by Heather Plett | Jun 17, 2010 | art, beginnings, change, Creativity, fearless, journey, Leadership
I don’t remember the question that we were supposed to discuss at our table group, but I remember where it lead us. One of the women at the table was the newly appointed head of a women’s program at a university. She was wrestling with where she needed to lead the organization after the departure of its founder.
She’d had an a-ha moment that week and had come to realize that what was ironically missing in the program was a truly feminine approach to leadership. It was modeled too closely after traditionally masculine styles and needed to evolve into something new. I think it was during our conversation that she had the even deeper realization that she had, in fact, been hired because her background in engineering made her well skilled at thinking like a man.
What she said touched me in a place so deep I didn’t even know it needed touching. “Yes!” I said. “YES! That is a systemic problem! I see it everywhere! It’s the major flaw of the feminist movement – that it poured so much of its energy into getting us access into men’s role and teaching us to adopt men’s wisdom and leadership styles that it forgot about what it SHOULD have put energy into – raising the value of women’s voices, women’s roles, and women’s wisdom and leadership styles.”
Spilling out beneath my words were so many memories of the times I’d tried to introduce things like “feeling checks” into staff meetings, or clay molding into annual visioning exercises – the many times I’d intuitively felt compelled to introduce a more feminine style of leadership. BUT almost all of those times I’d been met with so much resistance that I’d simply given up and fallen back on old models. Oh, I could write a book about the times when I let the fear hold me back from what had always come so naturally. Too many times I saw those things dismissed as frivolous, or “just a silly girl’s ideas”.
During the course of our conversation, something rather magical happened. I don’t think I realized just how magical it was until it was done. There were markers at our table and a paper tablecloth. As I so often do when I’m sitting in a meeting, I picked up a marker and started to doodle. The man at the table asked “can I add something to your art work?” and I said “oh certainly!” And then, with a gesture, I invited our other two tablemates to join in the fun.
It seemed innocent enough, but it was transformational. Soon, we were all animated and energized in both our conversation and our art-making. Each of us added our unique flare to the tablecloth and each of us built on something the other had done. At one point – though I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it – the man at the table tried to put a square black border around the area where we were making art. Something bubbled up from within me and I resisted, scribbling all over his border as he drew. The other women joined and soon we had spilled over the border into every direction. Defeated, but with a good sense of humour, the man happily added to the “outside the box” art. (To be fair, at another point, I ruined a sun that the man was trying to create by prematurely drawing a line around it.)
By the end of the discussion, we’d filled the whole tablecloth with art, and we’d helped the leader of the woman’s program realize some of the steps she’d need to take when she got home. On top of that, I think each of us at the table had a unique a-ha moment that emerged from both the art and the conversation.
Mine didn’t fully evolve until later. I knew that something significant had happened, but I didn’t at that point know just HOW significant. Some day I think I will look back at that collective doodle art and remember that it represents the moment my life changed.
Because, my dear friends, that moment was the culmination of so much wrestling, so much thinking, so much struggle to find my focus, my truth, my place of belonging. Remember the necklace metaphor – how it wasn’t the struggling that untangled the necklace but the slipping from my hands and dropping to the floor? Well I think that moment was the “dropping to the floor and untangling my truth.”
What am I talking about? I’m talking about THE VERY THING that I’ve been grasping for. For years now I’ve known that my greatest energy comes from sharing wisdom – through facilitating workshops, writing, public speaking, etc. – about the things I’ve learned about creativity and leadership. I’ve known that somewhere in all of that lay the nugget that would lead me into the next phase of my vocation. Only… I couldn’t seem to find the right shaped nugget to fit me. It all seemed too general, too vague – too unfocused. I thought I found a few times, but it never felt quite right.
And now, after a week at ALIA, and especially a remarkable moment of doodling, I have clarity that I’ve never had before. The purpose that is evolving for me is TO TRANSFORM LEADERSHIP THROUGH FEMININE WISDOM! There it is! Bringing more creativity, compassion, art, soul, and holistic truth to leadership. AND helping those people who think their feminine passions and gifts – art, spirituality, motherhood, body wisdom – do not make them qualified for leadership recognize that the world needs them to help in its transformation.
It’s simple and yet it makes so much sense. Look around you – wars, oil spills, climate change, oppression – isn’t it clear that we have a leadership crisis on our hands? Isn’t it clear that the old models aren’t working anymore? It’s time for a new model and I believe that new model includes a much bigger space for feminine wisdom. I’m not saying that all the male leaders need to be replaced by women – I’m simply saying that both men AND women need to learn to trust their feminine wisdom more.
It’s an idea as old as the Bible, and yet as often forgotten and marginalized as so many other truths in the Bible. Sophia. Wisdom. FEMININE wisdom. It’s what Solomon wrote so many sonnets about. It’s the feminine wisdom of God.
