by Heather Plett | May 27, 2011 | Leadership
Yesterday was my first call with the delightful tribe of people who signed up for the learning circle of How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on. What a great call it was! My only complaint is that it was much too short. AND that I didn’t get to watch people’s faces when they had their a-ha moments.
At the end of the call, when I asked the participants what nugget of learning they would take with them into the week and might find themselves journaling about a few days later, more than one of them shared that it was our conversation about the leadership of Rosa Parks.
Rosa Parks is one of my greatest models for leadership.
As I mentioned in my blurry vision post, I used to hold unrealistic models in front of me of what leadership and vision should be. Even in my teaching, I’d get people to deconstruct the leadership of people like Martin Luther King Jr. in order to learn what visionary leadership is all about.
But not any more. Only a handful of people will attain the level of leadership of MLK (or Oprah, for that matter), so I don’t suggest you try to model yourself after him. If you do, there’s a good chance you’ll fail.
Instead, model your leadership after Rosa Parks.
Rosa was a seamstress. She probably never used the word leader to define herself in her whole life. She was just a seamstress… and yet, she had a passion for justice. She had a vision for change. She knew that it was time for the world.
And so she took her seat on the bus. And she refused to get up when the bus driver told her to give it up for a white man. That action may seem insignificant, and yet it changed the world.
You don’t have to have a grand audience. You don’t have to have a hundred people looking to you for leadership. You just have to take your seat on the bus.
Taking your seat on the bus might mean that you clean up your neighbourhood. It might mean that you provide a safe space for marginalized people. It might mean that you give your whole heart to teaching yoga. It might mean that you model integrity and justice to your kids. It might mean that you say no to the bullies on the committee you volunteer for.
Like the participants on the call yesterday, many of us feel uneasy about calling ourselves leaders because the word carries so much baggage and seems like an unattainable mark. That’s because we’re trying to model ourselves off the wrong kinds of leaders.
DON’T lead like Martin Luther King Jr.
Lead like Rosa Parks. Take your seat on the bus. And don’t get up when the bullies and conformists tell you to move.
by Heather Plett | May 25, 2011 | inspiring people, Leadership, Sophia, Uncategorized, Wisdom
Before and after the leadership workshop that made me cry (and laugh) I got to hang out with a bunch of young feminists this past weekend. I was too old to participate in the ReBelles gathering, but I could at least volunteer and be inspired by their energy and passion. I worked at the registration desk and the merch table and I served some delicious vegetarian chilli to a bunch of hungry (and wet) feminists who’d come out of the rain after marching on the streets.
I was there for three reasons.
1. I wanted to be inspired by their passion and commitment and was hoping that some of their energy would rub off on me. I think we all have a lot to learn from those younger than us and I was open to the learning.
2. I feel a calling to be a mentor and supporter of young women leaders in the next generation and I want to do what I can to encourage them as they step into their own leadership and power.
3. I know some of the organizers and I am quite fond of them.
Though I wasn’t allowed in the workshops or plenary sessions (they were quite intentional about maintaining the space for women under 35 and I respect that choice), I got what I wanted out of the experience and I’m glad I went.
The truth is, I’ve been discouraged lately by what our generation is doing with feminism and I think it’s time to turn things around again.
As I said when I created Sophia Leadership, on my “About Sophia Leadership” page, the feminist revolution opened doors for women – doors that lead us into the houses of power. We became leaders and politicians and educators and business owners, but to do that, we had to learn to think and lead like men.
The post-feminist movement helped women tap into our sources of power – our spirituality, our creativity, and our intuition – but we didn’t take those things into the houses of power with us. We were mostly busy making the connection between our heads, hearts, and bodies in our own spaces for our own benefits.
We so enjoyed the freedom that the feminist revolution earned for us that we started spending most of our time focused on ourselves, buying all the self-help books we could find, going to all the yoga and spiritual retreats we could afford, and justifying all the choices we made to pamper ourselves instead of being in positions of servitude as our mothers had been.
