Truth and Consolation

Everything in the first list is true. Everything in the second list is also true. TRUTH Life is hard.* You are not important. Your life is not about you. You are not in control. You are going to die CONSOLATION Yes, it’s hard. It’s also joyful and magnificent. Which do you choose to focus on?

Poem for a Sunday Morning

The Peace of Wild Things {Wendell Berry} When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the

#45 – Integrity

“The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more one fully enters into the communion of all creatures.” {Wendell Berry} When my daughter was in elementary school one of her classrooms had the following sign over the door: THE DOOR OF INTEGRITY: I am responsible for everything I think, say, do and

Make Other People Powerful

This is what the best leaders do. They discover, with relentless curiosity, each team member’s sweet spot – what they are especially equipped to do – and then they create the conditions for them to do it freely and expansively. Like the arousing final lines in Hafiz’s great poem, the “beautiful rowdy prisoners” are at

The Paradox of Freedom

The things that free you also bind you. It is a sad cliché that the prisoner, finally freed after years of confinement, has a difficult time adjusting to his new reality. In the face of so many possibilities – so many necessary daily choices and responsibilities – a highly routinized lifestyle dictated by someone else’s

Set Them Free

The small man Builds cages for everyone He Knows. While the sage, Who has to duck his head When the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long For the Beautiful Rowdy Prisoners. ~ Hafiz Today, will you build more cages or drop more keys? The “small” leader needs to control because he feels

Freedom to Create, Freedom to Lead

Those who allow themselves to be challenged and changed will be the new creative leaders of the next period of history. {Richard Rohr} The disciplines of creativity and leadership require freedom from the limitations that stem from our undeveloped, unexamined selves. You cannot be creative if you are continuously second-guessing yourself, consumed by concern about

What they want

“They” are your team. You are their leader. This is what they want: Meaning. Also known as “purpose” and “vision.” When they say, “I want to be part of something larger than myself!” this is what they’re talking about. Trust. I once heard a leader say, “They have to earn my trust.” The only acceptable response to

It Can Be Done Another Way

I find it easy sometimes to get stuck on how something should be done versus how something can be done. Preferences for certain actions can blind us to the fact that a chosen behavior is indeed preferential and not the only option. We have some large palm trees in our front yard and occasionally a frond will snap and fall

#500

On May 14, 2007 I uploaded my first blog post. It was this poem – The Journey – by Mary Oliver: One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice– though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old