Speaking up is hard

Introducing our new course: Thought Leadership for Humans

Dec 22, 2025

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Hey there! 👋
Skander here.

You know that draft you’ve been sitting on for three weeks? The one where you finally explain what you actually do, why it matters, and what you’ve learned the hard way?

Yeah. It’s still sitting there. And so is the one from six months ago.

Meanwhile, some guy with a ring light and a hustle-bro newsletter is getting 50k impressions explaining “5 reasons AI is the next big thing” with insights you could’ve written in your sleep. Except you didn’t write them. Because every time you try, something stops you.

Here’s the weird part: you’re not bad at this. You explain complex stuff to investors, partners, and new hires all the time. You’ve got takes. You’ve got stories. You’ve got the receipts. But the moment you try to say it in public, something short-circuits.

Imposter syndrome. Fear of sounding salesy. The creeping suspicion that “thought leader” is just a fancy term for “annoying person on the internet.”

So you stay quiet. And the conversation keeps missing your voice.

We’ve spent two years building Climate Drift, an accelerator helping senior professionals break into climate, and a community where they actually stick around.

But we kept noticing the same thing: great people doing important work, completely invisible online.

Turns out we weren't the only ones noticing. A few months ago, Katie Gilbert and Sean Higgins, two drifties with decades of experience helping experts find their voice, pitched us on building something to fix it. Today, that something is here.

Today, we’re introducing Thought Leadership for Humans: a 6-week program to help you finally turn up your own volume.

Apply Now

Here’s what we’re covering:

Why the thing stopping you isn’t time (it’s something more fixable)
The 4 blockers that keep leaders quiet
How to build a practice that doesn’t feel gross
Why community is the unlock most people skip

🌊 Let’s dive in, handing over to Katie Gilbert

Introducing: Thought Leadership for Humans

Thought Leadership for Humans is a cohort-based program for climate founders, operators, job seekers, researchers, solopreneurs, and other experts who know they should be sharing about their work publicly, but haven’t figured out how to actually do it.

Six weeks
Small community (max 40 participants) to ensure hands-on support
You’ll publish by Week 1, and every week thereafter

Our next cohort starts February 2026.

Spots are limited, and early applicants will receive priority.

Apply Now

Key elements of the program:

Guided assessments to clarify your goals, voice, and audience
Weekly live sessions with teaching + practice, including show-and-tell sessions to workshop with peers and experts
Expert Q&As where you can bring real drafts and real questions
Async support and writing feedback between calls
Action-plan frameworks you can reuse after the program ends

On the fence? No problem.

Get a taste of the teachings offered by Thought Leadership for Humans by attending Climate Drift’s Open Climate session on January 15 at 9am PT.

Join the workshop

Speaking up is hard

I have a confession to make.

Despite 20 years of writing and communications experience, I’ve long felt tongue-tied when it comes to publicly trumpeting the value and importance of my own work.

I’ve co-authored and ghostwritten books, published long-form journalism, taught writing to undergraduates and business leaders, and collaborated with researchers and executives to help them raise their voices in public.

And yet, when it came to my own thought leadership, I couldn’t crack it.

Especially as I began to work with more climate leaders on collaborative writing projects, I really wanted to figure it out. I believe wholeheartedly in the power of ideas to move climate solutions forward, including my own. And I wanted to share more consistently. But I kept stalling out: long gaps between posts, overthinking every sentence, worrying I sounded self-important or salesy.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t the only one stuck between one urge (to make myself and my work more visible) and another (to give in to my fear of embarrassment and play small).

Over the past year, I’ve had dozens of conversations with climate leaders about their own thought-leadership hang-ups, and what I’m hearing sounds familiar:

A climate-tech start-up founder confesses to paralyzing imposter syndrome when I suggest she pitches an op-ed to her local newspaper.
A connector who convenes delegations to visit sustainable cities around the world knows he should be sharing, writing, and posting more about these trips, but he also knows he won’t change anything until he’s offered a clear framework to follow that fits his specific profile and goals.
The owner of a successful composting company is increasingly being asked to speak and write about his work, but he always declines because he fears he has nothing worthwhile to say.

