We don’t often talk about how gentle we must be as leaders.

Each day brings with it new people with new stories that are deep, rich and complex, and we must create the spaces for all of their unraveling to occur — and in these spaces we must find a way to move forward.

Some days call us to find a footing to take a stand for what is right — and find that thing which might be ethical — as we establish a position while each person shines a light on what they feel is right for them.

And within this conundrum we must carry the burden of ensuring we choose what is right for the many.

Each person arrives into our orbit with their own trauma, their own Mess, and a world entirely different to ours and we must hold the weight of it in the space that exists between us.

Allowing them to say what it is they wish to say as we place a gentle hand on their shoulder to ensure them that it's just me and it's OK — and we try so hard to avoid being the one that has to fix it and instead just be the one who listens.

As we battle with the idea that we must be the ones to solve it all, to design our way towards a solution instead of sitting in the Mess and embracing it, we miss the understanding that all we have to do is allow the other person's world to simply Be.

And that is enough.

Yet, we don’t often stop talking long enough to listen to the pain in between the lines of someone else's story, to hear that other story secretly embedded within the story they are telling us as we are too busy thinking about how we must design our way towards somewhere that looks like finishing.

We don’t often give ourselves permission to say that today was a day I’ll remember for the difficulty it allowed me to carry, and the valuable lessons these difficulties provided us — for the mistakes we fumbled through together and the errors that we made as we tried so hard to get it right and instead — as we laughed — we failed.

But we laughed together as we gave ourselves permission to say that even though we failed, today was a good day. A permission that would offer us the space to one day understand that these were errors that allowed us to arrive at our own version of Here.

We might in fact laugh together at each others journey, at the Mess of our lives and we might as we open up and find a common ground.

If we were taught that gentle was a strength, we may have seen so much more and we’d better understand that when we are gentle, we are at our best.

See you next week,