This past week was not a typical mellow last-days-of-summer kind of week. It was a work of art and love.
I am going to choose to go in chronological order at the risk of tsks from you and my now husband (oh, that word!).
First, my brilliant collaborator and renowned executive coach Kaley Klemp and I launched our new book, Leader Coach: Scaling Conscious Leadership at Work. It is so much fun to have this beautiful book in my hands at last!
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Leader Coach provides a pragmatic blueprint for leaders who aspire to manage with a coaching mindset. It combines actionable exercises and practical tools with profound insights into human dynamics. Reading this book is a coaching endeavor for you – the reader. Through it, you will improve your ability to immediately focus on the coaching context, alongside your more typical leadership structures and relationships. In a nutshell: the goal of this book is to empower leaders to be coaches without leaving their day jobs.
We wrote this book as an encapsulation of our live program, Coaching Certification for Leader Coaches. The 2025 program kicks off in January, and if it’s a fit for you or someone you know, apply now.
You can find the print, ebook, and audiobook (read by me) at Amazon today. We have promo codes for Audible. Say the word if you want one. We hope you like it!
On the heels of that, my man Eliot and I got married with the support and magical energy of all our favorite humans. It was not the first “I do” or “hell yes” (Eliot’s answer) for either of us, but this second rodeo was designed by us for us. It was so casual that our friends kept asking us questions along the lines of “Is the dress code really that casual?” Our friend Dan set the bar beautifully with an 80s Rush concert tee with some well-earned stains.
As we assembled on the deck of Acreage by Stem Cider and started the “ceremony,” 40 mph gusts came through. Our wonderful officiant and dear friend, Leah Pearlman, framed our story around the notion of adventure, and this weather was the perfect match for that theme.
My favorite part of our ceremony was Leah’s bespoke interpretation of the meaning of our wedding rings. Here’s what she said:
Sue said I could say something here about rings and what they mean. Here are a few meanings I’d like to offer you two in particular. You can choose:
1. This ring means you get to each live where you want to live, go where you want to go, but you are always taking the other person with you.
2. This ring means when you’ve circled the same topic a hundred times, you’ll circle it again, if that’s what it takes.
3. This ring means you’ll stay in the ring, even when things get hard.
4. Relatedly, this ring means when you feel like you’re in the ring with each other, you’ll eventually remember that you’re actually in each other’s corner.
How beautiful is that? And how real.
If you know me personally or through this blog, you know that choosing a true life partner has been an elusive pursuit. I have experienced so much love, but I haven’t felt a “yes” to anything like a long-term commitment for 25 years. Ours is a Princess Bride kind of love, but sometimes the ride is more like this than like any part of a more traditional fairy tale. We usually do get to some co-created version of “as you wish,” but it’s not always a straight, smooth journey.
At the heart of our union is a commitment to adventure, yes, and that sometimes comes in the form of spontaneous travel, a shared spirit of “yes,” living in two different states with relative ease, and a rolling-down-a-bumpy-hill kind of give-and-take in service of personal growth and shared learning with and from each other.
All that high-falutin language had nothing to do with the actual celebration of this decision, however. For me and our dear ones, it was, as promised, “a party during which a wedding might happen.” We danced for four straight hours on a balmy Colorado evening. The wind eventually abated. The flow of love running through my body still has not.
Rah!
Any thoughts, feelings, or blurts? Or what song gets you on the dance floor? Share all of it here.
