In late August 2020, amidst a pandemic, social uprisings, and increased impacts of climate change, I had a baby. Jade Selene was born at quite a moment in our collective history. So much is happening politically, socially, and environmentally, and the pandemic has thrown how we process time for a loop. While all of this is looming so large, when Jade arrived, my world also got very small. Days are scheduled around feedings and naps and diapers. This has been such an intimate, precious time for my husband and I to be with our child, in what feels like a chaotic period in our lives.

As I watch her every day, I’m struck by all of the changes that are happening in our little world. And it has made me reflect on what I have learned from her when it comes to change and whether there are any lessons for the changes taking place in our communities. I could basically copy and paste the core principles from Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown or the living systems principles from Kathy Allen’s book Leading From the Roots here because they also seem to be the principles of parenting. Coming up on my three short months of motherhood, here are three things that Jade has taught me so far about change:

1) Change comes in spurts: Every few weeks, Jade suddenly looks different to me. She’s bigger, heavier, more expressive, and more alert. Seemingly overnight, holding our little potato felt more like carrying a sack of potatoes. Her growth doesn’t happen on some kind of graceful, linear timeline. It happens in fits and spurts, starts and stops, not at all and then immediately. My normally calm and curious child will turn into a screaming, starving vampire for a few days, only to have grown again in that short time. And each time I turn to my husband and say, “Look at how different she looks again.”

Changes in our movements, organizations, and institutions have never happened in a smooth way either. Ricardo Levins Morales recently wrote a beautiful piece called Between the Waves. He talks about the changes necessary in the police system coming in waves:

​This framing is so helpful to me. I shouldn't expect change to come only when the timing is right. And when change feels like it is in a lull, maybe we are at a moment between the waves.

2) Little actions make big movements: Jade is constantly moving. Her wiggles are the signs of her instinct to crawl. Her little head lifts are practice for when she will start to roll over. She first started batting at toys that were dangled in front of her with clenched fists. Then she started opening and closing her fists around the toys. Now she’s grasping at all kinds of things in her reach. The gradual steps, building muscle and memory, and the constant practice leads to these milestones.

One of my favorite concepts in change work is fractals. Every journey is made up of thousands of steps, and they had to start with the first one. With the urgency of issues that we are facing in the world, we desire big impacts and fast. Sometimes the way to achieve that is through small actions of many people moving in the same direction. Our election process is a good example of this. To elect representatives we trust, who will make decisions in the best interest of the country, who will actively work on the issues that are affecting our communities, we need millions of people to vote for positive change. And mobilizing those voters takes volunteers, activists, and others making phone calls, writing letters, encouraging people to vote early, or driving folks to the polls. These are all of the little actions that lead to big movements.

3) We need to embrace paradox: Before Jade was born, I wondered what kind of mother I would be. Or how being a mother would change my identity. I have sat with how motherhood makes me feel, and I feel two things very strongly, kind of like a Yin and Yang. 

I feel motherhood very gently. I felt soft and warm, sweet, loving, and calm. I feel kind and nurturing. I feel like a blanket.

I also feel motherhood very fiercely. My feelings are sharp, focused and deep. I feel ferocious in my love for her and everything around her. Her presence has made me more ardent about issues that I used to think I already cared passionately about.

These gentle and fierce opposing feelings are not either/or. They do not exist separately from each other. They exist simultaneously, twinning in my relationship to Jade and in my identity as a mother.

For change to happen, we need to embrace paradox. A few weeks ago, Dr. Elizabeth Swain, co-founder and co-director of Climate Interactive, put out a short series of tweets that encapsulate this idea for the climate movement:

​We need individuals and systems. We need urgency and we need time. We need to do things and we don’t have to do everything. It’s both/and.

I will likely share more lessons about change the more that Jade keeps teaching them to me. Until then, I’ll leave you with the most important lesson of all: get some sleep.

In my coaching practice, many of my clients are considering a career transition. The most common question people come to me with is "Where do I even start?" Especially if you have been in the same role or with the same organization for a long time, or if the desire or need for change has come up suddenly, it's completely understandable why you may feel at sea. Knowing you can and want to do something new, you may feel daunted by all of the possibilities: "Where do I go? What do I do? How do I know where to begin?"

These are tough questions! And my role as a coach isn't to answer them, but to provide a framework for exploration so that my clients can discover the answers themselves. In my experience with my clients, I have found that the place to start is often in one of these four areas:

• Values: Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work. They (should) determine your priorities, and, deep down, will probably indicate if your life is turning out the way you want it to. If you are living your values, your family, friends, and colleagues should be able to take a look at your life and reflect your values back to you. What are your values and how do you use them in your career decisions?
• Purpose: I know, this is no small subject. I promise you that taking some time to sit with a question like "Why am I here on this planet?" is well worth your time for contemplation. It's likely your job isn't (nor should it be) the sole avenue for living your purpose. But without knowing your purpose, it's hard to tell whether your career supports it or detracts from it.
• Skills: Throughout a career, we collect all kinds of things that we learned how to do. But, which of these things do we actually LIKE to do? And, frankly, are we actually good at any of them? And maybe there are things that we don't know how to do yet that we'd like to learn. Taking inventory of our skills can remind us of all that we know and what we've dreamed of knowing.
• Environment: I love to ask my clients to envision the work environment in which they thrive. I ask them to imagine, "If I planted myself here, will I grow?" And so what does it look like, sound like, feel like? When making a career transition, we can't forget how important the environment is in addition to things like salary, benefits, and convenience.

