Cadre Today and Bold Followership

Foreign Cadre. How are we doing today? I hope you're doing good. A little bop to get your Monday going t north. How you doing, my friend? Nice to see you, Mel. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. 1% better. Speak. Wonder Bees of Bits crew is showing up. A little RuPaul for you this morning, y' all. How are you all doing? I hope you're doing great. And if you're not doing great, I want to assure you that that is okay as well. We may want to start Mondays, full tank, fresh eyes, bushy tailed, all the things.

But if you're not, and this isn't my opinion, this is tried and tested and true. A lot of people live some pretty remarkable weeks without feeling like they have everything in place. So, Kelly, Luke, as you come on in this morning as well, my reminder to you that if you're feeling great, awesome, go do it. If you're not feeling great, that's okay. Go do it. Whatever you need to do. So Mondays, we often talk about this idea of developing professionally. And again, I'm a big word person. Words don't mean anything until we place something inside them to say, this is what we mean.

I like to think of it this way. Professional development is all about what we do, personal development on Saturdays. That's who we are. Now, again, those two things, like a good Venn diagram, cross over quite a bit. But if you think about what you do, what do you do with your time, what do you do with your days, what do you do with your curiosity and your intuition? What do you do with other people? How do you work? How do you show up? How do you impact all those things? That's kind of what we talk about, which often brings us into the mindset of like, okay, so this is like leading and trailblazing and going out there and doing things that haven't been done.

Yeah, maybe. And even, maybe more accurately, maybe sometimes, because even those people who are leading the way, I could venture the conversation into existence that even the people who lead the most help actually spend the majority of their time following if they're leading sustainably and if they're actually leading anybody. So our little musical playing today was no other than the one and only RuPaul. If you're not aware or in the sphere of spending a lot of time with RuPaul. RuPaul is a comedian, an actor, an activist, someone who for decades has been blazing trails for people to really tap into who they are and how they show up in, showing their uniqueness and their specificity.

You may go. Wait, RuPaul, the drag queen? Yep, that one. So in the drag world, relationships are often set up this way. There's, you know, drag queens, and then there are people who they then mentor and kind of bring into the fold. So often drag queens become mothers, and new drag queens have a drag mother. And it's this really perfect image of. Of mentorship, of growth, of how do we grow our fold, how do we grow our impact? And whether that be. Let's say you've been at an organization for a long time, and all of a sudden someone is being put into your.

Kind of into your guidance to onboard. Maybe it's a. You know, you've been a member of a. Of a congregation or a group for. For a long time, and all of a sudden there's those people who walk in the door for the first time and you go, hey, I think I can provide some. Some light, some guidance, some warmth, some yes and some no. Who are those people who are within your sphere who are literally looking at you as, wow, can we have a conversation? Can I follow you? Can I learn from you? Can I ask you questions?

If you don't have those people in your lives, I invite you to find them. Think about your talents. Think about your passions. Maybe you're an author, maybe you're a poet. Maybe you're someone who's worked in a specific industry for a while and you feel like you got some confidence and clarity. What if you put out in the world, hey, you know what? I have this expertise or this familiarity. Does anybody want to learn about it? Does anybody want to have a cup of coffee and maybe pick up some skills that they don't currently have?

Find those people if they're not finding you, because they will change the way that you understand what you possess. It'll change the way that you put into the world these things that you have that have great value. I often talk about the idea of the high shelf. There's a lot of things that we place on the high shelf in this world. Meaning, you know, just like your. Just like your. Your grandma's find china. You place it up there and you look at it, but you never use it, and it gets dusty. What's the value of that thing?

Well, of course, that's a philosophical question at the end of the day, if it was a baseball card as I grew up, what's the value of a baseball card? Whatever someone will give you for it. You know, you can go ahead and say a baseball card is worth a million dollars, but if no one's going to give you a dime. What is it really worth? A million dollars or a dime? That china that sits on the high shelf? What's it's worth? Its memory of what it was used for and the food that it served and the smells and the tastes that rested on it.

If so, should we use it or should we keep it forever out of use? Think about your skills. Are you supposed to protect them? Are you supposed to isolate them? Are you supposed to hide them under a bushel? Are you supposed to allow them the space to breathe, to be seen, to impact? To each their own. But if you're going, wow, I have this thing that I love, that I want to share with other people, you may look at that as a I need a lead. But in reality, it's following where other people bring you back to RuPaul and all of RuPaul's drag daughters.

In this world, there's millions of them. There's this energy that connects up to down, but also down to up. The people who are following you are the people who teach you. The people who are following you are the ones who have the eyes, the ears, the freshness to make you aware of the things that you are not aware of yet. So if you're busy leading and sitting dusty on that high shelf, disconnected from the people who may actually be following, what if you put on those white gloves and take yourself off the high shelf and plop some good old home cooking on it and placed it back into circulation?

How would that change your understanding of its value, its importance? And by it, I mean the thing that you have, the talent, the experience, the passion, put it into use and see what happens. And if you're like, didn't think I was gonna be talking about drag queens to start off by Monday, look into the organizational infrastructure of the drag world and. And you're gonna see a system of really conscious support and sustainability that's literally through a tumultuous. Tumultuous world of being a kind of a segmented and often demonized part of culture.

And see how they've created sustainability. And it's within these relationships of up to down, but also down to up, y' all. You're gonna see Luke coming into play in about 20 minutes here talking about a little bit of motivation for your Monday. I know some of his family ran. Ran a race yesterday, and I have a feeling that that may be the catalyst for the conversation coming up at 8. And then this Friday at 4pm Central Standard Time, you'll see Luke and I jumping into a little Cadre Today interview talking about values.

To wrap up the week, y' all, Friday is almost here. Have a good one. I gave it all. All right, countdowns on. We'll see you later.