First and foremost, it is truly my honor to have been selected by all of you to close out our journey.Thank You.

I also want to take a moment to thank our leadership over these last several months. Dr. Haynes, thank you for holding the space, providing the guidance and the diversity of resources to support our becoming as business owner. For bringing us to our growth edge.

Thank you as well Chianna and Tuwana – for keeping us moving forward. The communication, resourcing, troubleshooting, weekly noontime knowledge- I know at times it felt like herding cats. And thanks to you – here we are.

And lastly, thank you to Mecklenburg County for investing in entrepreneurs, small businesses, and the future growth of Charlotte, North Carolina, and beyond.

There are 3 ways we show up in this world: Depleted – Replenished – our Nourished.

In the beginning we were – Depleted.

I find it quite fitting that our journey started in the dead of winter. Entrepreneurship is mentally and emotionally consuming in a way that is often invisible and isolating. We entrepreneurs carry entire worlds inside their heads that few people around us fully understand.

And more importantly you carry the weight of a beautiful vision that only you can see- one in which your business is literally a force for good in this world – and its heavy.

Then along the way - something shifted.

Maybe it was every temper tantrum that came with doing a 30-second pitch. Maybe the weekly report outs that of the victories. Maybe it was the care in which Dr. Haynes led this space every single week… the way he arranged the room, noticed the little things about us, and over time had our preferred snacks and drinks sitting in front of our name tags before we even walked into the room

Things that reminded us that we were being seen.

And -Somewhere along the way, we stopped just sitting next to each other and started showing up for each other.

This journey was not without its challenges. We celebrated some wins – and mourned some losses.

Supporting each other at events. Promoting one another’s businesses. Visiting each other’s workspaces. Learning not just what we do, but understanding the value each person in this room carries.

All that took us from Depleted to Replenished.

This is the “Get up” of Get Up and Grow.

Along this journey I’ve personally been reflecting a lot on the principle of leverage. The scripture says: “Faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.”

Now personally, as far as I’m concerned – with entrepreneurship you need faith the size of a mango seed to simply survive.

I even purchased this necklace as a reminder – i looked at it the other day and said – faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountant. And it hit me. Faith – is the size of a mustard seed. Faith – the size of a mustard seed – can move mountains. There is no such thing as big faith or small faith – its just faith. This scripture is about the relationship between faith and its power not its size.

And I think that’s the real lesson of “Get Up and Grow.”

Replenished – is not enough. Support alone will not make us grow.

We will grow – when we begin to leverage each other.

Leverage is when we stop simply encouraging each other and start actually integrating each other’s value, expertise, relationships, and resources into the growth of our businesses.

And yes, I’m going to say the part nobody wants to say out loud… because businesses exist to create value, that growth should be reflected in real financial outcomes for all parties involved.

Growth requires leverage. And leverage requires courage. The courage to actually say:

“This is who I’m trying to become.” “

This is where I’m trying to go.”

“This is what I need.”
“This is what I can offer.”

“And yes… this is what’s in it for me.”

Because once we become radically honest about what we desire, what we want, and who we’re trying to become, it gives other people permission to be radically honest too. And we can DO something with that.

And when we actually leverage each other - we nourish each other. And our business’s becomes the highest version its self -

We go from being a force for good to a force for change.

Because nourishment happens when what one person has become fuel for another person’s growth.

And notice… It doesn’t take much. It’s literally the size of a mustard seed.

Congratulations, Get Up and Grow Class of 2026.

Substack Footer:

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops high-performing women leaders navigating career, leadership, and chronic conditions who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand

Questions from The Nourished Leader™ Community

What does it mean to lead & work while navigating uncertainty, chronic conditions, pressure, pain, ambition, and complexity?

Each week, Natalie answers one reader-submitted question on leadership, resilience, clarity, capacity, and sustainable high performance.

Submit a question here →

Message Natalie R Legrand

What’s Happening:

The Nourished Leader Collective

Beginning this May, The Nourished Leader Collective will gather on the second and fourth Thursday of every month for a live leadership masterclass and conversation designed for high-performing women navigating uncertainty, complexity, and evolving demands in the workplace — especially those learning how to lead sustainably while managing capacity, burnout, or chronic conditions.

Thursday, May 28 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader™ Masterclass: Immunity to Change
Ever feel like you have one foot on the gas and the other on the brake? This practical leadership conversation is on the hidden patterns, beliefs, and competing commitments that keep us stuck — even when we genuinely want to grow.

Thursday, June 11 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader Collective™
Designing a Sustainable Career While Navigating Chronic Conditions

Many women are trying to sustain careers that are not designed for the realities they’re carrying. This practical conversation explores self-leadership, fluctuating capacity, chronic conditions, and how to begin to build a more sustainable way forward.

Together, we explore what it means to lead in complex times with clarity, resilience, confidence, and courage.

Connect With The Nourished Leader™

Check out and Join our: Upcoming Nourished Leader live events (in person and virtual)

Join our WhatsApp channel for real-time updates, reflections, announcements, and upcoming events.

You can also connect with The Nourished Leader™ on Instagram for new posts, resources, and event releases.

It was an incredible experience speaking with a group of women about the reality that women do not experience money the same way.

Our financial lives are influenced by many factors — responsibility, caregiving, confidence, health, visibility, leadership, risk, identity, cycles, and capacity.

One of the core ideas I shared during the event was this:

Women experience money differently because women experience life differently.

And those realities should be taken into consideration when we think about financial planning, career decisions, leadership development, sustainability, and most importantly - financial agency. We must design around it.

More on that in this video/post.

As always, I opened with the personal story that inspired The Nourished Leader™ - living well with sickle-cell. To my surprise, many people became deeply interested in the condition itself.

Not necessarily in a voyeuristic way, but it caught me off guard because it wasn’t the central point I was trying to make. The point was never: “Look at the condition.”

The point was: Look at the realities women are navigating while still trying to lead, work, grow, contribute, build wealth, and make decisions about their lives.

After the event, I started reflecting more deeply on the resources, practices, systems, and tools available for women living with chronic conditions — and the very specific things I personally do to navigate my own life, leadership, work, finances, and capacity. My business coach suggested I spend some time doing market research.

So I did.

Letting the algorithm teach me what people are actually saying about living and working with a chronic condition as a reality.

UGH!

“Chronic illness confessions.”
“Chronically ill mom.”
“Living as a chronically ill woman.”

I could feel my body shrinking while scrolling.

