Hello Everyone,
Where did November go? I must have only blinked once or twice, but I can hardly believe how quickly the month went by.
A quick reminder that tomorrows (Friday, Dec. 5th) Cultivar Coffee Chat livestream will be at 12pm EST. Hope to see you there!
I’m making soup and bread today, it’s quite cold and we are supposed to get snow. I took it a little easier yesterday than I planned (my kid had two appointments), really almost the entire week, turns out, I needed a break from the holiday break.
But the extended pause has given me time to really sit with myself, push back against the drive for productivity. Examine what actual productivity looks like.
I think that, like putting a soup together, everything can’t go all in at once. You put different ingredients and seasonings in at different times, and you get different impacts.
Sure, you can use a recipe. But that will always be someone else’s set of instructions, there won’t be anything that makes it yours. Your touch won’t be felt, but the soup (or whatever you are making) will still be good.
There is a time for movement, and a time for rest. As I reflect on my own journey of the past six months to a year or so, the contradiction of that statement becomes clearer, along with the truth.
Time, while measured chronologically, is remembered kairotically.
Kairos: time that goes by feeling, not counting.
The moment an extra pinch of pepper makes the soup just right. The flash of insight that comes while going for a walk. The connections that form from sitting in stillness and just being.
Events, struggles, wins, losses all get stored in our brain because of the impact felt rather than the time and place, though time and place may be a part of it.
When I’ve mentioned how it seems time is just flying by, I often get told “well, that happens as you get older,” (often by older people), but I wonder if it is isn’t because we are sequentially getting older, but rather our external and visible impacts become less frequent.
We (broadly speaking) have a tendency perceive ourselves as less important, because we do not feel our impact on the world in the same way we did when we were young, or full of exuberance for a new project that will “change the world.” But feelings of any kind are not sustainable.
I’ve had a tremendous amount of internal growth the past six months, really only known to me, and felt by others. But it isn’t explicitly visible.
And at the end of this long push, I’m realizing that at times of movement, part of me is resting, and at times of rest, part of me is moving. It’s not a simple binary, an on or off. But what many others see as just movement, or just rest, is all in interconnected relation with one another. We need the space in between them. That time of rest is just as important.
Maybe it’s equatable to sleep mode on a computer, background processes keeping programs moving and functioning.
Maybe it’s more like plants continuing to live in winter, storing up energy and potential for when the conditions are right for growth.
Point being, even when you aren’t “moving,” there is still movement. But is felt in impact, not seen in seconds.
How would you describe your time spent honing skills, capacity, and impact, if not chronologically, and out of corporate bounds?
Maybe something along the lines of:
“While working in pattern recognition, maintenance, and disruption across multiple disciplines, I’ve positively empowered over two dozen people to realize their own leadership potential and step into their work with a greater sense of self.”
While true, that’s honestly vague as shit.
Maybe we’ve become so conditioned to seeing things in terms of measurement over impact, that on the surface, that statement doesn’t necessarily tell you much. It doesn’t tell you how, whether it was in an individual or group setting. Was it free mentorship during unemployment, or as part of a 9-5? It doesn’t say if I did that over 5 years or 15, or what level of leadership it was at.
But this conditioning ties into something else I’ve been discussing with friends lately - the thought that as a society we are curious and seek knowledge not to understand, but to accumulate, own, and claim mastery over.
And if we took this relational, kairotic lens beyond ourselves but below the ecosystemic level, what would it mean for how we shape systems and structures, like our teams, our orgs, our work cultures?
What would it look like if, instead of measuring our performance by indicators and accumulation of points, we measured by impact felt to others, understood through curiosity of relation rather that certainty of measurement?
What if instead of being curious about how to optimize performance and claim mastery over body and mind, we were curious about how to make sure employees, employer, and culture were all in the right relation to each other?
The soup is done, but the bread didn’t rise in time to have it with dinner. It rested when it needed to, moved when it wanted to. It still rose to the occasion, just not on the timeline I set.
But because of it doing it’s own thing, that late-night fresh bread snack is gonna be felt and remembered way longer than if it had been ready to go when the soup was.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
- Chris
Welcome, and thank you for your presence!
I am a leadership ecologist rooted in Appalachia, raised through environmental respect, military service and Western educational institutions. I use an animistic lens to better understand the relationship between individuals, organizations, and systems.
When working with leaders and organizations, my approach not one of doctrine, but of guidance and tending to: to memory, to culture, to systems and people. I believe leadership is not a fixed role, but a living, relational practice.
My work draws from my lived experience and research into myth-making, insurgency and business strategies, regenerative philosophies, creative works, the landscape I inhabit, and the mundane, because the ember of humanity is often nurtured in and between those spaces.
If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.
You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.
I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.