by Heather Plett | Jun 20, 2011 | Leadership, Sophia, Uncategorized, 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.
by Heather Plett | Jun 19, 2011 | journey, Leadership
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.
by Heather Plett | Jun 13, 2011 | Leadership, Uncategorized, Wisdom
my daughter, my artist, my leader
As I prepare to travel to Columbus for ALIA (Authentic Leadership in Action), I find myself playing with the word “leader”.
Who are the leaders of the world? What do they look like? What makes them unique? What makes us want to follow them?
For a lot of us (especially for women), the word “leader” is a huge block. It feels like too much. Too bold. Too cocky. Too self-assured. Too “I don’t have my OWN shit together – how can I possibly lead other people?”
I’ve heard every excuse in the book. Heck – I’ve USED every excuse in the book. “I’m not smart enough. I don’t have enough knowledge in this subject area. I don’t know how to motivate people. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not confident enough. I don’t like having people depend on me. I don’t know how to fix my own problems – how can I possibly fix other people’s problems? I don’t want people to think I’m too big for my boots. I’m in too much pain.”
We let those limitations block us, because we’ve accepted the wrong paradigms for leadership. Ask any circle of people to name leaders in history or in their own lives, and they’ll talk about people like Nelson Mandela, Obama, Mother Teresa, or the executive director of the organization they work for.
Well no WONDER we get intimidated by the word leader if that’s our paradigm! Very few of us will ever be THAT kind of leader. The world only needs a few of those.
Until they’re coaxed, NOBODY in the room will mention the first grade teacher who opened the world of language for them, the guy who swept the floors in the gymnasium with a smile on his face and a kind word for everyone, the little girl in the playground who made sure everyone got a turn on the slide, the drummer in the high school band who wordlessly kept everyone on beat, or the waitress at the local coffee shop who listened to their stories and made them feel heard.
I’m on a personal mission to bust us all out of those old paradigms of leadership. I’m on a personal mission to make you see the leader in the janitor, the drummer, the waitress, and yourself.
Let’s ask ourselves some new questions.
What if the leader is the person who:
– asks the right questions, instead of knowing all the answers?
– remembers that play is the best way to learn?
– makes a lot of effort to make other people feel seen and heard?
– believes in the power of crayons and dance shoes?
– invites people to wander through possibilities instead of looking for the most direct path?
– creates a container where our feelings and ideas are safe?
– delights in the opportunities that arise out of mistakes?
– invites our bodies and souls to every gathering along with our brains?
– celebrates curiosity?
– believes that the collective wisdom in the room is greater than her own?
– intuitively understands when to say “stop” and “rest” and “walk away“.
– trusts that the most beautiful things often grow out of failure?
Sit with these questions, and then ask yourself “if I can hold this new paradigm, can I then call myself a leader?”
At ALIA, leaders of all shapes and sizes learn about leadership from jugglers, painters, aikido masters, dancers, jazz drummers, meditation teachers, dramatists, doodlers, floral arrangers, etc., etc. The incredible tribe of people who gather at ALIA believe that leadership lessons come from everywhere, and every person in the room holds some of the wisdom. It’s an awe-inspiring experience to sit in a large circle of paradigm-shifting leaders and know that your wisdom is welcome there.
Which piece of the wisdom do you bring to the circle? And what is stopping you from bringing it?
Note: If this new paradigm for leadership excites you, challenges you, or affirms you, then I’m sure you’ll enjoy How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on. The first learning circle has drawn together a fascinating group of people and I look forward to gathering the next one soon. (Dates to be announced.)
by Heather Plett | Jun 8, 2011 | Leadership
Early in my career as a director in the public service (around a dozen years ago), I hired a keen young intern named Gabriela Klimes. She was what you would call a dream intern.
She was eager to learn, full of ideas and energy, and willing to try almost anything. It was a great deal of fun having her on the team, because she energized all of us with her enthusiasm. She was instrumental in getting some pretty significant projects off the ground that year, including getting some commemorative signs on downtown streets (that she had designed and asked the city to hang), and organizing a regional youth writing contest that got national attention. (Incidentally, she stuck around after her internship year because I couldn’t bear to let her go.)
Gabby is now a director in the public service herself, and, much like the stage I was at when I hired her, she is also a mom to two small girls.
Yesterday I got a note from Gabby, offering a blurb for my testimonials page. I got totally choked up when I read it.
“I interned for Heather straight out of University. To some, intern may mean coffee runs and photocopying. But that was certainly not the case working for Heather. She entrusted me with real projects and put faith and trust into my ability to accomplish those projects. I cannot express how empowering that was to a young person in her first real professional environment. When I think back on working with Heather, it’s not boss or manager that come to mind, but leader and mentor and friend. Heather’s gentle encouragement of me to spread my wings literally began charting my career in a direction I never planned or imagined. Today, I am a relatively new manager of people and I recently hired my first intern. I have literally aspired to be the same type of leader for this young person that Heather was for me. And that is perhaps the biggest compliment to Heather’s leadership.”
