So why the title, ‘Lead the Change, Exercise Your Voice?’ Because when I first started thinking about a blog was when I was fired from a job over a year ago. I was fired because I questioned the leadership and the direction of a four year old start-up company. A company where I held the title senior vice-president, and so felt a fiduciary responsibility to the board of directors and those who put all the money on the table. I can’t say I was surprised by their reaction–what else where they going to do? Talk to me about it? Nuh uh. Major paycheck to be rid of here!
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s book, Tribe, and it inspired me to get going on this. I thought I’d start out easy and then move into what I really wanted to talk about. Well, two posts later, I’m there. For those of you who may not know it, Tribe is about leadership. And, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I am a leader in this particular field, a field that is being taken over by corporations because they see a buck to be made. It’s the field of massage therapy education. I’m pretty convinced that these corporations don’t really want leaders. They want yes people, people who won’t question the CEO, the CFO, the COO or any of the other C’s in the company.
I loved Godin’s blog the other day, titled, “Just doing my job”. He is so right on about that. All the people who encouraged me to speak up, and be the spokes person, turned their backs when I was fired. Oh, they talked about how terrible it was and ‘how could they do that to you?’, but all of them stayed right where they were with their heads down putting one foot in front of the other. Some are still my friends today, but there is this feeling of sadness for them, that they didn’t, and still don’t, have the courage that comes from being a part of a tribe and how tribes can make so many more changes than a single individual. I think that’s what I thought could happen. Naïve, huh? But perhaps the tribe I thought was there was an illusion.
