Lisa Fitzhugh

How we lead is directly related to how well we tend to our inner emotional and psychic landscape. Whatever untended ‘business’ inside of us will be projected onto the people around us, especially if we hold more positional authority.   

This essay explores the learning I did after my father died and the realization that the power to be a better daughter had been with me all along. In every relationship we have the opportunity to be the brother, sister, friend or leader we want to be without needing someone else to be different. 

A primary attribute of leadership is to remember we have to tend to our own ships, our own vessel, before we can be a stabilizing force for other people.  

“The essential responsibility of anyone living today, especially those privileged with societal power of any kind, is to fully activate the truth of our human condition – this being our inherent interdependence and implicit connection to one another and the planet we call home.”

A story of personal collapse that serves as potent medicine for change and transformation.  I suggest we ‘run to the roar’ – face our suffering directly, feel it all the way through, and trust that it will change us if we allow it the space to do so.  

Conflict is inevitable.  Learning from it is not.  In this essay, I share how I finally put down my positional tendencies and learned to balance a resect for my own point of view with a curiosity about and tolerance for differences with the person sitting across from me. 

Nothing could be more urgent in this moment than leaders doing the work to identify the power struggles going on inside and modeling what it looks like to when we integrate them consciously.