Welcome to the CPL blog where we bring leading-edge thinking and stories of purpose in action. You can count on learnings and brilliance gleaned from our work with Purposeful Leaders around the globe. As authors of The Art of Convening™, we explore how convening brings your purpose alive.
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Listening as an ultimate expression of connection and caring.
Authentic engagement is, simply, a genuine expression of what is true for us, and an attentive listening to what is true for another, or others. Why this simple human interaction often eludes us can be a matter of habit, distrust, faulty modeling, lack of attention, or fear.
From The Art of Convening: Authentic Engagement in Meetings, Gatherings and Conversations
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When our children were young, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a program I could absolutely trust to be thoughtful and fun. Recently I was reminded from two different sources the many leadership lessons we received, as well.
Kudos to PBS who aired "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and Southern Living Magazine for highlighting the leadership that Fred Rogers stood for and demonstrated. Read on for words of wisdom that inspire, offer perspective, and remind us all of our worthiness and inherent ability to make a difference in the lives of others. In other words, leadership.
"As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has--or ever will have--something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression."
“There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”
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“If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.”
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
“I hope you’re proud of yourself for the times you’ve said ‘yes,’ when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to somebody else.”
“Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.”
“It's our insides that make us who we are, that allow us to dream and wonder and feel for others. That's what's essential. That's what will always make the biggest difference in our world.”
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
"Part of the problem with the word disabilities is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities."
"Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now."
I hope these words have sparked some joy, inspiration, remembering of your true value and purpose in our world.
Additional reading: 20 Gentle Quotations from Mister Rogers, Mental Floss
The World According to Mister Rogers
"As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has--or ever will have--something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression."
From The World According to Mister Rogers
Dawn Revisited…
Dawn Revisited
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits -
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.
~ Rita Dove ~
(On the Bus with Rosa Parks)
'Joe Riley' jnriley@comcast.net [Panhala] <Panhala@yahoogroups.com>
Turning to one another…
In the back reaches of our professional mind, we know the people and relational aspects of business life have perplexed and stymied managers and leaders alike.
In our upcoming book, "Touchy Feely: The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff," we reveal the powerful and liberating truth that empathy and compassion along with vulnerability are not the weaknesses we've hoodwinked ourselves into believing, but are core strengths of successful leadership.
Below is an excerpt from an article from our friends at Korn Ferry that stimulated some related ideas. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
October 16, 2017 | DANIEL GOLEMAN, Contributor, Korn Ferry Institute
We all know empathy matters in our personal relationships, but how does empathy matter for business? You need empathy to work effectively with other people, especially in sales and client management, on teams, and in leadership. Empathy is the core of the competencies in the relationship management domain of Emotional Intelligence, the basis for more complex relationship management skills, including influencing other people or having a positive impact, mentoring other people, managing conflict, inspiring them as a leader, and teamwork. Read more…
We are just beginning to understand why knowing your purpose is key to good leadership. So why is it surprising that empathy is a crucial business skill?
Through empathy your purpose comes alive because you can see best where to serve. When we realize that our success is tied to others’ success and that interdependence (empathy) is not a personal liability but strength, then watch and experience miracles to happen.
Our book, The Art of Convening offers a roadmap of how purpose shared can get you there.
#purpose #PurposefulLeadership #leadership #RichardLeider #ThePowerofPurpose #TheArtofConvening
Why are you alive?
Who are you willing to be…
What purpose do you serve?
The door to gratitude opens.
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Craig joined 400+ intentional “cooleagues” at the 2018 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in Denver last month. He presented at the Showcase and convened an inspired Open Space breakout session on “How Do We Create Sacred Space in Dialogue & Deliberation?” with Salomeh Dastyari Diaz.
NCDD is a hub, facilitative leader & clearinghouse for a community of thousands of innovators. NCDD conferences are about having fun and enjoying the company of our field’s movers and shakers, as well as forming new partnerships, strategizing how we can tackle our field’s greatest challenges, showcasing some of the coolest arts, technologies, and methods for public engagement — and so much more.
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The workshops, presentations and Open Space breakout sessions all focused on how do we create opportunities to convene people in inclusive and creative ways, to nurture and support a world that works for all.
A report on the learnings from “How Do We Create Sacred Space in Dialogue & Deliberation?”: Salomeh and I knew the word “sacred” could be edgy. We asked: how do we talk about the areas of human contact and connection that bring in our whole selves? How do we describe the whole human experience beyond our intellectual and cognitive capacities?
The people who joined us were excited to have an essential conversation around how to create spaces of depth and affinity in any situation, knowing that creating containers of mutual trust and respect is one of the greatest challenges of our time. No matter our social, religious or spiritual foundation, we found a common sense of what the word sacred meant to us and why it matters as a reminder and expression of our core values and beliefs.
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What purpose do you serve?
Today we give thanks for dear friend and longtime collaborator Pele Rouge who introduced us to what has become a core practice in our lives and work. As a form of “Hearing All the Voices” the 6th Element of the Convening Wheel, Stringing the Beads is at once a sacred yet practical practice of joining people together in an authentic way. In our experience, it is the fastest way for people to reach connection and alignment, in what we call “The Arc of Recognition.”
