So… what does love have to do with it?
If I’m honest, I’ve come to believe this:
The most important relationship in our lives is the one we have with ourselves.
And paradoxically, the most dishonest person we often encounter… is also ourselves.
And the one person we cannot take a vacation from?
Ourselves.
So the real question becomes: what do I do about me?
Words matter.
I often use the Southern phrase bless my heart, not sarcastically, but reverently. It’s a way of honoring the heart even when it’s immature, overwhelmed, or a hot mess. Sometimes our best isn’t good enough. Sometimes we practice heart leadership, mess it up, and still get to celebrate the attempt.
There’s an axiom that says what we resist, persists.
But what about acceptance?
If we truly accept something…. What does release actually look like/mean? It’s not always death; sometimes it is life.
These questions have been quietly shaping my life for years.
The first one surfaced in 2018:
What if I prioritized peace?
Not productivity. Not performance. Peace.
It required a completely different prioritization stack.
Then came the next question:
What would it look like if, the older I get, the healthier I get?
And this past season brought the most confronting iteration yet:
What if my strategies for health were rooted in kindness toward myself?
Radical. For me.
One of the greatest gifts of this year has been the transition from self-abandonment to self-trust.
The clearest marker of that shift has been learning to use my outside voice to share my inside voice.
For years, my internal world and my external expression were not aligned. One of my strengths (and weaknesses 😊) is that I take things to their natural end. I took the axiom “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” all the way to its extreme. I forgot to inhale…..
I became exceptionally servant-hearted. Quiet. Accommodating. I believed that if I built enough trust, then, maybe, eventually, possibly, I’d be invited to share my internal voice.
That moment rarely came, if truly ever.
Instead, frustration grew; on both sides. I felt unseen. Others felt confused. The disconnect widened.
This past year, I made a different choice.
I owned my voice at a new level.
It was terrifying.
I lost relationships.
Or maybe, more truthfully, I lost the illusion of some relationships.
Painful? Yes.
Bad? Not necessarily.
As with most things, it’s a both/and. Losing illusion is part of becoming healthy. Some relationships didn’t survive. Others did and are now healing, deepening, becoming more real. It’s incredible.
If leadership is our relationship with relationships, then my capacity has grown.
And if life is built on trust, then my foundation is strengthened.
In December, I was given the gift of a pause. In the quiet, I heard a gentle internal question:
Can you own your courage again?
Can you be brave?
Bravery, I’m learning, isn’t just action. It’s heart-centered presence, on both the inhale and the exhale.
It’s the willingness to truly share what’s inside.
And that brings me to the word love.
Even writing this, I can feel my nervous system respond; (not necessarily in a positive way lol) body remembers. Love has been my North Star since I was a teenager. If I’m honest, all I ever truly wanted was to be loved. And I don’t think that’s unique to me.
At the end of the day. All the bugaboo. Beneath the noise, the striving. The denial and its coping mechanisms. I believe the deepest cry of the human heart is to be loved, and to love well.
My friend Carlene Hill Byron wrote, Not Quite Fine which explores mental health and the church with deep compassion. In it, she tells a story of a couple who traveled overseas to serve alongside Mother Teresa. Upon meeting them, Mother Teresa sent them back to the United States.
Their assignment?
To serve the pandemic of loneliness.
That story has stayed with me.
So this year, I’m choosing to share my own journey of understanding love: honestly, imperfectly, and in real time. Not as an expert. But as a human being learning to stay present with her own heart.
This is the work.
This is the leadership.
This is the love.