👋 Welcome to Climate Drift: your cheat-sheet to climate. Each edition breaks down real solutions, hard numbers, and career moves for operators, founders, and investors who want impact. For more: Community | Accelerator | Open Climate Firesides | Deep Dives

Today we are learning in public again: Kruthika Eswaran is an atmospheric scientist and climate-resilience researcher.

She joined Katie’s first Thought Leadership for Humans cohort with a familiar problem: She had the expertise, ideas & desire to communicate.

What she didn’t have yet was a structure that helped her start.

Readers of this newsletter are well aware that, by now, we have all the science, technology, and financial tools necessary to step into a brighter climate future.

What’s too often missing is execution: the ability and the broader support structure to set these solutions in motion.

What’s true on the broader level is true on the individual level, too.

The credentialed climate researchers, founders, and practitioners I work with are not lacking in good ideas.

They’re definitely not lacking in the desire to share their work more widely.

What they’re missing is structure.

Without it, even the smartest, most motivated people get stuck in the same loops of fits and starts. They open a draft and close it. They think about posting and talk themselves out of it. They watch someone less qualified hold the floor in a conversation they should be leading, and feel a sharp frustration they never quite act on.

These climate leaders don’t need to magic up more confidence, more time, or even more inspiration. The fix is clear structure: a defined sequence of steps that takes a smart person out of their head and into a thought-leadership practice with real motion.

That’s what Kruthika Eswaran found in the first cohort of Thought Leadership for Humans, a six-week program run within Climate Drift.

Kruthika is an atmospheric scientist and climate-resilience researcher. She came into the program without a clear sense of what thought leadership meant for someone like her, and with a mental image of what a thought leader looked like that felt nothing like who she was.

Six weeks later, she had a weekly practice generating real feedback from her audience, a live workshop confirmed in Singapore, and a graphic novel underway.

She didn’t find a new personality; she found a structure.

Below, she describes her experience in TL4H, and breaks down what got her moving (in the hopes that these takeaways might move you, too).

We’re opening up a free Thought Leadership Clinic on Wednesday, May 20, at 12pm EDT! Bring your drafts-in-progress for quick workshopping, glimmers of ideas for group gut-checking, and/or research questions for help building out your tiny thought-leadership experiments. You’ll come away with actionable feedback from Katie on your projects, and insight from what others are working on, too.

Join now

By Kruthika Eswaran, atmospheric scientist, climate-resilience researcher, and creator of climate doodles

If there’s one word that describes my background, it’s “researcher.” From a young age, I had a clear ambition: I wanted to win the Nobel Prize. As I understood it, the path to making a difference required expertise in compiling, analyzing, and publishing scientific research. I earned my PhD in atmospheric sciences, focusing my research on the role of aerosols in our atmosphere using satellites and radiation models.

Then COVID happened. I was in isolation in France, stuck between four walls, and I found myself tracing a long, slow thought spiral. I started asking uncomfortable questions: Was sitting in the background, producing research that few people directly encountered, really the kind of impact I wanted to have?

The answer that kept coming back was no. I wanted to be on the front line. I wanted to engage with people face to face. Most of all, I wanted to inspire people to take action.

That realization set off a winding journey. I tried corporate sustainability consulting, but I couldn’t use my skills the way I wanted to. I kept moving, kept searching, until I arrived at something much simpler and more honest:

I wanted to be a communicator and a changemaker, someone who could break down complex, interconnected problems, like climate change, the energy transition, AI, and societal disruption, in ways that actually moved people to act.

Eventually, I realized that to do that at any real scale, I was going to have to understand thought leadership.

Before Thought Leadership for Humans, my mental image of a thought leader was something like a philosopher mixed with a cult leader: someone who talks about many different topics with ease, draws people in, and amasses followers.

It’s not that I’d pinned thought leaders as manipulative. That was just the best way I could think of to describe the actual core of what thought leaders do: they have the power to gather people and inspire them to listen. That is genuinely powerful, regardless of what it’s pointed toward.

