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If you’ve been listening to my podcast, The Fosgail Mindset, for a while—especially to the last couple of episodes—you’ve probably noticed that I went quiet for a while. Several months, actually. I’m not going to spend a lot of this episode explaining that. I’ve written about it elsewhere and you’re welcome to dive deeper if you’re curious. What I’d rather talk about today is something more useful than why I paused: it’s what taking a moment to pause has taught me in the last few months.
Before I go much further, I want to offer a caveat: it wasn’t a true pause in every sense of the word. Especially not in the sense of things going quiet in my life. It was busy—full, even with international travel and client work and rites of passage for my family. It was specifically a pause from content creation. A time when I stopped talking so much and tried to listen more.
The Pipeline
I don’t really think about myself as a content creator, but I suppose by definition I am one. I started off 2026 with a new set of brand guidelines I developed for Fosgail and a completely restructured content creation pipeline. If you know me, you know how fond I am of project management tools and digital notebooks, and I had built out a lovely system of linked notes, tables, templates, and task lists in my Obsidian vault. I was going to work on content creation steadily across a two-week repeating routine and channel my creative energies into development of a single topic through multiple content channels across the Fosgail blog, this podcast, the Fosgail Openings newsletter, the Fosgail Community, and our socials on LinkedIn.
Does that sound like a lot? It was! I hadn’t intended it to be, but it was a lot.
Here’s roughly how it played out: one idea had to become four or five separate things. A blog post became a podcast script. Which then became a newsletter reflection. The newsletter became two or three social posts. The podcast got a short-form edit treatment to become one or two more social posts. Each piece depended on the one before it being finished, which meant if I got hung up or stuck on any one step, the entire pipeline would come to a grinding halt. And whenever that happened, my stress levels would spike.
By the time I was closing out February, my stress levels were quite high. In an effort to process what I was experiencing, I posted something to the Fosgail Community that I still reflect on. I’d gone a week without posting at this point and I was trying to name why. I wrote about the pull toward “adjust”—in the sense of the plan-do-check-adjust cycle a lot of us know from lean process work—was developing into a point of resistance for me. Everyone around me seemed to deliver quick iteration. Check, then adjust, then launch back into planning and doing straight away. But what I was actually feeling was a pull toward something slower: making sure I was really checking— thoroughly checking for myself and for the people reading—before rushing to adjust and start the cycle over again.
At the time I was working on an article about the Healer expression of Attendant Leadership—an aspect of being a leader that sits at the intersection of relational scope and relational depth and emphasizes restoration, reconciliation, and reparation in all our relationships. And there was something almost uncomfortable about writing that piece inside a schedule that didn’t leave room for any healing at all. It wasn’t just a matter of the subject and the communication medium not matching. It was that the way of being that I was writing about wasn’t the way of being I was experiencing or living. Late February was a time when we were beginning to hear rumblings of a potential conflict between the U.S. and Iran, and communities in the U.S. were reeling from abuses and oversteps by federal ICE agents. It was a moment in world events, as our present moment continues to be, when there was a great need for healing. However, writing about the Healer expression of Attendant Leadership from within this content-churning monster of a system I had built didn’t feel like helpful sharing; it felt like contributing to the noise and cacophony that was perpetuating our collective exhaustion. I was experiencing so much dissonance that I felt the most responsible thing was to step back and reevaluate how I was approaching my work, how I was engaging the creative process, and how I was communicating. That stepping back took a bit of time. And it took a little courage to step back in.
What Changed
So as I step back in and begin speaking and sharing once more, here’s where I’ve landed with content creation. Instead of one big content engine running continuously with an array of templates and formulas, I’ve decided set a theme for each quarter and focus on planning a small number of anchor offers—a white paper, a challenge, live events, a book club pick. Everything else, the newsletter, the social posts, this podcast, gets scheduled loosely around those anchors instead of all being manufactured together like it’s some kind of conveyor belt.
The Openings newsletter has become something more personal for me: one topic a week, written more like a letter than a broadcast. LinkedIn has become a place to reconnect with my network in a shorter form. And this podcast—I’m looking forward to going back to something closer to what it was in its first several episodes: a conversation, not a monologue delivered on a biweekly deadline whether or not it was ready.
Choosing themes will be something I do intentionally, arising out of conversations I’m having and what I’m noticing or anticipating in the season. When I was choosing a theme for this quarter, which started back in July, I looked around at what my clients were actually living through: the height of summer reading programs and the prospect of starting a new academic year; the beginning of a new fiscal year and the harsh realities of budget cuts. Transitions and change layered on top of each other to the point that it’s hard to tell what’s ending and what’s beginning; a place where everything feels like it’s in a state of in-between-ness. Liminality. An out-of-focus threshold. Living in that kind of layered, perpetual change makes it genuinely difficult to set goals, track progress toward them, or even know what’s reasonable to expect of yourself or the people around you. If you tend to hold high expectations for yourself, as I do, this kind of season is especially hard—not just because of the uncertainty itself, but because you probably need to loosen those expectations, and doing that can feel like giving something up.
That’s how I landed on Adjusting Expectations as this quarter’s theme.
Where This Showed Up In My Own Life
As I’ve sat with that theme this quarter, I’ve realized it isn’t just something I’m accompanying my clients through. It’s something that I’m currently living.
My youngest daughter left for college last month and my husband and I are empty nesters now. I knew this transition was coming—we did the practical preparation, the packing lists, the school supplies, I cleared my work schedule around move-in week. What I hadn’t fully prepared for was what came after: coming home without our daughter and the quiet that settled into the house, into my home office. Returning to routines that were familiar and foreign at the same time.
I started August assuming things would go back to something like normal fairly quickly. They didn’t, and normal looks different now. I’ve had to adjust what I expect of myself and of my time—how long certain tasks will take, how much focus I have from moment to moment, where distractions and interruptions come from. I’ve had to make adjustments to self-set deadlines and goals more than once. Even though I’m the only one who notices and is affected by these adjustments, managing the disappointment and other emotions that accompany adjusting my expectations has been hard. I’ve found myself confronted with truths about my capacity and what it means to cultivate resiliency that are difficult to acknowledge and embrace.
I share this not because it resolves neatly, but because it doesn’t. I certainly don’t have any answers to give you about navigating spaces like this, but I think sharing my recent experience is closer to the truth of what adjusting expectation does than any tidy lesson would be. It isn’t a switch you flip. It’s closer to a practice—noticing, again and again, when what you expected doesn’t match your experience of reality, and adjusting your expectation without treating that adjustment as a failure.
Closing
I’m genuinely excited to be back in the podcasting space. New episodes will continue to come out on an irregular schedule for a while, as I watch to see if any helpful rhythm emerges from my new approach to content creation. I am planning for them to feel more like conversations, so you can look forward to more episodes with guests.
If anything in this one landed for you—the pipeline that got too tightly coupled, the season you’re still adjusting to, expectations that prompt you to rethink your approach to work and goals—I’d genuinely love to hear about it. Find me online or by email and let’s chat.