I don’t know what compelled me to leave the beaten path on the way to my meeting, but almost before I knew it, I was wandering along a rough, ungroomed trail by the river close to downtown. People tend to avoid this trail for fear of encountering the homeless people who normally frequent it.
As soon as I stepped off the pavement, the tight feeling in my chest reminded me why I haven’t taken that trail in over twenty years.
It was almost certainly the trail that my rapist used to get to the window of my basement apartment.
That apartment building was along the river, just up the path from where I entered, and a person could easily sneak in from behind without arousing any suspicion from the street or sidewalk in front of the building. Nobody noticed him slip into my window and take my innocence away.
That path is not a place where good things happen. It’s not a place where respectable people wander. It’s a place where homeless people find shelter from bad weather under concrete overhangs and fallen trees. It’s a place where substance abusers hide from the prying eyes of the police.
Why then was I on the path and why didn’t I turn back? I’m not sure. Something compelled me. Perhaps it was a search for redemption, or a curiosity about what my response would be now, more than twenty years later.
As I got deeper into the path and further from the safety of the street, my throat began to close around my breath. What if I encountered someone who looked like my rapist, in this place where few people would here me scream? What if I stumbled across a crime in process?
At one point I passed a concrete overhang where flattened cardboard boxes and tattered blankets told the story of its inhabitants. “Did my rapist live here?” I wondered.
In some places the path was so muddy from recent flooding that it was nearly impassable. A flip-flop wearing young woman in front of me (the only other person on the trail) slipped and got her foot stuck in the mud. In my sturdier runners and from my place of somewhat more solid ground, I reached out my hand and pulled her out of the mud.
Almost to my destination, I emerged from the path back onto the street. There in front of me was a health centre that was once the hospital where my first daughter was born fifteen years ago. It was only a block from the apartment where I’d been raped nine years before that.
As I walked to my board meeting, I was suddenly overcome by the layers of personal stories that this one city block held for me. First a rape in my early womanhood, then the happy birth that made me a mother, and now, in that same block, a meeting of the board I sit on for thefeminist organization that is working to empower marginalized women.
All of these stories coming together in one place. Stories of hurt, happiness, and redemption. Stories of violence, transformation, and fulfilment. Women’s stories, all of them. My stories. The layers of me – from hurt young woman, to excited young mom, to maturing adult ready to use those stories to help other women.
In the end, it was the moment that I stopped to pull the young woman out of the mud that stood out most for me. That was the lesson that I was meant to learn from my wander along the riverbank.
Though I was once the victim of crime, now I was the one who pulled other women out of the mud. The strength of my more sturdy position and appropriate footwear meant that I could reach over and offer others a lifeline.
And that’s what leadership is about – reaching a place on the path where our somewhat more sturdy footing gives us opportunity to offer support and balance to those on less solid ground and less prepared for the situation at hand. We’re still on the path with them, avoiding the muddy patches ourselves, wondering where the path will lead us, worried about the dangers along the way, and yet our life experience and wisdom gives us something to offer other sojourners along the way.
It is both as simple and challenging as that.
Here’s a video I took along the trail.
Note: It seems appropriate that this experience occurred yesterday, just before I leave for my week at ALIA, a place where I will be challenged and encouraged in my leadership journey. This image, of pulling the woman out of the mud, will sit with me as I contemplate where the journey is about to take me.
Beth & Diane after building a leaf labyrinth together
Back in October, I had the pleasure of spending 4 days in a circle of powerful, warm, funny, wise women. We listened to each others’ stories, built a labyrinth of leaves, cried together, laughed together, ate together, dreamed together, and plotted ways of changing the world. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I felt like I was wrapped in the warmest hug of feminine support.
Even though I’d never met any of the women before, we were able to create an incredibly loving and energizing environment. This circle of women continues to meet periodically to offer each other support over the phone lines. I feel very, very blessed to have them in my life.
