by Heather Plett | Dec 20, 2013 | Leadership, Uncategorized
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was once boarding a plane flying out of South Africa, a few years after apartheid had ended, and he was delighted to see that the pilot was black. “Finally!” he thought. “My people can fly planes! We’re making progress!”
A few hours later, the plane hit turbulence, and his immediate thought was “can a black man really be trusted to navigate this plane safely through this rough patch?”
The thought surprised him and made him realize how deeply oppression imbeds thoughts of unworthiness in the minds of those being oppressed. Though he was a powerful advocate for justice, he too had fallen victim to the power of the oppressor to change the very way a person thinks about his own people and himself.
I’ve had a fairly profound realization lately, that the same can be said for my most instinctual response to the rise of the feminine in the face of the patriarchy. Though I’ve been a feminist for almost as long as I’ve known the definition of the word, I serve on the board of a feminist organization, I’ve fought my way through the glass ceiling to senior leadership positions, and I write and teach a lot about women’s leadership, there still remain some instinctual, deep-rooted beliefs that I am not fully worthy because I am a woman.
Or… Let me correct that… It’s not simply an unworthiness of me as a women (because I’ve gotten quite used to women in power, have been in positions of power myself, and don’t think I have any deep-seated issues that I need to excavate in that regard). It’s more of a sense that the feminine (whether it appears in women or men) is not quite worthy of power.
Let me explain…
When I left my last formal employment in a leadership position, I did it partly because I was burnt out from the tension I felt between the two tugs – either lead in the way the patriarchy accepted, or turn against the stream and lead with my feminine heart in a masculine-dominated world. I’d tried both, and both were equally stressful for me. I either had to give up what came instinctually for me and live an inauthentic life, or I had to have the courage to face the criticism I received when I dared to lead with more vulnerability, ambiguity, love, and community.
When I first became self-employed, I started a blog called Sophia Leadership, which was all about bringing more feminine wisdom into leadership. (Sophia being the Greek word for feminine wisdom.) I’ll be honest… I had a bit of an uneasy relationship with that blog. I loved it and I wrote my heart out, but I didn’t share it broadly with my former colleagues or my students at the university. I’d been so frequently wounded in my own attempts to bring the feminine into my leadership, that I was afraid to be ridiculed for writing something that I expected they’d judge as “woo-woo” or too “touchy-feely”.
At that time, I had a more professional website at heatherplett.com, and that was the one I shared with students, potential clients, and former colleagues. I was more comfortable with them seeing me behind the mask of my professional persona.
After awhile, though, I got tired of maintaining two sites that made me feel splintered, and so I combined them at heatherplett.com. That took some courage (because now my students, who have to access my site to get to their assignments and class notes, would witness me pouring my heart out on my blog), but once I did it, it felt good, and there were positive results (like four students in my class asking if I’d consider coaching them in non-class-related life changes).
Feminine leadership continued to drive much of what I wrote about and taught about (eg. Lead with your Wild Heart), but the more I focused on that, the more I realized that I was targeting my work specifically for women. That’s not a bad thing, but it hadn’t been my original intent. When I created Sophia Leadership, it had always been with the intent to bring more of the feminine into ALL of leadership, not just into the way women lead.
A couple of interesting things happened this Fall that helped me realize that some of the direction my business was taking was related to my own fear and my own deeply-rooted sense of inadequacy in the face of the patriarchy.
I was approached by a local training organization to teach workshops for executive directors in non-profit. I was flattered, but my instinctual thought was “oh… I don’t really think that’s my target audience. After all, my work will probably be too touchy-feely for them, and what they’ll be looking for will be more of a traditional leadership approach.”
It took me awhile to realize that my response to the invitation was not unlike Desmond Tutu on that plane. When push comes to shove, I don’t fully trust my feminine approach to leadership to be good enough. And I’m fearful that, if I trust it, I’ll crash the plane and people will get hurt.