What we forgot, however, is that along with freedom comes great responsibility.
I firmly believe that it’s time for the next step in the women’s movement. Now it’s time to merge what we learned in both the feminist and post-feminist eras and make some BIG changes. I suspect that it might be the next generation who will do the bulk of the work of ushering in a new era of feminine wisdom, and so I want to support it where I can.
That doesn’t mean, though, that we – the over 40 crowd – have an excuse to go back to our insular world of self-care and self-focused spirituality. Our young leaders may be the ones with energy and they may be the ones to do the turning, but they need us, their mentors, wise women, sages, and crones.
They need us and we need them. I was so glad to be part of a mutual benefit society this weekend.
And here are a few of the things the young feminists taught me:
1. Make your work, retreats, and gatherings accessible to everyone. Instead of gathering with only the elite who can afford spiritual retreat centres, find ways to prepare simple meals, host people in homes, charge on a sliding scale, and make sure the emerging leaders from poor and marginalized groups can afford to participate.
2. Be intentional about including only ethically produced and purchased food and products – things that are gentle on the earth and that weren’t produced by under-paid labourers in faraway factories.
3. Combine art and body movement workshops with political/advocacy workshops. Find ways of blending them in ways that are uniquely feminine.
4. Dare to be passionate. March in the streets. Write manifestos. If things need to be shaken up, SHAKE THEM AND DON’T APOLOGIZE!
5. Be intentional about creating spaces for those you’ve gathered, and don’t apologize to those you’ve excluded. But then honour those who support you from outside that circle and hold a feast for all to celebrate together.
6. Bring in wise women as elders, honour them and let them advise you, but do not let them run the show if you have people in your group quite capable of organizing gatherings.
7. Make the space as safe as you can for emerging leaders, by doing small things like asking the rental facility to ensure the guards on duty while you gather are all women.
8. Don’t leave until you have some clear action items and then follow up to make sure there is MOVEMENT. Don’t let people simply go back to their homes with warm fuzzies forgetting their commitments to positive change.
by Heather Plett | May 23, 2011 | journey, Leadership, Trust
It was Saturday morning and I was sitting alone on the couch, sobbing. Everyone else was still in bed. I had to get up early to facilitate a leadership workshop on “inspiring a shared vision”, and instead of doing anything productive to prepare for the workshop, all I could do was cry.
As the tears flowed, my thought process went something like this: “How can I lead a workshop on vision, when I’m in the middle of feeling like every vision I’ve ever had has disintegrated into a puddle at my feet? How can I teach people about inspiring others with their vision, when I don’t really know how it’s done myself?”
There have been a lot of discouragements lately. The big one that was sitting on my heart Saturday morning was the fact that I really haven’t managed to create a viable business in the six months I’ve been trying. Back when I quit my job in the Fall, I’d told myself that if I wasn’t making a reasonable living at it by the time my birthday rolled around, I’d have to go looking for a full time job again. That was about all the time I could afford not to be making decent money. My birthday was on Friday. Despite all of my effort and good ideas and wonderful connections with people, I’m barely making any money at this yet.
Part of me knows I need to be realistic, that business-building takes time, but part of me is starting to feel desperate because there are bills to pay, kids to feed… you know the story.
And that’s where vision comes in. When I walked away from my job, I had a grand vision- lots of them actually – of the way I’d pour my heart into the things I’d love to do, and people would show up hungry for what I had to offer and I’d be able to make a decent living. It really felt like a calling – the place I was meant to be at this stage of my life. But, the reality is there’s not a lot happening behind the wizard’s curtain. Or – I should qualify that – not a lot that translates into money. (And, sadly, at the end of the day, that’s the primary measurement in the world of business and bill-paying.) It’s discouraging. I meet with a lot of people, have a lot of great conversations, and then when it comes to signing on the dotted line, I’ve gotten a lot of “love what you do, would love to work with you… maybe in six months…” And then I never hear from them. It feels like a lot of wheels spinning and not a lot of traction happening.
