This week’s essay is dedicated in part to Harris. Harris is an incredible man, father, and solopreneur I’ve been coaching for the last little while.
He recently became a dad of two beautiful sons, while finding his footing in the new business he’s growing, and through both of these experiences also developing a closer relationship with himself and his tendencies.
During one of our recent sessions, we performed a somatic practice focused on recognizing what his body had experienced after a recent crucial conversation. Somatic self-awareness and reflection are powerful tools for fine-tuning our width and depth in challenging, unexpected, and even sad moments. By tuning into our body’s signals, we can transcend the reactive state spurred by our primal emotions and become more conscious of our actual choices.
Upon centering into his body and us focusing on the leadership lessons from his recent crucial conversation, he surprised himself: “It’s getting lighter by moving through it“.
It’s not that this isn’t obvious to all of us who’ve faced challenging truths before and felt lighter afterward, or that this is a revolutionary statement.
And yet, it holds such significance in the way we can allow ourselves to settle into the rites of passage - big and small - life has to offer us.
Just in the last week, I had conversations with humans I get to work with about:
- being replaced at the helm of their own organizations
- leaving an executive role unexpectedly
- a company restructuring and understanding whether the new org is in line with personal values
- facing a lot of pressure to be on top of the game while also really feeling the mom guilt increasing
- choosing a new exciting role and learning how to take up the kinda of space that will honor personal capacity and promise personal genius to unfold (as well as leading with a healthy sense of urgency in a culture of “being on all the time“)
- moving a family across countries with pure excitement, while recognizing the immense emotional labor that will bring on top of everything else
These are all such real challenges. And sometimes there is no other way than “moving through it.” We can’t make them prettier than they are. The obstacle is the way.
Yet, there is one thing that makes any challenge and everything that you are moving through right now feel so much more capacious, grounded, and growth-oriented:
Understanding yourself and your own relationship with change before, during, and after.
So let’s unpack that for a moment:
Before: How you make decisions (slow or fast, impulsive or well versed), your historical relationship with change, your relationship to spontaneity, your relationship with control, your desire for shared thinking vs isolation before big decisions, etc.
During: How you manage the transition, the angst or joy of letting go, allowing grief (or not), in-the-moment processing or rushing through it, desire to talk through it while it’s happening, or rather not talk at all, etc.
After: Your need to integrate change, how fast or not you are moving on, your body’s responses to catching up on change, your need for action or rest after big moves, etc.
Tapping into our historical “relating” to change and transition has the major advantage that we stop listening to generic advice on change, productivity, best practices, or stereotypical consultant advice. As leaders, we learn that we need to adapt our systems and ways of handling change to how we are currently able to adapt to it. We have to get out of our own way.
The reason why I am bringing Harris into the mix this week is that no matter where you struggle, no matter where you hinder your own success, and no matter what it is that makes a change, transition, or integration hard for you, one thing is universally available to all of us. It’s almost like spiritual insurance if you will:
It gets lighter as we move through it.
The mountain peaks and valleys of transition are demanding, but the intelligence of our body and nervous system knows how to move us through it. That is, if we can access the tools that help us transcend reactivity and access our bodily wisdom.
"Lighter” doesn’t mean life becomes easier, less complex, or less frightening. But “lighter” does mean that you have an inner trust, a faith that your body will keep you safe enough to move consciously through challenges with a sense of choice and agency: to take one day at a time, to slow down when we have to, to make moves and speed up when we need to, to stop ourselves and breathe deeply when thoughts are racing, or to remind ourselves of the grand willpower that lives inside of us by sprinting up the hill several times.
“Lightness” means listening to and acting upon the non-negotiables signaled by our bodies’ accumulated wisdom and spiritual backbone, rather than external impressions or our preconditioned minds.
Perhaps “lighter” means that there is a new perspective on life waiting for us, something that despite all our discipline and perfect performance humbles us deeply.
“Lighter” might mean that we are becoming so immensely clear on our purpose, our direction, and/or our commitment that even though we are being pushed against the wall at this moment, we feel light from clarity and duty.
Maybe “lightness” is facing what we’ve been avoiding looking at just to notice that it’s become softer, less edgy, and less anxious when we return to the thing that used to cause us so much pain. Anyone who has ever spent considerable time in meditation and faced their own blindspots and dark shadows is familiar with the beautiful ease and universal love that comes with sitting in our own mud.
Overriding this innate somatic knowingness by always pushing through, always thinking that faster is better, and always letting the winner’s or beginner’s mindset be your dominant energy leaves you empty, numb, and exhausted. It’s like living at the mercy of some satisfaction-craving voice that lives outside of us, rather than the calm inner knowing that lives inside of us that tells us “you can choose to be enough here.”
Please re-read this. There is so much in between the lines here. There are so many feelings and experiences from which my body is writing this— I can’t yet find the words to articulate the depth of this message. But I know, that if you stay here for a moment, you will fill these words with your own experiential leadership wisdom.
What I have been reflecting on is that Harris taught himself and us this week that sometimes (probably a lot of times), we need to be our own light workers. We need to remember that we can walk through some tough, hard stuff and walk out of it with newly gained lightness in the form of knowing ourselves better, standing stronger and more grounded in our own bodies, and serving others more humanly because we know how things feel like as we are moving through it.
If we allow ourselves to be our own compassionate witness in moments of deep vulnerability and strength, we lead ourselves, and we can bring this lightness to others. What I observe every week is the closer we get to our own light in that way, the less we are willing to waste it. Whatever that may mean for you right now.
Leadership that heals others starts within each of us and will heal others along your way if you are willing to make your inner, invisible work visible — making the implicit explicit.
All the love, all the power,
Franzi
Some News:
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