Hummingbird hovering under a hibiscus flower

The popular workshops, Leading With Love, and Leveraging Our Queerness for Leadership have proved to be quite powerful as participants discover their own superpowers, and the power of finding deeper and more meaningful connections with others. I’ve been longing to go deeper in a retreat format, and so have developed these into 3 day experiences for Leaders.

Leveraging Our Queerness for Leadership

This retreat for LGTBQ+ Leaders takes us deeper into the territory of orienting from Being (as opposed to Doing), Inner Culture (is the space between our ears a welcoming and affirming place to be?), liberating our natural Genius, navigating “Normal” and consciously choosing our own version of “Normal” where we unconditionally and unapologetically belong, just as we are.   

The retreat builds off an experience originally designed for the Out & Equal Executive Forum and is highly interactive with much of our time spent in dialog with small groups (4-5 people), followed by a discussion/debrief with the larger group.  Craig will be leading participants in storytelling exercises designed to uncover our gifts and give voice to our inner guides.  We’ll be talking about “covering”, the importance of psychological safety, and introduce the practice of “whole being listening” and dialog skills to be used in the small groups, and to take back to our workplaces, families, and communities.

Key Takeaways:

  • Our “difference” is our Superpower. By taking that to heart we can fully liberate our unique gifts and talents.
  • To create a work culture where everyone’s gifts are fully expressed we start by fully expressing our own gifts. 
  • Consider how our normal inner culture can be more inclusive, friendly, and welcoming.
  • Challenge our own assumptions about what parts of ourselves are “acceptable” in the workplace.
  • How we are Being as leaders can create powerful shifts on our teams, in our organizations, and in the larger world around us.

Leading With Love

“Working without love, is working without humanity.”

In the Leading With Love retreat we’ll unpack Empathy, Compassion, and Love as competencies of Conscious Leadership and share practices that we can use to develop ourselves as “loving leaders”.  Participants will have opportunities to share and learn from each other and experience practices to develop greater empathy, compassion, and love for themselves, as well as each other. 

This 1 and half day workshop for Leaders explores Love as a competency of Conscious Leadership, with empathy and compassion as building blocks.  We start with ourselves…

“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?  Can I get an amen?” -RuPaul

We’ll explore our Inner Culture (is the space between our ears a loving place?) and the practice of giving ourselves the gift we aspire to give to others, unconditional love and belonging, just as we are.   

We’ll then zoom out to our relationships with others, and how to bring Love into our day-to-day work.

The retreat is an expanded version of a workshop originally designed for leaders of HP’s global employee engagement groups and presented at the Out & Equal Workplace Summit.   Our time together will be highly interactive with much of our time spent in dialog with small groups (4-5 people), followed up by a discussion/debrief with the larger group.  

Key Takeaways:

  • Love as a way of being with and leading others can fundamentally shift how we move in, and relate to the world around us.
  • Skills to become more fully present to our own experience, and to others
  • Empathy, compassion, and love are trainable leadership competencies.