The further I’ve gotten into the work of helping leaders explore their feminine wisdom, the more I’ve been encouraged by how many other people are feeling similar tugs toward the same work. One of the greatest principles at the heart of this work is that WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER! We have abandoned old business models that tell us to be wary of the competition and have embraced new models that see us reaching out to like-minded people doing the same work so that we can grow it together.
Mary Stacey is one of those people. Together with two other women, Mary will be hosting a workshop called Leading Full Circle in Toronto at the end of September that I would highly encourage you to consider attending. I invited Mary to write a guest post to tell us about the work she’s doing.
Mary Stacey holds the founding vision for Leading Full Circle and is the managing director of Context Consulting Inc., which partners with clients at the intersection of strategy, leadership and change. Guided by her belief that women’s leadership is urgently needed in today’s business environment and larger culture, she works with women in senior roles and executive education programs who want to more fully express their potential.
Every day we see more indicators that our world is fundamentally changing. Conventional systems are giving way and we cannot yet see what is emerging. Among the calls for alternatives, we often hear that somehow women—and the leadership they bring—can be pivotal for the future. Former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan went so far as to say the future of the world depends on women.
Business schools heeding the call have increased their offering of women’s leadership programs. I notice that most of these are heavily weighted in the paradigm of the dominant masculine, and I can’t imagine that this is what we intend when we call for women’s leadership. It seems to me that what’s needed are women (and men) who can situationally draw on their masculine and feminine capacities, bringing focused action and connected compassion in right balance to address complex and uncertain situations. I remember once hearing Gloria Steinem say that women benefit from temporary, separate places where they are central and not peripheral. Creating ‘spaces of their own’ for women leaders allows them to reclaim the feminine and consciously integrate it with the masculine. In these environments women can develop new and powerful practices that are so urgently needed for business, community, and societal change.
We are also living, for the first time in organizational history, in a context where four generations bring their distinct worldviews, motivations, and preferred styles to work. So far, most organizations have taken a managerial view of this reality by segmenting the generations into Traditionals, Boomers, X’s, and Y’s and then focusing on address the conflict that exists between them. This approach leads to polarization rather than a more open and collaborative way of being together, such as I’ve seen emerge in our Multigenerational Leadership Exchange. In this ‘multi-gen lab’ we’ve seen many examples of how multigenerational leadership is a potent human resource and catalyst for change. Multigenerational leadership seems to naturally find the way through complex challenges. In our work we feel so strongly about the potential of multigenerational leadership we’ve declared that multigenerational learning is a core design principle for the future of leadership development.
I’ve wondered what might be possible if a multigenerational web of women who intentionally focus on their individual and collective leadership began weaving itself into our personal, community, and professional lives. Could this web initiate a new paradigm for leadership, integrating the masculine-feminine in service of a more just and sustainable world? Could it be a powerful source of energy and conscious wisdom that acts on behalf of seven generations to come?
Last spring I had the opportunity to begin exploring these questions as I joined with colleagues Sandy McMullen and Reilly Dow to offer Leading Full Circle – Women in Multigenerational Leadership. Twenty women between 19 – 68 from the corporate and non-profit sectors gathered over two days to explore their leadership through mutual mentoring, embodiment practice, and artistic expression. For all its deep intention, the program came to life in a very practical way. Women addressed real questions about their leadership, they formed new relationships to more meaningfully interweave their life and career, and they developed practical catalytic capabilities that they could apply immediately.
Near the end of the two days each woman made her unique gesture on an abstract expressionist painting that she’d created. Twenty vibrant works of art were created that day, representing the women’s shared intention to embody their learning about the transformative power of women’s multigenerational leadership.
Here’s what a few women said about their experience:
I leave the program so hopeful for the future- not only because of the younger women, but also because of the generation ahead of me.
~Jennifer Williams, Director, Unitron
This multigenerational women’s leadership program has been a powerful living experience for me; each one of us a teacher, coming to an understanding that wisdom in leadership comes from mutual mentoring.”
~Victoria Grant, Teme-Augama Anishnabai and President, Moving Red Canoe
The artistic practice allowed me to discover new sides of myself.
~McKenna Wild, Account Coordinator, Environics
The mutual mentoring was exceptionally moving for me. It helped me to understand my strengths in leadership.
~Lyndsay Macdonald, Student, Ryerson University
On Sept 30-Oct 1 we’ll be convening our next gathering of women in Toronto. We’re beginning to sense the fullness of what multigenerational networks of women leaders can offer their organizations, communities and to future generations. If you feel the program is right for you at this time, we invite you to complete an application and join us.
