Begin Your Journey
CO-ACTIVE® TRAINING INSTITUTE

Let's create a new language of leadership, together!

For the last 30 years the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI) has been offering the gold-standard in coach training and leadership development for individuals and organizations. Now we are creating a new language of leadership. Let's do this together. 

Let’s Cultivate Lightness

  • POSTED ON MAY 30, 2019
Having fun

Sometimes, life can feel heavy. The heaviness can be particularly evident if we are working in challenging environments or with challenging content. I remember when I used to work in the charity sector supporting women who had experienced some form of violence,  I’d take that heavy feeling home with me. The heaviness seemed to seep into all areas of my life. I’d try and run it off, or drink it off, but it followed me around and eventually took it’s toll and I felt I had to leave the sector.

Heaviness can come from all sorts of spaces; from being perpetually busy and stressed, from our own internal gremlins making life seem scary, or from the information we receive about awful events that happen in the world.

Heaviness shows up in some way at some point for all of us.

But there are ways to move through the heaviness.

In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown talks about ‘guide posts’ that help us to live what she calls a Wholehearted Life. There are two guideposts that I think are particularly relevant in releasing any heaviness that we experience.

The first is ‘Cultivating Play and Rest’ and the second is ‘Cultivating Laughter, Song and Dance.’

As adults, we tend to get serious and forget that the simple acts of playing and laughing are essential for us. We get too busy to play, to sing, to dance, to rest into existence. We get too busy and too serious to cultivate our lightness.

Lightening up for me means dancing in my front room, it means making up silly words and phrases with those around me, it means actively letting go of the monkey brain nattering that makes me worry about stuff that actually I can just let go of. Lightening up is about remembering that life can be light, that life can be easy.

In a world of challenges, darkness and heaviness it’s up to us to step into our light.

Written By

Hannah Massarella

Having spent much of her career in the not for profit sector, Hannah experienced first hand the toll front line support work can take on a person’s health and well being. Hannah believes giving your all to a cause or a desire to change the world, without taking due care of personal well-being, can lead to burn out. As a Certified Professional Co-active Coach, Hannah believes that self-development is not a luxury, it’s our responsibility if we want to have the impact we were born to have. She specializes in coaching female leaders by helping them connect deeply to their purpose, values and desires. She inspires them to use that connection and resonance to positively change the world.

View Website

This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember you. We use this information in order to improve and customize your browsing experience and for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media. To find out more about the cookies we use, see our Privacy Policy.

If you decline, your information won’t be tracked when you visit this website. A single cookie will be used in your browser to remember your preference not to be tracked.