As we enter the season of renewal and growth for what’s ahead, Nexus Founder and CEO Repa Mekha reflects on leadership in an uncertain landscape, discovering your purpose, and following the calling. Watch or read below!
What has leadership looked like to you this last quarter—inside Nexus, in the field, and beyond?
These last three months have called for us to live in the gray far more than in the past, to rely on insights and wisdom, and learn that it’s not always concrete. This calls for adaptation and the ability to be flexible, to be creative in the moment. In some ways, it’s calling for us to show up differently, to exercise our skills differently. But it also taps something that already exists in us.
I enter into leadership knowing that I don’t need to know all the answers, and that others may not know all the answers. But the places and spaces and ways that we never thought about gaining insight are in front of us now, and we’re paying attention: what are people not saying? If you stitch things together in the environment, what do they spell out, that you just wouldn’t have thought of or imagined when you were trudging along by yourself?
We are now operating with a higher level of intentionality and tension—being deliberate about paying attention to what’s in the gray. Before, if it wasn’t solid, if it wasn’t something that we could put our hands on, we didn’t have the time for it, right? Because things had to happen. Now we’re finding that there are answers in the gray, there are answers in the questions, that we wouldn’t have paid attention to before.
As a leader in these times, being able to help people see through that has been ratcheted up, both inside and outside of the organization. We are in this exploratory phase where we’re being called to be on the stage, actively engaged, and then having to go to the balcony to see the big picture at the same time. And in between the two, we’re having to hold this space of greatness, not always knowing what happens between the time that we get to the balcony or back to the stage, but being committed to keeping the work going forward.
I always say there’s far more in between the lines than on the line. It’s in that space between the lines that we’ll begin to find some answers. And that’s a different way of practicing leadership: It’s leadership without easy answers. It’s leadership that answers, “it’s a bad time,” it’s leadership that calls for you to have a sense of groundedness and the ability to hold what is unpredictable sometimes. I don’t think it’s momentary. It’s calling us. We’re being trained and engaged and invited to up our level of leadership, the tools that we use in leadership, in ways that we’ve just not had to do in the past.
As a leader, mentor, and community elder, how do you help people see into the gray?
When we are truly in this work, we come to it not as occupations, but vocations. There’s something very deep inside us that teaches us there’s work we should be doing and should be committed to. And unlike an occupation, you don’t retire from it, right? Careers are born to die because folks look for the day that they come to an end. I think that with vocation, a sense of purpose and calling, not only do you come to the work with a deeper sense of commitment, but you come to the work drawn from a deeper sense of wisdom that you didn’t just get trained up. You didn’t just go to school. You didn’t just go through some cohorts to be prepared, but you were sent to do this work.
Part of being able to really fulfill that is self-study. Self-study is tapping into the strength and wisdom and insight that not only come with you, but have been passed on by your ancestors or a Creator—there’s a different way to come to this work that gets reflected in how you show up. And the self-study piece, for me, is as deep as this: If you don’t know yourself, you can’t love yourself. Studying yourself is the only way you get to really know who you are and to know how to embrace yourself. And so as an elder, part of what I try to help folks do is tap into you, tap into your gifts beyond occupation, beyond career paths.
There are at least three ways folks tend to come into this work:
- Someone noticed something deep inside them a long time ago and cultivated it. And they, in turn, try to live into it—they act a certain way, they begin to think a certain way, they begin to practice a certain way, and they may even get some training and supports that help to enhance that.
- The other is very market-driven: you learn early on what’s popular, what’s in demand, and you spend your time shaping yourself to respond to that.
- The third starts from within. Early on, you really begin to recognize that you have a gift, that you have a purpose and a calling, and you may not even have the language for it. You may not even fully understand it, but it’s there and it keeps plugging at you. It keeps tugging at you. And over time, as you have experiences with others, part of what they do is help to pull that out. And as a result, there are things like your jobs, your position…my position as President and CEO of Nexus Community Partners is a platform for me to live out purpose.
I’ve never pursued a career. I’ve never pursued an occupation. I’ve always listened for the calling. And that calling, I understand to be much bigger than me. So the way we enter into this work now is going to be extremely important. It goes back to not only being able to live in the gray, but to hear in the gray: to hear messaging, to hear what people are saying, even when they’re not using their mouth. To see people in ways that have nothing to do with your eyes. I think that’s the kind of leadership we’re being called to do—it is rooted in culture, it is rooted in wisdom, in values around rest and self-care and all those things that are going to be important to the work as we go forward, especially if we become more and more intentional and raise the tension of the work that we’re engaged in. I think where we’ve been just won’t do it anymore.