Thought Leader Gathering July 2008

A(nother) beautiful focus for our circle by Pele Rouge, and another thought-provoking Bay Area Thought Leader Gathering from Heartland (What's a Thought Leader Gathering?).

Every TLG I've been to (and I'm on the production team, so I've been to most of them) follows the same pattern, and yet every one of them manages to stir the contents of my heart/brain in unique and unforeseen ways.

The conversation starters for this session were two women - Julie Gilbert and Mary Capozzi -  who launched an organization called WoLF (Women's Leadership Forum) to mobilize and support the women at Best Buy.

One of the first things that struck me was how they each wove very personal details of their lives into their talk. So much so that it stood out, and got me wondering why hearing personal details in a "business" presentation was so unusual...

Now granted the TLG conversation starters are always encouraged to make their stories personal, so we can go into the conversation from a deeper more authentic place right from the beginning, but these women's personal sharing was on another level. In retrospect, I think it had everything to do with their being women.

The truth is that in an integrated human being the personal and business realms are not separate, no matter how hard we try to make them be. Perhaps the idea that they even might be separated got started with the industrial age and its economically-driven division of roles for men and women. In any case it's a model that is broken and all but unusable now, thanks in part to the women's movement that gave voice to women who saw things differently.

So it's not surprising that it's women who are bringing an integration of the two spheres into the modern workplace. In increasing numbers, women - and men - are creating and participating in business on more human terms. And not a minute too soon.

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Speaking of women, and beauty (for of course the beauty of wholeness is at the heart of this whole conversation), I had the pleasure of meeting Julie Daley at this month's TLG. We met through our blogs - she writes Unabashedly Female - and became friends before we'd ever even seen each other, but when we met in the flesh it was absolutely luscious!

(Goddess! Isn't it great being a woman!? :-)