The best Valentine’s Day gift you can give to yourself or any woman you love, is the gift of a more balanced path to leadership and success.
The traditional path to leadership is often based on the myopic lens of profit and the exponential desire for more. The never attainable but always dangling carrot pushes us to work harder and aim for more, but deep down, the nagging feeling that “nothing is ever enough” is so ingrained in our path to leadership that it’s no wonder we seek external validation for our sense of self-worth and internalize the belief that “I am not enough.”
Arianna Huffington’’s word of the year in 2022 was “Resilience+.” She wrote, “And actually, it’s my leading contender for word of the decade… Resilience is not, as so many of us thought in the early days of the pandemic, an end state we can reach. It’s a constant process of becoming.1”
Resilience, defined as the “ability” of something to return to its original shape after it’s been pulled, stretched, pressed or bent” remains an elusive pursuit during traumatic times. If you pull, stress, and press something that is not rooted, it will either break or get pulled along with the force that it’s being subjected to.
As women leaders face disproportionate rates of burnout, accelerated departures from the workforce, and a rising crisis of mental and physical health issues, we need something more to withstand the challenges of the world today. We are exhausted. We have depleted our “surge capacity” to survive short-term crises by continuous engagement of our primal fight/flight/freeze responses.
Rootsilience (“root – zeel – ience”) is a new word we invented, and it rhymes with resilience. We invented the word because in order to affect real, transformational change, we need to create new consciousness with new language. Our new word, Rootsilience, takes the notion of resilience a step deeper, and teaches us to be grounded, rooted and able to respond to stressors from a place of stability rather than being stretched beyond our limits.
In our forthcoming book (out on February 14 by The Unbound Press), Beyond Resilience to Rootsilience: A Revolutionary Women’s Framework for Balance, Well-being and Success, we offer an insightful framework that integrates positive psychology with ancient wisdom.
The Beyond Resilience to Rootsilience framework incorporates insights from positive psychology, using the VIA Institute’s Character Strengths, aligned with the ancient Sanskrit chakra system, to help women decode the signs of overwhelm and restore self-care and purpose. The transformative and multidisciplinary approach is tailored to each reader to help women move beyond trendy, one-size-fits-all solutions and lead us back to balance.
How Rootsilience Helped Amanda Get Seen and Heard in the Boardroom
Amanda is a senior manager at a Fortune 500 technology firm who is well respected by her colleagues for her dedication and perseverance. Amanda suffers from debilitating migraines and often feels that she cannot speak up in meetings or in the male-dominated workplace. Judgment is a key strength for Amanda, which she identified from taking our Rootsilience Leadership Map, a foundational tool in our book and framework. By working through the Rootsilience framework, she recognized that she often overused her strength of “judgment” and would find herself stuck in a repetitive pattern of thinking, usually judging that her colleagues thought little of her and that whatever she had to say at meetings was a “silly question” or not worth bringing up at all.
The Rootsilience framework enabled Amanda to identify her lesser strengths and guided her through conscious leadership exercises to better understand her values, as well as guided practices that helped her embody her truth to gain confidence and clarity in her life. Amanda reflected, “The framework taught me a lot about where I put too much energy toward what’s not good for me. I never realized that I could choose not to listen to my thoughts or that they were wrong. This revelation has been life-changing for me.”
How Rootsilience helped Carol Heal from Overgiving and Lack of Boundaries
Carol realized that she was constantly over-giving to others, that she had a hard time giving herself permission to enjoy life, and lacked boundaries to make time for her personal space and self-care. Through the Rootsilience leadership framework and accompanying leadership and self-inquiry practices, Carol realized that her zealous fasting was actually an avoidance of truly nurturing herself. As she dedicated herself to savoring and enjoying her meals without technology to distract her while she ate, she found that her endometriosis pains subsided, along with reduced severity in her menstrual cramps. Carol used the exercises in the Rootsilience framework to determine where she was overextending herself and draining her energy and created boundaries that enabled her to honor her value of doing mission-driven work while staying centered. Carol shared, “The biggest takeaway from Rootsilience is that I have to love and nurture myself in order to live the life that I want, which is filled with meaning and purpose.”
It’s time we evolve beyond the false notion that success comes through the toil of pushing a boulder up the mountain. It’s time we recognize that our achievements do not determine our self-worth.
Imagine what the world would be like if we all learned to be Rootsilient leaders. What if we learned to recognize our bodies’ signs of dis-ease, the whispers of fatigue, chronic headaches or stomach upsets, and learned how to listen and adapt before those whispers turned into screeching alarms and disease?
Beyond Resilience to Rootsilience is a revolutionary framework that serves as an integrative compass toward sustainable well-being and success.
Beyond Resilience to Rootsilience: A Revolutionary Women’s Leadership Framework for Balance, Well-being and Success is available at your favorite booksellers. Head over to https://www.rootsilience.com/book for more information about the book and sign up for updates about courses, retreats, and workshops with the authors.
Excerpted from Beyond Resilience to Rootsilience: A Revolutionary Women’s Leadership Framework for Balance, Well-being and Success, Unbound Press, February 14, 2024