Sure, it’s good enough for the women who’ve come to my leadership retreats, who read my blog, and who’ve participated in Lead with Your Wild Heart, but it’s probably not good enough FOR MEN. That’s the bottom line.
It pains me to admit this out loud, after all that I’ve been teaching and advocating for in the last three years (because what if you start to think that I don’t practice what I preach?), but I think it’s something that we need to bring out of the shadows and into the light. I think it’s a story that many of us share and that we’re afraid to admit, so it will continue to haunt us.
Do we REALLY believe in the power of the feminine, or do we only believe (in the deepest, shadowy recesses of our hearts) that this is fine for women, but when it comes to REAL power, we have to fall back on the masculine model?
Since I started taking a closer look at this shadow in myself, it’s been showing up in other ways as well (including my dreams). I realized it when a couple of men bought copies of Pathfinder and I was more flattered than the dozens of women who’d bought it before them. Why? Because in my shadowy, wounded heart, I thought that my wisdom was good enough for women, but wouldn’t really be considered valuable by men.
It really surprised me that this was coming up for me, considering how long I’ve been working on this exact issue, and how many years I sat confidently at boardroom tables, surrounded by men but never doubting that I was equal to them and had lots of wisdom to share at those tables. Why didn’t I doubt it then? Because I was good at putting on a masculine mask and sharing my wisdom in a way that was acceptable in a patriarchal world. Very little that I said at those tables was a threat to them, because I wasn’t really challenging them to accept paradigms that they weren’t comfortable with.
Now my work has shifted, and I AM asking them to accept new paradigms, and it’s a whole lot scarier, a whole lot more authentic, and a whole lot more susceptible to their resistance and criticism. This is where the rubber hits the road, and suddenly I don’t feel as confident as I once did, because I now have to expose all of the wounds I suffered in all of those years of leadership. And if I expose wounds, I might make some of them feel uncomfortable when they realize they are the perpetrators of some of those wounds (if not in me, then in other people trying to lead authentically). AND I might even have to admit that I was the perpetrator of wounds for some people, back in my mask-wearing days.
It’s all rather scary stuff, and putting it out here on my blog feels even more scary. This is vulnerability, though, and vulnerability and courage are close companions.
In rather profound timing, I’ve been reading Marion Woodman’s book “Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity”. In it are the stories of three women who, like me, are on long journeys deeper into their feminine. The book has been bringing up a lot for me (and inducing some of the wildest dreams, since Woodman teaches a lot about what the psyche is trying to teach us through our dreams).
One of the things I didn’t expect the book to bring up for me was the importance of integrating the feminine with the masculine. The feminine, she says, cannot be fully realized in us unless the masculine is also fully realized. The same is true in our culture – if one is kept hidden, the other can never be fully healthy.
And that is where I must turn in my personal inquiry right now. How can I trust the intuitive, wild, passionate feminine dancer, and still embrace my strong, confident masculine warrior? How do I embrace both love AND power?
If I truly believe that the feminine must rise in our culture (and I do), how do I do that with power and courage? How do I heal my wounded heart and convince it that the only way forward is to speak my truth with confidence and power, in the public arena, not just where women gather? How do I stop shrinking back in the face of the patriarchy? How do I serve as a catalyst for real and lasting change instead of letting the shadow diminish my power?
I’m taking heart in the fact that, a few nights ago, I had a dream about a graduation ceremony. The ceremony couldn’t start until my date arrived. He did arrive, and – other than a few other complications that I won’t go into – we were ready to graduate (though the dream ended before the ceremony happened). According to Woodman, everyone who shows up in your dreams is an element of yourself, so I’m taking this dream to mean that I am inviting my masculine in and am almost ready to graduate into something new.
This is not a finished story, it is primarily an inquiry into where I need to go next and how we, as a collective body, who believe that the feminine must rise and take its rightful place alongside the masculine, move forward into the future.
