Language and Voice and the Things That Matter

Words matter. The words change leaders use to tell their story can make or break how effective they are in accomplishing their goals.

Over the past few months, Creating the Future has been intently exploring what words best describe the work we are doing. Through online meetings and private conversations, experts and fans have guided us, implored us, encouraged us to find our words, to stake our claim, to openly own who we are and what we are about.

Creating the Future is a living laboratory…
Creating the Future is exploring what creates and accelerates social change…
Creating the Future is a community, part of a movement to create what is possible…
Creating the Future is supporting that movement, helping those who are on the ground doing the work…

Words. Words that, at their best feel like just so much blah blah, and at their worst feel like just so much consultant blah blah.

And then at yesterday’s board meeting (watch the discussion here), we could feel it coming closer than it has ever been.

Following in the footsteps of the question Gayle Valeriote asked at last week’s Faculty Development meeting, board members were asked to share not only why they enthusiastically said yes to being on the board, but more importantly, what makes them want to keep coming back and not miss a single meeting? What makes this board and the work of this group so important to them?

As you read this list, see what stands out for you. Notice how the words make you feel. Perhaps most importantly, notice what it is you notice…

• Our work resonates with the values I want my own work to reflect.
• The time and the guidance to reflect and think about who we are and what is “the right thing to do.” To think about leading vs the day-to-day of "managing".
• To think in BIG ways, to question our own assumptions.
• Helping people see the gifts they bring to themselves and to the world, to understand their inherent capacity and power to create what they want.
• Being with a group of people who are embracing significant, transformative questions and conversations together.
• To be in community, to discuss, to participate, all around the big context, beyond checklists of “things to do.”
• Embracing words like possibility and joyful and potential and community.
• The opportunity to learn from people who don’t do what I do – from completely different realms and walks of life.
• The connection between individual human potential and the collective potential of all of us.
• The opportunity for people to create their own future via different ways of thinking.
• Our highest potential is not about what we do, but about who we are as people.
• This is a place where I get to be who I am, to follow through with my own personal mission.

Listening as each board member shared what draws him or her to this work, my emotions overflowed. It all become so clear!

None of those words have anything to do with running social change efforts or nonprofits or socially conscious businesses.

None of it sounds like a consultant wrote it – even though many of the people on our board are indeed consultants, some working in very staid institutions teaching and promoting standard management and governance and ethics.

Instead, it all sounds like real people talking about what is important in life.

Their words had to do with purpose and possibility and spirit. They were words about connectedness and conversation, asking and listening, taking time to think and explore, taking time to BE and to celebrate that we are all being and becoming, all the time.

As Alexandra and Dimitri pointed out during the meeting, the language of our modern culture is dehumanizing. Military language (words like “strategy” and “in-the-trenches” and “campaign”) has become business language has become consultant language has become the language of the world. We live in the third person, separated from what matters to us under the guise that all that “woo woo stuff” is not practical.

But here is the practical truth:

If this is the stuff that matters most to every living soul, AND if what matters most to us all is infused into the work of EVERYONE – the work of businesses and governments and social change efforts, the work of individuals living their lives and being in community – then we won’t all be working so hard to push the social-change rock uphill.

We will be changing the world by being that change. And as trite as that phrase has become, it is simply true. We will create the future by showing how to be that future now.

And so, we are finding our words. We are staking our claim. We are stepping into what is powerful beyond words because it is true and inarguable.

We may have started out seeking our words.

What we are finding instead is our voice.