So here we are, in 2025. So much is unfolding with speed and fury in our collective milieu, from climate disasters, to accelerating technological change, to rising authoritarianism around the globe. It is not for the faint of heart.
Certainly in these times, my team and I are feeling, in a new way, the profound need to support women in their leadership and in creating full and fulfilling lives. That’s the “what” of our work. But these times have prompted my team and I to reflect on what’s important about the how of our work – meaning, the stances we take and the values that guide our work with each other and with you each day.
I want to share how we, on the Playing Big team, are showing up in relationship to these challenges this year. We aim to operate with three principles informing everything that we do. These have all long been a part of how we work, but they feel important in new ways, and we will be making them more central to our work this year.
I think of this principle as “everybody precious.” Everybody holy – everybody a piece of, a part of – the divine. This principle is foundational, it changes everything, and there is a huge assault on it in our time.
Our team lives the conviction that every person is precious in so many different ways, large and small. It shows up through the deep care we always try to treat our readers and course participants with. It shows up when a member of our team sits down and writes, by hand, the name of each person in a course before it begins, saying a quiet blessing of well wishing over each name. It shows up in my starting assumption before any coaching conversation: that I am about to experience a miraculous human being worthy of absolute cherishment. It shows up, too, when we get a tricky or difficult email from a reader, and we slow down to do the sometimes lengthy reflective and discernment work to figure out how to ethically and generously respond.
In the current context, treating people in these ways is countercultural. If the rest of your day felt like it jerked you around with harsh words and experiences, we want our space to be different. We want it to be a soft place to land.
But it’s not just that we work to hold each person as precious. It’s also that, in our courses, people come to see each other’s sacredness and humanity – often across real differences in identity of many kinds. As just one example, on a recent course call, we had participants present from Croatia, Jamaica, Canada, Poland, South Africa, Slovakia, Sweden, Bermuda, Switzerland, Australia, Colombia, Spain, Netherlands, India, UK, and more. And within the U.S. participants joined from Chicago to Houston, from the Puget Sound to Florida, from Indiana to Wisconsin, and everywhere in between.
Because of the tone we set, and because we aren’t just engaging in small talk, but instead having coaching conversations in which each person’s tender dreams and fears come forth, something amazing happens. Across our wide-ranging community, people experience each others’ essences, their stunningly bright light. They are moved by each other. In the climate of increasing dehumanization, and the misinformation about each other that is so rampant now, this is important in an entirely new way.
The second theme we are embracing this year is helping people ground in ungrounded times.
What does it mean to be grounded? It means that we are regulating our nervous systems and processing our emotions so that we can keep returning to a state of openness, centeredness, and goodwill – and then taking action from that state. This is vital, as every day we are seeing leaders take action – not out of those calmer and wiser internal spaces – but out of their own gaping unhealed wounds and harmful animosities. As they do that on the most visible stages, they are normalizing that behavior, and granting a dangerous permission for others to do the same in their own communities and homes.
All of us who are doing work to help people regulate emotionally are doing a crucial collective task: building the cohort of individuals who can act from solid emotional and mental ground. Parents, teachers, therapists, coaches, wellness support people do this work quite formally, all day long. But many of us do it more subtly through our work – by being the calm one in the room, by knowing how to help people talk through triggers or intense emotions, or by being a problem solver who can help people move forward together. I see our team’s work as also fitting in here – both in offering coaching conversations that help us shift and regulate, and in teaching self-coaching tools that give people the skills to again and again move from fear, stress and resentment, back into their calmer and loving selves.
Our third principle is about embodiment. In these times, it’s all too easy to end up living like floating heads lost in our devices. Meanwhile, AI is rapidly blurring the lines between what’s human and what’s not. And we find ourselves in relationship to a disrupted, changing earth. All of these currents threaten to pull us away from our sensory, incarnate existence. But it’s through the body, so much of the time, that we ground and source ourselves. And so often it’s through embodied human connection – voices, faces, touch, felt energies – that we find comfort and calm.
In these times, I need the solace that comes from gazing at eyes and faces. I need to hear human voices aloud. In fact, “Keep It Fleshy” is my personal motto for 2025. It makes me chuckle because it’s such a cheeky phrase, but I’m not joking about the actual meaning of it at all! I am taking darn seriously designing a life that stays rooted in felt connection and embodied day-to-day living: more voices aloud, more gatherings, more touch, more immersion in water, more physical movement, more staring at trees.
In our work as a team, Keep It Fleshy means we will be offering more opportunities for live interaction within my courses, more opportunities for participants to know each other, and for me to get to know each of you. I’ll also be doing more in-person events than I have in a long time, as well as doing smaller events, with the grassroots communities and organizations that inspire me and fill me up. Because what I know for sure is that in these tumultuous times, we need each other – and we need to connect in embodied ways.
So, those are our principles.
Everybody Precious.
Grounding in Ungrounded Times.
Keep It Fleshy!
That’s how we plan to operate within our team and with you this year. We look forward to supporting you, gathering with you, and learning from and with you.
With love,
Tara & team
Photo Credit: Natalia Blauth