I welcome your thoughts on this. While this is my story, I know that it is a story that many of us share.
by Heather Plett | Dec 17, 2013 | Creativity, mandala
You fail at something, your work is rejected, or you second-guess what once had value and suddenly you find yourself spiraling into a dark chasm of self-doubt.
It starts with a critique of one project (“this is no good”), and before you know it, you question everything you ever created (“nothing I create is any good”). From there it’s a slippery slope into a dark hole of self-loathing (“I am no good”).
It’s all about the stories we tell ourselves. When the self-doubt spiral takes hold, instead of reminding ourselves of the learning and successes that have emerged out of past failures, we dig up all of the stories that point to our overall lack of worth. Like carrying stones around in our backpack that weigh us down and keep us from completing our journey, we drag around a lot of old stories that no longer have any value.
It started happening to me just last night. I’ve been trying to put the finishing touches on my memoir. I finished it a year and a half ago, but every time I try to do a final edit, something big changes and I end up feeling like there are still far too many loose ends. It’s been a great source of frustration, and I’m now at the point where I’m considering abandoning it all together and chalking it up to a meaningful process for my own value rather than a product I need to share.
As I sat there staring at 185 pages of hard work that might never come to anything, stories of “I don’t know how to finish this” became stories of “I seriously doubt whether this has any value and is worth publishing” and “I don’t know how to write a book” and “I’m really not a great writer anyway, so why should I bother?”
We ALL suffer from self-doubt now and then. When we’re in the spiral, we convince ourselves that everyone else has it easier, but that’s simply not true.
The people you most admire all have self-doubt too. Their success is not because they never doubt themselves, but because they’ve learned to work through it rather than get stuck in it.
What can you do when the self-doubt spiral threatens you?
1. Get into your body. The self-doubt spiral is the function of an over-active brain – a brain that is far too often driven by the ego. The ego’s job is to protect you from harm and to make you look good at all costs. Failure doesn’t sit well with the ego, so it will do whatever it can to convince you not to try again. Getting into your body (dance, run, walk, swim, etc.) helps the brain shut down the ego so that you can take a more honest look at where you’re at and focus on the stories that serve you better than those the ego keeps dragging up.
2. Go outside. Stand in front of a tree, lie in a field of grass, play in the snow, or dig in your garden. There’s something about being outside in nature that helps shut down the spiraling ego trap. Leaning on a tree that has been through the seasonal cycles of growth, harvest, and dormancy and then keeps showing up the next time Spring nudges it into growth, reminds us of our place in creation and our own strength to keep showing up the next time growth is required of us.
3. Help someone. Step away from the project that’s failing and go help someone else with their project for awhile. Or bring soup to a friend who’s sick. Showing up for other people helps shift us out of the self-centeredness of our failure stories. When you have a sense that we are all in this together and the community benefits from everyone’s best efforts, you’ll have renewed courage to carry on with offering the gifts that can benefit the world. Your community needs you and letting your own failure get in the way of that doesn’t serve anyone.
4. Develop simple rituals for halting the ego stories in their tracks. As the stories come up, write them on slips of paper and burn or bury them. Or write them on leaves and let them float down the river. Or create a shoebox home for your ego where the stories can be kept without getting in your way. You might even want to craft an ego creature out of clay and each time you sense your ego is trying to get in your way, have a conversation with it, or feed it your failure stories and then tuck it away while you go on with what needs to be done. Rituals help us find closure and they mark the passage into a new way of thinking.
5. Recycle your stories. When you have a beverage container that no longer serves a purpose, you recycle it so that it can be made into something else of value. Do the same with your stories. Turn them into something with value. Here’s a simple mandala exercise for that purpose:
1. Write down the stories that make up your spiral of self-doubt. Write them in a spiral freehand, or use this online tool to reconfigure text into a spiral.
2. Cut the spiral. Enjoy the fact that it’s already looking prettier than those stories in your head.
3. Cut the words apart. (It’s quite therapeutic to cut a sentence like “I am a failure” into separate words that no longer carry as much baggage.)
