For People Who Lead Others…
It’s Time To Return to Your Inner Power
You've been careful for so long that your people have stopped expecting the truth from you.
A free written practice sent straight to your inbox for you to work through on your own in about fifteen minutes.
Most organizations are trying to fix relationships with documents.
I’ve spent years inside every kind of organisation you can imagine including government departments, and across all these sectors I saw the same story.
People at odds with each other, feelings hurt, power misused, and everybody waiting for somebody else to sort it out.
All that discontent bubbles away underneath a pile of policy and training that sometimes leaves an organisation in worse shape than it was in before. The interventions don’t lead to change because what happens in the space between people can’t be fixed with paperwork.
I spent years waiting for the systems around me to change so I could do better work inside them, until I realised that was a losing position.
The only thing you have any real authority over is how you carry yourself into a room, and that decides what becomes possible once you’re in it.
You can’t ask your people to be honest with you while you’re managing around the truth yourself.
Inner Power, or Sna7m
My Elders taught me we’re all born with sna7m, which is the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh word for inner power. It’s the capacity to act with courage and integrity, and it grows when you’re connected to who you are, where you come from and what sustains you.
Our ancestors dedicated their lives to developing this power and using it wisely and deliberately.
There are people in my life who embody inner power effortlessly. They affect me through their presence without needing to say or do very much, and when they speak it’s as though they’re drawing on something much older than themselves.
Inner power shows up in the way people make decisions. They don’t choose based on what’s convenient or what they happen to want, and I’ve watched that take them exactly where they were meant to be.
You can feel the difference in a room. Someone with sna7m can be told a hard truth about themselves and stay in the conversation, which is why people tell them things nobody else gets told.
Whatever your own tradition calls it, you are born with it.
"Doing your own inner work is what makes the outer change possible."
Denise Findlay
Inner power is cultivated through practice.
Like any leadership skill it can be learned. In this practice you will:
- Name the places you've been shrinking to keep somebody else comfortable
- Find the fear or old belief that's been keeping you stuck
- Make room for the feelings you've been managing around
- Forgive whoever needs forgiving, including yourself, so the past stops deciding things for you
- Remember what you know to be true about who you are
- Name the truth you're ready to live, and the one step that puts it into action
You need about fifteen minutes and somewhere you won’t be disturbed. You don’t need to know anything about Sḵwx̱wú7mesh teachings, or to have done this kind of reflection before.
They lead from a place of connection and stay accountable while they do it
Tslekxáliya is my ancestral name
I spent two years preparing for my ancestral naming ceremony. I was the first in my family since my great-great-grandparents’ generation to breathe life back into our culture, and there were plenty of days I questioned whether I had any right to be doing it.
At one point somebody said things to me that were critical to the point of cruelty. I sat in my living room sobbing with my Auntie Jackie and my Uncle Stewart, and what they told me was that nobody was going to make this easy for me or give me permission. It was my birthright and I would have to take it, and believe in myself enough to take it in a good way.
They said these were tests, sent to see how serious I was and whether I could answer from a place of inner strength.
On the morning of the ceremony the power was out at the centre after a big storm, with four hundred guests on their way. The staff told us to postpone and the caterers couldn’t cook. My aunt and uncles said we would go ahead in the dark if we had to.
As people found their seats I could hear whispering that we shouldn’t be doing this at all. For a moment I wondered whether the power going out was a sign that none of it was ever meant to be. I got more and more nervous, and I started to pray. The room stayed dark for what felt like ages, but then my prayers were answered. The lights came on and the room erupted in cheers.
The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw canoe family drummed ten of us around the centre and onto the sacred blankets. The name Tslekxáliya is a reminder of my responsibility to embody and enact love in everything I do, and carrying it means that when tests come and knock me off the path, I have enough inner strength to get back on it.
"I had spent years hustling for external validation to prove I was enough. Standing on those blankets I understood that I had never needed to. It took me until my fifties to know that. I wrote this practice because nobody should have to spend a lifetime working out that the power they were looking for was already theirs."
Denise Findlay
Your inner power has been waiting for you since the day you were born.
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