Category: Creativity

We all need space to breathe. With our phones dinging new reports of war, economic turmoil and the environmental impact of our busy world. In Australia, a research project asked thousands of people about the changing balance between their home and work lives.

If you haven’t noticed, we are all being asked to lead in new ways.

The 2025 Women’s Ambition Report by Women’s Agenda highlighted that 72% of women experienced burnout in the past 12 months, with 61% of those citing the balance between home and career life as the cause.

These numbers tell a story.

I reached the end of 2025 and couldn’t juggle the load anymore. I am not sure if it was the realisation of perimenopause and the hormonal impact of my lifestyle, but after a career of increasingly taking on more and more responsibility at work over decades, I no longer wanted it all anymore.

My generation was promised it all. Leadership, opportunities, travel, motherhood, but I am learning that I can have it all, just not at the same time. I chose my family, my health and a more paced daily life, in a season of uncertainty.

We live in an ever-changing social environment. Women are rewriting the narrative by embracing entrepreneurship, creating flexible work environments that promote balance and resilience while challenging traditional corporate norms and expectations.

One where the nature of working from home has created more flexibility, but at the same time has changed the nature of connection and the rhythm of coming and going to work.

One where 34.8 per cent of Australian business owner managers are female, reflecting a 46 per cent increase over the past two decades, showcasing women’s rising presence in entrepreneurship.

An impressive 81 per cent of women business operators are mothers. They are not opting out of the workforce; instead, they are building something better for their families and communities.

A significant 46 per cent of Australian workers are now working from home at least some of the time. This shift has offered many the flexibility they desire, allowing for a better work-life balance. However, it has also blurred the lines between personal and professional lives. As remote work becomes the norm, many individuals face new challenges absent in traditional office settings, leading to heightened feelings of isolation and burnout.

The rise of remote work has introduced complexities that affect mental health. While the freedom to work from home is appealing, it can bring new pressures. Many workers find it difficult to disconnect from their duties, leading to stress accumulation. The overall perception is that while flexibility is beneficial, without proper boundaries, it can exacerbate burnout rather than alleviate it, leaving individuals yearning for a more balanced approach to their work.

The layer of uncertainty is fresh in our minds after the pandemic and the worldwide chaos that became a series of conflicts and misunderstandings. Our phones have enabled more publicity than ever before, but algorithms have created echo chambers that foster deep distrust in every corner.

Then I read scriptures written by prophets from generations ago. One’s like Isaiah, who was lost in the mire of deep societal unrest, war, and economic challenges, and it helped him return to the foundations of trust and to the way he leaned on God’s help.

“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

Isaiah 40: 10

So in our businesses, our families and our neighbourhoods, how do we lead in times of uncertainty?

1. Be predictable. Connection is a priority

When the world feels unstable, your steady presence is a gift. Show up on the same days, whether it’s sports, community groups or church. Keep your promises small and keep them well. With your family, routine will change everything. Keep your meals simple, but sit at the table. Journal for five minutes each day.

2. Name reality, then name hope

Do not pretend the news is not hard. Acknowledge it in one honest sentence with each other, then offer one hopeful pathway. This is the rhythm of the Psalms. Begin each day with gratitude, name the reality, but also name hope. In conversations with your children, partners, and friends, name the hard, then name the hope.

3. Build a connection first

Be curious. Don’t just assume your friends have stopped talking to you. Don’t assume that they no longer want to connect. Ask a question. Answer the DMs. Pray for your neighbours. Send voice notes. If someone crosses your mind, send them a message. Make time to catch up and have a cup of tea with no agenda. Reconcile lost relationships. Video call.

4. Celebrate small wins

Hope grows where small goodness is noticed. A sentence of gratitude in a text message. A photo with a neighbour. A verse that steadied you, shared somewhere. Name it out loud. Write it on your fridge, send it in a text. Rewrite the season’s narrative and anchor it in hope. Tell your friends you love them. Celebrate when they win.

There is a shift happening; a new way of being is here. Letting go of the labels and the constraints that religion has imposed. Here come the wild ones, and it’s time for us to get out of the way.

