Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller; #67; How Femininity Can Save Humanity-Nina Simons, Bioneers

i thought well if i don't want to be a leader in that old model and had inherited model that i hadn't lived that seemed aggressive and dominating and charismatic and but putting other people down and i know i had all kinds of associations like math and then i thought well who are the leaders that really an inspiring that can unify man the founder of pioneers from kalw npr at this inflection point i learned show or even know her industry recognized her as a visionary leader unified has rejected the label because she didn't like the quality of their society typically associate with it until she realized that she could redefine leadership mean to stay tuned to hear how she did it with stuff this is that i need to learn to live more for my family

inside and all my friends said are you kidding yourself eminem and i said well it may look that way to you but on the inside i can tell you is the way i have navigated my adult life has been through what i experience as my more masculine qualities you know i've relied heavily on my intellect and my analysis and my capacity for strategic thinking and my strong body and ability to power through and be persevering at all costs that's nina simonds the founder of pioneers an organization focused on solving the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges convening in an annual conference featuring innovative the tears when you know was in her thirties she's acknowledged that yet the reader for being an up and coming leader herself for starting this conference and she felt really uncomfortable about all the attention so she started talking with other women about their experiences and

realized she was not alone in feeling this way and what i knew was that there were a lot of parts of me that felt under exercised under seeing under acknowledged and so i began exploring that and what i found was that it was like every cell in my body said yes when i started doing that there was something deep inside me that was affirmed and that said only ask your dreams listening to your intuition oh what about the essential things like what about listening to your body's wisdom and what i began to realize was that for my gender lens perspective part of the inheritance of a biased culture has been that we value the intellect over all of our other ways of knowing in other words nina simonds began reading from the feminine and it changed her entire perspective of leadership i thought well if i don't want to be a leader in that old

model in that inherited model that i didn't like that seemed aggressive and dominating and charismatic and by putting other people down and i know i had all kinds of associations like that then i thought well who are the leaders that really it inspire me i would say this approach is sorely needed right now the leaders that are being prized now are being appreciated for their capacity to listen for their open mindedness for their ability to stay calm in stressful and challenging situations for their emotional and relational intelligence you might say our very survival depends on it what i've realized is this great uprising that were all part of that is so urgently needed to save humanity from ourselves really it's you know i've i long ago stopped same to save the earth because the earth will survive it they take or two or three million years to get over us

but shall survive it's really us that are in danger and all those women and girls who are growing up poor black and brown and yellow and red and all the colors that we come in and all the mixtures that we come in need to see women who were really owning themselves in a self loving way and also serving the transformation of the world you know and i also talk about how we have come to live in a patriarchal society and what it will take to balance the scales or as she put it the bird of humanity has been trying to fly with only one wing for far too long i learned seller and this is an inflection point but again as they say at the beginning well at the very beginning of my career or what i really wanted to do was work in theater and but the theater that i really wanted to do was theater that really challenge people's belief systems and i called it transformational figure and so early in my

adult life i started trying to do that and realized it could be a very hard path to make a living at and so i got kind of disillusioned and i managed restaurants i did all kinds of things and i discovered along the way that i had a gift for communicating with passion about things i believed in and i had a mentor tell me you know you could sell ice to eskimos and i remember thinking that was one of the creepy ist gifts i could ever what about that seniority but when i realized that i could use that skill to market ideas i began to get interested in and then i started working for our seeds of change which was but first bio diversity organic seed company that really had a mission of spreading bio diversity back into the food system harmed by working with an army a backyard garden hers and i felt like i was serving nature and serving the essence of life and it

felt very sacred to me even though it was a social venture so i did that for a time and then i worked for old while on a fresh juice company well before it got acquired by coca cola and when we were really idealistic and were basically selling healthy lifestyle and great use to people so some of my background before i headed back into the nonprofit world as you made your way through your career and discovered what your skills and talents were how did you think of yourself as a leader you know lorne i don't think i ever thought of myself as a leader i mean i think in a certain way that now that i can reflect back on it that in some ways my tendency to be extroverted and love connecting with people was a tremendous skill an asset for me and it caused me to be sort of a natural leader and to the extent that i really thought about it i think that it was just kind of following what it

