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This "Wild & Precious Life"

Community Starts within Us All

10/30/2024

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“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” – Henry Melville
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.

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Practice Happens in Our Bodies!

9/30/2024

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"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).

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The Key to Leadership is Being Present and Aware!

6/30/2024

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“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. ​

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True Belonging Starts Within Us

5/27/2024

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"You only are free when you realize you belong no place - you belong every place - no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great." – Maya Angelou
​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 …​

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Self-Compassion: The Way to Heal Ourselves!

12/31/2023

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“What if we know that forgiveness and mercy are what heal and restore and define us, that they actually are the fragrance that the rose leaves on the heel that crushes it?” 
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—Anne Lamott
Phew! The holiday madness has come and gone (in fact, it will certainly be in the past when you read this since I posted a version of it in the waning hours of 2023) and we are now a week into 2024. Interestingly, my plan for this blog post (fourth month of blogging in a row, just saying 😉) has been to write about self-compassion. And New Year’s weekend I got multiple messages about compassion and mercy. For one, I heard an interview with Anne Lamott on MPR – her words of wisdom for the new year were simple, rest more and laugh more, As she says “Peace is joy at rest and joy is peace on its feet.” For me, this is important advice that I rarely heed. Instead I get stuck in my daily beatdowns, “what have I done wrong? what have I not done enough of? what is wrong with me? How am I not measuring up?”

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The Both/And of Transformation ...

9/29/2023

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​“Change is inevitable, but transformation is by conscious choice.” – Heather Ash Amara
I’m in a season of big changes. In the last month and a half, I moved two of my four children to their next adventure, one son to Colorado State in Fort Collins, the other son to Northwestern University in Evanston. My oldest son has been adulting in Chicago for over a year now, so this was the first summer without a full family vacation. My youngest daughter is now the only one living at home (she misses the brothers). It’s a lot of change and that’s just my family change. In my business I’ve hired a new assistant (welcome Josie!) while facilitating National Women’s Impact Leadership Institute (NWILI), the leadership program Stephanie Shivar and I launched in February of this year, and I am continuing to grow my coaching and consulting practice. All this change has got me thinking about transition and transformation.

Transitions are ongoing, happening in almost every moment. They involve micro-decisions (is now the time to grab a bite to eat or stay the course with plowing through email or writing this blog post or is it time to take the dog for a walk or maybe even get the Wordle done 😀) and while it seems like they should be easy or at least get easier, I’ve found that’s not the case.

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One Year (And A Month) Later ...

6/25/2021

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"We must proclaim the truth that all life is one and that we are all of us tied together. Therefore it is mandatory that we work for a society in which the least person can find refuge and refreshment." Howard Thurman

Preface … I wrote this post a month ago – and then I didn’t put it out there. Throughout this month I’ve read and re-read it, edited it, sent it off to a trusted friend and still I’m hesitating. In the midst of my hesitation, I got curious – what is going on, why am I waiting? And I realized that I’m feeling vulnerable – I’m not sure how this will land, I’m not sure it’s “right” whatever that means. So here goes – I’m posting it as I wrote it (plus some ongoing editing), stepping into my discomfort – it feels like a metaphor for what’s next for me as I take a look at my post-pandemic life – what’s next is getting present and curious, breathing, experimenting and living into the moments even if they are uncomfortable and I’m not sure how they are going to go.

Post … What is it about birthdays and anniversaries – there is a ritual and comfort in marking the time and the people in our lives. Late May has always been a busy time for me with my birthday and my late dad’s birthday just one day apart, plus the Memorial Day holiday. This year there was another layer with commemorating George Floyd’s killing and all that that heinous act has brought to light and triggered around the world. How do we sit with the memories and the grief of the loss of this past year? 

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What Is Our Ripple Effect?

1/31/2021

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“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. 

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I Am Here

10/16/2020

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"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 have never been much of a meditator, in fact I had decided a few years ago when it seemed like everyone was talking about mindfulness that I simply couldn’t do it because my attention continually wandered! Then when I took up a sitting practice as part of Presence-Based Coaching training I was taught that the whole point of meditation is to bring my attention back – that’s the muscle I’m building! I can do that! And once I practiced, I began to see the impact of slowing down enough to be present in my own body, truly with myself at least once a day. This practice stretches time and allows me to be still – it’s changed me and lets me drop down into my own knowing. As Glennon Doyle says in her recent book Untamed  “I can know things down at this level that I can’t on the chaotic surface.”

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Breaking Patterns

5/31/2020

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"Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?" - Martin Luther King Jr. #GeorgeFloyd
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.


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    Caroline Cochran, PhD is a Certified Presence-Based® Coach and a Leadership Development Consultant with over 25 years of experience.

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