The State of Wonder & Community 2025
Insights on culture, creativity, and leadership in transition
Dear Tracker ~
Each year, I pause to listen closely to the Tracking Wonder Community. We want to listen to what’s changing in your work, what’s weighing on you, and what still gives you hope and a sense of possibility. Listening this year revealed that as well as the pulse of a culture in transition.
The stories and insights you share are a reflection of a larger cultural moment. We’re in a moment together in which many of us are rethinking what it means to lead, to work, to create, and to sustain purpose over the long arc of a meaningful life.
The TW Community spans over 40 countries. The insights are rich and potentially valuable to you.
We’ll explore what we’re learning from you and how these patterns might guide your own next season of growth - and point toward what’s on the horizon for our community.
In This Wonder Dispatch
Jeffrey’s Main Musing: What We’re Learning by Listening
On TW’s Radar: Resources for more hope, curiosity, and wonder-centered leadership
What brings people to Tracking Wonder:
Four Forces Shaping Our Work and Well-Being
Four recurring challenges keep showing up in our community. I have included a few verbatim responses so you can hear the way some of us described what’s weighing on us and what’s elevating us.
1. Focus, Follow-Through, and Burnout
Across sectors (education, entrepreneurship, service-based work, and leadership) the same challenge is repeated: How do I keep showing up with energy, creativity, and clarity in an age of overload? Many of you describe a deep desire to carve out space for strategic thinking and creative focus, only to find it overtaken by daily urgencies.
Many of you have bold, impactful ideas best shaped into books, business models, and new services.
“Prioritizing strategic thinking and planning is always my biggest challenge. I feel like it’s difficult to carve out the time to do this important work and keep defaulting to the everyday.” — a business owner and TW Community member
“How to start and sustain a workable business plan in action.”
A coach and TW Community member
Culturally, we’re living through a recalibration of what productivity means. The old heroics of overwork are giving way to the courage to slow down, discern, and design how we create. We’re collectively learning that doing less, better, is wise.
This area is the foundation of Tracking Wonder. We will continue to find sustainable ways that we can design experiences, workshops, mini-trainings, and regular calls with me.
For You: Notice what kind of energy fuels your days. Are you working from urgency or from purpose? What one boundary could help you protect your strategic and creative energy this month?
2. Growth and Sustainability
Many of you want your work to reach more people without losing integrity. You sense that your business or creative platform “deserves more visibility and better positioning,” yet you want it to feel authentic, coherent, and alive.
Growth today means alignment by telling stories and shaping services and experiences that reflect the truth of who you are and the impact you want to make. That tension between expansion and integrity reflects a larger cultural shift that we can grow with scale without compromising substance.
This area and the next two areas are ones where I flourish with private clients.
For You: What would it mean to define success by the sustainability of your energy, your team, your vision as well as by reach and revenue?
3. Reinvention and Transition
A remarkable number of us are in seasons of transition. We’re redefining our work-life identities, launching purpose-centered ventures, or weaving creative and contemplative practices into our professions. Reinvention is less about crisis and more about creatively fertilizing confusion.
“When I left the employment world in 2017 to start my own business, I never envisioned that I’d be managing the daily emotional drain of a crumbling democracy (and the related isolation of not being connected to a larger institution).” — an entrepreneur and TW Community member
If reinvention feels uncertain, remember that transitions are laboratories of identity. Characterized by wondrous bewilderment, they invite us to prototype the next version of how we serve and who we are becoming. We’re witnessing a generation of leaders and makers who no longer separate personal growth from professional evolution.
For You: If you’re in transition, what would happen if you treated this moment as experimentation time? What one experiment could you run to test the next version of your work?
4. Leadership and Systemic Change
Leaders in our community are contending with complexity that outdated systems cannot meet. Some are reimagining leadership itself.
“I can get so overwhelmed with information online plus requests coming in through Slack, text, and email that I lose myself. It feels as if I forget who I am.” — a leader and TW Community member
The future of leadership depends on those willing to lead from clarity, creativity, and compassion.
For You: Ask, “What does my presence restore in the people I lead?” Then let that guide your next conversation, meeting, or creative decision.
5. Resourcing the People We Serve
Many of you shared that the people you serve (e.g., your clients, students, customers, patients, and teams) are reaching new thresholds of fatigue, uncertainty, and disconnection. They crave grounding, imagination, and practical ways to reconnect with purpose. And many of you want better ways to guide them there.
You’re asking questions like:
“How can I help the people I work with stay creative and resilient without burning out?”
“What language, tools, or frameworks can I use to help my students or clients re-engage their sense of meaning?”