understood that i did well and that meant building teams of people and helping groups orient toward a common vision and a common goal hands with scenes of change i remember discovering that i had a knack for business and i had never been to business school but discovering that i was good at managing budgets and writing business plans was like a total surprise to me and what i realized was that as long as i was really honest about saying what i did and now and that the people who i was working with were okay with that then i could stumble my way along and learn as i went and it seemed as though whenever those those natural pragmatic talents that i had around business and people tom served me well so i didn't think that much about it until later in my life in my late thirties when i

began to be acknowledged as a leader and i i had been working with pioneers and developing this annual conference which i came to realize some years later actually fulfilled my dream of doing transformational figure but in a whole different form than i could ever have imagined but anyway so i remember that i got acknowledged by a magazine the academy reader for being an up and coming leader and i remember being horrified i i really was so uncomfortable about it i wasn't even sure why i was so uncomfortable but what i realized afterwards was that i felt like it painted a target on my chest and like it was it it felt eat a testicle and it felt like a label that i had never aspired to hand and so on i began this inquiry about leadership it really set me on a journey to understand i think i had

learned from buying years that what the world needs most is leadership from everyone and so i thought well if i had this reaction to being called a leader than maybe other people do too and the more women i talked to the more i learned that most women have a really negative reaction to calling themselves leaders and so i really began to unpack that and realize that i had all these our belief systems and images and ideas that i have never consciously adopted but there were enemy nonetheless about what leadership was and what it looked like and it won't be any of those things that it's so interesting because the west ashley nowadays where everyone is trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame and threw in their personal brand on social media and putting as many photos of themselves in selfies you're out there as they possibly can to create an anti doping a target on it

so you know and then the city had been featured in a magazine as you know a person of the year are other times i'm a man of the year for time up incoming leader under forty are a well and then but that i mean i would say many people probably put that as a career goal right right and you're in your reaction to as well and i think part of that was because i grew up with them a mother and a role model in my head that said services good and self is selfishness and not so good and so i think my sense of identity was really built around service and being of service to the greater good and then they concluded in that you know i had the gift of threw producing by nears witnessing hundreds and hundreds of readers come from all backgrounds and walks of life and what i realized you know part of my inquiry about leadership

involved reading like hundreds of transcripts of talks that have been given up by in years because i thought well if i don't want to be a leader in that old model in that inherited model that i didn't like it seemed aggressive and dominating and charismatic and but putting other people down and i know i had all kinds of associations like that than i thought well who are the leaders that really it inspire me so many get clear about that and what it what are they doing that i could emulate and perhaps growing to you i did this in order to do a book on which i edited called moonrise the power of women leading from the heart i'm what i found when i read all those transcripts and i looked for the themes in the patterns was that the ones that i really respected and admired more humble and they were leaving because of something that they really loved and felt passionate about and most often they didn't have formal training to do it no one gave them

a degree or a job or a crown but they they served something they really believed in and through that they attracted other people to get involved and in many cases they led collaboratively they led by raising up other leaders of course and they were not really interested in being in the spotlight and that was the kind of leader i really wanted to be and when you're going through all these gestures are these all women leaders that you're the connecticut did you start with men and women and then it filtered out well anyway i have to admit to having had a certain bias for women at that point i had an epiphany moment earlier in my life when someone turned me onto a film that was made in the early nineties and it's a film that anyone can find online by and by looking up the name it's called the burning times and it was the second in a trilogy that was made by a canadian woman filmmaker and it

basically tells the story of the three hundred year period in european history where you know historians can't agree on the numbers but somewhere between fifty thousand and millions of women were systematically persecuted and tortured and burned for the supposedly crime of being witches and in the film is a little dated but it's still tells the story better than anything i've ever seen and when i say i i had so many deep deep reactions on one was that i knew that the story and the legacy of that time was still alive in my bones that somehow there was a genetic memory but i knew i had hands it explained for the first time a fear that i had had that i'd never understood about speaking my truth in public about what really was important to me and the burning times and learning the history of that time made sense of it for me and it also changed my world view because for the first time