This is not the kind of feminine relationships you hear most about in the corporate world. No, we’re more likely to hear of cat fights, gossip, and “bitches” who do anything to protect their own interest. Some of that is true, and some of it isn’t. I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I believe that the part that is true is largely due to the fact that there is incongruence between corporate culture and the most instinctual way for women to relate to each other. We haven’t found a way to bring our feminine wisdom fully into the boardrooms and cubicles (and frankly, our feminine wisdom might very well abolish both boardrooms and cubicles).
One of the greatest beauties of the circle/story retreat I was at in October was the range of ages and life wisdom of the women in the room. The youngest was a medical doctor who hadn’t yet reached 30, and the oldest was into her 70s. We had all archetypes – maidens, mothers, and crones – represented in the room, and it was a beautiful thing that reminded me of the best kind of community.
It was a particular delight to me to have such beautiful older women present – women who fully embodied and embraced the “crone” archetype. Beth and Diane in the photo above are two of those women. Wow! These women are amazing! Their energy, wisdom and pure delight in the world continue to inspire me these many months later. They didn’t try to hide their ages behind layers of make-up or plastic surgery as the fashion industry has convinced many women to do. They celebrate who they were, dance in the leaves like phoenixes rising from the flames, and share their wisdom and strength in the most generous way I have ever seen.
How I wish they could live next door to me and I could sit at their kitchen table whenever I need a boost of courage!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Diane (whose face you see above). Even over Skype, Diane sparkles with energy and love. I adore her. She teaches Reiki, leads women’s circles, has a labyrinth in her back yard, builds sweat lodges, and does all kinds of amazing things in support of other women. She has become one of my most treasured mentors. I can’t tell you what it means to have a cheerleader like Diane who absolutely believes that I am on the right path and will do anything she can to help me along that path. If she believes that I will succeed, how can I not?
Qualla with her birthday cupcake
On the other side of the coin, I too have had the pleasure of becoming a mentor to a younger woman who sparkles with energy and love. Last year, when I was at ALIA, I met Qualla Parlman. We spent her nineteenth birthday kayaking off the coast of Nova Scotia, followed by a delicious barbecue on the dock. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her at ALIA (as we weren’t in the same sessions), but since then we’ve gotten to know each other better online and I absolutely adore Qualla and I would do anything to help her succeed. She is an emerging young leader who’s learning to trust her feminine wisdom and I just know she will do big things in the world. I am honoured to be a companion on her journey.
It’s the way of women, isn’t it? The true, natural, instinctual way of women – not the way we have been socialized to become (or to believe we are). We are meant to support each other through the generations and across the generations. We are meant to find wise women who will teach us the ways of the world, and then we are meant to BE those wise women and offer our wisdom generously and without apology to others who need it.
Who are your wise women, and to whom are you offering your wisdom?
“The purse strings of the planet are held by men. The greatest expenditure: global military spending at $900 billion. In 2003, according to the Women’s Environmental and Development Organization, the estimated funds needed to look after basic human needs were as follows: to provide shelter, $21 billion; to eliminate starvation and malnutrition, $19 billion; to provide clean safe water, $10 billion; to eliminate nuclear weapons, $7 billion; to eliminate landmines, $4 billion; to eliminate illiteracy, $5 billion; to provide refugee relief, $5 billion; to stabilize population, $10.5 billion; to prevent soil erosion, $24 billion. The estimated annual total budget for human needs, $105.5 billion vs. the actual global military spending, $900 billion. Imagine how differently women with maternal concern might manage the “family budget” now spent by the nations of the world.” – Jean Shinoda Bolen, Urgent Message from Mother
It’s time, women (and men who embrace their feminine wisdom).
Time to stop letting our leaders spend so much money on weapons when what we really believe in is caring for Mother Earth and her children.
Time to stop letting it be okay for little boys to grow up socialized to fight and win and never show their emotions.
Time to say “it is NOT okay to run through the streets of our cities and destroy things because your favourite team lost a game that has become much too violent and leads you to believe that violence as a response is okay.”
