by Heather Plett | Nov 4, 2011 | Beauty
the cloth that covers the table at the centre of our story circle each week
A story has emerged for me lately that has helped me define myself. It is that of a woman carrying a basket and filling it with story threads as she wanders.
Last week I was on a conference call with a circle of women planning a women’s gathering for next summer. We’ve been wrestling with what to name our gathering, and someone mentioned the words “weaving wisdom”. We all liked it. I shared with them the fact that lately I have seen my role in life as “weaving story threads into a tapestry of wisdom”. Each of the women in the circle is also a weaver of some kind.
With weaving on my mind so much lately, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that last night’s writing prompt was a spool of thread. I’d brought brown bags for each of the people in my creative writing circle and inside each brown bag was an ordinary item that the holder had to write about and possibly use as a metaphor for her/his life. I chose the last bag.
Here’s my story about the thread inside my brown bag…
The Weaver
For years she’d carried her basket, not sure what it was for or why she’d been gifted with it as a child.
Though she didn’t understand its meaning, she knew it was important. She knew she was meant to carry it.
As she went through life, she found herself attracted to colourful story threads everywhere she went. Each story thread that was offered her was lovingly tucked into her basket.
She was a wanderer, this woman. She could barely keep her feet from moving. Europe, California, Kenya, India, Nova Scotia, Ohio, Bangladesh… she went wherever the stories called her to go.
Everywhere she went, she added new threads to her basket. Stories of courageous young women in Ethiopia. Stories of devastated villages in Bangladesh. Stories of justice workers rescuing young girls from sexual slavery in India.
Her basket threatened to overflow with all the threads she carried, and yet it never got heavy. She loved those stories dearly and spent time with them every chance she could.
Still, though, she wondered… what was the purpose of all of this? What was the use of all of these threads? What was she meant to do with them?
She began to ask the wise people in her life. “What do you think I’m meant to do with my basket?”
“Hmmm….” those people would say. “It just looks like a tangled mess to me.” Or “You have to find the answer in your own heart.” Or “Have you talked to God about it?” Nobody could give her an easy answer.
And so she continued to wander and gather more stories. But her heart became heavy, for she knew that all of this was meant for something.
Then one day, there came a distant whisper. “Have you tried weaving those threads together and making meaning out of them?”
Hmmm… really? Was she meant to be a weaver? But these were just tiny snippets – how could she make anything meaningful out of loose threads? And… what if she didn’t have the skill to weave them properly, or even to know which colours to line up together? What if she messed up and damaged the threads that had been entrusted to her?
She picked up a few threads and played with them wistfully. Could she trust the wisdom in her hands to make something out of this tangled heap?
Soon she realized, though, that without much effort at all, she’d lined up those first few threads in a way that made the colours dance. Yes. That looked right. The stories took on new meaning and beauty when she placed them together. She added a few more… and then more. Someone slipped a new thread into her hand. Ooooohh…. that one looked so lovely with the others!
Before she knew it, she was weaving. The threads were slowly being shaped into a beautiful tapestry in her hands.
She worked for hours, lovingly caressing each thread as she added it to her work of art. When she finally looked up from her work, she saw that she was being watched by eager eyes. Several of the people standing nearby were reaching out to her. In their hands were new threads.
“It looks so beautiful,” said the people watching her. “Will you teach us how to weave?”
This shocked her. “You want ME to teach you how to weave? But… I’m just playing with threads…I’m not sure I know what I’m doing!”
“Oh but you do!” they said. “You need to trust the gift in your hands. The world is desperately in need of more tapestries.”
And so she gathered her willing new friends into a circle. Reverently, and in awe of what she had begun, she lit a candle and rang a bell. “Start by telling us a story,” she said, and slowly and tenderly the people in the circle began pulling threads from pockets near their hearts. The threads were beautiful and each one was different from the last. Some were sparkly and bright, others were rough and well-worn. All were rich in colour and texture.
Before the end of the evening, a new tapestry had begun to form. “We’ll come back next week and work on it some more,” said the friends, excitement in their voices.
And so they did, and each week the woman marvelled at what she had helped to shape.
by Heather Plett | Aug 12, 2011 | Creativity, Leadership, Wisdom, women
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 engage our right brains in conceptual, creative, intuitive, spiritual thinking and start imagining new patterns that will shift us away from our self-destructive paths.
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.
by Heather Plett | Aug 1, 2011 | Leadership
This morning I was browsing the internet a bit, trying to avoid the task I needed to do (prepare for tomorrow’s teaching), and looking for some leadership inspiration. What I found were a lot of typical leadership blogs that really didn’t appeal to me very much. Many of them are based on old paradigms of what leadership is – the top down, masculine model of a heroic, charismatic, strategic, high-performance, competitive individual who runs the show from a hierarchical position and “never lets you see him sweat”.
