Looking Back on 2025: Ease, Flow, and Agency in Unstable Times
Burning Man 2025
December has always been a reflective month for me. Yes, it’s the end of the calendar year and it’s my birthday month. I also run my annual look-back, look-forward workshops with my community and my clients. December is for comparing the aspirational hopes and goals for the year with the unexpected celebrations and griefs of what actually happened.
Choosing Ease and Flow
Going into 2025, my intention word was ease and flow. I’ve always been great at hustling: to push, work hard and grind. 2025 was year six of running my own business, and it’s the longest I’ve ever stayed in one job. The beauty is that it doesn’t feel like one job as I can take a portfolio approach to my work:
Coaching startup CEOs
Working one-on-one in deeper spiritual and shamanic spaces
Facilitating groups and leadership teams
Teaching online courses
Running my annual women’s retreat
Keynote speaking and writing
Professional ease and flow through the year
The variety keeps me alive. I’ve always been someone who follows curiosity, who likes to chase ideas and shiny objects, who gets energy from exploring new theses about how people work and what actually helps them change. Coaching gives me an unusual privilege to gather data through deep, intimate conversations. I can then identify patterns and form my own theory of change.
This is the positive view. Honestly, the past couple of years have been very hard. There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes with parenting a teen who is struggling. It’s often said that it is hard to be happy when one of your kids is not okay. My family life over the past year and a half has been a deeply emotional rollercoaster.
Letting Go of Control
What finally stabilized in 2025 was my willingness to let go of control. Of course, I’m going to continue to do the research to make sure that my daughter is supported. However, I cannot direct my daughter’s path or shortcut her growth. I can only tend my own energy so that I can be present, grounded, and available. I can also choose work that gives me energy, protecting my own autonomy.
Psychological research backs this up. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy shows that well-being is less correlated with external circumstances and more with a person’s belief in their ability to influence their responses and processes, even when outcomes are uncertain. When control disappears, agency moves inward.
I felt this shift viscerally in my work this year.
A fellow coach who also left the tech industry said something to me today that stopped me cold. She said, “Tutti, you’re the only coach I know who seems happy and also makes a sustainable living in an expensive city.”
My jaw dropped.
I’d lost track of my 2025 intention word of ease and flow (whoops!). In previous years, I had aggressively built pipelines, chased leads, hustled, and overextended. In year six, I was finally living ease and spaciousness. I was listening to my internal energy rather than trying to bend everything around me to my fierce will. This was the first year that I did not set a revenue goal, and yet it somehow has been my best financial year.
Personal ease and flow
Last Thursday, Irene Salter and I ran our annual intention-setting workshop for 2026. The first half is always a look back. I was struck by how different my personal 2025 was from the collective mood in the room.
Our look back had people draw a river of their past year. They drew various features: the calm waters, rapids, waterfalls, and still pools. Then they pulled out themes:
People spoke of being churned, flooded, stalled. Of having no paddle, no oar, no boat. Of surviving rather than steering. One participant said, “What I tried to force didn’t happen. What I trusted to unfold did.” Another shared that after years of cancer treatment, she had finally climbed back into the boat and could captain her body again. Others spoke of funding cuts, political chaos, layoffs, family health crises, and prolonged uncertainty.
Very few people described clarity. There was grief in the room. But more importantly there was also a hope that it’s a turning point and that they could put some of this collective grief behind them.
Research on chronic stress and uncertainty shows that prolonged periods of unpredictability erode people’s sense of future orientation and agency. When the ground keeps shifting, the nervous system moves into survival mode. Seen through this lens, 2025 was a year that asked too much of people for too long.
Agency in Unstable Times
This is why agency and individual choice matter so much right now. Ease and flow do not require calm waters. They require discernment, knowing when to paddle and when to let the current carry you. You can stop believing that hustle and effort alone, is proof of worth. Agency is choosing how you travel through the river.
Many of us have been trained to equate agency with force, output, and control… but that doesn’t work in unstable times. Instead, we can always rely on attention, choice, and energy.
When I look back on 2025, I see both challenge and clarity. I learned that being in flow does not have to be passive. I learned that ease is not lazy.
That is what agency has come to mean for me.
There is something quietly hopeful about ending a hard year with this kind of clarity.
As I turn toward 2026, I’ve created my intention for the year ahead with renewed optimism. I wish this same sense of hope and agency for you.