Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey

Prologue
Sixteen 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?

We 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. 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. 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 many of the policies proposed for enabling an economy to be growth-agnostic5 could help drive it towards being distributive and regenerative by design.” We could, for example, develop a new story about the way businesses and governments work together, as economist Marianna Mazzucato proposes, such that governments – and the people they serve – benefit from the R&D they fund.

We could, as biologist Janine Benyus proposes, choose to learn from nature rather than consume it. We could, as Donella Meadows, environmental scientist and author of Limits to Growth observed, recognize that “effective systems tend to have three properties—healthy hierarchy, self-organization and resilience—and so should be stewarded to enable these characteristics to emerge.7 We could, as Courtney Martin proposes, redefine “better off” as having clean air, clean water, less “stuff” and less stress.
We could rebuild the concept of the commons and the common good, using the rules Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom identified, rules we know work. We could heal trauma—ours and our ancestors’—and not pass it on to our children. We could learn to listen to the plants and the planet, learn to heal from the medicines plants provide us rather than ones industrially engineered.
We could acknowledge, as Rebeca Solnit has documented in A Paradise Built in Hell, that self-organized communities get far more done with far greater efficiency in times of need. We could deliberately restrict governmental powers so that bureaucracies cannot destroy citizen efforts during crises. And we could create governments in which “public servants” understand what that phrase really means.

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.
Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey
vi
#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
Prologue
vii
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?
1
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.
Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey
2
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 many of the policies proposed for enabling an economy to be growth-agnostic5 could help drive it towards being distributive and regenerative by design.” We could, for example, develop a new story about the way businesses and governments work together, as economist Marianna Mazzucato proposes, such that governments – and the people they serve – benefit from the R&D they fund.

We could, as biologist Janine Benyus proposes, choose to learn from nature rather than consume it. We could, as Donella Meadows, environmental scientist and author of Limits to Growth observed, recognize that “effective systems tend to have three properties—healthy hierarchy, self-organization and resilience—and so should be stewarded to enable these characteristics to emerge.7 We could, as Courtney Martin proposes, redefine “better off” as having clean air, clean water, less “stuff” and less stress.
We could rebuild the concept of the commons and the common good, using the rules Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom identified, rules we know work. We could heal trauma—ours and our ancestors’—and not pass it on to our children. We could learn to listen to the plants and the planet, learn to heal from the medicines plants provide us rather than ones industrially engineered.
We could acknowledge, as Rebeca Solnit has documented in A Paradise Built in Hell, that self-organized communities get far more done with far greater efficiency in times of need. We could deliberately restrict governmental powers so that bureaucracies cannot destroy citizen efforts during crises. And we could create governments in which “public servants” understand what that phrase really means.