That’s not the kind of leadership I’m interested in, and so I rarely read those blogs. I’m much more interested in exploring what it means for the leader to serve as host, artist, question-asker, chaos-embracer, doodler, meditator, and storycatcher.
After blog surfing, I asked myself, once again, whether or not it’s really a leadership blog I want to write. If I don’t fit in with those other blogs, and if I like to write about taking contemplative photo walks, embracing your inner child, and what brings me joy, am I really putting something forward that is of value to leaders and potential leaders? Wouldn’t I be better off simply writing a “how to live a good life” blog?
In the end, though, I kept coming back to this… if I want to contribute to a shift in paradigms, if I want people to imagine themselves as leaders even if they’ll never have those hierarchical positions, if I want to help people take personal responsibility for the state of the world instead of assuming it’s someone else’s problem, if I want us to imagine what the world would be like if more feminine wisdom (and more right-brained thinking) were at play in our decision-making process, then this IS about leadership.
Leadership is about living with integrity and letting our lifestyles be our messages.
Leadership is about recognizing when it’s time to just sit with your mother in the hospital room, rather than rushing off to get another thing done.
Leadership is about wandering through nature and honouring every beautiful thing you see.
Leadership is about knowing when it’s time to take the road less traveled.
Leadership is about spending time at the beach with your kids and knowing that rest and rejuvenation are as important as any meeting you might attend.
Leadership is about slowing down to appreciate and honour this earth instead of forever sacrificing beauty for the cause of efficiency.
Leadership is about inviting people into circles for deep and authentic conversations.
Leadership is about taking an art break and considering what is trying to emerge in your right brain that your left brain hasn’t been able to articulate.
Leadership is about staring at trees and knowing that they are our wise teachers.
Leadership is about inviting the right questions into the room.
Leadership is about recognizing that transformation takes time and cannot be fit into models or rushed through strategic action plans.
Leadership is about being willing to be an edge-walker even when it looks more safe at the centre.
Leadership is about looking deeply into a person’s eyes and letting them know they are seen.
Leadership is about moving, dancing, singing, and laughing.
Leadership is about living well, serving well, and loving well.
Leadership is about recognizing that the world needs your gifts and then taking responsibility to share them.
Leadership is about being truthful even when you’re surrounded by deception.
Leadership is about having the courage to step outside of society’s norms when the systems we’ve created just aren’t working any more.
We are ALL leaders, whether we recognize it or not.
We are ALL responsible for influencing other people, living authentic lives, bringing more beauty into the world, spreading compassion, honouring the earth, and serving the cause of justice.
This blog is about inviting people to take responsibility for these things, while at the same time recognizing that we’ll all make mistakes along the way. It’s about breathing deeply through the fear and stepping forward anyway. It’s about knowing when it’s OUR turn to be light-bearers, change-makers, story-catchers, question-askers, and justice-seekers.
It’s about offering you support, encouragement, ideas, and forgiveness as you step forward into the role you are called to fill.
Go ahead. Call yourself a leader. And when you need strength for the journey, come sit in my circle for awhile.
For more on shifting paradigms of leadership, check out How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on.
by Heather Plett | May 13, 2011 | Uncategorized
Today is another in a long series of grey, sometimes drizzly, sometimes windy days. This morning I feel like a caged animal, longing for the space beyond the clouds, beyond the grey.
I feel easily caged. It’s part of my nature. Put too many boundaries around me (office walls, too much structure, not enough time on my schedule to wander, too many rules or limitations), and I get so restless I could SCREAM. I pace the cage, I rail against the machine, I get really, really cranky.
I know this about myself, and yet I keep expecting something different. I keep thinking I should WANT to fit into the cages that seem to make other people happy, I should LIKE sitting still for awhile, I should be THANKFUL for the office walls and structures that box me in. Oh the “shoulds” I have dumped on my head! I’ve tried so hard to fit into the ordered worlds that seem to make other people happy. And yet I can’t. It just doesn’t work for me.
It’s the same way in the world of business. Even though I am thrilled that self-employment gives me more opportunity to wander, to sit in the middle of a labyrinth to do my work, or to choose the library, a coffee shop, or my tiny basement studio as my creative space for the day, I still find myself trying to force myself into some kind of box.
I should be able to fit my business into a box, shouldn’t I? All the business books tell us to be specific, to have a crisp clean elevator speech, to have a niche market, to KNOW what we offer the world and to be able to communicate it in simple clean language.