It’s not like I can’t relate, and I certainly live it.

It’s because I refuse to reduce myself to a condition or consume material that reinforces what can quickly become self-imposed limitations on my life and well-being.

I have a chronic condition. It impacts my life profoundly — my work, my energy, my confidence, my relationships, and my leadership.

And in my life, no matter the circumstance, I have CHOSEN to declare living with it as an asset, NOT a liability.

Many women I work with are quietly wrestling with the tension around their lived experiences with chronic conditions.

How do you honor the body, its rhythms, and its realities without disappearing from your own life?

They still desire leadership. Career growth. Visibility. Impact. Contribution. Meaning.

While navigating realities most people cannot see.

That’s the conversation I care about.

Not productivity at all costs or building an identity entirely around depletion. Because while chronic conditions impact identity, they are not identity itself.

That distinction matters.

The Nourished Leader™ is not just a leadership philosophy.

It is a practical approach to building a sustainable career, leadership practice, and life while navigating fluctuating capacity, chronic conditions, and the realities that impact how we work and live.

High-performing women do not struggle because they lack ambition, intelligence, or discipline.

They struggle because they try to build their lives around models that were never designed with their realities in mind.

The question becomes:

How do I design my work, leadership, decisions, finances, rhythms, and support systems in ways that allow me to grow sustainably?

The goal isn’t becoming untouched by hardship.

The goal is refusing to let hardship become the only language through which we know ourselves.

That is the work.

Not just mindset or motivation, but practical advanced leadership, career, and life design rooted in capacity, clarity, and courage.

That’s why at The Nourished Leader™, we offer one-on-one coaching, group programs, and resources designed to help high-performing women navigate career, leadership, and chronic conditions with greater capacity, clarity, and courage. Send me a msg!

Questions from The Nourished Leader™ Community

What’s Happening:

The Nourished Leader Collective

Thursday, May 28 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader™ Masterclass : Immunity to Change
A practical leadership conversation on the hidden patterns, beliefs, and competing commitments that keep us stuck — even when we genuinely want to grow.

Thursday, June 11 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader Collective™
Designing a Sustainable Career While Navigating Chronic Conditions
A practical conversation for high-performing women navigating fluctuating capacity, career growth, leadership, and sustainable success.

Together, we explore what it means to lead in complex times with clarity, resilience, confidence, and courage.

Connect With The Nourished Leader™

Check out and Join our: Upcoming Nourished Leader live events (in person and virtual)

Join our WhatsApp channel for real-time updates, reflections, announcements, and upcoming events.

You can also connect with The Nourished Leader™ on Instagram for new posts, resources, and event releases.

Hear me out.

A technical challenge has a known problem and a known solution.

But adaptive challenges are different.

The conditions change.
And because the conditions change, we have to change too.

That’s why so many people feel overwhelmed right now trying to navigate work, leadership, career decisions, and the future of AI.

Because this isn’t just about learning another tool.

It’s about learning how to adapt without losing ourselves in the process.

AI is not going away.

So the question becomes:
How do we grow through it?
How do we build careers, leadership, and lives within changing conditions instead of pretending the conditions don’t exist?

That’s part of what we’ll be exploring during our June 11 webinar on Immunity to Change, and I’m really excited for the conversation.

If you haven’t registered yet, be sure to join us.

In the meantime, start thinking about:

• What changes are happening around you?

• Which of your challenges are technical?

• Which ones are adaptive?

• And what might it look like to grow through this era instead of just reacting to it?

Substack Footer:

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops high-performing women leaders navigating career, leadership, and chronic conditions who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand

Questions from The Nourished Leader™ Community

What does it mean to lead & work while navigating uncertainty, chronic conditions, pressure, pain, ambition, and complexity?

Each week, Natalie answers one reader-submitted question on leadership, resilience, clarity, capacity, and sustainable high performance.

Submit a question here →

What’s Happening:

The Nourished Leader Collective

Beginning this May, The Nourished Leader Collective will gather on the second and fourth Thursday of every month for a live leadership masterclass and conversation designed for high-performing women navigating uncertainty, complexity, and evolving demands in the workplace — especially those learning how to lead sustainably while managing capacity, burnout, or chronic conditions.

Thursday, May 28 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader™ Masterclass: Immunity to Change
Ever feel like you have one foot on the gas and the other on the brake? This practical leadership conversation is on the hidden patterns, beliefs, and competing commitments that keep us stuck — even when we genuinely want to grow.

Thursday, June 11 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader Collective™
Designing a Sustainable Career While Navigating Chronic Conditions

Many women are trying to sustain careers that are not designed for the realities they’re carrying. This practical conversation explores self-leadership, fluctuating capacity, chronic conditions, and how to begin to build a more sustainable way forward.

Together, we explore what it means to lead in complex times with clarity, resilience, confidence, and courage.

Connect With The Nourished Leader™

Check out and Join our: Upcoming Nourished Leader live events (in person and virtual)

Join our WhatsApp channel for real-time updates, reflections, announcements, and upcoming events.

You can also connect with The Nourished Leader™ on Instagram for new posts, resources, and event releases.

You know you want to grow, make a career shift, lead differently, set stronger boundaries, or make more aligned decisions — yet something keeps pulling you back into the same patterns, hesitation, overwhelm, or uncertainty.

The Nourished Leader™ Masterclass: Immunity to Change is a practical leadership conversation designed for professionals navigating career transitions, leadership growth, burnout, competing priorities, and the invisible internal patterns that can keep us stuck — even when we genuinely want to move forward.

Inspired by the groundbreaking framework from Immunity to Change, this masterclass explores the hidden beliefs, competing commitments, and self-protective patterns that quietly shape how we lead, work, decide, grow, and respond to change.

This is not about “fixing” yourself.

It’s about understanding the internal systems that may be protecting you from risk, uncertainty, visibility, disappointment, failure, or loss — while also limiting your ability to fully step into the next version of your leadership, career, or life.

Together, we’ll explore:

• Why change can feel emotionally and mentally exhausting — even when it’s desired

• The hidden commitments and unconscious beliefs shaping your behavior

• Why high-performing professionals often feel stuck between growth and self-protection

• Practical tools for building greater clarity, self-awareness, and sustainable growth

This masterclass is especially for professionals navigating:

• Career transitions or reinvention

• Leadership growth and increasing responsibility

• The tension between ambition and well-being

If you’ve been trying to “push through” but still feel internally conflicted, exhausted, or stuck, this conversation may help you better understand why.

