Seven Stones Leadership

What is exquisite sufficiency?

Exquisite sufficiency is a way of organizing our lives, our work, our social systems, and our economy. Exquisite sufficiency asserts that we are enough exactly how we are right now. We do enough each day, each week, each year, and we have enough of whatever it is…

What is exquisite sufficiency?

Exquisite sufficiency is a way of organizing our lives, our work, our social systems, and our economy. Exquisite sufficiency asserts that we are enough exactly how we are right now. We do enough each day, each week, each year, and we have enough of whatever it is that’s required within ourselves, our relationships and collectively as a society. In this way, sufficiency is the lived experience of enough. Exquisite sufficiency is NOT about deprivation, settling or limited living. It’s about knowing – through experimentation, inquiry and presence – the threshold that gets us to “enough” and letting go of the habitual our drive for more.

As a mindset, sufficiency becomes the way in which we listen to others – and to ourselves – to discover our true needs and values. Sufficiency guides us, and our clients, to align our actions with clear priorities. We cultivate practices out of sufficiency that lead us to build businesses and lives that will stand the test of time over many generations. Sufficiency is an antidote to anxiety, fear, distraction and shame. It may feel like having gotten enough sleep or a sense of satisfaction for accomplishing enough for the day. In this way, it is less about a number that fits our ideas about enough, and instead is a declaration that empowers us.

Check them out!
Seven Stones Leadership
Lynne Twist, Soul of Money Institute
Miriam Hawley, Enlignment
Alan Rosenblith, Alternative Currency, Film Maker
Ana San Juan, Marketing Consultant
Carol Dearborn, Artist
Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos – for generating an environment of joy and connection, a…

Check them out!
Seven Stones Leadership
Lynne Twist, Soul of Money Institute
Miriam Hawley, Enlignment
Alan Rosenblith, Alternative Currency, Film Maker
Ana San Juan, Marketing Consultant
Carol Dearborn, Artist
Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos – for generating an environment of joy and connection, a culture of happiness in his organization.
Craig Newmark – for not selling his beloved website, Craigslist.com, for doing it for love of it, keeping it simple, accessible, and clean of advertising.
Piya Banjeree, Core Team Member of Generation Up

Shea Adelson is a leadership and organizational coach and consultant with Seven Stones Leadership Group, a professional services firm advancing the practice of leadership, wisdom, and sufficiency. Shea leverages a decade of experience across many disciplines, including corporate research and anal…

Shea Adelson is a leadership and organizational coach and consultant with Seven Stones Leadership Group, a professional services firm advancing the practice of leadership, wisdom, and sufficiency. Shea leverages a decade of experience across many disciplines, including corporate research and analysis, executive coaching and the embodiment arts to deliver programs that create high level, sustainable change for groups and individuals. She pulls from a wide berth of tools when she coaches and facilitates, including Action Science, SAVI Communications, Appreciative Inquiry, ontology, somatics and mindfulness traditions. She approaches her client engagements in partnership and collaboration, and is experimental and transparent in her process.

Gina LaRoche is an organizational leadership consultant, facilitator and coach. She co-founded Seven Stones Leadership Group, which engages individuals and organizations in the most pressings questions of our time. She develops organizational leadership and works with individuals on their persona…

Gina LaRoche is an organizational leadership consultant, facilitator and coach. She co-founded Seven Stones Leadership Group, which engages individuals and organizations in the most pressings questions of our time. She develops organizational leadership and works with individuals on their personal journeys. She brings respect, clarity, truth and love to all of her work. Gina leverages over 20 years of experience in delivering executive programs that have challenged leaders, teams and entrepreneurs to accelerate results using vision, strategy and accountability. She is also a writer and collage artist, and the author of Living in Sufficiency: A daily journey (2009). Gina is a popular public speaker, delivering keynote addresses on “what is enough?” and what it means to be a leader during times of great change.

Jennifer Cohen is a leadership and organizational coach and consultant with 20 years in the field coaching hundreds of individuals and groups. She co-founded Seven Stones Leadership Group, which engages individuals and organizations in the most pressings questions of our time. She teaches a uniqu…

Jennifer Cohen is a leadership and organizational coach and consultant with 20 years in the field coaching hundreds of individuals and groups. She co-founded Seven Stones Leadership Group, which engages individuals and organizations in the most pressings questions of our time. She teaches a unique model of leadership development and is pioneering work in moving organizations and individuals to a partnership model of living and leading based on the mind set and practice of exquisite sufficiency first offered by Buckminster Fuller and popularized by Lynne Twist. Jennifer’s fresh approach is informed by communication theories ranging from quantum physics and philosophy to neuroscience and Somatics. She loves working with social entrepreneurs, visionary thinkers, and leaders who know they must develop the capacity to shift with this quickly changing landscape.

Read more here… [sevenstonesleadership.com]

A new way to think about teams.