Have you ever rolled your eyes at the youth in your town? I know sometimes I see them riding their e-scooters and running across the road, and I find myself shaking my head. I don’t want to be cynical; I want my house to be a lighthouse sitting on the hill, not a place where teenagers feel condemned and shamed for their youthful zeal.

Acceptance, diversity, and story blowing through my life.

I grew up in a house that was always open. A table with enough food to spare. A bed for those who were unsafe. There was always a party brewing, and parents who wanted their kids home, with little need for a reason to celebrate, created a home that was nurturing, rather than a world repelling them from its fold.

Lately, I keep hearing the phrase “Here come the wild ones…”

Young people who are living through technological revolutions.

Teenagers who were told to stay home from school during the pandemic.

A generation that has more information at their fingertips, but is longing for experiences and analogue spaces of renewal.

The psalms proclaim it, the scrolling internet stories of God are increasing, and a swell of a new sound is arising.

“Voice”

Isaiah 40:3, quoted in all four Gospels about John: “A voice crying in the wilderness.” Not a name. Not a title. A voice. John himself embraces this when asked who he is — he doesn’t say prophet, priest or Elijah.

He says I am a voice.

“A voice of one calling: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God'”— Isaiah 40: 3

This is one of scripture’s most extraordinary identity statements. He had reduced himself to pure function — pure instrument. No ego in the sound. Just the word passing through him. This is what it means to live surrendered, to seek a new way of being and observe the new that is here.

That’s a kind of wildness; to be so surrendered, you become transparent.

I’ve heard whispers of wild generations past, across my life, I have heard story after story of the moves of God in the 1970s. The Jesus people, times of baptism in rivers and concerts, gathering, with protests full of love.

I keep hearing the words “The Wild Ones Are Coming.”

This is what I see…

They reject inherited faith but hunger for the real thing

They are not staying in a church because their parents went there. They won’t perform religion. But when they encounter something genuine — presence, transformation, community that costs something, they go all in. They’re repelled by veneer and drawn to substance.

They are not trying to rebel; they just don’t see the rules the way we do. Black and white confuses them; they realise there are parts of faith that are grey, and they are open to this tension.

They’ve grown up with constant change

Climate anxiety, pandemic, social media’s dark side, political chaos, and the loneliness epidemic. They have been formed in uncertainty in a way no previous generation quite was. This has stripped away the illusion that the world will hold you. It creates a kind of holy desperation that older generations, who had more stable cultural scaffolding, often didn’t feel.

They explore new technology like AI with curiosity, believing they can do anything.

They’re not interested in institutions; they want an encounter

They’ll drive hours for a worship night. They’ll fast. They’ll pursue spiritual direction and contemplative practice. They just won’t sit in a pew out of obligation. The hunger is real.

They are drawn to tables; they will be house-sharing for longer than any previous generation. Independence may be a word of the past. They realise that house parties, shared belongings, the need for sustainable fashion, and the impact of our consumerism are not just a philosophy; they shape the world they long to see restored.

They carry a both/and spirituality

They hold tension well: justice AND worship, mystery AND doctrine, embodied practice AND digital community. They’re not easily boxed. That makes them frustrating to program for and extraordinary to release into mission. They hate falsehood when teachers say one thing and do another.

They don’t want to be told what to do; they want to experience it. They are longing for companions, not leaders who control their reality. They want to explore the grey and redefine what shapes the future.

They’re drawn to liturgy

Liturgy, Lectio Divina, the Church Fathers, icons, disciplines, the mystics, silence. There’s a remarkable turn toward old traditions not as nostalgia but as anchors. They want something that has outlasted trends. That’s a generation looking for bedrock.

They want a simple faith. They want honesty. They don’t want insincerity.

What makes them wild?

They are ungovernable by consumer Christianity. They cannot be held by programs alone. They are, in the deepest sense, seeking a King, not a brand. They grew up in a kids’ church. Whilst their parents attended the conference, they drove in cars to school, listening to CDs. They wanted less.

Church Pastors, they want less, not more. Honest, not excellent. Brave, not perfect.

And when they find the real thing, they are extraordinarily loyal, extraordinarily brave, and extraordinarily willing to go to the hard places.