4. Prepare a colourful mandala in whatever way you choose. (I wanted to stick with the spiral shape, so I used that as my basis for colouring.)
5. Re-arrange the words into new stories – ones that uplift and delight you.
6-8. Keep going, arranging the words until you have a spiral of hope instead of a spiral of self-doubt.
9. Sit back and enjoy your new creation. And then carry on in your work, with hope and resilience instead of self-doubt and fear.
They’re just stories. The words can be re-arranged to make new stories.
Note: If you enjoyed this exercise, you can find 30 more like it at Mandala Discovery.
by Heather Plett | Dec 9, 2013 | mandala
I’ve just opened registration for Mandala Discovery for the January 2014 session. In the lead-up to that, I’m going to offer a few prompts here on the blog that will help you in this transition time between one year and the next.
The first mandala is a reflection on 2013.
We can’t control the past, nor is it healthy to let it control us. Growth pulls us forward into the future, and if we cling too tightly to the baggage of the past, the weight of it keeps us trapped.
That being said… the past has much to teach us, and the most healthy way to honour the past is to reflect on it, ask what it wishes to teach us, and then choose the stories we wish to carry forward.
As you reflect on 2013, ask yourself a few questions:
– What do I need to learn from 2013?
– What do I wish to release as I move forward into 2014?
– What has been offered to me as gifts this year?
– What struggles have served as my teachers?
– What am I grateful for?
To begin your reflection mandala, draw a large circle, with a smaller circle in the centre. In the small circle at the centre, write “Reflections on 2013”.
Divide the large circle into 4 quadrants.
Choose four words or phrases that will help you reflect on what the past year has been. The words “Grace, Gratitude, Growth, and Grief” worked well for me, because they helped me focus on the struggles and the joy, the learning and the gifts. The four words should have some balance to them, reflecting the positives and the negatives, the shadows and the light. Another suggestion might be the phrases “What made me happy, what made me sad, what stretched me, and what I succeeded in”.
Write one of those words or phrases in each of the quadrants. These four quadrants help you see the year as one of balance. Often we get stuck in a certain story for the year. For example, I spent a lot of time in grief this year, having lost my mom just before the end of 2012. I can get lost in that grief and assume that it is the only story of the year, or I can choose to see the grace, gratitude and growth that are also part of the story. That doesn’t diminish the grief or brush it aside, but it gives me hope and purpose that helps me move forward.
Starting in one of the quadrants, write one sentence or phrase that represents how that theme showed up for you in 2013. Turn the page and write one in the next, and so on. Writing one at a time in each quadrant rather than filling each quadrant before moving to the next helps you move through the cycles of emotions and not get stuck in one space. (You could also do this as a collage exercise, finding images that represent each of the quadrants.)
You may find that one story shows up in multiple quadrants. For example, my husband had a heart attack in 2013, and that showed up in my grief quadrant, but the fact that he is still alive showed up in my gratitude quadrant.
After you have filled all of the quadrants, spend some quiet contemplative time colouring the space, honouring the stories that filled your year, and releasing them as you step forward into 2014. You may wish to spend time in meditation or prayer, reflecting on the year and being intentional about what you wish to carry forward.
This exercise is now part of A Soulful Year: a mandala workbook for ending one year and welcoming another.
by Heather Plett | Dec 4, 2013 | Uncategorized
Suddenly I know what my word for 2014 will be.
Grace.
The sudden realization of it made my eyes well up with tears just now. Because that is what I wish to spread more of in the world and it’s what I need to practice giving more of to myself as well.
This past year has not been an easy one – first there was Mom’s death, then Marcel’s heart attack, and then my broken foot – but it has been a year that has taught me that there are few things more worthy of spreading in the world than grace.
Grace is the woodpecker that arrived at the bird feeder moments after mom died reminding us that the world is still beautiful in the midst of pain.