If you’re like me, you might relate to each of these fears even as you see right through them. Of course these brilliant people have something to say! Their work is dynamic and full of lessons and demanding of niche expertise. But most of all, what I want to impress upon each of them (and all of you) is this: Your climate work is important. The world needs to hear more about it.

My year of conversations about thought leadership has shown me that what’s keeping us from speaking up isn’t what we think it is. It’s not that we need more hours in the day, or the arrival of a GPT perfectly trained on our “brand,” or the right rigid posting plan.

What we need is something more human than any of that: a connection to a like-minded community and an approach to thought leadership that actually feels aligned with our values.

Over the past several months, I’ve worked closely with content-strategy expert Sean Higgins to build something new inside the Climate Drift Community. And today, we’re opening it up to you.

The climate needs your voice

You probably already know this, but it’s worth saying plainly: Oil and gas (and the political right) have figured out influence. They invest heavily in narrative-shaping, because it’s effective.

Climate work, by contrast, is still under-voiced. The work is happening, but too often in silence.

When we stay quiet, we might assuage ourselves by saying we’re just being modest. But the result is something less virtuous: We’re withholding attention from the solutions, teams, products, policies, and funds that could move the needle.

In other words, missing voices from the climate conversation = missing oxygen for climate solutions.

You and I both know we don’t need more generic “climate influencers.”

But we do need founders, operators, VCs, policy thinkers, organizers, scientists, and builders who are willing to become faces for their causes, not for their vanity.

Thought leadership done right is not self-promotion, but good-idea promotion. It’s not a performance, but public thinking in service of the work.

And doesn’t that sound like something worth our collective time and effort?

Thought Leadership for Humans: A six-week program to help climate leaders turn up their own volume

We’ll cover:

What’s holding you back:

If you haven’t yet built a consistent thought leadership practice, it’s probably not because you don’t have time (even if that’s what you keep telling yourself).

In conversations with dozens of climate leaders, Sean and I kept seeing the same four blockers come up, and we’ll address each one over the course of the program.

Distaste

You hear “thought leader” and picture a LinkedIn influencer with a ring light and a hustle-bro newsletter.

So you opt out.

But thought leadership in climate isn’t about becoming a viral personality. It’s about becoming a recognizable champion for a set of ideas that matter, and connecting with the specific partners, clients, and advocates who can help you push those ideas forward.

Depersonalization

You may have tried plug-and-play frameworks and copy-paste content formulas.

They feel wrong. You stall.

That’s because they skip the mindset work that makes a practice sustainable. They also discount your voice, your story, and the specific context of climate.

What you need is:

A structure that’s clear but flexible
A way to tell your story your way
A practice that fits your actual life, not someone else’s productivity-hacked fantasy

Drought Prediction

You’re secretly afraid you’ll run out of things to say.

In reality, the opposite is true. Once you start sharing regularly, you’ll notice:

Every conversation, meeting, or field observation becomes a potential post
Your published ideas spark questions and replies that actually generate more ideas

You’re already having “publishable thoughts,” trust me. They’re just trapped in:

1:1 calls
Internal memos
Notion docs
Side comments in Slack

… and they’re not seeing the light of day.

Thought leadership is simply the discipline of getting those ideas out in public.

Disconnection

You’re trying to do it alone.

But in isolation:

Imposter syndrome gets louder
Every post feels like a referendum on your worth
You get stuck in perfectionism, then burn out

On the other hand, in community:

You see how normal your fears are
You borrow strategies from people at a similar stage
You benefit from accountability and a surge of collective momentum

It’s like having a trainer and gym buddies, but for your climate thought leadership practice.

