Love Not Just One Day But Every Day

This blog was originally shared as an email with the Loving Leaders community. If you'd like to hear from Renée every week, directly in your inbox, you can sign up for the emails here.

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It's Valentine's Day, the one day in the year when more people feel safe naming love as a human value, not just a romantic experience. 

Then, too often it's back to business as usual, tucking Love away as an unmentionable. But business is anything but usual right now. Love is urgently needed by leaders and on teams to counteract the examples and harms of fear-based, dehumanizing leadership. 

But I don't have to tell you that Love is crucial. YOU, Loving Leader, are here each week, sometimes a couple of times each week, reading an email, blog or social post about Love at work. That is one small and hopeful act, and one of the many things you probably do as a Loving Leader.

• Perhaps Love guides your response when someone makes a mistake.

• Maybe Love helps you prioritize developing your team members and their learning.

• Perhaps Love informs how you communicate with openness and transparency.

• Maybe Love guides you through tough choices.

• Perhaps Love brings you back to improving processes so they are respectful of people.

• Maybe Love gives you the template for leading change.

• Perhaps Love causes you to pause and listen, acknowledge and appreciate.

Love helps us do all that and more, when we commit to Love not just one day a year, but applying it in practice every day, in all the spaces we are in, with all people we encounter. 

When you commit to Love, you don't wait for the calendar to give you permission to pay attention to Love either. Many “official” calendars are now unreliable sources of what's important anyway.

So you decide.

You put Loving events that include and uplift on your calendar.

You advocate for Loving organizational systems and practices.

You Love your team in all the moments that matter.

You Love yourself as you would love others.

You Love every damn day, wherever you are, whoever you encounter.

You do that because you know that Love is good for the goals you're trying to achieve to be sure. And because you know it's good for people too. You can sleep at night knowing you're living your values, not ignoring them. You do that because you believe in the power and impact of Love. The necessity of Love. The urgency of Love. Everyday every place for everyone.