The Unburdened Leader

Everyone gets angry.   And most people have learned to hide their anger–often at great costs.   There is a LOT of baggage we carry around the emotion of anger.   These burdens come from our faith traditions, culture, family of origin, work, school and inform your relationship with anger today.   We are constantly navigating the many rules of what is ok and what is not ok when it comes to expressin...

We love to be right. So much so, that we often trade being right for being in relationship.   Without relationships, we cannot experience meaningful change because the change we desire is rooted in relationships, not the certainty of being right.   But dang, the expediency and certainty of being right sure are seductive.   Pursuing being right cultivates the tunnel vision of perfectionism which ru...

How you lead yourself impacts how you lead others.   And how you lead yourself and others has a ripple effect in all the spaces you live and work.   It really is that simple. And that important.   Unaddressed pain from difficult life experiences and traumas rob us of our capacity for connection.   Unaddressed burdens of trauma impact how you make decisions on everything from parenting to public po...

  The commitment to being an engaged citizen is a commitment to being an engaged leader.   When you make the choice to invest your energy into staying informed about social and political issues, you are investing in your leadership.   I’m hearing more and more from leaders who are prioritizing leading with justice, equity, and community care in mind. So if the kind of leader you truly want to be m...

Everybody’s carrying a burden that’s weighing them down.   If you dare to care, it is inevitable you will end up carrying the burdens from grief, betrayal, and rejection.   And these burdens are often unseen.   These invisible struggles fuel loneliness, shame, and despair. Eventually, the unaddressed burdens we carry start to impact our ability to live and lead in ways that are important to us. Th...

  Toxic cultures–at home, school, work, in faith communities–make it incredibly hard to do the right thing.   Choosing to risk your reputation or livelihood when you want to move from being a bystander to standing up for what is right is a bind too many face when they want to say ‘no more’ to abuses of power.   Yes, we need to move beyond being passive bystanders and be better allies. Yet I want t...

  We watch leaders crash & burn all the time.   We watch with morbid fascination as leaders fall out of grace because their unaddressed pain led them on an unsustainable path of poor choices–even dangerous and deadly choices–to avoid feeling the vulnerability of rejection.   Those times when you experienced the pain of rejection leave their mark because rejection hurts. Like, physically hurts....

It is time to stop living a divided life.   When your life is divided between home and work, personal and professional, you're vulnerable to all sorts of relationship troubles and everyday friction.   When you separate yourself from your values and see your business and life divided instead of integrated and unified by your purpose and values, you will break from the pressure of it all.   You feel...

  Boundary barriers become leadership barriers.   What gets in the way of setting and maintaining boundaries gets in the way of leading well.   Our polarized culture, along with so many demands on our time and energy, make it so important to get clear on what gets in the way of setting and maintaining boundaries…and what they are protecting.   Do you know what your boundaries are protecting?   You...

Our capacities are at an all-time low.   Between the pandemic and politics and injustice–not to mention our already overflowing lives and schedules–we have access to far fewer resources for staying calm, beating back anxiety, or holding space for others.   It’s in times like these that leaders like you need to know what trips you up--so you can take better care of yourself and continue to lead tho...

Too often, we exile the parts of us that hold complex emotions and difficult parts of our story at the expense of our wholeness. And not respecting our own wholeness in favor of living a compartmentalized life is perpetuated in the spaces we live and lead.   So, we hide away the things that we’ve been taught to believe are not acceptable—and what we hide is often rooted from the soul of what makes...

  Never underestimate the power of your decisions.   Especially the little decisions you make each day.   How you go about making decisions offers so much data about you and what you believe about yourself and the world around you.   Many of us second-guess our decisions because we're unsure of ourselves in the first place. Maybe you underestimate your ability to do hard things or give added weigh...

  Caring about those you lead means caring about the harm you may unknowingly be doing.   Many of us who fit western standards of beauty and live in conventionally abled bodies don't understand how our choices can cause pain. We've internalized ableism and fat-phobia to the point where we can't even grasp how our words & deeds cause harm.   In particular, in the last year, and perhaps for a wh...

