My mentor Fred Kofman taught me a principle decades ago that I use regularly for myself and in my work with women: know your “success beyond success.”

Success beyond success is how you want to BE based on your deeply-held values regardless of the situation.

Determining your success beyond success can be a general stance you take (Lynne Twist wonderfully differentiates between a stance and a position) and becomes more honed when facing a difficult situation.

Your success beyond success puts you on a rock-solid foundation no matter what you’re facing. You not only cannot lose, but you gain dominion from leading from this place.

Success beyond success is how you decide to *be* – the qualities and mindset and authentic expression of it – no matter the situation and ESPECIALLY in difficult ones where power is involved.

Sometimes we’re shaking in our boots when we speak from our success beyond success inner stance. No matter. The quiet power comes across changes everything.

The liberating aspect of your higher view of success is this:

No matter the other person’s response – no matter how the chips fall when you’ve stayed in your integrity and expressed yourself from a values position – you are completely intact.

And that allows you dominion to move forward.

We really can create the lives we want and be the leaders we want to be!

It takes work to define our success beyond success, but it becomes easier and easier when a regular practice.

Exercise to consider:

• Is there a difficult conversation you need to have?

• Is there a decision involving others you’re afraid to move toward because of the possibility of an unwanted outcome?

• If so, take a minute to write down:
  1) what you most want from the conversation,
  2) what success would be ABOUT YOURSELF no matter the outcome, when the conversation is over.

I’d love to hear what you discover.

It’s so easy to work hard, gain skills, learn, grow, achieve impressive outcomes, hear others’ accolades about ourselves AND NEVER OWN THAT WE’VE HIT MASTERY.

Professional mastery creeps up on us.

We chisel our unique gifts and amass year after year of application-experience. We love our work.

But a bell doesn’t ring when we hit mastery. There’s no rite of passage and no bouquet of balloons.

Other people see it. You hear it in the appreciation they express. People are awed by what you did; perhaps by what you helped them achieve or how you made them or your company shine.

By then, it had become an easy and natural to do what you do. By now, you may well take it for granted.

Whitney Johnson talks about this in her teaching about the S-Curve of growth.

When we reach mastery, it isn’t a big stretch anymore.

And in my experience as an executive coach, women in particular greatly underestimate the level unconscious competence they’re reached. If it isn’t hard … if it doesn’t take efforting … it must not be … valuable.

Have you taken for granted the mastery you’ve gained?

Have you mistaken the ease with which you lead, teach, direct, write, public speak, run operations, smooth customer complaints, deliver results?

If so, it’s time to update the snapshot you have of yourself.

TODAY.

Make sure you see the competence others see in you.

Make sure you claim within yourself the mastery you’ve gained.

The most important picture we can ever capture is the one we have of ourselves through a clear, updated lens.

In my work with high-achieving women, many are in the frightening and exciting question “what now?” exacerbated by the pandemic.

The constant state of unknowns, employment situations that are not responsive to changing needs, new discoveries about what’s most important (and what’s not!) are all coming into the fore with greater clarity.

If you find yourself in that question, you are probably feeling tremendous dissatisfaction with how you’re living and working right now, OR you’re hearing a strong call toward something new you can already envision.

These two energies are equally useful: the angst and discomfort of needing to MOVE AWAY FROM, or the strong inclination to MOVE TOWARD something you can already see or taste.

I’ve written a lot about this: My own “what now?” was terrifying.

I had reached a satisfying conclusion of my global OD work with corporations after 25 years. I knew in my bones I was done with it.

But I had absolutely no idea what was up ahead or what I wanted.

When we have created a life around doing what we love – what we’ve been good at – it’s difficult (no matter how much we’re taught otherwise!) to separate our identity from what we’ve been doing and doing well.

The only way I could get to a renewed, reinvented place in my life was to go THROUGH the wilderness, even though I believed it might be the end of a life I loved and for which I felt proud.

My “going through” included interviewing 100 women.

You will have your own “going through.” It’s a basic principle of how we reach breakthrough changes in our lives: rather than avoiding, we walk forward using our courage, curiosity, and intuition to help us with every step.

And we’re smart enough to find guides to help us so we don’t feel alone.

So many women have navigated the wilderness of their work/lives with outcomes beyond what they expected: composing whole new ways of being, living, working.

We can compose what we want … and we usually know, somewhere deep inside, what some of the characteristic are.

If you’re not sure where to start:

1) Make a list of what you’re Done With. What you feel you’ve outgrown. What bores you, frustrates you, under-utilizes you.

2) With the room you’ve created by being honest about what you’re Done With, begin to capture and write down glimpses — even if they’re far off — of aspects of life you’d like to welcome. They’re already showing up in moments when you’re relaxed.

And needless to say, I’m here to listen for 30 minutes anytime you’d like to share what’s going on in your “what now?” question. I’ll help you find the next small step.

https://bookcallwithsue.as.me

Fasten your seat belts: it’s a topic many of us like to avoid. I know. I’m one of the avoiders.

Especially in these last two weeks of August when Summer is having its last hurrah and we know Fall will be here soon, we cling to “where the livin’ is easy” as the old song goes. Summertime tends to stave it off, whereas Fall brings it in spades.

