Latest / Fire That Gathers / Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Catching the Lie
Transcript
- Amanda Swiger: Welcome to Fire That Gathers, fuel for purpose-led leaders forwarding what's next. Leading in a way that meets this moment is a stretch, not just for what must be done, but for how you're called to lead. Fire That Gathers is a movement of leaders choosing to use this moment of breakdown and possibility as a catalyst for the systems you're creating and for who you're becoming. At this hearth, there is fuel for your movement. From the field, real conversations with purpose-led leaders forging what's next. Not the polished case study, the live questions they're walking, where the map runs out. At the edge, breakthrough moments for my coaching rooms and me walking my own developmental edge in real time. I'm gathering too. Come with me. Every episode anchored with an alchemical question, the kind that transforms what you see. Because shifting our paradigm is among the highest leverage points for systems transformation. How we see shapes what's possible. Welcome to Fire The Gathers. One can't believe impossible things. I dare say you haven't had much practice of the Queen. When I was your age, I I always did it for a half hour a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And it's been on my wall for 20 years. I feel like every purpose-led leader has a version of that. There's some vision you have, some calling to make a difference. And the system you're looking to shift, climate, healthcare, education, right? My foundation clients working with immigrants and refugees, whatever it is. There are others who would look at that and say, like, that's impossible. It looks fixed. But for you, there's like an inspiration, there's a calling, there's a passion to make a difference. And I want to talk about that as I'm reflecting on Gabriel's episode. You know, not every one of us had the gift when I hear him tell the story about his dad working on the early electric vehicles or his internship and mentorship in. The little hacky sack town that went from that to being like a global arts Mecca, an invitation, right? I didn't grow up with seeing impossible things and as inevitable. ⁓ and I'm curious, right? Maybe, maybe you did. But for those of us that didn't, like I wonder where we build this capacity, this practice. So I think back to this, you know, I When I w heard this quote as an adult, and it struck me as like so much of what I believe is needed, what I see as how I want to meet this moment, it feels impossible. And it also to me that's inspiring. It's like I know there are people for whom kind of the routine get it done, it's been done before a job. It's like that's that's okay. And yet, even when I was a corporate attorney. What I wanted and the deals I love to do were the ones where we've never done this before. The first deal to put Android on phones. ⁓ I wanted the deals where we're not sure where it's going, where there's a willingness to sit in the unknown, where there's an invitation to experiment and explore. And my guess is that might resonate for you. There's a moment of like, ⁓ I'm gonna be fully used here. My passion and my commitment and my resources and my education, like all of it, all of the history and all of who I am today is needed. There's still moments in the middle of this work, maybe especially in these moments lately. So much is uncertain and it's changing so fast and resources are shifting. You know, I feel like I've got clients that are, you know, government funding is changing and the work is moving at a pace that's unexpected. There are moments, even for those of us who like playing with impossible things, where Where we feel like we hit a wall. Whether that's the urgency of the moment that has us just look at what's feasible or seeing the change in resources and being able to do what we've done before or doing what we think is needed just simply isn't possible. Those are the moments as a coach that I love. Those are also the moments that I make sure I have somebody to support me in. Because I think, especially for those of us who are used to being the person, and my guess is this is you too. Like people come to you when they're ch when they're struggling, not just those that directly report to you, but others in the organization or in your family. They come and they when things are hard and you have the perspective to scan back a little further. To invite perspective, to kind of poke, invite, explore when they're stuck. But this quote for me was a reminder that relating to the world as though what feels impossible is actually a doorway and not a wall we run into is a practice. But the biggest practice isn't repeating over and over again that it's possible. It's not some. Affirmation. It's the very first moment when we catch the lie. And here's what I mean by the lie: it's always some version of the same thing. This isn't possible, right? Sometimes the doctor says it, sometimes the market says it. But the ones that are most insidious, where sometimes we need help or a reminder is the moments where we say it to ourselves. We don't notice that we've said it. And once you catch it, once you catch That sense of options closed. You can work with it. So the hard part isn't really fixing it. It's the very first part. It's catching the lie. So I'm curious, where have you had the chance, maybe not at work, but in your full life, to play with impossible things? I remember a moment. When I had torn a hamstring in high school and had a doctor tell me I might never run again, and I just knew he was wrong. Or if it was six years of fertility treatments. knowing even as the tests were coming back and I wasn't pregnant or keeping the pregnancy again, I I was gonna be a mom. Gabriel speaks about