  There is nothing safe about catalyzing the much needed changes we need in our world today.   Speaking your truth feels loaded right now. I’m not talking about speaking your truth as a way to say whatever you feel whenever and wherever.   I’m talking about the deep knowing inside of you that is you without the armor, the spin. The you that doesn’t absorb the projections onto you from the world.  ...

The quickest way to crash and burn your business and life is to place your worthiness and safety with the opinions of others.   This may sound like a captain-obvious statement but the pull to care what others think is something fierce. And it is sneaky.   The competitive drive is no stranger to many of you. In fact, it is often the norm.   Honoring your boundaries around healthy competition is har...

  We might want change now—but change is almost always met with resistance.   And resistance to change is, at its core, protective.   Yet, this well-intentioned approach can end up hurting instead of helping especially when the desire to protect is at the expense of the well-being of others.   When we look at the industries that focus around our image, it gets even messier.   I am late to the fash...

  Community over competition is indeed a well-worn hashtag. The cynical can dismiss it. Those beat up by year after year of injustice understandably call BS.   But in practice, leading with the lens of community over competition is subversive and culture-shifting.   Community over competition requires deep life-long work to unburden the load we carry of scarcity and comparison.   In a highly conne...

Our workplaces need more laughter.   Our homes need more laughter.   The world needs more laughter.   And I don’t know about you, but I too need more laughter.   There have been times of late when the smallest thing sets my family into a laugh-fest - usually triggered by something we were watching on TV or something one of us said that just tickled the proverbial funny bone.   This communal laught...

Avoiding controversy for the sake of comfort is not an option for you as you lead, do life, and rumble with all the big and little decisions before you.   Sure, you do not want to contribute to the noise.   You are not looking for a fight (or, like me, you try not to get scrappy just to offload some stress), or to be right just for the sake of being right.   No. You value the big picture. You valu...

Grief is inevitable as it's simply the other side of love.   The more you love, the more grief you feel. It’s inevitable when you’re all in on life and the relationships within it. This is the cost of a life full of love and meaning.   Daring to care means that grief and loss is inevitable.   If we let it, grief can be a powerful teacher. But first? It deconstructs. It disrupts the best laid plans...

  One of the toughest and most important choices for a leader is to look within and do the deep work to heal the echoes of trauma. By looking and healing our past, they lighten the load of their burdens so they can lead themselves—and others—better.   On the contrary, right now, we are watching in real time the dangers of leaders who are not in touch with their humanity and lead with pain, bullyin...

The belief that hope will kill you is a common reason that many people reject the practice of hope in the first place. Most would rather keep the bar low and expect the worst. Protecting yourself with this level of cynicism leads to living a negative, small and joyless life. And we are not here for that. Embracing hope might look dangerous and reckless on the surface, yet, in truth, it is a deeply...

  Instead of making an enemy of your anxiety, you can make a friend out of your anxiety.   This approach to the challenges of living with anxiety—in both your life and business as a leader—helps to turn the fear that comes with anxiety into your superpower.   But if you’re to make friends with your anxiety, you need to understand the story behind its fear and concerns. Anxiety has a mission to pro...

  Over-functioning is the default setting for so many leaders.   They want to fix and rescue everything—and sometimes that looks like working harder than others. But is that truly leading?   Fueled by anxiety, a high sense of responsibility, and a lack of clear boundaries, over-functioning can hijack the best of us. What’s tricky in overcoming over-functioning is that part of your superpower is se...

One of the most challenging aspects of leadership is facing bullies.   …the bullies from our past.   ...the bullies in our present.   ...and the bullies between our ears.   We live in a culture that normalizes—and even elevates—bullies in the name of entertainment. Our culture encourages us to enjoy the suffering of others instead of empathizing with the personal pain of the bullied. Our culture i...