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.

We four are new friends–just met for the first time at dinner earlier in the week.  Of the four, three of us have had breast cancer and we range in age from 42 to 65.  The youngest of us is still healing from the surgery.  The cancer in common did not bring us together.  A friend in another state connected two of us and after months of trying we finally had a dinner date, which included our respective partners.  That’s where the cancer connection was made.

On a hike this morning we talked about getting older, our bodies changing in ways we don’t like, how long it takes to heal from a bicycle accident, getting past cancer, and the death of a friend a few months ago (from cancer).  We also talked about what we’re doing differently in our lives–making more time for those we love, taking up bird watching, going back to school, finding a new or deeper purpose, becoming urban chicken farmers, and being perfectly content to walk instead of run a marathon.

I’m gratified at the connections we were able to make, not having known each other at all a week ago.   Sometimes it’s scary for active people to get older (maybe for couch potatoes too), but most times life does seem easier these days.

I find myself wishing I was at least 10 years younger–a waste of time of course, but it’s hard not to go there.  I’ve developed a new passion, or maybe it’s just a deeper passion, about some things that I want to know everything about.

I did not grow up with a computer. In fact, I thought the electric typewriter was an extraordinary invention!  But I love the internet, my new Macintosh computer, and all the blogs I put on my iGoogle homepage.  And I have always loved education.  Now it’s distance education and how information, knowledge and learning can take place anytime, anywhere–or, all the time and everywhere.  My background is in adult learning and vocational education, but until recently my experience and knowledge have been classroom based.

This fall I started a master’s program at a small liberal arts college in Arizona where the student designs the course of study and then becomes a self-directed learner of the information she wants to know about (there is assistance and guidance of course).  The study is in business with a focus on e-learning.  I’m just finishing my first semester and decided it was time to blog about being a student again, in my sixth decade.  Most of the time I think it’s really a great age to be in school again (which in my case means in front of my computer).  No grade pressures–we don’t get grades, no sense of competition–except with myself, and nothing to prove to anyone else.  And right now, it beats trying to get a job.