Leading With Love 💕

Hello, cadres fear. Anila here, coming to you live from sunny Minneapolis. Sunny and hot. Feels good. I am Anila Adnani. I am coming to you with lived experience, with my Alphabet soup of mental health conditions and my work as a mental health tech entrepreneur and as a nonprofit founder as well. The things just keep going for me, and as a breast cancer survivor, I can keep listing stuff. So I'm here on Cadre because I want to spread this message of leading with love and this idea of leading with love, it's.

It's not new, it's not radical, it's not, uh. Welcome, Jules. Good to see you here. How are you? Hi, Luke. Happy Wednesday to you. Uh, so this idea of leading with love is actually pretty simple. Simple, but not easy. And maybe a little bit, uh, like, duh, I should have thought of that, or. Thank you, Luke. I'm loving being here. I caught your live a few days ago. You were sitting outside, and you had some really. It's really, really awesome to be able to connect in these ways. The insights that come from people as they're talking about their lives and their challenges, there's always something to learn.

So I'm happy to be here sharing my life and my challenges with you all so that you can hopefully find something that helps make your life better. And in the same way, that good karma is all coming full circle as I find things to integrate into my life. So my leading with love segment is really like a reminder to myself to lead with love, that it is so simple, yet so hard to do. And I think a lot of it comes from just the noise in our head that makes it so hard. So, for example, this morning, in my head, I have a 915 doctor's appointment.

I need to be back home by 915 so that I can get on my zoom, so that I can do my doctor's appointment. And in my son's head, he's got la dee da. I'm going to chess camp today, mama. Can I tell you a story, mama? Which. Which. Which toothpaste should I use? And I'm like, move, son, move. We gotta go. But that was also in my head. Outwardly, I was leading with love. I was gently coaxing him to get what he needed to done, engaging with his way of doing it without getting too irritated, until at one point, he was holding his socks, and he was gonna tell me again that his dog is his mother, and I'm sick of hearing that one.

So I finally just said, put your shoes, put your socks on quietly. But I still did that in a sweet way. And I think that that is all the difference. Just doing stuff in a sweet way. Another example, social media, right? Nobody's got time for anybody anymore. Even on social media. You ask a question and you get, like, an obnoxious response. I'm in this group on Facebook that I don't even know how I got into the group, but it's all about watching and following the northern lights. And someone wrote, I don't know all the science terms, but essentially last night or coming up in the next few days, the northern lights, you'll be able to see them again.

And someone posted a picture and was like, is this northern lights? I'm not sure. I can't tell. And it was this gorgeous picture of stars in the Milky Way. And someone was like, that's just stars. Stop. Like, just, like, jumping down this person's throat. All they did was ask a question. Why can't we just be kind? Why can't we just show each other love? Why is it so difficult? What happened to us that we can't just be polite? Can't just hold the door open for someone when we see that they're holding so many things.

We can't let someone in to the merging line with a smile instead of a f*** you. Like, why are we so angry all the time? And I'll tell you, I think it's because we're not living the lives that we want to be. And when we are not living the lives that we want to be, we get angry. And subconsciously we turn that anger outward. And then it makes it really, really hard to lead with love. And I'm squinting and closing my eyes because, man, that sun is just filling me up right now. Oh, Jules, I'm so glad that you have some beautiful photos of the northern lights.

Hopefully you will get to see them again. It is so exciting to be living in these times where we have this technology to be able to coordinate and connect with people and say, hey, northern lights are going to be in your area. Go drive 2 hours away and go see them. It's just like, there's so much magic. And this guy is just like, those are just stars. Like, hello, guess what? Even stars are magical and beautiful and the science and the nature. And I just. I just can't believe how some people just are so hard.

Hard on themselves, hard on other people, and making life, like, hard for no reason. And that's why I want to lead with love. So I want to show people that this other way is just not working. And it's taken me 40 years to figure it out, because my whole life, I was leading with negativity. I was leading with self, I was leading with anger towards others and, like, jealousy and envy. Growing up as a kid in a town that had, you know, the high school parking lot was nicer than the teacher parking lot kind of place, and I was.

That wasn't us, right? We moved there so that we could get a good education to be around that, but that wasn't us. And it's hard to grow up in a place like that when you're always kind of questioned for your worth, and then you start questioning it yourself, and then you start hating those types of people without even really getting to know them and understanding where they're coming from or if they were even thinking about you or even that kind of thing, where your mind starts filling in gaps where it shouldn't, and it does so in this way of using fear and negativity.

And so leading with love really takes conscious effort. Even like this morning, I was consciously being patient with my son for as long as I could. And then the noise in my head was getting to me of, I gotta be back by this time, in order to get on the call. By this time, I gotta walk the dog. So that means I have x number of minutes to walk the dog before I leave for the whole day. And, like, the stress, the stress, the stress, the stress. And then chatter, chatter, chatter from my little one chatter, chatter, chatter in my head.

And then, boom. Just put your shoes on quietly, please. I'm done. So, recognizing that idea, also of, like, we have a tank and it gets depleted, and in order to lead with love, we have to keep refueling that tank. Because it's love is. Love is in abundance, but to keep giving it, you have to replenish it in some way. And that's what keeps the abundance going that cycle. So, Jules, I hope that you get to see northern lights again soon. Luke, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Happy Wednesday to you all.

I am excited to lead with love with you, and I will see you next week with some more examples of leading with love. And I can't wait to hear how you're leading with love. So if you're still here, give me a comment of maybe a way that you've done it in the past or, you know, tag me in the chat feature on Cadre later on and share a story of how you're leading with love. Because it's important to show these examples to others to help them get that little inspiration of, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I could do that.

I could, I could buy the. Yeah. Refueling the sun. Yep, absolutely. Like, oh, yeah. I could buy, I could buy a cup of coffee for the person behind me just for s**** and giggles. That's leading with love. I could pick up that piece of garbage on the street where I just parked. That's leading with love. These are all simple, simple things and they all add up and they all help fuel us and allow us to keep giving love. And the more love we give, I promise you, the more love is going to come back to us, the more goodness is going to come back to us.

That's sort of another thing that I believe is this idea of serendipity as a strategy in the business world of to show up and do good and help people. And I promise you that all comes full circle. It all comes full circle in time and the good comes quickly. It's the bad. When you're doing bad things, it may take a while and you may be like, ha ha, I'm getting away with it. But no, karma gets you. And so you put good into the world, I promise you, you will get good back. And even when you don't, it just means you're not done yet.

Keep going and keep leading with love, wishing you love, strength and awareness. Enjoy the sun, enjoy the stars. Enjoy the northern lights. Enjoy the magic of life. Until next week. Bye.