Cadre Today: Wear Your Own Shoes

Hey there. Good morning, Cadre. How are we doing today? I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope more than anything that you are doing great today. I hope you woke up feeling ready to do whatever it is you get to do, have to do, want to do. But also, I say even more loudly, if you're not feeling great, that's great. May not feel like it, but you are still just as capable, just as wonderful, just as worthy as you are in any other state. If you're checking off the boxes, awesome. If you're not checking off the boxes, awesome.

Newfield lover Sue. Nice to see you. My friend, Nick A. How are you doing? It is Tuesday, Speak Wonder. And the month of August is starting to tiptoe towards the finish line. Where you place your focus so often is where the pitter of the heart goes to so, so often. You know, like a month starts and a month ends and all of a sudden time flies by. When you're thinking in months, if you're thinking about never missing a Monday and, you know, burning until a Friday and, you know, working for the weekend, Emily.

All of a sudden the weeks start flying by. Focus on the day. If you focus on the hour, if you focus on the minute, if you focus on the meeting, that's where all of a sudden the moment flies to. Yeah. Speak Wonder. The act of savoring is twofold. There's the act, the mmm moment, and then there's the thing that you're acting on. Is that the month or is it the moment? Well, hey, I'm glad that I'm here. I'm glad that you're here. I know what I know, and I care about you. On Tuesdays, a lot of times, the conversations circle around who we do things with.

And I'm not talking just about in the Cadre sphere, you know, I'm kind of an old dog within the. Within the Cadre sphere. And in an earlier chapter, we kind of had this cadence. Mondays was a lot of professional development talk. Tuesdays was a lot of community development talk. Wednesdays was a lot of mental health awareness calibration development talk. Thursdays was how do we care for other people Talk. Fridays was how do we deal with losing stuff? Talk. Saturdays was how do we develop personally.

And Sundays was how do we care for ourselves. Now we think about where that design falls. Because I'm a story person, I think all that ties in. Mondays we think about how we do what we do, and Tuesdays we go, oh, my gosh, for actually doing something impactful. We are doing what we do. With other people. So I always like talking about on Tuesdays, how do we develop communities, Whether that be a one on one relationship or one on many, or many on one or a many on many. How do we do things together?

So I have this idea of the outward facing clique. Cliques are quite often culturally derived as this inward facing. We have something that we like and we're not gonna let anybody else be a part of it. We're also gonna make anybody else feel bad if they're not doing the thing that we do in the way that we think it should be done. But if we take that and we outward face it, if we go, hey, we have something that we think is really special and we want you to be a part of it. We want you to come in and inform it.

We want you to come in and mess it up. So today's topic fits right in that moment. How often do we hear the phrase, ah, you got big shoes to fill, or the analogy of the shoe, the analogy of stepping into someone else's place with honor for the person who wore the shoes and challenge for the people who are putting them on. I'll tell ya, I will never put on someone else's d*** shoes. I have no interest. And also I don't have enough confidence in myself that I'd ever be able to be somebody else. I don't.

I think the idea of putting on someone else's shoes is rooted in maybe a really wonderful sentiment to connect us to the before and to give us a vessel, a vehicle that being a shoe to travel us into the future. I tell you, the shoes that people have worn become a part of them. They are tattered and torn and tied up because of how they did the thing they did. Not because it was the best way, not because it was the right way, but it was because it was their way. It was their story, it was their navigating, it was their fight.

I've had some wonderfully expressive, belligerent moments in the last couple of weeks where people, you know, with a little bit of friendly, macho, masculine challenge, which if you know me, roll my ey, I bunched right back at them. They gave me the, oh, you got big shoes to fill. Here you go. And I right back at him like, I will never put in anybody else's shoes. And if you're going to gauge my pathway and my success off of how I match up to what someone else did, get ready to be let down. And I'm going to smile at you while I'm letting you down.

But I am going to walk in my shoes, and I'm going to do that with a lot of courage and curiosity, bravery and boldness, honesty and humbleness. All the things after I walked in my shoes where they were encouraging me to maybe consider the shoes in which I'm replacing, they came up to me after events and like, wow, you really did that thing good. My response was, mm. I had no doubt of the goodness that I was capable of creating, but I did have frustration that people were wondering how I would fit in the other shoes.

Now, after they had a little paradigm shift, they realized, like, well, like, I can understand how maybe, like, the stepping into someone else's shoes could seem condescending or seem challenging. What they were really saying is, we're scared. We're scared that the shoes that we've been following are no longer going to be moving. And in that fear, we're saying, we hope that there are shoes still to follow. So if you are that leader, I invite you to do two things. Number one, acknowledge.