Plenty For Everyone

In the latest episode of Plenty for Everyone, we dive deep into the transformative world of trauma-informed leadership with guest Carolyn Swora.  Carolyn is a mom of two, scholar, author, podcaster, and former corporate leader renowned for her impactful work on trauma-informed care. This engaging discussion sheds light on Carolyn’s journey from trauma to leadership insights and explores how integrating mindfulness and compassion into leadership can significantly impact workplace culture. 

Tune into this episode as we explore: 

What is Trauma-Informed Leadership? Trauma-informed leadership is an approach that recognizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery. It emphasizes seeing the whole person in a leadership context, acknowledging that past traumas can influence current behaviors and interactions of people and how they interact with others. Through her profound personal and professional experiences, Carolyn illustrates how leaders can adopt an approach to foster a more supportive and understanding workplace environment by being mindful of the trauma employees might carry. In doing so, leaders can create a culture of safety, trust, and mutual respect.

Carolyn's Journey: From Personal Trauma to Leadership Insights: Carolyn's story is heart-wrenching and inspiring. After losing her husband to cancer while pregnant, she embarked on a journey of self-discovery and healing. This personal tragedy led her to explore the depths of trauma and its impact on the human psyche. She offers some great tools for leading others with empathy and understanding.

Integrating Mindfulness and Compassion into Leadership: The conversation gets deep quickly when we discuss the tension between striving for excellence and practicing self-acceptance. Carolyn shares how she advocates for integrating physiological and psychological safety in the workplace, and we explore how listening to one's body can enhance decision-making, communication, and overall performance.

Shaping Workplace Culture through Trauma-Informed Practices: We discuss how trauma-informed practices can shape and improve workplace culture. Specifically, Carolyn points out the need for leaders to be aware of their employee's varying nervous system states and how they can do so. 

As always, thanks for subscribing, reviewing, and sharing the podcast.

Well, it's been a minute, but our podcast is back! Welcome to episode 51 of our Plenty for Everyone podcast.

 

In this episode, try to catch you up on our everything that's happened since episode 50 this past fall. It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating our 10th anniversary – to say that our time since then has been full is a huge understatement.

 

One of our most important personal and professional accomplishments has been publishing our new book, Leading with Light: Choosing Conscious Leadership When You're Ready For More, in March 2024. What a whirlwind journey! It's been both gratifying and surreal to hear from so many readers about the book and see its message spread. As of this posting, we've sold copies of the book in nine different countries, a reach we never dared dream about. We've been blown away by the texts, posts, and messages from people sharing photos of themselves reading the book. So cool! 

 

With the book launch came the chance to be on a number of other podcasts, so while we haven't released a new episode of Plenty for Everyone in a while, we've been on a dozen other podcasts. We spend a bit of time detailing the interviews we've done and what it has been like to be on a podcast book tour.

 

And finally, a few weeks ago, we held a book launch event in Marshall, Michigan, organized by our friend and client, Derek Allen of Starr Commonwealth. Thanks to Derek's wonderful efforts, the event brought together a passionate community of nearly fifty conscious leaders eager to engage with the book's message and one another. We were touched by this wonderful community and the chance to watch peer-to-peer learning and connection in person.

 

There's a whole lot more in the episode, too, as we preview what's next for us in 2025, including the debut of Lighthouse, our new virtual group coaching program. We hope you still have Plenty for Everyone in your podcast feed, and we're glad to be back!

It's hard for us to believe, yet amazing for us to celebrate: Today, Plenty is ten years old! Yahoo!

All month long, we're going to be sharing our gratitude, our lessons learned, and our dreams for what comes next. We're thrilled to start that with today's episode of the Plenty for Everyone podcast – which also happens to mark another great milestone, episode 50.  

Plenty was founded on Thanksgiving of 2013, an auspicious day for a company built on the idea of helping people see the abundance all around them and within them. Since then, we've had the privilege of working with incredible individuals and businesses, helping them grow consciously and holistically. During that time, our work has morphed, changed, contracted, and expanded, often in surprising and always in fulfilling ways.

The journey hasn't always been easy, but we wouldn't change what we've created, who we've worked with, and what we've learned. Now, as we celebrate our tenth birthday on Giving Tuesday 2023 – another auspicious day and another wonderful synchronicity – we invite you to come along with us as we meander, talk, and reminisce about the ten lessons that have shaped us and how we serve.

In this week's episode of Plenty for Everyone, we have another deep conversation - shocker, we know! Yeah – it's totally out of character for us to share a deep discussion of awareness, insight, and the nature of thought, but it's true. 😉

Just kidding! It's the kind of juicy conversation we love! This week's discussion is inspired by our September session of Lantern II, our annual reunion for graduates of Lantern. We had a magical week with these humans and conscious leaders who have now become good friends of ours (and each other). It's a treasured gift to know these people and be trusted to hold space for their growth year after year.