Read more here… [sevenstonesleadership.com]

Underlying principles
- Conversations are actions and they make possible a future that otherwise would not exist.
We coordinate action in language by making offers, promises, requests, as well as declining.
All of these moves lead to creation of that which did not exist prior to the conversa…

Underlying principles
- Conversations are actions and they make possible a future that otherwise would not exist.
We coordinate action in language by making offers, promises, requests, as well as declining.
All of these moves lead to creation of that which did not exist prior to the conversation.
- Different kinds of conversations require different moves in language and in body.
- Conversations have moods in them. Conversations evoke certain states or, you might say,
require certain states for them to be effective or optimally effective.

Read more here… [sevenstonesleadership.com]

What do we mean by context?
Context is the background, the container, the larger space surrounding, and actually in large
part, steering your life.
There are several contexts operating at once in any person’s life:

Read more here… [sevenstonesleadership.com]

A Fresh Look

What are we developing, and why? We must always keep this question at the forefront in every professional development intervention.

There are at least two lenses through which people look at such engagements:

We are either fixing something broken, such as “get that executive…

A Fresh Look

What are we developing, and why? We must always keep this question at the forefront in every professional development intervention.

There are at least two lenses through which people look at such engagements:

We are either fixing something broken, such as “get that executive, or manager, some help before we fire him/her.”
Or, we are investing in high potential leaders who we want to keep happy, well fed, and in condition to beat the competition.
Either way, with this initial inquiry, we are lead to have to confront the hidden or not so hidden assumptions driving the intervention. Many of the executives with whom we have been tasked with ‘developing’ hear unspoken messages in the background akin to: “something is wrong with you,” or “in some way you are not enough as you are.”

In our culture, many of us have grown up on a steady diet of making things better, improving performance, effectiveness and dreaming for a better way or a better life – what is commonly known as the American Dream. This endless quest for improvement is internalized and we hold the message almost as gospel, that it is good and necessary. But there is a way in which someone being developed can end up feeling less than and inadequate, without being clear why, as if there was a sleeping giant beneath all the action. This does not feel good and can even be perilous.

Inside of this paradox that there is nothing to “fix” in someone, yet professional development is required, we have created underlying assumptions within which we operate that are critical to the work of professional development as we see it.

You are enough exactly how you are right now. No improvement necessary. Your organization has enough resource, enough brains, enough passion to pull off what it wants ALREADY. You already do enough every single day. Getting more done will not improve anybody’s anything.
Growth in the service of your mission or your greatness or your organization’s success is fine if you are starting from an organizing principle of what we call in our work, ’exquisite sufficiency,’ which is the context for #1 above. (Click here for a robust discussion into exquisite sufficiency on the Seven Stones Leadership website)
Having a clear purpose for your development efforts – ‘for the sake of what’ – will serve to quell the screaming voices of scarcity that may lurk just beneath the surface.
The above operating assumptions shift the work of professional development in several significant ways. Firstly, it turns something the recipient can often feel to be intrusive at best and oppressive at worst to become work that can be owned by the person engaged in it. The work is crafted inside a context that goes far beyond pleasing the boss, enhancing the review, fighting for the job or even improving the company bottom line. These are not bad reasons in and of themselves, indeed sometimes necessary. I have found, however, that alone they will not ignite people’s passion or heart or willingness to be vulnerable, which is the only way people “develop”.

Secondly, the work is more effective and successfully integrates more deeply in the person, within the team, and inside the organization’s goals. Starting from lack tends to breed more lack, which can sometimes express as overcompensation. Either way swinging on the monkey bars of this polarity of lack and excess tends to produce a bit of behavior modification but not the lasting, deeper shifts that a person can carry with them for a lifetime. As we come up against the limits of the current scarcity model to create a world that sustains seven billion human inhabitants, we see that we have also reached the limits of a traditional model of personal development to spark and drive cutting edge leadership.

Work with the following questions to begin thinking in this new way: What shifts in our approach to professional development …

If we move from an assumption that something needs to be fixed or grown, to an assumption that we are whole and complete as we are and can always learn and develop the human spirit?
If we have reached the limits of growth as a model for economic development as well as the development of human beings?
If we stopped trying to be somewhere different than where we are because “over there” is better than over here?
If we are not trying to outsmart the competition to survive and be on top but rather cultivate nimble, agile leaders who can innovate in turbulent waters and collaborate across industries?
Here is to developing the human spirit, cultivating the human heart and igniting the passionate mind to lead us all well.

This anthology of interdisciplinary writings looks at the integration of mind, body, and spirit as it plays out in the workplace—whether in birth coaching, teaching parents, assisting the terminally ill, or working in the military, the classroom, or the corporation. These essays reveal what gets …

This anthology of interdisciplinary writings looks at the integration of mind, body, and spirit as it plays out in the workplace—whether in birth coaching, teaching parents, assisting the terminally ill, or working in the military, the classroom, or the corporation. These essays reveal what gets in the way of our humanity in the work world and how to rediscover that humanity. Written by leading professionals in business, education, medicine, technology, finance, psychology, and the military, this collection of essays explores how reconnecting with one’s humanity can result in true leadership in any field.

[amazon.com]

Get the book, Un-Stuck: Make the Shift, by Gina LaRoche, plus our self-paced course on DailyOm.com called Escape the Grips of Scarcity, a great companion experience for $15.95.

[sevenstonesleadership.com]