Bold Followership

Well, hey there, cadre. Happy Monday. And if it's not a happy Monday, that is alright too. m. start to the week and got up to the counter at the restaurant and said, "Hey, two decafs." And she was like, "Oh, we don't have decaf ready yet." Normally, Tuesday is our decaf crew. And normally I'm not a Monday morning decaf person, but it just felt right. So hey, if you were ready to dive into some decaf to start your week, lovely. Hi, Diane. Hey, speak wonder. If you were needing a little bit of caffeine and jolt to start your week, Marisa, nice to see you, no matter where you are, this is the right place to be.

Mondays we talk about professional growth, development, professional, whatever it is you are doing. And I have to just share a couple of my friends were going back and forth earlier this morning talking about Steven's live stream, brother from another mother on the on the east coast, just talking about what a wonderful communicator and storyteller and professional and peer that they got to experience this morning. It's one of the lovely things about this cadre sphere. There's always these little speckles of humanity that you have the opportunity to dive into.

So coming up the rest of today, I think you got one more live stream after me. I think Nick is going to take you on a walk in a couple of hours, about 90 minutes or so. But if we've never shared time and space together before, my name is JC lip old, Hey, Jules. And thank you for the opportunity to spend some time with you on this professional development day. Culturally, I always attempt to swim slightly away from the current, because I think quite often that's what we feel that we're doing. So I try to do it on purpose and to see what there is to learn into that friction.

So on a professional development day, where most of the time we may talk about our ability to lead, or desire to lead, I talk about the relationship of leader and follower from the relationship of follower. Why? Because often leader is seen as the active and follower is seen as the passive. But if we take more than one second to think about that, what do we do? We go, gosh, followers who are passive get the leaders very far. And very rarely actually, I don't think ever is a leader solely a leader.

And a follower has so much, so much power and potential to be the influencer of the direction of where we are going. So welcome to bold followership. One of the groups of people that I attempt to follow are young storytellers. I am a theater educator, and it's no secret. Why do I do it? Because I learn more from young storytellers than I do. I think from anybody else on this planet. I learned from everybody, but I'll tell you, young people who attempt to tell stories teach us a lot of things. They're closest to the state of humanity that is willing to dream boldly, to imagine, to consider all possibilities, rather than the possibilities that life has shown them.

So I luckily have opportunities to sit. Hey, Vanessa, nice to see you. Luckily, get to be in the seat of a theater educator quite often. One of the theaters I work at is about 15 minutes that way in Hopkins, Minnesota. It's called Stages Theater Company. It's a wonderful, wonderful theater for young audiences. And right now, they are doing Finding Nemo Jr. I don't think there's many movies on top of Finding Nemo with great examples of powerful, bold followership. In the difficulty, it takes an individual to see the potential in following.

So Finding Nemo, if you're not familiar with the movie, is this lovely tale of a father and a child. And the child is not given permission to risk and play and to go out into the world by said father. So what does the young fish do? The young fish goes and goes out into the world, which all of a sudden sends the father on a journey to find Nemo. Now again, you go, huh, who is who is the leader here? Is it the father? Well, who learns the most in this story? Who goes on the longest journey following other currents?

It's the father. The leader of the family finds growth by following friendship with Dory, by following his offspring, by taking risks and going after what Nem o wants. And of course, at the end of this journey, once Marlin, father finds Nemo child, Marlin is challenged with the moment of going, do I trust Nemo that Nemo knows the direction to go when conflict presents? What does Marlin go? No, I find more comfort in my seat of leadership , of my perspective of the world that that is where I'm going to live and stay.

And of course, through this journey, Marlin goes, ah, I need to now again, we often think it's like, Oh, I need to trust my kid or I need to allow my kid to grow up. It's like, take it out of the context of a parent child for a second. The one who is in the seat of leader, the one with power realizes that their inability to learn from those around him is what got them into this whole mess in the first place. It is the follower who had the right pathway in their lens and leader did not have the courage or the trust or their perspective to see that.

We often find great comfort in sitting in the seat of leader. Now again, leader, I know it. There is great responsibility in that seat as well, and you are responsible for others. So what if we boldly lead as much as we boldly follow? I always love taking long movies and trying to figure out how short we can make them if one little thing changed. What if finding Nemo was a couple minutes long? If Marlin said, Hey Nemo, swim over the great divide. Go where you haven't gone. Trust your capacity. Fail.

Go with the flow. The movie wouldn 't be called finding Nemo. It would be called Nemo, or Marlin, or I don't think it would be called anything. But that's why we tell the stories that we tell. Marlin had to move from seat of leader into seat of student, from leader of knower into seat of not knower. All of a sudden Nemo became the one who had the lesson to teach, and Dory had the lesson to teach, and Crush had the lesson to teach, and Bruce had the lesson to teach. And the big, blue, beautiful world was already there, waiting to lead Marlin to the future.

I think it's the reason why Pixar is so popular in this world. If you are a parent, or if you are of parent or older than parent age, how often do you hear people say, Oh, Pixar is so great because my kids love it, but it's so much for adults. Yeah, what a great way to market your product, to make it accessible and interesting to everybody that is out there. So hey, leader, follow a follower. Don't passively exist. Influence be positive friction on. And notice when you look around, it's never the leader's fault.

It's never the followers fault. It 's the fault of the individual who doesn't see the relationship that exists between the two. With that being said, boldly follow my friends, and know that you're a cadre family. And I mean that term really, that global cadre family is here with you whenever you click on it . We'll see you soon.