Amanda Halbersma is a veteran communications strategist with over 15 years of experience driving engagement within complex, matrixed organizations—including Google and Wells Fargo.

A journalist by trade and a strategist by practice, Amanda has seen firsthand how uncertainty impacts both the audience and the creator.

Hold On Loosely (But Don’t Let Go): Doing Good Content Work in Uncertain Times

Co-presented with: Melinda Belcher

Work today isn’t just chaotic—it’s precarious. Layoffs feel constant, career paths feel fragile, and AI has amplified the pressure to produce and the fear of being replaced. Many content leaders respond by “job-hugging”, clinging so tightly, they lose sight of what makes their work valuable.

Job-hugging isn’t weakness. It’s survival. But when the grip is too tight, it undermines what makes leaders effective: clear priorities, sound judgment, and the ability to say “this isn’t ready.”

This session introduces a framework—hard center, soft edges—for deciding what to protect and what to release. Drawing on decision science, performance psychology, and burnout research, we’ll explore why “optimal, not peak” matters, why strategic disappointment is a leadership skill, and why choosing what to neglect matters more than ever. It isn’t about letting go. It’s about loosening your grip just enough to do your real work well.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Apply the hard center, soft edges model to distinguish between work that defines your professional value and work that can tolerate imperfection, delays, or depolarization.
• Practice strategic disappointment—Choosing in advance who and what to underwhelm so that higher-stakes work gets your best judgment.
• Recognize the difference between optimal and peak performance, and why sustainable effectiveness under real conditions matters more than perfection under ideal ones.
• Identify when AI acceleration is improving your work versus deepening unsustainable patterns of overcommitment and chronic vigilance.