i saw that all of the problems that i had learned about from pioneers could be seen as a function of the imbalance between the masculine in the feminine in our culture and so what i saw was not only the route story that described to me why women tend to be positioned to be in cat fights in competition with each other but also why we often see each other is scary because of the legacy of that six generations of children watch their mothers and sisters and aunts and grandmothers get burned and as it investigated and researched it after seeing the movie i learned that that there was a whole economy that's built up around this and that there were more women alive at the beginning of the burning times than man which changed during the course of the burning times and all of these social systems and institutions like medicine went from the purview of women who had been the

herbalist and the midway aids and the hospice workers they were the first to get persecuted and burned and by the end of the burning times only men could practice medicine you had to go to college to practice medicine and only men were allowed to eight years of this and well it was from about the fortune hundreds through the seventy you know and as i researched it i found that it happened in every major country in europe and that there was an equivalent to it in one way or another that happened in other continents as well so of course you know in this country we are largely influenced by your centric culture but even what i found was even women who are of african descent in latin american descent and there was a kind of flipping of the spirituality that of course happened during that time because it went from a largely earth goddess honoring culture to a patriarchy where religion was practiced in a

church and led by a priest an intermediate good arm before the burning times the way that people experience their own spirituality was through their direct connection with nature and the divine and after the burning times it was all mediated so i mean i just got fascinated with this sweet story and why every child that you learned this in school you know we learned about the salem witchcraft i have i've never heard of it i know it's a huge story and then for me it's fascinating and it explains a lot so i did have a bias toward women when i was reading all those transcripts and i also knew that the way that our culture has valued the masculine in us as human beings and devalued the quote feminine and us as human beings i believe is part of that legacy and that it's true in man as it isn't when so all of us regardless of our temporary gender assignment you know have that imbalance has a legacy of our culture i believe and

so there's a lot of inner work to do so what i found been reading all the transcripts was that there were men who were personified leading from the heart and it became important to me to include some men in the book so i did you know my publisher was very uncertain and said are you sure this is the one sport where we putting an aneurism as we have to and so i'm glad i did this is inflection point and learned schiller my guest is nina simonds the founder of pioneers will be right back routes re re sells bestir him chef but shows bus i learned schiller and this is inflection point i'm talking with nina simonds the

founder of pioneers and founding director of the women's leadership initiatives well would you say that the things people value in a leader are and what percentage of them would you say are considered masculine traits well i actually think i actually think were living in england but you know around how we define because i think that good traits that people value in leaders of yesteryear have been a kind of charisma and aggression strength and insurance and perseverance not that any of those things are bad and of course they're all great but i believe we're living in a time now and a lot of social science research bears this out there's a great book called the athena doctrine and it says that sixty seven percent of the people that they polled and forty nations around the world said the world would be a better place

if more people lead like when an and there's evidence from all sectors that the more women that are in leadership in corporations and on boards but better their bottom line and the more women are doing negotiating and peacekeeping in the world and the more peaceful things are and you know on and on it's the evidence is pretty astounding units it's coming from every direction and it's not about putting down man it's about saying we're all in a giant shift you know to me one of my favorite reference points is a phrase that town and indigenous people from the global south say which is that the bird of humanity has been trying to fly with only one winner for for too long and it needs to be balanced well it take for that shift happened where were no longer fighting the system that we've created a system where both the masculine and feminine are valued well i think we'll get there i mean i am

but i am deeply up and optimistic by nature and i think there's evidence of that in you know when i i look at couples raising children in their twenties and thirties right now there's an awful lot more sharing of housework and of parenting and you know i i look at my my grandkids and i see how beautifully their parents just pass the ball and there's no question about what's mom's role in what's dan's roll their disco parenting so i think there's a lot of evidence of change and i think in a way it's a generational shift that we're experiencing and this is related to how we kiehl from systems of privilege and bias and and i've been a student for the last ten years or so about how white privilege and racial bias and and what i've learned is that there are a lot of things that translate from gender

