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    Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey
    Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey
    Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey
    Ebook261 pages3 hours

    Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey

    By Lisa Marshall

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    About this ebook

    If you find yourself wondering “why am I the only grownup in this room?” or “when do I get to work with real adults, instead of these smart, emotionally adolescent people?”...Yin is for you.

    If you crave the (elusive) satisfaction that comes from feeling like you’re living in balance with who you really are, living the life you crave....Yin is for you.

    If you’ve done all the things . . .
    organized your calendar
    set your goals
    taken the courses
    worked endless work weeks
    chased the bright shiny objects
    brought back the golden fleece

    and you’re still not satisfied, I wrote Yin for you.

    Yin – the part of life to which we pay no attention — is the power in the leadership journey, the source of our voice and our ability to act.

    Yin is the source of the growth that makes maturity possible.

    Yin, Completing the Leadership Journey, is a book, a guided reflective journey, and a workbook designed to help you reach that end. Want to know more? Read “What is Yin?”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLisa Marshall
    Release dateFeb 22, 2022
    ISBN9781736237007
    Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey
    Author

    Lisa Marshall

    Lisa was born in Pittsburgh, PA in November of '45. For five years, because of her father’s work, her family lived in the Midwest. Lisa always felt that living in the Midwest was dreary and lonely, only moderated by summers in central PA where there was green, spaciousness and extended family. At six years old she contracted chicken pox, mumps, measles and scarlet fever, missing 80 out of 180 days of school. For Lisa it was a long, lonely year, and as a result of all that missed school, Lisa taught herself to read. To this day, she takes pride in being one of the fastest and best readers she knows.A graduate of Bennington College, Marshall is certified by the International Coaching Federation, and she has received additional certification in Conversation-Based AssessmentTM, Syntax Communication Modeling, Newfield’s Ontological Coaching, and William Bridge’s Transition Management. Prior to entering the business world, Marshall spent twelve years working as a documentary filmmaker. It is from that background that her fascination with story, and its power to transform real-life lives, took hold.Lisa is a nationally recognized expert, trainer, and speaker on leadership maturity and organizational development, and president of her executive coaching firm, The Smart Work Company. Marshall founded The Smart Work Company to help leaders develop critical communication and collaboration skills. For over twenty years, her seminars and trainings have offered executives a creative way to become more self-aware and tap into their potential through the power of story. She has coached individuals and teams at such firms as NASA, Intel, USDA, and Taiwan Semiconductor. Lisa is the author of Speak the Truth and Point to Hope: The Leader's Journey to Maturity and her recent release is Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey.On becoming a business coach Lisa states, “I realized that coaching was a much more effective way to improve people skills than training. And then the people I worked with kept getting promoted....so I ended up doing a lot of leadership and executive coaching.” One factor that helped was that her dad was in industrial advertising and strategic planning. She grew up around those conversations, and could easily transition engineer clients into thinking about business issues and long-range planning.Lisa is now a fierce elder and grandmother, who aspires to be a good ancestor. She lives with her husband on the Yin side of First Mountain, part of the ancient mountains that run along the eastern side of the U.S in central Pennsylvania. She has set up her schedule to have “off” and “on” work weeks. During “on” weeks she'll talk to clients from about 11:00 to 4:00 for several days. “Off” weeks find her focusing on family including her youngest grandson. She is fascinated by the idea of learning to listen to the natural world as well as she listens to her clients. Lisa understands the power of story, and that stories live in our bodies. And she is deeply committed to the idea that our purpose in life is always, whatever path we take, to grow up, to mature, to become an elder.

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      Book preview

      Yin - Lisa Marshall

      To My Readers

      ommon wisdom is that one writes with an audience in mind.  Unfortunately, that has never worked for me.  I write because something has seized me by the scruff of the neck and won’t let go.  It wants to be said, and is using me to say it.  Only later can I figure out who is supposed to hear/read it.

      So it was with Yin. Fortuitously, my daughters were NOT having it.  ‘Who’s this for, Mom?" they kept asking.  And at some point, I realized it was, more than anything, for them: Millennial women (and men).  And for those coming after.  For those young people who were told there was no bias when there was.  For those for whom full equality and opportunity were promised but not delivered.  Those who were promised a level playing field economically, only to find it was a sham, a charade.  Those who were discovering that being one of the guys was a shallow victory that cost far too much--cost, in fact, their voice.

      And for all of us, female and male.  All who struggle to find their full, rich, resonant voice, to sing the song only they can sing, make the art only they can make, lead the organizations only they can lead, plant the garden only they can plant.  Because voices take many forms.  And, as with the blues, only when we’ve faced the darkness can we really offer the light and sing the song fully.

      Why aren’t there more stories in here?  Stories would show us how it could be done, one colleague said.  Because you already know the most important stories, dear reader.  They’re the ones you’ve experienced and hidden, haven’t told, been afraid to recognize and honor.  You know how your voice has been silenced, how Yang enhanced your fear of Yin, kept you afraid of the dark--the composting, the rotting, the turning of your ego into the humus in which something new and magnificent could grow.  So rather than feeding you others’ stories, I’m suggesting that you pay attention to your story. 

