Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Architect of Becoming: From Proving To Being > Status Update

“They say the phoenix rises from its own ashes, reborn and renewed….
But what the metaphor doesn’t capture is how long it takes for the ashes to cool. How painful the burning is. How disorienting it is to be remade. How you lose everything familiar, everything you relied on for identity and security, before you can become something new.
And how what rises from the ashes isn’t the same bird that went into …

“There is wisdom in the universe, wisdom in the body, wisdom in the patterns that emerge when we stop forcing outcomes. This is what I’m learning to trust now.”

“Increasingly, I felt diminished. Ostracized. Cast aside by those competing for position and power. I was not aligned with the new organizational direction and began to feel unmoored. I lost my purpose and eventually left the organization.
But not before absorbing months of toxicity, months of trying to protect my team, months of buffering them from the dysfunction while being slowly destroyed by it.”

“I was forced out of the role I had given my heart and soul to. Sidelined. Stabbed in the back and thrown under the bus by colleagues and bosses - there were many bosses, each with their own agenda. Yet I was still committed to fulfilling the promise I had made to myself and my team….”

“I was learning to see my son not as a collection of disorders to be treated, but as a whole person whose brain worked beautifully - just differently.”

“The disability framework focuses on deficits, on what’s missing or broken or wrong. But what if we asked different questions? What if we noticed what’s present, what’s strong, what’s different in ways that could be valuable if we built environments that appreciated those differences?”

“In learning to put my son first…I was discovering something about leadership…The best leaders aren’t the ones who control everything, who have all the answers, who impose their vision on others. The best leaders are the ones who serve - who help others grow, who create conditions for others to thrive, who subordinate their own needs to the needs of those they’re leading.”

“The 2-hour drive from Yekaterinburg to Kamensk-Uralsky took us through rural Russian countryside - fields of crops, small towns with rundown houses, babushkas selling food and wares on the roadside. Exactly as one imagines Russia to be. I would travel this road many times over the coming weeks. I can still see it in my dreams.”

“I would be traveling with another couple from a neighboring town who were also adopting. We would become close friends through this journey.”

“Sometimes the most Important decisions we make aren’t the ones we plan for.”