"I wish I could be more available to my family," a friend told me recently.

He is in the midst of exploring what life is asking of him, particularly around his work in the world. He is considering whether to remain in his current role or transition towards work he feels more deeply called to. This is a significant tension for him—and a familiar one for many of us.

When we make ourselves available to one thing, what do we become less available to?

There is a website I have not launched.

It has been good enough, by most reasonable standards, for a couple of weeks now. There is a self-inquiry tool that works. There is a membership structure with the offers and pricing decided. There are two cohorts with dates and enrolment thresholds. I have refined all of it, repeatedly, with real care. 

I have shown the website to almost no one.

Less-than-ideal conditions take something from us. We should name that and work to change them. But perhaps we can also ask: What do these conditions call forth—and what do people make possible within them?

There is a question that has been quietly following me for years. What do we actually mean when we say someone is mature? It has followed me into coaching conversations with executives, into conferences with business owners, into conversations with school principals in the Caribbean, into ceremonies in the Amazon rainforest, and into the ordinary moments of my own life.

A Caribbean male leader said this near the end of our coaching session this week — quietly, almost apologetically. I asked him to name the emotion. He paused. "Just feeling emotional about what I'm discovering about myself."

For nine days last month, I stayed in the Brazilian Amazon with the Madha and Yawanawá peoples. Our group of five was welcomed into Aldeia Kamikua by Vesku Yawanawá and her son, Runuina Yawanawá. We came to study the ancestral voice tradition carried by pajés Mana and Ratsuha Madha, a couple whose devotion to each other and their lineage is as moving as the chants themselves.

I just spent the last two weeks facilitating some leadership development sessions with leaders in the Grenadian government. And during my years of working with leaders across the Caribbean, I have observed that you cannot just import leadership models here. And its hardly helpful to start with one. You have to listen your way in. Because leadership in this region is shaped by…