Summoning Leadership As Love
- Nov 23, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 27, 2024
The Empire of Love initiative supports executives, boards and organizations in embracing the idea that Love ultimately governs any evolutionary process. We are three professionals from various horizons who are committed to catalyzing leaders´ and relationship-systems development, expanding consciousness and capacities.
If there is to be an Empire in the world, it would have to be The Empire of Love, would it not? In our times of significant change, many of us sense an urgent need to counter violence, greed, and ignorance by decolonizing structures that hold unjust power over Life. It is imperative to more intelligently navigate towards a viable future for humanity on our beautiful planet. It starts with each of us decolonizing our thinking, our bodies, our cultures of separation and segregation, and our patriarchal modes of governance – and through activating our capacity to enact love and power. In this article, we invite you to peek inside our Empire of Love initiative and discover its origins, intentions, and practices.
We know that “empire” implies command, hold dominion over, and colonize. In our use, Empire means to counter colonialist thinking, power over, and any actions not sourced in Love. Empire of Love is about meeting “non-love” with Love.
A decolonial future will require great effort from the world as we know it, built and perpetuated as it is by forms of conscious and unconscious violence and unsustainable power over people and nature. People holding leadership roles must go first in stewarding the change we need to be. If those of us in leadership roles don’t begin by healing ourselves, who will?
Yes! The Empire of Love is an imagined empire where Love conquers our organizations and communities. We started building it from three different countries through decades of healing our pasts and expanding our consciousness and capacities. Overcoming our limitations in perception and thought patterns yields freedom from the suffering of being stuck in repeating the old. Sourcing our actions in Love guides us through transformation and growth.
As stewards, we share the intimate knowledge that Love ultimately governs any evolutionary process. Seeing and experiencing much, on the contrary, we started dreaming up an Empire summoning leadership AS Love. What we mean by leadership “AS love” is a way of leading our lives, communities, and organizations, honoring our essential oneness – that is, Love in action. We intend to build “an experiential empire” with you where we all experience our truth, honor our wholeness, feel our oneness, and re-humanize business by serving more of Life.
Our format is a digital, global space to learn and practice how to effectively upskill ourselves and our organizations in times of significant change. We share knowledge, practices, and inquiry to co-create regenerative experiences that transcend what feels outdated.
“Summoning leadership AS Love” feels potent, and holds a magnetic, gentle pull to transform outdated behavioral patterns and leadership styles of power, serving only the few. In response to the polycrisis of our times, we must transform ourselves together, in action, to become the poly-opportunity our world sorely needs.
Empire of Love facilitates global workshops where we grapple with inquiries around Love, power, and leadership in multiple contexts with coaches, scholars, entrepreneurs, and professional creatives. In our gatherings, we meet around an inquiry, intending to cross a personal edge, ever widening our understanding, and ultimately expanding our minds in grappling with tender and difficult topics.
Our Empire of Love becomes a reality as we co-create our space, ensuring there are no dogma or barriers, that all voices in the system are listened to, and that the new relationship system, as a whole, listens to all voices as well. Being held as we are, participating in co-creating a field of opportunities where everything feels possible, each of us can do real transformational work. When our actions are sourced in Love, in connectedness, in shared stewardship – our contributions become fruitful, focused, and potent. This practice is leadership AS Love.
After each gathering, the experience of Empire of Love becomes a field of resonance, almost a humming, ever vibrating, ever co-creative through the emergence of the knowledge of what and who we can be together in relationship systems intelligence. When we gather in practice, we experience more than we could on our own, witnessing everyone else present and then perceiving intelligence from the whole – ever richer with data and wisdom than before we met. This experience ripples out as transcended thoughts and actions since each participant returns empowered to their respective relationships and fields of operation.
In conclusion, we offer experiential practices co-created as processes of shared inquiry so that we can learn together – transform, gain new understanding, always with epistemic humility, in deep trust of our human potential and our whole humanity – realizing the essentiality and existentialism of Love.
There are plenty of opportunities to join us in co-creation while building an extensive Empire of Love together.
As we draw up the blueprints for expanding our Empire, we realize they are the most potent drawings we ever made!
Read more from Empire Of Love
Empire Of Love, Executive Leadership Coaching & Facilitation
The Empire of Love initiative engages executives, boards and organizations that embrace the irony and the truth of Love, which ultimately governs any evolutionary process.
Ilaria Distefano (Italy), Gabriella Fenesi (Hungary) and Silvie Le Muzic (Norway) are the visionary stewards of this initiative. They bring together a unique blend of backgrouonds in organizational and leadership development, action research, sustainability, governance, architecture, creative technologies and entrepreneurship. They channel this diverse experience towards expanding human capacities and partner with leaders and relationship systems committed to growing, prospering, and elevating their contribution to the complexity of our times.
Photo credit:
FRAX. Fractal image of Mandelbrot fractal–ever evolving, discarding what does not work, building on what does. Much like our Empire of Love initiative.
