Welcome Mavens!

Want to hold the brief in your hands (it’s 10 pages)? Download PDF here. Want to read more deeply about the quick takes? Find links within each to do a deeper dive on your own with downloadable excerpts, Lael Notes, podcasts, videos, etc.

Themes

The Bridge (Embodying)

• Seeing the power of our position as GenX—between two generations that seem at war with each other (Baby Boomers + Millennials/Z). We are fluent in both languages and share values with both. We have grown up straddling two different realities (“the way it is” and “the way it should be”), which makes us powerful conduits for change if we can stay on (and lead from) the bridge.
• White women leading white men (applying lessons learned from black women leading white women)—harnessing the power of our relationships to engage people in their discomfort, be with them in transition, and usher them into hard conversations. This also applies to our relationships with other white women.
• Being an outlier—resisting the pull to water ourselves down, temper our truth, or concede to popular thought/feelings. Feeling different, weird, unconventional, leading from the edge, and being lonely.
• Key questions to consider: Where do I feel like I’m between two worlds? How can I stay fluid?

Focus (Holding)

• The need to focus in the age of distraction is paramount, and yet it’s never been more challenging. It takes ENERGY to focus—it’s physically demanding, lonely, and not popular. It seems we’re always missing some vital piece of information because things happen so fast. Our bodies are taking in and processing all that information, which exhausts us, and our old tricks of self-care aren’t cutting it.
• Many would prefer to not see what’s happening right in the light of day (“let’s just hope that doesn’t happen”, “I can’t talk about that anymore…”) because it’s easier to not see/feel than it is to take action and address. Resentment, judgement and distain are at an all-time high, while curiosity feels like it’s at an all-time low because exhaustion has set in—our ability to engage in thoughtful discourse has seemed to vanish as the divide between people seems to get bigger.
• Simply put: the world is louder and time feels precious—which means solitude, reflection, wandering, deep thought and research feel like a luxury we don’t have the time for anymore.
• Key questions to consider: What will support me in seeing more clearly? Where do I resist seeing? 

Reckoning (Owning) 

• Being able to weave together different thoughts, patterns, words, images, data points and stories to paint a picture of where we are and what we’re experiencing as a means to disrupt a pattern of one-dimensional thinking
• Mental elasticity, systems thinking, the ability to hold multiple truths and a capacity to be with ambiguity/unknown (“I don’t know…”) are the competencies of being on the bridge between here and there—and this is challenging in a society that values knowing, answers, fixing and doing.
• Understanding resistance—in ourselves and each other—to increase compassion while also hold boundaries. The need to stay whole (integrated, connected, rooted) in a culture that feels fractured, scattered and determined to “get it right” rather than assume responsibility or own our mess ups.
• Key questions to consider: Where am I being challenged? Where can I challenge others? 

Quick Takes

Luvvie Ajayi Jones: Professional Trouble-Maker

• I want to dream like white men who have never been told there are ceilings for them, let alone caps.
• The audacity of unshackled white men is massive.
• The only way I wish to be more like them is by having the lack of oppression that gives me the freedom, gumption, and unmitigated gall to think it’s even possible to own a mountain. I want that dauntlessness.
• This must be said: It’s not that the men of Summit are smarter or even braver than anyone else for thinking about buying a mountain. But they (like millions of white men) benefit from being constantly centered, elevated, and catered to, so they have not been programmed to expect less from the world, like the rest of us have.
• We need the nerve and rashness to dare to think these things are possible too, even when we know we might need to be four times as good, three times as qualified, and twice as professional to get what they will have handed to them when they walk into a room in their cargo shorts, half asleep.
• Dreaming big is in itself a privilege. However, I’m asking us to trick ourselves into thinking we have the privilege of dreaming big.
• Sometimes we must dream so big that we make people uncomfortable. That is actually when you know you’re doing what you should—when you mention something to someone and they gasp.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: What If We Get It Right?

