47: Shifting to a 'We' Culture: Nina Simons

Humans and Earth

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing a regenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, and co-creating a healthy, peaceful, and equitable world for all. Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, orientation, and more to create conditions for mutual learning and leadership development. She is the author of Nature, Culture, & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, and of Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart.

Hear Nina discuss:

• “We are in a paradigm shift from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture.” “We are collectively co-creating a new world.”
• “The Earth needs us all to be leaders now.” And hierarchical models of leadership won’t provide the restoration that is needed.
• Her experience of redefining leadership as non-hierarchical and collaborative so that it became a role she could accept. What humans and Earth need is a “full-spectrum leadership” that departs from patriarchal values and instead values both feminine and masculine strengths and contributions. This leadership honors bodily and emotional wisdom as much as rational thought.
• We need to recognize that vital forms of leadership include parenting, art-making, teaching…”There are probably as many expressions of leadership as we are human beings.”
• “The most inspiring leaders I know are those that can show up with vulnerability and not knowing, turn to each other for help, and exercise what I call relational intelligence. They’re helping create a culture where transformation is possible.” We all become leaders by supporting these skills in ourselves and others.
• Our whole culture is up for review and renewal. We need to nurture this within models of regeneration, not depletion of self, others, and our planet. “It’s not really our power we’re reclaiming, it’s actually the power of life’s energy coming through us.”

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