What the six weeks in TL4H changed for me wasn’t that core definition; I still think that this gathering-power is the heart of thought leadership. What changed was my understanding of how many different forms that power can take.

Learning about the six archetypes of thought leaders from Katie was, for me, one of the most important unlocks early on. I had never thought about the fact that one of these archetypes, The Translator (someone who takes complex ideas and makes them accessible), is just as much a thought leader as a magnetic Storyteller or a Connector who bridges different communities.

Seeing that wide range of thought-leadership styles made it possible for me to locate myself in it. Once I could see and claim my own type, I could stop wondering whether I “counted” as a thought leader and start thinking about how to do it well.

One of my favorite parts of the program was the first week: Tiny Experiments. The idea is simple but subversive: instead of waiting until you have a perfect plan, you run a small, consistent action over a defined period of time and pay attention to what you learn.

The experiment I designed in the first week was this: I would post one climate doodle or cartoon every week, on the topic of extreme heat, for four weeks, and create them in a way that a school-age child could understand.

Over the next couple of weeks, I could see that the experiment was working. I posted the doodles, shared them with my network, and got genuine feedback that kids were understanding the content. That confirmation was important, not just as validation, but as a data point. The tiny experiment showed me that my instincts about format and audience were right, and gave me the confidence to keep going.

The broader lesson I took from this and want to share with others who were in my shoes: You do not need to have everything figured out before you start. The experiment is the figuring-out. Start small, stay consistent, and pay attention to what comes back.

After the excitement of Tiny Experiments, weeks two and three of the program slowed things down in a way I found genuinely valuable. Week two was about Limiting Beliefs, the internal blocks that stop so many of us from putting ourselves out there. Week three was about identifying your Three Core Themes as a thought leader.

Both of these required sitting quietly and doing real thinking. People underestimate how useful that kind of structured self-examination is. A lot of people who want to do something creative or communicative are circling a block they haven’t named yet. Naming it doesn’t automatically dissolve it, but it does mean you can start working with it rather than just around it.

For the themes exercise, I had to get specific: what was I actually trying to achieve? Eventually, my answer was that I wanted to be a changemaker who inspires people to build crisis-resilient communities. That was still broad, and the exercise pushed me to get more concrete. I really had to think about what that actually looks like in practice, who I’m speaking to, and what thread connects everything I want to create.

If you’re looking for some structure to start this process on your own, I’d encourage you to push yourself to answer these three questions:

• What are you trying to achieve by creating thought leadership?

• What’s stopping you from going toward it?

• What are the two or three themes at the center of what you most want to be sharing about?

I want to be honest about something that surprised me: the program changed how I feel about speaking up.

I’m becoming more confident in putting my views out there, whether in writing, in doodles, or when I’m speaking aloud. I can feel myself slowly blossoming into the kind of person who speaks, not just someone who thinks. My mother always believed I had that in me. I’m starting to believe it, too.

I think this is one of the less-advertised benefits of doing any kind of consistent thought leadership work: it compounds. When you put something into words on a page, for example, it becomes easier to say out loud. When you draw something, you understand it better. When you share something publicly and survive the vulnerability of doing so, the next time is slightly less scary. The different modes of communication reinforce each other.

When I look at where I am coming out of this program versus where I started, the difference is concrete.

The most exciting development: I have a live workshop confirmed in Singapore. It’s open to the public and it will be my first real in-person engagement with children. If it goes well, the goal is to use those connections to scale up into actual schools and educational institutions. This is a first step, and it feels significant.

Alongside the workshop, I’m actively reaching out to schools, educators, and institutions to figure out how to bring my doodles into school curricula and get my live programming into classrooms. Those collaborations are still developing, but the direction is clear: I want the doodles to have a life inside formal education, not just on social media. LinkedIn has been a useful starting point for building visibility, but it’s obviously not where I’m going to reach kids. Getting into schools is the real goal, and that’s so much closer now.

