I am a coach who loves to help people make a difference in the world.
Like the gymnastics coach at the Olympics who sits on the sidelines and bursts into wild applause when the gymnast excels sticks her landing, I love nothing more than to watch my clients shine in their giftedness. The world is a better place when we ALL share our gifts.
I’m exploring something new that will allow me to help more people do transformative work.
The challenge that I have is that often the people I most want to work with are people who live at the edges of the financial economy (usually by choice) and do not have a lot of money for the kind of coaching that would help them grow their world-changing work.
Here’s what I want to do… I want to transform my business model to free myself up to offer more gifts, and thereby free other people to offer their gifts as well. That doesn’t mean I will give away all of my services (I still need to make a sustainable income that will feed my family and keep a roof over our heads), but it means that I will accept and give gifts more freely to help more people serve as imaginal cells to transform the world.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. – Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
Indeed.
You can be mediocre.
You can fail to capture the attention of hoards of admirers.
You can struggle all of your life to create a masterpiece and then leave it, at the end of your life, unfinished.
You might never get your book published.
Your business might never bring in more than $1000 a year.
You might not get that masters degree you always dreamed of getting.
You may not make it to the Olympics.
You might die without a penny to your name.
It doesn’t matter.
All of those measures of “success” are not important. They are the measures that we have arbitrarily attached to our efforts because we feel the need for yardsticks and goalposts.
But what if there are no yardsticks and goalposts? What if life is not a competition? What if the only winner is the person who lived well? What if the journey is the destination?
What if, at the end of your days, the only thing that matters is that you were faithful to your gift and your calling?
What if the only measurement you need to concern yourself with is whether or not you kept walking?
What if the only thing that’s important is that you let the “soft animal of your body love what it loves”?
Yes. This.
It’s about love. It’s about the wisdom of the bumblebee as it follows its hunger to the next beautiful flower. It’s about the trust of the wild geese as they follow the migration patterns that call them to their next home.
It’s about the soft animal of your body – the part of you that knows nothing about goal-setting or success, but knows everything about love.
It’s about writing and painting and dancing and laughing and connecting and counting and inventing and problem-solving out of our deep and passionate love for that thing we do. It’s about doing it because we can’t be happy any other way. It’s about trusting the gift to lead us where we need to go. It’s about sharing what we do because we feel compelled and it doesn’t matter what other people think.
The outcome is not your responsibility.
The path is the only goal. One foot in front of the other. Winding, dipping, trusting, falling, surrendering, picking yourself up from the ground and stepping once again.
Your only responsibility is to love what you love. And to be who you are. And to dream what you dream.
Now stop telling yourself you have not succeeded. Are you in love with what you do? Then you have succeeded.
Go ahead and ask the soft animal of your body what it loves.
I was at a social justice conference once when a well known storyteller got up to speak. I settled comfortably into my chair, preparing to be inspired.
He told a great (and very short) story, and then sat down. I thought he was just taking a break – maybe a musical interlude or dramatic pause – and then he’d get up to tell us what the story meant or how we should apply it to our lives.
Nope. Nothing. That was it. End of story.
I felt cheated. It was, after all, a social justice conference. We’d come to be inspired, to take home a toolkit full of take-aways and lessons-learned. If I remember correctly, his story didn’t even seem to have a social justice lens. It was just a story.
But was it?
The truth is, it stuck with me throughout the day, and into the week – long after I’d forgotten the take-aways from other talks or workshops.
One of the things I learned from his story is this: we don’t always need to hear the moral of the story. Sometimes, in fact, there is no moral. There’s just story. And the story becomes what each of us needs it to be. (Kind of like Jesus’ parables, right?)
I am a meaning-maker, a metaphor-finder, and a teacher. I like to follow story threads to their natural conclusions and then wrap the threads into neat little bows that allow you to take the stories home in pretty little packages to unwrap later. I’m used to shaping my ideas into teaching tools so that you have useful takeaways. It’s what I do and it’s often what I expect others to do.
