Back to my nature
It was in late 2012 that I first began a deeper journey of being nurtured by and in nature.
I found myself in a small village just outside of Cape Town, South Africa. I had some close friends based there who had invited me to support them in getting a local NGO organized for sustainable success — but in reality, they were inviting me to escape the hustle and bustle to reimagine life.
Because at that time, I was deeply burnt out. It was incredibly difficult to see a path forward in my career. By most objective metrics, I was displaying success — I had started or been involved in multiple successful projects and was well-admired by my colleagues and community. But why was I so miserable?
Desperate for a change, I left my legal career and moved across the globe. It was then that I began really processing and discovering how this intense burnout came to swallow me up. Thankfully, learning how and why burnout came to be was connected to an equally powerful solution. This solution continues to be a gift to me as I move through life — and one that I am determined to continue sharing with others.
This is a snapshot of the journey that led me back to myself, back to my nature.
In that great South African adventure, I was given the gift of learning about my CliftonStrengths. The more I had time to process and reflect on my strengths, the more the recent past started making sense…
Some of my strengths were still present in meaningful ways, which brought some empowerment and hope.
Some of my strengths had been exploited, which brought frustration and anger.
Some of my strengths were dormant, which brought sorrow and sadness.
It took some time to understand that my environmental conditions, which expanded beyond my workplace, were not conducive to my nature.
In fact, I had lived a lot of life in environmental conditions that were not conducive to my nature. Another way of saying that I had been through many challenging experiences — in the workplace and beyond — that over time led to a disconnection from my nature. Eventually, this disconnection led to distrust in most things and people, including no longer trusting myself. This realization prompted important action to seek therapy. Often, I share with my clients that learning of your strengths is “fuel for therapy” — most people can identify how their strengths showed up in childhood, and we all have memories and experiences of various levels of friction against them. I believe this is part of how they are birthed, and healing them is part of how they are liberated into the future.
My nature, my unique way of being in and seeing the world, was something that I now felt I could take responsibility for. Being more clear about my strengths gave me insight into changes that I needed to make in life to embrace them more fully. That year, I doubled-down on my strength in organizing people and resources for impact — I dove more fully into the work I was doing in South Africa, co-led my first team-building event, and decided to pursue an MBA upon my return to the United States. Highly motivated to learn, I took a unique position that would include various responsibilities for a collection of family-owned businesses — bringing CliftonStrengths into every project. This position brought invaluable learning experiences into the art and science of leadership. During this time, I was quite physically free to travel, and continued volunteerism abroad — including my birth country of Greece, in addition to England and Albania. With vigilance, I studied what made these various projects succeed or fail — all the while knowing myself, my strengths, and what they needed to thrive with greater clarity.
Of course, even with this new and refined clarity, there is still so much to learn. Every time our strengths meet resistance is an opportunity for them to evolve and refine their movement through life... and these opportunities will be endless as there is no predicting environmental conditions called life. Eventually, I completed graduate school and launched a startup, which took me right into 2020 — the year few of us saw coming. The intensity of a global pandemic, racial injustice, and social division were more unwelcome opportunities for refinement. It was that summer that I knew it was time for me to share this work with the world.
This journey began and continues with connecting to the flow of life within myself.
The natural wisdom that I am honored to share and connect to the human experience brings the opportunity to liberate the human spirit in powerful, world-changing ways — bringing power to the flow of life within individuals, teams, and organizations.
Canon Collaborative had been emerging since 2012 and officially debuted in September 2020. This approach to individual and collective empowerment is inspired by the way the natural world survives and thrives, which is by finding and expanding access to flow. As humans, we are a part of nature — and we have so much wisdom to absorb from its intelligence. By seeking greater and greater alignment of our natural strength within their surroundings, we get to be a witness to their unique and natural flourishing.
At Canon, we #powertheflowoflife by supporting individuals and organizations in seeing their natural strength more clearly and wholly — and by designing environments to facilitate this natural flow of human strength.
Reach out to learn more.
