In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, [you can listen to the interview here], Brené Brown named something rare that and also costly.

She described the “care tax”—the hidden toll of being treated as a national therapist, expected not only to share ideas but to absorb people’s deepest stories of pain and trauma. After her books, women flooded her with accounts of workplace abuse, harassment, and heartbreak. They wanted her care, her healing, her presence—not just her research.

Most of us will never carry that kind of weight. But her insight reveals something crucial about today’s influencer economy. Too often, influence drifts into dependency. Gurus and thought leaders set themselves up as the fix, creating codependency instead of capacity. The cycle feeds itself, but it rarely transforms anyone.

Learning as Spectator Sport

There’s another layer, too: learning itself has started to resemble a spectator sport.

We scroll, we double-tap, we save the carousels, we repost the brilliant quote. We feel a rush of recognition and maybe even empathy when someone names something we’ve lived. For a moment, it feels like we’re participating in change just by reading, sharing, and nodding along.

And yes, there is learning happening. But without transference—without embedding those insights into rhythms, choices, and systems—most of it stays as momentary inspiration. It soothes us in the short term but doesn’t stick in the long term. We mistake the feeling of absorbing for the practice of applying.

In a sense, we even worship certain people in these spaces—whether legal, artistic, or nonprofit—as if proximity to their brilliance equals progress. But are we really making the changes we need? Yes, they are sharing. Yes, they are inspiring. But inspiration without transference is just more consumption.

The Consultant Trap

This is the same pattern I see in business.

Organizations hire consultants to carry what they don’t want to hold—to be the ongoing caretaker of dysfunction. And too many consultants lean into it. They build their models around staying. They anchor their ego and revenue in being indispensable.

It looks like transformation. But it isn’t.

The real role of a consultant is not to be the hero. It’s to:

• Diagnose clearly and surface what’s hidden.
• Transfer tools, rhythms, and practices.
• Build the client’s capacity to sustain change long after the engagement ends.

True transformation can’t be outsourced. It must be owned.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves

I was listening to a podcast and heard Dr. Benjamin Hardy share that many business owners lie to themselves about what they really want. They say they want transformation. But what they often want is relief. They want the feeling of progress without the disruption of doing the work of transmission. They hire for influence and inspiration but resist the mess of actual embedding.

That has always been my biggest challenge. And it’s why I myself want to move away from “doing the implementation.” Not because I can’t, but because it drains energy and—more importantly—it doesn’t create lasting effect. Implementation can’t live in me; it has to live in in the client and the client organization.

So What’s Required?

The real question becomes: how do we facilitate implementation so that it sticks? How do we ensure meaning and endurance beyond the workshop high or consultant hand-off?

I don’t pretend to have the final answer. But here are a few experiments I want to keep trying:

1. Embedding Rhythms, Not Projects
   Transformation sustains when teams adopt simple, repeatable rhythms—weekly check-ins, quarterly tune-ups, scorecards—not when they finish one-time projects.
2. Shared Ownership, Not Outsourced Fixes
   Every department has to see how it contributes to retention, referral, or client experience. If only leadership “gets it,” or one department “gets it”, nothing sticks.
3. Labs, Not Lectures
   Real change happens in live testing spaces where teams co-design and iterate together. Not in static decks. Not in binders. In labs, mistakes and breakthroughs live side by side.
4. From Inspiration to Transference
   Capturing insight is not enough. Every learning moment has to map to a behavior, system, or decision the team can carry forward without me in the room.

These are experiments. Not doctrines. Because transformation is less about perfection and more about persistence through experimentation.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where in your business are you consuming influence or outsourcing responsibility—when what’s really needed is transference and ownership?

If you’re ready to move past the quick hit of inspiration and embed alignment that actually lasts, let’s talk. My work is about experiments that transfer capacity, not dependency.