But sometimes I try too hard and sometimes I do the story a mis-service by giving it only one shape when perhaps what you needed was a different shape entirely. Perhaps the story is still what you need, but through your lens it looks different and I’ve just ruined that for you by prescribing my own shape to it.
I’m finding lately that I’m growing somewhat weary of blog posts and social media updates, mostly because there seems to be too much expectation that we make sure every story has a moral, and every thread is tied.
We want to make sure we’re offering “good content”, and so we tie those threads. The blogging professionals remind us of how many extra hits we get when we can give “helpful tips for an easier life” or “do-it-yourself advice for ending the story as successfully as I did”, and so we give every story a nice juicy moral that readers can apply to their lives.
In doing so, sadly, we lose some of the messiness (and beauty) of life. We take out the really raw bits, because they don’t fit into neatly tied packages. We don’t tell the stories that end unhappily or not at all. We ignore the journeys that don’t conclude in simple and profound destinations.
This is one of the blocks I’ve had lately. This blog is now part of my business, and so I should be giving you good content that will keep you coming back for more. I should be offering you neatly tied packages. And I should do that on a regular basis so that you’ll come back often. And I certainly shouldn’t post this blog near midnight on a Friday. It’s blog suicide.
Unfortunately, many of my stories are messy and rarely do they come to me at appropriate blogging times of day. And often they don’t fit into clean frames or end with simple-to-communicate morals. Many of them are just little pieces of my journey and so the end is simply the beginning of something new. Sometimes (like when a man climbed through my window and raped me more than twenty years ago), it takes me years and years to process the lessons I’m meant to take away from a story. And even when I think I’ve learned all there is to learn, something new shows up a few years later and I realize the story hasn’t finished unfolding itself in my life.
And yet… I know those stories, as messy and unfinished as they are, are worth sharing. So I’ll keep offering them to you, but sometimes I won’t bother tying the threads together. I’ll let you find your own threads and see how those threads weave into your stories.
I am reminded, once again, of one of my favourite quotes.
“I’m not a teacher, only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.”
– George Bernard Shaw
Traveling is what I do. It’s what we all are doing. I haven’t reached the destination, so I can’t give you the “moral of this life-long story”. But maybe I can help you navigate some of the rocks that tripped me up.
Where am I going with all of this? I don’t know for sure. I haven’t figured out a way to end this post with a neat little moral either.
So I’m just going to leave you with what it is… some of the thoughts finding space in my head.
Note: this piece was included in this month’s newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to do so, over there on the right.
Last week while I was in Toronto, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon in St. James Park at Occupy Toronto. I found the experience to be very moving and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.
What struck me first when I entered the park was the lengths to which people have gone to turn the park into an intentional community. One of the deepest values that was apparent immediately is the value of caring for each other and creating a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. The other value that’s clear is the value of volunteering whatever gifts you can bring for the benefit of the whole.
There is a food area where donated food is available free of charge, a free library where books are shared and free classes are taught by volunteers, a medical tent, a logistics tent, a recovery tent (for people in 12 step programs), a safe women’s area, a silent meditation area, a volunteer sign-up area, a town square where general assemblies take place twice a day, a music zone, and an information table for people who are new to the park. While I was there they were looking for volunteers to set up a children’s area. Everything is free and everyone is welcome.
Shortly after I arrived in the park, I discovered why it had been so quiet – participants were returning from a rousing protest march. They brought great energy and enthusiasm to an otherwise quiet space. Here’s a short video capturing some of the energy they brought with them:
The energy wasn’t all positive. Clearly there had been conflict on the march with one group wanting to march through the financial district and the rest of the group prefering to stick with the initial plan. Apparently someone had told the police that the group that wanted to go to the financial district was planning to incite violence. The people in that group insisted that it wasn’t true. As their voices raised in frustration, a few people stepped out of the crowd to offer them deep listening and a way to reframe their stories so that they could once again offer positive energy to the group.
