2019 was a really fantastic year. In July, I took the leap to working for myself full time. I've learned an incredible amount in the last six months about so many things. From running a business, to delivering keynote addresses, to working with a wide variety of organizations on all kinds of issues, I feel like I've absorbed more in the last year than I have in a long time.
By far, the people I have learned the most from this year are my coaching clients. They have taught me lessons with such grace and grit, and I will forever cherish what they have taught me. And I feel not only obligated but extremely humble to share what I have learned from them here: 1) Mindset matters: People often find a coach because they need to make a change. And often this change is not easy. It involves vulnerability, risk, emotional exposure, and putting oneself out there in ways that can feel scary. With so much potentially at stake, it's no wonder that many people can feel stuck or unstable or paralyzed. The clients I have worked with who have successfully gotten through this are the ones who are able to look at the situation in another way. While what they want to accomplish seems huge, they believe to their core that they can do it, they will do it, and they deserve the change they are trying to make. They ask, "Am I stuck, or am I on the edge of getting everything that I've wanted?" My clients have taught me that a shift in mindset makes the biggest difference when it comes to making a big change. 2) Run to, not from: This is not a new concept. It's probably a lesson you've learned more than once in your own career. But what I learned from my clients this year is that the joy of running to something with arms wide open will make you want to do it again and again. I don't mean switching jobs over and over. But that if you run with joy to a new career, you are more likely to run with joy in other areas of your life: health, spirituality, relationships, etc. Running this race instead of the rat race just makes you want to keep running to and not from the places in your life that require you and your attention. 3) Know your values: I cannot say enough about the value of knowing your values. You can use them to make decisions, to take the temperature on how your life is going, and to articulate who you are to people who need to know. My clients have taught me that knowing your values means you are more likely to live them, and that actively using them in your everyday life can make huge shifts from relatively small actions. 4) Cast a net or find focus: This year, I learned from my clients that people have different preferences for approaching a potential transition. Some people love to gather a bunch of information, meet a wide variety of people, and map out and consider all of their options before starting to narrow things down. Other people find that terrifying. They would rather pull on a few specific threads and see where they lead. Knowing whether or not you are the person who would rather cast a wide net or narrow in to find focus can help you structure your next big change. 5) Start small: Again, change can seem huge. Like you are standing at the bottom of a gigantic mountain, looking up at the top that seems miles away. And when approaching change most people want to start with "How do I get to the top?" But what I learned from my clients this year is that it's much easier and more productive to ask "What do I need in order to take one step?" The mountain will always be there. The goal is not to get to the top, but to enjoy the journey. And to do that, each step, no matter how big, makes a difference. I am incredibly grateful to all of my clients, partners, collaborators, friends, and family who made this year possible. I'm so excited to see what 2020 will bring and where it will take us. I'm looking forward to continuing this journey with you.
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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:
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. Hey! If you are already here at the blog, you might as well sign up for the newsletter! It will appear in your inbox (about) every other month. Check out what I've been up to and subscribe!
https://mailchi.mp/32a41a671ccf/trailblazer-leadership-newsletter-november 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! Today is the day. It's finally here. I feel like I've been waiting for this day for years and it also feels like this is happening so fast.
Today is my first day full time with Trailblazer Leadership. This business that I have been growing and nurturing over the last year is launching with some exciting things ahead. Just as it has felt slow and fast at the same time, it also feels terrifying and exhilarating, peaceful and chaotic. I feel so clear and also so uncertain at the same time. And all of that tells me I'm exactly where I need to be. Working for myself is, in a way, a step back towards one of my original career choices. After graduating from the Humphrey School, I worked at an incredible consulting organization where we worked on capacity building projects with organizations all over the country. One of my favorite projects was a partnership with PolicyLink to design a year of learning for the civic engagement grantees for the Kellogg Foundation. That's the kind of consulting work I plan to do again through Trailblazer Leadership and I can't wait to see what's ahead. I'm particularly interested in exploring how I can bring a living systems mindset to leaders and organizations, and how we can use the lessons we've learned from nature on how to develop more humane and regenerative organizations, policies, and systems for a different way of being. I'm also excited about the coaching part of my business, which is growing like crazy. I love working with my clients to explore their opportunities and to build the courage and confidence to just take the next step to see what emerges. My current clients are all at different stages in the careers and at different points of exploring their values and what makes them tick. I'm intentionally weaving emotional intelligence both into my approach and the practices I utilize with clients. And I've got some really complex and rich training and facilitation opportunities coming up. I'm learning that I'm gaining a reputation for working with leaders and organizations who need to have difficult conversations. These conversations range from structure to funding and other potential decisions that may have huge impact on organizations and the people who care about them, to identity, trust, vulnerability, and other conversations that are often hard to have with those we love, let alone those we work with. Even as I read everything I just listed above, I feel like I need to pinch myself and verify that all of this is real. Part of me feels so incredibly lucky, privileged, and potentially unworthy to be doing this. And the other part of me feels like this has always been an inevitable place where my career would lead me. I'm so incredibly grateful to the friends, colleagues, mentors, elders, and family who have provided the support and the security to allow me to take this leap. It's much easier to make the jump when you have faith that if you fall your community will catch you. Here's to what's next. I'm part of a women's group that meets monthly. We talk about everything, but it's a group with purpose. We process what's happening in our lives, we explore our core values, we have tough conversations about what's holding us back, we support each other through the difficult times, and we nudge each other to take risks to live the lives we desire. We share meals, take turns hosting, and rotate who leads the conversation each month. I feel so lucky to be part of an amazing group of women like this who want to intentionally to walk through life together.
