We are in complex times. Leaders need to know how to navigate complexity.
I can help you do that:
get unstuck and find your path to contributing to shifting the systems you care about.
I help people bring themselves, and their organizations back into sacred union between the drive and the presence, the masculine and the feminine.
Welcome to the space for sacred systems work…
I spent the last 15 years teaching and consulting in old stoic masculine institutions: Oxford, Yale, Dartmouth, and other global institutions where I designed educational programming and systems learning tools that are being used around the world. Before that I spent a decade living in Asia, teaching in Japan and then founding and running an educational organization and hybrid social enterprise in Cambodia.
My type-A life got me an MBA, two co-authored books (with a third on the way), and the chance to coach, facilitate, and design strategies for global companies, organizations, and foundations looking to contribute to systems change.
Along the way, I felt like I had to bury the inner work, the leadership and reflection processes, and the sacred pieces of this systems work, and of myself, in service of the more technical and tactical approaches to systems change.
I’m done with that.
This world, and each of us, needs balance: of the outer work and the inner work, of the yang and the yin, of the masculine and the feminine. In working to bring myself back into balance I have found ways to help others who are looking to do the same.
This isn’t about gender. This is a divine balance that is important and possible in each of us. The balance of the sacred masculine (the drive, the goals, the intelligence, the tools, the strategy) with the sacred feminine (the intuition, the awareness of interconnectedness, the systems approach, the spaciousness, the relationality, the presence).
I help people bring themselves and their organizations back into sacred union. In doing so, we can each contribute our part in bringing our world back into balance.
We can no longer pretend that the masculine work of mapping systems and designing impact strategy can be detached from the feminine work of understanding ourselves, our energy, our intuition and each other.
In these complex times, we need leaders who can understand and lead in complexity.
We can’t change the systems external to us without being in touch with our internal systems. When we act from our inner wounding, we create the same distortions in the external world as those in our internal world.
There is no such thing as “trauma in the system” unless there is trauma in the individuals in the system. We can’t work on one without working on the other.
We live in a world that has been built on dominance, speed, and winner-takes-all mentality, and now that we have created a plethora of complex global challenges, we are trying to “fix” those with the same dominance, speed, and competition. This world, and each of us, needs balance: of the outer work and the inner work, the doing and the being.
You can’t “solve” a system, and you can’t “solve” a symptom.
Yet we all try to do that alllllll the time. The problems we care about in the world are the results of complex systems that are perfectly designed to get those results: poverty, environmental harm, mental health struggles. Working to “solve” those things is like putting a bandaid on a wound with the knife still in it. They can’t be “solved” by working on them directly as if they were a lost set of keys or a broken phone.
That said, those results can be changed, by learning how to understand systems and then focusing our energy and money on contributing to shifting the systems that are creating those results.
“Fixing” vs “contributing to shifting.” Totally different approaches that require totally different mindsets.
We need humbleness (the realization that we can’t do it all alone) and systems perspectives (to figure out how the unique gifts you came into the world with can contribute to the work of others). In this feminine, sacred way, we are no longer fueling a competitive heropreneur model of change. Instead, we are using the circular nature of systems and feminine leadership to contribute our gifts to help all boats rise, together.
JOIN THE
Unstuck Club
This community is helping people get unstuck to thrive. If you want to be in community with people who are looking to balance their own yin and yang, to keep their drive and vision but pair it with ease and inner grounding, we’ve got you.
We are all better off if we do this work together.
In this community, we become our own fractal of what is possible in the transformed way of being in the world: interconnected, collaborative, intuitive… together.
Want to stay involved in our conversations about systems change, leadership, and the sacred?
Follow along with the Call to Systems Substack, Daniela’s LinkedIn, or her Instagram for lessons, inspiration, and stories to help you find your own path to impact.
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