Michelle Grant, founder of The Great Full, is a powerhouse in coaching women leaders around food systems and sustainability. In this conversation, she emphasizes the need for intuitive leadership and the integration of emotional awareness in decision-making. Michelle discusses the evolution of leadership styles, advocating for more feminine energy and community support. She shares her insights on how personal well-being is crucial for impactful change, blending love and joy into the leadership equation. It's a refreshing take on creating a more sustainable future.
Michelle Grant emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership, advocating for a more inclusive and holistic approach to foster collaboration.
The Grateful addresses burnout in the sustainability sector by prioritizing mental health and creating a supportive community for women leaders.
Self-awareness through tools like the Enneagram can guide leaders toward authentic interactions, enabling personal and collective growth for effective change.
Deep dives
The Origins of The Grateful
The Grateful was founded by Michelle Groth as a response to her extensive experience in sustainability, particularly focusing on food systems. After years of working on various sustainability projects, she realized that many of the challenges faced were interconnected with how humans interact and collaborate. This led her to explore the deeper aspects of leadership, emphasizing the importance of being authentic and present in the process of creating meaningful change. The Grateful aims to provide a space for reflection and discussion on sustainability and regeneration, recognizing the need for a supportive community to combat burnout in the sector.
Leadership Redefined
Michelle discusses her evolving understanding of leadership, moving away from traditional and hierarchical models toward a more inclusive and holistic approach. Her experiences, particularly in male-dominated environments, highlighted the systemic issues that often undermine effective leadership. The conversation centers around the significance of emotional intelligence and the need for leaders to connect with their inherent humanity while navigating change. This redefined view of leadership focuses on collaboration and the well-being of individuals, fostering environments that promote joy and creativity.
Overcoming Burnout in Change-Making
Burnout is a prevalent issue in the sustainability and non-profit sectors, and The Grateful addresses this by emphasizing well-being as an essential part of leadership. Michelle emphasizes the importance of finding balance and joy in the work process, urging individuals to prioritize their mental health. By providing coaching and training geared specifically toward women in the sustainability space, The Grateful fosters an environment where participants feel supported. This collective approach allows for shared experiences and practices that acknowledge and address the emotional toll of change-making.
The Role of Self-Awareness Through the Enneagram
Michelle highlights the value of self-awareness in leadership, particularly through frameworks like the Enneagram. Initially skeptical of personality-based tools, she's found that the Enneagram facilitates deeper personal insights that can guide behavior and decision-making. By understanding their intrinsic patterns and tendencies, leaders can shift their actions toward more authentic interactions. This self-reflection process allows for a holistic understanding of how individuals contribute to larger systems and fosters personal and collective growth.
Transforming Contributions from Fear to Love
A crucial theme in Michelle's work is the shift from fear-driven contributions to those rooted in love and compassion. She illustrates this through the story of a monk who creates tempeh from a place of joy and playfulness rather than efficiency and profit-driven motives. This differentiation emphasizes the significance of connection, presence, and intention in the act of creating positive change in the world. By cultivating environments where individuals can operate from a place of love, it fosters a ripple effect, encouraging others to engage in similar practices for collective benefit.
Michelle Grant is an alumna of our Vision 20/20 program and was part of Tribe 2 that started in September 2020.
She’s the founder of The Great Full and offers coaching and community for women leaders within the realms of food systems, sustainability, and regeneration.
Michelle combines her deep knowledge of sustainable systems with her passion for personal and professional development.
Her leadership programs like "Be the Change" and "Lead the Change" offer a supportive community and tools to empower women changemakers to take care of their personal wellbeing, as well as that of the planet.
She’s passionate about the importance of inner work to create impactful outer change, blending theory and practice, science and philosophy, and engaging the head, heart, and hands in her learning journeys.
She is also a professionally certified coach with the International Coaching Federation, trained in the Enneagram, and a seasoned yoga and meditation teacher.
In this episode, Carlos, Laurence, and Michelle explore questions like
How can we develop more intuitive leaders?
How can we promote more feminine energy in leadership?
Why does the old style leadership need to change anyway?