That’s where I was on Saturday morning – the day after my birthday, sobbing on my couch because the dream hasn’t come to fruition the way I’d hoped and I may need to brush up my resume. (And I know that, by admitting all of this to you, I may in fact be further jeopardizing my ability to be taken seriously as a confident business person, but being authentic is what I do, so here’s the truth – this is really, really hard sometimes.)
I checked the mirror before I left to make sure there were no tell-tale signs that I’d spent the morning crying. I didn’t have any clue how I’d manage to deliver the workshop without bursting into tears, but at least it was a small group that I’d met with before, so I didn’t have to worry as much about first impressions.
I had no idea how the workshop would go. I’ve done this workshop a few times before, so I had an outline and lots of exercises and handouts, but the day before, when I’d been reviewing the material, nothing was working for me. Usually we talk about visionary leaders who inspire us or who’ve changed the world with their big dreams. Sometimes we play Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. In the end, participants usually emerge with some version of a personal vision statement that they’re meant to take with them into their leadership roles. But none of that was working for me this time. It all felt flat and useless and mostly irrelevent.
So I went to the workshop feeling lost and broken. And that’s the place I started from.
“I want you to sit for a moment with the word vision,” I said at the beginning, partly because I needed some time to gather my thoughts and contemplate which of my notes held relevance for this particular group. “Sit quietly – perhaps even close your eyes – and contemplate your response to the word. What does it do to you? Does it excite you? Fill you with fear? Make you feel inadequate? Bring up old stories of failure or discouragement?”
And then, in that safe place, stories started coming. Stories of dreams and failures, hopes and disappointments.
Instead of talking about grand visions, we talked about blurry vision – the kind that keeps you believing in something better, but never looks clear along the path. Instead of talking about charismatic and visionary leaders like Martin Luther King, we talked about people like Rosa Parks – real people who never delivered grand speeches, but simply made deliberate choices each day to stand up for what they believe in. Some people talked about their children, who dared to be seen as a little quirky at school in order to live out their authentic personalities. Others talked about simple visions like knowing how they wanted their garden to look, but accepting, in the end, that plants have their own way of developing and there is only so much under our control.
Vision, we decided, is like the curvy trail that winds up a mountain. You may never actually see the top while you’re on the path, and many, many times it feels like you’re heading in the wrong direction, or a curve makes you feel like you’ve failed and now need to back-track, but slowly but surely you’re reaching the top of that mountain.
Vision is also like that tiny ladybug crawling across a tapestry. All she can see is a few threads just in front of her. She never gets the grand God’s-eye-view of the whole piece, but she keeps crawling across and marvelling at how the threads change in their colour and texture.
Sometimes, we all agreed, our ideas end up failing, even if we think they’re led by vision or calling. But if we follow the lessons of nature and see the death of those ideas as the compost that provides nourishment for new ideas to grow, we’ll learn to recognize the importance of even the failure.
At the end of the session, instead of trying to articulate vision statementw, we worked on vision boards, cutting out the images that drew us in and told us stories of vague and blurry visions that kept calling us up the winding path to the top of the mountain.
In the end, the workshop was the perfect example of blurry vision. I had an outline and a sense of how the workshop should go, but when it came time to deliver it, I had to let go, trust that it would work out, and then let it unfold the way that it needed to for the learning the participants (and I) needed. The beautiful thing was that throughout the workshop, I saw the most wonderful a-ha moments flash across the faces of every single one of the participants. That happened not because I carefully followed an agenda, but because I let go of my plans and trusted the wisdom of the circle.
In the end, vision – that winding path up the mountain – looks something like this: Dream. Plan. Pray. Surrender. Trust. Try again.
The biggest a-ha moment was (of course) my own. That’s the best part about being a teacher – you get to learn SO much.