The topic is precision and commitment.

As we finish the months that invite spacious, free, exuberant, and celebratory ways of being, fall calls forth something more empowering. In fact, if we want to lead ~ and the world needs women leaders right now ~ we will recognize the call at some point to give our work the attention it deserves.

And whatever work is deserving of your attention will require precision that is honed and definitive.

Precision is the fuel that makes things happen quickly. The more precise a decision, the more power it has. The more power it has the more resistance will come up. Precision is risky and requires vulnerability because it comes before a commitment. And along with a commitment comes the reality that it might fail.

I find that my resistance comes up in spades and a physical sense of avoidance arrives when I have to make a significant decision. I literally feel discomfort. Part of me knows that both intended and unintended results are going to follow when I’ve gotten precise about a decision. I have to be ready, damn what may!

One of my top 3 favorite books is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The entire book is about ways that resistance dresses up to distract us. Resistance is literally the enemy against our art.

To stave off resistance and step into what you know is worthy of pursuing, think about small and large ways you might be called to express precision this Fall.

It might be making a significant decision that will be visible to others or that you will announce.

It might be a behind-the-scenes decision about something you’re not going to do anymore, and the announcement will be behaved.

A prelude might be a feeling that the time has come, or that this shit’s gone on too long, or you’re bored or feel unstretched or too comfortable.

In my own world after taking chunks of spacious time this summer to assimilate a family situation and dive into a few new areas of study (the Sophia Century, the S-curve are two) I decided last week to offer another Women’s Retreat in the very late Fall. It will be available to six women, it will be virtual, and it will begin with an application process. I watched myself first avoid honing its details, but when I finally sat down to capture the decisions that had been emerging as right, I felt a surge of empowerment. My whole being is excited, focused … and planning!

Resistance is a grizzly bear that comes out of the woods every time we start to erect the campsite of our work! It has chased me down many times when I’ve begun to do something consequential. It takes courage and sometimes requires support to take a stand or make a decision. But if there’s something burning in us that we know is ours to do, precision is required. Movement itself is a win.

Precision-love does not always sound like love! But it is ~ especially when a coach like me can see the powerful contribution people around me can make with some focus and planning and yes … precision.

Reflection questions:
1. Thinking ahead, what commitment do you know is asking for your precision even if you’re not ready to enact the commitment yet?

2. Looking back, to what did you make a courageous commitment that overcame resistance and empowered you as a result?

3. What is the cleverest form of resistance that appears in your life?

4. Where do you really want to make some movement this Fall?

In my recent “Further Becoming” Workshop for Women, we applied the concept from Otto Scharmer’s work of Letting Go/ Letting Come.

U-theory teaches the criticality of the letting go/letting come of transformation. As women (and men) emerge from the pandemic, this has tremendous implications.

We’re sometimes forced to let things go.

We sometimes choose to let things go.

Making peace with what we’re letting go gives us freedom to ‘let come.’

The letting come sometimes starts with little glimpses we catch.

The subtle awareness of a new sense of ourselves.

Something we want to create or do, perhaps surprisingly.

As we enter the initial phase of emergence from the pandemic, this is a transformative time.

My coaching to women is to USE it.

Resist the urge to “go back to normal.”

‘Normal’ does not exist.

We are different as a result of this forced isolation. We have intolerance for things we used to let slide and immense gratitude for things we scarcely noticed before.

The world is different too.

It’s a good time to pay attention.

To serve our highest selves by naming what we’re letting go and let come what is calling us.

#womenover50 #womenover60 #womenover40 #alwaysfurtherbecoming #coachingforwomen #womenleaders #personaltransformation #professionaltransformation #newnow

I didn’t know what my 700 page of interviews notes would reveal from 100 conversations with women over 50.

I didn’t know how strong the voices would be about what we’re Done With.

I didn’t know that one thing we’re Done With would be not allowing ourselves to say what we’re done with!

Our Done With That energy coalesces around seven things. (there’s a chapter devoted to them)

One of them is being in work environments we’ve outgrown.

Where our voices are not heard.

Where our creativity and talents don’t have room to shine.

Where we can’t be big enough.

Especially post-pandemic, many of us are unwilling to reenter old ways of working and cultures we’ve outgrown.

We’ve all learned things about ourselves during the pandemic.

We’ve learned what we deeply appreciate. We’re grateful for the magic of the ordinary – small things we may have overlooked BC (before coronavirus as my friend Susan Furness calls it).

That’s a good thing.

Being a leader starts with leading our own lives with truth and courage. As Brene Brown teaches, that’s hard.

But ‘we can do hard things’ (credit Glennon Doyle).

What are you Done With that you need to claim?

Today I encourage you to name them.

My 700 pages of notes say *doing so* will clear the way for grand new things.

I’m excited to be facilitating an informal conversation about how the wisdom of women over 50 speaks to this very moment in time. Join us at Conversations for Connection on Feb 11th! Hear deeply grounded truths and practices that grow our resilience and dominion. Men and women of all ages are welcome.