Play with your Food – “plop” go the raspberries

It’s June here in the San Francisco Bay Area and there’s a tropical feel to the air. We’ve gone from a cold late spring into an early June of weird steamy atmosphere.  I’m a little peevish because I moved here decades ago partially to escape the “dripping wet under the armpits” humidity of East Coast summers. But, you know, there’s always a silver lining – the raspberry bushes are loving this weather!  With two beehives tending to their pollination, lots of moisture and overcast sun, the bushes in our garden continue to be heavy with beautiful, bumpy purple fruit.

In early afternoon today, I decided I needed some centering before immersing my mind in the process of dissertation editing.  So, I went out to play in the garden.  I said hello to the new crop of half-inch worms in the worm box, added our kitchen scraps to the compost, shared some of the more delectable scraps with the chickens, scratched my cat Bitty’s belly, and then turned my full attention to berry-picking.

Fully ripe raspberries, ones that are almost all juice held together by a delicate skin, are just waiting to “plop”.  Looking closely, you can see how gravity is pulling the juicy weight off the stem, loosening it for freefall.  With my berry bucket’s ribbon around my neck, I have both hands free for berry-catching.  I wade into the bushes carefully and gently move bright green leaves aside so I can catch sight of the sweet gems they hide.  About every ninth berry goes straight into my mouth, providing an eye-closing moment of sheer delight.  I pick berries with one palm underneath, encouraging them with my other hand to drop without squishing.  As I’m pulled into the flow of wading-revealing-plopping, I flash on an early memory of my relationship to berries.  I’m about 4 years old and strawberries give me a belly rash so when my sisters take me to the big wild strawberry field, I’m strictly told to Pick but not to Eat.  I learn the secrets of berry-hunting from them but I cannot resist the sweet rewards!  By the time we leave, my face, hands and t-shirt give evidence of my happiness and I walk home already scratching at my tummy.  Smiling at how little I’ve changed in some ways, I finish filling my little bucket and head into the kitchen to store my harvest.

The deeper I go exploring into the nature of collaboration, the more I realize the importance of our recognizing our relationships to everything in our world.  If we can see our own collaborative relationships in tending bees that nurture and feed from berry flowers that in turn “plop” fruit into our hands, we are more prepared to create and participate in the flow of human systems.  We are in no way estranged from the world in which we live.  We only need to open ourselves to the truth of our connection.

From me to you with joy, Nika

Without Blinking

Practice means learning from life instead of being bounced around by it. Once you know the worst isn’t going to run you over, you can look the world in the eye without blinking.  - Krishna Das in The Sun (March 2011)

Times of great change invite us to discover our practice as EveryDay Leaders.  How will I approach each day, each person, each joy or fear?  I often ask my coaching clients to tell me what brings them back to center – breathing, a walk, a cup of tea, chocolate? Knowing and using these tools is essential to in-the-moment practice, creating a foundation of calmness and clarity.  In my experience, practicing compassion and surrender also deepens my ability to hold the paradox of what is and what is possible, supporting me to lead my life from my loving, joyful, creative center.  I believe this opening to love and creativity is essential to leadership development in these times.

What does it take to look the world in the eye without blinking?  Coming across Krishna Das’ words today, I felt such strong resonance of truth.  Earlier in life, I was “bounced around”, often quite dramatically.  Always curious, I discovered many teachers and many ways of designing a reflective life practice, an approach to both learning and developing trust in myself and something greater that unconditionally loves me.  Last November, I got bounced again, this time through being injured in an auto collision (the first in decades).  After the initial shock and swelling subsided, the real healing opportunity surfaced.  Something sculpted into the articulation of bones and muscles in my upper body began to shift. Working with my chiropractor, I stand, move, breathe more freely.  Reflecting in my journal, I called this releasing the “cringe”, a fearful recoiling from anticipated anger, rejection, danger learned in my childhood environment.  Through the years, I had layered calm and relaxation in myself, attempting to soothe these core somatic responses.  Now, I’m deeply changed and sense that a cage has fallen open and away from my heart.  Friends, clients and co-workers tell me I appear radiant, like I’ve just fallen in love.  I have, in a way. I’m lovingly looking “the world in the eye without blinking.”

