Sent from Nebraska.

To listen, click ▶️ on the postcard. 

Here’s the transcript of Cy’s message:

Hello. Cy Wakeman here on behalf of CultureLab Audio Postcards.

We’re in some pretty challenging and – for some –  very unsettling times.

As a leader, as a founder, the temptation is to figure out what you know and go out and have an impact, figure out how you can do what you need to do, keep driving, thriving, keep business on track. (You) just do it differently (now) – you do it virtually, from home. And all of that is good and much of is necessary.

But I want to invite you to get everything you can out of this experience, to really mine this experience for all that it has to teach us, to get what it came here for. And to do that, I need you to move out of all that you know.

As leaders, we jump into: “What do we know?,” and unfortunately our knowing keeps us from… knowing. 

I want you to spend as much time in unknowing, in pure curiosity – getting back to beginner’s mind. 

See, situations happen and we, as leaders, jump in – sometimes from ego – like we’re going to have an impact, we’re going to succeed in spite of the facts – which I love – but I also know that we need to actively allow ourselves and our teams to be impacted by the experience. Not to be traumatized – but impacted. 

So, I’m allowing my team some time to just really curate their lives from this, to ask ourselves the questions:

• What is it here to teach us? 
• What don’t we know?
• What do we need to spend time with?
• What do we need to mine these lessons for? 
• And how can we use that information (not what we know) to survive this thing?
• How can we use what we don’t know and what it teaches us to flourish in the future and to really take a look at those lessons and use them to curate a life going forward? 

Part of me believes the Universe put us in the big time-out because we needed to reflect and we needed to really get in touch with the things that we’re not knowing and we need to get to know them.

So, stay curious. Let your teams be impacted by this and carve your way forward not with what you know but with what you’re curious about and come to know with beginner’s mind.