Zombies to Zealots

How to Read or Use This Book Zombies to Zealots calls on you to embrace the concept of embodiment: living and embracing your truth with your entire being, including your heart, your brain, your “guts,” and, most important, your spirit. This book is an embodied collection of insights and stories from my work with amazing people, both clients and colleagues. It reframes contrasts between the disembodied, disjointed mind-sets of workplace knuckle draggers and those who embark on heroic journeys to come back to life. The last chapter is a nod to those who risk changing cultures to create the ideal—organizations filled with passionate, exuberant, workplace zealots. Zombies to Zealots is soul food and consumable for even those with jammed-up gray matter and a short attention span. It does not matter where you begin or end. You can start at the beginning or just read the chapter that resonates for you. Play with the ideas within. Let the words speak to you as you consider the four paths back into the light of conscious connection.   Introduction Why I Wrote Zombies to Zealots These days, leaders and their human resources partners are urgently questioning how to get people to engage fully in daily endeavors. The chaos people experience in organizational change, the amount of information poured into their brains, and, the sense of identity loss or any lack of hope for success in many organizations has created zombie teams. The world’s largest and most successfully traded companies are full of disengaged, cynical members who leave weekly meetings to mindlessly follow orders out of fear of consequences, questioning if they will ever be or do enough. After these meetings, they gather at the local watering hole to commiserate, trying to decide what’s next. Not only are people weary, disheartened, and shutting down, they are disconnected from their truth and creative spirit. And when I say people, I am including the many leaders who drive daily mandates in ways that they can’t actually stomach. It is high time that we revolutionize the way we work and lead and that we liberate people to bring their best contributions to each day. Through my work as a coach, I have witnessed some things I felt were worth sharing, beginning with what it means to be an enthusiastic leader—a regular-person zealot—and to call your spirit back into the work you do. Among those I’ve been privileged to coach are the people I mention on the dedication page. Anne’s Story: A Revolutionary Zealot Leader Let me introduce you to the remarkable leader, change agent, and fired-up human being mentioned on the dedication page. From the time Anne was old enough to speak, her mantra was, “I can do it… myself!” Her mother tells stories of Anne crawling into her own crib at night when she was just over a year old, refusing to be lifted into her bed by anyone who stood taller. That independent spirit has been with her since she landed on the planet, just as your inner spark has been there with you. As Anne made her way through high school, she faced the typical teenage challenges and disappointments that helped shape what I call the inner revolutionary (aka rebel)—that part of us all that typically surfaces around the time we are able to climb into our own cribs, when we want to just do everything ourselves. That spirit within gets louder at age 13 and stays with us, a captive force pacing inside of us, until we acknowledge its voice and pay attention to its power in our lives. Our inner rebel is that part of us that says no and aids us in standing up for ourselves when we most need to. We all share this archetype to some degree, although many push it way down into their gut instead of heeding its wisdom. Recognizing all the aspects of your personality, especially this rebel, can give you the power of choosing when it serves you, if you figure out how to work with it. Anne was an avid ball player from age five through middle and high school, until she was cut from the team her freshman year in high school. She admits she was devastated when the coach didn’t call her name for the shortstop position she had played most of her life. Her dad found her in tears later that day. When he asked her what happened, she wept, “I am too slow. I play the wrong position for a left hander. I am just not good enough.”