If you are a leader who embodies activism, you are moved by personal convictions that see beyond yourself and the bottom line. You boldly desire to make intentional change that will impact another person, your family, where you work, our planet.

When activism is seen as a negative word, it supports the status quo. Making activism negative plays upon your fears being misunderstood or being seen as too much, too disruptive.

And it is easy to respond to these fears by quickly defaulting into silence or complacency.

But there is something immensely freeing by owning our values and desires for the world we want. Sure, it can feel a little scary and most definitely vulnerable.

When we do the work to not be weighed down by our burdens, we can move through the fears and increase our capacity for vulnerability so we can own our activism not as something to be ashamed of but as a beacon for our meaningful work and life.

My guest today wrote a whole book reframing activism with a more...

What motivates your dreams is just as important as the dream itself.

Maybe even more important.

These dreams for your future inform your daily decisions and where you focus your time, energy, and resources, and they impact how you lead yourself and others.

They fuel the drive that motivates you to get up each day as you do the important–and sometimes tedious–practices that build the future you want for yourself and the world.

They support moving from a vision or idea to action, creating the reality you have always longed for.

The tricky thing about your desires for the future is they require understanding your past and any pain it holds.

No matter how smart the parts of you are that strategize and plan - if you are not clear on the echoes of your pains, losses, and unmet needs then they can become interwoven with your vision for your future.

And if you are not aware of these influences, they can drive you in ways you may not be aware of, setting you up for burnout and...

What drives you can make you or break you.

We often look to our values, commitments, and operations as a map to how we do life and work.

But there are things that get in the way of honoring our commitments to ourselves and those we serve - no matter what we have professed as our values and mission.

The messages that tell us we are not enough. We have to do more or get more. We have to over-deliver and never disappoint.

These shame-based messages get in the way of our ability to make our aspired values consistently lived in action.

Shame is insidious, sneaky and can become a powerful driving force in our lives if we do not get clear on what is driving us and why we are making the choices we do day in and day out.

Until you look at your own unique experience of shame and what drives it, shame will continue to chip away at your capacity for courage and convince you to compromise your integrity.

Getting granular about what drives you - and why - can reveal some hard truths and important...