What does it mean to pause? To allow ourselves the gift of slowing down when everything around us insists we keep moving, doing and producing? Honouring self is a practice I’m learning—not as a destination I’ve reached, but as a daily returning to what my body, heart, and spirit need.
Reflective leadership isn’t found in the loud declarations or the polished outcomes. It lives in the quiet moments when we stop to ask ourselves: How am I, really? What season am I in?
Making space for self can feel countercultural, even uncomfortable. Yet it’s one of the most holistic acts we can offer ourselves and our communities.
When we practice slowing down, we create room for truth-telling, for grief, for joy, for the messy middle of becoming. This isn’t about perfection—it’s about presence. About honouring self enough to show up honestly, to walk alongside others without abandoning ourselves in the process.
When we commit to making space for self, we create room not only for our own growth but for deeper connection with those who travel alongside us. This practice of slowing down allows us to recognize that our journeys are both singular and shared, individual and collective.
Reflective leadership begins with the courage to honour our own paths while celebrating the intersections we create with others. As we explore what it means to be holistic in our approach to life and leadership, we recognize that the act of slowing down, breathing and acknowledging our paths is itself transformative.
Making Space for Self: The Power of Slowing Down
journey, path, road
Words that when used in the singular, noun (place or thing) context convey a single, individual, disconnected experience.
But these words often feel like a mix of the singular and plural.
journeys, roads, paths
They also feel like action-oriented, active, adjective and collective/community/relationship centred experience
- journeying together
- travelling together
- intersecting paths
- finding our way together
- walking alongside each other
- mapping our journey
- navigating roads and paths
Reflective Leadership Through Honouring Self
- honour yourself & others?
- honour the season you are currently in?
- celebrate the work (personal and collective) it has taken to get where you are?
- honour how prepared you are for the various weather you have travelled through, and adapted to, to get to this point?
Honouring Self: A Holistic Practice of Connection
These two poems resonated with me about journeys, honouring ourselves and each other. I hope they resonated with you.
What is one thing you do to honour your journey(s)? And the ones you travel with others?
remember the body
of your community
breathe in the people
who sewed you whole
it is you who became yourself
but those before you
are a part of your fabric
honour the roots – rupi kaur
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
—–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I keep coming back to this: honouring self is not separate from honouring those we love and lead alongside.
Making space for self—for rest, for contemplation, for the questions that don’t have easy answers—is how we stay conencted to our truth.
Reflective leadership asks us: to be honest about where we are, to name the weather we’re navigating, to celebrate the small and large acts of resilience that brought us here.
Slowing down is an act of trust. Trust that we don’t have to perform our way through life. Trust that our bodies hold wisdom worth listening to. Trust that a holistic approach to our journeys means tending to all of ourselves—mind, body, heart, spirit, community.
In making space for self, we make space for others to do the same. We model what it looks like to honour the tender, beautiful, complicated truth of being human. And perhaps, in that slowing down, we find our place in the web of life.