• If ever there were a moment for our collective wisdom to take center stage, this is it—all hands and minds and hearts on deck.
• I have a tenuous relationship with hope. I don’t even like the word. It seems so passive, like wishful thinking. I’ve been asked ad nauseam, What makes you hopeful? How do you stay optimistic? That always snags me, because I’m neither. I’m a scientist: I’m a realist. I immediately think: Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?
• It took me far too long to realize that what people were really asking was, ‘Can you please give me hope? I need some.’ And that version of the question, that vulnerable and true version, that “tell me how you, how I, can keep going” version, I totally get. We, those of us trying to turn things around, are not robots. We are humans with heaps of emotions and attachments and fears.
• The dictionary definitions of “hope” and “optimism” both include the expectation of a positive outcome. A positive outcome is a wild thing to expect given the scenarios we face. But the definition of hope, also includes the word “desire” something I have in abundance. I want climate solutions so badly.
• So when people perceive me as hopeful, I think what they’re actually seeing is that I am joyful. And thank goodness for the human ability to decouple hope from joy.
• It’s worth repeating: this shit ain’t over yet. And while I don’t have any assurances for you—hot damn, the world is a wreck and the future uncertain—I am overflowing with motivation to work toward a better world, even knowing it won’t be a perfect world. A world with mended landscapes and renewable energy and clean air and climate justice is possible. And that is worth a shot.

Johann Hari: Stolen Focus

• When attention breaks down, problem solving breaks down.
• If we can understand what’s happening, we can begin to change it…focus=clarity
• Bottomline: we are losing our light (to see clearly, to act accordingly)
• Attention takes 3 different forms (source: James Williams, former Google Exec), Hari added a 4^th
• *You can only find your starlight and daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind wandering and deep thought

1. Your Spotlight—The first layer where you focus on immediate actions. It requires narrowing your focus.
2. Your Starlight*—The second layer that applies to your longer-term goals over time. When you feel lost, you look up at the stars to get the direction you’re traveling in.
3. Your Daylight*—The third layer makes it possible to know what your longer term goals are in the first place, It allows you to reflect and see the things around you. This is the most important because it allows you to know who you are, what you want, and where to go.
4. Our Stadium Lights—The fourth form of attention that allows us the ability to see each other. It enables us to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals.

Halla Tomasdotir (President of Iceland) interview with Adam Grant

• Leadership ultimately comes down to asking yourself the question ‘Who am I not to offer myself up to do something?’ Experience has taught me that if I wait until I’m confident to do something, I’m unlikely to take big risks or take big leaps.
• In a world where we face so many fears, so much anger, so much hate, so much division, so many complex challenges and questions, I think we have to really draw on our full mental and emotional capacities to meet this moment.
• I didn’t become President in 2016 [I lost], but I became president of my own life. It was really about me taking the time to sit well in my own skin. You may not win the race you offer yourself into, but if you do it with a clear vision for why you do it, and how you want to do it, there is every chance you’ll come out of it as a winner because you’ll grow a lot.
• Questions are far more important than answers right now. I want to be a president who is known for asking questions, not having the answers.
• There is something that each and every one of us can do to help deliver the world we want. I have a lot of respect for people who don’t want to do it from such a visible post, but I think all of us have a reason to ask ourselves, ‘How can I serve?’
• I worry how we build trust in a world that already has low trust when we have nothing that we can collectively agree on as truth. There just seems to be all kinds of versions of truth being pushed and echo chambers…so I think we’re all developing blind spots.

Andrea Gibson on Instagram

• If I’m to be what Mary Oliver called a bride, married to amazement, I cannot file for divorce.
• The only thing we have control over in this life is where we put our attention. So in the darkness, I put my attention on the moon, pouring into the skylight above the bed, to kiss my love’s forehead.
• Life is so sweet I’ve said to her 7,000 times in the last year, and only then realized that I’d previously been living my life like I was owed my days, owed the sunlight that travelled 93 million miles to warm my face today.

NYTimes Opinion: Thanks a Lot, Boomers.

• “It’s easy to hold a sign saying ‘I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit’. But if you’re looking to hold someone accountable, own the world YOU made. Protest yourselves. You were handed the world on a silver platter. You’ve been an electoral powerhouse since the 80s. When presented with the choice between protecting your interests or investing in a better future for your children, you usually chose yourself. It’s like you feel Democracy only exists to serve your needs.’