When I left the workshop, I didn’t necessarily have any more clarity about my own business or what the next step needs to be, but I at least felt more content and sure that what I’ve been doing is the right thing even if it fails. Even if I only manage to touch a few people in each workshop I do, or you, my beautiful readers who offer me such encouragement and hope, then I am doing the right thing and I need to keep doing it. Trusting that the money will come is excruciating, but somehow it will work out (even if I end up in a full-time job again) and I’ll make my way up that curvy (and sometimes back-tracking) trail to the top of the mountain.
At the end of the workshop, I shared this quote:
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. – Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
by Heather Plett | May 11, 2011 | beginnings, dreaming, growth, Leadership, Uncategorized, Wisdom
I’m done with writing goals. Good-bye. Good riddance.
I used to write them faithfully – at least once a year and sometimes in between. A lot of smart people told me that they were good and necessary and vital to my success, and since I have a habit of listening to smart people, I not only wrote them but I told other people to write them too. (After all, I wanted people to think I was smart too!)
But I’m done with goals. I’m kickin’ them to the curb. Because they’re not the most effective tool in my tool kit.
You want to know what works better than goals?
Questions.
Yup. You heard me right – questions work better than goals.
Here’s a short section from How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on that explains why…
To get stuff done, ask good questions.
We have all been taught the value of effective goal-setting, but rarely have we been taught the effectiveness of curiosity. Research has shown, in fact, that curiosity and openness help us get MORE accomplished than determination and goal-setting do.
Three social scientists once conducted a series of experiments to determine which was more effective, “declarative” self-talk (I will fix it!) or “interrogative” self-talk (Can I fix it?). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause”.) Before the participants tackled the problem, though, the researchers asked half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they would complete the task. The other half of the group was instructed to tell themselves that they would complete the task.
In the end, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.
The researchers – Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi – then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretense, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.”
This experiment resulted in the same outcome as the first. People primed with “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In follow-up experiments, the same pattern continued to hold. Those who approach a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.
My nine-year-old daughter Maddy figured this out before I did. (Or perhaps I had it figured out at nine too, but somewhere along the way I let smart people convince me otherwise.)
Not long ago, she started her first journal. “Mom,” she said, “I’m going to call it ‘A lifetime of questions.'” And then she proceeded to write pages full of all the questions she has about life, leaving blank spaces after each question in case she finds the answer and wants to fill it in. Sometimes she shares her questions with me and sometimes she doesn’t.
The other day, she was waiting in line at six in the morning to audition for The Next Star, a TV talent show that’s like Canadian Idol for kids. After the original giddiness had worn off, she plopped herself down on the ground, pulled out her journal, and started writing her questions. She didn’t show them to me, but there’s a pretty good chance at least one of them was “will I be the Next Star?”
The answer to that question was, unfortunately, “No” (she didn’t make it past the first round of auditions), but if you ask me, she’s a pretty big star just for having the guts to do all the research about how and where to audition, practice her songs relentlessly for weeks on end, get up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, wait in line for five hours, and then march off alone into an audition room full of strangers (I wasn’t allowed to watch) and compete against kids who were mostly a few years older than her – all at the risk of failure. (One of the first questions she asked me afterwards was “Mom, can I take singing and dance lessons so I’m more prepared next year?”) That little girl is a hero in my books!
So I’m taking the lessons I’ve learned from Maddy and those researchers, and I’m living a lifetime of questions.
Remember that black canvas I painted when I was in the depths of despair over my long surrender? I decided to fill it with a bunch of hopeful questions.
I’ll let you know what the answers are when I find out!