They are a new breed of John the Baptists.

Wilderness-formed. Uncontainable. Absolutely certain of identity. Pointing beyond without hesitation.

A question I have for you today?

How are you holding space for the wildness found in the youth in your neighbourhood? How are you encouraging expressions of faith in your home? How are you listening with surrender to the beauty that God wants to birth in the next leaders of the Church?

The wild ones are coming…

Can you see them?

How Stories Heal and Simple Steps to Unlock Yours.

A psychologist named James Pennebaker was invited to speak to top-level leaders from organisations such as the FBI, Corporate Banks, and the police force. After the events finished, late into the night, these experts kept telling him the same story. An executive would sit down for a conversation, body rigid with stress. Then he’d confess. And the moment the words left his mouth, something extraordinary happened.

He relaxed.

Completely. Even knowing the consequences, telling the truth set his body free.

Confession changes everything.

Pennebaker couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What if secrets were making us sick? Not metaphorically. Physically. He spent the next four decades finding out, and what he discovered changes everything about how we think about writing.

Here’s what he found. People who carry trauma and never speak it, never write it, never release it, are significantly more likely to get sick. Their bodies hold what they can’t say. But when people were given four days, fifteen minutes each day, to write about the hardest experiences of their lives, everything shifted. Fewer visits to the doctor. Lower anxiety. Better sleep. Stronger immune function. Improved memory. Some came out of the writing room in tears. But they kept coming back. And by the last day, most said it had been one of the most important things they had ever done.

I think about this a lot when I sit across from women in leadership.

Women who carry so much. Who have prayed and counselled others through their hardest seasons, and shown up faithfully decade after decade. And somewhere along the way, quietly, without even realising it, they stopped telling their own story. They stopped writing it down. They convinced themselves it was self-indulgent. Arrogant, even.

Your story is not just yours. The things you have lived through, wrestled with, survived and been transformed by set us free.

For you first. And then, in ways you cannot predict, for the people who come after you.

Pennebaker found that the women and men who healed through writing weren’t the ones who wrote perfectly. They were the ones who wrote honestly. Those who let themselves shift perspective. Who used words like “because” and “I realise” and “I think” — words that signal a mind making meaning, constructing a story, finding a way through.

“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, ³² and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8: 31-32

That is exactly what you do when you write your story.

You are not just recording the past. You are making sense of it. And your body, your tired, faithful, carrying-too-much body, finally gets to exhale.

This is why I created a workshop called “The Book Within You”. Not just because the world needs more books. But the world needs more insight from stories of people who have healed. Clarity. Release. The slow and holy work of becoming someone who knows what she has lived through and is not ashamed to say so.

If something in you has been whispering “write it down” for years now, I’d love you to listen to that whisper.

The research says your body already knows what it needs.

The Journey Is Too Much For You Alone.

You know the feeling. You’ve given everything to the work, the people, the vision. And one day you find yourself just… empty. Not a little tired. Empty, exhausted and overwhelmed. There is a prophet in the Old Testament who felt the same Elijah knew it too.

This is the man who called fire down from heaven. Who stood against 450 prophets of Baal and didn’t flinch. He was possibly the most powerful prophetic voice of his generation. And yet, in 1 Kings 19, we find him under a broom tree in the wilderness, asking to die. “I have had enough, Lord.”

If you’ve ever whispered something like that, even quietly, even just to yourself, we sit together. In this story, God doesn’t remind Elijah of his calling. He doesn’t send a vision or a strategy. He doesn’t say, “Come on, pull yourself together.”An angel visits him and says:

“Get up and eat.”

A cake is baking on hot coals. A jar of water. Elijah eats and lies back down. And the angel comes again. Not with urgency, not with disappointment. With the same gentle compassionate invitation…

“Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”

The journey is too much for you.

Not a rebuke. An acknowledgement. God sees Elijah’s limits and meets him exactly there, with bread, water, and permission to rest.

The last season has been vast.

