The world needs our souls to sing. Together.
Like a huge, enthusiastic, and at times slightly out-of-tune choir, you can’t help but be moved by – a collective of humans unashamedly basking in their own joy and aliveness, united by something that can’t be explained.
It’s from that place that our most alive, world-changing ideas emerge. The ideas deeply needed at this time in human history.
It’s that energy that sources us to voice them – and bring them into reality, even though our knees may be shaking.
Inner work has its place – but it’s the wondrous mystery of art in all its forms, and the divine presence of one another, that awakens and sustains our creative power as women.
The era of the leader as poet (in a choir!) is here – unapologetically embodying her full-spectrum aliveness. Following her highest, wisest, minxiest, sovereign self, and shaping what wants to emerge in service of the world she longs to create.
The seeds of this vision first came to me as a poem, some time ago…
Bringing forward the work we're here to do requires a willingness to inhabit uncertainty as a creative and spiritual practice.
When I wrote that poem, I felt a little lost. I was in that fertile, low-energy in between place, where the thing you thought was 'it' turns out not to be it after all, and the next thing has not yet revealed itself.
But I was not writing to hone in on what my next step would be. If I’d been ‘trying’ to figure that out through the act of poetry writing, I’m pretty certain the insight that did surface would have wriggled away.
It was also no coincidence that it was written in the company of a small group of women writing together. When I read it aloud, they saw me and what was emerging. Perhaps it is in being truly seen that what’s emerging becomes visible to us, too.
Some definitions
Here three definitions that are central to this Joy-Led® work:
Highest, wisest, minxiest, sovereign self: My term for describing what is often referred to as soul. I like the term soul, and it also reminds me of church, and church is a place that had me feel a lot of shame as a girl. This alternative feels like a gorgeous reclamation of all parts of us – our essence. Including the minxy parts we may have previously believed were unwelcome. It is my belief that it’s those parts that live in the shadows that hold our greatest gifts (btw, minxy is my favourite word of all time).
Creative Power: When we unleash our creative power, we are active participants in shaping reality, rather than endlessly adapting ourselves to systems, cultures, businesses, and leadership models that were not designed with women in mind. Being in our creative power is a stance we can inhabit in all parts of our work and life.
Joy-Led®: A way of creating, leading, relating and living rooted in aliveness rather than fear, performance, extraction or self-abandonment.
Joy, in this body of work, is not superficial happiness. It is life-force. A signal that something that serves life is wanting to emerge through us. Being Joy-Led does not mean feeling joyful all the time. It means allowing aliveness, intuition, creativity and our full-spectrum humanness to participate in how we create, lead and live.
To be Joy-Led is to trust that what makes us feel more alive is deeply wise.
Five Joy-Led Principles
1. Creation precedes clarity
We discover what we're here to create by creating. There's no avoiding it. It's how our work becomes embodied. And that's what these times are calling for. There are already enough experts sitting on the sidelines, commentating on what they see.
As Joy-Led leaders, we jump IN. We create fully, imperfectly and wholeheartedly. Because doing this, gives us information about what wants to happen next. It's almost as if each creative act we step into has a life-force of its own.
No. Not as if. It is my belief that our creations are alive (Yes – I encourage the women I work with to talk to theirs).
2. We revel in being surprised
Our logical brains are wonderful aren’t they? But they are limited. Why on earth would we limit ourselves to only what we think the point is, in its entirety, every time we create or take action?!
Our gorgeous human selves are always scanning for certainty. But that’s just a way of trying to control the future (and we all know how that goes).
Joy-Led living and leadership invites us into embodied curiosity. Rather than asking: will this work? We ask, what delights are in store if I step into this and expect, even demand, to be surprised!? Yep. It might be a bit bumpy, but what will be revealed? Who might I become? What wants to emerge?
We trust that the journey is guided by something far more wondrous than what we can know and see today. We trust that something wiser and far more mysterious than our logical minds is leading the dance.
3. Resistance is divine data
Sometimes resistance is plain old resistance (of course). But much of it, when we delve into its murky depths, is actually pointing us to where our souls really want us to go.
Time and time again I’ve seen business owner clients hell-bent on bringing a particular offering into form, discover something far more expansive wants to take its place. That’s why they were stuck.
Sometimes our resistance is a divine act of resistance against the prevailing cultural norms we've inadvertently internalised about how we should show up.
Once we spot it, we’re not at its mercy. Instead, we can step into into what does feel true for us – and keep choosing it, even when the inevitable, bog-standard kind of resistance shows up too. Because it will. Fear. Doubt. Who the hell am I to be doing this? I’ve come to see that kind of resistance as a confirmation. 'Ah. There you are. I wondered when you'd arrive.’
4. In our bones, we remember community
Before the age of the nuclear family in the West, we worked together, gave birth together, and communed with all life dealt us – together, as women. One of the greatest lies patriarchal culture teaches us is that we must figure everything out alone. It is also one of our greatest heartbreaks.
For our creative power to expand we need the presence of other women on the same path.
We need spaces where our contradictions, brilliance, uncertainty, weirdness, longing, grief, joy and unfinished, unpolished becoming are all allowed. The possibilities for each of us – and for the collective – expand.
Spaces where fixing, performing and competing have no place. Only witnessing, truth-telling, experimentation and permission.
We can even be together in silence, on Zoom, working on our websites or the proposal we've been putting off, and unseen support is invoked, enhancing all that's being created.
I have come to believe the Great Creator herself gets excited when women gather, and lends us a hand.
5. Ultimately, The Joy-Led path is about our becoming
Time and time again, as we feel and follow the urge to create, we will doubt. We will fear. We will encounter resistance. We will be sent mirrors that show us where we are still hiding, still contorting, still giving our power away.
As we shine our light more brightly, some people may project onto us. Some will misunderstand us. Some will celebrate us. There is nothing wrong with any of it. It just is.
It is a divinely designed curriculum: one there is no online course for. The uninvited feedback that says 'you are not ready' is often what ignites the embodied knowing that you are. When someone pushes against your boundaries, as they will almost certainly will as you take your work into the world, you strengthen the part of you that is ready to stop abandoning yourself to keep other people comfortable.
It is by bringing our work forward that we become our untamed, unconditioned, unleashed selves. More courageous. More trusting. More alive. More magnetic.
Our gifts flow into the world with ever more abundance, weaving with the gifts of others in ways we could never have predicted when we first said yes.
Like all living things, this philosophy continues to evolve. Every poem, conversation, workshop, retreat, organisational partnership and woman who says yes to becoming part of it contributes to its unfolding.
Perhaps we'll write the next chapter together.
If something here resonates, I'd love to hear from you.