Learn more about the stories behind our event:
How Leadership Happens
What if the key to unlocking success lies not in relentless hustle, but in finding moments of rest and stillness?
Recently, I was taking a YouTube yoga class (you know the ones!) and couldn’t get my brain to stop ticking through my to-do list. I’d pull my belly button to my spine and then get stuck in the next series of meetings coming up – was I prepared enough? Would people listen to me? Did I have the data I needed to clarify my points?
I gave up and went back to my desk, and worked for several more hours, spinning myself in circles – because I did have the data, I was prepared. The pieces that were really bothering me – would people listen? Did anyone care what I had to say? Those weren’t things I could hustle my way through. “Working through it” was a modern myth designed to keep me focused on small tasks and leave the leadership to others.
When I got back to yoga, I tried to listen to the teacher’s insistence that I let things go, that I take a minute for myself. Being still, finding rest – that is what allowed me to reconnect with myself. To remember my confidence in what I can do, to speak from a place of authenticity. When I started showing up for myself, I started showing up as a leader.
Why being heard and seen matters
Do you ever realize, midway through a conversation with someone, that you can absolutely tell they aren’t listening to a word you say? It’s not usually their fault! Distraction, stress, their own busy schedule – they have enough going on. You can understand, even empathize with that – but you still get that sinking feeling in your gut that it’s not them, it is you, and what you had to say wasn’t interesting or important at all. So you go back to your day a little more defeated, a little more unsure of yourself.
We’ve all been on both sides of this – none of us need to be perfect listeners all the time. What we do need, though, is to understand the value of real connection. Of hearing others, and being heard. There are countless ways that this makes us better friends, partners, bosses, or community leaders. But what I find so amazing about the small agreements we can make with each other – to really hear, to be vulnerable enough to ask to be heard – is how powerful one small moment of that can be. Letting yourself be heard, truly listening to someone, even for just a few moments, can counteract the relentless ways we are ignored or overruled in the rest of our lives. It’s not an antidote to every societal problem, not even to most of our problems – but it’s a stepping stone to realizing how to give and receive what we need in the community. And in building those stepping stones, we start to see the recipe for a better society emerge.
What is a facilitated discussion?
The Disruptors, led by facilitators Alexandria and Dana, are creating an intentional space to build connection, to listen and be heard. We’re done with webinars and training where the speaker talks at you, where the goal is only one-way knowledge transfer. Our work, to create transformative cultures at home and work that allow us to fully thrive, can only exist in spaces that are full of connection, that prioritizes dialogue and learning from each other. Our hope is attendees walk away with concrete tools to create change for themselves, to continue to find daily inspiration to invest in themselves. We also hope that by creating this space, we are offering a different model of education and community experience – one that prioritizes connection and equity, one that makes people feel inspired both by the topic and how we feel discussing it.
Why the American Dream?
We arrived at this topic from explorations in our own personal and professional lives. We’ve both been to a variety of training, listening sessions, and transformative workshops with a goal of improving – the culture of work, ourselves, and our careers. We asked ourselves what if the goal wasn’t improving, but simply being? What if we pushed further, and asked ourselves – what does improving mean? By whose standards? And through those questions, we realized we needed a space to come together and question the root of all our stories of dreams and success, to examine the truths and misconceptions. Through this questioning and dialogue, we hope to shake off the myths that are trapping us in a cycle of improvement for improvement’s sake and dig into what a life lived by our own standards could look like.
Why do dreams matter?
You can be whatever you want to be. Live in the moment! Start saving for retirement ASAP! These trite pieces of advice pull us all in different directions, and every day there is a new story of someone who broke all the rules and made it big.
How do you make sense of what rules to follow? What makes the rulebreakers successful? It can’t be just luck…can it?
Dreams give us our own roadmap to success, allow us to shake off the external expectations and fix our heart by our own compass.
That is far from an easy task. When advice is coming at us from all sides – our families, bosses, phones and news – and our social feeds are flooded with comparisons to others who have “made it”, our internal compass can get lost in the cacophony. That’s what we’re excited about in our upcoming discussion – having a dedicated space to step back from the din and examine the stories coming at us from all sides. To use the power of connection to untangle the stories that matter to us from the stories others want us to believe. To support each other in defining and adhering to our internal definitions of success. To find hope in fixing our heart by our own dreams, and to embrace the resilience that comes with living life authentically.