One-Year Later
Last year, I had the good fortune of speaking with Dr. Nwando Anyaoku about leadership and life. Nwando dropped some serious pearls and you can revisit her entire interview here. I recently caught up with this in-demand global speaker and here’s what she had to say about her 1-year celebration.
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A year ago, I was asked a simple question:
“It’s a year from now. What are you celebrating?”
My answer was immediate.
“Lots of travel, rest and joy. Living out loud. Standing on the biggest stage I can come across.”
Looking back today, I’m smiling as I reflect on an amazing, enriching and enlightening year. I talked about prioritizing rest, but I had no real idea what rest actually looked like. For a while, despite my protestations otherwise, I was running. From silence, from contemplation. Then I hit a wall. No gas left in the tank. Emotionally drained. More questions than answers.
So I stopped everything. I did the thing that always resets me at a crossroads: I went home. Back to the sounds and smells of my childhood. To friends, laughter, nicknames. To stories I could re-enter midstream because I already knew the players, the context.
That’s when the pieces of the kaleidoscope in my mind and body started to float gently into place forming the first tile. The foundation.
Over the months that followed, I rebuilt tile by tile. Tiles of reflection. Reconnection to myself, to my essence. Tiles of friendship and sisterhood and joy.
There was in fact a lot of travel in that process but also rest, stillness, silence.
A cocoon.
A chrysalis.
I came to the powerful realization that I already had everything necessary for my evolution, I just needed to hold space and focus to birth it. I’ve come to appreciate that transformation isn’t the dramatic moment when the butterfly takes flight. It is the quiet work that happens inside the chrysalis, when nothing on the outside seems to be changing, yet everything is.
What’s emerging now are beautiful, colorful, vibrant tiles coming together to create a mosaic that I couldn’t have imagined a year ago. A masterpiece that is still unfolding.
And yes…I still intend to stand on the biggest stages I can find. Only now, I understand that becoming the person who belongs on those stages mattered far more than simply getting there.
Here’s to the next era.