All Posts

October 15, 2026 Living with integrity starts with clarity about what really matters Virtually every day of my childhood, I looked at a small blown-glass vase on a windowsill in our living room. We moved a lot, and no matter where we lived, it was on one of the windowsills. It was a silhouette of John F. Kennedy, and around his head was a quote from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” My mom talked about it

September 24, 2026 Why it’s designed to make you lose — and the one comparison that actually helps A while back, I started learning more about Rick Rubin. He’s a famous music producer. I listened to interviews with him, watched a documentary series with him and Paul McCartney. I’ll admit it — while I am not generally an envious guy, I did find myself envying Rick a bit. I love music. I always wished I’d had a career in music of some kind. And here’s this guy living in Malibu,

It's integrity — and it's more practical than it sounds. During my first tour in the Foreign Service, I experienced what an Assistant Secretary of State told me and the other junior officers called " some of the worst leaders" in the Foreign Service. I'd developed a new approach to a big annual report my consulate owed Washington, and when I presented it to embassy leadership in Mexico City, my boss's boss — put on the spot by a question she didn't understand — tried to dista

October 1, 2026 Why naming what you feel is the first move — and what to do next My dad and my mom were opposites when it came to emotions. Between the two of them, they covered both of the approaches most of us were raised with. Neither worked. My dad grew up in the Great Depression, volunteered for the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor — lied about his age; he was sixteen — and saw some of the worst action in the Pacific. He came home with what we now know as PTSD and never g

Four dimensions almost nobody teaches you There’s one relationship I had years ago where I didn’t have some of the uncomfortable conversations I should have had. I knew in the moment I was avoiding them. But my fears and discomforts were paralyzing for me. I was afraid of hurting someone else’s feelings, of the relationship not being able to withstand the discomfort. So I allowed discomfort and tension and unease and unmet needs to fester. As a result, the relationship never

This past weekend, I watched two former students get married. I taught them a decade ago, back when they were teenagers at the lab school I ran — and somewhere in those hallways, they fell in love. Watching them stand up together as adults, I had a unique vantage point: I remembered who they were at fifteen. And I can tell you, they were special people at 15 and they had grown into themselves beautifully. I think their vows were the best I've ever heard. Not because they

Where to put your energy instead STEVE WALKER August 26, 2026 In April of 2025, I got a sudden sharp pain in my upper middle back. A 10 out of 10. I went to the ER. They checked for an aneurysm, a blood clot. Nothing showed up. They sent me home to see my PCP. I saw a doctor — not my regular one — who ran bloodwork for my gallbladder and something else, then sent me to physical therapy, figuring it was muscular. PT didn’t help. Three weeks after that first ER visit, I went ba

Why it's harder than it sounds — and what gets in the way STEVE WALKER JUL 21, 2026 I was a junior in college, visiting a friend in Washington DC over Thanksgiving. Walking near the Lincoln Memorial, crossing an empty field, a voice said to me: why do you want to be a lawyer? I stopped and looked around. It sounded like someone was right behind me. There was no one there. I kept walking. The voice said it again. Why do you want to be a lawyer? I stopped. I thought about my mo

The permission was never theirs to give. It was always yours. STEVE WALKER AUG 12, 2026 On New Year’s Day 2023, I woke up alone in my one-bedroom apartment in Stamford, Connecticut. I’d moved there at the start of COVID as a temporary landing spot after selling my lakehouse. Temporary had started to feel “permanent” by default — not by choice, just by inertia. I’d been there three years. I was turning 60 that year. And lying there that morning, I asked myself a question I had

Rest Is Not a Paycheck Hi, it’s Steve. A few weeks ago, the same limiting belief found me and a friend within a single day. My friend first. They’re running on fumes — close to real burnout — and when we talked, they finally said their rule out loud, maybe for the first time: if there’s still work to do, rest has to wait. Here’s the problem with that rule: the work is never done. Especially as a small business owner, which they are. Which means the rest never comes. My fr