Vast in opinion, vast in conflict and vast in pain. If you’ve been leading for a long time in business, ministry, family, or community, your body and your soul have been carrying more than people see. The kind of tiredness you’re feeling isn’t fixed by a good night’s sleep or a weekend away. It’s deeper than that. Over the last 18 months, I have been on a journey in which my body couldn’t keep going the way I had, and the journey as a leader was too much for my weary soul. I have learnt a few things from this place of exhaustion, and I would love to invite you to consider the same journey. It’s not a formula, but a resetting of our nervous system, to rest with care.

Simple Rhythms of Restoration

Creativity doesn’t come from pushing harder. It comes from creating space. When Elijah rested and ate, he was able to travel forty days. The simplest rhythms are often the ones that bring back the energy and imagination that sustained you in the first place.

Nourishing food that resets your energy

The angel brought Elijah bread. Not a feast, not a gourmet meal. Simple, nourishing food. Notice what you’re eating when you’re running on empty. Are you grabbing whatever’s convenient, or are you actually fuelling yourself? You deserve to eat well, not as a luxury, but as an act of stewardship.

Drink water. More water.

The jar of water in the story is there for a reason. Dehydration affects your mood, your thinking, and your resilience. Lean away from leaning on wine, tea, and coffee to get through the day. You don’t have to give them up. Just lean into hydration first. A practical step that’s made a difference for me personally: electrolytes every day, especially when travelling. It’s a small thing that genuinely changes how you feel.

Sleep that actually helps

Elijah lay down and slept. Twice. There’s no guilt in that story, no wasted time. Just received rest. A few things worth trying: put your phone on charge in another room, take magnesium before bed, drink water, and keep a notebook nearby to write down what’s keeping you awake. Getting the thoughts out of your head and onto paper is one of the most underrated things you can do for your sleep. In started recording my dreams and they became a blueprint for the changes I was making.

Short retreats to reset your vision

Elijah travelled to Horeb, a place set apart. You need rhythms away from your everyday life that help you see your life from a different angle. Even a short retreat, a weekend away with intentional space, can shift things profoundly. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It has to be intentional.

Meditation and prayer to quieten the noise

At Horeb, God asked Elijah, ‘What are you doing here?’ That question created space for Elijah to name what was actually going on inside him. Meditation and prayer do the same. They slow the rolling worry down. They help you get honest with yourself and with God about where you actually are, not where you think you should be.

Create your personal board

Even Elijah was given Elisha, someone to walk alongside him. Who is in your corner? A counsellor, psychologist, spiritual director, or coach can each offer something different. Think about building your own personal board: people who know you, who will speak truth to you, and who will help reset your perspective when you’ve lost sight of it. You were never meant to carry this alone.

Reflection:

Take your time with these. There are no right answers.

What would it mean to let the journey be too much and stop pretending otherwise?

When did you last eat a proper meal, drink a full glass of water, or sleep without your phone beside you?

What simple rhythm have you let go of that used to sustain you?

Who is on your personal board right now? Who is speaking truth into your life?

If you had a weekend retreat with no agenda, just space, silence, good food, and time to think. What would come back to you?

The Journey Continues

Elijah didn’t stay under the broom tree. After the rest, the food, the honesty, and the gentle re-commissioning, he got up and went. Not because he’d found some new burst of energy or renewed enthusiasm. But because he’d been met, seen, and sustained.

That’s available to you, too. You don’t have to figure out how to keep going. You just have to let yourself be cared for. Start with something small. A glass of water. A full night’s sleep. A conversation with someone who knows you.

The journey is too much for you. And that’s okay. Get up and eat.

I am opening a space for leaders this April, designed for your reflection and renewal. Selah, leadership retreat; you’re invited.

The years of chaos piled up like the clothes on my teenager’s bedroom floor, and I was far from calm. I was fresh from five back-to-back Zoom calls, with Teams messages dinging and another crisis to manage. As I sat across from my manager, their gaze distant across the screen, I found myself unable to express what was happening for the first time in my career.

My confidence was crushed, projects were piling and I gave up emptying my email inbox months ago. No matter what I did, I could not reset my nervous system, and even if I kept working overtime, I could never meet the ever-increasing demands.

That morning, I was standing at the breakfast table listening to my husband parent our children. He said something that stood out to me as alarming. He said to my teenagers, “The calmest person leads the room.” I knew he was speaking to me as much as the kids, and it was the moment I knew something needed to change deeply.

