How to Be a Love-Based Leader

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How to Be a Love-Based Leader

As I considered what is crucial for leaders to embody in a time when everything is changing fast and when we are being called to connect with each other, human to human, and learning how to be more humane in the process, I realized, again, that we need to know we matter, than what lies within us is good and real and alive, and that everything we need to give what we are here to give is waiting inside of us to be shared with the world. And, that through this creativity that we are each so capable of sharing, we will find the new and exciting ideas and possibilities we need to solve our most vexing problems.

As leaders, we are designers of containers in which people can be fully creative, in which they can emerge with everything they have to offer to the organization, community, city, family, the world.

Love-based leadership has many qualities. Here are three…

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I Was Mansplained

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I Was Mansplained

It’s a practice to learn to stay in connection in conversation rather than resorting to needing to be right or explaining to the other person what’s true and ‘how things are’. We can learn to not fall into the trap of believing that we don’t know what is true for us. When we do, it becomes much easier to stand in our own authority without denying the other person theirs.

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Unveiling & Embodying the Soul thru Deep Listening to Self

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Unveiling & Embodying the Soul thru Deep Listening to Self

To be fully expressed, this is key. Otherwise, we are expressing what we see in the outer world rather than the new freshness of soul in its own vibrant intelligence. As creativity becomes more important in our outer world, this capacity to hear and liberate what is within becomes more vital. When you liberate yourself from within, you add to the liberation of all of life and you enhance your capacity to do the deeper work in the world that requires your inner strength, resiliency, compassion, power, intuition, and joy. These are all within you waiting to be set free.

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The Struggle for Freedom is a Creative, Communal Act

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The Struggle for Freedom is a Creative, Communal Act

The struggle for freedom is a creative act — but an error many of us have made in the past is to believe the struggle is for our personal freedom, for our personal equality, for our personal world to be bettered. 

No longer can we afford to see freedom and creativity as such. Freedom and creativity have never been about the personal. Even when one is creating in solitude as an artist or a writer, what comes through that creative act is always something for the whole never just for the creator.

The idea that we are individuals first and foremost is and has always been wrong. Our individuality is born out of the wholeness of life. 

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Love in a Time of Personal Power

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Love in a Time of Personal Power

But the feminine is not moving within all of us because we haven’t become conscious of how she is within us. And we become conscious of how she is within us when we come to see what is hidden within us, when we find the courage to face that which we haven’t wanted to see. When we do this, our hearts can break open. Our compassion can flow. And, our love can pour forth.

We can come to remember our wholeness.

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Choosing to Stay and Be Human

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Choosing to Stay and Be Human

As I’ve contemplated this dance between Eros and Thanatos, I’ve wondered if I (and any one of us) can truly make a full choice to stay, can truly choose this once, or if it has to be chosen over and over and over again. And I’m not just saying this in the large sense of life or death, but in the small moments where it feels like you will die if you stay and can only survive if you run, or when it feels like you will die if you run and can only survive if you stay. Moments in relationship with others, with yourself, with your work, with a creative project.

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Liberating Ourselves from the Pervasive Bind of Being Reasonable and Logical

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Liberating Ourselves from the Pervasive Bind of Being Reasonable and Logical

We are not logical creatures. We never have been. We are imaginal beings, sacred to the core, mystical beings appearing as real live people, here to awaken love, here to find delight and joy in living, here to not turn away from ourselves or each other when we forget what we are.

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Transforming who we believe we are and what we know ourselves to be capable of.

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Transforming who we believe we are and what we know ourselves to be capable of.

The creative process is a transformational process. By entering into the unknown space where true creativity can emerge we must let go of what we think we know, acknowledge that we do not know, and be open to receiving that which will both carry us across the creative unknown and transform who we know ourselves to be and what we know we are capable of. 

It is by facing the obstacles we meet, as well as being able to ask for and receive help along the way, that we become more aware of our essential capacities within that have been there, silently waiting for us to call upon them, all along.

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Insistence of Expression: What do you long to experience in 2018?

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Insistence of Expression: What do you long to experience in 2018?

If you’re looking for a different way to envision what you see 2018 bringing to your life, consider what you’re longing to experience as a way to get in touch with what you desire for bring forth this new year.

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Stay Close to the Bone

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Stay Close to the Bone

There’s an essence about oneself, a sense of ‘-just-is-ness’. Essence as in a closeness to — an intimacy with — a truth of oneself. I language this as staying ‘close to the bone’ of one’s true nature. It’s a kind of ‘solidity’ of self that isn’t solid at all, but finds and knows itself as seemingly solid in human form. But more than this, the bones are a metaphor for deep knowing and understanding — not of the mental variety but rather of a kind of wisdom and intelligence inherent in all things.

This feels real to me as it bridges our nature as consciousness, itself, alive in the cells of a human body. Awake and alive, close to the bone, is close to home.

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Creativity isn’t a thing; it’s a fluid process.

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Creativity isn’t a thing; it’s a fluid process.

Your creativity isn’t really a thing. It is a fluid process. That, along with its mysterious nature, is what makes it so hard to define. The good news is that this process brings forth powerful qualities that we each need to live more fruitfully and successfully in the world, qualities such as strength, will, joy, compassion, and intuition. Again, these qualities come from within you and they are in service to you living your whole and full self in this world.

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