Originally published on Unstruck Soundbites Substack. Subscribe to interact and receive weekly posts in your inbox.

I’ve been remiss to restart Soundbites, caught between winter’s call for hibernation and the pull to stay connected and birth a new year. How do we hibernate without hiding? I’d love your help if you’ve figured it out and your company in the journey of exploring. From the book that introduced me to the verb of winter:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; we* don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that we lived in the summer. We prepare. We adapt. We perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get us through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

— Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (*I’ve changed “they” to “we”)

These words hit differently this year, as I replace “them” with “we” to include myself. I’m done pretending that I can generate and sustain the same energy throughout winter as I do in summer. Where I’m at, it’s COLD. And I don’t like it. It stings. Yet, I love the feeling of warmth hugging a frozen tickle and bundling up in fluffy, fuzzy, furry fashionables. I don’t like missing out on shared experiences with friends and family. Yet, I love the simplicity of only needing to check in with myself for a spell. Like in comedy, it’s the contrast that brings delight.

But I haven’t yet found the delight in the contrast of wanting to rest—to spend more time closing out my old year—against the pull of starting strong and the burden of being a coach wrapped up in the hype of “new year, new you” action. I’ve been wronging everything about New Year’s—the timing, traditions, pop culture. Until a friend challenged me: What if this is the perfect time to celebrate? How does that impact how we celebrate?

1. From the calendar’s story, when we wrote that winter is not the death but the birth of a new year, we wrote that winter is also the womb, a gestational season, and its conception. This makes now a fitting time to impregnate myself with the futures I will birth in due time—shifting my focus from the action of giving birth RIGHT NOW to concepting. And just like that (finger snap!) … intentions, mottos, resolutions make different sense.
2. As for how to celebrate, I’m giving myself permission to honor my own pace inside of the Human Race. I know I need a grizzly bear’s den of space to keep reflecting, exploring, and experimenting as I create what will later be birthed, knowing that not everything conceived will survive beyond this season.

The delight, I’m discovering, lives in the juxtaposition of hibernating while connecting through the sharing of unfinished discoveries. And my practice is to give myself lots of space—several Soundbites if you will—to let intentions root deeply in the dark, quiet soil of winter before asking them to bloom.

As you winter, what delights are waiting for you in the space between hibernating & connecting?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments or my inbox. Cheers to however you’ve chosen to conceive and ring in your new year!

Published on Unstruck Soundbites Substack. Photo by USGS.

Fear of the unknown and inevitable is universal and wise. It signals that we’re paying attention. That we care about being alive. To honor our fear is to honor our aliveness. To honor our fear is to listen for its lessons. It was never meant to stop us, but to wake up—alert us to the wild wonder that we’re alive—simultaneously existing and becoming.

This week’s quick yet spacious read ^[1] and inspired practices comes from a poem commonly attributed to Khalil Gibran ^[2]

“It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.”

—FEAR, KHALIL GIBRAN

When I think of my fears, my first instinct is typically to avoid, hide, dissolve. And then I think of the river becoming the ocean, surrendering to gravity and the inevitable. I imagine myself holding my breath until I realize that I belong here—I can breathe here. It’s in this belonging that I can let go of what was and retain what always will be inside of what’s new. It’s in this belonging that I don’t have to disappear into my fear and can expand beyond. This kind of belonging and becoming isn’t one-and-done. (No one steps into the same river twice, after all.) It’s a practice, that like all practices, find power in repetition.

A Grounding Practice: River Meeting Ocean

• Stand and imagine yourself as a river
• Feel your “headwaters” at the crown of your head
• Slowly move your attention as you “flow” downward through your body
  • Notice where you feel contraction or constriction, resistance or fear
  • Notice where you feel expansion
• As you end at your feet, notice what it feels like to meet the “ocean” and then become the ocean as you extend energetic roots into the earth, lengthen in your energetic tether to the sky, and feel into your “3D” presence

Questions for Reflection

1. What wisdom lives in the place where your resistance meets your longing?

2. What’s your ocean—your future that you’re resisting and becoming?

Footnotes

1. One of the many reasons I love songs and poetry is for their power to stop time—I can get lost in their lines, feeling a memory long forgotten, seeking to soak in their magical ability to shift my mood, a mystery begging me to linger. And when I linger, they extend an invitation, an offering, a question—along with a reminder that I’m not alone. I call these spacious reads for the space they create for me to simply be with myself. Contrast that with the art and media I consume to escape being with myself. ︎
2. While commonly attributed to Khalil Gibran, I wasn’t able to find a primary source of this poem. I did find a reference to a possible source by another author, proposing that it evolved (and was channeled) through multiple authors. ︎

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention lately—how it flows, where it lands, and how it’s increasingly automated—and with the rise of AI, at a rate never seen before. After hours of writing and rewriting to explore this territory, what emerged for me was something I’m calling the Automation-Attention Paradox:

Automation-Attention Paradox: The counterintuitive phenomenon where increasing automation of tasks and processes, while designed to free up our attention and cognitive resources, instead diminishes our capacity for deep attention, discernment, and noticing. As we automate more aspects of work and life, we simultaneously reduce the regular practice of attention-related skills precisely when the complexity of our environment demands these skills more than ever.

