Iran, empire, and what complexity asks of us as leaders.

⏱️ Reading time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for social impact professionals navigating power, career, and change.

What's inside today's newsletter:

1. What is happening — and what I believe about it
2. Two things can be true — and both can break your heart
3. What this asks of us

I texted a friend this week.

She is Iranian. She has family there. She has been sitting, like so many of us, with the news that the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes over the weekend that killed Iran's Supreme Leader, other top officials, and countless civilians.

I didn't know what to say. So I said exactly that. I don't know what to say. I'm thinking of you. Sending love. Praying for peace.

And then I sat with my own swirl of feelings for a long time.

1. 🌍 What is happening — and what I believe about it

I have a complicated relationship with certainty. I spend most of my work helping leaders sit with ambiguity rather than reaching for false clarity. But there are moments when I think our sector — social impact, development, civil society — retreats into careful language right when honesty is most needed.

So here is what I believe: this is not justice. This is geopolitics.

I have a bachelor's and a master's in international relations and economics. I have worked across five continents on issues of civil society, governance, and power. And the pattern I'm watching is an old one.

When the US intervened in Chile, they installed Pinochet. When they went into Afghanistan, they left twenty years of devastation and a Taliban government. When they dismantled Iraq, they sowed the sectarian chaos that gave rise to ISIS. The British partitioned India with five months of notice and borders drawn in blood — over a million people killed, fifteen million displaced.

Imperial powers do not intervene because they care about ordinary people. They intervene because of power — who controls resources, who acts as a bulwark against China and Russia, who sits at the table when the world is being carved up. And history tells us who tends to rise when that intervention leaves chaos in its wake.

Trump is, at least, honest about this: this is about America. The rest is window dressing.

2. 🕊️ Two things can be true — and both can break your heart

I want to hold something tender here, because I've been in enough diaspora communities to know the reality is more complicated than the headlines.

Many Iranians — particularly those in diaspora, particularly those who have lived under theocratic repression — feel something like relief. I understand that. Some Venezuelans felt something similar when the US seized and imprisoned Maduro — that same complicated mix of relief and dread about what comes next. The longing for freedom from a brutal government is real, and human, and legitimate.

And.

That relief can live right alongside dread. The knowledge that what tends to follow US military intervention is rarely freedom. That a people's right to self-determination — to dismantle their own government on their own terms, however messy and long and nonlinear — is not served by bombs.

Two things can be true. A government can be oppressive and its people deserve the right to determine their own future. An authoritarian leader's death can bring momentary relief and set off a cascade that serves no one but the empire.

Holding that tension — without collapsing into either celebration or despair — is some of the hardest work of this moment. And it is, I would argue, one of the most important leadership capacities we can build.

3. 🧭 What this asks of us

This week inside Flourish, we did something deceptively simple in our peer coaching session: we practiced staying curious instead of jumping to answers. Sitting with someone's complexity instead of rushing to resolve it.

Watching that room of leaders hold space for each other, I kept thinking — this is also what the world is asking of us right now.

Not to have the right take immediately. Not to perform clarity we don't feel. But to stay curious: about history, about the people we love who are living this in their bodies, about our own reactions as they move through us.

The leaders I have seen hold up through destabilizing moments are rarely the most certain ones. They are the ones with the most capacity to hold complexity without being consumed by it. That capacity isn't a personality trait. It's a practice. It is built slowly, in community, through learning to name what we're feeling without being ruled by it.

One framework I return to: distinguishing between what is in our sphere of control, what is in our sphere of influence, and what is in our sphere of concern — and refusing to let the enormity of that last one swallow the first two.

Outrage is information. It tells us something has violated our values and requires response. But outrage without strategy, without community, without the capacity to hold the long view — that becomes despair. And despair, ultimately, serves the powerful.

Staying curious doesn't mean staying still. It means choosing your response — whether that's showing up in the streets, writing, boycotting, organizing, or simply refusing to let grief become despair — from a grounded place rather than a reactive one.

A closing thought

I still don't fully know what to say to my friend.

I am holding her this week, my Venezuelan friends, and everyone I know who is navigating an impossible mixture of relief and dread right now. I am watching the ripple effects — in the Middle East, on the already-fragile architecture of the region — with the particular dread of someone who has studied enough history to recognize the pattern.

And I keep coming back to the same thing: staying curious is not the same as staying neutral.

Curiosity, in this context, is not detachment. It's the discipline of staying present to complexity when every instinct wants a clean answer — holding grief and analysis at the same time, loving the people affected and naming the forces at work.

That's what this moment asks of us. Not certainty. Not the right take. Just the willingness to keep looking clearly, stay connected, and keep building — slowly, in community — toward the world we actually want.

Tell me: Where are you being asked to hold complexity right now? What do you need to stay curious rather than tip into despair?

I'd love to hear from you.

Maya 🧡

P.S. So much of what I'm describing — holding complexity, staying grounded when the world is destabilizing, figuring out your next strategic move — is exactly what we work on together inside Fearless.
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If you're at a career crossroads and wondering what's next, I'm hosting our first of two free workshops this Spring on Tues, March 31 for underrepresented social impact leaders to get career clarity. Register here →​

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