      My hope is that Yin will give you the courage, the confidence and the strength to own it, tell it and, where needed, change it. To help you do that, Yin is designed to be a conversation with yourself, about yourself. I’ve put a set of questions, and left room for you to make notes at the end of every chapter, notes that will help you excavate, explore and reshape your story to one in which you can be and are your fullest, most wondrous self. 

      So this is a book to think on and write in, as you explore your own journey to leadership maturity.  It is not a book to inhale, so much as sip.  Read a chapter, think about it, journal about the questions and reflect some more before you head off to the next chapter.  Allow time and space, and give yourself the gift of deep absorption.  A voice is a terrible thing to waste.

      Prologue

      ixteen years ago I published a book, Speak the Truth and Point to Hope; The Leader’s Journey to Maturity, on what I’d learned about leadership and maturity from my leadership coaching practice. I wanted to stake a claim for the primary role of love in leading. I used Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and the concept of archetypes to structure the book.  Since then, I’ve been asked many times but does that concept apply to women? My answer has always been, Yes! If you’re not the hero in your own story, who is?  And still……..there was something missing, something different.

      Many years later, Hyemeyohsts Storm, friend and mentor, author of Seven Arrows and other books on the cosmology of America’s First Nations, read Speak the Truth and told me, This is a good book, Lisa, but you have to write a book on leadership for women.

      I was flummoxed: I had worked hard to make sure Speak the Truth was a book about leadership for everyone.  And looking back at it now, in many ways I did.  I tried rewriting it and failed: I didn’t really seem to have anything new to say. I still believe what I said then: love is ultimately the key to effective leadership.  So how is the journey to maturity different for women?  As these things often do, it took a long time, and then a very specific convergence of experiences for the answer to become a blinding flash of the obvious.

      #MeToo.  Woman after woman stood up to tell her story.  Stories that had been told and silenced, stories that had never been told, out of a fear of losing life or livelihood, or being seen as weak, incapable of holding one’s own.  Hearing these stories, day after day, I suddenly saw what had been in front of me all along:  The Journey IS different (and it is the same.)  The difference is that women (mostly) don’t go after the Golden Fleece or Medusa’s head.  What I now call the Yin journey (or pilgrimage) is interior: we go inside to find our voice. 

      And in finding our voice, we frequently give voice to a deeper collective unconscious, what author and consultant Meg Wheatley calls what wants and needs to happen. We ask different questions.  We make what is felt implicitly explicit and whole. Experiencing this vast wave of women finally saying It happened, it wasn’t ok.  And it still isn’t, I could finally grasp how the Yin version of the Hero’s Journey was different.

      While the Yang version of the Journey story is about external striving, learning and growth from being organized and focused, about grasping the Golden Fleece and winning the battles, the Yin journey is internal, to find one’s voice and bring that gift--its insight, concerns, caring and wisdom--into the world. It is in service of giving voice and presence to that which is felt, yet is unspoken and unseen. For both Yin and Yang, the goal is always ultimately to bring something of great value to one’s community.

      A lot has happened in a couple decades.  As I began to explore what new needed to be said--for women and men--about the leadership journey, I realized that an exploration of Yin was central to that journey.  I also discovered the juicy new thinking that has emerged around the concept of development in our physical, spiritual, emotional and intellectual domains. Our understanding of maturity has been vastly enriched. Thus began

      a new journey…….

      Chapter One:  Where Do We Start?

      e start, as I am writing this, from the year 2020. We start from lockdown in the time of Covid.  We start from the reality of pandemic, of a deadly and little understood killer disease that is clearly the result of our globalized, interlocked, inter-webbed, interwoven world.  And we start from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, a time of protest, a time when injustice lies exposed and bleeding.

      We start from a world inflamed and often aflame.  We start from a planet under siege by its inhabitants.  We start from a world driven by a cancerous concept of growth at all costs, damn the consequences.  We start from a place where the curtain has been pulled back on the flimsy structures that were the underpinnings of our global economy, and the terrible injustices propping it up stand clearly revealed.

      We start from a concept of civilization that requires vast disconnection--from the planet, from our ancestors, from our communities and from ourselves.  We start from loneliness, depression, isolation and despair.

      We start from a world whose carrying capacity has been exceeded.¹  We start from a world that still believes there is an away, a place to get rid of the junk we have accumulated in an attempt to fill the voids in lives that have no sense of purpose.  

      We start from a world where identities as citizens have been replaced by identities as consumers.²  We start from a normal that never should have been normalized.

      We also start from a rare moment of possibility, when many things that people thought would never change have, in fact, quickly and dramatically changed. We start from a liminal doorway, where the old normal still pulls us and a new normal beckons but has yet to reveal itself.  We start from a moment of choice.

      One choice is to return as closely as we can to the old normal.  To the dysfunctional relationships we have with the planet and with one another--our governments, our legal systems, our educational systems, our economic systems.  Systems thinker Gregory Bateson long ago observed, "That is the paradigm: Treat the symptom to make the world safe for the pathology."³ Our centuries-long experiment with unchecked growth is self-terminating. Either we figure out a way to end it ourselves, or it does the job for us.⁴

      Or we could build new stories. We could, as economist Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, has written, opt for economies that make us thrive over economies that insist on growth.  (The doughnut is the space in which thriving is possible.) She observes that it is "most striking…that

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