Wholeness at Work Hi, it's Steve. Last week I gave a webinar for the Global Finance Services group at AstraZeneca on something I've always cared a lot about: wholeness at work. Here's the short version of what I told them: most of us were taught to sever our work self from our real self — leave the personal at the door, be professional, keep the rest of you for evenings and weekends. It sounds responsible and safe. Sure enough, when I asked, most people in the chat indica

The Whales Didn't Show Hi, it's Steve. I just got back from a week in Washington state — family and friends I hadn't seen in years, two babies I met for the first time, and one thing I'd been looking forward to for months: a whale watch. Here's what happened on the whale watch: nothing. No whales. Not one. The crew told us it was the only trip all season without a single sighting. I did everything right — picked the cruise, got on the boat, scanned the water for hours. T

What nine months of silence taught me about conflict — and connection STEVE WALKER MAY 07, 2026 When I was fourteen, my father and I had a serious conflict. I don’t need to go into the details. What matters is what happened after: I stopped talking to him. For nine months, I gave him silence. At the time, the silence felt like control. Safety. Independence. Necessary. When it was over — my mother finally begged me to talk to him and I did — it wasn’t because anything had been

On love, loss, and the permission we never got to feel it STEVE WALKER APR 27, 2026 I was twelve years old when the phone rang just before Christmas, 1975. My dad was on his way back from a business trip. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Grampy was dead. My grandfather had been my best friend in a childhood full of loneliness and moving around. He took me fishing. He took me to my first Red Sox game. He was larger than life to the whole family — funny as hell, the kind of

April 20, 2026 Why the most important skill you can build has nothing to do with emptying your mind I was fifteen years old when Rocky DiRico, my sensei, first taught me to meditate. I was studying the martial arts, and early on Rocky introduced meditation as a core part of the practice. I worried it would be almost impossible — how do you quiet your mind and just focus on your breathing? Sure enough, like most people, I found it really challenging. Thoughts kept intruding. M

April 13, 2026 How to stop letting other people's opinions run your life — and what it actually costs to live your own I’ve had four careers. Diplomat. Activist. Educator. Life coach and meditation teacher. Each transition was a conscious decision to immunize myself from the judgment of others about what I should or shouldn’t do — and to take a leap of faith in my own values and my own intuition. None of them were easy. All of them were right. In 1993, I resigned publicly fro

April 6, 2026 In June of 2018, I told my superintendent that if I could retire, I would. I loved my job — teaching, running an innovative lab school — but I had reluctantly taken on the role of director while still teaching, and it had beaten me down. The arthritis in my hip had become excruciating, and on top of the job fatigue, had left me empty. Nothing left in the tank. That August, I was supposed to visit friends in Thailand and do some solo traveling there and in Malays

Chemistry, calm, and why I had it backwards for much of my life March 30, 2026 I was adopted. I was separated from my birth mother at birth, and then from a foster mother at about five months when I was adopted by my mom and dad. I don’t have conscious memories of either transition — but my nervous system does. What some call the “primal wound” left me with a fear of abandonment that quietly shaped how I understood love for much of my life. What it reinforced — and our cultur

When everyone sounds polished, being real is the whole game. Mar 25, 2026 I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing lately. And, honestly, it’s been making me a little self-conscious. Not in a “I can’t put words on a page” way. More like I keep asking myself: does this sound like me? Or does it sound like everyone else’s polished, well-organized, slightly soulless LinkedIn post? Or worse — like AI slop? Here’s my situation: I learned to write from academics, policy wonks, and

I’ve always hated sales. When I was in college, I worked at a Gap store for a bit and was good at it—and felt uncomfortable every day. It felt manipulative to try to get people to buy something so I could make a small commission. So I didn’t. I tried to be helpful but let people decide on their own what they wanted to buy, if anything. At the time, I thought this was just a quirk of my personality. I didn't realize it was pointing to something deeper.