A New Week | May 24th
What leadership energy do you want to wire and fire in your brain and body this week?
Main question today:
What is your leadership energy? And how are you cultivating it daily?
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It’s a German holiday and I am sitting in a field surrounded by green trees, a huge playground with cheerful children, soccer fields, and a skate park.
When we arrived an hour ago, my husband encouraged me to get a head start on my weekly writing, so I pulled out of the family moment, centered for 5 minutes, did 50 pushups, and sat down next to my notebook in the grass.
Here I remain, soaking in the cold breeze and sunlight, drinking my morning drink. It feels like I’ve already “won” the day. I am quiet and still inside, not because I’ve checked all the boxes on my to-do list (the traditional metric for “productivity” many of us use), but because I’ve prioritized the activities that are most important for me to feel a state of abundant life energy and creative flow:
Got outside and greeted the sun
Moved my body
Kids are active and happy
My husband and I are in sync
I tuned into my somatic energy
As a servant leader to myself, my family, and my clients, this is the place from which I am most fully able to be present, listen, create, and influence.
For the longest time, however, the pressure and expectation to perform prevented me from understanding the importance of personal energy management for my own leadership. My work was never enough, others’ work was never enough, the amount of time in the day was never enough. These conclusions of inadequacy often resulted in a feeling that I wasn’t enough and that neither were those around me, but more important is that these feelings of personal inadequacy and dissatisfaction left me beginning each day anew as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we chase productivity instead of paying attention to what feeds or drains our energy, we never feel whole.
One path to sensing what enlivens you and makes you feel whole, is to pay attention to feelings of pushing versus feelings of pulling.
What many of us do instead of pulling toward us what is energetically (and thus productively) available to us, we push to make it happen. When we push for too long without recharging our batteries, we end up drained, disconnected, and even burnt out. But when we pull, productivity feels more effortless - connections happen, projects flow, and ideas emerge, all the while energizing us rather than draining us of energy.
Question for you:
What is your physical sensation when you pull? What is it when you push?
I sense abundance, attraction, positivity, and tangible outcomes, when I pull things towards me. It’s like I am making a conscious choice to invite things into my life - expected or unexpected. My arms are opening, I get less competitive and more inclusive.
I sense heaviness, lethargy, soreness, and scarcity, when I push for too long. Like I am running out of time always.
There were periods during this pandemic with all kids at home and both Ted and I working full-time where all I was doing was pushing…until I hit a breaking point and took back control. Control over how fast I would let time pass, how I would experience my day, how the many emotions in my household—or in the news—were going to affect me. I couldn’t allow myself to lead my business, serve my people, raise my children, and nurture my love to my husband on low energy. The stakes are too damn high.
For something to change I NEEDED TO CAUSE AN EFFECT, not wait for the pandemic to end, for my business to grow faster, for my husband to say something I needed to hear, for my kids to be more engaged and enjoy life at home 24/7. I couldn’t wait for the effect to happen outside of me so it would impact me. I had to become the cause, the effect, and the impact.
That is leadership. You are the cause, the effect, and the impact. For yourself, and those you serve and love.
Leadership is so much more than accomplishing. It’s bringing an enlightening, promising energy to you and your team to find the resilience, meaning, and personal leadership inside of all of us. And that requires you to prioritize living the activities and commitments that energize you rather than drain you, that feel like pulling rather than pushing.
In today’s book that inspired all of this the 2nd chapter restates all the tasks of leadership.
Envisioning Goals
Affirming and the Re-generation of Values
Motivating
Managing
Achieving Workable Unity
Trust
Explaining
Serving as Symbol
Representing the Group
Renewing
Questions for you:
Which one asks for your attention right away? Which one stood out as you read each of them?
Which emotion did it cause inside of you (not just in your head)?
What’s your next thought?
This list of responsibilities may not be new to you, but it may serve you as another visual representation of how vast and wide the duty is that you uphold every day.
What’s relevant about these leadership responsibilities in this week’s message about energy management? Well, none of them fit on a productivity-oriented to-do list; instead, each requires critical thinking, feeling, compassion, creative compromise, non-violent communication, expectation management, and boundary setting.
Your ability to conduct any of this comes from how YOU lead your life, how YOU see yourself when you wake up in the morning, how YOU meet the daily challenges of running a business, your life, a community, your family. We can only meet others in the way we have met ourselves. These non-productive elements need to find a time in your life to become present, to be understood, re-evaluated, nurtured, and practiced.
They are not just philosophical, they are important strategic elements to build our resilient selves.
This is - at its very core - creative and conscious leadership: to ask yourself how can I and my team bring our whole selves to work while achieving our goals and mission? What am I leaving on the table by ignoring my and everybody else’s emotional state by prioritizing productivity at all costs?
Start your week by asking:
What energy would make today a successful day?
What behaviors might cultivate that energy?
Lean in,
Franzi
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Weekly discoveries and news:
The music I used to focus today: Hang Drum Music for Focus
An embodied moment: long stretches. Stretch parts of your body for 90sec+. Sink into the uncomfortable feeling and find stillness in it. Inhale for 4. Hold for 3. Exhale for 5. We can teach ourselves to find creative compromise if we are willing to sit through the initial pain of emerging conflict. Our body can be our teacher.
A quick announcement:
I am excited to invite 20 people to an exclusive bravespace bootcamp on somatic leadership. It’s a 5 day bootcamp from June 21-25, for 60 minutes each morning running twice per day at 6am Pacific/9am Eastern, and 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern. Think of it like your morning coffee, but stronger and no refill needed. ;)After our last three bravespace events, many of you reached out looking to deepen your understanding of somatic leadership, or the practice of self-healing, and tapping into the deep inner wisdom of the body to improve how you lead yourself and others.
Show up for 5 days to enjoy the game of radical, deep personal growth, where every blind spot discovered is a victory, a mapping of new expansion territory.
If you want to reserve on of the few spots ($20 for the entire bootcamp) before the launch, send me an email at franzi@venturesome.co.
A book: The Go-Giver. Simple 150 pages on reversing the idea of the go-getter and becoming a successful business person by illuminating the principles of contribution, abundance, service, and success.
A thought: The more I read, the more I come back to the same books with a new, maturing perspective. Each time the same pages mean something else; I see a new truth. What a beautiful metaphor for life and our need to change perspective on the things we encounter frequently.
A personal moment:
In my meditation corner: We didn’t become astronauts to play it safe. A special present we received from our friend Kevin a long time ago. An evergreen reminder of the spirit in our home.