justice to racial justice so for instance com what i've learned from being a woman of privilege from from being a white woman in this country is that privilege creates blinders and it normalizes its own experience and so it was a long time to understand that i had privilege and to not feel guilty or ashamed or we're about it but to actually embrace it so that i can say i'm going to use this privilege to help make a different hands i think the same is true for men i think that you know when you know when we talk in circles or were conferences of women about the experience of being in an all male board room and raising an idea and having it fall on deaf ears and then the guy next he says the same thing in a different language and everybody jumps on it everyone around is nodding her head cause we don't know that we've all experienced and many however don't see that they don't see it when it happens and it's not anyone's fault as an individual it's it's a

challenge of the system as how to we awaken to the blinders the privilege creates for us tell me about some of the work that you've been doing with women's leadership training well for the last twelve years we have been developing a program that we called cultivating women's leadership stand it's a six day immersion experience that how we invite women to apply for and then selected each cohort of twenty women very carefully and we've been selected more women for a number of criteria one criteria for example was we really want to know how passionate they are about making change in the world cause those of the women we must when i work with and another is is there evidence of this woman being able to influence change in her community or constituency and the third criteria which is perhaps the most

interesting is that we select each cohort to optimize for diversity in every way and what that means is that each cohort typically has women ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies or eighties bands across all kinds of ethnic diversity and across sexual preference and discipline and so you get this you know a group of women who in normal life in our country would never get to encounter each other in a deep way and give them six days too do a lot of deep work both on an individual level and with each other and by the end of the six days what's been remarkable is that very often those women have bonded really deeply with each other and they form connections that are lasting years later on which is part of our intention so that's been a journey we always knew that it was important to us to have a lot of ethnic han

han racial diversity in the room and it was hard to do and partly because at that time i was doing most of their facilitating with the woman who i really co founded the program with who was another white one and i read a book by lynn guitar whalen called women lead the way and what i learned from the book was that there is social science that shows that for any minority to fully show up in a group they need to be at least thirty percent of the room and i thought oh that's so interesting because what i mean part of what they said was until they're at thirty percent they just don't feel flanked enough to take the risks to really be outspoken and really be themselves and and then i i reflected on that in relation to the percentage of women in our house and senate which is not even

remotely close range and we made a decision as soon as i read that book we said okay from this point forward we're always going to have a minimum of thirty percent of women of color in our groups and we brought in our facilitators who are women of color so that there was always a third facilitator thirty three percent of us was a woman of color and as soon as we did that we started getting thirty five to fifty percent women of color in our training center and that's been an incredible teaching for me and it can really interesting in terms of all the things were talking about from the boardroom to classrooms too in this case learning environments and gathering groups together what that actually feels like a more achievable goal then that fifty fifty will get their well but there's another piece to this too which is you know i've come to believe through the work that i've been doing that mothering is one of the greatest acts of leadership that any woman can do in her life

and of course we're all trying to recover from a culture that has so systematically devalued mothering and degraded as and you know i mean i often i find that mothers who are who are also leaders who do this work with us are so grateful to have motherhood you know appreciated as for what it is because i've been off mothers i mean i'm a woman whose childless by choice and so in many ways i get to mother a lot of women but in other ways i just i look at what women who are mothers do and i am just gob smacked it's amazing so as we as we try and imagine are our future here putting a value on mother head is is a good thing for many reasons i think the donaghy what are you about that right now again research says that if you are a woman and you have a child that your lifetime income is almost certain to be twenty to thirty percent less than an embassy it's in

the same position as you sow perhaps in this new world that we're crazy you could be twenty to thirty percent increase in your salary as a woman with a child well not no good reason why not although although you know part of what comes to mind for me with that is there was a near times article recently about janet yellen's speaking at brown university i think and she said that the best thing we could do for our economy to grow the economy and develop jobs is adopt the family friendly maternity practices end reproductive rights practices that europe has adopted all over the place because it would allow so it would support so many more women to be in the workplace yeah so you know in terms of job creation and that economic bottom line like hello you know the gdp we need more family friendly practices are other areas of finding direction this is inflection point

