Your Love is Needed Now.

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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Your Love is needed now more than ever.

In the places we work and in our communities, now is the time to embody love. In the face of dehumanization, destruction, and cruelty, in this time of uncertainty and chaos, your Loving Leadership practices matter.

Your kindness, compassion, and inclusion matter.

Your respect and courage matter.

Your consistency, noticing and tending to your team matter.

Not just generally. Specifically in this context.

This is the time to assure those you lead that you are not changing how you lead. You are not changing how you work together. You are not changing how you collaborate or communicate or recognize or amplify. You are not changing how you listen, or how you help them learn and grow.

You are not caving in and embracing fear-based, dominating, cruel, dehumanizing leadership.

Others may. But you won't as a leader and you won't as a team. 

No way.

Show your team this. And explicitly tell them too.

In your own words tell them:

“Others may be abandoning their values, but we will not. Others may be embracing fear and cruelty, but we will not. We will keep caring for each other. We will keep uplifting each other. We will keep listening, learning, and supporting. We will keep challenging each other too. We will keep making our work better for our customers. We will keep loving each other through this time. And when we get through this time, we will be proud of how we worked together in alignment with our value delivering on our mission.”

There may be forces impacting you that are outside your control and you may face tough decisions. But remember how you do that matters. This is an opportunity to strengthen what a woman I coach calls your “Loving Leadership musculature.” Exactly!

While this moment is hurtful and horrifying in countless ways, you are stronger than you know. Turn to others in your life who can be your community. Gather and support and strengthen human bonds.

And remember to care for yourself too. Thanks to the pandemic (whoever thought we’d say that?) but yes, thanks to the pandemic, you have wisdom about how to care for your nervous system to be healthy and thrive. You learned techniques for resilience during the pandemic. Do those now. Breath. Cry. Move. Laugh. Connect. Create. Be in nature. Embrace loved ones.

And then keep Loving. 

Now is when it gets real. Now is when it matters.