Grace is the circle of friends who rallied around me to help pay for my trip to Lake Tahoe and Atlanta.
Grace is the food friends brought in our times of grief and illness.
Grace is that quiet moment in the woods when a deer stopped to look deeply into my eyes.
Grace is my daughters, giggling all night in a cheap hotel room, satisfied even though their friends hopped on planes to exotic destinations.
Grace is a picnic table and a bottle of wine at the edge of the lake while the sun set over the prairies.
Grace is accepting the quiet moment at Lake Louise with my post-surgery brother as enough, even though we both longed for more.
Grace is the many circles I have sat in and hosted – writing groups, leadership retreats, an artist retreat in a tiny border town, an international circle of women in Lake Tahoe, and a circle of grown-up campers at Lake Lanier.
Grace is late night swimming with a new circle of wild women friends.
Grace is hundreds of heart-opening conversations.
Grace is a quiet comment from a client that “your work changed me.”
Grace is getting up in the morning and forgiving the mistakes of yesterday.
Yes, 2014 will be a year of grace. Just like 2013 has been.
by Heather Plett | Dec 2, 2013 | Uncategorized
“Decide in your heart of hearts what really excites and challenges you, and start moving your life in that direction. Every decision you make, from what you eat to what you do with your time tonight, turns you into who you are tomorrow, and the day after that. Look at who you want to be, and start sculpting yourself into that person. You may not get exactly where you thought you’d be, but you will be doing things that suit you in a profession you believe in. Don’t let life randomly kick you into the adult you don’t want to become.”
― Chris Hadfield
Last Thursday, as Marcel and I were heading to bed, our night-owl daughters were teasing us because they’d get to sleep in the next day (it was a day off school) and we had to get up to work. Smiling, we both gave a similar reply… “I don’t mind. I actually LIKE my job, so it’s not that hard to get up in the morning.”
It was a lovely realization that we’d both come to places in our lives that “work” feels a lot like “play”. We’re both doing what we love to do and we feel like we’re making a difference in the world.
It wasn’t always that way. A dozen years ago, when we were expecting our third daughter, we were both pretty miserable in our jobs. Marcel was working in the transportation industry more by default than intention (a former truck driver who’d moved into management), and I’d worked my way up the government ranks into a job that used a lot of my creativity and leadership skills but left me feeling miserable and without a sense of purpose. We were making good money, and we enjoyed the perks that money bought us (like a boat, camper, a second vehicle, trips, etc.), so we’d stuck with it through the misery.
Gradually, though, we both recognized that we were nearing burnout and that our unhappiness wasn’t helping us to be very effective parents. Plus our exhaustion was causing us to make poor choices, like buying a few too many MacDonalds meals for our kids at the end of our long days at work.
So we started making changes. We sold our boat, camper, and second vehicle, and cut out as many discretionary expenses as we could. Marcel quit his job so that he could become primary caregiver to our kids (and cook us healthier meals than MacDonalds could offer) while attending university.
More changes followed. A few years later, we downsized even more so that I could leave my government job to take a job in non-profit that suited my passions and sense of purpose better. I loved that job for about 5 and a half years, and then got burnt out during my last year and knew it was time to move on and pursue the thing I’d long dreamed of – starting my own business.
It was pretty risky jumping into self-employment when I did, given the fact that Marcel had only managed to find work as a substitute teacher and his income wasn’t very stable or high enough to support our family, but the timing felt right, so we agreed to try. A year and a half later, Marcel got a great job teaching at a jail, and my business started to grow.
Which brings us to today, when things finally feel financially stable and we are both happy to get out of bed in the morning and work.
Has it been an easy 12 years? Not at all. We’ve had to do without a lot of things, say no to our kids more times than we’d like, not go on the trips we dreamed of taking our kids on, and cash in more of our savings than we wanted to. There have been lots of sleepless nights when we weren’t sure how we’d pay all the bills that were coming in. We’ve been living with the ugliest set of couches this side of the garbage dump, our carpets need replacing, our walls need painting, and most of our dining room chairs are broken. (An aside… yes, I recognize my privilege when I talk about these things as hardships. Some people would think of my ugly couches and worn out carpet as luxury.)