Discover and embrace your practice. Find the courage and the partners to do the work of releasing your fears.  Lead your life with love and creativity.

With an open heart I remain your Quirky Auntie,

Nika

What’s your evolutionary strategy?

“Realistic” people who pursue “practical” aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run of life as the dreamers who pursue their dreams. – Hans Selye

As it’s the beginning of the year, I find myself defining and discussing strategy in many aspects of my life and work.  Entrepreneur clients working with me as a business coach want to figure out how to make 2011 a better year.  My housemates and I regularly fall into co-imagining (and drooling over) what we’d like to produce in the garden this season.  Headed into the final production of my PhD dissertation, I’ve been assessing how I can bring an artful and practically successful approach to reviewing mounds of data and articulating what’s essential, meaningful, wonderful.  The non-profit board I lead works collectively to shape a sustainable path that supports the organization’s long-term benefit to human life and social change.

The word strategy tends to bring business and/or military contexts to mind.  But I’m attracted to this definition: an adaptation or complex of adaptations (as of behavior, metabolism, or structure) that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success. Strategy is about learning and changing. It’s a process of reflecting on factual and experiential intelligence, evaluating success, imagining possibilities, and forging these combined insights into a plan of action that we sense has the potential for greater success.  Through strategy, we adapt consciously with an orientation to our values, desires and dreams.

Organizations make large investments in strategic planning.  But, in working with EveryDay Leaders, I find that strategy is overlooked or seen as a mystifying process for which people are unsure they have the time. “Who me? Have a strategy? That’s someone else’s job. I’m not big or important enough!”  So many of us live immersed in the streaming river of our experience, rarely mining the learning through which to shape ourselves, our endeavors, and our human future. And yet, right now, our adaptation to the ever-more-apparent-Big-Changes-on-the-planet is the main work at hand.

I hope you really grasp how important you are in the bigger picture of “making up what comes next”. I eagerly invite you to step into leadership, into active engagement with yourself, your life, and your environment. Know your fears but don’t sink to their level. I challenge you to create an evolutionary strategy. Yes! This is tough and worthy work! Take the time to honestly reflect, alone and with others, on a regular basis. Combine the factual and the imaginal to see yourself, your work, your family and community, your environment (both natural and human-made) – in 5, 10, 20 years. Believe in a satisfying and joyful future.  Take action on adaptations – what you can do now that contributes to both current and evolutionary success. I’m right there with you.

Namaste, Nika

Playing with Shared Power

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness – Thich Nhat Hanh

Sharing power is an ongoing human dilemma that is rising to critical priority in this century because of increasing planetary, economic and social pressures beyond historical precedent. In his recent State of the Union address, U.S. President Obama called repeatedly for unity of purpose and cooperative practice to “win the future”.  Listening to him triggered my ongoing questions about how we move a nation of individualists into successful, skillful collaboration with each other.  My longtime curiosity about this has become my all-absorbing focus in both my research and professional practice.

My experience indicates that playing together helps us to explore and learn about sharing power, and I’ve made this the core of my approach to cultivating teams. Moving, artmaking and storytelling as a group and in pairs provides an opportunity to step out of competitive or emotionally laden life and work scenarios, and play with power.  When we step back into our daily contexts, we can bring along insights and alternative patterns that seed and nurture more cooperative behaviors and relationships.  After all, Daniel Goleman advises in his book Social Intelligence, “Nature [in the form of our primate social brain] tends to foster positive relationships” and “even among complete strangers, a moment of playfulness, even outright silliness, forms an instant resonance.”  But, in the U.S., play (of this artful sort) is more often than not viewed as frivolous and merely entertaining, not a valid element in the formula for creating productive and successful leaders and contributors in the workplace.

Follow the leader(s)

“Play isn’t a character defect; it’s the builder of character, developing persistence, competence, mastery and social skills that take us beyond perceived limitations” (Joe Robinson in the Huffington Post).  Two weeks ago in London, I led a group of consultants, artists and activists through a morning of following and leading, pausing occasionally to process and learn from their experiences.  Collaboration emerges from the interplay between individual power and collective power. Grounded in confidence from knowledge of our inner authority, our power to choose and act, we are readied to face the uncertainty of interacting with the will and ideas of others.  We test our expectations and limitations about group performance.