But every time I try one of those boxes, I start to get really, really restless and I want to bust out of the box. Every time I try to define myself as one thing – “writer, communications consultant, teacher, creative midwife, facilitator, leadership coach, transformation guide” – I start going a little crazy and my body fills with angst.
And then I do that thing I do when I assume everyone else is figuring it out except for me – I assume there must be something wrong with me. I beat myself up a bit, and I try a little harder to fit into a box.
But the boxes NEVER FIT!
Because I am a wanderer. An explorer. A scanner (in the words of Barbara Sher).
I am a creative thinker. A box-buster. A questioner. An outside-the-lines-colourer.
And you know what? I’m proud of that and I don’t want to beat myself up over it any more. I want to BE WHO I AM and build a business out of that instead of trying to find some model that doesn’t fit.
Because of that, two things will be happening in the coming weeks:
1.) Next week (on my birthday), I will be releasing a new product that I absolutely LOVE because it is so true to my heart. It is about the beauty of being a wanderer and I’m SO happy that other wanderers have agreed to help me with it. OH MY GOSH this is going to be fun! I’m celebrating what makes me a wanderer, sharing it with you, and hopefully helping you to celebrate your own box-busting, colouring-outside-the-lines, happy wanderer nature too.
2.) Within a month or so, I plan to migrate my blog over to my heatherplett.com url. I have loved Sophia Leadership, but it has begun to feel like another one of those boxes. Not nearly everything I want to write about or create or sell is about feminine wisdom or about leadership. It’s time to just brand MYSELF and release the products and services that emerge out of my gifts instead of trying to squeeze all of my energy and creativity into a brand that doesn’t fit. I’ll still write about leadership and feminine wisdom now and then, but that won’t be the whole she-bang. Being a WANDERER is part of my brand, and so I will celebrate my burning need to wander from one idea to the next.
I’d love to hear from you if you have any ideas. For example, let me know what your favourite things are about visiting my site. What would you like to see more of? What things would you buy from me if I created them? What e-courses would you like to see me teach?
by Heather Plett | May 10, 2011 | parenting, Passion
I’m not a mommy-blogger for a few good reasons. I don’t think I’m particularly competent at parenthood (aren’t we all just feeling our way in the dark?), and there are a lot of other things roaming around in this grey matter that I’d just as soon write about as parenting. While I take great delight in my three daughters, I’m not one of those moms who gives up all else for the sake of her children (nor do I think that’s particularly healthy for mom or kids).
Today is an exception, though. I’m going to blog about my kids.
Last night, I was curled up on the couch when a lovely thought occurred to me. “My three children are all blessedly happy at this moment.” It was a good moment and I had to bask in it while it lasted.
The oldest daughter had just returned from a rugby game and was riding that post-game adrenalin high as she demonstrated some of the plays for her dad and I.
The second daughter is off on a French exchange program in Quebec, and though I didn’t speak with her last night, I can only presume she was happy based on all of the conversations I’ve had with her so far. (There was pure joy in her voice after visiting Old Montreal.)
The third daughter was taking great delight in some new art supplies (thanks Connie!) and was making art in her new journal.
Fierce athlete, curious explorer, and imaginative artist.
That doesn’t paint the whole picture of those three girls, but it certainly gives you a clue about what makes each one unique.
I didn’t mold them into these things, nor did I put any particular effort into helping them find these particular paths. I just did two simple things – I gave them tools and permission. The tools weren’t particularly expensive. Just rugby cleats, art supplies, and a suitcase. And the permission? Well, that was just a matter of deciding a long time ago that I was going to be okay with watching them choose their own paths, whether or not they seemed like the right paths to me.
I think this goes way beyond parenting, though. I think it’s got everything to do with leadership too. Give them tools, give them permission, and set them loose on the world. It’s what leading with your paint clothes on is all about (which, by the way, could also be called “parenting with your paint clothes on” because there are so many parallels).
And it has everything to do with self leadership and self care too. Give yourself the tools. Give yourself the permission. And set yourself loose.
If you love to paint, when was the last time you bought a new paintbrush or tube of paint? If you love to write, why not invest in a beautiful journal and trust that your thoughts are worthy of a good home? If your body loves to move, why haven’t you bought yourself a good pair of dance shoes or running shoes?
And when was the last time you gave yourself the gift of an afternoon to do these things you love to do? Are the things that bring you joy at the bottom of the list after all of the other priorities you have to get to? Stop doing that. Seriously. Give yourself permission.
It’s pretty simple, really. It’s the only way you’ll find your path – give yourself the tools and the permission.