knowing the impossible is inevitable. And I get curious about what what has you know that? Where have you had a chance to practice that in your own life in a way that you can hold the vision for your impact, for the purpose you're here to create, and in in an unshakable way. For me, I can feel that on my body. If somebody's actually telling me it's not possible, there's a fire. Like I can feel an intensity, an energy, a pressure in my belly. That is just part of my system saying no with a lot of potency, a lot of power, a lot of fire coming through me. But I've once I've caught the lie, if I come back to what's true, I knew I was gonna be a mom. I knew I would be able to run again. And as you'll hear in these client stories, I knew something else was available for my clients. For me, that knowing feels like being immersed in cold, clear blue water. So before I share a few client stories, I'm curious, what is your felt sense? What does it feel like in your body when you've landed on your own truth? You know, what does it feel like for you when you hear a lie? Maybe it's from someone else. They sell it, tell you you can't do something that you know is possible or is uncomfortable when you're like, when you're, when you're hide in your own knots when there's something that you want and it feels like you can't you can't get there. Do you know what that feels like? Notice. And then for you, what is your version of cold c clear blue water? What does it feel like when you land on something unshakable and true? We're gonna talk about this in different scales in a moment in a coaching conversation, in one hour in the midst of a leadership offsite. Or the course of a year for a CEO. And then we have Gabriel Scale, as he shared about on our last episode, 14 years holding a vision, a moment, an hour, a year, and a decade. So one example I've shared before is with a client who, the funder working with immigrants and refugees, and she came into a session asking, How do we move a million dollars fast? And I could see the urgency, the need, the desire to take care of her existing grantees right in that moment was people need resources. This year, beginning of twenty twenty six was feeling scary and precarious and resources needed a flow. But alongside the urgency, what I noticed for her was A level of heartbreak. That that number, while big to some, was actually far from what she knew the need was. And so we you know, my question for her is, you know, we we can talk about how to deploy that, but I but my question first is what's actually needed? And she slowed down a little bit and her eyes widened a little bit. She started cheering as she took a deep breath. Well, actually, we don't need a million, we need more. And she started calculating and talking through the amount of resource needed for her grantees and their ecosystem. And the number grew to three and a half million. And she said, But I don't, you know, we don't have that. It's like, great. Who else? What else is needed? And she thought about her programs team. And her policy team. I said, Great, that's inside your organization. Who else? And she thought about the broader ecosystem and the relationship she had and the way she was able to be a catalyst. And the lie that she caught there was, you know, a million dollars was feasible. If it was just her and her team. But what's actually seemed impossible at the start was can I actually move enough resources to meet the need of this moment? And we caught the lie. We caught the focus on what's feasible and what can I do right now and shifted to what's needed and what's possible and who else. That's what it looks like in a moment. Wanna speak about a a client where we did this more like the ninety minute, the one hour version. Not a moment, but in an hour. So I've been called in to work with a a team technology company. First time I'd worked with a team in years. And I was really brought in to build cohesion with a team that was siloed, struggling, and a lot of tension. And we set the agreements. People knew why they were there. But the container allowed for things to bubble up. The tension, the stress, the frustration, even a little bit of the screaming. And I could see in the look on some of the leadership team members' faces, the fear, the stress, the like, ⁓ God, did that just happen? Now what? And the lie in the room to me as a facilitator was this was bad or wrong. And now we either need to recover from it or we need to pretend that didn't happen. So I took a moment, separated people out, went deeper with certain members of the leadership team about why what was underneath the frustration helped folks regulate and get curious. And then it brought everybody back together and named the lie. The lie to me was that this outburst, this like Volcano eruption in the leader leadership team was a problem, was broken. And instead, what I saw, and here was the impossible thing I named, was put a stake in the ground. There wasn't any evidence yet. There was a choice. That this outburst, this bubbling up of emotion and content. Was going to be the catalyst this leadership team built the level of cohesion, trust, and collaboration that was needed to meet their yearly goals. And then I paired folks up and sent them out just for ten minutes each, each pair, to talk about how was this outburst a catalyst for building the team they needed. Impossible. Maybe. But also generative. By the next meeting the team had just a month later, this leadership team, the CFO of all people, mentioned that they'd never had a more productive or more fun meeting. Even at the end of this same meeting, another leader said, We've had outbursts before, but we've never been able to be productive after. And here's why. To me, it was catching the lie. The lie was that we can't deal