Lovely Human,

I am back and I hope you love the updated look. We also have a 1 year milestone of this newsletter this month. We are at 25k subscribers so thank you for allowing me to be on your journey with you.

Now let’s get started together again…

Last week, a GLEAC community member told me she hadn’t taken a proper holiday in three years. Not because she didn’t want to. Because she “couldn’t.” Her team, her clients, her inbox they all needed her. And she said it with this strange mix of exhaustion and pride.

How many of us have been there or ARE there right now?

I think about this a lot in the GLEAC community, because so many of our members are exactly the kind of brilliant, high-functioning leaders who get stuck in this loop. They’re so good at what they do that they become the bottleneck (yep #metoo). The single point of failure dressed up as the star of the show.

Here’s the reframe I want you to sit with: the most sophisticated thing a leader can do is engineer their own replaceability.

Think about it. The leaders we admire most didn’t just lead. They built systems, cultures, and people that continued to thrive when they stepped back.

And yet, most of us resist it. Because being needed feels good. It feeds that sense that we are valuable, that we have a place, that without us, things wouldn’t work.

Replaceability isn’t about making yourself small. It’s about making your impact large enough that it doesn’t depend on you showing up at 7am every Monday morning.

So this week, I’ll leave you with this:

If you disappeared for 30 days, what would break? And is fixing that answer the most important leadership work you could possibly do this month?

Religious Focus this month- Quakerism

We explore a unusual religion each month not to convert anyone to change believe , but to open up our vision board on how we all of us process joy, suffering, peace and this incredible journey called life.

Quakerism, formally known as the Religious Society of Friends was founded in 17th-century England by George Fox, who believed that every person carries “that of God” within them. With no clergy, no creeds, and no formal liturgy, Quakers worship in communal silence, waiting for what they call the Inner Light to guide them.

Margaret sits in a circle of six wooden chairs in a room that smells faintly of old books and lemon polish. It is a Tuesday evening in Philadelphia. The radiator clicks softly. No one speaks.

She has come tonight because she cannot decide whether to leave the career she has spent twenty-two years building.

The five people around her, her clearness committee, are not here to tell her what to do. They are not therapists, consultants, or advisors. They are Friends, in the Quaker sense, and their role is more demanding than any of those: they are here to help Margaret hear herself.

The session begins, as all Quaker gatherings do, in silence. Not awkward silence. Not the silence of people waiting for someone else to go first. This is held silence …the kind that has weight and texture to it, the kind that says: we are not rushing you. We are not going anywhere.

After several minutes, a woman named Ruth speaks. Not to offer advice. She asks a question.

“When you imagine yourself a year from now, still in this role, what do you feel in your body?”

Margaret closes her eyes. The room waits. A full minute passes before she answers.

“Tight,” she says. “Like I’m holding my breath.”

In most professional settings, this pause would be filled. Someone would offer a framework, a comparison, a personal anecdote about their own career pivot. But in a clearness committee, the silence is not empty space. It is the space where clarity lives.

The practice is rooted in one of Quakerism’s most radical beliefs: that every person already carries the wisdom they need.

Guiding question:

When was the last time someone helped you find an answer, not by giving you one, but by asking you the question you didn’t know you needed?

If your team can’t function without you, that’s not loyalty — that’s a design flaw.

The most powerful leaders don’t hold positions. They build them —and hand them over.

Being irreplaceable sounds like a compliment. It’s actually a trap.