Thriv Resources
Writing at the Intersection of Clarity, Creativity, and Real Life
This is a place to think out loud, slowly, and with care.
Essays, reflections, and short-form writing that explore decision-making, leadership, creativity, and the lived experience of navigating change. The focus is not instruction. It is observation. Not answers, but orientation.
Creative Adaptive Intelligence runs quietly through how choices are examined, pauses are held, and return is treated as intelligence.
This page is a reading room.
Where real life meets real clarity and joy gets the last word.
“It’s like she turns chaos into coherence without losing the human part.”
A weekly note written for people who lead, create, and carry responsibility.
Not a recap. Not a sermon. A moment of grounding.
One email a week, designed to clarify rather than consume.
Subscribers receive reflections drawn from lived experience, current writing, and the quieter moments that tend to get lost in urgency. The tone is intentional. The cadence is human.
One intentional sip at a time.
The essays collected here examine how clarity, discernment, and values-based choice show up in real life.
They look closely at urgency, burnout, leadership pressure, rest, over-adaptation, and the long arc of decision-making over time.
Rather than defining concepts, the writing traces patterns.
Some pieces are personal. Others are observational. All are grounded in the same question:
What helps people move forward without losing themselves?
Featured Essays: Decision-Making in Uncertain Times
Three foundational essays exploring why choosing feels harder right now — and what kind of intelligence this moment is asking of us.
Essay I: Why Decision-Making Feels Broken Right Now: Examines the contemporary conditions that strain decision-making and explains why capable people experience fatigue, hesitation, and loss of orientation without personal failure.
Essay II: This Pause Is Intelligence at Work: Explores how Creative Adaptive Intelligence functions when certainty is unavailable, reframing pause, discernment, and orientation as active forms of intelligence rather than delay.
Essay III: The Intelligence That Returns: Describes the spiral pattern of mature decision-making, showing how revisiting questions reflects integration, boundary clarity, and evolved judgment rather than regression.
The Core Values Quiz: What’s Driving You Right Now?
A 5-minute Core Values Quiz to explore how your Creative Adaptive Intelligence guides pace, boundaries, and decisions when life gets loud.
The Intelligence of Returning to What Matters
An essay on returning to values when resilience alone isn’t enough. Jenn Ocken reflects on how clarity, pause, and integrity guide decision-making during demanding seasons.