During this episode, we share an anecdote that catalyzes our conversation: one of our attendees remarked that she felt she had lost her intuition. How, she asked us, could she find her way back to the gift she had when she was a child?

We use her comment as the launching pad for an exploration of whether any of us can really "lose" our gifts or innate qualities. Can our wellbeing vanish? Can our intuition abandon us? Can we drop our inner wisdom like we might drop a coin out of our pocket?

Or is it more likely that the things we think we lost are simply waiting for us, perhaps behind our thinking or everyday chatter and stress?

It's a conscious conversation about transformation and change, and the opportunity to reclaim who we really are and who we've always been.  

It's true – we love deep conversations like this, and we love people like you who listen! We hope this week's episode will help you try taking your hands off the wheel and allowing the journey to unfold naturally. You deserve that and more! 

Thanks for listening, and as always, thanks for subscribing, reviewing, and sharing the podcast.

Have you ever felt happy and sad at the same time?  Have you ever felt fullness combined with a sense of loss?

Inspired by the recent departure of our kids to college, in this week's episode, we discuss the incredible capacity we have to feel a full spectrum of emotions at once. 

When we feel sad or lonely or anxious, it's tempting to try to talk ourselves out of those feelings or replace them with something more positive. But what if sadness, loneliness, and anxiousness are, in their own way, positive? We're made to feel feelings for a reason.  Feelings come and go, but we often limit ourselves to thinking that some emotions are better than others or that we need to feel this or that. 

As powerful as they are, we are not our feelings. Our feelings give us the experience of being alive. We're designed to feel a full range of emotions (energy in motion) daily. Can you imagine how bland your life would be if you could only laugh and not cry? Or cry and not laugh?  

In this episode of Plenty For Everyone: The Podcast For Conscious Leaders, we explore this idea as we undergo the transition of one phase to another. Some highlights include:

• Exploring the ability to feel contradictory emotions simultaneously – and how to find your own sense of emotional balance.

• The difference between conscious leadership and positive psychology in handling emotions – and how conscious leadership can usher you to a new sense of being.

•Embracing positive and negative emotions as an essential practice of the human growth school – and how to let go of the need to control our emotional state.

It's another juicy conversation! And a timely one for us – and we hope you as well.

As back-to-school approaches and summer comes to a close, we're reflecting on how many things in our lives are shifting in mysterious ways. Kids are growing, schedules are changing, and roles are shifting. We find ourselves once again in the territory of uncertainty – unable to clearly see what is about to emerge.

Living in uncertainty can seem very unsettling, but it doesn’t have to be. What if we could trust that whatever is to come will be exactly what we need when we need it most? What if uncertainty was a blank canvas waiting to be painted upon?

In this week's episode of our podcast, Plenty For Everyone, we dive into the art of navigating uncertainty, how to tap into innate intuition, and how to embrace the unknown with patience and openness.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from our conversation:

• Uncertainty is an opportunity for growth and transformation.  While grappling with uncertainty can be challenging, it is also an opportunity for us to evolve into our most actualized selves. By learning to be comfortable with uncertainty, we can tap into the creative expression that wants to come out while we unlock new opportunities to be more of ourselves.

• How to create open space to sit with uncertainty. Just as you wouldn't shake your fist in a murky pond to see the bottom more clearly, it's essential to allow space for uncertainty to settle. This can involve meditation, spending time in nature, or setting aside time for quiet contemplation.

• Break free from biases. Our perception of uncertainty is often shaped by unconscious biases. For example, many people assume uncertainty is always unfavorable. By breaking free from these self-induced biases, we can open ourselves to a world of opportunities and innovation.

• Recognize the moment of your own knowing. Intuition is the most powerful tool to guide us through uncertain times. By recognizing the cues our bodies send us – a surge of energy or a sense of calm – we can be guided along our paths and more confidently choose what experiences, relationships, and opportunities align with our true selves.

• Cultivating the practice of patience, stillness, and openness can help us navigate uncertainty with confidence. By embracing the unknown, we manifest our most extraordinary lives.

Listen to the latest episode and leave inspired to navigate uncertainty in the most empowering way!

Self-care is trendy. It's hard to open your social feed, check your phone, look at your watch, or turn on the television without hearing dozens of messages about the importance of self-care. We're bombarded with it!

But most of the self-care "solutions" feel more like stress hacks than true paths to mindful living. It's great to log your meditation minutes and fantastic that your watch can remind you to breathe, but there's a risk that those kinds of tools actually just become one more thing to do. Self-care isn't a quick fix or a slang shortcut. 

In today's episode, we're fresh from coming off of an extended, restful summer break. Summer vacation has always been a special time to rest, play, and soak up the sun with those we love – a time to get the space, replenishment, and healing we need. But this year, we also used summer break as a mirror to see how busy our non-vacation lives can be. 