The true test of a community is how they handle conflict, and though there is much to admire about the intentionality around the Occupy movement, they are not immune to the challenge of having various factions in their midst bringing different viewpoints and differing passions. Gather people with passion into the same space and at some point, you’re bound to experience conflict.
As soon as the marchers returned, the general assembly began in the town square. Young facilitators did their best to manage the energy in the large and passionate group. Using the human microphone (the speaker shouts their words, and then the group shouts them back so that more people can hear), they tried to give voice to all of the concerns and ideas as they arose. To increase people’s opportunity of being heard, they asked us all to break into circle groups to offer our personal ideas of what things should be done in the future. After the circle time, spokespersons from each group brought the offerings back into the larger group. Then, at the end of the meeting, a speaker’s list was formed, inviting anyone who still felt they had something important to say to add their name to the list.
The process wasn’t perfect, and it was clear that the facilitators were learning (and making up) the process as they went along. Those of us who have facilitated large and passionate groups know that it’s challenging to give voice to so many people, especially when there is conflict involved.
I would argue that those imperfections and efforts are what makes the movement beautiful and potentially powerful. No, the movement is not one of perfect clarity (as the critics continue to say). Each person brings a different desire and restlessness to the circle. But what is remarkable is that so many different voices are coming together to create circles, live in community, and share their questions, passions, ideas, and alternatives for the systems that have begun to enslave rather than serve us.
Whenever something new is emerging, we have to be willing to walk through chaos to get there. We have to have the patience to sit in the ambiguous spaces. We have to let the questions sit heavily on our hearts.
One of the speakers who stood up during the general assembly spoke the words that have resonated the most loudly for me since that afternoon. “People say that we are a leaderless movement,” she said. “I would suggest that instead we see ourselves as a leaderful movement. We must ALL see ourselves as leaders in this new journey we’re on.”
And THAT is the beauty of the Occupy movement. For the community (and movement) to succeed, each person has to step into personal leadership and offer their gifts into the circle. Those who have medical skills have to show up at the medical tent. Those who can teach meditation, have to show up in the meditation area to coach others. Those who are facilitators need to offer their skills to the general assembly. Those who are good at diffusing conflict need to step in and help where they can.
Each person brings his/her passion and ideas and a willingness to listen to the passion and ideas brought by others.
That’s wisdom that goes far beyond the Occupy movement and right into our lives. Whatever your gifts are, show up and offer them for the good of all people. And then listen and receive what others have brought.
YOU are a leader and you need to step into that role in order to serve the people who are waiting to be served. That’s the only way community can work.
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.
What struck me first when I entered the park was the lengths to which people have gone to turn the park into an intentional community. One of the deepest values that was apparent immediately is the value of caring for each other and creating a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. The other value that’s clear is the value of volunteering whatever gifts you can bring for the benefit of the whole.
As soon as the marchers returned, the general assembly began in the town square. Young facilitators did their best to manage the energy in the large and passionate group. Using the human microphone (the speaker shouts their words, and then the group shouts them back so that more people can hear), they tried to give voice to all of the concerns and ideas as they arose. To increase people’s opportunity of being heard, they asked us all to break into circle groups to offer our personal ideas of what things should be done in the future. After the circle time, spokespersons from each group brought the offerings back into the larger group. Then, at the end of the meeting, a speaker’s list was formed, inviting anyone who still felt they had something important to say to add their name to the list.
And THAT is the beauty of the Occupy movement. For the community (and movement) to succeed, each person has to step into personal leadership and offer their gifts into the circle. Those who have medical skills have to show up at the medical tent. Those who can teach meditation, have to show up in the meditation area to coach others. Those who are facilitators need to offer their skills to the general assembly. Those who are good at diffusing conflict need to step in and help where they can.