I was no longer calm. I didn’t know how to move out of the drive system, which kept me constantly in threat mode as a leader. Listening to the news as I drove kids to school, my nervous system responding to every text message, opening my emails on the weekend, and my mind unable to stop the running dialogue of not-enoughness.

The pandemic, global economic challenges, perimenopause and life’s ebbs all found me washed up on the ocean shore, without a clear pathway back to the pond of calm surrender. This was the space I knew a leader needed to lead from. I just didn’t know how to access it, in this new season of stress and adversity. Physical weight started to pile on, matching my inner world and the responsibilities I carried heavily, the demands of monthly travel and the allure of remote work waned.

Have you ever endured a season where, as a leader, you could not reframe the weight of the responsibility?

Across one decade, leaders have been asked to navigate what no previous generation has faced simultaneously — a global pandemic that dismantled every assumption about stability, a moral reckoning that demanded courage in the face of institutional fracture, the trauma of terrorism and war, the psychological impact of public life with bullying online through social media’s always-on scrutiny, and the disruption of artificial intelligence rewriting the rules of human work and value.

These crises have not arrived one at a time, giving leaders space to recover and recalibrate. They have arrived all at once, stacked on top of each other, compounding in ways that have left even the most experienced leaders depleted, disoriented, and quietly wondering whether they have anything left to give.

Researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter created a framework in which burnout is a measurable psychological syndrome characterised by three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (feeling drained and unable to recover), depersonalisation (developing cynical detachment from people and work), and reduced personal accomplishment (experiencing decreased effectiveness and competence).[1]

If you were to slow your mind right now and reflect on these three measures, what score would you give yourself in each arena?

We lead others through the lens of our own compassionate gap, and the impact is immense. The Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report identifies manager burnout as a critical tipping point: when managers burn out, team engagement follows, and, ultimately, productivity. [2]

Only 42% of burned-out workers have told their manager about their burnout — and of those who do speak up, 42% say their manager takes no action to help. Maslach and Leiter identify six organisational factors contributing to burnout: workload (demands exceeding capacity), control (insufficient autonomy), reward (inadequate recognition), community (lack of supportive relationships), fairness (perceived inequity), and values (ethical conflicts). [3]

As a leader, how can you take a pause, a selah, to reset the rising tide of responsibility, to lead from a place of inner calm and leadership? If we are unable to articulate clear pathways for space and retreat, how will our teams feel empowered to do the same?

Your leadership needs what you can’t find in a strategy session

1. The calmest person leads the room. You can’t regulate a culture you haven’t regulated in yourself first. Leadership calm isn’t the absence of pressure — it’s the capacity to stay grounded inside it.

2. Burnout is not a personal failure — it’s a systemic signal. When you can no longer reset your nervous system, empty your inbox, or find the floor beneath the weight of responsibility, that is not weakness. It is data. The most honest thing a leader can do is pay attention.

3. You cannot lead others through a gap you haven’t named in yourself. The compassionate gap — the space between the leader’s needs and others’ needs, and the depleted person behind the role — doesn’t close through more effort. It closes through honest self-awareness, intentional retreat, and the courage to ask for help before the crisis demands it.

The word selah appears throughout the Psalms — a pause, a breath, an invitation to stop and listen before moving forward. It is precisely this kind of intentional space that the Selah Leadership Retreat offers.

Designed for leaders who are ready to move from depletion to discernment, Selah is a curated retreat experience where you will reclaim the gut-level wisdom that gets buried under noise, integrate the presence that balances decisiveness with compassion, and learn to read beneath the surface of what your team is actually saying. You will develop the self-regulation that separates reactive leadership from grounded authority, and you will leave with a concrete leadership development plan — a blueprint for the culture and future you are building.

If the calmest person truly leads the room, then Selah is where you learn to become that person again.

[1] Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, “Understanding the Burnout Experience: Recent Research and Its Implications for Psychiatry,” World Psychiatry 15, no. 2 (2016): 103-104.

[2] Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report Available at: gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

---

[3] Maslach and Leiter, “Understanding the Burnout Experience,” 105-107.