Creating a shared story

Many participants in this group, as in others I’ve led, commented on their enjoyment of finding an ease-filled active space between leading and following, where shared leadership emerged without strain or confusion.  For some, it was an uncommon experience or one they desired to have more of.  They expressed being tired of just leading or following, especially in their work.  For others, it was their natural approach to life.  Pouring the composite power of partners or the group into this space between, possibilities are seemingly infinite and innovation sparks.  And did I mention it was Fun? Faces lit up, bodies were alive and the energy in the room was palpable.  Out of playing with shared power, we can learn to reap the full harvest of inspiration, learning, creativity and healthy community needed to evolve sustainable organizations.

Know a team that wants to collaborate better and has the willingness and courage to Play with Power?  Workshops and longer term consulting support available.  Contact NikaQuirk@mac.com or 510-381-5350.

Right mix? open source & proprietary

My conversation over B&B breakfast with a computer science college teacher spilled over into dialog with colleagues at Ashridge Business School (UK) today.

How does an open-source, sharing-based environment create interdependence and community?

How do the “walls” built in organizations (including those between people) to protect proprietary information impact collaborative performance?

How will we find the effective mix of open-source and proprietary to support a sustainable commercial and social future?

What do you think?

Nika

I will follow you…

Have you seen the YouTube of solo jumping dancing guy who eventually inspires the entire crowd? One person begins to follow him, transforming him from lonely outlier to focal center. Leadership is esteemed; followership, though undervalued, can shift reality. Seems to me that the art of following deserves some attention as a skill for the changing landscape of life in this time.

Sitting here at Julie’s Tea in Alameda CA over an elegant Sunday breakfast tray, I’m designing the workshops I’ll lead in the UK over the next two weekends. Follow, Lead and In-Between: I mull over the options for content and structure How will we learn to follow each other? How will I describe what I know so well – the mysterious connective tissue that seems to grow between us when we wholeheartedly follow each other?

As I sip this cup of black lavender tea, I recall a moment in my own learning about following. As a woman born into no money or influence, I worked hard to be seen, heard and recognized as a leader with a credible voice. Sitting in a women’s group, a wise member told me to “step back into the circle.” I learned to listen and follow what arose from those gathered, and to recognize when what I had to offer lent clarity, strength or creativity.

Sometime today, I encourage you to take a breath and relax into following some pattern you notice. The pace of someone walking in front of you. A child’s zigzagging run or playful storytelling. Your friend’s ideas about what you could do together. Lean into following, and see what happens.

2011: Living and leading through interdependence

I’m going to put a stake in the ground and claim that each of us needs to add “Live more interdependently” to our resolutions this year.  Goals focused on personal acquisition are out of step with current reality.  A sustainable way of living together needs grounding in sharing and collaboration in all parts of our daily lives.

My life depends on my collaborative relationships. I’ve always been drawn to working with partners and in teams, but moving into my current cooperative household on an urban homestead has made me realize how deeply I believe in living and working interdependently.

I’ve been amazed at how many of my friends are deeply curious about how well our household works. It’s spurred me to pay attention – just what is our secret?  One fundamental element is that my housemates and I hold a shared belief that the level of attention, connection and communication we invest in our successful interdependence produces individual and collective benefit.  Together, we are productive, learn, have fun, and expand the scope of what’s possible in so many ways.  Second, we are pretty skilled at following and leading.  I notice that we all have fairly strong ideas about some things and we’re not afraid to take the initiative, but we also know how to discuss things that have group impact, respect each other’s values, follow each other’s lead and actively lend support to each other’s ideas.  I’ve had very similar experiences when working in very high functioning teams in organizations. In this kind of environment, mutual trust, connectedness and care about the group’s success grows strong through lived experience.  Joyce Fletcher, research scholar at Simmons School of Management, states in her book Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work:

working to create the experience of team is leadership of a different sort. Activities…are…intended to create the background conditions in which group life could flourish.