THAT is the power I’ve been called to stand in, the wisdom I’ve been called to share. It’s time to get busy sharing it!
How will this evolve? I’m not quite sure, but I am excited. I know this… I am not really “fumbling for words” anymore. This is something new and it will need a new space. Maybe it’s “leading with your paint clothes on” or maybe it’s “sophia leadership” or maybe it’s something else I haven’t thought of, but I’ll be spending the summer thinking about it and hopefully by September something will have emerged.
Hang on for the ride, because it will most definitely be colourful and exciting!
by Heather Plett | Jun 15, 2010 | fearless, journey
We might think that knowing ourselves is a very ego-centered thing, but by beginning to look so clearly and so honestly at ourselves—at our emotions, at our thoughts, at who we really are—we begin to dissolve the walls that separate us from others. Somehow all of these walls, these ways of feeling separate from everything else and everyone else, are made up of opinions. They are made up of dogma; they are made of prejudice. These walls come from our fear of knowing parts of ourselves. – Pema Chodron
A couple of days before leaving for ALIA, I had a “dark night of the soul”. I had just facilitated a full day visioning/strategic planning exercise with my local staff and I walked away feeling completely depleted. I had put together what I thought was a great day of connecting, creating, and visioning, that included a nice mix of body, mind, and soul. We did some body movement stuff, played with clay and scissors and paper, had a great lunch together, and did some good ol’ fashioned brainstorming.
It went relatively well, but some time in the mid afternoon, this enormous sense of failure washed over me. It wasn’t anything specific that happened, or anything anyone said, it was just this really heavy, dark presence in the room – my own gremlins, I suppose – telling me “This isn’t working. You’re losing people. You’re not accomplishing anything with all your creative ideas and gobbledy gook. They want to see RESULTS. GOALS. ACTIONS PLANS. You should have stuck with a neat and tidy strategic plan in square boxes on a spreadsheet.”
That night, I was feeling wounded and depleted, but I didn’t do the wise thing and just spend time in soulcare. I started out that way, and thought I was doing okay, but I wasn’t really listening to the signs well enough. Against my better judgement, I did some reading I shouldn’t have – reading about how to dream big, bust out, and be a firestarter. Oh what foolish timing. It resulted in an all-out panic attack. “I can’t do this. I’m not a leader. I’m a fraud. I don’t have enough focus. My creativity is pointless. My ideas are shitty. I should just stick to the easy stuff where the risk of failure is so much less.”
And then it moved from there to “What the hell am I doing flying halfway across the country to spend a week at an Authentic Leadership institute? I’m not a good leader and I don’t deserve it and I’m wasting my organization’s money and I won’t fit in there and nobody will want to have me as part of their group because I won’t have any wisdom to share. I should give up on this leadership thing, because almost all of the people I lead would happily tell you I suck at leadership and should have become a mechanic instead. Except that I wouldn’t make a good mechanic either, ’cause I’m pretty pathetic at everything I try.” You know where these things go, right? You’ve been there too, right? PLEASE tell me you have… just humour me and play along so I won’t feel so much like a neurotic weakling.
Because I knew she would hold my fear gently, I sent a panicy pain-filled email to my dear friend Christine, and she did exactly what I expected her to do – exactly what I would have done if I’d received the same kind of email. She said, (I paraphrase) “take a deep breath. You KNOW that you are in the right place, doing the right thing and ALIA is EXACTLY where you need to be. And remember… it is no big surprise that you’re going through all kinds of whacked out emotions and fears, given the fact that you are still healing from the river of pain you’ve waded through this Spring.”
And, of course, even before I got her response, I started feeling better. Just putting those fears in writing and trusting them to a friend shrunk them into a manageable size. She was right, and when I took a deep breath, I knew that all was well with the world.
It didn’t take long after arriving at ALIA that I found myself in tears – but this time for a different reason. This time it was because my whole body knew that I was in the right place. Not only that, but all of the things I had been learning, all of the things I’d been writing about, all of the things I had been leading my team through on that visioning session were the RIGHT THINGS. Here I was surrrounded by people who were trying and tripping and dreaming and creating and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing at the very same things I was trying to do as a leader.
A few days into ALIA, I was in my module on Leader as Shambhala Warrior and we were talking about fear. Meg Wheatley led us through an exercise in which we sat facing another person, and for 5 minutes, one person would ask the other person “what are you afraid of?” When the other person answered, the first person would say “Thank you. What are you afraid of?” In doing this, we dug deeper and deeper into our real fears.