There is so much bad news out there, if you look for it. Riots in London, failing economies, famine in East Africa, changing climate causing erratic weather disasters… the list goes on and on. Some days it feels like the whole world is crashing in around us.
It’s enough to make a person completely discouraged. It’s enough to make a person want to bury her head in the sand, and choose to live a self-focused life instead of spending seemingly useless energy on problems that are too big to manage.
Everything I see tells me the same thing over and over again… we need a big hairy audacious paradigm shift.
We need to imagine the world differently.
We need to imagine leadership differently.
We need to imagine ourselves differently.
We need to imagine community differently.
We need to get our heads out of the sand and instead of paying attention to the big ugly negative news, turn our attention toward each other.
We need to keep on caring for each other even though it hurts sometimes and often feels like useless resistance in a tsunami of bad news.
We need to start insisting that our news media focus on the good in people and not just the bad.
We need to engage our creativity and collaboration and stop listening to those people who tell us that consumption and competition is what makes the world go round.
We need to stop believing that the economy is our god and over-consumption is okay because it feeds the economy. We need to seek happiness in other places than shopping malls.
We need to turn to each other, focus on building our communities where we live, and trust that the benefit of local communities will have far-reaching impact (as my friend Kathy Jourdain so eloquently suggests).
We need women and men who will rise up and shift the tide away from aggressive “command and control” leadership to participative “engage and collaborate” leadership.
We need to sit in circles and tell each other stories that will help us understand and celebrate each others’ differences and similarities.
We need to get our egos out of the way and start admitting that the only way to find a new path through the weeds is to trust each other to contribute the necessary skills. And then we need to believe that we are better together than alone.
THIS is why we need more feminine wisdom in leadership. It’s not about women taking over from men (and making their own sets of mistakes). It’s about trusting the wisdom that tends to be more inherent in women than in men. (Even the Washington Post says so.) It’s about engaging our creativity, spirituality, compassion, collaboration, and empathy in the way we lead. It’s about letting our right brains contribute to our decisions as much as our left brains.
None of these problems is going to be fixed overnight. In fact, even using the word “fix” shows limited thinking on our part. These things are not simple problems with simple solutions. There is no linear logic to apply, like a math problem on a high school exam. We can’t just assign more police to the streets of London, for example. We need to look at the systemic problems that shaped what happened long before anything erupted. There is deep complexity that will require a lot of deep thinking and collaborating and failing and trying again and meditating and engaging in conversation.
When change happens, there is always a time of great chaos before new solutions are found. It feels like much of the world is in that place of chaos now. This is not a time for despair. This is a time for hope and creativity. This is a time to gather together and lean on each other.
The world needs new ideas. The world needs YOUR ideas. Get your head out of the sand and start sharing them.
What do you write the day after you’ve released an e-book on writing to impact change and you’ve heard from people all over the world that they are enjoying it and sharing it with other writers? What big and meaningful thing can you say that follows that up in a suitable way? How can you be worthy of the new people showing up on your website who might expect you to have some wisdom to share about writing and leadership?
Ack! DOUBLE ack! You know what’s happening here, don’t you?
WRITERS’ BLOCK!
I started thinking too much about the right things to say, the right way to follow up a successful free product launch (about writing, no less), and the right way to impress you and make you think I’m a wise guru worth paying attention to, and… well, I froze. That old familiar fear lump started forming in the pit of my stomach, and no matter what I did to try to get words onto the screen, my brain and fingers wouldn’t cooperate.
So I decided to go down the path that has always served me best… honesty. (As in… “I am honestly not sure what I should write and I honestly don’t know if this is worth reading.”) And I decided that since nothing showed up that had a lovely sense of flow to it or that could be tied up in a pretty little bow, I’d give you random.
Here are some honest, random things about me, my writing, and the path I’m on these days:
1. I love to write. Love, love, LOVE it. It’s like breathing for me – necessary and life-giving. I don’t know if I could survive a week without writing. To be honest with you, writers’ block rarely gets in my way, because even if I can’t find the words for one particular piece I’m writing, I can almost always dislodge the block by starting on something else (like this random post). And there is no shortage of writing ideas in my brain. Quite the opposite, in fact. Often my problem is that there are too many ideas and I just can’t settle on one.
