Flexability | Walking on sunshine

I am starting 2024 walking on sunshine after my book reached #1 bestseller in the categories of Organizational Learning and Organizational Change on Amazon in 2023. What a great feeling!

I wrote The Advantage of Other: A Leader’s Guide to Building an Equitable, Dynamic, and Productive Workplace for business leaders and managers who find themselves daunted by the challenge of successfully giving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) room in their offices. I used my experience of how businesses struggle to develop a practical guide to transforming the workplace from the inside out, and I dedicate the level of success attained by the book to everyone who recognizes the importance of DEI in the workplace.

Radical acceptance

While it’s great to start a year riding a wave of success, I cannot overlook the fact that 2023 also held times of trouble. That’s why part of my theme for 2024 is radical acceptance.

To practice radical acceptance is to make a conscious effort to acknowledge and honor difficult situations and emotions. By fully accepting things as they are, instead of ignoring and avoiding them, or wishing a situation was different, we can calmly assess the situation and find solutions.

Accepting a difficult situation is not the same as saying what has happened is acceptable, but it eliminates the first part of the struggle, that “why me?” part that can take up so much of our time and energy. There is often no answer to that question anyway; sadness, frustration, and grief are part of life. Accepting and acknowledging them is the vital first step towards moving on.

Build resilience through networks

Another important part of being able to ride life’s inevitable waves of misfortune is to be careful to build and maintain a network of people whom you can depend on. In personal life, these are our friends; in the work arena, these are our business connections.

I’m a Women Presidents Organization (WPO) member, and I have found the connections I have made among this inspiring group of successful women CEOs and company presidents from various industries to be indispensable. These women have faced business challenges and triumphed. We support each other, sharing our strength when others need it so that collectively we show the resilience that is needed to walk down the strenuous path of entrepreneurship.

I was delighted to meet up with these wonderful women at the WPO Entrepreneurial Excellence Forum in Las Vegas in May 2023. It’s great that so many of them are only an online meeting or phone call away, but to meet up with them all in person was hugely inspiring.

I also shared my thoughts on how to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous workplace at the Strategic Human Resource Symposium at the Wisconsin School of Business, and as a guest on the podcasts Speakers Who Get Results by Elizabeth Bachman and How Women Inspire: Invest, Lead, Give by Julie Castro Abrams. Apart from discussing my latest book, we delved deeper into the importance of belonging and professional worth.

It didn’t stop there! I also spoke at the 2023 National LGBT Chamber of Commerce International Business & Leadership Conference in Denver. What a remarkable opportunity! The conference is globally recognized and brought together more than 2 000 members of the LGBTQ community and allied business leaders to network and engage. I hope that the connections forged and the deals struck create ripples of positive change for years to come.

As a panelist at the inaugural EI3 Conference in Fort Collins, Colorado, I took part in a discussion on “Get in Formation: Using Influence to Build Your Strategic Stakeholder Squad”. The energy in the room, and the shared stories and insights, left me buzzing with inspiration.

I am so looking forward to similar opportunities this year. Let’s go 2024!