i'm lauren shuler my guest is nina simonds the founder of pioneers and editor of the anthology moonrise the power of women leading from the heart believe that ray after break i learned schiller and this is inflection point i'm talking with nina simonds he co founded by in

years and is the founder of their women's leadership initiatives well i want to talk more about how you ultimately embrace your role as a leader so you know that the reader says you know amazing things that you could see on their cover used a narrow and then you go in you can understand why you might've felt that way and i am so how have had to come to terms with yourself well hey it had this big turning point moment when i turned forty so it was twenty years ago and i made myself several promise is at that point and one of them was about understanding and unpacking this leadership conundrum that i'd gotten into and another was that i decided that i needed to learn to live more for my feminine side and oh my friend said are you kidding yourself eminent and i said well it may look that way to you but on the inside i can tell you the way i navigate in my adult life has been through what i experience as my more

masculine qualities you know i've relied heavily on my intellect and my analysis and my capacity for strategic thinking and my strong body and ability to power through and be persevering at all costs and and what i knew was that there were a lot of parts of me that felt under exercised under seen under acknowledged and so i began exploring that and now i'm and what i found was that perk it was like every cell in my body said yes when i started doing that there was something deep inside me that was affirmed and that said oh yeah your dreams oh you are listening to your intuition oh what about the essential things like what about listening to your body's wisdom and what i began to realize was that come for

my gender lens perspective part of the inheritance of a biased culture has been that we value the intellect over all of our other ways of knowing and so i i really went through a conscious process of trying to turn up the volume on all of my other ways of knowing and practice valuing them and i think a part of how i did that really was through gathering and and facilitating groups of women the first time i gathered when it was actually in two thousand to dance i convened thirty five very diverse women leaders for a gathering called unreasonable women for the earth and that year was inspired by an amazing activist named diane wilson who had spoken at nine years and end at the end of her talk she said i'm going to adapt to george bernard shaw called that says you know he wrote about man but i'm going to

say about when and she said and reasonable woman accepts the world as it is an unreasonable woman works to change the world as he knows it needs to be so she knows it needs to be so she said looking out at the audience i encourage you all to be and reasonable because the earth really needs us now and that phrase just stuck in my head so i wound up convening thirty five amazing women and i had no idea what i was doing i was making it all up as i went along and we spent for five days together and in a very beautiful place and what actually emerged from that gathering was code pink women for peace yeah just kind of good outgrowth of something called on reasonable one and i learned that it's very important what title you organize under the cabaret act that could you briefly describe her pink shortcut think

is a wonderful time organic organization that actually encourages women to learn about and practice direct action on it in a way that is fun and eye catching and effective and playful and awe has a particular form of leadership it was it grew out of the time when we were going to war in afghanistan and suddenly there was that whole thing about code orange and code red and that was why i think the founders jodie evans and medea benjamin call it code pink women for peace and it was a way of teaching women and engaging with women to make our political voices heard in a way that's fun and playful and also affect so for you when it came at an additive free in terms of how you approach but the work that you had set up for yourself today you know well i think as the iaea we claimed all these parts of myself and i saw how women

who could really embrace and stand with their own vulnerability and their own intuition and their own body wisdom and their own humor i i saw how powerful that could be and as i aspired to it i think it cultivated myself to become more and more like that and in many ways the cultivating women's leadership retreats of the last twelve years have cultivated me as well as all the women that have been through them you know so what i've found is that i started out doing those retreats and i have a lot of ideas about what women should do and what kind of leadership was needed and i've very quickly disabused myself of those beliefs because what i realized was that women were showing up and war shapes and forms and styles uniqueness is than i could ever have imagined and that my job my purpose became not to tell anyone what they should

do because it's hard enough for me to know what i should do but rather to create the conditions for them to discover for themselves how their best expression in the world could manifest or will manifest as we like to say that i am now you know and and that's given me a lot of hope because what i realized is this great uprising that were all part of that is so urgently needed to save humanity from ourselves really it's you know i've i long ago stopped same to save the earth because the earth will survive it may take her two or three million years to get over us but shall survive it's really us that are in danger here and so there is a leadership in as many forms i believe now as we are humans on the planet and and there is a leadership that we need to learn from our non human allies here you know from the trees

