My good friend and meditation teacher, Dina Kaplan, smiled across from me as she sat cross-legged in her chair in the small circle of Type As gathered to connect and meditate with each other. The sun was setting and I could feel the warmth of it on my forehead. Without hesitation, I answered: “My happy place: running with Eric along the Marina Green with views of the Golden Gate Bridge”. Nature, exercise, and connecting with my partner have always been a joyous “threefer” for me.
Yet, as I sat there and reflected on a very intense past week, I realized how many other moments brought me joy. They weren’t outside, there weren’t any beautiful views involved, and Eric was in Dubai. The joyous moments I experienced were in a hotel in Dallas, Texas with our top 200 leaders at Udemy. We launched our inaugural Leadership Summit with leaders from around the world—Türkiye, Australia, Ireland, India, Mexico, and North America. Joy is not the first word I think of when describing last week. Words like, “intense”, “stressful”, and even “gritty” are better descriptions. We had put this summit together in less than 3 months. There were a lot of decision makers and the design had to integrate leading people and leading the business with plenty of connection time and fun thrown in between. We were still evolving and iterating on the design a week before the summit. I wrote and re-wrote scripts throughout the week, updated the evolving schedule, designed slides, facilitated tough conversations, and did a last-minute moderation for our executive panel.
My dad used to say, “You can’t stop the wind, but you can learn to adjust the sails”. I was adjusting the sails constantly, weirdly energized by the joyous moments I experienced. I have come to realize throughout my career that I can choose how I respond to what is going on around me. I can also choose my focus. It would have been easy to focus on all the things that were not working—and I did. I am human. But I also consciously chose to take in and even actively seek out the joyous moments. Those are what fuel me and remind me why I do what I do. Here were some of the joyous moments I had this past week:
A team hug and spontaneous meet-up at the hotel bar
The random hugs in the hallway from colleagues thanking me for an incredible experience
Line dancing with our General Counsel and our Chief Product Officer
The laughter that came after a few vulnerable and personal jokes were made onstage
Watching my friend and mentor do her thing on stage
The connection I felt after hearing the raw and vulnerable stories of our leaders
Partnering and strategizing on what the next few hours were going to be with Matt, our VP of Strategy
The trust being built through three powerful words shared by many leaders, “Tell me more”.
Getting slacks on Friday morning from leaders saying, “I genuinely feel valued and cherished as a person at this company to have you invest in that summit for us”; “That was the best learning experience I have had in my career”.
A bus ride home with Justin to do a “rodeo debrief”
David Whyte, one of my favorite poets and someone I reference throughout my book, ReCulturing, shares this about joy:
”To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self…” ~David Whyte
How do you find those joyous moments? You actively listen and look for them—they are everywhere—especially in the most challenging moments when the wind is strong. You have to be open to them, and as David Whyte says, allow yourself to be joyful.