Op-ED: The Power of Intentioning: Are you ready to answer the #1 most important question for your life?

Gloria Feldt, Co-Founder & President of Take The Lead, shares on the life-changing power of intentioning for women, as revealed in her newest book.

On a spectacular Arizona day in late January, 2020, when you can be lulled into thinking all’s right with the world, I was hiking with a friend. Then boom! I tripped on an unseen pebble, put my hand out to catch myself and knew immediately from the snap and the pain that I had broken my wrist. The first broken bone I’d ever had.

It’s never the mountains that trip you up. It’s the pebbles on the path.

Within 6 weeks, as everything shut down because the whole world had been tripped up by coronavirus, I realized I should have seen it as an omen. The year of broken bones I called it. Broken almost everything. More like two years now. And when will it stop?

We’ve all been through a difficult time of so much loss and grief.

The pandemic tripped us up. Ground us to a halt. Changed so much about how we see the world and each other. Maybe it changed how you envision your career and life from now on.

So there’s no better time to answer the question that prompted me to write my book, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. This is without a doubt the #1 question you need to answer to be in the driver’s seat for the rest of your life, not the backseat wondering where life is going to take you next.

Your power TO WHAT?

What does that mean? Here’s the backstory.

I started writing Intentioning well before Covid-19 reared its ugly head. I interviewed over a dozen women whose stories form the basis for a new set of Leadership Intentioning tools to build on the 9 Leadership Power Tools in my last book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power.

In No Excuses, I explored women’s culturally learned relationships with power. I realized ambivalence about power was a key to why women hadn’t reached parity in leadership of any sector despite all we’d done to open doors and change laws. So much female potential was not being realized.

We needed a different idea about power than the oppressive narrative of history that’s based in fighting and wars and the assumption of scarce resources. By shifting the paradigm to the expansive, creative, generative, abundant idea of power TO, women’s would say, “I want that kind of power.”

Now, after a decade of teaching and coaching women how to embrace their power on their own terms, I realized the necessary next step is to ask, “the power TO WHAT? How am I going to use my power once I know I have it?”

Your answer will enable you to clarify your intentions.

Identifying and getting what you want out of life can seem like a daunting task, even more right now, when you may be uncertain about whether you’ll be working from home, whether your children will be safe, and if your job will exist at all. And it isn’t automatic that a woman will want to walk through an open door or even see it as a possibility. She may feel ignored or not respected, exhausted from experiencing microaggressions. She may fear she’ll be passed over for a promotion at work, that it’s too late to start over when her profession or company changes, or that for whatever reason she’s not good enough.

This doesn’t have to be how you live your life and I don’t want it to be that way for you.

Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic and another pandemic of belatedly acknowledged racial injustice created huge disruptions in every part of our economy and social structures.

But that is, or can become, a good thing.

We are in a season of disruption. We are in a season of rebirth. The two have much in common.

Disruptions of this magnitude are the best opportunity we will ever have to make long needed structural changes. Because when the world is in chaos, people and organizations have to think differently to survive. Ideas that wouldn’t have been considered previously become solutions.

So here’s a quick overview of the 9 Leadership Intentioning Tools that will enable you to achieve your goals once you answer that #1 question for yourself:

The Self-Definitional Leadership Intentioning Tools

• Uncover Yourself – what sets you apart is what gets you ahead, and the keys to your best future are already in your hands
• Dream Up – if your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.
• Believe in the Infinite Pie – when we use our power to build rather than rule over others, we learn that the more there is for everyone, the more there is to go around.

The Counterintuitive Leadership Intentioning Tools

• Modulate Confidence – self-doubt can have a positive value.
• Strike Your Own Damn Balance (and love your stress) – you get to choose what matters to you and reject the rest.
• Build Social Capital – relationships are everything and will ultimately help you as much as educational qualifications or work experience.

The Systems Change Leadership Intentioning Tools

• Be “Unreasonable” – sometimes you have to break the rules and invent new ones to get where you want to go.
• Unpack Implicit Bias and Turn Its Effects on Its Head – you can make its effects your superpowers.
• Clang Your Symbols – they create meaning, which brings others into the story, the most essential function of leadership.

I wish you great intentioning.

Bio: Gloria Feldt is the Co-Founder & President of Take The Lead: Breakthrough diversity and women’s leadership  solutions for individuals and companies, and author of Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. On her website, you can get her free workbook that accompanies the book and will help you answer your #1 question, get the most from these tools, and make a plan to achieve your highest and best intentions.