It all seemed like the perfect time to contemplate what self-care looks like and why it seems so damn hard to prioritize sometimes. The episode is a fun journey into what works, what doesn't, and how we can each take steps to create space and calm each and every day. 

Among the topics we consider: 

Why self-care is more than a hot bath, a quick trip to the yoga studio, or a nice glass of wine – although we love all three of those things!

Why bringing your goals to life is the ultimate self-care.

Why asking yourself, "Does this serve me?" is actually the path to productivity, not a sign of selfishness – and how in the urge to be selfless rather than selfish, you can undermine yourself. 

How practicing "not doing" is as important as practicing "doing."

And finally, how the simple question "What is getting in the way of my self-care?" can be the key to unlocking the awareness you need to truly replenish yourself. 

This episode is for you if you've ever found peace, calm, and happiness on your summer vacation, only to lament it all vaporizing away the minute you go back to work! 

 

We hope you listen and share – and we hope you choose to put yourself first this week.

On today's episode of Plenty For Everyone, we dive further into the topic of alignment for conscious leaders. Earlier this week, we wrote about alignment and why it matters in creating conscious culture. In this episode, we go deeper to share our personal experiences with creating alignment and the challenges we've encountered when striving to align ourselves with our values and the essence of our businesses.

One of the main themes you'll hear is the idea that maintaining alignment is a continuous practice. Like everything on the journey of conscious leadership, alignment requires ongoing intention and self-reflection. It would be great if alignment were a permanent state of being that, once achieved, never lapsed. But alas, we aren't wired to work that way! Part of the joy of work and life is that we get to continue to define who and how we want to be. That isn't always easy – but the rewards can be tremendous.

Despite its importance, alignment is often neglected in today's business world. We like to think of it as a river. When we are in sync, flowing with the current, alignment comes naturally. But when we get out of the flow, whether through an ill-advised decision or something unexpected that knocks us off, we might need to make a conscious effort to realign ourselves.

As we've written before, for leaders of organizations, creating safe spaces where team members can express their authentic thoughts and ideas is crucial. True alignment is not synonymous with agreement but rather with finding common ground and committing to a higher purpose.

In the same way, it's important to note that alignment isn't the same as compromise. In a compromise, everyone feels like they have sacrificed something. Instead, true alignment often results in everyone feeling that they have created something greater than the sum of the parts. 

Alignment conversations can be challenging, especially if open and honest discussion hasn't been a regular practice in an organization. Active listening, open sharing, and collaborative co-creation are essential. Vulnerability plays a key role, too – and as leaders, modeling a safe and supportive environment is the first step towards creating one. Incorporating activities that encourage presence – like taking breaks from technology and going for walks during team meetings – can encourage contemplation, provide perspective, and foster the trust you need to align around what matters.

We hope you'll tune in to take part in this lively exchange about the transformative power of alignment in leadership and its positive impact on individuals, teams, and organizations.

All month long, we're preparing for the upcoming summer solstice. On today's episode of Plenty For Everyone, we explore the significance of the solstice and how it can serve as a catalyst for reflection, growth, and most of all, alignment in your life and your leadership.

For thousands of years, civilizations have celebrated the solstice. Many of the most impressive ancient structures were built to align – literally, to line up – with the position of the sun on this day. For our ancestors, the solstice was a time to celebrate hard work, give thanks for the gifts of life, and get in right relationship with family and neighbors.

In our modern world, you can check the position of the sun with any iPhone app. But aligning your soul with gratitude isn't always as easy! In our fast-paced world, the solstice is an invitation to pause and reflect to set things right. It encourages us to notice and celebrate what's important to us – and calls us to take the next step to bring forth what wants to come forth within us.

The solstice also offers a wonderful blend of ancient wisdom and fascinating science. During the episode, we consider both – and reflect on creating an alignment between nature and technology that is all-to-often missing in our lives.

Join us for a conversation about what alignment means to conscious leaders, how the solstice can encourage you forward, and how you can make this summer your best yet!

Are you ready to become a more conscious leader and positively impact the world? We are thrilled to share with you our latest podcast episode, featuring a replay of our keynote from Virtuous’ Responsive Nonprofit Summit titled “Changing The World Starts With Changing Yourself.”

Join Plenty Consulting principals, Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck, as they take you on a journey to explore why the world calls us to lead consciously – and how conscious leadership can empower you to become a more responsive, confident, and calm leader.

In this engaging episode, you will gain insights and uncover the power of conscious leadership and how to harness it to create meaning and growth in your life, your organization, and the world.

Tune in and discover practical tips to apply immediately at work or in life. Learn how to find your grounding as you lead yourself and others through change by focusing on cultivating awareness, alignment, and intention.

Don't miss out on this inspiring and thought-provoking episode! Listen now and be ready to change the world by being more of yourself.