Lee Harris’s November Energy Update

• Skepticism is based on non-experience or disbelief
• Don’t be surprised if you’re a little less tolerant of the judges in your life—I have compassion, but I also have boundaries. I have no problem with people not meeting me, but I’m not very tolerant these days of someone who wants to push against me…I did a lot of that when I was younger and more wounded. I don’t need to play that game anymore. Watch the hygiene of how you let people speak to you.
• Someone else’s truth does not have to be yours—and the fact that they believe their truth is the only truth tells you what a limited world they’re living in. This level of certainty of the mind has actually been very helpful for societal control. Societal control is going through a real reckoning right now.
• It’s hard for you to change anything when you’re hiding something. The minute you stop hiding and you bring yourself forward, your energy signature, your truth, goes into the room, and it effects the room. So many more people are capable of change than we realize.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Women Who Run with the Wolves

• The modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue.
• And when we pick up on her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one’s mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer.
• All one might need, all that we might ever need, is still whispering from the bones of story.
• Story grease the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.
• To find her, it is necessary for women to return to their instinctive lives, their deepest knowing. So let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones. Shed any false coats we have been given. Don the true coat of powerful instinct and knowing.

Brittney Cooper: Eloquent Rage

• The problem with the 2016 presidential election is simple: white feminists didn’t come get their people. Who are the people of white feminists? Other white women. Until the election of Donald Trump, very few Americans, beyond political scientists and analysts paid attention to the fact that white women have a long history of voting for predominantly for Republican candidates in presidential elections. But when we woke up on November 9^th, 2016, to discover that white women were not interested in forming a president in their own image, suddenly we began to train our eyes more on white women.
• I have always known of white women’s great capacity to be treacherous. But I did not know that they suffered a far more acute version of a problem that white feminists have, for decades diagnosed Black women with having: For white women, their race comes before their gender.
• Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc, felt like an exercise in white-lady tears if I ever saw one.
• It feels really important in this moment to make clear that feminism is a multiracial project. Feminism doesn’t belong to white women.
• When white women signal through their tears that they feel unsafe, misunderstood, or attacked, the whole world rises in their defense.

Lael Couper Jepson: Spit-It-Out Love Letter

• This waiting thing we do? It’s got to stop. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment in our history, and ours are all bound up—not by someone else, but by our own thoughts about who we are and what we’re capable of doing.
• You are an untapped resource, woman, but you’ve yet to fully open the spigot of you. Imagine what would be possible for our world if you did—indeed all of us women did. We would create a veritable tsunami of change, seemingly overnight.
• It’s dark out there and feels vastly unknown. So much is there, but unseen, which is scary. And yet, there is an expansiveness to the ocean. We sense it as it reawakens our skin, offering us hope even as it feels daunting.
• We talk about what might be possible for our world if women were to lead us into the future. We imagine what might be different as a result.
• I believe men—and the predominately masculine values they have used to design, organize, govern, and grow our world as we know it—are an exhausted resource. Literally and figuratively.
• Until women find our way back to this place where the feminine lives and unlock it for ourselves, we will continue to reach for and deplete the very same resource that has been thoroughly exhausted—the masculine energy in us.
• I believe with all my heart that if enough women choose to trust themselves and what they have inside them at this particular moment in history, we will create a groundswell of change that is so desperately needed in this world. We will create—collectively—a critical mass powered by women.

Sharon Blackie: If Women Rose Rooted

• The world which men have made isn’t working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves—and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries—to stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination—don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet.
• Stories matter, you see. And so the stories that we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, and the stories that are told to us by others about the world and our place in it, shape not just our lives, but the world around us. The cultural narrative is the culture.
• We need to understand our dysfunctional ways of being, to confront the beliefs and values we have subscribed to which cause both women and the planet to be in this mess in the first place. We need then to discovery our own authentic values and ways of being in the world, to wake up to our own creative power as women, conceive our own individual vision for what we might offer to an ailing earth.
• ‘The world will be saved by the Western women,’ the Dalai Lama once said. And if we stand with our powerful and inspiring native sisters from around the planet, together we all might just have a chance.
• And if we rise up rooted, like trees…well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves but the world

Margaret Wheatley: Who Do We Choose to Be?

