Welcome to 2026
When we wrote the above words for our website five years ago, I’m not sure we imagined quite how weird and troubling things might get so soon. Environmentally, yes. Politically and socially, perhaps not?
Today’s world of uncertain strategic and relational challenges calls for something different in our ways of being and doing, in our leadership. We’re in a crossover period, where old patterns remain stubbornly at play even while new, regenerative patterns start to emerge. The confused seas we find ourselves in feel turbulent, dangerous. The power struggles are real and increasingly bloody. We may indeed be in over our heads.
We continue to believe that Leading Through Storms is not a journey to be undertaken alone.
Over the past six years we have offered safe spaces for people to deeply explore all that matters. To build capacity to be alongside painful feelings, to find ground, to connect with what it means to be fully alive.
We support people in their brave, creative experimentation as they breathe life into what they love. Pursuing their visions - not of what someone has taught them to want, and not what they have learned to be willing to settle for, but of what they truly wish for. Community member Bel Jacobs’ work with The Empathy Project is a profoundly encouraging example of the clear-eyed, deep-hearted leadership that is rising.
Our work is in some way an act of refusal. Unwilling to accept as normal or inevitable all that is so evidently (to so many of us) ‘wrong’. We hold a torch for something different, having experienced for ourselves what else becomes possible when we connect with our own true nature and respect the web of intricate engagements and interactions that govern life. Coming together with others to take pause, to reflect and inquire, we discover new ways to navigate through the mire. (A degree of) sanity returned. Common humanity (re)established. Our hearts filled as we touch into the beauty of precious life. Clear about what we will, and will not, stand for. More adept at distinguishing signal from noise.
It hits hard every time I read something like these words from Bill McGuire, an emeritus professor of climate hazards at University College London: “To all intents and purposes, the 1.5C limit is now dead in the water. Whichever way you look at it, dangerous climate breakdown has arrived, but with little sign that the world is prepared or even paying serious attention.”
System transformation takes time. While there may be tipping points, there don’t seem to be short cuts. Yet I feel the motion of a great turning and see bright, fresh, tender shoots of a future, of a life, that in some way represents what I wish for. I wonder, do you?
In a recent article, one of my teachers, Satish Kumar, reminded us that just 60 years ago “not a single government had a ministry of the environment. No newspaper had a correspondent covering environmental issues. Not a single wind turbine was producing renewable electricity in the UK. A plant-based diet was a rarity.” A lot has happened during this short, urgent time in human history, much of it terrible, and much of it awe-inspiring.
The Well-being of Future Generations Act, passed in Wales just a decade ago, offers an example of how long and deep the roots of transformative change are. Jane Davidson, Minister responsible for creation of the Act, traces her work back to the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ of 1992. Then, the duty placed on the newly devolved Welsh government in 1999, to ‘promote sustainable development’. So many enabling factors quietly at play, perhaps at the time not fully seen or understood. And now, with the Act operating as a central organising principle of governance in Wales, mindset and culture change are underway.
So we are called to bring forward patience alongside urgency during these highly consequential times. Committing to spirited leadership and ‘right action’ not because we can feel sure that things will turn out well but, in the words of Vaclav Havel, “with the certainty that it makes sense”.
When we’re beavering away at the coal face (our world seems to invite mixed metaphors) it can sometimes be hard to appreciate the progress we are making. Stepping away to gain perspective – as a gardener or stonemason might – feels vital, as part of tending our personal energies, not least. Perhaps you have a felt sense of how it is when you see with new eyes what you are part of? A growing movement of movements, finding a stronger collective voice, narrowing the range of possibilities for denying the structures and forces that underpin our troubles. Reducing harms meaningfully while getting serious about skillful adaptation to our rapidly changing, volatile world.
While we certainly do not have another 60 years if we are to avoid the worst consequences of our current predicament, I take heart from remembering that we stand on mighty shoulders. With no shortage of understanding about what we as a species are now required to do.
Whatever you see behind you and around you in this moment, whatever dreams you hold for a liveable future ahead, we wish you good speed through this year. May we grow together a sense that everything everywhere all at once is shifting, and that by putting our restless energies to work in service of what we most care and worry about we are playing a vital part in the massive improv act underway here on planet Earth, our home.
Below, Jake and James share some of their musings of the moment, reminding themselves, us all, of why they do what they do.
If you’d like to come together with others Leading Through Storms, please join whichever of our regular gatherings feel right for you. Or for an exploratory conversation, book a call with one of us.
If you’d like to bring our thinking and practices into your community or workplace, contact us via info@leadingthroughstorms.org. It’s remarkable what unfolds when vision and energies are brought into alignment.
In gratitude,
Kirstin
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Reflections from Jake:
Our relationship with ourselves, humanity and the more-than-human has been ruptured, catastrophically in too many instances - and sometimes it can be a challenge to know where to start, so complex and painful are the issues facing us. And yet slowing down, breathing together with other humans and with the more than human goes some way to some repair and heal, to regulate our nervous systems, and usefully disrupt business-as-usual.
Flourishing Fridays on Hampstead Heath, an act of soft rebellion, has turned two full cycles around the sun - and some. Our monthly seasonal and Nature inspired drop in to wood time and process continues to unfold and reveal. This month we worked with the qualities of silver birch and letting go and in February we will be with the new beginnings of Imbolc (in the belly). And so we continue to turn around the sun, turning inwards, turning towards each other with open hearts, and turning towards the wisdom of the natural world, offering our attention, our listening and sometimes our song.
There is often metaphor and poetry in our work, and Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese describes in few words what we are about when we meet, wherever we meet, and especially on the Heath.
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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Reflections from James:
2025’s Monday Monthlies demonstrated to me the value we each get from pausing in community to reflect on our behaviours (whether seen as leadership or not) in the context of these mega-uncertain times. The preparedness to explore our restlessmess (sic), limited understandings of what is happening and what might be an appropriate next step is clearly revitalising for many of us. As one new participant put it “there is much power in conversation with strangers” even when blankness in the face of confusion challenges us, and our identities.
The danger of being seduced by and in thrall to the distant and grand, at the expense of the local and humble often accompanies some of us, exploiting the inevitable doubts that accompany active hope. That so many continue to work with these doubts, means that much grass-roots work has an immediate honesty that transmits. And in community, voicing the insistent questioning doubts, seems to consistently demonstrate the truth that powerful dialogue includes more uncomfortable and / or expansive questions than (falsely, simplistic but attractive?) answers.
I’m continually reminded that the practise needed from each of us doesn’t demand more knowledge but more wisdom. Reconciliation to the turmoil, relinquishment of old control-based identities, restoration of committed in-community time and shared resilience in the face of the chaos.
The challenges of not being (prepared to be fully,) truly seen, and of othering, remain barriers. Connection can rejuvenate souls and perhaps make the significant worldview adaptations we need to take less punitive and painful, and more possible and liberating.