Shapeshifter

#26 - Lead like a tree

Caro Gomez Episode 26

What if leadership didn’t ask you to climb higher, speak louder, or move faster — but instead invited you to root deeper?
 In this episode of Shapeshifter, I share a living philosophy that’s been growing within me for years (but I didn’t know it!): Leading like a tree.

Recorded in the presence of winter trees, birdsong, and big blue skies, this episode is a slow, honest reflection on leadership, legacy, and the deep exhaustion many of us feel with the dominant models of success, urgency, and visibility. This isn’t a strategy-heavy episode, it’s an ancestral remembering, rather than a terrestrial one.

Join me as we explore:

  • Why Traditional Leadership No Longer Fits: Questioning urgency, extraction, hierarchy, and the idea that it’s “lonely at the top.”
  • Rooted Leadership: What it means to lead from lineage, ancestry, and the body — not from algorithms or market gaps.
  • The Tree as Teacher: Understanding leadership through roots, trunk, branches, fruit, leaves, and soil — and how this living architecture applies to your work and life.
  • Fulfilment Beyond Metrics: Why multi-six-figure success without nervous system safety and joy isn’t success at all.
  • Visibility Without Burnout: Honouring cycles, seasonality, and presence without betraying yourself.
  • Leadership That Lasts Generations: The story of living tree bridges in India and why true leadership is often for people we’ll never meet.
  • A New Way Forward: Introducing Lead Like a Tree — a living practice for those who are done with forcing, hustling, and performing.

This episode is for the shapeshifters, the quiet leaders, the artists, witches, space holders, mothers, elders, women of depth and creators who feel the call to do things differently. Slowly, honestly, and in reciprocity with life itself.

If your work took 20, 30, or 50 years to fully bloom… would you still do it?
 If the answer is yes, this episode is for you.


 🌿 Remember: you were never meant to do this alone. Let’s grow something that outlives us.

 

LEAD LIKE A TREE – a living practice for those that don’t fit inside traditional leadership models, we begin February 17

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