I had the incredible pleasure of being interviewed by Julia Winston on her podcast, Facilitator Forum, about my awareness as a facilitator and how I engage to facilitate people's power and leadership via sensing, rites of passage, wayfinding,  and learning from nature. This was my most fun podcast interview to date!

Here's the episode description:

“We need time to rehabilitate from the trauma of the pandemic” as Dr. David Rock, CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, wrote in the Harvard Business Review in February. This is a crucial pattern for all leaders and teams to take note of with many more contributing factors than just the pandemic.

It's notable when I have a moment when I'm having the same conversation across all my clients. This is one of those moments.

Here are some factors contributing to why we’re seeing such a widespread pattern:

1. Immersion in a constant trauma field in the world &...

Ready to Toss in the Towel at Work? Ask These Seven Questions Before You Do

 

"There has to be a way to do what I love, that has meaning, and still allows me to make a decent living" 

We hear this craving for an integrated life almost daily from our Wayfinding community. 

Over the last two years each of us have had plenty of time to ask, "what else might I want? how can I make a difference in the world and still make a living?"

Before you make the leap, changing jobs is a major transition. You can enter it with chaos and spin, or you...

I was terrified of remembering my power because I have abused it before. 

So when I received the offer to become part of Vital Leadership, I experienced huge inner resistance. Flashbacks of power abuse where I was the perpetrator came flooding in. Guilt towered over me, heaving rocks of shame. I was caught up in a storm, and I was drowning in a sea of fear.

If I get to remember my power, will I be intoxicated again?

But if I don’t trust myself to be capable of wielding my power for good, how am I supposed to support my team in creating systems for ...

In my previous article I explored what we know (and don’t know) about what intuition is (and isn’t). 

Through the course of this series, I’ll be sticking with the definition of intuition as a process of rapidly recognizing things without knowing how we do the recognizing, which results in affectively charged judgments.

In this article, I’ll talk about how you can practice sensing-based business by accessing your intuition for important decisions. 

In its essence, the way you access the knowing related to intuition is about receiving. 

The modes of how...

The simplest answer to the title question is: it depends on you. 

Intuition presents itself in a wide range of ways for me. In this article I’ll share examples of the sensations presented with leaders of innovation that I interviewed to give you a sense for what you too might be unknowingly experiencing in the workplace. 

If there are skeptics in your life (or maybe it’s your own voice in your head) that says “it’s JUST a feeling” you’re not alone. The dominant culture many of us grow up in emphasize our use of intellect as the most valid...

Practically speaking…

Intuition is a source of power and I want to make it more accessible to leaders. As we practice living with our intuition we become more whole, as family members, as partners, as teammates and as whole human beings seeking to do good in the world.

I have been exploring the depths of intuition since 2017. Both academically as part of completing my Masters in Positive Psychology & Org Development at Weatherhead School of Management as well as in the field with client-leaders looking to transform culture and introduce more sensing-based capacities into their...

There are certainly times when logistical constraints (time, money, etc) prevent us from investing in opportunities to grow, no matter how keen we are.

But there are also times when we tend to focus on money fears or their already overfull schedule as a way to not address an underlying (often subconscious) fear — that they’re scared about stepping into their own power.

The part of us that is small and protective grips and digs in when we’re considering a bid for power (*expanding our own capacity to open to greater energy) and it tells a lot of...

The end of the year invites us into our bones.

Whether it's landing our learnings in our bones, being grateful for life's blessings down to our marrow, feeling stripped to the bone by challenges, turning inward to nourish ourselves at the bone level, having the desire to curl up and rest our bones... May we listen and learn from the bones.

Here's a conversation Larissa and Nick had recently to land their learnings and sensing of 2021 in their bones.

Nick: Would you mind inviting me into the house that you speak from when you talk to this community in our newsletters? 

Larissa: Yeah,...

Wayfinding is not only the name of our organization and the signature system I’ve been contemplating, embodying, and weaving to find my way and support others finding their way in life, leadership, and organizational evolution. It is also a long-standing human skill that has existed across time and still exists in rich cultural traditions.

Wayfinding is our ability to find our way to places we have maybe never been before, or to places that we have been, but on a different day, as a different self, in a different time, and so in that way, too, they can be new.

...

Meet Jimmy Chin. He’s a world-renowned National Geographic photographer that brings us into incredibly intimate relationship with mountainscapes from all around the world (*you should definitely follow JimmyChin)

Jimmy and I have something in common. We both know that questing is a privilege. These are the journeys we choose to make room for and command all of our resourcefulness to make happen.

The Solo Quest is a signature element of the Alchemical Leadership program at Wayfinding. It allows the leaders who...

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Recently, I was working with an executive coaching client who got clarity on his calling.

Not just a market opportunity, but rather: what life has been preparing him for to bring forward greater service to the whole that aligns with his gifts and life experiences. He shared about it with excitement, named the trepidation about all the electricity coursing through him, noticed the ways it pulled at his ego, inhabited a visible sense of feeling humbled, then sat breathing deeply and quietly.