and the animals and the creatures of all kinds and so i'm not sure if i answered your question so i'm curious about your husband an end and where it is even on your journey and turns earth and sherri talk with our baghdad do you know you're the discoveries by yourself and go on radio as maisie everything work his feminine saturday may be very happy well i think you already had it i think it was part of my laundry list of essential qualities when i was when i was calling him in but he's been a great advocate really i mean he actually suggested there and reasonable women for the earth retreat before i thought of that he's been you know he's a very future thinking visionary and he suggested their women's leadership book the moon rise book before i thought of it so he's been an advocate for me really and he understands you know he understands and appreciates the need for that rebalancing hand

and really it's also been a joy that as i've learn and grow into my own sense of of feeling good about myself as a leader being able to say yes i'm a leader and yes i take exquisite care of myself because that old model of leadership where you drive yourself into the ground we can't do that anymore so let's be leaders to take great care of ourselves and really listen and and math and as that's happened for me we've been able to write i've had these amazing exploration grounds and learning grounds like buying ears on which each year produces a huge conference on which is then turned into media on all these different platforms and so and there have been amazing radio shows and television and he notes and candles exploring women's leadership from all these different vantage points and and for me it's been a particular strong source of pride to say i want a lift up the models of women of all colors

and shapes and ages and sizes because we don't have enough role models in our culture and because all those women who are and girls who are growing up poor black and brown and yellow and red and all the colors that we come in and all the mixtures that we come in need to see women who were really owning themselves in a self loving way and also serving the transformation of the world and but by yours is not a women's conference that mean it no cause and there's anger isn't all ages of all colors it's a diversity come friends it's a conference that's really about lifting up a visionary solutions for ai healing our relations with ourselves each other in the earth because there in the recognition that they're all fractals and the same relational imbalance so it's a conference that's hard to describe as you can tell but what i do know about it is that people of all ages

and backgrounds including myself get wildly inspired it's like this somebody the experience of the world that's possible to day on that we don't get to see and feel anywhere else and i think one of the things that i love about it is that when kenny and i first started creating nine years as a conference neither of us had ever been to a conference and in fact our first reaction when someone suggested it was that sounds boring why would we make a conference and i think because we had never been to an academic conference or for a corporate conference or any other kind of conference we made it up as we went along which means that it to it really addresses all of the elements of our humanity you know so it's not just ahead conference it's a conference that includes movement and creativity in and spirituality and has a very strong indigenous program

at its core i am which we're really honored tahoe post and we had ninety four indigenous nations represented at the last conference and there's a huge and growing youth program at the conference and twenty percent of our three thousand attendees were youth lasting so that's super exciting hand and women's leadership and leading from the feminine which again everything we programs for everybody have been a growing part of our programming this is inflection point i learned schiller my guest is nina simonds only back ray after this break the peak is back

i learned schiller and this is inflection point i'm talking with nina simonds founder of pioneers and the editor of moonrise the power of women leading from the heart he's also the director of pioneers women's leadership initiatives would you say a leading from the feminine and leading from the heart are interchangeable expressions are would you define him slightly differently cash well you know i think we're in a time where language can be a trap and so leading from the heart is much more accessible to most people however for me it's not the same because leading from the feminine is bigger than leading from the heart it actually includes leading from your connection to the divide your spirit as well as intuition as well as your body's awareness i think they're all intelligence is that have been chronically undervalued so for me leading from the feminine includes all

those three realms not just the heart it's so refreshing because i i just feel like we're living in this world that is being led by fear here and that all of the decisions that are being made you know the government level and ending probably at the corporate level and maybe sometimes at the family level are based on fear yes and athens it's messing with us the way you're talking about it it's you know it feels like it's completely the inverse well it's really interesting you say that i agree and i think that we're living through a time when pretty well anyone alive and paying attention is dealing with some post traumatic stress i mean i think life is that stressful right now and i think young people growing up with an awareness of climate change it's a big stressor and so on part of what i'm