Developing these conditions for flourishing group life is the focus of my scholarly research on leadership and my consulting work.  On January 16 in London and January 22 in Bangor, Wales, I’ll be facilitating my workshop Follow, Lead and In-Between, exploring with participants how we can gain insights and embodied experience following, leading and building connectedness in relationships.

With sincere wishes for a satisfying and interconnected new year,

Nika

Let your hips lead

Joe Medina and my brain are inspiring me to walk distances. Joe, a brain scientist, wrote the recent book, Brain Rules. Rule #1? Exercise. Our ancestors developed this luscious brain walking 12 miles a day on the Serengeti; it still needs movement to stay fit.

Being a doctoral student, I sat, sat, sat. Some behavioral revisioning is due. Yesterday I circumvented Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland with buddy Gretchen Wegner, academic coach and inventor of MuseCubes. She’s walking for her brain-in-a-body like I am. We both support clients to be vital whole-brained bodyspirits.

But what about Hips, you ask? Well, as I set off for a 3 mile urban walk this afternoon, I noticed how awkward and disassembled I felt as I walked. My head was leading, chin and neck out like the chickens in our yard. I took a breath and pulled my chin back about two feet. Whoah! The tension in arms-shoulders-neck relaxed; my spine aligned. Another breath. I started hearing the middle eastern beat on my iPod and my hips began a swinging gait, easy, fluid, fun! Arms swinging, I covered lots of ground.

I wonder how often this is an apt metaphor. How often does my head try to get there first even while discombobulating the rest of me? How might that easy relational swing of hips be a better way of arriving?

Off now to complete my circuit. Enjoy your day, and maybe swing a little?

Weave and Mend – Worthy Work

Inspiration arises from all sources. Yesterday morning, I again came to the last few pages of a book I never tire of reading, Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron. Whenever I thin my library, it’s one of the books that’s been a keeper for 20+ years.  Once again, it brought me home to my core purpose, weaving and mending the society of women, the contribution of the feminine to the world, and what Cameron’s book calls our “soft power.”  Here’s a section of the book’s ending poem:

In golden light

I recognize the enemy faces

fear of our bodies

fear of our visions

fear of our healing

fear of our love

fear of sisterkind

fear of brotherkind

fear of fear

love is healing

healing is love

There are Women everywhere with fragments

gather fragments

weave and mend

When we learn to come together we are whole

When we learn to recognize the enemy

we will know what we need to know

to learn how to come together

to learn how to weave and mend

In this morning’s Wheeeee! We’re Alive free tele-fun call, we danced with what we are weaving and what we are mending in our lives.  Relationship to self, broken heartedness, connection to the divine, new ways of being -these and other patterns of human life all showed up as the shared stories unfolded.  As the poem says, “when we learn to come together we are whole.”  Women left the call having affirmed the one thing they would mend this week.

Facing our fears (those “enemy faces”) and doing our real work is, I believe, the core of human life and is accomplished in the company of others. When women take action, we make the lives and world we want.

What do you want to act on?

Six women have the opportunity to take action while being “fiercely loved and supported” in the new EveryDay Leaders tele-coaching group scheduled to start May 5. Click here for more information and the registration link.

Yours in the weaving,

Nika

Practicing Discipline

Do you struggle with discipline? I do, and have all my life. With a strong fear of losing my freedom and an equally strong avoidance of dreariness, I defined Discipline as “chaining myself down” to a repeated pattern of activities or tasks. Thus equating it with burdensome drudgery. Many of my clients have shared with me their aversion to discipline, wanting to achieve their goals and yet bumping up against this barrier time after time.

Both being self-employed and developing my PhD dissertation have required that I face the hurdle of discipline again. I’ve had to step up and I’ve found that both belief and behavior must change. I now define Discipline as ” the intentional practice of applying my resources to make my dreams and goals real”. I laugh as I schedule “butt in the chair” time that recently resulted in finishing my PhD proposal and my Quickbooks data entry. I laugh but it works!

If we are leaders in our own lives, then clear intentions, values, priorities, choices and actions are how we practice leadership. Discipline is a mindful practice of grounding that clarity to make our lives and our world. Whatever we tend – gardens, children, projects, etc. – we must come back and invest ourselves continuously. We must say yes to discipline.

Enjoying life,
Nika