Because sustainable leadership isn’t just about doing more.

It’s about understanding the patterns shaping how you lead, grow, and navigate change

Register Now

Questions from The Nourished Leader™ Community

What does it mean to lead & work while navigating uncertainty, chronic conditions, pressure, pain, ambition, and complexity?

Each week, Natalie answers one reader-submitted question on leadership, resilience, clarity, capacity, and sustainable high performance.

Submit a question here →

Message Natalie R Legrand

Connect With The Nourished Leader™

Check out and Join our: Upcoming Nourished Leader live events (in person and virtual)

Join our WhatsApp channel for real-time updates, reflections, announcements, and upcoming events.

You can also connect with The Nourished Leader™ on Instagram for new posts, resources, and event releases.

You make a decision - to leave one operating system often before the next one was fully stabilized. This can take on many forms.

And for many women navigating leadership transitions, chronic conditions, entrepreneurship, reinvention, or identity shifts, that transition can feel deeply disorienting.

Especially if you are no longer being carried by the structures that once held your life together.

I attended a tea party yesterday for women for a foundation focused on providing access to mental health for women and the theme was grief. One woman spoke of the implications her newfound health realties had on her career, motherhood, etc.

In that moment I reconnected with my own grief – the loss of previous infrastructures that use to support me:

The corporate scaffolding. The institutional legitimacy. The externally regulated rhythm. The company-funded travel. The externally coordinated opportunities. The externally provided identity reinforcement. The externally subsidized prestige

The titles. The systems. The predictability.

The visible markers that once reinforced expansion.

However – like many – my aim is to replace it with:

Self-authorship, ownership, mobility on my own terms, integrated identity, sustainable leadership, and the most important value of all - agency.

Let me be clear –

These exchanges are EXPENSIVE. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Especially when your nervous system remembers what freedom, mobility, expansion, or possibility once felt like.

That dissonance is real.

And one of the hardest parts is that from the outside, it can seem like regression because the visible markers change. Fewer vacations. Financial compression. Insert yours here. That contrast can feel psychologically loud.

But internally something else happens:

What I and many women discover during these transitions is that we are no longer willing to build a life that depends entirely on borrowed infrastructure.

This is the real gift.

And honestly, a lot of women who eventually build meaningful lives, careers, or businesses go through a contraction phase first.

A season where:
the lifestyle drops temporarily,
liquidity evaporates,
identity destabilizes,
status becomes ambiguous,
you confront what was externally subsidized, and the basics become important again.

It will feel like you are going backwards- but you’re not. The reality is:

You are building consciously this time.

And for women living with chronic conditions, there is often an additional layer beneath all of this: the pursuit of agency itself.

The realization that while some conditions in life may never be fully within your control, there are other conditions you do have the power to create.

That realization changes everything.

Because eventually, the goal is no longer simply survival. Its evolution.

Questions from The Nourished Leader™ Community

What does it mean to lead & work while navigating uncertainty, chronic conditions, pressure, pain, ambition, and complexity?

Each week, Natalie answers one reader-submitted question on leadership, resilience, clarity, capacity, and sustainable high performance.

Submit a question here →

What’s Happening:

The Nourished Leader Collective

Beginning this May, The Nourished Leader Collective will gather on the second and fourth Thursday of every month for a live leadership masterclass and conversation designed for high-performing women navigating uncertainty, complexity, and evolving demands in the workplace — especially those learning how to lead sustainably while managing capacity, burnout, or chronic conditions.

Thursday, May 28 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader™ Masterclass : Immunity to Change
Ever feel like you have one foot on the gas and the other on the brake? This practical leadership conversation is on the hidden patterns, beliefs, and competing commitments that keep us stuck — even when we genuinely want to grow.

Thursday, June 11 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET
The Nourished Leader Collective™
Designing a Sustainable Career While Navigating Chronic Conditions

Many women are trying to sustain careers that are not designed for the realities they’re carrying. This practical conversation explores self leadership, fluctuating capacity, chronic conditions, and how to begin to build a more sustainable way forward.

Together, we explore what it means to lead in complex times with clarity, resilience, confidence, and courage.

Register here:

Connect With The Nourished Leader™

Check out and Join our: Upcoming Nourished Leader live events (in person and virtual)

Join our WhatsApp channel for real-time updates, reflections, announcements, and upcoming events.

You can also connect with The Nourished Leader™ on Instagram for new posts, resources, and event releases.

Some women experience work as identity, ambition, fulfillment, or “choice,” while others experience work as survival necessity.

Those are radically different nervous system realities.

And when you have spent your life surviving — really surviving — it changes you.

Especially for immigrant daughters.
Especially for Black women.
Especially for women with ADHD.
Especially for women who became hyper-capable because collapse was never an option.

Survival changes the way you move through the world.

When survival has been central for decades:

· joy becomes secondary,

· softness feels unsafe,

· practicality overrides desire,

· hypervigilance becomes intelligence,

· exhaustion becomes identity,

· and love itself starts being filtered through stability calculations.

So when people speak about career, motherhood, ambition, work-life balance, or “choice,” we are not all speaking from the same structural reality.

Some women built careers because they wanted fulfillment.
Some women built careers because they had to survive.

That difference matters.

And I think one of the things we don’t talk about enough is how many women were sold independence without being taught structural sustainability.

Meanwhile, other women were taught:

· marry strategically,

· preserve energy,

· optimize family systems,

· protect motherhood capacity,

· build around wealth stability,

· and avoid depletion.

Each model has shadow sides.

The “career woman” model can create burnout, loneliness, delayed life, debt, and over-identification with productivity.

The “strategic wife/mother” model can create dependency, constrained identity, lack of autonomy, suppressed ambition, or vulnerability if the structure collapses.

Neither is universally right. Neither is universally wrong.

But what becomes painful is when people flatten realities they never had to live.

You can have your worldview.
You can make the choices you made.
You can strategically protect your daughter/son.

But do not flatten the suffering of women whose realities required different choices.

Because many women were not making decisions from spaciousness.
They were making decisions from survival.

And survival-driven women often carry an invisible grief:

the grief of realizing that many of their choices were shaped by pressure, not possibility.

Not because they were weak.
Not because they were foolish.
But because survival leaves very little room for softness.

I think many women are quietly asking themselves:

What did it cost me to become this strong?

That question is not bitterness. It is awareness.

And maybe the goal is not to become anti-career, anti-education, anti-intelligence, or anti-ambition.

