Connection and courage. As a spiritual director, I often work with my clients on identifying the difference between believing in a spiritual concept or idea from their tradition, and having a felt sense of that spiritual concept or idea. For some, it is easy to hold both. At the most core level, a client may believe in a higher power or truth intellectually, and also feel in their bodies or relationship with or connection to that higher power. For others, there may be a strong belief without a real felt sense of connection, or a felt sense of connection may come clearly without a named belief or thought about what it means. My personal experience here suggests that felt sense is what will sustain us in life. But the belief is often what we claim to or grasp that. When it comes to connection and courage, there's a lot I can say. And much we can try to communicate and shared meanings, it will always come back to felt sense. I was in a recovery meeting recently when someone said, I'm not so spiritual. But I have come to trust fully in my experience of the interconnected love of people in these meetings. I love this idea as a guide here. What is spirituality? If not that? What good is all of the beliefs or ideas or teachings in the world if we don't have that felt sense of connection somewhere? And what does it really matter how we explain it, or what we call it, as long as we feel it. Connection encouraged work is about working with the felt sense. I don't know what language you might use to describe it. And I don't necessarily feel moved to create the language for you. The felt sense of being connected to life to others to yourself is yours. Call it life, call it community, call it God, call it love. Call it whatever you call it, and yet pay attention to it as a leader. So many concepts of leadership get trapped in our thinking minds, get trapped in the world of ideas. Leading is connecting, connecting is leading. In connection, we find courage. It's the work of being ourselves in the world and letting others do the same. With that as my opening here, I'll invite you to consider the things that I've discovered that drive disconnection. Many of them we've covered in this section on presence already, but they are worth reiterating. Comparison, in my experience, is the biggest driver of disconnection. The notion of imposter syndrome that has gained so much momentum in recent years, the idea that somehow, I am not enough for I don't belong here in this role, in this work, in this community, in this life. This is in me on a visceral level. In many of my relationships, I feel a constant nag of questioning my belonging, of questioning my connection to others. What I've found is that this often stems from questioning my belonging to myself or to life itself. There are times that has to do with what is going on in the work or relationships or community, sure. But more often than not, it is about whether I'm showing up in the work, relationship or community connected to myself, connected to life. In the moments I do not feel connected to myself in life, I'm also much less adept at noticing and working with the waves that the work or the relationship or the community might be sending negative messages. All of this said, we are swimming in oppressive capitalist cultures, the drive messages of not being enough, of not belonging and less fill in the blank. This is where my wish for every leader is to have a felt sense of connection and a practice of nurturing that connection in themselves and others. How do we move away from disconnection and in to connection? I want this question to be on the minds of all social change leaders. Presence work is about embracing that connection, and courage. They are here right now, for all of us just as we are. Our work is to honor it and live into it. Presence is not the only work of leadership, but it is a huge an essential part of what brings us together to heal, transform and have an impact on the world. Sometimes clients will push back on me in regards to connection and courage work, saying, "but I have this problem, I have to fix, connection doesn't seem to serve me and fixing it". This is where I want to be honest that connection encouraged do not magically create skill or competency and areas of doing or process problem solving. You might have a team member who's not contributing in the ways you'd hoped, you might have made a big mistake at work and have to figure out what to do next. Maybe your team failed at getting the results you desire it on this project. These are all super common leadership problems that on the surface connection doesn't seem to fix. What I'll offer is that while connection encouraged alone will not solve these problems, disconnection and fear will exacerbate them. So when we're working on building connection and courage and leadership, we're working on creating the conditions that can nurture creativity, problem solving, recovery, healing, transformation, and impact. Cultivating connection enables having a difficult conversation with a colleague. It supports honesty and non denial and accounting for our mistakes. And it allows team dynamics to thrive in the midst of failure or disappointment. Courage is about placing our hearts into the world. Connection is about doing that in relationship with our purpose with others and with life. How do you experience and feel these things? A few notes and pointers along the way. Be intentional about non transactional ways of being as you seek connection. All connect if, or if I do this, I want that from them, are cues that you might be setting up a transaction. Be clear about your needs and boundaries and listen for others needs and boundaries and connection. When relationships are taken advantage of by not honoring boundaries, that is actually disconnection, though it can be confusing and hard to see. Interdependence is not the same as co-dependence. Connection encourage our presence practices. Don't use them to try to control the future or reinvent the past. Putting ourselves out there and beginning again with each new moment, is how we will practice connection and courage in relationship to ourselves, to others and life itself. So the practices here are all about tapping into a felt sense. What is connection in your body? What is courage in your body. I hope you'll share with me what you experience.