Here’s a question that’s been sitting with me: How do we stay centered when we don’t know what’s coming next?
Not in a doomsday way. Just in the regular way that life keeps delivering surprises we didn’t plan for. Changes we can’t control. Futures we can’t quite picture yet.
For those of us leading organizations, teams, and initiatives, this hits differently. We think we’re supposed to have the answers, chart the course, and hold steady for everyone else.
Meanwhile, our own nervous systems are sending up flares: “The future is unpredictable!”
Yes, it is.
So, here’s the real question: What does it mean to lead, to live, fully present when we can’t control what’s arriving?
The Wheel Is Off-Center
A teaching from Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi, stopped me cold. She explores the original meaning of ‘dukkha,’ a Buddhist term usually translated as “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.”
Interesting, the origin of the word ‘dukkha’ refers to a cart’s wheel. The wheel has an axis; ‘dukkha’ literally means that the axis is off its center. As you might imagine, when the axle isn’t aligned with the center of the wheel, everything feels wrong. The cart lurches. Movement becomes painful. Nothing quite comes together.
The Buddhist counterpoint is ‘sukha’ or bliss, joy, aliveness. The axis is back on the center, aligned.
Think about that for a moment.
The difference between suffering and thriving isn’t whether circumstances are perfect or whether we have all the answers. It’s whether our axis, our deepest sense of presence, is aligned and smoothly centered so the wheel of who we are can move about freely.
The leaders I work with, who are smart, capable, and dedicated, yet are running themselves ragged trying to control the uncontrollable, aren’t doing anything wrong. They’re simply trying to stabilize the cart by gripping the wheel harder instead of checking the axis.
Here’s what that looks like in real terms: You’re brilliant, capable, and working harder than ever. But you’re slightly out of sync with everything, and you feel it. Plans that made sense six months ago are strangely obsolete. Strategies that worked before aren’t working now. You’re exhausted, but you can’t quite name why.
That’s what it feels like when your axis is off-center, not aligned.
My dad, who loved his old cars and kept a ’40 Ford Coupe and ’56 Mercury out behind the barn, used to talk about regulators. How if the voltage to the alternator is too high, it overloads the electrical system. Too low, everything shuts down.
The regulator’s job? Keep the voltage in that sweet spot where everything functions optimally. “You get better mileage that way,” Dad would say, knowingly.
We too have an inner regulator, homeostasis, that keeps our systems in balance.Body temperature, blood pressure, stress hormones. When we’re chronically overwhelmed, our voltage runs too high (overstimulated, wired, can’t shut down). When we’re depleted, it runs too low (exhausted, can’t get started, running on empty).
Either way, we’re out of alignment. Off-center. And from that place, we’re broadcasting chaos to everyone around us. Broadcasting.
Dr. Ginny Whitelaw’s research on resonance shows why this matters for leaders: when you’re off-center, your nervous system literally transmits that jangled energy to your team.
Your electromagnetic field, yes, you have one, broadcasts the signal. When the signal is chaotic, people around you feel it. You become the noise that amplifies more noise.
But when are you centered? When your axis is aligned and your regulator is calibrated? You become the signal that settles for everyone else, a magnet for collecting energy and focus. Just by being aligned yourself, not because you’re doing something heroic.
Bodily Inhabited Stillness
Baden Roshi speaks of “bodily inhabited stillness” as the doorway to “unstructuring the mind.” Not stillness as the absence of noise. Stillness felt in your body that pervades your entire experience.
This matters because our minds are structured and shaped by everything we’ve lived, learned, adapted to. We carry patterns, some that are useful, many that are automatic, that quite literally simulate how we perceive reality. We think we’re seeing “what is,” but we’re really seeing through layers of views and assumptions.
Here’s the profound part: the mind can be unstructured. And if it can be unstructured, it can be restructured.
We need space between what’s happening and our interpretation of it. Between the future arriving and our attempt to control it.
This is what practice gives us. When we pause, when we drop into bodily inhabited stillness, we move from chaos to coherence. From interference to resonance. From off-center to aligned.
