How and When to Leap
I want to introduce you to one of my favorite action-taking tools: the leap.
Here’s what you need to know about leaps, as outlined by my teacher Tara Mohr in Playing Big:
It puts you in touch with your intended audience
It evokes yirah (good, exciting, awe-inspiring fear)
It helps you stretch into a bigger arena
It can be completed in two weeks or less
It has a learning objective
Leaps are powerful because they help get you out of your head and jumpstart momentum.
Is there are an area of your life that is yearning for a leap? What might that look like? Now would be a great time to bust out your trusty journal – or Notes app! – and jot down some ideas.
My leap.
I recently was challenged to design my own leap to further my role as a coach. I recognized it’s time for me to crystallize and share why nature is a cornerstone of my coaching approach and my life:
🌳 Connecting to nature allows us to better connect with ourselves.
🌎 It fosters an intimacy with our planet, inviting us to be more attentive and loving stewards.
⭕ All of this creates a beautiful feedback loop of tender caring that extends to everything in our orbit: the earth, plants, creatures, one another, and ourselves.
It’s our birthright.
When I first brought my older daughter home from the hospital, I noticed that taking her outside was the most consistently helpful thing when she was fussy.
Then I noticed that stepping outside helped me calm down when she was fussy. Or when I was.
The same thing happened with my younger daughter.
I’ve since delved into the wide body of research showing the benefits of being outside on our nervous systems, immune systems, and emotional wellbeing.
There's strength in connection.
Have you heard about mycorrhizal networks? Suzanne Simard shares about this discovery in her book Finding the Mother Tree. These fungal networks connect individual trees (and other plants) together to create a giant symbiotic network that shares nutrients and information.
Trees that are part of a mycorrhizal network are much stronger than solo trees.
They help one another thrive and benefit from being part of the system.
They flourish.
We are nature.
The same is true for human beings, because we are nature.
We have seasons and cycles.
We are breathtakingly beautiful.
Our value doesn’t come from achieving or accomplishing.
Sometimes, when it appears nothing is happening, there is radical transformation happening below the surface.
When we share what we have and what we know, we can help strengthen and heal our network – and let our network help strengthen and heal us.
As Julia Plevin writes in The Healing Magic of Forest Bathing, “The most important and fulfilling work we as humans can do on this planet at this time is to reconnect to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world…The call to return to nature – your true nature – comes from deep inside.”
This is holy work.
How is this a leap?
✅ It put me in touch with the people I want to reach: you.
✅ It invoked yirah; writing this made me super nervous! (“Do I say too much? Do I say too little? What if they don’t like me? What if this is too weird? Why am I second-guessing myself?”)
✅ It made me stretch and play bigger; if I’m going to play the role I’m called to play, I need to get clear on how I talk about this vision.
✅ I allowed myself only two weeks to work on this letter.
✅ My goal is not to get this perfect (though wouldn’t that be nice!), but to better understand what resonates and what falls flat so I can refine how I share my vision with people. Which leads me to…
My ask
Two, actually:
If you can take 90 seconds to let me know what landed and what didn’t, that would be an enormous help! (I’m setting my ego aside on this one, so if you have constructive feedback, please don’t be shy.)
If this resonated with a big HECK YES, I’d love if you could share this post with two people so we can grow and strengthen our own “mycorrhizal network”.
P.s. You may notice “Sacred Nature Coaching” around these parts more in the future. My hope is that this letter helps explain why.