• It is possible to use our influence and power to create islands of sanity in the midst of a raging destructive sea. So much is possible if we consciously and wisely choose how best to step forward as leaders for this time.
• Facing reality is an empowering act—it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service of this time.
• But we can’t get there from here without traversing through the falling apart stage. We cannot simply leap into new ways of being; first we must prepare for disintegration and collapse.
• The chaos cycle predicts this has to happen, that things must fall apart. And human history documents in astonishingly clear detail the pattern of collapse that all civilizations go through.
• This book is born out of my desire to summon us to be leaders for this time as things fall apart, to reclaim leadership as a noble professional that creates possibility and humaneness in the midst of increasing fear and turmoil.
• The belief in never-ending progress is fueled by our inexplicable arrogance that we can supersede the laws of the Universe. For the first time in history, humans are changing the global environment, rather than adapting to it. This is hubris of ahistorical proportions, and we are failing miserably, as you may have noted.
• For those of us not blinded by the false promise of progress, we may understand the dire state of this civilization. Do we fall into private collapse consumed with fear and despair? Do we become one who does nothing but complain for what’s being lost? Do we succumb to grief for the suffering of so many? Do we give up? Do we cocoon in self-protective bubbles? Or do we acknowledge where we are and step forward to serve?
• Blind reactivity and fear are not the answer. Self-protection is not the answer. Denial is not the answer. Sane leadership is. What is sane leadership? It’s the unshakable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative, and kind. Within our sphere of influence, there is much we can do.

Shawn Anchor: The Happiness Advantage

• Escaping the Cult of the Average: The fact that there is one weird red dot (on the scatter plot diagram)—what we call an outlier—up above the curve is no problem. It’s no problem because we can delete it. We can delete it because it’s clearly a measurement error—and we know it’s an error because it’s screwing up our data. If you are interested in observing the general trend of what you are researching, then outliers mess up your findings.
• The typical approach for understanding human behavior has always been to look for the average behavior or outcome. But in my view this misguided approach has created what I call the “cult of the average”. If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.
• Conventional psychology consciously ignores the outliers because they don’t fit the pattern. I’ve sought to do the opposite instead. Instead of deleting those outliers, I want to learn from them.
• You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.

Minna Salami: Sensuous Knowledge

• Working as a black, African-heritage woman in the white and male dominated world of ideas, I am like the second explorer who has navigated the other side of the metaphorical mountain.
• It is not my aim to convince the first explorer that he’s wrong about the mountain. That would place him, yet again, at the center of the narrative. What’s important to me is the second explorer’s hidden narrative, to put her world at the center.
• I emphasize the word hidden because it is also not the point of Sensuous Knowledge to provide a “new” or “alternative” perspective to the Europatriarchical one. That would also center whiteness and maleness by implying that they are the axis around which everything must turn. My blackness and femaleness are not “new” or “alternative” angles to me. They are the only angles I know as far as race and gender are concerned.
• [Toni Morrison once wrote], “Black women have always considered themselves superior to white women. Not racially superior, just superior in terms of their ability to function healthily in the world.”
• And so what’s important about the explorer’s hidden view is that it disrupts one-dimensional thinking and contributes to a more vibrant understanding of the world.
• We have to wonder why, despite all the feminist work, womanhood is still so devalued.
• Striving to become like men and adopt notions of masculinity is, frankly, setting a low bar. Men are just as enslaved by the social system. The golden prison of masculinity sentences men to a life of conformity. Both women and men ought to reject the imprisoning definition of masculinity.

Lisa Lister: Witch—Unleashed, Untamed, Unapologetic

• The witch represents the part of each of us that has been censored, ignored, punshed and demonized. And it’s a part that wants—no, needs—to be accessed and fully expressed. I regularly get asked, ‘Why do you think women are fearful to speak out, to be heard and to fully express themselves?’ My answer: It’s because we’re fearful of the witch inside each and every one of us. The witch is a woman fully in her power. She is in touch with the dark. She knows how to be the witness, how to let things go and how to follow her own counsel. Most importantly though, she questions everything.
• She hears the whispers of those who have gone before her and she feels the ancient secret that are in her bones. She’s the one who knows without fail that there’s more to this life than actually meets the eye. She causes hierarchical power structures to shake in her wake. She knows that at any given moment, she can be a hot mess, a woman of grace and beauty, angry and grief-struck, loved and pleasure-sated, tired and soft and raw and vulnerable. She knows that in some moments, she can be all of these at once. She is whole.
• A modern-day oracle shares the very best counsel when she remembers herself—the deep intuitive trust of the wisdom and knowing held in her body.