And then there’s my graphic novel. This is a project I’m genuinely excited about, and it signals an expansion of my audience beyond children to young adults and adults more broadly. The themes I’m exploring are the ones I think are most urgent right now: AI, energy, and the shape of society as these forces collide. I’ve started writing it the old-fashioned way, pen in notebook, and something about that process has opened up my thinking in a way that typing doesn’t. The ideas are flowing.

All of these threads (the workshop, the educator collaborations, the graphic novel, the ongoing doodles) are still taking shape. But they are real now in a way they weren’t six weeks ago.

The TL4H program didn’t hand me any of this. What it did was give me the clarity, the structure, and the confidence to go get it.

If someone came to me and said they had no idea what thought leadership was or whether it was for them, here is what I would tell them:

A thought leader is simply someone who can gather people and make them want to listen, whether through their words, art, or presence. There is no single type. There are translators, storytellers, connectors, visionaries, and many others. Find where you fit in that range, and you’ll have your starting point.

Then, don’t skip the inner work: figure out what you’re trying to achieve, identify what’s genuinely blocking you, and get clear on your themes.

Only after you do that does it make sense to start thinking about platforms, content strategy, or workflow (the topics we covered in the second half of the TL4H program). The outer architecture is only as useful as your inner clarity behind it.

And then, start something small. Today, if you can.

Kruthika Eswaran is a climate communicator and creator of climate-focused doodles aimed at making science accessible to children (and the adults in their lives). She is currently developing a graphic novel exploring the intersections of AI, energy, and society. You can follow her thought leadership on LinkedIn and Instagram.

“The structure made the difference” is the through-line across so many stories from our first cohort. Not one person came in already knowing how to do this. They came in with important work that was stuck in silent mode, and a nagging sense that they could be doing more to help their work reach the people who needed to hear it.

They left with clarity, a plan, and in several cases, work already published and in motion.

By the end of six weeks, TL4H cohort members had launched newsletters, started building podcasts and YouTube channels, written for the Climate Drift newsletter, and, like Kruthika, established collaborations they hadn’t yet conceived of when they first signed up.

Post-program feedback from the first cohort tells the story. Participants gave TL4H a 9.2 out of 10 overall rating. One described it as a program that takes you “from 0 to 10.” Multiple others said it “exceeded expectations.”

We’re forming the second cohort of TL4H now, and it launches Monday, June 1, inside Climate Drift.

We’re looking for climate founders, operators, researchers, practitioners, and communicators who are ready to stop carrying their ideas alone, and find out what becomes possible when they finally have the structure to share them.

• A complete curriculum built around the specific psychology and strategy of thought leadership for people doing mission-driven work. Not generic content advice. Not a plug-and-play framework that strips out your voice. A structured practice designed around who you actually are and what you’re actually trying to say.

• Weekly live sessions with guest experts who have built real audiences, written books, and raised funding through their public thinking (and who will engage directly with your work in real time, not just present at you).

• A cohort of peers who understand the urgency of what you’re building. The community inside TL4H is one of its most-valued features. In post-survey feedback, participants named their cohort members again and again as a key part of what made the six weeks so transformative.

• Async writing and strategy feedback from Katie and your peers, so you can move through the program at your own pace as you balance your busy schedule.

And, because we all know that the hardest part is starting, you will publish something in Week 1. Not when you feel ready. Week 1.

You’re a credentialed expert or practitioner who:

• has more ideas than output,

• suspects your visibility gap is costing you real opportunities, and

• is allergic to self-promotion (but is starting to see that staying quiet has a real cost, too).

You don’t need to already see yourself as a thought leader. Kruthika didn’t. She just needed structure, and a nudge to start something small.

Applications for the second cohort are open now. Spots are limited and reviewed on a rolling basis.

If you’re ready to see the thought-leadership practice that can develop when you have the scaffolding to move, schedule a 30-minute call with Katie →

Apply Now