For those hollering, “What rock have you been living under? Have you never heard of the Paradox of Automation or the Time-to-Automation Paradox or the Productivity Paradox!?” Bear with me. ^[1]

The Seduction of Automation

I deeply understand the seduction of automation and its value—I spent a large chunk of my career implementing it for others. There’s power in it—freeing us from mundane tasks for more powerful thinking and freeing our time to focus on what we love and what matters.

The risk lies in not using that freed time to continue building our noticing skills. We automate to gain space, then immediately fill that space with more inputs rather than strengthening our discernment.

I lost my first love to automation—photography. Photography is a practice of careful seeing, deliberate choices, and constraints that forced presence. Then digital paved the road for cloud syncing, and the practice that had taught me to truly notice the world drowned in a sea of “I’ll look at these later.” I had unwittingly adopted the practice of delaying my presence.

That personal loss got me wondering: as leaders increasingly automate our workflows, communications, and decision processes, what essential practices of noticing are we unwittingly surrendering? And what might the cost be to our organizations, our teams, and ourselves?

Examples appear everywhere. In finance, as subscription economies balloon transaction volumes, we’ve simultaneously automated financial systems. The average business owner now rarely engages with spending patterns until they sit down overwhelmed by months of automated transactions.

The Leadership Cost

What happens when we outsource our attention without strengthening our capacity to notice? The cost is profound: reactive decision-making, diminished creativity, shallow relationships, missed opportunities, and perhaps most concerning—a false sense of control while actually removing ourselves from the practice of discernment.

As leaders, our most valuable asset isn’t our ability to process volume—it’s our discernment, our presence, our capacity to notice what others miss.

Herein lies the Automation-Attention Paradox: just when we need our discernment and noticing muscles the most, we’re systematically training them out of our daily practice. Which led me to wonder: if automation’s premise is to create space, why must I be so intentional about creating space to practice attention?

The Automation Vacuum

Then it hit me! Automation doesn’t create space—it creates a vacuum. And nature abhors a vacuum. It fills rapidly with whatever is nearby—notifications, emails, updates, dings, rings—like space debris to a spaceship. What’s meant to create clarity attracts chaos.

It’s like that scene in Spaceballs where the massive vacuum sucks all the air from the planet’s atmosphere. Manual processes are the atmosphere holding our attention; when they disappear, we need a new atmosphere to prevent our attention from escaping.

Our Opportunity: Create a New Atmosphere

This is our opportunity. We wanted to eliminate the old atmosphere of “arbitrary” constraints for good reasons—so now we have to create a new one that doesn’t require every interaction to hold our attention and isn’t consumed by distractions. It’s challenging because it requires muscles we haven’t developed en masse. But, lucky for us, we can do hard things.

We’ll get good at this—really good—because we’ll bring the same intention and diligence to our attention that we bring to our strategic plans. This new leadership capacity—the ability to notice deeply in an age of automation—might be beyond anything we’ve previously known. Because it is. We’re developing skills for a world that’s never existed before. ^[2]

Rituals for Practicing Presence

How are you navigating this challenge? What rituals have you developed to stay present and focused in a world designed to automate your attention?

I’ve started interviewing leaders about their unconventional practices—those that fall outside the “5 AM club, cold plunge” narratives flooding our streams. If you have a practice you’d be willing to share, join my interview list. (And stay tuned for these interviews in future issues.)

Looking for inspiration? Check out my complementary publication: Unstruck Soundbites filled with bite-sized practices, including one inspired by this week’s Automation reflection.

What pitfalls and blindspots around automation and attention are we not talking about yet? Let us know in the comments.

Footnotes and Credits:

Photo: The International Space Station was orbiting on a northeast track 261 miles above the Pacific Ocean when this photograph captured the first rays of an orbital sunrise illuminating Earth’s atmosphere. NASA/Matthew Dominick

1. In researching related concepts, I found several established paradoxes: The Time-to-Automation Paradox focuses on how automation initially requires more time investment before saving time. The Paradox of Automation (Lisanne Bainbridge) concerns how automatic systems still require human operators who have less practice when intervention is needed. The Productivity Paradox examines how increased IT investment doesn’t always show in productivity statistics. The Automation-Attention Paradox differs by focusing specifically on how automation affects our cognitive capacity for attention, discernment, and noticing—particularly crucial for leadership. ︎
2. Mindfulness isn’t new, but the environments in which we need to practice and develop mindfulness are unprecedented. ︎