But has it been worth it? I would have to say an unequivocal YES to that. I am living my dream – doing just the kind of work I’d been longing to do. The same for Marcel.
AND, even though those 12 years have been without many of the benefits that money brings, they have been (mostly) good years. Marcel thoroughly enjoyed going to university, and I loved the non-profit work I did (especially when it took me to interesting places like Ethiopia and Bangladesh). We were much happier parents than we were when we had more money and more stress. Our kids may not have gotten Disneyland, but they have lots of good memories of road trips, camping weekends, and cheap hotel rooms. (Some of our best family conversations have been around campfires.) They’ve learned to appreciate the simple things in life and are rather proud of themselves when they pay their own cell phone bills while some of their friends have parents who pay for everything.
There is not much in our lives that promotes the value of sacrifice. We all want easy lives, and advertisers try to convince us that we deserve easy, so we buy bigger houses than we can afford, put more on our credit cards than we should, and seek that which will make us feel (temporarily) happy.
The market economy that drives so much of our culture is based on the quick fix rather than the long sacrifice. In order for businesses to grow, they have to sell us the next best thing that will make our lives easy, and we buy into that, so we are forever searching for something outside of ourselves that will fix our unhappiness. It’s a never-ending cycle, though – we go into debt to buy the things that will make us happy and bring ease to our lives, and then the debt stresses us out, so we need to buy MORE things to make us happy, and so on, and so on. There is no true ease or true happiness in that.
There is also a culture of ease within the self-help and coaching industry. There’s this dream that if I can only find my giftedness and if I think all of the right positive thoughts, I will always live a life of ease and abundance and won’t have to make any sacrifices. Many coaches and self-help authors try to sell you that dream because it makes them more money, but it’s not based in truth. Living your dream means putting in the effort to get there.
True happiness comes from the long sacrifice, not the quick fix.
Last Friday night, we celebrated my friend Jo’s registration as a licensed clinical psychologist. For nineteen long years, she has worked her way through her education to finally get her PhD and pass all of the requirements to be a psychologist. That’s a whole lot of sacrifice, but if you ask Jo, she says it’s been worth it. She’s doing work she loves and is making an impact in the world.
This past weekend, I read Chris Hadfield’s book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Christ spent almost all of his life training to be an astronaut, and only spent a total of 6 months in space. The path to astronaut is an incredibly difficult one and the competition is fierce, and even when you finally make it in to the space agency, there are no guarantees you’ll end up in space. And yet, Chris would tell you that all of the sacrifice was worth it. He lived his dream, and even if he’d never made it to space, he said his years in the space agency learning everything he needed to know to go to space were worth it.
As I say in Pathfinder, that path to true happiness is not a smooth and easy one. “Sometimes the journey is excruciating. The ground is rocky and uneven, the storms come and wash away the trail markers and leave giant puddles for you to navigate, and your travel companions desert you. You’re in the middle of a jungle of broken dreams, failed relationships, disappointment, betrayal and confusion, and you’re scratched, bruised, disheartened and exhausted.” But does that mean it’s not worth it? Not at all.
A life of authenticity, integrity, and following your dreams is worth every sacrifice you make and every rocky patch you have to go through.
Instead of ease, seek truth. Instead of momentary happiness, seek long-lasting joy. Instead of the quick fix, choose the long road that leads you to a life of purpose.
Note: If this reflects the path that you have chosen in life, you may find “Pathfinder: A creative journal to find your way” to be a good companion on the journey.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was once boarding a plane flying out of South Africa, a few years after apartheid had ended, and he was delighted to see that the pilot was black. “Finally!” he thought. “My people can fly planes! We’re making progress!”
