In starting my business, I stepped out of the mainstream so that I could genuinely support folks in the traditional institutions to change their lives and work in value-aligned ways, shedding the overing and burnout.

Reflecting on the third-year anniversary of my business being my full work focus, I see that a regenerative model promotes interconnected resilient work. That’s why I’m building a regenerative business that is community-oriented and with values of embodied connection and transformative growth.

Resilience is about how we adapt and transform in response to the environment and what’s around us. Having a resilient business means evolving in response to the changing environment. The nature of my work evolves in response to the needs of my clients and community.

In applying my own resilience framework to myself and my business, I have been reflecting on this question this year:

How am I, both as a human and a business, adapting and transforming myself and my community in ways that are regenerative and mutually beneficial?

One answer is clear…

What helps you thrive through challenging times and moments?

I was a department chair of two large graduate programs during the pandemic shutdown. While it was a really challenging time and disproportionately impacted folks, I felt purpose in guiding the program through it. In hindsight, I can see how it foreshadowed the work I do now related to resilience and the messy middle of change. That said, how I led during that time definitely came at the cost of my mental health. I mean, ultimately, I ended up taking FMLA and then transitioned my work out of academia.

This is why a lot of you come to me with the question: Should I stay or should I go? My response: Let’s shift your relationship to work first, then answer that question. Here’s why.

Summer solstice makes its hot entrance this Thursday here in the northern hemisphere.

The official mark of summer season highlights longer days with more time to be outside and active in the evenings and lots of garden watching for me. Last summer solstice felt like an invitation to devotion. This summer solstice feels more both/and. Great moments of joy and a hefty dose of discomfort with the heat and lack of rain.

I think bringing my attention to moments of joy will help me feel embodied and connected this summer, instead of disassociating and wishing for something different.

Feel the resistance and do it anyway. 

Never in a hustle muscle kinda way though, right! We’ve come too far together to go back to burnout and disconnection.

Right now all my work seems to be sitting in the discomfort of the both/and space. Early summer must be the season for this. Makes sense. As I look over to the garden beds, I see the green bean seeds pushing up through the soil–yet, also curled in a little. Expansion is a push/pull - it’s a both/and. Can you imagine if the bean seeds felt the resistance at the top of the soil and were like, “Ohhh, that’s hard. No thanks. I’m gonna stay here in the dark.”

What’s your typical response when you start to feel uncomfortable in your body or in a conversation or when you notice your deep emotions?

Developing our capacity to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty is a necessary skill for this moment in history. Given the world, this includes learning how to cycle between joy and grief pretty regularly. I see this in my climate work in the Fort Collins community, folks want to jump to solutions or what to do, which would bypass the important inner work of anger, grief, heartbreak, all because they feel the discomfort, sometimes immensely.

The messy middle is a courageous space of possibilities. 

When I meet with potential organizational clients, I tell them my work - resilience building - lives in the messy middle within leadership and team development. This often elicits an uncomfortable chuckle. I smile. When we move forward in our work together, they’ll understand soon enough.

The messy middle is the space between the status quo and the edge at which you’d drop into overwhelm or numbing (hyper and hypo arousal states)….

“I’m done overworking.”

“This feels wrong.”

“I’m tired of everyone else’s urgency. What about mine?” 

Ooffff, feel that last line, my fellow Overers? Sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism. It’s about prioritizing “creative work first, reactive work second,” says creative coach Mark McGuiness. 

Can I get a hell yea! Say it louder for those in the back, will ya?! 

Creativity is a process with the power to alchemize your grief.

Yet in our scarcity-minded society we push both of these away - our innate creativity and our experiences of grief. It’s no wonder you have been left without practices and rituals to process that grief into your healing and next vision.

Career grief can feel isolating and guilt-producing, especially because career grief is unacknowledged grief that others may not support or validate, which is exactly what lands it in the category of disenfranchised grief. I see a parallel treatment of climate grief in my workshops on building climate resilience.

You aren’t ever going to have time.

You have to make the time and be intentional. I know bandwidth is low. And I also know that creative rest paired with a supportive community will increase that bandwidth. That’s why I created Creative Cocooning. It will grow your window of tolerance if you let it.

Creativity isn’t a luxury or optional when you want to live a life of impact.

As a leader you can’t afford to skip your creative process.

Creativity is one of the key practices to innovation and resilience.

Creativity requires a reconstruction and deconstruction of sorts, like the metamorphosis process.

Why care about creativity when you have so many pressing issues and too many demands on your time and attention?

You’ll hear me say this on repeat. 

Resilience is a built competency with skills, content knowledge, behaviors, practices, and mindsets. It’s about your body’s felt sensations, nervous system and emotions, mindset, and the stories you tell yourself. It’s how all of those pieces either inform your behaviors in a reactive way or in an intentional, responsive, slowed down way.

Okay. That's my soapbox foundation. 

Now add: Regular creativity work…