Leading the Leaders and Leading the Dreamers

My significant-other, Grace, is a well-seasoned Human Resources professional. She is a self-made woman who climbed her way up various corporate ladders from a retail clerk to a Senior Vice President for a well-known media company with over 100,000 employees.

Last year she took a gamble on herself and broke away from that media corporation to open her own executive consulting firm. But as challenging and scary as taking that leap may sound, for Grace that was the easy part. She is well-skilled in her craft and has a great intuitive sense of self and others. She has a deep network of contacts who are keenly interested in the skills she provides. Creating this new consulting firm should have been reason to stop, look around and take pride in her achievements. But that isn’t Grace's way. She is a woman who navigates through the steep rocky hills of life more quickly and assuredly than a shiny new Ford pickup truck in an over-produced Superbowl advertisement. She had larger dreams and this was the time to execute on them.

Grace dreams of helping woman of all ages develop into better professionals, better leaders and better people. She lets nothing in this world hold her down and lives to  empower others to realize that nothing should hold them down either. It’s great to dream of achieving these lofty goals, but its better to make those dreams realities.

This past week she did just that when she launched Half the Sky Leadership, a new professional development program for women in industry. To get to the point of this week's launch she's put in many months of countless hours nurturing a budding idea, engaging a base of trusted faculty and advisers and loyal staff, developing curriculum, producing materials, finding and configuring facilities, promoting and selling, and ultimately executing on the Institute’s leadership sessions. This week the Institute opened its doors for a two-day session of its premier class of young female leaders. The cohort will convene for two more two-day sessions before graduating later this summer. By week’s end Grace was exhausted but rightfully delighted with the achievements of the Institute, its faculty and staff and the matriculating class.

Of course, I’m proud of Grace. But what I see here is more than just another in a great line of accomplishments. What I see is an inspiration for others to execute on their dreams and make them a reality, to follow-through TODAY and stop thinking that there’s always tomorrow to start. I know some of Grace’s additional dreams for helping young women make their mark in this world. I think that creating Half the Sky Institute is both a milestone achievement as well as a stepping stone to making her next dream a reality.

Too many of us wait for that “tomorrow” to begin making our own dreams come true. But as long as you see “tomorrow” as part of your plan, the TODAY to execute your dream may never come. Don't wait. Start living your dreams now.

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