When They Gut Your Mission: Start Here…
You’re still standing. That means you get to choose where to go next.
🧭 Staying Human: Micro Strategy #1
🛠️ A micro strategy is a small, usable move to cultivate agility, purpose, dignity, and clarity in the face of authoritarian harm. This post is the first of a new series.
Maybe you’ve watched the mission you devoted your career to get hollowed out or publicly dismantled. Maybe you’re still technically in your role even though the meaning and integrity are gone. Or maybe you’ve been pushed out, laid off, purged, made expendable.
Trump, Musk, and their allies are waging a war on truth, service to country, and democratic infrastructure. The goal isn’t just to erase institutions. It’s to erase memory, moral clarity, and the people who care.
That’s why this strategy matters.
The Strategy: Write a Legacy Letter
A legacy letter is a short, values-driven reflection that helps you process what’s been lost and name what still matters, making it easier to move forward with your footing restored.
When your mission has been gutted or co-opted, it’s easy to lose the thread—of your work and sometimes even your sense of self. You may be grieving what’s been taken. Or feeling rage at what’s being done.
That’s where this strategy begins. You get to decide what your story’s chapters mean and what aspects of that meaning you carry into your future. The legacy letter helps you sort what to keep and what to let go. It’s a way to put your stake back in the ground and reclaim your voice in the face of tyrants trying to silence it.
Legacy (noun): something of meaning or value carried forward from the past—an inheritance of purpose, memory, or principle that shapes what comes next.
Write the raw, unfiltered version privately, with no edits or expectations. Say everything. The rage. The grief. The betrayal. What was stolen. What still lives inside you that they can’t take.
Be honest. And be smart. Don’t put it in the cloud! Assume you’re being watched.
Then, if and when you’re ready, write a second version. A version you might decide to share, with trusted confidants or publicly, depending on the context. This version is about what you still stand for. What you want to carry forward, or pay forward, into your next chapter. What you will fight for.
Why This Works
When the harm is this personal and this systemic, it’s easy to lose your footing. Writing a legacy letter helps you stop internalizing the harm being done to you. It helps you start remembering who you are. It interrupts the rumination and reorients you toward your values and identity.
Pain is a signal. It doesn’t just hurt, it tells you what matters. And anger is an activating emotion that can fuel action. This strategy turns that pain into purpose, that anger into energy you can draw on strategically when needed.
Have you tried something like this? What did you say? What did you need to say but never could? I’d love to hear.
About This Project
I help people and organizations live and lead through this authoritarian period while preserving their purpose and humanity.
This post is part of a larger project to share strategies, tools, and frameworks for staying human and staying strategic under pressure. Sign up for my Substack newsletter to get future strategy posts delivered directly to your inbox.
If this post landed for you:
Share with someone who’s also struggling
Add your voice in the comments
Subscribe to keep following the series
We are not helpless. We are not broken. We are living inside an anti-democracy authoritarian system intended to disorient and divide, and we are learning how to move through it with humanity, solidarity and conscience intact.
Stay human.
Stay strategic.
Shape tomorrow.
Check out these related recent posts:
Befriend Yourself: A Strategy for Staying Whole While They Dismantle Everything That Matters. Trump and Musk want to disappear you into a cell of despair. Kindness to yourself is how you stay human—and begin your escape.
Life Inside the Authoritarian Harm Complex: Understand It to Stay Human. They want to break you through a blitz of actions that destabilize every level of life. Clearly seeing the pattern of personal and institutional harm is how you begin to resist and stay human.
My Consulting Services
📞 Need a strategic plan that protects your mission—and your funding? I partner with progressive leaders to navigate threats and build stronger, resilient organizations. Let’s talk.
📩 Message me to start the conversation.
▶️ Make sure others see this. Share, repost, and subscribe to stay ahead of what’s coming.
From Progressive Strategy Now, a publication of Paul T Shattuck LLC.
***The views expressed here reflect my personal analysis as a researcher and consultant, and do not represent the positions of any employer, clients, or affiliated organizations.
Your Legacy Letter activity reminds me of The 3 Letters technique of Colin Tipping in his Radical Forgiveness technology, I really resonate with your view that "pain is a signal" to honor my values and bring them into my future with action.