Braiding Values, Visions, & Vistas

Welcome, and thank you for joining me. I’m really glad we’re here together.

I’m looking at the times we're in, and the moment-to-moment experience therein, recognizing the duality of reality. We can look around and see suppression, feel compression, and sense retroactive retrograde in many key social structures. Yet in this same moment, we can look within and to one another and see expansion, feel compassion, and re-member our revival.

What equips us to consciously choose where to look, how to hope, and when to act? How do we know with clarity what is nourishing and what is not?

When external turbulence is rattling for my attention, I turn with intention to my still point within. This is the place within myself where I braid together my values, my visions, and my vistas.

• My values are the core beliefs underlying my conscience.

• My visions are the conceptions of how to advance change in the world.

• And my vistas are where I glimpse the unfolding potential for humanity beyond our conscious awareness and familiar assumptions.

I remember when and where I honed my leadership stance.

Though it had been developing for decades, I remember when the pressure cooker that took my self-trust and decision-making capacity to another level:

• I held a director-level position in a national maternal-child health organization at a time when mothers and babies were brutally separated at the border.

• The organization’s membership had recently doubled to become more representative of the diversity of our nation, so the organization both embodied and was accountable to many new communities.

• Meanwhile, the lion share of the organization’s funding was from federal sources, which felt like a point of potential vulnerability.

• Since it was uncharted territory, there was no natural consensus across staff and board as to what the organization should do in response to the crisis.

• Getting through each decision of that era required developing a felt sense of my still point within. Braiding my core values, visions, and vistas became daily, if not hourly, work.

Fortunately, I was immersed in four lineages of practice that guided me in many ways.

• The first is skilled facilitation for cross-sector collaboratives. Using and adapting a method known as Collective Impact, I have extensive experience supporting groups to find common ground, take action, and achieve results at scale.

• The second is inclusive practices for mutual liberation and systems of belonging. This is concerned with disrupting oppression, courageously shaping structures and cultures to facilitate belonging, and actively navigating difference with compassion and skill.

• The third is systemic principles bringing ease and insight to human systems. Utilizing the Orders of Love as articulated by Bert Hellinger, I've learned to perceive underlying dynamics in families and workplaces, to sense what bring greater ease and peace.

• And the fourth is somatic wisdom for systemic sensing and integration. While mental and emotional intelligence can take us far, we also tend to project and distort our perceptions. The body is an honest consort, offering direct feedback we can use if we know how to speak that language.

From that pressure cooker in the national landscape, I developed a leadership decision-making framework that informed my way-finding through that time. I now teach this framework in systemic coaching and organizational consulting engagements in fields as divergent as legacy farming, technology, affordable housing, and charitable foundations.

The offerings of Many Ways are the fruit and flowers of all my endeavors.

• CONSULTING: Equity, inclusion, and justice work is one way to live my values. I am an experienced guide for organizations navigating policy, structural, and cultural transformation, including times when some leaders are divesting from that critical work.

• COACHING: Systemic Coaching to support life transitions and Systemic Executive Coaching to support leadership development, is some of the ways I live my vision of building individual and collective capacity for social good.

• COURSES: I love facilitating group work. The Embodied Life, Leadership, and Decision-Making Training is the core training platform of my methods, available in several levels.

• CONSTELLATIONS: I expand my vistas with every Systemic & Family Constellation. I work with individuals, and convene monthly Constellation Workshops in Portland, and semi-regularly in Newport, Oregon and other locations.

• COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE: Communities of practice are developing around Collective Constellations as a form of mutual aid in the coming years; and Systemic Summer School.

• CEREMONIES: Still waters run deep in this vein of my work to accompany life’s big moments. Working with couples to explore their values to vows is just one example.

I’m happy to connect with you and to introduce you to the work I’m passionate about. Please feel free to book a discovery call. I’d love to discuss your needs and interests.