One that most of us have been trained to override.

The leaders this world needs right now aren’t the ones with the best plan.

They’re the ones who can hold a vision and stay present at the same time. Who can move through chaos without becoming it. Who can tell the difference between a tamed habit — a survival strategy that once made sense — and the actual right choice for this moment.

Creating from Chaos

We’re living in a chaotic moment. That’s not a hot take.

What I want to offer is that the chaos doesn’t have to consume you.

When I was inside a group with an abusive dynamic, treading carefully, waiting for the next hot flash of anger—I didn’t know I was doing it. That’s what taming does. It becomes invisible. It becomes the water we swim in.

And then something cracked open. And I picked my head up mid-sob and said: it’s all going to work out. And here’s what we need to do now.

That creative tension — between I’m here and I know what’s possible — is where true leadership lives.

Not in the certainty. In the willingness to stay present with both.

If you’ve been waiting for the version of your leadership that doesn’t fit neatly into the mold you were handed — that keeps longing to breaking free of all the boxes —

Welcome home.

🎧 This piece was born from a conversation with Brian Perry on Season 3, Episode 1 of Untamed Leader. Brian turned the mic on me — and something I hadn’t quite said out loud came through. Listen here, or watch on YouTube.