By Pele Rouge
Why the name – Stringing the Beads?
Each human is viewed as a unique and beautiful bead.
As each person speaks, the talking piece goes around the circle and becomes the energetic “needle” carrying the thread of connection from person to person, “Stringing” the Beads together into a complete necklace and an energetic whole.
The talking piece and our words are the thread of connection that create the larger fabric, the “We”.
Much like a shuttle moves back and forth in a loom connecting/expanding/transforming the “independent” strings into a woven fabric that contains the beauty of each thread and creates a larger beauty.
Click here to read more.
Creative Commons License - Use with Acknowledgement of Pele Rouge and writing her at pelerouge@timelessearthwisdom.com
2018 Center for Timeless Earth Wisdom
Good evening from the lake. Find your wild places wherever they may be. The untamed parts of your life, inside and out, that call out to you. They may take time to find, however, you'll know them when you see and feel them. The hunt may save your life. As it did mine.
By Patricia Neal
On a chilly Minnesota day, it’s wonderful to recall the recent Fusion 2.0 Conference, hosted by Salveo Partners. The warmth and generosity of spirit made this conference a wonderful learning and sharing environment. Craig Neal and I were honored to present "The Art of Purposeful Leadership," a Learning Lab.
We followed a keynote by high-energy Ondra Berry of MGM Grand. Jennifer Gilhoi gives an excellent recap of the day here: https://lnkd.in/eUK2g9R. Her comments about our session are below.
What did we learn? There are at least 2 languages of leadership: from the head and from the heart. The head needs to create order, quantify and measure; the heart needs and gives aspiration, inspiration and connection.
The Art of Purposeful Leadership
In this session packed full of purposeful tools, Craig Neal, The Center for Purposeful Leadership, began with one simple idea: A purposeful leader is anyone who steps up to make a positive impact in the world. Craig and his wife and business partner, Patricia Neal, had a cadence to their sharing that made the experiences in this session delightful. In a U-shaped seating arrangement with a range of tactical items at our fingertips, the group practiced “stringing the beads,” where each person contributed their response to a prompt like what gets you excited to get out of bed every morning?
Beyond the straightforward response of, “an alarm clock,” each comment or bead, told a story about the person and at the end, a collective story of the group. Craig and Patricia walked us through The Napkin Test, by Richard Leider, an Art of Convening exercise to outline nine steps to thoughtful collaboration, and a Conversational Intelligence Assessment to rank ourselves and select one area to improve upon.
If you’d like to explore more about The Art of Purposeful Leadership, join us for an upcoming Zoominar. Each Zoominar is an opportunity to explore together the why and how of bringing your purpose to shared action in the world. And finding a way towards committed and shared outcomes. [45-minute, live, interactive conversation + 15 minute Q&A]
Click here to register or contact Craig @ cneal@centerfpl.com
Hard to believe it’s been a year since The Waters Senior Living hosted a Launch Reception for CPL! On November 1 we celebrated with Richard Leider, our Associates Team, the leadership of The Waters and other Twin Cities colleagues. It was a snowy night; we were so pleased so many made the trek! Thanks again for Katherine Todd’s introduction to her Leadership Team.
1 year later, as we what has become core to our work and daily practices is this how convening and purpose are integral to purposeful leadership. Convening creates a structure to connect to your purpose and be in authentic relationship with others, a core practice for purposeful leadership.
Scroll down for a livestream of remarks from CPL, The Waters leadership, and Richard Leider.
This past Wednesday, Center for Purposeful Leadership hosted its first reception welcoming over 45 colleagues. Our purpose was not only to convene and reconnect with colleagues but to introduce the CPL Team.
We were honored to have purpose leader Richard Leider speak on the Purpose Movement and Purpose Research and pleased to connect and convene with others to spread the voice of what Center for Purposeful Leadership stands for.
The Waters leadership embodies purposeful leadership. Thank you to Kyle Didier, Lynn Carlson Schell, Katherine Todd and The Waters for hosting, and to those who attended.
Gathering with so many thought leaders from the Twin Cities truly shows the great direction purposeful leadership is headed. CPL is honored and excited to have you on this journey with us!
#purpose #PurposefulLeadership #leadership #RichardLeider #ThePowerofPurpose #TheArtofConvening
By Patricia Neal
Craig and I are having a blast hosting Zoominars on The Magic of Purpose Shared and introducing a new model for Convening the Purposeful Path to Commitment.
Purpose is an action verb.
Purpose alone is for the sake of what?
Convening alone is for the sake of what?
Convening is purpose shared.
At the heart of the matter of sharing your purpose is convening: the art and science of gathering and holding people in a safe and generative space, for the sake of authentic engagement, each time we invite people together, both virtually or in person.
Each Zoominar is an opportunity to explore together the why and how of bringing your purpose to shared action in the world. And finding a way towards committed and shared outcomes.
“A few words well-placed can really change the trajectory of somebody's career.”