Book Giveaway: The Courage Way

Congratulations to DeAnn Akins for winning Greg John’s Notes from the Playground and to Jan Meyer for winning Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson’s Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems.

Our next Book G Francis-CourageWay-cover-stones stacked iveaway is The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity by Shelly L. Francis with a Foreword by Parker J. Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak. Though I’ve only had the chance to read a few chapters of The Courage Way, I can already tell it’s a valuable book for those seeking how to live and lead with courage particularly in these chaotic times – in other words, it has something for all of us!

Not surprisingly, “Awakening Leaders with Poetry” caught my eye. Before reading this thoughtful excerpt, let me tell you how you can win an autographed copy of The Courage Way.

Win a Copy of The Courage Way

As a special thank you to our blog subscribers, each month we will give away autographed books by a wide range of authors and poets. Winners are picked randomly at the end of each Book Giveaway and announced here and on our Facebook page. Each month, we will send up to four blog posts – thoughtful reflections on teaching, the teacher’s life, and poetry – to subscriber’s inboxes.

Subscribe to our blog by February 21st to be entered to win a drawing for The Courage Way and all the following Book Giveaways.

Awakening Leaders with Poetry

Leadership is full of moments when our humanity is asked to show up. It’s often our internal landscape and weather, which only we see inside ourselves, that make the night-and-day difference for the people around us. One of the best ways to help one another access what we’re thinking and feeling is not head on but rather through the side door, through something that is unusual for most leaders and organizations: poetry. Poetry accesses that part of ourselves we don’t normally invite into leadership.

Patrick is one of many leaders who told me that poetry has become an important tool for him, both for internal reflection and for connecting with colleagues. Patrick even shared poetry with his patients.

“There were times near the end of my practicing career when I had the courage to offer someone a poem or the like in lieu of a prescription,” he told me. “I especially recall a woman going through a messy divorce due to her husband’s infidelities and asking about an antidepressant, and I said, ‘Actually, what you need is an anti-grief pill, and we don’t make those, but this poem by Mary Oliver might be helpful.’ (It was ‘The Journey.’) It opened a whole new level in our dialogue—and saved me from feeling useless in the face of her grief.”

Another such leader is Diana Chapman Walsh, president emerita of Wellesley College.3 Earlier in her career, a retreat experience with Parker Palmer had unleashed her inner poet. When she stepped into her presidency at Wellesley, she invited Parker to come and speak at a multifaith baccalaureate service the evening before the installation. “He read the Mary Oliver poem ‘The Summer Day.’ It’s a beautiful poem that ends with ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’” Parker talked about his experience with poetry and then he told Diana, “The world needs presidents who are also poets. Keep your poetry alive.”

About two years later, the challenges of the presidency were pressing in on Diana as she climbed a steep learning curve. She arranged to spend a weekend with Parker and his wife, Sharon, at their home in Madison: “One of the first things I said to him when I arrived was, ‘Parker, I haven’t kept my poetry alive. I just don’t have time. There is so much I have to learn. I’m letting you down.’ He took that in, and we took a long walk at the end of which he offered, in his gentle way, ‘I wonder if you could find it within yourself to think of your presidency as your poetry?’

“This new frame for thinking about the essence of my work was enormously powerful and helpful. There are so many distractions that push us away from our deepest longings and truest insights that we need to be able to find our way back repeatedly, as Parker’s offer enabled me to do in that instance.”

Poetry helps leaders reconnect their inner and outer lives on the Möbius strip. It becomes a natural leverage point for leaders to slow things down for themselves and others—providing time for personal reflection and at times a communal response. Poet and Courage & Renewal facilitator Judy Brown explained what she has seen in her work with leaders: “Leaders are attracted to poetry for its ability to say what might be in their heart but they don’t want to say directly. When we choose to read a particular poem or quote to people, we’re offering them something to make sense of themselves, but we’re also offering a huge amount of our self, because we’re saying implicitly, ‘This touched me. This is important to me. I want to read it to you.’ It’s both an offering freely given, and, on the other hand, it is an acknowledgment of open authenticity about who we are in a world that doesn’t necessarily invite that and where it may feel risky sometimes for people to be who they are.”

Poetry speaks to a different part of the brain, which helps us move out of our default thought processes through creative disruption. It speaks to our hearts. W. H. Auden famously quipped, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Poet William Ayot says Auden got that seriously wrong: “Poetry gives us direct, unmediated access to the ‘invisibles,’ those unseen, unspoken qualities of empathy, imagination, and creativity that give our lives both meaning and depth. It lifts us out of our left-brain obsessions with short-term, literal, reductionist results and mechanistic outcomes.”

Ayot points out the energy generated by speaking poems aloud: “It feeds both speaker and audience and, at its best, brings a gathering of disparate individuals to one of those deep and reflective communal stillnesses that the Quakers call ‘companionable silence.’ It’s a curious phenomenon.”

Testimonials About The Courage Way

“Everyone should read this gem of a book. The Courage Way is a powerful tonic for our challenging times. Keep it close at hand so you can savor its life-giving music again and again.” — Dr. Gloria J. Burgess, distinguished scholar, professor of transformational leadership, and author of Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside, Pass It On!, and Flawless Leadership

“This is the book that won’t claim to change your life, which is exactly why you can trust that it probably will. What you will find in these pages is no less than the technology to tune into your true self—your real intuitions and outrage and intelligence—and a sense of how to show up in community with that revitalized understanding of your own power. In a cacophonous world like the one we’re living in, I can think of no more critical or renewing opportunity.” — Courtney E. Martin, author of The New Better Off

“For many years, the Center for Courage & Renewal has been preparing us for this ‘post-truth’ era when courageous action is demanded from leaders who care about people and planet. We need leaders who put service over self, who know what they stand for and stand there. We need leaders who are committed to serving people, who recognize what is being lost in the haste to dominate, ignore, and abuse the human spirit. I am deeply grateful for this book as a guide and support for moral leadership as we face the darkening future.” — Margaret Wheatley, author of nine books including, most recently, Who Do We Choose to Be?

About the Author

Shelly L. Francis has been the marketing and communications director at the Center for Courage & Renewal since mid-2012. Before coming the Center, Shelly directed trade marketing and publicity for multi-media publisher Sounds True, Inc. Her career has spanned international program management, web design, corporate communications, trade journals, and software manuals. The common thread throughout her career has been bringing to light best-kept secrets — technology, services, resources, ideas — while bringing people together to facilitate collective impact and good work.