We are excited to share with you the next interview in our “Beyond the Page” series featuring Maria Wade.
Your best leaders can look calm and still be in trouble. When uncertainty stops being a short-term disruption and becomes the water everyone swims in, “stay strong and push through” turns into isolation, second-guessing, and a constant fight with their own internal signals. That’s the heart of our conversation with executive coach and coaching supervisor Maria Wade, author of “Holding It Together Is Not the Job: Coaching Leaders in Prolonged Organizational Chaos.”
We dig into what changes when the world moves from complicated to complex to chaotic and why senior leadership challenges stop being technical problems you can solve with more expertise. Maria shares how coaches can use presence and interoception, the felt sense of what’s happening inside the body, as real data in a session. We talk about why the goal isn’t to calm a client down, but to help them get accurate information from a system they’ve learned to override, and how neuroscience on constructed emotions informs a more careful, respectful approach.
From there, we zoom out to the identity shift leaders face after promotion: more autonomy, fewer guardrails, and often less honest support. We explore vulnerability with boundaries, breaking isolation without oversharing, and bringing the system into the room through psychological safety and accountability. Maria also points listeners to a practical Chaos Guide and explains how her leadership integrity framework connects inner awareness, relationships, and the larger organizational system.
In this episode, I talk with Maria about her article published in our June 2026 issue.
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