Susan Cain: Bittersweet

• Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents. We’ve organized American culture around the sanguine and the choleric, which we associate with buoyancy and strength.
• The bittersweet-melancholic mode, in contrast, can seem backward leaning, unproductive, and mired in longing. It yearns for what could have been, or what might yet be. But longing is momentum in disguise; it’s active, not passive; touched with creative, the tender, and the divine.
• The space you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.
• The word compassion literally means “to suffer together.” Sorrow and tears are one of the strongest bonding mechanisms we have.
• If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant or fierce someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.
• None of this is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. [We need to learn] to walk the bridge of sadness, and find the joy of communion waiting on the other side.
• Leonard Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah.” That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That is broken apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us. Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in doing so, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness.

Susan Simard: The Mother Tree

• [I wanted to] unlock the mysteries of why the land mended itself when left to its own devices. The trees soon revealed starting secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy that can no longer by denied.
• I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication, of the relationships that create a forest society. The most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.
• This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.
• Cooperation is the key to our survival.
• My childhood was shouting at me: The forest is an integrated whole

Brook Baldwin: Huddle, How Women Unlock Their Collective Power

• Huddle is a word associated with masculinity and sports. But what if we flipped it on its head and feminized it? It’s a noun. It’s a verb. And it’s time for us, as women to own it.
• A huddle is a place where women can become energized by the mere fact of their coexistence. A huddle is where we can uplift each other to succeed, thrive, and if I may—get amazing shit done.
• Sometimes they are a space where women can simply bear witness for each other, or quietly sustain each other’s very survival.
• I know women aren’t always great to each other. When we compete or trash each other, we miss out o something incredibly valuable. One of the most potent resources we have is each other.
• Groups of women are changing the face of this country—and long before America elected the nation’s first female vice president, women have always had a very strong hand in shaping our history. But sometimes these stories don’t make the headlines and historians don’t always focus on the huddles of women who have helped change the world.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: Stages of Grief (modified)

1. Denial (“uninformed optimism”) characterized by numbness, this can’t/won’t happen thoughts. It’s very much business as usual, and talk about change is dismissed as “heard it before…”. People don’t want to think about what needs to change—especially if it doesn’t impact them. Thoughts are very much centered on the past and focused on external environment (not internal feelings). Associated with danger.
2. Resistance (“informed pessimism”) characterized by blaming, stubbornness, and lots of emotions. There is questioning and a tendency to withdraw. People claim to not have heard about something, seem shocked by something that has been present for a while, and are confused and bewildered. Focus is very much internal, centered on the self, and references the past longingly. Associated with endings.
3. Exploration (“maybe if…”) characterized by a lack of structure or clear boundaries. High uncertainty, but also high creativity. Lots of energy, but not as much focus. Stress is present. Focus is still on the internal/self but is more forward-looking. Associated with beginnings.
4. Commitment (“I want to make this happen”) characterized by renewed focus. Challenges and goals are identified—energy is now focused both outward (on external circumstances) and future. Prepared to learn new skills. Most receptive time—open to new processes and practices. Associated with opportunities.

Brene Brown: Lock-In and Lock-Through Power

• I wanted to use the concepts of locks to illustrate the tricky work-to-home and professional-to-personal transitions that we have to navigate with our partners, children, and friends.
• Specifically, we have a “locking through” problem—the term used to describe the process of raising or lowering a boat to match the water level of the adjoining waterway. We’re coming off of one depth and either falling uncontrollably to a completely different level of flow, or we’re scrambling to rise and get synched with something more elevated. Either way, there’s a lot of rough water in these transition processes.
• When we don’t make the time for the lock-through process—when we fail to take the time to level-up or down with our new environment, we can quickly find ourselves questioning why, just hours ago, when work seemed overwhelming, we were longing to be in the very place that we now find ourselves trying to escape.
• “Locking in” is about paying full attention, going “heads down” to get it done, and making a commitment to limit distractions. We lock in for reasons of mental toughness. We lock in when we go into flow. We lock in when we go into deliberate practice, and we lock in when we go into deep focus.
• Your one flashlight can only ever be shining on one thing at a time. In a day when you do a lot of task switching, you’ll start having less integrity in any of the states your attention is in. You’re going to become more slower, more error prone, and emotionally worn out.