Getting behind the younger generation this week

Lyedie here, From my blue chair.

Are you getting behind the younger generation this week?

They are speaking up. They are rising up. They are transforming their grief into activism. They need and deserve our steadfast support.

I thought I was going to take the Daily Activist’s Log down today, but I can’t bring myself to do it. The timing is all wrong. Strengthening our activism is more important than ever and the voices of students in Parkland, Florida have sparked my activism this week.

Reading the news, my resolve has kindled up once again — inflamed by the oxygen in the voices of:

• Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky and Sam Zeif demanding the right to be safe in school.

• Chase’s teacher who is carefully tracking who is falling through the cracks in her class’s social life and then working to break the code of disconnection early and often.

• Heather Sher boldly describing the damage an AR -15 does to the human body.

• Arthur Brooks naming contempt as a problem in American politics.

• Michael Ian Black identifying the emotional suffering of boys in our culture.

In the last 10 days each of these people took up a role in repairing and strengthening the cloth of our democracy, the democracy that we grew lazy about protecting.

Whose voices kindled your resolve this week? What is your thread in the cloth of being a citizen in our democracy? However small or grand your thread might be, make it stronger, more effective, more beautiful.

My thread is delicate and strong and expresses itself in this blog and in the way I get behind my clients in my coaching work every day. This spring I will put the Fulfillment Journal up alongside the Daily Activists Log. My guiding star for this week is activism on behalf of fulfillment.

Please keep strengthening the muscle of your activism. And always remember to make breakfast. Make love. Make some trouble on behalf of beauty, truth, and goodness.

Thank you for everything you do to keep putting power in the hands of love.

Blessings, Lyedie

Your Greatest Resource is . . .Your Attention

Your attention itself is essentially your greatest resource. As I see it, managing your attention well is a key to fulfillment and to developing the resilience we all need in these times. Lyedie
 
It is mid-January. The frenzy of resolution-making is settling down, and I find this to be a good time to hunker down into the basics so as to set a solid trajectory for the year. So please bear with me, and consider your attention itself as a resource — I'm defining attention here as being the flow of the most essential energy particles that you direct (consciously and/or unconsciously) as you move through life. Within this definition, thoughts and feelings are forms of attention.
 
Here are a few questions to help you explore and assess how resourcefully you are working with the essential currency of your own attention. 

1. Locating your attention: Where has your attention been in the last hour? Has it been out the window, on your best friend in high school or, deep in the project you've been working on? Has it been in the past (remembering), the present (now), or in the future (planning)? Have you been directing it, or has it been commandeered somehow?
 
Here is a surprisingly beneficial little practice: Stop yourself a few times a day and just notice where your attention is located. Setting a timer on your smartphone to prompt yourself to take note of this will gently help you awaken to your attention. After all, where your attention is is where you are. Choosing to notice, in and of itself, is an act of taking control and directing your attention.
 
2. Then there is the quality of your attention: What is the quality of attention you are giving to this moment?  Is it focused and penetrating, or is it diffuse and receptive? As you consider these words is your brow slightly furrowed as you engage your focused attention in an effort to understand, or is your brow soft indicating that your quality of attention may be more receptive? What kind of attention you give to what, and when, can make a big difference in the quality of your experience and the quality of what you produce.
 
3. And how do you decide?  How aware are you of your default priorities? Do you tend to put attention on making progress or tending to things?  Do you approach challenges by springing in to action, seeking perspective, fostering others, or nourishing yourself? Which of these areas do you privilege in your approach to life?
 
Getting back to the basics of working with our attention and energy provides foundational support to working effectively with the balance of work - rest - play - collapse that is critical to developing resilience. This can allow for making good contact with the ache of our longings, and then to getting around to fulfilling them. As the prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief, so aptly revealed to to me many years ago, “My favorite class is still Ballet I.”
 
I hope you have found this helpful in some way. If you are looking to make a shift in your approach to life — to developing your resilience and to getting on to fulfilling those longings, click here to learn more about working with me. Or go ahead and just schedule a discovery session with me.
 
Warmly, Lyedie

 

Great Questions

Great questions spring from the mouths of babes. . .

One afternoon, way back when I was a young mother, I was busy putting groceries away and thinking about making dinner when my 7 year old daughter, Sara, burst into the kitchen with a burning question, “Hey Mom! What I want to know is, how come God doesn’t talk to me the way he talked to Noah?”  I knew it was a burning question because of her wide stance and the way she had her hands on her hips. I found out later that her teacher had just read Noah's Ark to the class in school that day.

