A Leadership of Nurturance and Nourishment

I take a morning walk each day. Usually, it’s early — say between 6:30 and 7:30 — when I step outside and head to my favorite cafe for a mocha and time talking with a group of us who meet every day. I head out toward the park, and each morning pass my favorite tree. Some days, especially summer days, it is foggy here in the city. The past few days were sunny and warm. Today we were back to fog again.

On my walk, as I pass under trees and smell their fragrance, often things come to me unexpectedly. Insights and understandings, as well as images of visions for things I want to create. It’s a form of meditation for me — being with nature in quiet as the day awakens me to awaken as well.

This morning, I saw something so beautiful; not out here in the physical world but in my mind’s eye. I saw how each human being has so much to offer to this world. Each one of us has a genius we’ve come to offer. And we need every human being’s genius offered into this world. When we get to do this — when we are free to be ourselves and create in the way we were created to — the grand array of life unfolds as intended. And when this happens, life is joyful. It can be joyful even when there are difficulties. But it is joyful because all voices are being known, every song is being sung, the wisdom and beauty of life itself have room to unfold.

I feel this. That there is a great thrust of life that longs to come into existence. Longs to be known. But we humans have created systems and ways that systematically shut down many peoples’ genius. The systems and structures in place don’t function in a way that supports people to live out their potential.

I see leadership as a powerful force for change in this world because it can, if we become leaders who know how to do this, support the unfolding and evolution of humanity’s genius and potential. And what I know is that this true genius and potential are aligned with the genius and potential of life itself when it comes from within — not from the over-fretting and judgmental mind, but from the deeper aspects of each person. It’s where our creativity, which is simply our essential nature and genius — arises out of.

I see leadership as a source of nurturance that strongly and tenderly supports each person to come to self-acceptance, self-honoring, self-dignity, self-compassion, and the very powerful lived understanding of one’s innate self-worth. If we know we are worthy. If we know dignity and honor. If we find compassion and acceptance for who we are — foibles and all — we begin to trust and have faith in that which moves within us, and we begin to find the courage to share it with the world.

I see leadership as a source of nourishment — feeding and bringing back to life and health the places within people that have atrophied for lack of trust, love, and caring. We all have these places within us.

I see leadership ultimately as an offering of love to a world that has forgotten how very much we are loved by existence itself.

Each of us is a system of wholeness. When we hold ourselves and others as whole, and the system within begins to feel itself held, what was once resisted within has the chance to be liberated within. As leaders, we help a human being’s system remember it is whole.

As leaders, we must come to know this within our own lives. All of this. The dignity, the honoring, the compassion and acceptance, the lived experience of a self-worth that is rooted deeply in the ground of our own existence. And when we lead others from this place, we come to know a kind of love for existence that is quite beautiful.

This is what I do. I guide and support you to be this leader.