Being Complexly Whole

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts! At age 47, I am finally whole, bringing together all the different parts of me that have each had their own designated corner to live in for so long.

Do you ever feel like you are wearing so many hats in life that you have become different people at different times? I have! Life can become very siloed as we try to navigate and make sense of our complex world. I believe this to be particularly true for working moms. There have been different Me’s for different situations. I am a wife, mother, friend, sister, motherless daughter, CEO, volunteer, community leader, an intuitive healer, a nature lover, a creative, travel lover, an introvert, an empath, a personal development junkie, and so much more. Each of these roles requires a different set of skills, priorities, and likes/dislikes. Over the last 20 years I have kept my work Me’s and my personal Me’s separate because I didn’t know how to reconcile them all into the whole Me. No more! I don’t have the mental or physical energy to be more than one person anymore. It’s exhausting and so inefficient! Most importantly, I believe we are meant to be all of ourselves, a whole being as complicated or as simple as the universe created us.

What does this have to do with strategic consulting?!? For me, EVERYTHING! Before I even knew what strategic foresight was or understood its relationship to mindset and neuroscience, I developed a Joy Forward Strategy both literally and figuratively. The siloed life I was living had choked the joy right out of me and kept me stuck in the past unable to move forward. Recognizing this (after way too long), I decided I had to find my joy again to be able to move forward in my own life and purpose. I started listening to my intuition, getting creative, and finding the commonalities of those Me’s I had tried to be at different times. That intuition had me create a green and magenta pair of shoes with the words “joy” and “forward” stitched on them. (See my previous blog post about the shoes.) That was the start of my personal strategy to focus on moving forward into the future with more joy.

Strategy was a big commonality for all those Me’s because that is how my brain naturally works. I had done strategic planning numerous times in both work and volunteer roles loving every minute of laying out plans to create a desired future. Joy Forward Strategy became not just my personal vision and philosophy, but the name of my business because helping people imagine a vision for the future and strategize how to make it reality brings me joy.

Embracing the personal development junkie part of myself, I knew there had to be a better way than regular strategic planning or SWOT analysis to create collaborative visions and agile strategies. I always want to continuously improve things big and small! My intuition led me to strategic foresight. The more I learned and trained the more my own brain and the world made sense!

Strategic foresight, when well-practiced, embraces complexity and demands silos be broken down. Silos may have worked in the world 75-100 years ago, but they just don’t anymore. We live in a complex world that is interconnected in more ways than we can count. Personal and professional decisions have impacts and consequences that ripple out before we can blink. To thrive in such a world, we need all of ourselves to show up healthy, whole, and complete each day.

Strategic foresight is not just a discipline. It can also be a personal development practice. It certainly has been that for me. In addition to breaking down my own silos of all the different versions of myself I had created over time, foresight has given me hope in the endless possibilities for the future even during 2020 when there didn’t seem to be much hope to go around. When there is hope for the future, it becomes easier to create and work towards goals. In that place of hope and possibility, foresight allowed me to be more mindful in the present so I can make the better more thoughtful decisions to pull myself resiliently towards my desired future.

Thus, Mindful Foresight was born out of my own personal foresight journey. I’m ready to use my whole self, including all my collective skills and resources, to help others with their own foresight journey.  

My mindful foresight journey looks like the icon in my Joy Forward Strategy logo bringing all my different directions and subtle shades of various colors together in one whole with room to continue to grow. What will yours look like?

Mindful Foresight allows continuous learning through awareness and curiosity to empower better decision making in the present, thus creating the future.