Our facilitator this month brought several prompts for us to think about, and we were supposed to speak to the one that called to us the most. There were phrases such as, "First, honor the divine." Or questions like, "Why not now?" I knew the one I would choose immediately when I saw it: "Metamorphosis is the process of intentional destruction." This concept doesn't just speak to me right now. I FEEL it in my bones. I have been intentionally destroying some paradigms in my life that have gotten me this far but are no longer serving me. And this kind of breaking down in order to build something new is not neat and clean. It can't be planned out. It feels messy and disruptive and murky. And I'm really uncertain about what will happen next. At several stressed out moments, I have asked, "What the heck am I doing?!? Why would I blow up my life like this?" I was describing this to one of my mentors, and she asked, "Is it that you are blowing up your life, or is it that you are at the early stages of transformation? What would nature tell you about what you are experiencing?" Nature tells us to get purposefully messy before beauty emerges. It tells us we have to cause a little chaos in order for the new path show itself. Or, in a very unscientific description of the process, we have to make bug soup in order to have what's next. Because it is intentional destruction it means that we HAVE to go through this phase in order to get to the next. There's no clean way through this. The only way out is through. And so we have to destroy somethings that we know or believe or are holding on to for the next phase of our lives. This is how emergence happens. This is natural and occurring around us constantly. What if we handled this the way nature does, easing into our intentional dissolving 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. What paradigms are you bringing down in order to bring out the new? What are you decomposing so that something can grow? What transformation in your life is asking you to let go and ease into it? What do you need to move through in order to have what's next? The 2019 Nonprofit Leadership Conference is on June 13th this year at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota. And I'll be co-presenting two great sessions at the conference this year!
First, I'll be presenting with my good friend Erik Jacobson, donor engagement officer at Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative AND founder of his own awesome company, Lulo. Erik and I met through the iPEC coaching training program, and we LOVE to talk about nonprofit leadership anytime, anywhere. So you better believe we are going to bring all of our energy to our 8:00 am session Skip The Coffee! Shift Your Nonprofit's Energy Naturally. At this session, you'll get a glimpse of the energy levels that you have within your power to use as a nonprofit leader, and how that energy directly affects the actions and behaviors at your nonprofit organization. After the morning keynote, I'll be back with my awesome colleagues from the Public and Nonprofit Leadership Center to present our session on Navigating Systems Change at 11:00 am! We've created a session that will engage your brain and your body in what it's like to be part of complex system and help you realize your impact in that system through the way you show up. We promise it will get you thinking and talking right up until lunch time! I'm excited for ALL of the sessions at this awesome conference. It's truly one of my favorite conferences of the year. I hope that you'll stop by these sessions or say hi if you are there! It's winter here in Minnesota. We are currently covered in more than two feet of snow. Spring may be around the corner, but it feels very far away. I'm craving the company of green, living things. My house plants are doing their best, but I can't wait to walk through a lush forest of leaves again soon. When you are overwhelmed with snow, there is no better book to turn to than the illustrated edition of The Hidden Life of Trees. This is a seriously gorgeous book. Is nature porn a thing? If so, this is it. You can't help but be captivated by these pictures of trees from all over the world. I put a little video below, flipping through some of the incredible pages so you can see for yourself. Peter Wohlleben used to be a forester. He looked at trees as a commodity, lumber to be sold. But then he started to pay attention to the trees. He's no treehugger, but he has collected what he has learned about his experience with trees into this beautiful book. Now, Wohlleben manages a forest in his country of Germany on behalf of the community. Brain Pickings has an excellent summary of the unillustrated version of the book, and you can read an NPR review of the book or listen to the author himself talk about trees as social creatures. I often look to nature for lessons on how to live a better life. We are surrounded by tall, 200 year old teachers who we can learn a lot from about our own humanity. Here are some things I learned from this book I believe we as humans have the potential to replicate for our own growth and sustainability:
There is so much more I could say, but I promise you that if you were to pick up this book yourself, you would not be disappointed. |
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