​When I meet with clients, we walk through this framework, and while we will eventually talk about all of these areas during our coaching relationship, there is usually one of these areas that stands out. I find that having one place to start makes the whole process feel less insurmountable. And by starting at that one place, it reveals all kinds of answers in the other areas.

If you are contemplating a career transition, consider which of these places might make the most sense for you to start digging in. For instance, have you articulated your values? How would you use them to make decisions around what kind of career move would be best for you? And how would you ensure that you are living your values throughout your career? If you need a coach to help you explore these questions, I can work with you to unearth the answers that are already inside of you.

On August 15, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Essentials Conference. I've pulled the content from that speech into a series of three blog posts on change.

So, if change is constant and you don’t actually make change, that means we need to move from a perspective of making change to creating the conditions for change to happen. This is going with the flow of change. This is doing the honeybee waggle dance. How do we do that?!? What helps us effectively ride those rapids?

Some of these tips come from my own experience, and others come from some of my favorite sources on this topic including Emergent Strategy from adrienne maree brown, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, Leading From the Roots by Kathy Allen, Active Hope by Joanna Macy, and from an organization called Biomimicry for Social Innovation.

• Start small: adrienne maree brown says “Small is good. Small is all.” Things don’t scale immediately. It takes time. My work has actually moved from working on large scale capacity building projects to working one-on-one with people through coaching or with cohorts of leaders. A pearl starts with a single grain of sand. What is your grain of sand?

• Trust people: Easier said than done, right? But funny thing about trust, that it’s much more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than not. Rather than waiting for people to prove themselves trustworthy and then we give them our trust, if we trust people first, they tend to become trustworthy. That takes vulnerability and courage on our part. That relational way we need to create conditions for change to happen? It requires trust. Especially if you find yourself feeling resistance to the rapids, remember to trust.

• Relationship before task: One thing that builds trust is to build relationship. I know. We’re talking about work. And I’m telling you that before you do the work, you have to build relationships. This does not mean you become best friends with your colleagues, but riding the rapids is more fun when you’ve got other people in the boat with you.

• Always lessons, never failure: Every single thing that happens, every rock you run into on those rapids, every time the boat flips, none of this is failure. It’s only an opportunity for you to learn. What if you saw everything as an opportunity, rather than a problem?

• Use emotional intelligence: Remember what I said about our resistance to learning from disruption is often about fear? Well, fear is our amygdala telling us to run or to fight. And we have developed deeply ingrained behaviors all the way from childhood on how we react when faced with fear. Emotional intelligence helps us realize what fear feels like, how to recognize it, and how to create a pause so that it doesn’t take over our brains so that we can be in the moment, stay present, and keep going.

• Assume abundance: Many of the reasons we try to force or control change within organizations because we believe that we have scare resources in order to make it happen. But, if we assume that we, our partners, our organization have abundance - of talent, knowledge, innovation, ingenuity - then our job is not to hoard it, but to unleash it.

• Rest: Tap out to tap back in. It’s ok for it to be someone else’s turn for a while. It’s ok. It’s ok to disengage so that you can re-engage. Self-care is a radical act. Then the most radical thing you can do is nurture yourself.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series!

On August 15, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Essentials Conference. I've pulled the content from that speech into a series of three blog posts on change.

​With nature as our teacher, we have the opportunity to reconnect with our human experience with change. You’ve been riding those perpetual rapids, and you are still here. You’ve already been doing this your whole life. I invite you to do your own little naturalist exploration of your own past for just a few seconds. Think back to the you that you were three years ago. Where were you? What did you look like? What were you doing? What were your priorities at the time?

You already inherently know what it is like to experience change. You are literally experiencing it all the time. This is how change actually happens is: Change is not episodic, it’s constant. Those disruptions I was talking about? They either accelerate the pace for change or shift or nudge its direction. But change is in fact a constant flow. It’s already happening and you are moving with it. Our ability to handle it comes with our ability to move with it and to ride those rapids. 

But that actually requires us to become very comfortable and ok with change. We have to jump in. We have to say yes to riding the rapids. I’m not an experienced white water rafter, but I do know that the easiest way to get hurt or worse when riding rapids is to stiffen up, to try to go against the water, to move away from the flow rather than with it. But I also know the easiest way to drown is to jump in without a boat or just limply be carried away or carried under.

