I was sitting in an herbalism class recently when Miki Agrawal, entrepreneur, author, and founder of brands like Thinx and Tushy, said something that caught my attention in a way I wasn't expecting. She was talking about soft power. Not as a consolation prize for people who don't have hard power. Not as a gentler, more palatable version of ambition. But as its own distinct force. A way of leading, creating, and moving through the world that draws from a completely different well than the one most of us were trained to drink from. It stayed with me.

Not because it was a new idea exactly, but because hearing it named so plainly cracked something open. It gave language to something I had been circling for months without knowing what to call it. And it made me realize how long I had been operating in its opposite, not out of choice really, but out of survival. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized this tension between who we truly are and who we perform ourselves to be isn't new. Across traditions, the same invitation keeps surfacing.

The idea isn't that any one tradition has the answer. It's that they're all pointing at the same thing. And for most of my adult life, I was pointed somewhere else entirely.

It didn't happen all at once. It happened in micro-moments, so small and so ordinary I barely registered them as choices. I was thirteen when my family relocated to Cairo, my first time in a co-ed school after years in all-girls environments, and I absorbed something very quickly about how the world worked. I watched, and I adapted. I learned that being emotional made you a target. That leading with your heart in a room full of logic was a liability. That if you wanted to be taken seriously, you needed to speak the language everyone else was already fluent in.

So I became fluent. More than fluent. I mastered it.

And honestly, code-switching wasn't new to me by then. I'd been doing it my whole life, across more dimensions than just gender. Navigating which version of myself to bring into a room, how much of my background to share, when to stay quiet about my faith to avoid the conversation that follows, when to sand down an edge so the person across from me stays comfortable. I became, without ever consciously deciding to, an expert in reading a room and adjusting accordingly. It kept me safe. It opened doors.

Through high school, through college, through every professional environment I stepped into, I built an operating system designed for one thing: to excel inside a world that rewarded a particular kind of energy. Assertive. Analytical. Unflappable. I stopped crying in situations where crying would have been natural. I stayed quiet when speaking my real perspective might have made someone uncomfortable. I learned to scan a room and calibrate, always asking some version of the same question: What version of me fits here?

But at some point, the system started to feel less like a strategy and more like a second skin I couldn't take off. And I began to notice the weight of it. Not loudly. Just a low hum of something slightly off.

The clearest moment came recently. I was at a dinner with a table full of investors, the kind of room I've sat in dozens of times over the course of my career. This wasn't ten years ago. This was after the sabbatical. After my recent career pivot. After I'd already started building The Rewilding Collective and begun following what lights me up.

And yet.

I spent most of that dinner talking about my consulting work. The "relevant" work. The work that had a language everyone at that table already spoke. I barely mentioned Rewilding. Not because I was ashamed of it, but because some part of me, still running the old code, quietly decided it wasn't the right thing to lead with in that room. I didn't even notice it happening until I was on my way home.

I'm giving myself grace for that moment. I'm still learning a new operating system. These patterns don't dissolve overnight. But what struck me wasn't the slip itself. It was how automatic it was. How quickly and seamlessly I had code-switched, not out of strategy, but out of pure reflex. And it made me wonder how many hundreds of moments across my career looked exactly like that one. Moments where the most alive, most true version of what I was thinking, what I actually cared about, got quietly set aside so I could speak the language of the room.

That's the thing about an operating system this deeply engrained. You don't always know it's running.

So when Miki talked about soft power, what landed for me wasn't just the concept. It was the permission inside it. The idea that your intuition belongs in the boardroom. That warmth is not a weakness to be managed but a force to be led with. That the parts of yourself you were told to leave at the door, your sensitivity, your spirituality, your strangeness, your opinions, are not liabilities. They are, in fact, the whole point.

Soft power, as I'm coming to understand it, is the courage to lead from your actual self in rooms that weren't built for you. It's bringing your whole operating system online, not just the half that was deemed acceptable. For me, that meant doing the deeper work of rebalancing something internal, learning to trust the parts of myself I had spent years suppressing. But the path looks different for everyone. What the ancient traditions agree on is simply this: that wholeness requires all of you, not just the parts the room approves of.

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These experiences are small by design. Each one is an opportunity to step out of routine, meet others that are asking similar questions, and experience the ethos of The Rewilding Collective live.

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Each month, I share something that has shaped the way I see, listen, or move through the world as an offering to the village.

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I recently listened to an audiobook by Robin Wall Kimmerer who is a botanist, Indigenous scientist, and one of the most quietly radical thinkers writing today and I couldn’t recommend it more. In her new book The Serviceberry, she uses a single tree as a lens for reimagining how we relate to abundance, generosity, and each other.