2. Despite the fact that writing has been a part of my career for more than 15 years and I’ve had oodles of things published, I still have moments when I deal with major doubt. I still question whether I’m good enough, and I still feel the pain when those rejection letters come. I’m pretty sure that’s normal.
3. I have recently completed the first draft of a memoir that began as the story of the impact my stillborn son had on my life, and then grew to be about surrendering to the mystery, especially when life gets painful. I set it aside for a couple of months before starting the editing process, and as I look over it now, I can honestly say that it’s pretty darn good! I am genuinely proud of it and am convinced that it needs to be shared with the world. It will be published one day, I promise.
4. The more I write, the more I realize that writing has to be part of a holistic experience for me. In order to write well, I have to find space and time for regular body movement, artistic expression, reading, and spiritual practice. I am not particularly disciplined about any of these things, but if I don’t do them fairly regularly, my writing suffers. Writing needs to engage both my left language-oriented brain and my right conceptual/creative brain and to do that I need to do things that exercise both. Movement and spiritual practice engage my right brain, while reading engages my left.
5. Variety helps me write more creatively. I can not do all of my writing at home in my office/studio. Sometimes I write on the couch, sometimes at Starbucks, sometimes on a picnic table in the park, sometimes at the library, and sometimes in the middle of the labyrinth across the river. When I was writing the Wanderer/Edge-walker series, I found that I could only engage that part of my brain if I’d done a little wandering first. I wrote none of those posts at home.
6. I want to make enough income from my writing, teaching, and speaking that I can give my family a comfortable livelihood, but I worry every day about how that will be done. After 9 months of trying, I’m still at a place where it’s not fully sustainable. I have my worst moments of panic about that in the mornings just after I wake up.
7. I wrote a novel once (while on maternity leave for my second daughter) and almost got it published, but life got busy and I set it aside. Now I’m more interested in personal writing than fiction writing. I may go back to it some day, or I may not. Whether or not it’s ever published, it was worth it just for the process and the sense of accomplishment.
8. I teach business/PR writing at the university, and I love it, but I don’t love grading papers and I’d really rather teach the kind of writing that is close to my heart. I’m designing some courses on things like “Creative Writing for Self-Discovery” and “Writing your Stories”, which I can get much more excited about. There will be no grades for these courses.
9. I love to help other people develop their writing skills. Serving as a midwife while they birth their stories gives me great delight. I’ve had the pleasure of watching two memoirs and one young adult novel come to life while I provided encouragement and guidance from the side. If this is something you’re interested in, check out this page and then contact me. The first conversation is always free. 🙂
Good writing changes us, whether we are the writers or the readers.
I’ve taught a few writing courses this year and have plans for more in the coming months. No matter what kind of writing course I teach, whether it’s PR writing, business writing, or personal writing, there is one common element to what I teach. In every course, there is at least one session in which we talk about writing that impacts change.
Whether we write blog posts, newspaper articles, press releases, novels, ad copy, memoirs, or simply emails and Facebook updates, there is always potential for our writing to impact change in other people and ourselves. We may never see it that way (and often it’s best if we don’t), but writing is a powerful medium that can cause a LOT of impact.
While paddling across the lake last week, my friend and canoe-mate Jo, who’s very close to achieving her PhD in Psychology, told me that there is a growing field in psychology called bibliotherapy in which people use books, poetry, and other written word as their therapy. It was a relief to me to hear that this is taken seriously among experts, because books have always been my favourite therapists.
Because I love their advice, and I love playing with images, I put together a beautiful little ebook that I’m thrilled to share with you. (The pages look like the sample above.) Along with a tip, each page contains an original photo taken by me. (Except for the last photo, which was taken by my daughter Maddy.)
It’s a freebie – no strings attached, no need to give me your email address, no need to sign up for anything. Just download it, share it, pass it around, read it out loud at your writing circles, save your favourite pages and use them as your desktop wallpaper, or print and laminate them and hang them on your wall as posters in your writing room.
All I ask is that you PLEASE, pretty please, always remember to credit me and the other writers who graciously shared free advice with you. 🙂
To download, simply click on the image of the cover below. And then… enjoy! Be inspired. And WRITE!
Note: If you’re interested in an 8 week course that I’ll be teaching in Winnipeg this Fall called Creative Writing for Self Discovery, or if you want to know about the 1 day workshop on Writing to Impact Social Change at the university, email me at heather at heatherplett dot com.
