How can I hold and encourage journeys of personal and systemic transformation?

By Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle

Our title today comes from the ninth and final question in our curatorial book, 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work. 

There’s a plenty of talk about transformation in leadership work, but transformation from what? to what? for what? And following what path? How do leaders inspire, design, enable and support these transformations, for themselves and others, and help to shape the relationships and the contexts that make them possible?

This post offers some quotations that have inspired us and called us toward healthy and generative transformation. More quotations and sources are available in the book.

Yes, your transformation will be hard. Yes, you will feel frightened, messed up and knocked down. Yes, you'll want to stop. Yes, it's the best work you'll ever do.     

- Robin Sharma

To transform yourself, you don't need to do big things. Just do small things in a big way. Transformation will follow you!    

 - Rahul Sinha

The one thing that I have learned from all these projects is that the key to transformative change is to make the system see itself. That’s why deep data matters. It matters to the future of our institutions, our societies, and our planet.

- Otto Scharmer

Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one. 

- Marianne Williamson

I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own nonsense. 

- Elizabeth Gilbert

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.  

Every positive change - every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness - involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.

- Dan Millman

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

- Karen Armstrong

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

- Manifesto for Agile Software Development

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. 

- Joseph Campbell

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.  

- Haruki Murakami   

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.  

- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back.  

- Paulo Coelho

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.  

- Ernest Hemingway   

The Vision Quest, or perceiving quest, is the way we must begin this search. We must all follow our Vision Quest to discover ourselves, to learn how we perceive of ourselves, and to find our relationship with the world around us.  

- Hyemeyohsts Storm

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

- Serenity Prayer, often attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr 

Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting, before becoming.

- Victoria Erickson

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. 

- Anais Nin

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

― Maya Angelou

A truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

- Henry David Thoreau

[S]elf-transformation is a gradual, painstaking process won at the expense of joy and sorrow, or so it has been for me. Nevertheless, certain power events, or growth events, blaze out from the background of my life. These events mark the juncture at which my restless heart touched the timeless, transforming heart of the universe. The year I spent in the desert was filled with many such events.

- Steven Foster

No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.

- Carl Jung

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. 

- Leo Tolstoy

What I like most about change is that it’s a synonym for “hope”. If you are taking a risk, what you are really saying is, "I believe in tomorrow and I will be part of it.”

- Linda Ellerbee

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

- Henri Bergson

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. 

- Anatole France

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples. 

- Mother Teresa

We work actively each day within in our networks, with our clients and students, to explore this question, as well as the others. We'd love to hear your stories, share your puzzles and celebrate your triumphs from your own journeys of inquiry.

Scott Downs is an Agile Coach with Fractal Systems Ltd. 

Gerald Doyle serves on the faculty of Wolcott College Preparatory High School, provides Ministry Placement Research/Consulting for Career Formation Services at the Catholic Theological Union and advises several edtech companies including Upkey and GetSet.

Scott and Gerald are co-founders of Tri Cosain, a practice which weaves inspiration, learning and career coaching for leadership in life and work; they are the co-authors of 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work. Their work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity and well-being as foundations for personal leadership.