Maybe the goal is to stop equating exhaustion with worthiness.

or

Maybe the goal is to build lives where our intelligence is connected to ownership, sustainability, nourishment, and support — not just performance and endurance.

Because beneath all the conversations about leadership, work, motherhood, ambition, and success is a deeper question:

How do we build lives that do not require us to abandon ourselves in order to survive them?

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops high-performing women leaders navigating career, leadership, and chronic conditions who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand

Questions from The Nourished Leader™ Community

What does it mean to lead while navigating uncertainty, chronic conditions, pressure, pain, ambition, and complexity?

Each week, Natalie answers one reader-submitted question on leadership, resilience, clarity, capacity, and sustainable high performance.

We hope these reflections support you in leading with both strength and nourishment.

Submit a question here →

What’s Happening

The Nourished Leader Collective

Beginning this May, The Nourished Leader Collective will gather on the third Thursday of every month for a live leadership masterclass and conversation designed for high-performing women navigating uncertainty, complexity, and evolving demands in the workplace — especially those learning how to lead sustainably while managing capacity, burnout, or chronic conditions.

Together, we explore what it means to lead in complex times with clarity, resilience, confidence, and courage.

First Session:
Thursday, May 21
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST

Topics will be announced one week prior to each session.

Link to follow!

The hole may be the destination, but the target is often somewhere else entirely — the place you aim so the ball eventually ends up where you want it to go.

That insight made me reflect on leadership, life, and especially money. Many of us fixate on the destination — the outcome we want — while overlooking the strategic targets that actually move us forward.

Sometimes the real transformation isn’t arriving somewhere new.
It’s developing a new way of seeing the path in front of us.

Years ago, after finishing my Peace Corps service, I wrote something in a card to friends and family that I rediscovered this week: one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. That idea feels just as true today.

This realization is also what inspired the Women’s Financial Strategy Clinic I’m hosting on May 4th at Highland Creek Golf Club in partnership with the James Black Foundation.

Together we’ll explore how to rethink our relationship with money, deepen our financial literacy, and challenge the assumptions that shape how we make financial decisions.

Because the goal isn’t just financial outcomes.
It’s gaining clarity about how we move toward them.

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops women leaders who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand

Owner, The Nourished Leader™

Women, Money & Self-Trust

A Financial Strategy Clinic

📍 Highland Creek Golf Course
🗓 Monday, May 4
⏰ 10:30 AM
🍽 Lunch provided

Register here: Women, Money, & Self-Trust

I’m sitting here drinking my coffee and mulling over a question I ask myself often as I continue building The Nourished Leader.

The question is this:

What would it look like to build a life without burnout and sacrifice?

Over the last couple of years, that question has been my driving force. It’s literally the reason I started The Nourished Leader.

I was tired of feeling like a sacrifice to everything.

Having burned out not once, but twice, forced me to pause and ask myself what it would look like to build a life that isn’t predicated on burnout and sacrifice.

For me, this became an existential question. Burnout simply isn’t an option anymore. Losing vision in my left eye and coming to terms with living with a chronic condition made that reality very clear.

So I began asking:

What does it mean to become a nourished leader?
What would that actually look like?

That’s what we explore here.

Recently I picked up a book that has been making waves online. It has sparked a lot of conversation, and in some cases, a lot of backlash.

The book is Start With Yourself by entrepreneur Emma Grede.

If I had to answer my original question — what does it look like to build a life without burnout and sacrifice — in less than five words, my answer would be this:

Start with yourself.

Now, I understand why the conversation around this book has become so heated.

As someone who teaches emotional intelligence and spends a lot of time thinking about leadership, culture, and systems, I can see why parts of the narrative are landing poorly for many people.

We’re living in a moment where many women — especially ambitious women, multicultural women, and women of color — are reckoning with the promises we were given about success.

We were told that if we worked hard, hustled, earned the degrees, checked the boxes, and did everything right, things would work out.

Many of us did exactly that.

And yet, what many people feel now is disappointment.

Disappointment with the outcomes that followed all that striving.

Disappointment with systems that often depleted us rather than nourished us.

So when someone comes online and says, essentially, work harder, hustle more, it doesn’t land well.

Women are tired. Women are angry. Women are depleted.

And that reaction is understandable.

But there’s something important we have to recognize:

The first step of leadership — especially self-leadership — is learning to tune out the noise.

Social media amplifies noise.

Arguments about someone’s background, their marriage, their schedule, or how many hours they spend with their children — that’s noise.

Getting pulled into those debates is easy. I catch myself doing it sometimes too.

But ultimately, it’s unproductive.

What matters is the principle.

And the principle is this:

You do have to start with yourself.

That truth doesn’t disappear simply because we’ve been hurt, burned out, or disappointed.

It doesn’t disappear because systems have failed us.

And to be clear, I am not saying that hustle is the answer.

I’m also not saying that simply working harder solves everything.

But here’s something worth acknowledging:

Most of us don’t actually mind working hard.

Working hard can feel incredibly good.

There’s something nourishing about putting your hands into something meaningful — thinking deeply, solving problems, creating something, building something.

The issue is not our willingness to work.

The issue is depletion.

The return on our hard work often hasn’t looked the way we were promised it would.

Many of us invested in degrees, credentials, and professional identities only to feel like the payoff never quite arrived.

We sacrificed.

We burned out.

And now we’re trying to reclaim our power.

That’s why the phrase “start with yourself” can feel triggering right now.

But the truth remains:

It does start with us.

That doesn’t mean blaming ourselves.

It means reclaiming our agency.

It means stepping back, tuning out the noise, and asking a different question:

What would it look like to begin again — starting with ourselves?

As I continue reading this book, I’ll share more insights with the Nourished Leader community.

And my invitation is simple: Read it, but read it differently.

Don’t read it through the lens of the author’s lifestyle, aesthetics, or social media narrative.

Read it for the principle.

Because the second step to becoming a nourished leader is this:

Start with yourself.

But the first step?

Tune out the noise.

Tune out the noise about who someone married.
Tune out the noise about their background.
Tune out the noise that distracts from the deeper message.

And instead ask:

How do I start with myself?

Because that’s where power begins.

And that’s how we take it back.

Have a lovely week.

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops women leaders who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand

Owner, The Nourished Leader™

What’s Happening

Tuesday Masterclass | April 21 | 4:00–5:30 PM EST

For Financial Literacy Month, I’m sharing my $6,000 - less than 20hrs a week 90-day Uber experiment in Charlotte and what it revealed about bridge income, professional identity, and financial agency during career transitions. Bonus: I’ll also share the exact strategy for making money with Uber in Charlotte, NC.

