After a month of focusing on self/feelings/sacredness/work, we’re allowing a different aspect of being an interdependent leader take the focus: how we handle complexity and mess.
(New here? This is the intro to the six-month cycle)
Those of you who’ve been around for a while know that I’m fascinated by the lenses adults can develop to look at the wild uncertainty of reality.
How we can (but don’t always do) move from wanting to just be a good belonger, to standing out for solving specific problems, to being inspirational and focusing on outcomes, to then despairing at how everything ELSE is broken and wondering who the hell we are and what we’re here to do, to finally finding some kind of peace as we zoom further in and further out of what’s happening around us.
This month I think I’m holding a few things gently (and I’d love if you joined me):
Patterns
What is this an example of? What does it remind me of?
Time
What length of time am I seeing this through? What happens if I zoom more into the immediate moment? What happens if I delve into the deep past that lead us here? What future timelines am I aware of - and how far forward am I thinking?
Empathy
Who do I have empathy with and how deeply do I allow that empathy to go? Who do I NOT have empathy with and what effect does that have?
Ways of knowing
Which ways of knowing do I sit in out of habit? Can I allow other ways of knowing to be added in? Where do I have certainty/fundamentalism? How do I know what I know? What else might be true? What does my body know? What does younger me know? What does Big Me know? What are non-human people telling me - the plant people, the animal people? What hunches or instincts am I listening to or ignoring?
A friend asked me a while ago about what was missing in ‘leadership’ education. I said I felt like the middle 65% is very well looked after. But the edges - the super macro and the zoomed in micro are often missing.
My hunch is that we’ll get a lot of mileage from looking at the margins this month, the liminal spaces. The quiet, corner-of-the-eye, don’t-look-straight-at-it subtleties. The big, high/deep, sweeping hugenesses.
Let’s see what happens!
As always, let me know if you are using any of these prompts and what they spark for you. Either by replying here or finding me on the socials (I’m @megalightheart everywhere - Insta, FB, Twitter, Medium).
Another world is possible.
PS Support a Black trans author AND do yourself a favour by having a plotty book that will take over your brain - order/pre-order The Library Thief