If you're wondering whether this table is for you

A first, unfinished word about who I am and what this 'table' is for

What is this

If you’ve just landed here, you might be doing the thing I’d be doing, trying to work out if you’re in the right place. Let me work it out with you, out loud, because I’m still working some of it out myself. That’s actually the point of this corner of the Table.

Most of us are carrying something we don’t talk about: at work, at home, in the rooms/spaces/places where we’re supposed to have it all together.

The fear underneath the competence.
The cost of the performance.
The quiet sense that the person everyone’s dealing with isn’t quite the person who’s actually in there.

We’ve been taught (or learned along the way) to keep it inside. We don’t say it, because saying it feels unsafe, or self-indulgent, or like it might cost us the thing we’ve built. So we keep it down, and we keep going, and we get very good at seeming “fine”.

This is a room for that. The stuff we don’t talk about, and who we really are underneath who we learned to be. Some of what I share here will be finished: pieces from the humanKIND Journal, brought over so we can read them together and talk them through. Some of it, like this, won’t be finished at all, it’ll be me thinking out loud, half-formed, in company, before I’ve composed it into anything. And some of it will just be quick notes in passing. All of it is free, and none is gated. No tier, no members-only anything, no ‘pay-to-play’ and no version of belonging you have to earn your way into.

Hi, I’m James

I should tell you a bit about me, because I’m not a neutral host and I won’t pretend to be.

For over three decades I’ve built brands, some of them names you’d know. I was good at it, and part of why is that I learned very young how to build a version of myself that a room would accept.

I grew up knowing that I was gay in a fundamentalist Christian world that taught me, before I was old enough to question it, that who I was was wrong/sinful/evil/unworthy/dirty and that who I was needed to be hidden or ‘fixed’. So I did what most young children do. I obeyed. I got fluent in performing an ‘acceptable’ me, and I carried that fluency straight into a career that paid well for exactly that skill: manage the perception, locate your worth in the room’s response. And for a long time it worked. On companies, and on myself.

And then it stopped, the way it does when the performance finally costs more than it pays. What I found underneath wasn’t a better strategy. It was a person I’d stopped listening to a long time ago, and a thing I now think most of us are quietly carrying: that we were never as wrong, or as alone, as we were taught to believe. The worth was never out there to earn. It was the thing I’d been building over top of the whole time. That remembering: the long, unfinished work of coming home to who I actually am, is the ground all of this come from. Not as an idea. As the thing that saved my life.

Do you belong here?

You might have noticed I keep saying “leadership”, and you might be wondering whether you’re in the wrong place if you don’t ‘run’ anything. You’re not. Leadership is where I’ve watched this play out most publicly, and it’s where a lot of the finished writing lives, but it was never only about work. The same swap happens at home, and with the people we love, and in the quiet of our own heads. If any of that is yours, this is for you.

You don’t have to have a “leadership” title.

You don’t have to be all sorted out.

You don’t have to arrive with the right words.

You don’t have to agree with me.

You don’t have to be anywhere in particular with your own remembering.

Come as you are. The version of you underneath the one you built (or think you should/need to be) is the one I’m actually talking to.

If you want somewhere to begin, “You were never a brand” is a good door in, it’s the piece closest to my own turning. And more will gather under Start Here as they come.

I want to be honest, I haven’t fully worked out what this becomes. That isn’t a flaw in the plan; it is the plan (and yes, parts of me are challenged by this). I’d rather build it in the open, with you in the room, than hand you a finished thing. So this is less of a welcome mat and more of an open chair.

If you’re carrying something you don’t say out loud, that gap between the version of you that’s winning and the You that’s gone a bit quiet, you don’t have to explain it or fix it here. But if you’d like to name it, even just a word of it. Saying it plainly loosens its grip, and it lets the next person see they’ve been carrying the same thing. I’ll be in the comment threads, notes, and chats.

The humanKIND Table is a room for the stuff we don't talk about — and who we really are underneath it. The finished pieces read together, the thinking still in progress, and the quick unfolding in between. Everything here is free, and nothing is gated. Hosted by James Powell; the finished work's home, in full and canonically, is humankind.work. New here? The About page is a good door in.