with this. The lie was that this is a problem. And certainly we don't want to continue in that way of relating as a with a team that was not useful, but held well and with a stake in the ground, right? The impossible thing. One of the six I believed before breakfast that day was that the eruption could be useful. So it's a moment. It's an hour a quarter to see this team really turn it around. And then for a year, I had a another client who's a founder and CEO of a social enterprise. And she came in with this question and this discomfort that her the cadence of her leadership team meetings just felt off. And it felt like she either needed to just fix the cadence of meetings or accept the discomfort she was feeling. It's already in everybody's calendar. Flights were already booked to come together. But something felt off. And I think a lot of leaders, there's a sense of like, all right, it's off. I must need to work with it. I need to either tolerate it or I need to fix it. But we got curious. What does she really want? Are these these meetings seem right for the strategy you had, but what is actually wanted now? What's, you know, it's similar to the first inquiry, like what's needed? Here's what's wanted. What do you want? What do you really want as a leader? And what emerged were a mix of things that felt like they couldn't possibly go together. She wanted seven figure take home, six weeks off, a strategy that would actually scale a leadership team that could actually lean in and support the business even as she took more time to be present with her family. That mix of things felt so impossible that it sat underneath this like our cadence of meetings doesn't feel right because it's not getting us where I want to go. And yet, once we caught the lie that she couldn't have all of those things, we could get curious about the strategy, about her role as leader, about what it meant to be a CEO in this phase of her business, and then walk our way together through the year to make it real. So every one of these stories, the one moment, the one hour, the one year, Gabriel's fourteen years, the impossible thing. The impossible thing, the impossibility was the lie. Once you catch it, you can ask different questions. Now, in the room, I keep thinking back to this leadership team. In the room, it would have been easy to say that the eruption was the end of the meeting. But at the end of the two days, the team said it was the most productive, most fun they'd had in years. Why? Because we held it as possible. Because we asked a more generative question. How is this the catalyst? For the client, the lie was just that the for the social enterprise client, the lie was just that being leader means holding it, being hard, that the discomfort was hers to absorb. Catching in the c that and the catch once we caught that lie, the question became, what do I really want? And then building a plan to get there. For that hacky sack town, the lie was it's not possible to become an art's destination. But flip it around. And the question is, what's possible from here? And the answer was the arts festival. The hard part I don't think is actually what to do when you see it. Once you see it, you can work with it. The hard part is catching the lie. It's knowing that we are looking for six impossible things before breakfast, just to see them, and maybe choosing the one that actually is worth your full attention. So where are you carrying impossibility as fact? And building on this piece that I loved in Gabriel's story. It was what's possible from here? What do you really want? Now and so where are you carrying something as impossible as fact? What I hope Gabriel's stories and the ones today just point to is two things from Gabriel's really get get excited about this arts festival. Like what's possible from here? What is the next step you actually can take? And whether that's the one moment story I shared of a leader moving three and a half million dollars, or turning around a leadership team that's in tension, or saying yes to all of the desires, the resource, the money, the time, the growth of a social entrepreneur. To me, underneath all of those is a noticing. When we're focused on what's feasible, when we're focused on met just holding the attention rather than asking underneath that, what's needed and what do you really want? And then Thinking about Gabriel's stories, about the bigger desire for this global arts mecca and knowing what's available from where we are. What is your version of the arts festival? of the experiment that's available right from where you are. Network Leadership Series is where we dig in deep, and Gabriel is one of our facilitators. Eight live sessions over eight weeks, about 20 practitioners, all of you bringing questions from your own network and working them with peers. We start where Gabriel and I start here. What's my why and the most sustainable fuel for this work? From there, where is my network in its evolution and what's the next developmental edge? How do I spark genuine engagement? What does it take to build trust across boundaries? And when do I step forward, hold the center, or step back? And how do I, as a network leader, hold the creative tensions without forcing premature resolution? It's grounded in the five C's of impact networks, self-determination theory, and the science of trust. And it works on the shift in being, not just the doing. From the leader as the one who needs to make it happen, the hero. To the leader as facilitator. The fall cohort runs October 14th through December 9th. Sliding scale and scholarships are available. Details in the show notes for weavingfutures.org. Join this cohort of network leaders and gain frameworks, coaching, and peer support as you gather toward your own impossible vision. Join us.