“How can I model the very qualities of presence, curiosity, and calm that I’m inviting others to cultivate?”
This fifth current of resourcing others through wonder feels like the next evolution of the Tracking Wonder Community.
What I hear in your responses is not just a need for new techniques but for a more integrated approach to human flourishing, one that bridges the research of psychology with the art of creativity, the finesse of facilitating growth, and the practice of leadership.
We’re exploring how to design future trainings and frameworks that help you bring these tools directly into classrooms, practices, organizations, and creative studios.
What You Want and Hope For
When I read through your responses, I hear a shared yearning that speaks to both the heart and the horizon of our work together.
You want grounded guidance and practical strategy in five interconnected areas:
Leadership that aligns with deeper purpose:
“I want to align my leadership with my deeper purpose and grow into the kind of leader who inspires possibility with greater calm and clarity - even in uncertain times.”
Business development or reimagining with integrity and/or a coherent thought leadership platform
“I want to translate my expertise and ideas into a cohesive, sustainable business or creative ecosystem that reflects who I am, is impactful, and is more profitable.”
You want to help others flourish.
“I want to guide the people I serve from burnout or uncertainty toward renewed purpose, creativity, and grounded possibility through approaches grounded in the science of human flourishing. / I want to become even more resourceful in guiding the people I serve toward more renewed purpose, creativity, and/or grounded possibility through approaches anchored in the science of human flourishing.”
“I’d like a training course for applying the Wonder Method to (college) education.”
“TW Coaching—a program that makes one a TW-approved Coach. The mission would look and sound something like: ‘coming alongside clients to help them flourish.’”
“Tactical tools or ideas for unlocking creative play in corporate environments.”
Navigating transitions with clarity and creativity
Integrating meaningful work with a more creative life
And you want your expertise to find a form that’s both true and sustainable.
“I am majorly focused on how to create something that integrates the different aspects of my work into a coherent whole. … I would love an integrated, multi-faceted, flowing, healing for my heroes, and lucrative business.”
These aims and yearnings together reflect a movement.
They point toward a cross-generation of leaders, founders, business owners, educators, coaches, and creators who want to ground their influence in the science of human flourishing and the art of wonder.
This area points toward what could be on the near-future horizon.
In the coming days, I might reach out personally, especially if you completed the Listen & Learn Survey.
Stay tuned. Stay true. More soon.
Your Turn to Wonder
As you read these reflections, consider this:
Which of these forces or desires most resonates with where you are now?
How might you begin to bring more coherence between who you are and how you serve?
What would professional growth look like if it renewed you more than depleted you?
If one insight from this Dispatch stirs something in you, make a note of it or reply and share your reflection. You also can leave a comment here in The Wonder HUB. You might be surprised how that single thought can shape what you create next.
We do offer a lot of content, insights, and tips for free. You can up your subscription level to have more voice in what we offer at The Wonder HUB, get weekly bonus Shots of Wonder, receive discounts on future courses & workshops, and gain the joy of supporting this work in the world. Thank you.
On the TW Radar
If you have come across a resource, podcast episode, article, video, book, or poem that you think our readers might appreciate, send it to us. If I use it, I’ll certainly give you a hat tip.
»> Taylor Swift and Creative Obsession (Inc. my friend Minda Zetlin) - I loved seeing this piece on Taylor Swift and creativity in Inc. Magazine again - almost a follow-up from this article for which I was interviewed. My Wonder Interventions include baking, photographing, sketching, and wander-driving.
»> The Power of Empty Space: Why business leaders need room to think, pause, and create (Inc. by Klodian Pepaj)
»> The Little Miracle of Sonder (TEDx Pace by youthful speaker Emma Alvarez) - Thanks to
for tipping me off. “Sonder is the realization that everyone has a life as complex as my own.”»> The Gift of Wonder (LinkedIn | Karen Suber) - This strategic advisor recalls how her 17-year-old daughter taught her the gift of wonder, something we leaders need and need to spread.
»> Deepak on wonder: Deepak Chopra once said this to Jimmy Fallon about wonder and children. With all due respect, he only got half of the story. My take: Wonder is not kid’s stuff. Wonder is radical grown-up stuff.
»> And as if to reinforce that point, Lillian Wautheir kindly shared this image from Sweatpants and Coffee. Thank you, Lillian. May we all hang onto that part of us that points the way not only to possibility but toward a more true, beautiful reality.
Well, I’m honored to work with you here, and I’ll see you later this week for a premium piece and see you in two weeks for the next Wonder Dispatch.
We’re in this together.
Thanks for running with me,