It’s not easy right, to reveal what’s hidden. Sometimes because we don’t know. Sometimes because of unconscious bias or blind spots. Sometimes because we feel to vulnerable or don’t want to reveal. There have been a few posts recently here on LinkedIn about how changing gender from female to male has dramatically changed the way...
You may recognise this phrase if you’ve ever done a slightly edgier personal development programme. From experience, when the activity is explained it can make the heart quail (mine did/does), at least a little (even for those who can dance, though proficiency isn’t the point). Yet, slowly, embarrassed shuffling becomes something freer, more essential, as...
You are doing battle every day. Sometimes it can feel like a constructive use of energy. Sometimes it can feel hopeless. How often do we stop to really ask ourselves just what we are battling for? Heroes, knights and mercenaries all had/have their reasons for their battles. As leaders we are more than mindless cogs...
We might interpret gaps as negatives, a lack of, a hole to be filled, a deficit. Gaps in a usually busy diary might cause anxiety. Am I needed? Working hard enough? Is there a problem? We can obsess when others have knowledge or skills we feel we don’t. A gap. I am learning to think...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the call of surrender and how it brings the opportunity, indeed the requirement, to let go and accept what is. In the past few weeks, I have learnt even more. It cannot be half hearted, intellectually driven or conceptual. True surrender requires everything of us. It wants us...
Routines, habits, life-acquired filters. They’re helpful in managing the day to day. On the other hand, rigidly adhered to, never examined for value, they become blinkers, or worse, blindfolds, blocking the light of higher possibility. The world shifts, its issues ever more pressing, our perspective stays stuck. We operate solo, and as organisations, on autopilot....
When the original 13 colonies merged to form a single US nation the founding fathers adopted the motto E Pluribus Unum – out of the many, one. Notwithstanding the challenges the US and all of us around the world face from division and polarisation isn’t this motto – which speaks so powerfully and inspiringly to...
For various reasons I’m being called on to surrender in my life. Not easy when you are used to taking responsibility, figuring things out, having an insight that guides. Surrender, at least for me can feel like giving up, giving in, being weak. And yet as I have sat with it more, I realise in...
On the whole when discussing the many aspects of leadership we don’t speak much about true intuition or the help that might be available to us by ‘reading the tea leaves’. Walking the cliff path in Cornwall this past week and using the time – while battling the wind and ‘enjoying’ the steep inclines and...
I’m deeply grateful that I get to not only talk about building a culture of psychological safety within leadership teams but also help them to build it. And that usually entails some exploration of vulnerability. It’s funny really because working on resilience from the perspective of ‘being strong’ feels like safer territory for many in...