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By Emily Soccorsy
As a leader, I’m recommending you take a trip. Regularly.
The destination will be the same each time.
Going there will take some doing.
Going there will require you to put aside things your thinking mind will be telling you are More Important.
Going there will seem insignificant at first, maybe even foolish.
Then, it won’t.
That’s when you’ll know you’ve arrived.
Going there will ground you. Disarm you. Remind you. Catapult you.
Going there might even inspire you to think and act differently so that you can solve the challenges waiting for you back where you live and work every day.
This place is the origin of your idea to build, to become, to say more about something that mattered to you.
This place is your Love.
What love? You might ask with a chortle.
I don’t know. But you do.
It might be: Your love of your family, your love of your work, your love of your art, your love of your clients, your love of service, your love of making or building, your love of bettering yourself of proving someone wrong, your love of independence, your love of creating things.
So, to summarize: I want you to regularly visit with that Love. I recommend setting aside everything else once in a while. All the working. All the planning. All the managing of the numbers. All the worrying about the outcomes.
Stop it for a moment. Go to a special place. Sit or move with intention: to make the trip. To reconnect.
Go back to the beginning.
Allow yourself to feel that love. Make it the center of your thoughts. Let it light up your feelings. Let yourself look at how that love is coming through in what you do every day. It’s OK if you have to wonder a little bit to get there.
Let that love polish the rough edges of your own ambition, judgment, and unrelenting pursuit. Let that love tell you things. Let it point out your wins, let it show you sympathy, let it shine light on the places you could do better.
Let it illuminate new ideas.
I happen to believe love is the greatest force in the universe.
Soak it up.
This is important work. For your brand, AND for your business.
These visits power you, inform your decisions and keep you, as a human, intact (which is essential if you want you as a leader, as a brand, to be intact.)
As a brand strategist and strategic communication expert for over 25 years, I know that all endeavors of significance are rooted in this love.
If you go make money, make a thing, make a brand, and you do it without connection to this, it will bite you back, nip at your heels, prickle your neck hair at some point. Persistently. Ignoring it will take up more energy than is good for you.
So why not visit regularly?
Why not stay rooted in that Love and allow it to guide you?
Part of what I Love and visit with regularly is that, somehow, magically, I get to accompany and guide leaders on these expeditions. I have the good fortune to help you map that journey, articulate the nuanced, the esoteric and the unnamed. I help alchemize to name it, make it known. Then I get to jump into the wild river of expression with you, and find a way to ford those churning waters to share that truth with the world.
This experience feels like helping, bit by bit, to realign the world toward truer things. To realign us to truer expressions. And that I love, too.
I stay rooted in those ideas and visit them so that I can navigate the mechanics of entrepreneurship and the everyday matters I, as a leader, shoulder and shuffle. This Love, this clarity, is fuel.
Spoiler: the trip you’ll go on regularly: it’s not about getting to a destination. Rather, as Henry Miller put it, it’s about getting to “a new way of seeing things.”
Go.