In this episode I interview author Cyndi Suarez, who has just released The Power Manual, a book on how to master complex power dynamics. Cyndi has written a comprehensive operations manual for living into the tension of these distinctions and quite literally enacting our way to freedom.

Last month I was blessed to facilitate the fourth annual Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, our flagship program. A workshop to make dreams real. I also facilitated the first ever Evolutionary Leadership Graduate Program, an opportunity for former workshop participants to come back and level up. 

I was moved to learn that my friend Kenzo An, runner, meditator and all-around passionate man, wrote a post on the practice of fulfillment for About Meditation.

In Yes, Fulfillment Is a Path but It’s Also the Goal he writes that:

There is a deeper source that doesn’t fluctuate based on external conditions. The sense of fulfillment is immediate and unconditional.

The impulse to develop the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop was the desire for creative freedom. I work for institutional clients, the client is the convener and I’m invited in to design and facilitate the experience. It is beautiful work and I am privileged to do it. But it is work that demands compromise. The client has their own goals, their sense of what is possible and their own set of constraints.

I set out to create a space that was free of such compromise. I decided to try being the convener. And I developed a workshop where I could apply the very best of what I have learned in service of what I see as our highest purpose.

Intention. Connection. Experimentation. These are the tenets of the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop.

When I launched the Better Men Project I chose to focus on cisgender (term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth) heterosexual men in committed relationships. The intention was not to exclude other men, but to humbly begin the process based on the experience that I know. You have to start somewhere. And it is good to start with yourself.
My dear friend Felix Endara was generous enough to sign up for an interview anyway. Felix is a trans man. I had no idea until the moment of our interview. I have been working with Felix for years. It turned out to be the most powerful interview that I’ve had during this process.
Who better to speak to the redeeming aspects of masculinity than people who have had both experiences, the experience of being assigned female at birth and the experience of transitioning to life as a man. I write with Felix’s permission and with his eyes on these words. 
 

We need to grow. To stop growing is to start dying. But the quest for achievement is not always about growth. It often is about wanting to become whole. It can be fueled by the idea that we are somehow not enough, and that happiness can only be found at some point in the future, when we become worthy of it. This is wrong.

When I ask a group to talk about what it is like to be with someone who is really present, they say words like: comfortable, safe, being held, alive, joy, energizing, grounded.

WOW.

Consider being so present that others feel joyful around you, alive, energized, grounded. Wouldn’t this be an amazing way of being?

We can be this generous.

I can tell you that there are people who punctuate their lives with acts of devotion, who make sacred offerings with every meal and who sing prayers into every hearth. And I can tell you that they are beautifully perfect as much as they are also flawed. They have moods, preferences, blind spots and human stuff as much as any of us. But they show up. They say yes to the work. They try harder. They try again. They do it with devotion. They do it with love.