How to finally increase your own visibility (and feel great about it)

Sean and I have distilled the drivers that actually help climate leaders build a sustainable thought leadership practice to serve both their missions and their businesses.

Over the six weeks of Thought Leadership for Humans, we’ll dig deep into each of these.

Solution 1: Pick a problem and a thought leadership type, and run with it

Right off the bat, you will:

Identify the most pressing problem for the people you or your company serve
Learn the Six Archetypes of Climate Thought Leaders and choose the type that fits your style and goals
Use simple templates to publish or share something each week of the program, starting Week 1, so you can see how the wins quickly compound over time.

Solution 2: Don’t skip the mindset work

We’ll go beneath the surface tactics and into:

A values exercise: What’s actually driving this practice for you?
Naming and reframing your key barriers:
- Imposter syndrome
- Fear of exposure
- Concern that you’re “selling out”

This is how the practice becomes not just doable, but sustainable, and even meaningful.

Solution 3: Build your strategy around a feedback loop

Over the course of the program, we’ll co-create a strategy that reflects:

Your ideas
Your audience
Your goals (for your org, fund, product, or career)

Then we’ll run through your strategy, treating it like a scientist:

Try things → measure results → adapt → repeat

You’ll set a super-achievable “minimum-baseline goal” (e.g. one post per week to begin), so that even the most skeptical parts of your brain can’t protest. Then, we’ll help you layer on “tiny experiments” to explore new horizons in format, channel, and topic.

Solution 4: Do it in community

Throughout the program, you’ll be embedded in both our Thought Leadership for Humans community (for six weeks) and the wider Climate Drift Community (for three months!), giving you full access to:

Peers who understand the climate context, both the urgency and the constraints
A safe space to test ideas, to get feedback and gut checks, and to learn from what others are trying

Community isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the key to accessing the next level of this work.

Who is Thought Leadership for Humans designed for?

Founders and operators building climate products, orgs, and coalitions
Company employees and teams who could significantly boost their org’s profile if only they talked about it more
Job seekers who are committed to working on a climate-focused mission and need to announce it to the right people
Freelancers and solopreneurs building a roster of mission-focused and sustainability-minded clients
VCs and funders who need to articulate a clear thesis in public
Anyone whose climate work would benefit from a clearer, more consistent voice in the broader conversation

What you’ll take from the program:

Confidence in yourself as a storyteller and a big-ideas person, without feeling like you’re performing a character
A concrete, sustainable plan to follow (no more boom-and-bust posting cycles)
Oxygen for your ideas in the broader climate conversation
Real sparks of collaboration and possibility, with partners, funders, hires, and allies who finally understand what you’re all about
A thought leadership practice that has become a business thinking tool, not just a marketing channel

Our next cohort starts February 2026.

Spots are limited, and early applicants will receive priority.

Apply Now

Our weekly layout:

Two live calls per week:
- One interview with outside expert
- One “show-and-tell” group call, where participants share what they’re working on and get live feedback (and learn from others).
Pre-recorded audio lessons to dive deep into the weekly theme
An active community hosted within Climate Drift, where participants can post works-in-progress for feedback from me (Katie) and from peers
A weekly prompt with “homework” to produce writing and ideas that participants will be encouraged to post, first within our community, and then in public.

Topic breakdown by week:

Week 1: The Six Archetypes of Climate Thought Leaders
Week 2: Mindset blocks holding you back (for example: surprise, you do already like thought leadership)
Week 3: You have more ideas than you think; how to find them
Week 4: How to write thought leadership that doesn’t suck
Week 5: Building your long-term plan (aka content-strategy lite)
Week 6: Bring this work forward (editorial calendars and more)

How does the application process work?

After you click “Apply Here” and submit the application form, we’ll review your responses and get back to you. We’ll set up a time for a 30-minute video call to ensure that the program is a good fit all around. Once we follow up to let you know you’re accepted, you can enroll with the first of two payments of $473 ($947 total).