Why do we resist going with the flow of change? The biggest reason is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of failure. Uncertainty, ambiguity. It’s scary. We are not completely in control. We can’t necessarily control the outcome. We can read the river, but we can’t control it. But let’s turn again to mother nature, our greatest teacher. What if we handled this the way nature does, using our intuition to intentionally ride the rapids without really knowing what might happen? What if we let go of the outcome and just let it be? The caterpillar has no clue that it will become a butterfly. The tadpole doesn't know it will become a frog. They don't have a choice in their change. It just is. In nature, these happen all the time. You know what nature doesn’t do? Six months of strategy planning to decide the direction. It does not get stuck in analysis paralysis. It just happens.

You do not make change happen. You can create disruption. But as I’ve already said, that’s not the change. So, that term “change maker”, let it go. You may very well be a disrupter, a shifter, a nudger. But change is happening whether or not you do anything. That river is running. How much do any of us like to be forced to change? What happens instead if we allow change to happen organically?

I have a few favorite examples of organic change from nature, these first two are described in the book Systemic Leadership. If you’ve ever run barefoot on wet sand, you know that when you are running and moving fast, really slapping your feet again wet sand, it feels hard, almost like running on concrete. But, if you stop and just stand there, you will slowly start to sink and your feet will be absorbed by the sand. The sand accepts your presence. You become part of the system. Change should actually disappear within the system. Just notice where you might be doing one or the other. Are you slapping people upside the head with what change you think they should be making? How well is that going? What would it look like to sit with it rather than try to force it?

The other image is birds on a wire. When you see a bunch of birds hanging out on a wire, it’s very rare that they all take off at once. When one of them determines it’s time to move, it will get up and circle away and then come back, then another one will join and they will circle away and come back. A few more join in until all the birds get the hint and the whole flock takes off of the wire.

My third favorite is the way the bees self-organize to collaborate on complex tasks, which you can read about in the book Honeybee Democracy. To select a new colony hive site, a few scouts go out and find a new place, and then come back to the colony to perform a “waggle dance” that shares the site location, quality, etc. When a “quorum” of 15 join the waggle dance, the whole colony moves to a new location. Doesn’t that make change sound like fun?

Where are you resisting the flow of change in your life?

Is there anywhere in your life you are trying to force change to happen? What would happen if you let go of trying to make change?

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this series!

On August 15, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Essentials Conference. I've pulled the content from that speech into a series of three blog posts on change.

If you actually feel or perceive that change is happening faster and more dramatically than it has in the past, you are not wrong. The rate and pace of change has accelerated in many ways. One of the areas this is most obvious is in the tech world. The first iPhone was released in 2007, just 12 years ago. It’s now not only the most ubiquitous technology out there, but it has had huge influence on the tech industry. The ripple effect of the iPhone on communication, banking, music, photography, is enormous. In 2015, several executives in the tech industry got together with the Apsen Institute to talk about what was happening and they have described it as navigating continual disruption. A “disruption” is an event, often unexpected, that interrupts the normal course of events or challenges the unity of something.

So, what happens when we are living in an era of continual disruption? When we have an unexpected, unity challenging event basically all the time? It requires us to radically change our views of the world and embark on a very painful transition that will significantly effect us in the short term. As humans, we have an almost infinite capacity to rationalize why responding to disruptive challenges is not necessary. In the tech world, those that didn’t respond went away. Does anyone remember the Zune? I had a Zune. 

What are disruptions in the nonprofit sector? What are the unexpected unity challenging events that affect our work? Often, these can be changes in policy or the funding environment, like when funders change their strategic priorities or when the business model of longstanding funders like the United Way no longer works. Or in times of recession when demand for our services come at the same time when funding becomes constrained. 

But disruptions are not all bad. We often need disruption. We need it to challenge the status quo. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have been important disruptions to the unity of white supremacy and patriarchy. We need disruption when we need to make important shifts in the ways that we do our work. They are the things that cause disequilibrium, discomfort, which is actually the place where growth happens, where new ideas and innovations emerge. 

Sometimes we need to challenge our previously held conceptions of the world. A disruption is not change in and of itself. It is the catalyst to accelerate or shift the course of change. And in almost all realms of our modern lives, both professional and personal, these disruptions are happening on a constant basis.

A metaphor that is often used for people in organizations experiencing this kind of continual disruption is permanent white water. This was first introduced by Peter Vaill, in Learning as a Way of Being. Here’s how he describes it:

“Most managers are taught to think of themselves as paddling their canoes on calm, still lakes. . . . They’re led to believe that they should be pretty much able to go where they want, when they want, using means that are under their control. Sure there will be temporary disruptions during changes of various sorts–periods when they’ll have to shoot the rapids in their canoes–but the disruptions will be temporary, and when things settle back down, they’ll be back in the calm, still lake mode. But it has been my experience . . . that you never get out of the rapids. . . . The feeling is one of continuous upset and chaos”

I have a feeling, whether you are a manager or not, this feeling is familiar to you. That maybe in your work, or in another part of your life, you are riding perpetual rapids. 

Where in your life are you riding perpetual rapids? What does it feel like?

Where in your life do you NEED some disruption? What needs to shift or be challenged?

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of this series!