The fact that someone as talented and smart as Gabby is would model her leadership after me is the highest praise I could imagine. Years ago I remember reading something that said that we should always lead as though we assume (and hope) those we lead will some day out-shine us. That’s how I always felt about Gabby – totally honoured that I could be part of her journey to greatness, and quite certain she would out-shine me some day.
The truth is, I learned as much from Gabby as she learned from me. By responding so well to my leadership and my trust in her, she helped me see that I really could be a leader even when I didn’t yet know it myself. When she joined the team, I knew intuitively that I could trust her with big projects and she never let me down. In that experience, I learned that collaboration, trust, and intuition are some of the most valuable skills you can employ in leadership.
I also learned that the wisdom and vision in the room should never lie with the leader alone. If I hadn’t trusted Gabby with her amazing ideas and energy, we wouldn’t have accomplished nearly as much as we did. If I had insisted that my vision was the right one, she wouldn’t have produced half as much as she was capable of.
Whenever I teach classes or workshops, I tell my students some version of this: “Chances are you’ll be taking notes at some point in this class, and you’ll mostly be writing down the words that come out of my mouth – as though I have some exclusive claim on the wisdom in this room. Let me tell you up front – that is not the truth. I may have more experience in this area than you (and that’s why I’m getting paid to teach you), but I do not have all of the wisdom. The wisdom is shared by everyone in the room and I want you to take notes on every wise thing you hear in this classroom, whether it comes from a classmate’s mouth, your own, or mine.”
Whether you are the leader or the person being lead (or both, as most of us are), always remember that no one person could possibly hold all of the wisdom in the room. We ALL learn from each other and our collective wisdom is always greater than any of us could hold alone. Don’t even be fooled by people who publish books or have popular blogs – they don’t hold all of the wisdom either.
You learn from me and I will learn from you. You share your wisdom and I will share mine. Together we will shine brighter than we could alone.
Thank you Gabby for teaching me that so many years ago, and reminding me of it with your note yesterday.
Note: It is partly thanks to my experience with Gabby, and the many others who came after her, that I now serve as a Leadership Mentor. I would like to help you emerge into the leader you were called to be.
by Heather Plett | May 30, 2011 | Birthing Sophia, journey, Leadership, Passion, Sophia, Uncategorized, Wisdom
photo taken by my talented sister, at thousandwordsphotography.ca
A few posts ago, I mentioned the winding path that one must take up the side of the mountain when the ascent is too steep for the ordinary wanderer.
That metaphor has been ringing so true for me recently, especially in this self-employment journey. Each time I think I’m on the right path, I hit a curve and find myself going in a different direction entirely, never really sure that the path will get me to the top.
When I left my job and started this journey, I was quite convinced that Sophia Leadership was the right path and that feminine wisdom and leadership were the passions that would drive my business. There were so many signposts pointing me along the path – whether it was a horse named Sophia, a fortuitous statue with the word “Sophia” engraved in it, or the amazing experience I had in a circle of women gathered by the lake for our Listening Well retreat.
But then the year ended and a new one began and I found myself feeling restless, knowing something was trying to be born. As it turned out, it was a memoir stretching the walls of my figurative womb, trying to push itself into the light of day. Without totally abandoning Sophia Leadership, I stepped away from some of the passion that drove it to give space for the book to emerge. The book is about my stillborn son and the way that he has been my spiritual guide in my life as I learned and relearned many lessons of surrender.
When the book was in the birth canal, and my primary focus was the labour pains of bringing it to life, I just didn’t feel much like writing about feminine wisdom or leadership and I no longer knew whether Sophia Leadership was the space I belonged. “All I want to do is write,” I thought. “And I don’t want to be restricted by these boxes. Not everything is about Sophia or about leadership.”
So I began to contemplate switching my blog to my heatherplett.com site and making it a more general space about personal growth and transformation and stillborn babies and surrender and LIFE.
But then I hit another switchback on the path. The first draft of the book got done and I started sharing it with a few trusted readers. And as I shared it, I started to realize that it really IS about feminine wisdom AND about leadership, and I really hadn’t switched paths after all.
A few other signs showed up as well. I facilitated an in-person leadership workshop and sat in a circle of people hungry for a new paradigm for leadership, eager to make a difference in the world, and uncertain they have the right to call themselves leaders. They were leaders in search of a guide to point them to the right path.
