In her book, Wrestling with Our Inner Angels, Nancy Kehoe highlights lessons from her vocation as a nun and clinical psychologist working with the mentally ill. She cites one patient who described his Zen practice as a way to stay centered and his music as a way to stay connected. Staying centered and staying connected are simple but profound pursuits at the core of spirituality and leadership.
Staying centered is at the heart of most religious traditions and spiritual practices. It involves being present in the moment, developing awareness of self, being mindful of others and the world around us and opening ourselves to the sacred, however we understand it. Staying centered in leadership requires aligning performance with key personal and organizational purposes and values and flexing with inevitable changes in the environment.
Staying connected is a spiritual practice of nurturing our essential relationships with ourselves, partners, families, friends and the animals we tend. Staying connected as a leader involves holding true to the mission, cultivating relationships with customers, team members and other stakeholders and anticipating both threats and opportunities.
Reflecting on staying centered and connected to self and all that surrounds us, I am reminded of a line from As You Like It: “these are counsellors that feelingly persuade me what I am.”
sacredlead 
Thanks Bob, Centered and connected very important in my life today. Heidi
I am blessed by my connections with you and Bob and our classmates.
Thanks Bob, lovely and timely…this is something I’ve been very tuned to in the last few weeks as a lot of compelling events and situations intersected…staying centered and connected implies thinking about it, making deliberate choices that lead to our being able to be open-ended and spontaneous while maintaining a sense of responsibility and community. Rather than “following our bliss”, it’s more like “following OUR bliss”…in her book My Stroke of Insight (and in a TED talk she gave that’s fantastic) Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about the spaciousness of the right side of the brain and the organizational drive of the left side, something that by now we’re all pretty aware of, but she puts in in terms of choice, of how do we WANT our brains to work, when do we want the organization to kick in and when we don’t. How we can rewire, essentially. Buddhism speaks of dren shay, the concept of mindfulness (dren) and introspection (shey). We remember and we act. Center and connect.
Love these thoughts, Clemma. Thanks for your contributions.
As a writer who is happy to be holed up for days at a time in my own creative world, I find it extremely helpful and even necessary to get out and interact with others, in my case through community involvement, yoga, or writer’s groups – it helps to keep me connected and centered so that I am inoculated from the side effects of writer’s isolation. Thanks for the post!
I salute you for your mindfulness in staying centered and connected and the ways you have chosen to do both. Keep writing your wonderful blog.