Lisa Fitzhugh

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 someone I love.  It’s time to build relationships of resilience especially if we are leading an organization.  

The story of one of the most debilitating weeks of my life that serves as potent medicine for change and transformation.  I suggest that we ‘run to the roar’ – that is, face our suffering directly, feel it all the way through, and trust that it will change us is we allow it the space to do so.   Most of us are still working with an inner landscape of old patterns that very much need our patient, loving attention.  

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

These expectations hold us back from being the sons and daughters, the humans really, we are meant to be, without a need for someone else to be different.  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.    

 Leaders so often present only the outermost layer to the world, leaving a great deal open to interpretation.  Nothing could be more urgent in this moment but leaders doing the work to identify their power struggles going on inside and modeling what it looks like to when we integrate them consciously.  

How you lead’ is directly related to how well you tend to your inner emotional and psychic landscape.  Whatever untended ‘business’ is in you, will be projected onto the people around you, especially if you hold more positional authority in an organization.