Reserve your seat

Women, Money & Self-Trust

A Financial Strategy Clinic

📍 Highland Creek Golf Course

🗓 Monday, May 4

⏰ 10:30 AM

🍽 Lunch provided

Register here: Women, Money, & Self-Trust

People who have lived through complex, uncontrollable conditions—serious illness, caregiving, or long-term uncertainty—often develop a different relationship with certainty and judgment than those whose lives have been more predictable.

I recognize that pattern because of my experience living with sickle cell disease.

When I went through my journey of sickle retinopathy that ultimately left me without vision in my left eye, the moments that stayed with me most were the 1:1 conversations I had with my eye doctor toward the end of the process.

At the beginning, the odds were in my favor. There was an 80% chance I would not lose my eye. But over the course of a year and a half, those odds slowly collapsed until we were facing a very different reality.

Even sitting in the room with the expert—the person with the most knowledge about what was happening— at the time the outcome was uncertain AND unknowable.

Here’s what I realized:

Our early leadership experiences tends to focus on proving knowledge, asserting judgment, and solving problems quickly.

But later our leadership MUST become more comfortable with our capacity to embrace uncertainty and navigate ambiguity - including holding multiple truths at once.

Some situations cannot be solved with certainty.

They can only be navigated.

And experiences like illness, caregiving, or long periods of uncertainty tend to develop three leadership capacities that many people never learn any other way.

First, you recognize the limits of control. When you live with something like a complex or unpredictable illness, you quickly learn that information does not equal control. Expertise does not eliminate uncertainty. And decisions often involve trade-offs without clear answers.

Do: Practice empathy by softening the impulse to force certainty in other people’s decisions.

Second, you become more attuned to invisible realities. People living with chronic conditions constantly carry realities that others cannot see.

Pain. Fatigue. Risk calculations.

Do: Learn that someone’s reasoning may make perfect sense inside their reality—even if it looks irrational from the outside. This builds a muscle most leadership programs try to teach but rarely achieve:

Epistemic humility — the recognition that your perspective is incomplete.

And third, you begin to understand that hope itself can become a legitimate strategy.

In environments of high uncertainty, hope is not naïve. It becomes a functional resource. Psychologists studying chronic illness and resilience often find that hope does something certainty cannot. It helps people:

• adhere to treatment longer.

• maintain a stable sense of self.

• stay oriented toward the future.

Hope allows people to keep participating in life despite uncertainty. And because of that, the practices that sustain hope begin to matter more.

• Small rituals.

• Daily routines.

• Moments of faith.

• Even a little mysticism. ( My personal favorite!)

From the outside, these practices can look irrational. But inside uncertainty, they are often what allow people to keep moving forward.

In that sense, hope isn’t wishful thinking. It becomes a strategy for survival.

These capacities change how you make decisions. They change how you interpret other people’s choices.

Because once you have lived inside “true” uncertainty, something becomes clear.

Insisting on certainty in complex situations is dangerous.

It leads to premature decisions. It minimizes context. It produces conclusions that are too neat for the reality in front of us. And it silences that which might have led to better outcomes.

For women in particular, this tension shows up in a very personal way.

1. It makes us abandon our own complexity

Many women are living inside multiple truths at the same time:

• career ambition and caregiving

• financial responsibility and health limits

• leadership expectations and emotional labor

• competence and uncertainty

We the often force ourselves into simpler narratives than our lives actually allow.

2. It traps us in over-proving

I see more and more women chasing more credentials, more proof, more preparation.

That impulse often comes from the belief that:

If I just know enough, I’ll finally be right.

But real leadership rarely offers that moment of perfect certainty. Without the capacity for ambiguity, women can get stuck in perpetual proving instead of stepping into authority.

3. It shortens our thinking

When we insist on being certain, we rush toward answers. When we insist on being right, we rush toward answers.

But complex lives require something different.

They require the ability to sit with the situation long enough for better understanding to emerge.

In sum: Developing the capacity to hold ambiguity allows us to:

• make decisions without perfect certainty

• stop forcing ourselves into impossible standards

• move forward without needing every answer first

It gives us room to lead our lives honestly.

My experience with illness taught me long ago that certainty is often an illusion and that leadership maturity is not about eliminating uncertainty.

It’s about developing the capacity to move forward without it.

This is always what led me into executive coaching and advisory work.

Because the self-leadership capacities required in complex situations—recognizing the limits of control, seeing invisible realities, and navigating ambiguity without forcing certainty—are rarely developed through credentials or traditional leadership training.

They are developed through disciplined reflection, rigorous thinking, and conversations that allow leaders to see themselves and their situations more clearly.

As the saying goes, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

If you’re a woman leader navigating health challenges, transition, and the pressure of performing in high-level roles, feel free to reach out.

I have two spots open in April for one-on-one executive coaching.

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops women leaders who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand
Owner, The Nourished Leader™

What’s Happening

Thursday Masterclass | April 16 | 4:00–5:30 PM EST

For Financial Literacy Month, I’m sharing my $6,000 - less than 20hrs a week 90-day Uber experiment in Charlotte and what it revealed about bridge income, professional identity, and financial agency during career transitions. Bonus: I’ll also share the exact strategy for making money with Uber in Charlotte, NC.

Reserve your seat

Women, Money & Self-Trust
A Financial Strategy Clinic

📍 Highland Creek Golf Course
🗓 Monday, May 4
⏰ 10:30 AM
🍽 Lunch provided

Register here: Women, Money, & Self-Trust

Recently, a woman shared with me a series of decisions she had made about her health — including a significant financial investment she believed would improve it.

As she spoke, I recognized the pattern immediately. I understood the mechanics behind how decisions like this are often influenced, and I felt the urge to diagnose the flaw in the decision and explain why it didn’t make sense.

Instead, I said to myself, “Natalie, shut up.”

And I got curious. I asked her how she came to make the decision.

As she told the story, the details began to unfold. As she explained it to me, her reasoning was simple and deeply personal.

She is living with a complex, unpredictable illness. Something I’m VERY familiar with. And the decision she made wasn’t just about money or logic — it was about hope.

When you live with a condition like that, hope isn’t a small thing.

Hope shapes how someone cares for themselves. Hope can influence a persons behavior. Create better habits. Hope can change how they see their future. Sometimes, hope is the only strategy a person feels they have left. And most importantly - her decision was paying off because -

Her belief and her behaviors were in alignment.