At first, I said the expected things. I was scared of failing, scared of hurting people, scared of not being a good enough mother. But then some surprising things started to come up. “I am afraid that I will never again get the chance to feel the freedom I felt when I jumped out of an airplane.” “Thank you. What are you afraid of?” “I am afraid that I won’t be able to teach people what it feels like to have that kind of freedom.” And then, just before the five minutes was up, “I am afraid of my own power.”
And there it is, the bottom line. I am afraid to be powerful. I am afraid to step into the power that the Creator has available to me. I am afraid to serve goodness and justice and beauty and wisdom in the bold and powerful way that I might be called toward. As Pema Chodron so wisely says, I am afraid of knowing parts of myself. Because then more will be required of me.
“Thank you. What are YOU afraid of?”
by Heather Plett | Jun 14, 2010 | change, journey, Leadership, travel
My head, heart and body are full of the memories of last week at ALIA. I have been changed.
I have been transformed by the many people who brought their vulnerability, their longings, their spirits, their truths, their hurts, and their gifts from all over the world to a common space in Halifax where all of us dreamed together of what the world could be like if we would put our heads/hearts/bodies together and work for transformation. I have sat with people from Sri Lanka, Brazil, Czech Republic, Chile, Poland, California, Alaska, Holland, Denmark, Ohio, Zimbabwe, and many places in between, holding space for beauty, wisdom, and goodness. I have moved my body with greater freedom than I have for a long, long time. I have sat quietly and listened to the wisdom of the earth. I have shed tears over the fears that have blocked me. I have stretched myself and delighted in the stretching of those around me. I have been comforted, inspired, encouraged, and changed.
It will take me weeks to fully distill all of what last week was for me. It will take even longer to let the changes and wisdom sink fully into my being. These things I know for sure: I felt like I was coming home, and I knew I had found “my people”.
There are lots of posts to be written and many conversations to be had, but none of that needs to happen quickly. For now, I am mostly just sitting with it and letting it seep into the deepest parts of me.
For now, while words feel inadequate, I am playing with images. Last night I put together this simple video of photos I took during the week. The words come directly from my journal – notes I took from workshops, presentations, and conversations.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nPAuZwW6cw]
Photos are available here.
by Heather Plett | Jun 8, 2010 | Uncategorized
It would be impossible to wrap words around what the experience of ALIA has been for me so far. It’s just too big to fit on a blog. Some day I hope that I can share some of the powerful moments that have shaken me up, broken me open, and sent me spiraling into a big and powerful life… but not yet. A lot of processing will have to be done.
For now, though, let me offer you a little metaphor that paints the picture of what I am experiencing here.
Yesterday morning, on the first morning here, I was dressing for breakfast. I dug my favourite silver necklace out of the simple ziploc bag that holds my jewellery when I travel. The thin chain was completely tangled – wrapped around the triple spiral pendant. I struggled with it for awhile – tugging, unwinding, trying to pinch the chain between my fingernails to grasp it enough to untie the knots. It wasn’t working. Determined though, I would not give up the struggle.
And then the necklace slipped from my fingers and dropped to the floor. There it lay at my feet, perfectly untangled. Perfectly ready to be worn as it was made to be worn.
This week, I am that necklace. Letting go, giving in, trusting the fall to untangle my knots.
Just like that moment that I let go of the wing of the airplane and leaned in to the parachute as it untangled itself from my pack and held me gently as I drifted toward the earth. I am soaring, floating, trusting – listening to the distant silence of the earth and learning what the sky tastes like.
by Heather Plett | Jun 5, 2010 | travel
I’m not feeling very focused tonight. I was going to write some kind of semi-profound post about going away, preparing for what I expect will be a life-altering week, and leaving the family behind for the first time since Marcel’s breakdown. But nothing very profound is emerging.
So I will part with just a few random thoughts popping through my mind.
- All is well in our household. There’s a lovely balance and a peacefulness I wouldn’t have expected even a month ago. I can go away without worry.
- Last night, there were five extra teen girls sleeping in our house. I liked it, despite the late night giggling that occasionally woke me. I’ve always wanted to have the kind of home where teens feel comfortable hanging out.
- Marcel and I went for a coffee date tonight, as we often do just before I leave. It wasn’t much, but it was lovely in its simplicity. I was struck by how strange the other girls (who spent the night in our house) thought it was that we still go out on date nights. None of their parents do.
- I am going to ALIA with an open mind and an open heart. I want to see both mind and heart expanded by the things I hear and the people I encounter.
- This morning I finished sewing the dress that Nikki designed for her junior high grad. It looks quite stunning. She could strut down a New York street with the Sex and the City girls and not feel out of place. (Yes, pictures will follow.) That girl’s got a future as a fashion designer!
- I feel so very, very lucky that this life has taken me to so many interesting places. Sometimes I think I have the perfect life – just enough travel to satisfy my wanderlust, but then a comfortable home and beloved family to come home to when I’m done.