My first response was internal, ‘Damn, he never talks to me the way he talked to Noah, either!’ Then I managed to slow down and stop bustling around in the kitchen. We had a talk about the Bible's booming voice of God and I started to articulate for her, and for myself, the many ways that God "speaks" to us.  Sara’s question has reverberated in my life for years. I’m so grateful that she asked it and that I stopped long enough to listen. For the life of me I can’t remember what I cooked for dinner that night.

Initially, Sara’s question roused me to examine the masculine voice of God that so often prevails my western Judeo-Christian lineage. Her question was what prodded me into discovering the feminine face of God. It led me to wondering, ‘How is it that we just Know? What senses inform me? How accurate is my interpretation of what I intuit? How can I tell? How could I have missed that? From where do I feel enough certainty to act?’ Since that day you could say I’ve been on a quest to “listen” (active mode) and to “hear” (receptive mode) more, better.

Eventually it led me to my interest in leadership.  In graduate school and subsequent trainings I specialized in the nature of creativity, innovation and emergence and the multifaceted aspects of what constitutes authority. Now the focus has evolved into seeing how Noah’s brilliant response to massive flooding is a story about a leader who innovated because he had a glimpse of the highest future and he managed to act on it. All of this lofty business translates directly into practical application in my daily coaching and facilitation practice. Yes! Now almost thirty years later, I can trace all that back to my little girl’s great question. And I'm still, always, honing my listening skills.

Great questions. They show up in our lives in the darnedest places, when we least expect them. The trick is to recognize them and to open to letting them reverberate and inform us. Tracing the reverberation can reveal the narrative of your life and give you a strong glimpse of what is calling you forward.

What is calling you forward?

What might you need to let go of to move toward that calling?

What action will it require?

What joy will it bring?

When questions like these start to burn in you, contact me.  I can help you cross into the next chapter of your adventure.

Gratitude For the Life of Maya Angelou

This week Maya Angelou departed from this world for another . . . Thank you Maya, for having the courage to recover your voice in the midst of adversity and express such beauty, truth and goodness while you were here.

On The Pulse of the Morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spelling words
Armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The river sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the tree.
Today, the first and last of every tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name,
You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
Then forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of other seekers--
Desperate for gain, starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the tree planted by the river,
Which will not be moved.
I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours--your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me,
The rock, the river, the tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
Into your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.                                                                           

                              Maya Angelou (Written for the occasion of Bill Clinton's Inauguration in 1993)

Leading With Grit and Grace

In the field of Leadership, the rise of the feminine is causing a deep rumble. Emotional intelligence is gaining perceived value. Communication skills, and the capacity to build shared meaning and purpose in our places of work, are more widely recognized as critical to success. Women are taking up leadership more firmly, with more compassion and more radiance than ever before.

We are “leaning in” at work, as Sheryl Sandberg describes, and we are still carrying the lion’s share of responsibility for the quality of life for our families. “A record 40 percent of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family,” the Pew Research Center reported in May of 2013, as it released data that certainly won’t surprise many Americans but underscores some dramatic shifts over recent decades.The juggling act that each of us performs in our own private lives is actually a societal and cultural developmental edge. We are on the front lines of a massive experiment in life with less-clearly defined gender roles; the stakes are high, the gains and the losses are very real, and there doesn’t appear to be any going back.

Particularly when working with women, I help them to step forward into the challenge of this experiment in their work and personal lives. Using developmental models, I map out the stages of life and help you to find your place so that you can broaden your perspective on the unfolding narrative. With current and ancient wisdom concerning the masculine and feminine applied to leadership theory, I help you hone your directive/assertive and supportive/receptive aspects and to bring them into a powerful balance. I point you in the direction of what is essential and true to you. While I draw on the successes and failures of my own life, I rely on Integral methodology and many years of research and personal development to help women find their way.

• How do you navigate the demands of your work and personal life without succumbing to Superwoman Syndrome?

• How effectively do you stand up for what you know?

• Do you know when to stand down?

• How tenacious is your follow through?

• Does being authentic and strategic feel at odds to you?

• What do you listen for?

• Do you know how and when to give direction and support?

• Are you able to initiate and foster real and fruitful dialogue?

• How much quiet do you allow yourself?

• Have you discovered the value of silence?

Together we explore questions such as these along with the specific ones you bring to the table.

Together we hold the paradoxes until the contradictions begin to shift and wane, giving rise to the opportunity for transformation.

Together we discover more and more about your leadership style, and what is essential to you; we build your capacity to lead your life with grace and grit.