In that moment, I realized something:

Correcting her would have been easy.

But doing so would only serve my need to be right.

The need to be right is one of the biggest blind spots in our leadership today.

It shows up when we:

• feel the urge to correct someone

• grow impatient with their reasoning

• start preparing our counterargument before they finish speaking

To be fair -early in our careers we develop expertise - and that sharpens our judgment.

But sometimes that same expertise causes us to filter everything through what we know or what we THINK we know.

And sometimes the real discipline is knowing when not to assert it.

Thank you for reading The Nourished Leader™.

The Nourished Leader™ develops women leaders who rise in uncertainty, command ambiguity, and transform complexity into the power, presence, and position required to lead.

— Natalie R. Legrand
Owner, The Nourished Leader™

What’s Happening

Tuesday Masterclass | April 14 | 4:00–5:30 PM EST

For Financial Literacy Month, I’m sharing my $6,000 - less than 20hrs a week 90-day Uber experiment in Charlotte and what it revealed about bridge income, professional identity, and financial agency during career transitions. Bonus: I’ll also share the exact strategy for making money with Uber in Charlotte, NC.

Reserve your seat

Women, Money & Self-Trust
A Financial Strategy Clinic

📍 Highland Creek Golf Course
🗓 Monday, May 4
⏰ 10:30 AM
🍽 Lunch provided

Register here: Women, Money, & Self-Trust

Our financial systems assume constant capacity.

Our bodies do not operate that way.

Across a month, many women experience shifts in energy, focus, and cognitive capacity tied to hormonal rhythms. For women living with chronic illness, those fluctuations can be even more pronounced and less predictable.

Yet the systems that govern work and money—whether in corporate environments or self-employment—are built on a different assumption: steady output.

Consistent productivity.
Consistent availability.
Consistent performance.

When a woman’s capacity fluctuates, the tension becomes visible.

If income depends directly on output, a low-capacity period can quickly become a financial concern. Not because the individual lacks discipline or capability, but because the system she operates within was never designed to accommodate fluctuation.

For women managing chronic illness, this tension becomes even more pronounced.

Chronic conditions like sickle cell disease introduce a level of unpredictability to physical capacity that most financial structures simply do not address. There are periods where energy, focus, and physical strength are not available in the same way they may be at other times.

Yet financial expectations rarely- if at all - adjust to reflect that reality.

Most of us are taught how to earn money, save money, and invest money.

Very few of us are taught how to design our financial lives around the bodies we actually live in.

Recently, I realized something about my own life.

I have always aligned my life with my cycles and my capacity. I learned early how to listen to my body and adjust when necessary. Living with sickle cell disease required that awareness.

But there was one area of my life I never designed with that same awareness in mind.

My finances.

For most of my career, I operated within systems where money functioned almost like an event. Income arrived through structures that absorbed some of the variability in my capacity. I never had to confront the question directly.

But when those structures changed, I was forced to ask a question I had never seriously considered before:

What does my chronic illness mean for my financial life?

Despite living with sickle cell disease, despite understanding the rhythms and limitations of my own body, I had never intentionally considered what those realities should mean for my financial life.

That realization has led me to a series of questions I believe more women should begin asking.

Not just women living with chronic illness, but women navigating hormonal cycles, caregiving responsibilities, and the many realities that shape capacity over time.

If our bodies operate in rhythms and fluctuations, then our financial thinking should account for that.

We should be asking different questions.

What financial structures protect periods of low capacity?
What kinds of income models allow for fluctuation without financial collapse?
How do we build buffers that acknowledge biological reality rather than pretending it does not exist?

These are not questions most financial conversations address.

But they should.

Because self-leadership—especially for women—requires us to design lives that work with our humanity rather than constantly overriding it.

So the question I am now exploring is a simple one:

What does money look like when you design around the body you actually have?

It is a question more women should be asking—especially those navigating chronic illness, hormonal rhythms, caregiving responsibilities, and the many realities that shape our capacity over time.

Because if our financial systems ignore those realities, the result is predictable: women overriding their bodies in order to survive inside systems that were never designed with them in mind.

I don’t believe the answer is to override our humanity.

I believe the work ahead is learning how to design financial lives that respect it.

That conversation—how capacity, biology, and financial design intersect—is one I am increasingly bringing into my advisory work with women leaders.

Because money is not just about numbers.

It is also about the systems we build to support the lives we are actually living.

When women ignore their biological reality in their financial decisions, they often stop trusting themselves.

Why?

Because they keep trying to perform inside systems that don’t match their capacity. When their body inevitably pushes back — through illness, fatigue, or cycles — it can feel like personal failure instead of a design problem.

That erodes self-trust.

Self-trust with money begins when we stop pretending our bodies don’t matter

The Nourished Leader is partnering with the James Black Foundation on May 4th

Women, Money & Self-Trust, where we’ll explore questions like:

• How do we see our financial reality clearly without shame?
• How do we make money decisions we can trust ourselves to stand behind?
• What does financial self-trust actually look like for women navigating real-life capacity constraints?

If this article resonated with you, I hope you’ll join me.

Women, Money & Self-Trust
Highland Creek Golf Club — Charlotte
Monday, May 4 | 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Lunch will be provided, and the conversation will be practical, honest, and grounded in the realities many women are navigating right now.

In honor of National Financial Literacy Month, The Nourished Leader is partnering with the James Black Foundation to host Women, Money & Self-Trust, a financial strategy clinic for women on May 4 at Highland Creek Golf Club. A portion of proceeds will support the foundation’s work advancing financial literacy through education and golf. Read to the end for event details — and for upcoming opportunities to join me live in a series of webinars.

The stupidest thing we say about money is:

“I wish I had started earlier.”

It sounds wise. But most of the time it removes agency from the present moment.

Instead of asking what can I do now, we sit in regret about a version of ourselves who supposedly should have known better.

Why This Shows Up So Much With Women and Money

When women talk about finances, the first sentence is often:

• “I wish I had started investing earlier.”

• “If I knew then what I know now…”

• “I’m so behind.”

But those sentences quietly assume something that isn’t true:

That the only thing missing was information.

And that’s rarely the real story. Most women didn’t delay because they were stupid.

They delayed because of things like:

• survival

• caregiving

• unequal pay

• lack of financial models

• fear of making a mistake

• being told money wasn’t their domain

• prioritizing everyone else first

So when we reduce all of that to “I should have started earlier,” we flatten the complexity of our lives into a single regret.