interested in is is really how do we develop the capacity for resilience and ourselves and some of that means going against the tide for sure you know because with things speeding up as much as they are and as much media and as much information coming out allison all that stuff it's becoming increasingly important to slow down and to actually go inside you know there's a very interesting correlation that all this stuff about the feminine to which i love and i remind myself often which is that carl young's suggested that the feminine is our interiority and the masculine as her ex tear your hand when you think about all that fear based panic driven motion it's very extremely focused and it's it's pursuing some imagined safety or security

that probably isn't very real and and i feel like the only real security lies inwardly and in our relationships i think it's really through you know a web of connection to the people we love and love us and also to the places we love and the creatures we love and that whatever it is we love you know that's to me that security because we all know you know corporations are laying people off rain left in this whole notion that you're gonna just have a straight up career and then retire with a gold watch it happen a name or you know so so i think we need to shift our understanding of what security really means and also you know for me what's exciting about the path that keeps revealing itself to me is inviting people into a life of meaning because there's an awful lot of destruction out there and what i found you know it's part of the work we do in

these women's leadership or treats we do something we call upon this marathon and it's a very long afternoon where that has a lot of repeated questioning and it's sort of like peeling an onion skin as you go deeper and deeper inside yourself to notice what you really love dearly and what all your life has been a really resonant thing and what breaks your heart out but you know i know for me when i read stories about wales dying of stomach cancer cause of all the plastic inside them it breaks my heart you know and when i learned about the rate of extinction and that we may not have large mammals in another twenty thirty years on this planet it really hurts me and and i don't know why that is and i don't really care why that is a cure that it motivates me and that and that it's a way in to my deepest passion and so for me i feel like the work of this time is for each of us to find what were most

exactly called to do and then invest ourselves there you know i once had hair and i'd suggest to me that i was very impatient about finding my path and i thought why don't i know what it isn't why isn't clear and how i get there faster and what she said was she suggested that i invest in my longing she said you're longing lives in a chamber behind your heart and if you invest your attention there it will attract to you what you most want to have held hands you know i didn't know if i believed in order not but i tried it and i actually think it works what's the best advice that you've ever been given about how to slow down well a couple of things come to mind one piece of advice was also about

identifying your purpose but it's related to how to slow down and how to listen inwardly and so i had a great teacher say to me hey exquisite attention inwardly to what makes your flavor brighter and she said you have to be very still and pay a lot of attention because sometimes that flame just perks up just in an instant and it's like and if you're not paying attention your message so that was great guidance and the other thing that actually is very alive and me these days when i'm teaching a workshop with a woman who is a wonderful mindfulness teacher and she lived in a zen monastery for seven year recess and end in many ways i think what she has done is to famine eyes meditation and zen and what she teaches is that meditation is the socialist form of self work so you

know so it's this quality and i can profess to say that i'm a great meditator i'm not but there's a quality of really deep listening inwardly to all the parts of yourself that feels to me like a great way to slow down and the other way that i practice all the time as being in nature is go to nature you know and i always find that when i'm depressed or stressed or freaked out or confused being in nature is my solace pinky so much nina serve that was nina simonds the founder of pioneer let's take this time it's already set aside to listen to the show and just for a few seconds he released till it's ok because everyone around you think you're listening to the radio

or podcast here we get just five seconds of silence that's not quite enough time to listen to all the parts of yourself or learn what makes your flame growth later whether it's leading from the heart from the feminine or full spectrum meters i love that we can redefine what it means to be a leader for ourselves and to get the next role model for someone else out there just by doing that this is how women are eyes out and this is unsettling that's our inflection point for today is there are women changing the status quo you'd like to hear from lettuce know an influx of my radio dot org and while you're there and try to become a patron of infection quite like the perkins died his contributions are helping bring the voices and views of

powerful women to the ears of everyone and you can't do that unfortunately radio dot org we're on facebook and affectionately radio alex and follow me on twitter at la salle or to find out more about the guests you heard today on infection police radio inflection point is produced at the studios of kalw ninety one point seven fm and delivered to public radio stations nationwide care if you're in an airline and give us a review we know that our engineer in producer is eric wayne i'm your host aaron schiller