From that place, we lead differently as we welcome the future.
Receiving the Future
Here’s where Baden Roshi offers something radical: In Western culture, we think we’re “going into the future.” The past is behind us, the future is ahead, and we’re moving forward.
But in Eastern cultures, it’s reversed. The future is coming toward us. We’re receiving it.
Feel what shifts when you consider this notion. (Go ahead, take a pause here to let this shift in focus sink in).
If I’m going into the future, I have to be ready. Know what’s coming. Prepare, plan, control. There’s a forward-leaning urgency. I need to stay ahead.
But if the future is coming to me? If I’m here, grounded, centered, and the next moment is arriving? Then I’m receiving rather than grasping. Responding rather than reacting.
This isn’t passive, not at all. Receiving the future from centered stillness is intensely active. It requires that I’ve done the work to return to center, to align the axis, so when the next moment arrives, I can meet it fully.
For leaders, this shift changes everything. When you’re frantically trying to predict what’s next, you exhaust your system and broadcast that exhaustion.
When you’re grounded in the present, receiving what comes with centered awareness, you become the signal that settles the noise.
The Practice
So how do we actually return to center? Two practices I use with everyone, lay people and leaders alike:
The Leadership Pause Reset is your access point.Before your next meeting, that difficult conversation, your morning email: Pause. Center. Focus.
Place one hand on your belly, one on your heart. Feel into your sensations as you breathe. Notice where you are, not where you should be. Where you actually are, right now, in your body too.
This is your observing mind waking up. Am I centered? Aligned? Or slightly off, running on autopilot?
Then, a Coherence Breathcan help you return you to center:
Sit or stand with feet grounded. Inhale into your belly. Exhale four to five times longer releasing your breath down through your toes into earth. Let the next inhalation arrive naturally. (Two-second inhale? Eight-second exhale. Four-second inhale? Sixteen-second exhale.)
Once your rhythm establishes, shift attention to your heart. Call up appreciation, gratitude, love, something genuine. Let it permeate your being, carried by breath.
After two to three minutes, you’ll sense a shift. More quietude. More calm. More receptivity.
You’re not just calming your nervous system, though you’re clearly doing that. You’re creating coherence by aligning your head and heart. You’re adjusting your regulator, bringing your system to that sweet spot. The voltage stabilizes. The axis aligns.
From here, you will receive the next moment differently. You can notice your patterns without being controlled by them. You can choose how you want to meet what’s arriving.
The daily practice:Notice when you’re off-center. When your regulator is struggling, the voltage is too high or too low.
Pause. Center. Focus. Breathe. Return to bodily inhabited stillness. Receive the future from that place. Then act, not from reactive patterns or fear, but from your deepest knowing.
The cart keeps moving. The wheel keeps turning. Your job isn’t to smooth the road or predict every obstacle.
Your job is to keep the axis centered, and the regulator calibrated.
That’s where the juice of aliveness lives. That’s where you get better mileage. That’s where satisfaction lives.
Right in the center of the wheel.
Ready to Realign?
If you’re feeling off-center as you look toward 2026—if you know you need to lead differently but aren’t sure how, start with the Executive Energy Audit.
It’s a 30-minute no-cost dive into where you are now, what’s draining your capacity, and what practices will move the needle for you. We’ll identify your patterns, pinpoint where you’re off-axis, and create a clear path back to centered, coherent presence.
The leaders who start here discover something remarkable: when they align their own axis first, everything else begins to shift.Not because external challenges disappear, but because they’re finally meeting them from a place of groundedness rather than reactivity.
Think of it as tuning your instrument before the concert. You can’t play the music ahead of time, but you can make sure you’re ready to receive each note as it comes.
Click here to schedule your Executive Energy Auditor reply to this newsletter.
Here’s to staying centered in 2026, whatever arrives.
With deep respect for your leadership,
Chris
P.S. The Coherence Breath above? Try it right now, before you move on. Two minutes. Feel what shifts. This is where practice begins—not someday, not when things calm down. Right now, in this moment that’s arriving.