And then I facilitated an online leadership learning circle for How to Live with your Paint Clothes on, and the same thing happened. An incredible circle of women bravely voiced their calling to leadership of some kind and admitted they were unsure of how to do it and how to work outside the old paradigms of leadership we’re all surrounded with. More leaders in search of a guide.
And then I had an amazing conversation with Bridget Pilloud, and she pushed me kind of hard when I said I was thinking of giving up Sophia Leadership and told me that there is a huge need among women in leadership (including herself in a previous career) for someone to help them see their paths clear to a place where feminine wisdom is honoured and accepted.
Last but not least, Sophia spoke to me in a bookstore. It was one of those restless days when I couldn’t find a book to settle the angst that had taken up residence in my heart. I was wrestling with my wandering tendencies, and the winding path and wondering WHY OH WHY I couldn’t just settle into an ordinary easy path like other people. There were relationship things going on as well that reminded me of my tendency to be an outsider, always on the edge of the circle when others are smack dab in the middle having all the “easy” fun.
Flipping through an art magazine, I heard Sophia whisper “you are called to the edge.” Bam. Just like that. A proclamation that answered so much of my angst and unsettled feelings. “You are CALLED to the edge. This is not an accident.” I’m not SUPPOSED to be in the centre of the circle having easy fun. I’m not SUPPOSED to be one of the people who get called to seemingly easy and straight paths. I’m meant to be out here on the edge.
I am an edge-walker. I am most myself when I am at the edge of the circle where I can serve as witness both to the things going on inside the circle and those happening outside. I am a leader whose vision of what’s ahead on the path helps direct the people at the centre who have less clarity. I help people feel safe because they have a sentry at the edge. I serve as scribe, witness, and facilitator for the people in the centre because I am less attached to the gravity and ideas that pull everyone to the centre. I watch for dangers and I help people avoid them. I follow new ideas and new paths because I know the people in the circle need them.
The particular edge I am called to live on is the edge called Sophia Leadership. I feel more and more certain of that. Bringing feminine wisdom into leadership is edgy, difficult, and not always popular work, but the people in the centre NEED this work. Everywhere I look I see more and more leaders in search of a guide/mentor.
When I walked out of the bookstore, I felt simultaneously like a great burden (of unknowing, doubt, uneasiness) had been lifted off my shoulders, while a whole new burden of responsibility and calling had been added. But the burden was not mine to carry alone – Sophia God was there carrying it for me.
The clarity has carried me through to today. The top of the mountain is becoming a little more visible as I round this latest switchback. I’m not sure how “edge-walker” would play on a business card, but I know what it means to me, and that’s what matters.
In the spirit of being an edge-walker and guide, I am offering new services and clarifying some old ones. Thanks to the roadsigns, there’s more clarity to them than anything I had on this website before. Perhaps one of them will resonate with you. If you need guidance, or if you feel a similar call to the edge, I would love to work with you and serve as your guide.
You can find the buttons for these services on the right-hand side of this blog. Or click on the one that appeals to you below.
(By the way, I am totally in love with the photo my sister took at the top of this page. On my face you can see that perfect mix of seriousness with a hint of a smile, angst with a hint of devil-may-care, and strength with a hint of softness that makes me who I am, standing out here on the edge.)
by Heather Plett | May 28, 2011 | Language, Leadership
Maddy and her best friend being goofy in the tunnel
I’m on a personal mission to change the culture by changing the language.
As I mentioned in How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on, most of the language we’re used to using in leadership and corporate culture (and, to be frank, even in communities, churches, etc.) is based on old paradigms. Because these cultures were formed by men in a patriarchal society, we adopted language that was comfortable for them. That language is the language of sports, warfare, and the industrial revolution. (Some of you have heard me on this soap box before, I’m sure.)
Even if our work has nothing to do with these three things, and we’d be much better off building communities than teams, we still talk about competitive advantages, officers-in-charge, high performance, and targets. I’ve worked in government and non-profits where competition and production are not important, and yet we still use the same language. Even in the softer side of leadership where we’re working on personal development, we still hire “coaches” to help us. Language gets so embedded in our culture we don’t even recognize how it shapes what we do.
Last week, the university where I teach asked if I’d want to teach a social media workshop called “Using Social Media to Gain Competitive Advantage”. Well yes, I responded, I’d be happy to teach a social media workshop, BUT I’m not interested in one with that title. If I teach it, the words “competitive advantage” won’t be part of it.
In my experience, social media is about relationships and COLLABORATION, not competition. You get an advantage not by competing with other people but by building relationships with them. That’s the only way I’d know how to teach the course.
Fortunately, I work with good administration who are open to my ideas, and so they changed the title to “Tools for Social Media Visibility”. I can live with that.
It might seem like a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but we have to start somewhere. If we want to see more feminine wisdom in our leadership, we have to walk the talk and talk the walk. Changing language CAN change culture.