Time to tell our politicians to start building communities instead of polarized enemy camps.
Time to honour sustainable growth over excessive production and consumption that rapes our earth.
Time to let kindness become as important in the corporate world as competition.
Time to rise up and be leaders and stop letting old leadership paradigms hold us captive.
Time to quit apologizing for our wisdom and ideas.
Time to let our fierce love change the planet.
Time for courage.
Time to place some of the power of the purse-strings into women’s hands.
In micro-credit programs in developing countries, it’s a well known fact that if the money is placed into the hands of the women, there is a much greater probability that the children will get fed, the community will be looked after, and the money will be paid back when the loan is due. What if we extrapolated that wisdom and did the same with the $900 billion currently invested in military spending?
We’ve waited long enough. We’ve watched too many things break our hearts. We’ve seen too many of our sons and brothers die in needless battles. We’ve let too much oil spill into our oceans. We’ve been patient with too many testosterone-driven government decisions. We’ve cried over too many little girls sold into sex slavery.
I’m fed up. You’re fed up too, I know it. It’s time to act. Time to make bold moves.
Time for Sophia leadership.
Note: I feel a fire burning in my veins, and I know I need to act. This is my calling – to serve as a catalyst for emerging leaders learning to trust their feminine wisdom – and I need to start doing more about it. This is urgent. We can’t sit around waiting for someone else to right these wrongs and shift the balance. We ALL need to act. With this in mind, I’m planning to offer something I’ve been meaning to launch for quite some time now – a Sophia circle. It will be a gathering place for women who feel their fierce feminine rising up and calling them to claim the name “leader”. If this feels like the right fit for you, leave a comment or send me an email with any ideas or thoughts you might have on it. I’ll be unrolling the details in a few weeks, when I come home from ALIA.
This article originally appeared in my newsletter. A number of people responded favourably and some wanted to link to it, so I thought I’d post it here as well.
Ten years ago, I was in the most difficult and discouraging job of my career. I was the communications manager of a major, high security federal laboratory that was involved in every major health scare from SARS to West Nile Virus to Mad Cow Disease (and many things in between).
I was miserable. Not only was it extremely busy and stressful (during the height of SARS, my one staff person and I were fielding hundreds of media calls a week from all over the world and were often working seven days a week), but it was not at all aligned with my interests or passions. Though I pride myself on being an expert communicator, putting science mumbo-jumbo into laypersons’ language is not my idea of a good time.
The worst part, though, was that I felt completely disillusioned with the leadership path.
I felt like I’d taken a detour that led me straight into the fire swamp, and the “Rodents of Unusual Size” were closing in on me (a Princess Bride reference, in case you’re confused).
Only a few years earlier, I’d taken on my first leadership role (in another government department) and had completely fallen in love with the experience. I had keen and gifted young staff who were passionate and exciting to work with, and I had a boss who modeled Sophia leadership and was my greatest champion and mentor.
At the lab, though, everything was different. I still had a passionate and highly-skilled staff member on my team, but our contribution to the organization was not valued, we were short-staffed and couldn’t get proper funding, we were forever in conflict with the powers-that-be in our head office, and we felt marginalized and demoralized.
One of the biggest downfalls that I saw at the lab (and that I’ve witnessed in other similar environments) was the fact that they promoted good scientists to leadership roles (to reward them for their contribution to science) and forgot to consider whether or not they would make good leaders. At most management meetings, I was the only person who didn’t have “Dr.” attached to my name, and I was the only person whose eyes were consistently above the table instead of under it where the Blackberries were “hidden”.
I wouldn’t say that good scientists can’t be good leaders, but by and large, the skills that make a person a good scientist are not the skills that make a person a good leader. A scientist has to be good at working independently in a laboratory, focusing for long hours on tiny details, being a micro-manager, and putting scientific breakthroughs ahead of personal relationships. None of these are what I would consider strong leadership traits (especially when it comes to Sophia leadership).