And regret is not a strategy.

The Real Shift: Literacy vs Agency

We talk endlessly about financial literacy. But literacy is not the same thing as financial agency.

Financial literacy means:

• you understand interest

• you know what investing is

• you know what a retirement account is

Financial agency means:

• you make decisions

• you act

• you take ownership of your financial life from this moment forward

You can be financially literate and still paralyzed. But once agency enters the room, everything changes.

The Better Question

Instead of asking: “Why didn’t I start earlier?”

Ask: “What do I understand now that I didn’t understand then?”

And then an even better question:

“What is the smallest action I can take with that understanding today?”

Because principles are timeless. Compounding works whether you start at 22 or 52.

Decision-making works whether you learned it yesterday or ten years ago.

What matters is not when you should have started. What matters is when you begin acting with the clarity you have now.

A Nourished Leader doesn’t spend her energy rewriting the past.

She gets curious.

She asks:

• What do I see now?

• What do I understand now?

• What is within my control now?

And then she moves.

The most powerful financial decision you can make isn’t wishing you started earlier.

It’s deciding that today counts.

April is Financial Literacy Month, and here at The Nourished Leader ™ we are focusing on all thing’s money – Financial Capacity, Financial Clarity and Financial Courage.

To mark the occasion, The Nourished Leader is partnering with the James Black Foundation to host a conversation for women navigating financial decisions in uncertain times.

If you’ve ever thought “I wish I had started earlier,” this conversation is for you.

We’ll explore the difference between financial literacy and financial agency, and how women can begin making clear, confident financial decisions from exactly where they are.

Join Us

Women, Money, & Self-Trust

📅 May 4, 2026
⏰ 10:30AM-12:30 PM
📍 Highland Creek Golf Club

It’s dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of financial education and developing healthy money management skills.

For the last 90 days, I’ve been running a personal experiment. I’ve been driving for Uber. Working fewer than 20 hours a week, I’ve made a little over $6,000.

And I did in The Nourished Leader way.

But what’s been most interesting about this experience hasn’t just been the income. It’s been the lessons.

Every shift has been a real-time classroom in:
- Supply and demand
- Market behavior
- Behavioral economics
- Timing of capital
- Emotional regulation under financial pressure
- Micro-market analysis

You start to see patterns. You learn when to move, when to wait, and when to call it a day.

Money moves in rhythms.
Markets move in patterns.
And people move emotionally.

Uber just happens to be one of the clearest places to watch all three happen at once.

Heres is what i know - the best financial education doesn’t come from theory.
It comes from watching how money actually moves in the world.

About The Nourished Leader™

I’m Natalie R. Legrand — leadership advisor, keynote speaker, and creator of The Nourished Leader™.

Here I share reflections and leadership lessons I’m learning in real time — about clarity, capacity, money, decision-making, and what it means to lead with courage in uncertain seasons.

If this resonates with you, subscribe and follow along.

— Natalie

“We often tell our students the future is in your hands, but I think the future is actually in your mouth” – Ocean Vuong (Vietnamese-American poet and essayist)

We are often told that words have power. We are also told that words create. There have been times when I’ve been ‘reprimanded’ for saying something ‘negative’.

It bugged me.

In the last year or so, I have become more conscious with my words—not out of fear that I will ‘manifest’ something I don’t desire, but because I realized how much our understanding of words is… problematic. It’s been an eye-opening experience.

It’s not the words that have power—it’s the meaning we inherited around the word- through family, culture, and experiences. That’s what is activated in our bodies. That is what we respond to.

When I coached C-suite teams abroad, the expectation was that all members spoke in English for the sake of the facilitators. It kind of annoyed me. Clearly, these teams communicate in their native languages when we weren’t around, and the expectation to do ‘deep work’ in an acquired language made absolutely no sense to me.

Think about it—you’re being asked to find meaning, make meaning, and connect deeply in the language you mostly use to get work done.

There was one activity in particular where we’d give them a set of words and ask them to assign value judgments and sort them accordingly. Then I’d challenge their choices because I know that everyone’s understanding of a word is not the same.

And every single time, there were words where multiple members had completely different interpretations.

I always say—forget the word. What matters our ability to come up with a shared meaning.

Humans are meaning-making species first—consciously or unconsciously. The impact a word has is dependent on the meaning assigned by the individual. Often, that meaning is inherited—through family, culture, community. But more importantly, it is our lived experience with the word that cements it in our psyche.

As a black woman in midlife, going through what I like to call the ‘second puberty,’ I believe we are challenged to revisit what words mean to us. It is an opportunity to question, challenge, and most importantly—reclaim our authority over meaning and ultimately its impact.

The discovery has been mind blowing - take for example the word ‘urgency’. It physically triggers me. I associate it with rushing and I HATE being rushed. The more you rush me - well lets just say the more like a donkey I behave. Its somatic.

The trouble is not with the word, or even its definition, its with how it translates in my body. This needs attention now → I must abandon myself and move fast. Its distortion. So I’ve created a new relationship with the word - choosing to understand it as a signal for priority, or a call for grounded decision making in the moment.

Bottom line:
The power of a word is in its meaning.
Better yet—the power of a word is in our relationship to that word.

The “second puberty” is the perfect opportunity to consciously re-establish a relationship with the words that we use. The dramaticness of the shift can reveal so much about the relationships we have in our lives- but more importantly the relationship we have with our self.

And because of that, we must challenge the relationship we have with words—because from that relationship, our evolved identity begins to emerge.

When we reclaim the meaning of our words, we become aligned.

And from that alignment—we create our futures.

In the season of the snowdrop (Galanthus), that internal heat that melts the snow around us is power.

The meaning—deeper yet, the relationship—we have with words is - power.

Self-leadership begins the moment we stop organizing our lives around what needs to be done and start anchoring our days in who we choose to be.

I’ve always had a problem with to-do lists.

Not because I’m disorganized. Not because I don’t believe in productivity. But because, quite literally, I never understood the assignment.

You see, when someone told me to make a to-do list, I assumed the task was to do the list.

So I did. I wrote it. List completed.

If the job was to create a to-do list, then technically, the moment the list existed… the task was finished.

And that’s exactly how it always felt to me.

I would write a beautiful list. Organized. Thoughtful. Clear.

Then something strange would happen.

My brain would quietly say: “Well done. You did the list.” ( It wasn’t wrong…)

And the rest of the day would move on.

