Almost 3 months ago, a new friend reached out and nudged me into signing up for Acumen’s online course based on Jacqueline Novogratz’s book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution.
I’m so glad she did.
The book itself is inspiring and full of lived wisdom from Jacqueline’s decades of pioneering and then spreading the model of patient capital to solve poverty.
Working through the book with individual exercises and sharing those reflections week after week with a small but diverse team of extraordinary women, though, somehow fulfilled – and concretised – a need that I hadn’t until then fully realised that I had. And it reminded me of how grateful I am to Seth Godin for his Akimbo model of building thoughtful, generous communities of practice, for sharing the model with others (including Acumen), and for teaching and nudging us to step up and build our own.
The final exercise in the course was to write our own manifesto.
After sharing our versions in the safe and trusted space of our team, one of us asked if we were planning to put our manifestos up somewhere. To inspire and motivate us in the beautiful struggle of the moral revolution that each of us is drawn towards, yes, and also simply to remind ourselves of how much we grew throughout the course, knowing full well that growth up close rarely looks linear, nor one-way.
So here’s mine. It’s a statement of intention of my future self. But I find it helpful to think of it less as an end-state to be achieved, and rather as a daily practice, a way of being. It’s a commitment to myself: to practise being this way consistently, acting my way into the person I want to become.
It starts with consistently growing into a better version of myself and using that to make the world a better place for all, present and future.
That better version is always asking: what is the right meta-stable state – for me, for the situation, for the system – to be in, in this moment, on this spectrum? It advances confidently towards its Southern Cross and deliberately crafts a space for as-yet-unheard voices to offer different points of view.
It is a version that makes others feel seen and that they matter, simply because they are. It awakens possibilities, inviting them to develop into a better version of themselves. If they accept, it accompanies them: boarding their bus, trusting in their wisdom, letting go of the outcome, dancing lightly and staying curious.
It steps boldly into the role of cheville ouvrière, facilitator, or mediator;
it takes on the responsibility of moving complex, uncertain and ambiguous situations towards outcomes that it believes in;
it leads with love, integrity, hope and fierce intellect;
because it sees that that is what is needed, and because it can.
Who are you practising becoming?