On Growing Together— Read Together June 2026
Read Together · June 2026 · Wrap-Up
On Growing Together
A celebration of what June held — and a quiet look at what's coming next.
June is almost behind us.
And I want to take a moment before we turn the page — not to close it, but to celebrate what this month held. Because something happened here that I don't want to rush past.
We sat with leadership and influence — not as a concept reserved for corner offices or podiums, but as something quiet and daily and entirely available to all of us. We asked hard questions. We held them alongside our children, our teenagers, our own interior lives. We put books down mid-page because something stopped us.
That's not nothing. That's everything.
What I'm still carrying
I'm leaving June with Simon Sinek's central idea sitting quietly in everything I do. The village. The villager. The daily, unglamorous decision to value the people beside you not for what they produce but simply because they are enough.
I don't think that idea is finished with me yet. And I don't think it needs to be. That's the thing about a good book — it doesn't close when you do. It keeps showing up in your kitchen, in your school pickup line, in the way you respond when someone shares something hard.
Leaders Eat Last will keep living in how I move through the world long after July begins. And I suspect Becoming will too — because Michelle Obama's question of what it means to keep becoming yourself doesn't have a finish line.
These conversations don't end when the month does. That's exactly how it should be.
On the living, growing nature of this book club
I want to say something about what Read Together is — and what I hope it keeps becoming.
This isn't a book club with a syllabus and a deadline. There are no wrong answers, no late submissions, no requirement to have read every page before you're allowed to have a thought. This is an open table. You can come back to June's books in August. You can find yourself in October sitting with something Becoming planted in you back in June and only now breaking the surface.
That's not falling behind. That's how growth actually works.
The themes we explore here are designed to build on each other — not replace each other. Leadership will weave into creativity. Creativity will weave into whatever comes next. This is a living, growing thing and you are part of what makes it so.
A look ahead — July
An invitation to create freely.
That's what July is.
I've been thinking about creativity a lot lately — and not in the way I used to. Not as a talent you either have or you don't. Not as the domain of artists and musicians and people who went to art school. But as something far more ordinary and far more essential than that.
Creativity is what happens when you set something down and come back to it differently. When you find a new way through something that used to stop you. When you make something — anything — out of what you have, where you are, with the time you've got.
I set running down once. I came back to it on completely different terms — slower, quieter, more honest. That was a creative act. I didn't have a name for it at the time. But it was.
Building Wildflower Running required me to imagine something before it existed and then make it real piece by piece. That's creativity. Not the polished, effortless kind you see in highlight reels — the messy, uncertain, keep-going-anyway kind.
And then there's the athleticism angle that doesn't get talked about enough: sport is creative. As a Division I track and field athlete I wasn't just executing — I was problem-solving in real time. Adapting. Improvising. Finding what my body could do that no one had told me it could. That's innovation. That's creative confidence before anyone put that name on it.
July is an invitation to look at your own life and ask: where am I creating? Where have I set something down that's waiting to be picked back up? What would I make if I gave myself permission?
I can't wait to explore this with you.
The books are coming. They're good ones.
A note on where to buy
Every book mentioned here links to Bookshop.org — buying through these links supports independent bookstores in your community, not a warehouse. Same books, same price, a better place for your money to land.
There's no right place to begin. Just the place you're drawn to today.
Come as you are.
Read what you can.
See where it takes you.
I'd love to know which of these you're reaching for first — and if any of them are a reread for you, I'm especially curious: is leadership landing differently the second time through? Sometimes a book finds you at exactly the right moment, and sometimes you have to grow into it first. Leave a comment below and let me know where you are with it.
Here's to growing together this month.
A deep breath in a beautiful life.
— Britt
We're halfway through July and something happened this week that I didn't expect to feel as significant as it did. A reflection on empathy, creative confidence, and what it means to offer a solution when you're not the obvious expert — plus this month's discussion prompts for every reader in your life.