When the Form Finally Reveals Itself

For forty years, I have witnessed The Heart of Leadership transform people. I have watched people see themselves differently, listen to one another differently, repair relationships, take stands they had been avoiding, and return to their work with a new understanding of who they are as leaders and human beings.

And over those same years, one question has kept arising: How do we create a culture where everyone has the opportunity to grow?

Sometimes the question has been asked this way: “How are we EVER going to get everyone in our company through The Heart of Leadership?” Or, “How can we make this available to people who simply can’t step away from their work for five days?”

And once, a client asked me very directly, “Can you do The Heart of Leadership in two days?”

I knew my answer immediately. “I can do something in two days. But it won’t be The Heart of Leadership.”

There are some things we cannot accomplish simply by making them shorter. Transformation takes what transformation takes. And yet, the question underneath his question stayed with me, because my client was right, too. We can’t take everyone out of a hospital, a grocery store, a school, a business, or an organization for five days.

So how do we make the heart of this work more widely available?

For years, I didn’t have a response.

When I began writing The Heart of Sacred Listening, I wasn’t trying to solve that problem. I was writing the book I knew I was called to write. And when I began creating an online course alongside it, I wasn’t trying to turn The Heart of Leadership into something smaller.

In fact, that was important to me. This course is not The Heart of Leadership. It does not replace it. It grows from the same roots that have nourished The Heart of Leadership for more than forty years, but it has become something of its own.

And somewhere along the way, I realized: This is one response to the question I have been carrying all these years.

For almost a year, alongside writing and publishing The Heart of Sacred Listening, I have been creating, recording, refining, and building a self-paced online experience called The Art and Practice of Sacred Listening.

It offers another doorway into the work—an auditory and visual one as well as the written word. A way for an individual to enter. A way for a family or partnership to begin a different kind of conversation. A way for a team to practice listening differently. A way for an organization to begin developing, more broadly, the capacities that make trust, partnership, leadership, and a culture of growth possible.

And perhaps most importantly, it allows people to enter the work where they are, in the midst of the lives they are already living. They don’t have to leave the hospital for five days. Or the grocery store. Or the construction site. Or the company.

They can begin where they are.

And now, the door is opening.

Beginning today, I’d like to invite you to explore The Art and Practice of Sacred Listening.

I won’t begin sharing it broadly with the world until the public launch on September 9, but I wanted you—my Substack readers—to be among the first to know that it is here.

I’ve created a place where you can explore the course, hear more about what it offers, and see whether it speaks to you.

https://online.galeleadership.com/

I am enormously happy about it—not simply because I have created a new course, but because a question that has followed me for years has finally found a response I trust.

There will always be experiences that cannot be compressed or replicated. The Heart of Leadership is one of them. But there can be more than one doorway into transformation.

And perhaps that is part of what I have been discovering myself. Sometimes, when we cannot solve a problem in the form in which it first appears, the invitation is not to try harder to force an answer. Sometimes we need to keep listening—deeply enough, and long enough—to ourselves, to the world, and to opportunities that somehow present themselves, until the appropriate form arrives and reveals itself.

Interestingly enough, I have been living with another question lately. As I enter the world of marketing and publicity for the Sacred Listening work, I have found myself asking: How am I going to do this? I was preparing myself for what I imagined might be a steep and rather rough climb.

And then, more or less out of the blue, another form appeared.

My friend Leslie McGuirk, an astrologer who has been a guest on Coast to Coast AM a number of times, recommended me to the show’s producer, Tom Danheiser. He called me.

And tomorrow night, I will be George Noory’s guest on the program.

I could not possibly have imagined that form when I first asked the question.

Case in point.

And I wonder whether you have been living with a question—perhaps an immensely important one—for which the form of a response has not yet appeared.

Perhaps it isn’t asking you to try harder to find the answer.

Perhaps it is asking you to listen.

To yourself. To the world. To what presents itself.

And perhaps, in time, a form will reveal itself that you could not have imagined at the beginning.

A response you trust.

Tomorrow Night: Coast to Coast AM

Find the Coast to Coast AM station in your area

Tomorrow night—Thursday, August 20, at 10:00 p.m. Pacific—I’ll be a guest on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory.

Don and I have listened to Coast to Coast for years, so I find it rather wonderful to be joining the conversation from the other side of the microphone!

We’ll be talking about The Heart of Sacred Listening, The Art and Practice of Sacred Listening, and what becomes possible when we truly listen.

If you’re awake, I’d love to have you listen in.