For years I thought something was wrong with me. Everyone around me seemed to live and die by their to-do lists. Entire productivity systems were built around them. People swore by them.

Meanwhile, I felt like the moment I wrote the list. Task complete.

Side Bar: It turns out there’s actually a reason for this. Our brains release a small sense of accomplishment when we define a task, not just when we finish it. The act of organizing the work can trick the brain into feeling like progress has already occurred. Go figure!

But the deeper realization I had recently wasn’t about productivity at all.

The work of a nourished leader is not about becoming more productive. It’s about becoming more self-led. And self-leadership doesn’t start with what you do.

It starts with who you choose to be.

Most people structure their lives around to-do lists.

But I’ve started experimenting with something different: A to-be list.

Instead of asking: “What do I need to get done today?” I start by asking: “Who do I need to be today?”

Once those identities are clear, the actions follow naturally.

Mic Drop: The doing emerges from the being.

And here’s the surprising part:

When you start with being, more meaningful things actually get done.

Not because you forced productivity, but because your actions are aligned with identity.

The Issue with To Do Lists:

To-do lists reinforce what I now call task identity.

Task identity is the belief that your value—and even your identity—comes from completing tasks.

· If I accomplish this, then I am responsible.

· If I finish that, then I am productive.

· If the list is done, then I am successful.

Sound familiar?

The problem is that task identity traps people—especially women—in an endless cycle of responsibilities, checklists, and obligations that keep life moving but rarely move us forward.

What Happens When You Live from Task Identity

When your life is organized around doing instead of being, you often end up playing one of three characters.

The Victim

This is the moment when the list overwhelms you. You feel:

• buried under responsibilities

• resentful about how much is on your plate

• exhausted from constantly reacting

The inner dialogue sounds like: “Why does everything fall on me?”

The Hero

So you push harder. You step in. You fix things. You take responsibility.

You become the one who:

• handles the crisis

• saves the situation

• carries the team or the family

The hero gets things done.

But the hero is also constantly overextended.

The Villain

Eventually the exhaustion shows up as frustration.

You snap. You withdraw. You blame someone.

Not because you are actually a villain — but because the pressure finally spills over.

Now the inner dialogue sounds like: “Why can’t anyone else handle this?”

The Cycle

The trap is that task identity keeps you cycling through these three roles:

Victim → Hero → Villain → back to Victim.

All while the list keeps growing.

The problem isn’t your capability. It’s the starting point.

When your day begins with doing, you end up reacting to the system. When your day begins with being, you start directing your life instead of constantly rescuing it.

Which makes me think Shakespeare might have been onto something.

“To be, or not to be” wasn’t really a question about action. It was a question about identity.

And identity ALWAYS comes first.

This is a woman with a PhD. Someone who has spent years advocating for justice, speaking out, showing up, and carrying the emotional weight of systems that needed changing. She has always been the one “on fire”—the one people point to as an example of commitment and courage.

But now she’s tired.

And instead of applauding her honesty, the narrative around her—and around many women like her—is that quietly quitting is a sign of disengagement.

I see it differently.

Quiet quitting is often a strategic decision, especially for women who have spent years over-functioning.

For many of us, the expectations have never been limited to the job description. We take on emotional labor. We fix problems that aren’t ours to fix. We carry the morale of teams, the integrity of organizations, and sometimes the hopes of entire movements. We do it because we care, because we believe in the work, and because we’ve been taught that being reliable, strong, and self-sacrificing is part of leadership.

Eventually, the cost shows up.

When a woman begins doing only what she agreed to do—when she stops volunteering for the invisible labor, stops trying to climb every ladder, and stops being the hero in every room—it gets labeled as quitting.

But in many cases, it’s something else entirely.

It’s power returning to its rightful place.

Quiet quitting often marks the moment when a woman stops abandoning herself in order to prove her commitment. She begins to set boundaries. She starts honoring her capacity. She withdraws energy from systems that have been sustained by her overextension.

That isn’t disengagement. It’s recalibration.

In fact, it may be the first time she is truly choosing herself.

There’s a deeper truth here that we don’t talk about enough: many high-capacity women reach a point where the roles they once carried with pride become unsustainable. They are navigating midlife transitions, shifting identities, and the realization that being constantly “on fire” is not the same thing as being well.

When they step back, they often feel shame. They wonder if they’re losing their drive, losing their edge, or losing the version of themselves that people admired.

But what if the opposite is happening?

What if stepping back is not a loss of leadership—but the beginning of a more sustainable form of it?

Leadership that is nourished, not depleted.

Leadership that comes from choice, not obligation.

Leadership that recognizes that impact does not require self-abandonment.

If you find yourself quietly quitting right now, consider this: you may not be quitting at all.

You may simply be reclaiming your energy, your boundaries, and your right to choose how you show up in the world.

And that might be the most strategic decision you make all year.

My favorite time of year.

Every year around this time — as we move toward International Women’s Day on March 8 — I’m reminded why The Nourished Leader exists in the first place.

Years ago, while living in Ukraine, a little girl handed me a delicate white flower for International Women’s Day.

podsnezhnik — which translates to - under the snow.

I remember looking at it in disbelief.

How could anything grow in these conditions?

Later, I learned something remarkable. The Galanthus (snowdrop) flower doesn’t wait for spring.

It creates its own heat.

That internal warmth melts the snow around it, allowing it to push through frozen ground long before the season changes.

That image has stayed with me ever since. It has been part of my brand for over 10yrs!

Because leadership — real leadership — often works the same way.

We don’t always get perfect timing.
We don’t always get certainty.
We don’t always get ideal conditions.

But we move anyway. We create momentum anyway.

We grow anyway.

And that’s what Galanthus season represents to me.

Not perfection.

Self-leadership in motion.

This year feels especially meaningful.

I’m bringing The Nourished Leader back online in a more intentional way — and over the next couple of weeks, in honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s Month, I’ll be sharing more about:

🌱 The Galanthus story and what it means
🌱 The principles of self-leadership I teach
🌱 Conversations with women navigating complexity and change
🌱 The 15 Commitments of a Nourished Leader
🌱 Reflections from this season of growth

And honestly — I’m excited.

Because Galanthus season isn’t about waiting until everything is figured out.

It’s about choosing to grow while you’re still in the middle of it.

So if you find yourself in a moment that feels uncertain, cold, or unlikely…

I hope you remember:

Something in you already knows how to create the warmth you need.

Spring doesn’t begin when conditions change.

It begins when something inside decides to grow.

Happy Galanthus season. 🌱

— Natalie