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.
A collection of excerpts from past keynote speeches that touch on leadership, introspection, creativity, stepping up, and more.
This essay was based on a vivid and disturbing dream. It describes a large ship of adolescents trying to sail into a fierce storm, unable to harness the power of their collective courage and creativity to save themselves. It speaks to what’s needed for any team to assemble well and survive such times.
In this essay, I highlight the essential role of the fool and his/her capacity to challenge our assumptions about what we accept as the truth, the key to any creative endeavor worth its salt. This may be more relevant now in 2025 than when I wrote it in 2021.
A summary of the skills required to ‘up’ our relational resilience. Skills such as listening infused with curiosity, refraining from the need to be right, expressing authentic gratitude, patience to allow problems to unfurl in their own timing, making the “intangibles” visible, and taking responsibility for our fragile egos.
A quick hit on how schools might be adapted to consider the whole child. And to imagine we are all much like a plant that needs the right organic conditions, the fertile ground, to grow well.
This short clip was filmed by my colleague Steve Miranda who was teaching at the Puget Sound Community School. He was doing a deep dive on the value of creativity and teaching creative habits of mind. I had been on a run of speaking gigs talking about creativity. This one probably sums it up best when I said that if we couldn’t access the ability to challenge more of our assumptions, we might find ourselves, as a civilization, just running headlong over a cliff!
The timing of this talk could not have been worse for me personally. I was asked in 2009 to give one of those 18-minute TEDx talks in Tacoma, WA. But my son’s dad and I had just split and I was submerged in a sea of sadness. Somehow, I pulled some thoughts together with a slide show of images and proposed an idea around creativity -- that our souls were seducing us to come home to ourselves, to be ourselves in all our authenticity, and this journey would enliven our creativity, guaranteed.
As Donald McKinnon says in his book, In Search of Human Effectiveness, “The most salient mark of a creative person is courage… the courage to stand aside from the collective and be in conflict with it if necessary; the courage to become and to be oneself.”
