Openness As We Approach Our New Year's Resolutions

Living with two bulging, herniated discs can be a pain (no pun intended), especially in our rainy season, when my back seems extra sore. During a family barbecue, my sister, who is an RN, asked if I was experiencing pain. When I asked why she inquired, she said that I looked like I was guarding.

Guarding is a medical term indicating when a person has pain somewhere in their body and they become rigid as though to protect the area from further pain or injury. We do the same in our lives with our minds and hearts. We protect ourselves from perceived pain…basically, we guard.

To be open, for many of us, means to be vulnerable. We’ve been open and we’ve been hurt--at least that explains some of our experiences.Ego loves it when we stay closed and works over-time to ensure we do not enter openness. “Remember when you did that before and this happened?” is one of the many voices of ego.When we are open, the gates of Divine guidance, to intention, to the flow of Spirit happen.

Closing the gates of our minds and hearts is insanity and it is the main reason New Year’s Resolutions rarely follow through past the first few weeks. So how can we practice openness?

Here are three strategies to being open, open, open:

1. The first step is reflection. In what areas of your life do you feel closed or blocked to openness? Work? Love? Spirituality? Journal your thoughts.

2. Practice random acts of kindness. These don’t need to be grand gestures, sometimes the smaller the better!

3. Develop compassion and let go of your need to be right.

Even with the best intentions, sometimes we feel as though it is not enough. Why do the barriers to openness show up, guarding our sacred spaces, putting another brick in the wall?Ego, again is the answer. Blocks to our openness manifest in the forms of negative voices cemented in our dialogue and culture. Evidence of this insanity in our workplaces includes statements like,” Nice guys finish last”, or when considering doing something nice for someone, like a favor, we hear, “If you do that for one, you’ll have to do it for everyone” or “No good deed goes unpunished”.

Opening our perceptions and inviting in Spirit through surrender, allows healing of the mind and heart to take place. Through healing, the ego no longer has hold on the barriers and blocks to the gates of openness. Just as a clenched fist cannot receive a gift, a closed mind cannot grow and a closed heart cannot receive love.

As we prepare to begin this new year of 2020, I want to hear from you. What are some other ways you plan to practice being open?

With love,

Maria

Grace in the Workplace

Why would grace be a lesson on leadership?

How can it not? Grace is the state many wise leaders seek: grace under fire. The state of grace, however, is not just essential under fire; grace serves leaders all of the time. During times of stress, confusion, joy, and peace, grace is always at its best.

Many leadership books talk about policies, procedures, and processes. The extreme challenge in today’s organizations is that we value policies and procedures more than we value and honor people. As the Rev. Dr. King, Jr. said, “we need a heart full of grace”. Grace is found in love and personifies elegance, politeness, and generosity of spirit. An organization steeped in love, is an organization steeped in grace.Grace is a word and concept ripe with different mental models for people. Most definitions and constructs have common elements such as beauty, elegance, dignified manner, generosity of spirit, and a gift from God. The ability to see beauty in anything is a gift of grace.

Mother Teresa saw beauty in the poorest of the poor, when she said, “Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.” Grace is seeing with the heart and eyes of God.Victor Frankl described the worst of horrors in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He told a story of sitting on the floor in the concentration camp eating soup, exhausted after laboring all day for the Nazis, when a fellow prisoner rushed in to ask them to join him outside to marvel at the wonderful sunset. Even in the midst of the heinous concentration camps, those prisoners understood the beauty of grace.

Grace is elegance personified. Many of my female executive clients work with me to reclaim their femininity in their high-level leadership positions. Through the process of reconnecting with their feminine energy, they discover elegance and grace. Elegance is refined confidence in self. It is a calm, quiet knowledge of self-efficacy that you can handle anything that comes your way with dignity. This comes from knowing you will never run out of resources because you are tapped into your source, the source of all resources, God.

Grace through elegance is a powerful leadership example. I’ll never forget when Paula, a colleague 20 years my senior said to me, “I never knew that a woman could lead with softness and femininity. I always thought you had to be tough, hard-nosed, and aggressive for others to follow. Thank you for showing me another way, an even more effective way.” An authentic way. Paula learned the power of elegance and grace in leadership. She saw it in fact, move mountains.

How do you see grace manifested in your workplace? How can you impart grace in this holiday season?

With love,

Maria

BTW – This is an excerpt from my book!