There is another way

begin

I can spend hours thinking about how to write to you. Asking, ‘will this land?’, ‘how do I help her see things differently?’, ‘what would have made it click for me?’. You see, this work we do in the world, these hours we spend filming and writing and teaching, they’re about so much more than running a business. They’re about another way.

I’m speaking a foreign language

“Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor”.

I went to a posh school (it was a free place, don’t go making up stories about me now). We did Latin. That’s what you do at posh schools.

I was terrible at it. So it made sense to do it all the way through to my final exams and scrape through by the skin of my teeth.

For some reason, I remember this quote. I have no idea how, and when I searched for it on Google, that font of all knowledge, I couldn’t find who said it, although I found the quote easily enough.

“I see the better way and I approve it, but I follow the worse”.

Genius really. Aren’t we all doing that in so many ways?

Why would we do that?

Now there’s a question I suspect we’ll never quite get to the bottom of.
We stay in jobs we hate, stick around in partnerships that make us miserable, eat food that makes us sick, work all the hours when it burns us out, say yes to things we mean to say no to…the list is endless. It’s astounding how many times we see the better way, know it makes sense, and yet choose to keep on keeping on.

I’m trying to attract your attention here

And when I think of it that way, it all makes sense.

Here we are, jumping up and down, saying, ‘Look, here’s the better way! Lady, it’s AMAZING over here! Come on, what are you waiting for?!’

and there you are looking over and saying,

‘Yep, I get it, honestly, blinking brilliant what you girls are doing. I’ll be with you in a minute. Just as soon as I’ve been on this sucky conference call and written a big long email about some Powerpoint thingy. Oh, and then I’ve got that big inbox to polish off alongside a manky sandwich from the canteen. Once all that’s done, I’ll be right there’.

It’s quite hard sometimes. Sigh.

Even though we like to make it easy.

It’s not you, it’s me.

Our #favouritenotfavourite, question comes to me immediately. Because of course, it’s not about you at all. It’s about us:

“How are we creating this?”

It’s never any fun working out how to get you to change. Far easier to work out how we do.
So for today, I’m scrapping the best party in the world.

Life’s a series of experiments after all. And a good friend sent me this book that said ‘Whatever you think, think the opposite’.

Let’s see how this goes down.

We’ve launched this really crappy leadership programme. It’s awful.

  • Love working loads of hours? Excellent. We’ll show you how to do more.
  • No idea what you’re doing it for? Brilliant. We should teach THAT to all your people – nothing like no purpose to get people moving.
  • Want to work out how to generate MORE office politics? YES, let’s make that happen straight away
  • Enjoying living with a mind that tells you you’re not good enough and you probably can’t do it? Easy enough to show you how to dial that one up.
  • Need to make sure nothing sticks for long around here? We know LOADS of ways to crack that one for you!
  • Want to master doing all the things and never getting round to the important stuff? We’ve been working on that for YEARS.

You should totally join our programme. You just kind of learn by osmosis while scrolling your email.  Costs a bomb as well.

To be entirely transparent, we used to do one that was all about being bolder, having more impact and being full of joy. It was ridiculously easy and frankly, created the kind of leaders we all longed to have in the world.

But funnily enough no one could quite find the time for that.

So we made this instead.

Remarkable Leadership for Remarkable Women is open for enrolment for the June 2020 cohort.

We really do know another way.

It’s time to take it.

CREATE YOUR REMARKABLE LIFE,

Danielle and Nic

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