In a place where leadership was secondary to science, I saw a lot of bad leadership. I also saw a lot of bad leadership at the political and bureaucratic levels in Ottawa. (Since we were so high profile, and the health scares our scientists were working on were in the media nearly every day, politicians & high level bureaucrats kept their noses firmly planted in our business.)
It was all very far from my intuitive sense of what leadership should be. And yet I felt like my hands were tied. Though I challenged some of the practices, and tried hard to build a more effective internal communications strategy, mostly I had very little influence and not enough experience to convince people that there was a better way.
I spent a lot of time crying during that period in my life. I had two small children at the time (and gave birth to my third while I was working there) and every day I would ask myself why I had to leave them to spend my days in misery in a place where I didn’t belong. As I described in a recent blog post about trees that need to die to create compost for other young trees to grow, I was firmly stuck in the rot.
And then one day, a tiny seed got planted in the middle of that rot.
Surfing the internet, I came across a Margaret Wheatley book called Turning to One Another, about “hosting conversations as the means to restore hope to the future.” Say what? Conversations can help us restore the future? Sharing our stories will help shift things? A highly educated author believed what I knew intuitively to be true?
I was intrigued and the idea wouldn’t let me go. Before long, I’d found the book in the library and devoured it like a starving man released from concentration camp. It was brilliant, but depressingly far away from my current leadership experience.
I started looking into everything Meg Wheatley was putting out into the world, and became particularly fascinated by an organization she’d co-founded called Berkana Institute (whose byline is “Whatever the problem, community is the answer”). Following a trail of breadcrumbs, I also found the work of Christina Baldwin (and her partner Ann Linnea), and was equally intrigued. Christina teaches about how gathering in circles and sharing stories can help transform the world. (I love all of Christina’s books, but especially recommend The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair.)
It was like someone had lit a candle for me in a dark place.
Suddenly I saw true leadership illuminated in a whole new way. I started reading everything I could by Meg, Christina, and other thought leaders in their circles. It was transformative for me, and even though nothing much shifted in my workplace, I started to hold out hope for another way. At the time, a little dream popped into my head… some day I would study with Meg and Christina and maybe even work with them. It seemed impossible at the time, but I couldn’t help dreaming it.
A couple of years after that, I left the job at the lab and spent the next six and a half years in a non-profit organization that was much more suited to my passions and skills. It wasn’t always easy, but I had an amazing time leading a national team and traveling across Canada and around the world. My leadership skills and philosophies continued to be stretched and challenged. During that time, I started feeling a familiar tug leading me to the next stage in my leadership journey… it was time to teach and write about some of the things I’d learned.
Fast forward to 2010. As many of you know, 2010 was a big transitional year for me. I left my non-profit job to launch Sophia Leadership. But before I did that, I spent a week in Halifax at ALIA(Authentic Leadership in Action) Summer Institute. I was drawn there largely because I’d read about it on Meg Wheatley’s website. While there, I was delighted to be part of a 5 session leadership intensive that was led by Meg (and Jim Gimian and Jerry Granelli). It was a dream come true. The whole experience was one of the most profound and transformational experiences of my life.
Four months later, after leaving my job, another dream came true. I got to spend four daysstudying story and circle with Christina Baldwin (pictured on left), and again my life was changed. When I told Christina that she’d lit a candle in a dark place for me ten years earlier, tears sprang to her eyes.
Ten years after first encountering them, ten years after that seed had been planted in the messy rot of my unhappiness, and in the very year that I was launching my own leadership & creativity business, I got to study with both of the women who’d planted that seed. And then the seed began to grow and now I am self-employed as a leadership mentor and teacher myself. Even now I can barely believe my good fortune that all of this has come to pass.
As I reflect on those ten years and all that transpired in that time, I recognize a few important lessons that we can all learn from.
Follow the thread. If something excites you, and makes you feel alive and energized even in the middle of despair, follow it. Though there were years in the middle of those ten years that I thought very little about Meg or Christina or the things I learned from them, I never let go of the thread and I never gave up the dream that I would some day study with them.
