“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”
Steve Jobs
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The most profound leadership lessons come long before you encounter any formal training. Your earliest influences—parents, mentors, caretakers—demonstrate responses to difficulties that shape your leadership instincts, whether you consciously internalize them or not.
In my last newsletter, I introduced you to my earliest leadership model: my mother, a physical therapist. As a child, I would occasionally visit her at Riverside Community Hospital, observing her with patients or drinking in the stories she brought home each evening. What stayed with me most was her ability to see beyond obvious symptoms to the underlying patterns causing them, to distinguish the presenting pain from its true source.
Below, you'll find resources that have recently inspired my holistic thinking. Each offers a unique perspective on addressing challenges at their roots rather than treating surface indicators. Like my mother's approach to healing, they invite us to create space and respond to what's actually happening beneath appearances.
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💜 The Heart
Tools to support your conscious leadership practice.
🌱 "What Do We Do With All This Consumer Rage?" [Newsletter]
Root causes grow from literal soil in this piece. In her newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen describes the online dahlia hobbyist community as a microcosm of entitled consumer culture. She examines how expectations have been warped by corporate giants, leading you to demand instant gratification even from small, artisanal businesses. Proximity between customer and provider fosters patience, while anonymity can enable outrage. If an escalation in unrealistic standards is affecting your business, she proposes that building relationships directly with local providers and practicing grace could be viable solutions.
🌌 Timeless wisdom to transform how you solve complex problems [Book]
If Eckhart Tolle calls a book an "unequivocal message of spiritual empowerment," it's worth a read. Three Magic Words by U.S. Andersen explores how your awareness shapes your reality, and it has elevated my leadership thinking significantly. Each chapter closes with a meditation that encourages thoughtful rather than reactive problem-solving and helps align you with what Andersen calls the Universal Mind, a collective consciousness between all living things. This 1954 classic remains visionary for anyone willing to expand their understanding of the nature of being. You can listen to the full audiobook for free on YouTube.
🌀 A visual meditation on finding order in chaos [Video]
The same pattern that organizes galaxies and DNA also holds the secret to integrating the disjointed parts of your organization. This mesmerizing film explores the spiral, an ancient symbol that appears in everything from weather systems to human consciousness. Effective leadership requires a strong center and a clear mission, much like how the spiral balances expansion with stability. This video from the Awaken the World initiative speaks to so many leadership dynamics, but, in particular, how what appears as chaos contains recognizable patterns if you look at whole systems rather than analyzing parts.
🧠 The Matter
Leadership trends that caught my attention.
🚶🏾♀️Women's advancement: why labyrinths offer more hope than ceilings [Article]
Power structures weren’t built with women in mind, which means most have had to find their own way through. This article for Harvard Business Review reimagines women's leadership challenges by replacing the glass ceiling with a different metaphor: the labyrinth. Unlike a maze with dead ends, a labyrinth offers a single continuous path, complex, sure, but navigable with persistence. Though it was published in 2007, women’s workplace challenges haven’t changed: unconscious bias, expectations for leadership styles, and family demands (to name a few). This piece offers comprehensive solutions for leaders committed to equity.
🌐 What empathy reveals that analysis misses: design thinking for systemic challenges [Article]
How do you identify the true source of a challenge when all you can see are its symptoms? This breakdown of the five-step Stanford Design Thinking process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) shows how to tackle “wicked problems,” what engineers call symptoms as opposed to root causes. This methodology emphasizes understanding human needs before jumping to technical solutions. I've found Design Thinking especially useful when facing situations where traditional analyses fall short because they overlook the people involved.
📢 How viral workplace vocabulary reveals shifting power dynamics [Article]
The new lexicon of “quiet quitting,” “coffee badging,” and “polywork” isn't just trendy jargon; it’s the language of a changing workforce. This LA Times piece examines how such vocabulary reveals the tensions between employers and employees since the pandemic. It traces symptoms (viral terms) to their root causes: workers attempting to maintain the autonomy they gained during remote work while companies push for returns to pre-pandemic norms. Read this if you're willing to come to terms with what's actually happening beneath productivity challenges and resistance to office returns: a fundamental rethinking of work's place in everyone’s lives.
🎯 Final Thoughts
True systems thinking asks you to look past surface issues and trace what’s unfolding underneath. Whether it’s the sacred geometry of the spiral, the architecture of a labyrinth, or the human component of design thinking, each of these resources suggests that true transformation begins with a deeper view.
I'm curious about your journey. What wisdom shapes how you practice leadership?
Sending love and light,
Ginny