Turn on your light. Shine it brightly, that others, too, may reduce and completely release their suffering. For as we suffer less, our energy, love, and attention become available to serve beyond ourselves. No longer fixated on our own survival and the quelling of our personal fears, we become available – available to innovate, to co-create, to communicate, and to connect. Join in a global community of 'peer pioneers'. Continue Reading
Gandhi – Self-Reflection as a Way of Leading (Part 1)
What’s so intriguing about Gandhi is how he transformed himself. One of the most influential people of all time, he didn’t lead a nation of 400 million Indians to freedom and self-government as the man he was when he began this epic journey. He led it as the man he was committed to becoming. Gandhi’s story – and his incredible and timely / timeless example to us – is that if something isn’t working, we must become what can allow Continue Reading
“Be The Wave” – Interview with Kenneth Schwenker of Leaders Causing Leaders
Are you an aspiring leader? What would you like to see different in the world today? Do you believe you can contribute to affecting positive changes? If so, how? If not, why not? Interview Introducing "Be The Wave - Part 1 - Revealing the Shift" There are a lot of questions that we never seem to ask ... Like ... 'Do you believe that you must suffer?' 'Is it possible to navigate your way through life without suffering?' 'What Continue Reading
The Wright Brothers
One of my favorite stories of ‘leadership’ and of ‘change’ is of the Wright Brothers. I’m an abstract storyteller, so please forgive me if the ‘details’ of this story are not historically absolutely precise! Imagine yourself … As if you were alive, in the town where the Wright Brothers lived, when they began publicly expressing their ‘visions’ that a silver bird could fly. Ha! Most people surely mocked them, Continue Reading
Leaders and Followers – Part 2
For those of us who live lives where (yes, most of us do work ... and yet) we have ‘leisure time' – what do we use this leisure time, and energy, and attention for? We are droned to spend it glued in front of the television, the iPod, the cell phone, the computer, the … whatever electronic device you wish to name – without discernment. Without using these ‘tools’ as just that – communication devices that can deliver enriching, Continue Reading
Leaders and Followers – Part 1
It was as I was flying home from the UN Earth Summit – twenty-eight hours in flight – that I received this, amongst many, insights: Most people are followers; few are leaders. This revelation dawned in my awareness – not as criticism, rather as a necessary fact to be recognized, should I wish to truly participate in affecting any real and long-lasting, beneficial change. The minority are leaders. What does this Continue Reading
Global Warming or Pollution? – Part 2
The signature of ‘development’ stands blatantly against the natural world. It is more challenging for us to see this – those of us who live in the ‘developed’ world – as it is what surrounds us now. And the photo gallery during the UN Earth Summit in Brazil – showing photographs of three generations of Brazilians who have been born and raised in a massive ‘dump’ that is so vast, it spans the horizon. This … is the Continue Reading
Global Warming or Pollution? – Part 1
My husband, Colin Hillstrom, has a very good point: As long as we are preoccupied with the ‘argument’ of whether global warming is human caused or part of an epic and ongoing cycle natural to nature … we miss the point. We miss the point that very real and massively consequential shifts are taking place as we breathe. Shifts that, if we do not heed their warning signals, could result in our species’ entire extinction – a Continue Reading
Underwhelming the Overwhelm – Part 2
And so the isolation of the millions of people who do have tremendous power to influence change – the everyday people of this world – was being essentially ‘turned off’ as a result of their overwhelm and paralysis. Flip forward nearly twenty years, and what is the state of our current civilization? Thanks to the Egyptian, Libyan, and other middle eastern people, we’re all waking up – and remembering the power, innate in all of Continue Reading
Underwhelming the Overwhelm – Part 1
In 1992 (some of you may not have been born then!) I felt called to participate ‘live’ in the most important global gathering of the century – the United Nations Earth Summit, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As I recall, some 180 heads of state gathered (an unprecedented showing) to discuss the critical implications of human development on the environment. Leading up to this monumental event, I noticed that something was Continue Reading