Never stop learning. Read lots of books, go to as many workshops as you can afford, and invest in your learning in every way you can. Even when you’re in the middle of a dark place and it feels like you will always be there, read books that challenge you and talk to people who inspire you to follow that thread.
Be patient. Ten years is a lot of time to wait for a dream to come true and for a new door to open, but those ten years were not wasted. I learned an awful lot of leadership lessons in those ten years that helped prepare me to serve other emerging leaders, and I don’t regret any of it.
Sit with the rot (a.k.a. persevere through the fire swamp). Oh, this is a tough one. When you’re in the middle of transition, and it feels like there is nothing but despair in your life, it’s hard to believe that some day dreams will come true again. They will. You need to believe it and you need to let the things that have died turn to compost so that new seeds can grow. I hated that job at the lab, but I learned a lot from it and I’m a better leadership mentor now than I could have been without that experience.
Next week I’m traveling to Columbus, Ohio for my second experience of ALIA. It wasn’t easy to pull this off, given the fact that I’m in my first year of business and not making a lot of money yet. But this is my tribe, my replenishing well, and my summer camp, so between air miles and an offer to do some promotional work for ALIA in exchange for registration, I’m making it work. I couldn’t be more excited. I know that I will grow once again and I will come home inspired with even more ideas and energy.
One of the things that tickles me about this trip to ALIA is that this time I’m doing a leadership intensive with Deborah Frieze, who spent several years running Berkana Institute, the incredible organization that inspired me ten years ago. I’ve recently read Walk Out Walk On (about communities that walk out of broken systems and dream something new into being) which Deborah wrote with Meg Wheatley, and it excited me about this work all over again. Once again, I can’t believe my good fortune.
I have little doubt that every single experience in these past ten years has helped shape me and shape the services and wisdom I now offer the world. It hasn’t been easy to hang onto that thread or to trust my blurry vision, but it has been worth every minute of it.
Wherever you are on your journey, whether you’re stuck in the rot and feeling hopeless, or on a winding path that doesn’t seem to be taking you where you think you should be going, I hope that you will be inspired by my story to stick with that thread, follow your inspiration and passion, and keep the faith.
Like Meg and Christina did for me ten years ago, I will continue to put my stories and wisdom out into the world in the hopes that they might light a candle for someone else. I encourage you to do the same.
– Pelicans. I’ve seen more of them this Spring than ever and I just love the way they glide through the air in giant, lazy, graceful circles.
– Birthday lunch with my 14 year old daughter Julie on a patio yesterday afternoon.
– ALIA. I’ll be there at this time next week with my tribe, soaking in the wisdom, and being awakened to new ideas and possibilities.
– Lilacs. I can’t walk past a blooming lilac bush without stopping to smell the blossoms.
– New, soft growth on evergreen trees. I can’t resist reaching out to touch.
– Interesting clients who let me serve as midwife for their stories. This is more fun than I could have imagined.
– Interesting members of my Paint Clothes learning circle. I can hardly imagine more fascinating and deeply honest conversations. They energize me to do more of this work.
– Friends. And the fact that I get to hang out with several of them at ALIA and another one after ALIA.
– Princess Bride, and the giggles I had with friends and followers on Facebook & Twitter as we shared favourite quotes.
– Books, books, and more books. (My “Sophia Reads” page is updated with new recommendations.)
– Hope showing up in some places that seemed hopeless a few months ago.
– Arizona Green Tea with ginseng & honey.
– A healed foot injury that means I can go for long walks and runs again. (Note: for those who remember that I was going to run the half marathon, well, I’m not. I missed a month of training and I’m just not up for it, but I’m going to do the 10 k walk this Sunday instead. And I continue to train for the 100 km. walk in September.)
– This work I get to do. Today I am filled with gratitude that I was chosen for this amazing work and that I get to interact with such an amazing circle of people in the process.