1. Pack a few canoes with everything you’ll need to survive for the next few days. Together with 8 other adventurous women (who aren’t afraid to pee in the woods), paddle across three lakes, carry the canoes and all of your provisions across two portages, and at the end of a long, arduous, but beautiful day, set up camp at the edge of the lake in the middle of the wilderness where you will see no other signs of human habitation for the next few days.
2. Sit around a campfire with those women, telling stories and eating food that could possibly be the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted because it was well earned and well prepared and you are outdoors. Finish off your meals with roasted marshmallows and tea or hot chocolate that may or may not have a few twigs floating in it.
3. After the hard work of paddling, spend a day or two doing little else but playing in the water at the lovely sandy beach down a short path from your campsite, and reading your way through a good book or two. As an added bonus, drag your therma-rest out of your tent, prop it up like a reclining chair on a rock under the shade-giving trees with a view of the lake, and create a comfortable little nest where you can curl up with your book.
4. In the morning, go down to that private beach where nobody but the loons can see you, take off all your clothes, and wade into the crystal clear water. Float, swim, tread water, stare down at your feet (visible through the impossibly clear water), and feel yourself deeply connected to the water, the trees, and the loons playing at the edge of the water. As you float, consider that this is how it feels to be in the womb of the Goddess who birthed you and all that you see.
5. In the evening, after you have completed your supper and you are relaxing in comfort around the fire, catch your breath with wonder when one woman in your circle spots the Northern lights through the hole in the tree canopy above you. All together, rush to the large rock at the edge of the water where you have the best view of the sky. Lie on your backs, watching the Northern lights dancing like playful angels in the dark starry sky. Ooh and aah for extra effect, especially when you notice the way the aurora borealis reflects on the water.
6. Pay attention. Be mindful of everything you see. The bald eagle carrying itself on powerful wings high into the sky where it floats in leisurely circles. The two butterflies sunning themselves on a rock. The sky turning pink as the sun bids you good night. The sound of loons calling across the lake. The taste of wild raspberries, blueberries, and saskatoons. The endless possible shapes of clouds. The loons racing across the surface of the lake, using their wings as paddles. The milky white petals of the water lilies. The many shades of green in the trees and thick beds of moss. The bear that stands up on a rock just as you drive past on your way back to civilization. (p.s. Be grateful that you were in a car when you spotted the bear and not in a tent.)
7. As you are carrying the last of your things away from the campsite and down to the canoes, ready to head back across those lakes, spot the large white feather lying on the ground next to the now cold fire pit. Remember what Amy Oscar, in her book Sea of Miracles, says about white feathers appearing regularly to remind her of the presence of angels. Say a silent prayer of thanksgiving that you have been surrounded by angels for the last few days.
8. Exhausted but happy, carry one last canoe on your back up the hill and over the railroad tracks to the waiting vehicles. As you put it down, and you stretch your aching back and neck muscles, congratulate yourself and the other women for being strong and powerful and courageous. As a reward, stop at a restaurant on the way home to eat a delicious meal on a patio and to share a few good laughs about the adventure you’ve just had. For good measure, add a delicious frozen sangria to your meal. Sip it slowly and mindfully.
9. Return home to your family, refreshed, alive, and full of gratitude for the beauty and bounty of creation. Carry the wilderness with you and remember what it feels like to be wild, free, and beautiful, next to the pulsing heart of Mother Nature.
Mary Stacey holds the founding vision for Leading Full Circle and is the managing director of Context Consulting Inc., which partners with clients at the intersection of strategy, leadership and change. Guided by her belief that women’s leadership is urgently needed in today’s business environment and larger culture, she works with women in senior roles and executive education programs who want to more fully express their potential.
situations. I remember once hearing Gloria Steinem say that women benefit from temporary, separate places where they are central and not peripheral. Creating ‘spaces of their own’ for women leaders allows them to reclaim the feminine and consciously integrate it with the masculine. In these environments women can develop new and powerful practices that are so urgently needed for business, community, and societal change.
I’ve wondered what might be possible if a multigenerational web of women who intentionally focus on their individual and collective leadership began weaving itself into our personal, community, and professional lives. Could this web initiate a new paradigm for leadership, integrating the masculine-feminine in service of a more just and sustainable world? Could it be a powerful source of energy and conscious wisdom that acts on behalf of seven generations to come?
Near the end of the two days each woman made her unique gesture on an abstract expressionist painting that she’d created. Twenty vibrant works of art were created that day, representing the women’s shared intention to embody their learning about the transformative power of women’s multigenerational leadership.