Here he was sitting on the threshold of...

Some of the expertise that my clients value the most comes from my personal life and my healing journey from a near-fatal accident that happened 10 years ago on Jan 10, 2011.

This journey is inseparable from my work in the world, informing my work every day. 

In honor of my ten-year anniversary, here is a map I made — primarily of the physical layers of my healing journey.

Leaders consistently value the insights I learned through this extended terrain because I learned how to bring a system (my body) back from near-death to bright aliveness, and I know how...

I didn't know there were awards for coaching :) But evidently there are and somehow I got nominated and was awarded Best Personal Growth and Development Coach for 2020 by Corporate Vision.

I didn't start Wayfinding to get awards — but I'm immensely proud to be creating beneficial impact for my clients and the world through my work.

Thank you, Corporate Vision!

In this fabulous conversation with Patrick Courneyer from Peakon, he and I explored opportunities for organizational evolution and redefining what's possible for business now. Navigating this new world of work is asking us to deal with enormous amounts of pressure, learn the true intelligence in sensing and aliveness, and to evolve systems of power in service of the whole. “The price of admission, at each stage is our old self. It’s our smaller skin. Like a snake, we have to shed that skin. We have to let it go.”

By far one of my favorite podcast conversations...

Leading from the inside means listening to our inner sensing and navigating systems change from there. This is why I created this ritual experience to help attendees and listeners from around the world tap into their inner wisdom to know how they feel called to create change on the scales of self, land, family, society, and work.
Here's the recording of the ritual I led for Global Entrepreneurs Week.
#GIW2020 was hosted by the League of Intrapreneurs.

Originally the retreat portion for the innaugural cohort of Alchemical Leadership was planned to be an 8-day community immersion near Joshua Tree with a 48-hour wilderness quest. Little did we know when we began on March 3, 2020 that COVID-19 would change those plans. Instead we designed custom at-home retreats for participants based on their unique situations, and it was a truly amazing experience.

The NY Post featured an article on the redesigned quest experience entitled “I went on a tech-free retreat while quarantined in my NYC apartment.” Read the full article here.

In mid-May, I had the pleasure of speaking with Damon Klotz for Culture Amp's 7-part series exploring how we can all work through the pandemic. Damon and I explored some false codes of leadership, particularly diving into grief at work and how leaders can approach transformation at work. The series is a rich digital magazine of information — I highly recommend subscribing to it.

Here's the link to Working Through It by Culture Amp.

I'm honored to be named one of the OBO 100!

The list recognizes innovators achieving successful outcomes and prosperity by putting people first.

Thank you, Dev Tandon, for creating the OBO movement!

Here's the link to see the full list of amazing people and to learn more about OBO: https://obomovement.org/#obo100

As I get excited to dive into this year's Culture First conference tomorrow, I'm remembering a highlight from last year of designing and hosting a panel exploring safety and intimacy at work featuring Chris Marcell Murchison, Jay Bendett, Max Masure, Celeste Hirschman, and William Winters. With this diverse set of panelists with specialties in gender inclusion, activism, and sex and intimacy coaching, this conversation explores the tensions of intimacy dynamics at work and possible ways to move toward professional, intimate connection in our teams....still so relevant. One of my favorite...

"Navigating unmarked territory to find our way through the mystery is an inherent drive in the human spirit. This ability is the essence of the skill known as wayfinding. It is invaluable, in general, and especially now, as we face very real, high stakes globally."

We speak our values and the way we see life into existence through words, so names have great power. People often ask me why I chose Wayfinding—what it is, what it means to me, and why it's relevant for our times. This is my answer.

I'm so happy to be featured as one of Culture Amp's Top 21 Executive Coaches. I'm proud of the work I do at Wayfinding, and glad to be creating positive impact for my clients and in my field. 

Thank you, Culture Amp! 

Sensing, power literacy, and doing inner work together are crucial skills for stewarding systems change, yet they are rarely discussed due to the double binds we can experience around power dynamics and job security.

Here's a mini clip from my talk—Sensing Power and Cultivating Organizational Aliveness—at last June's Culture First conference hosted by my friends at Culture Amp

In the full talk I explore:
- Our sensing capacity as a critical tool for revealing tension and guiding self-correcting actions in living systems—our selves, teams, and orgs—and how we can...

Grief is a core pillar of my work along with aliveness, power, connection, and creative possibility. It's a critical pillar, because without engaging grief, we cannot deeply access the other aspects of our capability (the elements we most deeply esteem at work).

Here's an amazing conversation I had the pleasure of sharing with my friend and colleague in the Chinese Medicine world, Gray Estrada, about grief as a critical component of personal and organizational aliveness.

It's a long, rich one—there's so much in here!—so here are some nuggets:

- Unprocessed grief occurs as...