Note: For this and other unconventional wisdom about how to take a more unique and powerful approach to life and leadership, check out How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on. There’s still room in the learning circle (along with the fascinating people who’ve already joined) and we’d love to have you!
by Heather Plett | May 4, 2011 | Leadership, politics, Sophia, Uncategorized
Throughout this federal election, I have been watching to see whether any of the people hoping to get elected to represent Canadians in Ottawa would exhibit the qualities of Sophia Leadership. I had almost given up the search (oh, politics is such an ugly game, isn’t it?), until I watched the acceptance speech of the first Green Party representative ever elected to Parliament, Elizabeth May.
When I watched her speech, I thought “Now THERE’S a woman who deserves a Sophia Leadership Award!” And so a new award was born out of that thought. Because I think that, along with encouraging more people to unleash the power of feminine wisdom in their leadership and their life, it is my responsibility to celebrate it when I see it in practice.
With that in mind, I honour and acknowledge the work of Elizabeth May.
Elizabeth, I hereby present you with the Sophia Leadership award:
– for your courage to restore civility and respect to the House of Commons
– for your determination to end heckling in Question Period
– for your deep and unwavering commitment to the environment
– for modelling integrity and authenticity in a political arena where those things are not often valued
– for speaking truth to power
– for refusing to embrace the politics of spin
– for giving us all hope that a new leadership paradigm is possible
– and for demonstrating that women can be strong and fierce without compromising those things that make them feminine.
THANK YOU ELIZABETH MAY! You have given me hope.
by Heather Plett | May 2, 2011 | Leadership, Sophia, Wisdom
I have mixed feelings about last night’s reports that Osama bin Laden is dead. On the one hand, I understand the need for justice and I ache for those people still living with the deep loss that 9/11 caused. I was in New York City a month after the towers fell and I breathed in the smell of death and shared in the collective grief of that beautiful city in that beautiful country. I understand why people would want to destroy the person responsible for so much destruction.
On the other hand, though, what does this resolve? Does bin Laden’s death offer us any more hope for peace? Does it provide a salve for any of the wounds inflicted by him? Does it suddenly stop terrorism from forming in other parts of the world?
Sadly, terrorism does not operate under the logic that “oh – they killed bin Laden, best not to attack them”. Terrorism thrives on death. Think of the people willing to give up their lives for their cause, who hi-jacked those planes, or who blow themselves up regularly as suicide bombers. They’re not afraid of death. They will not go silently into that dark night.
Vengeance is a frightening thing once it gets ahold of you. And it has gotten ahold of a lot of people since 9/11. I keep wondering how many people will have to die in Iraq and Afghanistan before the need for blood has been satisfied. Sadly, when it comes to vengeance, there is always collateral damage. I was saddened this morning to learn that, in the attack on bin Laden’s compound, a woman was killed because she was used as a human shield. She is only one of the many, many people who have been killed in this decade long fight to avenge 9/11.
Many years ago, when a man broke into my apartment and raped me, my dad’s first reaction was to admit how badly he wanted vengeance on the man who hurt me. It was a primal and fierce reaction, and – I’ll admit – it made me feel loved. I was angry and hurt, and to see someone who loves you take up that anger and hurt along with you feels good at the moment. And so I understand the need of so many hurt Americans to see their country (and supporting countries) rise up and support them in their anger and pain.
But the legacy my father left me was not vengeance, it was peace. If he had gone after my rapist and demanded he pay for his crime with his life, he would have only served to spread hatred a little further. Instead, my father modelled peace and forgiveness in all that he did, even in learning to forgive my rapist. One of the greatest things he taught me in life was that pacifism and love are always better options than war and hatred.
Is it possible that, instead of seeking vengeance for any more hurts, we can learn to model peace for the world, just as my father modeled it for me? Can we quit fooling ourselves into believing that an eye for an eye will somehow usher in peace? Can we learn to forgive those who trespass against us and spread love instead of hate?
This morning I keep thinking this thought… “oh how badly we need Sophia leadership. Oh how badly we need wisdom that is feminine, spiritual, intuitive, creative, visionary, and compassionate in this time of so much unresolved hatred and hurt. Oh how badly we need love.”
I pray that it will be so.
