Community has been on my mind and heart this month. I've had amazing reminders of the beauty of authentic community alongside devastating examples of how fear divides us. A couple of weeks ago, I basked in the joy of community with our 2024 National Women’s Impact Leadership Institute (NWILI) cohort (thank you to Stephanie Shivar for partnering with me to start and grow this program) – we shared appreciation and gratitude with each other. There were belly laughs and tears, all of it. Even as I am taking in the love of this community, my heart continues to break with the wars around the world along with the politics of fear underpinning the 2024 election. And what I know to be true through it all is that we are meant to be in community. It matters for our health and well-being, it matters for our work and leadership, it matters for our souls. 
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Community is the outer layer of my leading from the inside out framework and for me it’s a non-negotiable. We are all wired for community and my wiring is especially sensitive, or maybe it’s tight.

"Our bodies are always talking to us, trying to get our attention. Our work is to unfold, to listen, and to claim the truth about our beautiful, storied bodies." - Ellie Roscher

With this blog post I’ve blogged every month for a whole year! Yay! I think I can call myself a blogger now, it’s a habit that’s part of me and who I am. Last year at this time I wasn’t sure it was possible and here we are. Yes, these posts get mostly written the last day of each month and yet they get written! Yes, there are times when I wonder what I’m going to say up until the very moment I start writing and yet my words emerge as I sit at my computer and type. It’s a habit and a practice that I’ve been nurturing, it’s been a slow burn. Here’s what I know about this practice so far. It’s available to me when I’ve gotten present, when I’ve started to notice what’s bubbling up for the topic of the month – I’ve turned the light of awareness onto what wants to come out right now. It’s available to me when I’ve given myself some grace, even as my judge is telling me it’s too late, I’ll never finish and really who’s reading these posts anyway?! 😉 It’s available to me when I give myself some space in my day to just BE and I honor that space as part of the process. It’s available to me when I choose it! It’s easy for me to get lulled into the next thing on the list that’s easier to do than a blog post. And then I remember, I’m a blogger, I blog every month and I choose to write. These are the inner layers of my leading from the inside out framework along with some space in between and my choosing! These elements support my writing practice.

And this has me thinking about practice, the next layer of leading from the inside out. Practice is a word that I hear often in many different contexts. “I need to practice.” Or “I don’t want to practice.” (the mantra when the kids were in music or sometimes even sports).

“In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love. We need only pause, breathe, and open to the experience of aliveness within us. In that wakeful openness, we come home to the peace and freedom of our natural awareness.”  – Tara Brach

Ever feel like you can’t quite catch up, catch a break or even catch your breath? That has been a space I’ve been occupying lately in fact, I’ve set up camp here. I’ve decorated the walls with mental sketches of what it takes for me to feel productive, good, or simply enough. Lately I’ve had lots of both exciting and difficult to navigate happenings and I’ve found myself with too much to do, too much to take in, just too much. It’s a familiar, and in this way a “comfortable,” place. Yet I know it’s a place where I miss things, I miss whole conversations with family and friends (or my response is so delayed it brings a laugh or worse an eye roll from my teenage daughter), I miss taking in the beauty of my surroundings, I miss experiencing what I’m up to fully, and most importantly I start to miss my life.

As I watched an interview I did with my fellow Northwestern University alum, Dr. Jay Kumar for an episode of the GenConnectU’s series Thriving Brain called Why Are Presence and Awareness Essential for Effective Leadership? I realized that what I’ve really been missing lately is presence. ​

​In last month’s blog post about stories and community I touched on belonging and this month there’s more to say! I tend to lead with my heart if you hadn’t noticed, and belonging is near and dear to me. In fact, of the three basic human needs, safety, belonging, and dignity – my go-to and non-negotiable is belonging. For much of my life I’ve mixed up belonging and fitting in, this meant that belonging was about what others thought of me and how I could “fix” myself to be more liked, more accepted, sometimes just more. I have spent a lot of time proving my enoughness to fit in. Oof, that’s a lot of work and it’s exhausting work because there is a drum beat of “not enough” pounding in the background the whole time I do it. And all this work, as hard and draining as it is, hasn’t and won’t lead to true belonging because it can’t.

​True belonging is not about finding a certain place, group, or situation; instead it's about finding ourselves. True belonging starts within us. It starts with acceptance of who we’ve been, who we are, and who we are becoming. For me this idea of acceptance has been a bit of a bugaboo. I’m very practiced at conditional acceptance, when I do this, look like this, feel like this then …​

​“Change is inevitable, but transformation is by conscious choice.” – Heather Ash Amara

“Never underestimate the valuable and important difference you make in every life you touch, for the impact you make today has a powerful rippling effect on every tomorrow.” – Leon Brown

With the inauguration and official (and thankfully smooth) transfer of power in the United States, I’ve been thinking about power and impact lately. What does it mean to be powerful? What is the impact of that power in the world? What is our ripple effect? As I’ve learned as a Radical Leader® we are all ALWAYS having impact – the key question is, is it the impact we WANT?! 

Power and impact live within the broader context of connection. Humans are wired for connection, as Mark Nepo says “we have an innate call to find each other and join.” This connection with ourselves, others, the universe and God forms the context for our lives and is the water where the ripples emerge. 

"It seems the closer we get to being broken open, the more rawly we experience the muscle of paradox ... inside everything that is breakable, including us, is the one unnamable thing that is unbreakable." - Mark Nepo

I wrote a post for my blog a couple of weeks ago and just didn’t put it out there – I wasn’t exactly sure why. It felt like there was something missing, it didn’t feel complete, it wasn’t ready. And I see now that there was a reason for my hesitation because the world has changed again – as I write I am listening to the constant hum of helicopters and insistent whine of sirens and I’m in a place of rawness. Layers of what I know and patterns of my life are being stripped away. With the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protest and unrest in my city and others around the country I’m left grieving and unbalanced. This is not my pain directly and yet I feel it. This is not my experience directly and yet I’m in it. I wonder how to show up in new ways for my whole community.