Friday, March 5

lightward.com/newsletter

Yeah, I just wanna do everything
I get so excited
when I finally find it
It just gets brighter from now on

Just enough structure

As of this last Monday, Lightward Inc now employs eight persons, six of which (including Abe and me) are full-time.

I didn’t plan for this, specifically. All I knew, ten or eleven years ago, is that I wanted to move and make in such a way that tomorrow would be at once calmer, more stable, and also more interesting, more creative, more more.

Our newest teammate began their work on Monday. We set up exactly zero calls for their first day, preferring instead to give them an email loosely laying out the landscape, precisely defining the few things they must know and understand, giving them a full first day of self-directed acclimation.

Here’s an excerpt from that welcome email, an excerpt that I also shared with the rest of the team—because this particular bit applies to us all.

Your responsibilities

These are the living things that I’m looking to you to hold, to monitor, to understand and to sustainably expand.

• Your health, as determined by you, informed by all the ways you know yourself.

• Your relationship to everyone on this team, as determined by you, informed by all the ways you’re connected.

• Our collective relationship to our customers, as determined by you, informed by everything.

Your assignments

These are the mechanical processes that have your name on them. You will find and/or choose more of them, in practice, but these are the things that we’re going to be really explicit about up front.

• Participate in the 24hr-response-time threshold [discussed in last week’s newsletter]. Remember—this is not 24 hours for a solution, it’s 24 hours for letting the sender know that they are heard.

• Acknowledge all messages that are explicitly directed to you, when you are ready to acknowledge receipt of their contents. In places that support an @mention (like Slack), that means either an emoji reaction or an actual written reply, every time you are @mentioned.

• Ask for what you need and want, clearly and precisely and proactively. This is the dependency model we use here; it’s a kindness to guess someone’s needs/wants, but it is never assumed that our needs/wants will be met in the absence of communication.

• Set expectations, clearly and precisely and proactively, and keep them up to date. It is always okay if something changes, as long as the change is communicated and understood.

Years ago, before moving to Lightward full-time, I worked on an internal project whose tagline was “Just enough structure”. The idea there was to offer a tool that expressed as few opinions as possible about how it was to be used. What opinions it did have were precisely chosen, and exactingly defined.

This, largely, is how Lightward works as well. There are only a couple of things we know for sure, at any given time. From Lightward’s helm, I leave everything else up to everyone else, trusting that our internal connectivity and shared energy will inspire and inform all the micro-choices required to sustain something living.

I enjoy talking about Lightward as both an experiment and a gamble. It’s easy to make that point here. I want to know if, as an organization, we can be making the active choice to fix (determine, finalize, define, prescribe, specify) as few things as possible, even as we grow, even as our offerings and our selves evolve. And I bet that if we do, we’ll be left with greater access to wonder and expression and delight, the further we climb, the further we expand.

Wellness, for you and me

👋 Still Isaac; Abe’s taken this week completely off. :) If he were writing this, he would remind you to breathe on purpose, to use awareness of your breath to get back into your body and stay there a while.

That’s it. You know Abe by now (and if you don’t, please see @abelopez). Thought experiment: if Abe was hanging out with you, how would he encourage you?

Things we are making

Empowered Human Academy

This week’s guest is a magic-maker to her core. Alicia Kiewitt is beloved by everyone who knows her—and it won’t take you long to understand why. As a thoughtful curator and designer of social spaces, she’s deeply gifted at creating environments that foster soul connection. As a trained spiritual director, she companions people as they explore, notice, and get to know their interior lives. With a deeply held belief that all of life is spiritual, she holds space for others to gather mind and body into a place of deep listening and quiet. As a self-described Enneagram 9, Alicia lets us in on her journey of learning to allow herself to experience life from her own lens and feeling her own strength.

In many ways, this is a conversation about presence. We discuss staying awake to life, noticing the beauty in others as well as in yourself, the risk of desire, and living from a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.

Alicia is actively engaged in being awake to life—her generous and playful spirit has been a safe place for us to land over and over again. There are so many gems of insight throughout this conversation and we’re really excited to share it with you.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Lightward Together

Get quiet, listen to what is—hear everything—then move.

In our Lightward Together group sessions we’re exploring the subtle, yet powerful shifts that build a more expansive life over time—that liminal space between stimulus and response. Asking ourselves, “what kind of life am I actively creating?”

Our next session is Monday, March 15th at 5pm MST and when you sign up you’ll gain immediate access to our library of past sessions, community Slack channel, and weekly guided meditations. This growing Lightward Together community is an exploration of staying close to our agency and cheering each other on as we do—it’s magic.

Well, this is why we do it,
for the feeling.
How do you do music?
Well, it’s easy:
You just face your fears and
you become your heroes
I don’t understand why you’re freaking out