I had an essay about 75% written for this week when the wheels fell off my ability to write. I didn’t understand why but my mind refused to continue on the path I had chosen to write about. All day Wednesday, I could not connect how the words we use matter and how our species had intentionally gotten off the path of being goof people and stopped valuing relations between other people and our world.

Wednesday evening it hit me. I heard aa news story about a young Sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln It told a story of his mental decline, his call for help to his commanders and his eventual attempt to end his life. I reflected on two young men I had mentored and who had joined the Marines and the Navy. One is now dying from cancer and the other was asked to leave because of a training accident that has left him with a leg giving him constant pain.

I knew I had to tell all yall this Cherokee story. If I tell it in the true Cherokee way, you will not be given a “Moral of the Story” ending. It will be left up to you to decide what, if any, lesson you receive from these stories.

Before the Cherokee had ever heard of or seen White people, we formed a government that was split in half. During times of peace and prosperity our Nation was led by the White or Peace Government. Each town had a Peace Chief, his second Chief, a Spiritual Advisor and a Medicine person for healing. Any decisions made that effected the entire town had to receive a unanimous vote of all the people.

During times of strife the Peace Government would step aside and the Red or War Government would fill all the roles. For each role in the White Government there was a corresponding role in the Red Government. I person could not serve any role in both governments.

Think of these two governments a filing cabinet. When an enemy attached and the people voted to go to war, The drawer with the Red Government was pulled out and the White Government drawer was closed. When the danger had passed, the Red Drawer was closed and the White Drawer was opened.

War could be thrust upon our towns by an enemy showing up and wanting to fight. At such a time, the War Hoop would be sounded and all warriors would grab their weapons and head to a pre-planned rendezvous site to begin the defense of our homes and families.

The choice to go to war, was made in the Town Council House. It would be large enough to seat the population of that town. A discussion would begin with why some family, Clan or group thought that war should be perpetrated against some other people. War was seen as the last resort to restoring some imbalance in the world. The killing of a family or Clan member by another people could bring up the talk of war. If some negotiated way cold not be found to rebalance the world, war could be the only option left.

Like many things in the Cherokee world, there were seven steps to prepare the warriors for the battles to come. Most of these were administrative or spiritual.

Once the people decided to go to war, each town would send their Red/War Chief to the council of war chiefs and they would choose which one of them would be named The Great Warrior and lead the Cherokee into battle and Take the Oath of the Great Warrior. This person would take to Oath of the Great Warrior.

All warriors would leave their town and gather at ta chosen site on the opposite bank of the river from the town. War was seen as a sickness that everyone wanted to keep from entering their town. War preparations were conducted for a seven-day period away from where the people lived.

The group would fast and perform cleansing ceremonies during this time. Towards the end of preparation, each warrior would pass a Quartz crystal that had a red streak thought it, The Blood Stone, and a seer would divine if that warrior would be coming home. Those warriors who were deemed to be endanger of death were offered an opportunity to withdraw. The last night before departing to face the enemy, the warriors returned to the Council House where the Beloved Woman of the town had prepared the Black Drink. This is believed to be some type of stimulant for the warriors.

As the group approached the enemy’s village they began sounding the War Hoop. This was to announce that they were coming and to instill fear in the enemy There was no stealth in these warriors. They wanted everyone to know that the Cherokee were in the woods and mayhem was about to fall on them.

The primary weapons were the War Club and a long, very sharp knife. The warrior would attack the head of an enemy with the club and use the knife to stab the victim in the belly and then rip up with the blade. This would either break the enemy’s skull and leave his intestines on the ground.

After the battle, the Cherokee would gather anything they wanted from the village, such as household goods and sometimes captives. They would then head back to the preparation grounds on the river opposite of their Cherokee town.

Upon reaching their former preparation grounds they would undergo another seven days of cleansing themselves, their weapons and tools and anything or anyone they brought home from the battle. This was to ensure that the evils of war were left behind them before they would return to their homes.

Notice that after the war the same amount of time and effort was used to cleans the warriors. body, mind and spirit, as was used to prepare them for war.

War was never glorified for it’s own sake. War was a last answer for restoring balance in the world, bound in duty, restraint and spiritual law. A great warrior was not defined by how many enemies he killed, but by how well he upheld balance. A great warrior had learned the lesson of discipline before strength.

Now it is up to you to learn what is yours to learn from this story.

ᏩᏙ WaDo

Once the people decided to go to war, each town would send their Red/War Chief to the council of war chiefs and they would choose which one of them would be named The Great Warrior and lead the Cherokee into battle and Take the Oath of the Great Warrior. This person would take to Oath of the Great Warrior (see below).

This week I seem to be returning to a topic I seem to want to cover often. In the past I have cloaked it as your mind-set or simply getting your head right. I an hoping that this week I will say this in a way that is more direct It is a recuring theme in leadership across all spectrums of the subject, Character Counts.

This week I seem to be returning to a topic I seem to want to cover often. In the past I have cloaked it as your mind-set or simply getting your head right. I an hoping that this week I will say this in a way that is more direct It is a recuring theme in leadership across all spectrums of the subject, Character Counts.

The title this week comes for Ret. Gen. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. who was the commander of United States Central Command. Most folks my age got to know Gen Schwarzkopf as he led all coalition forces in Operation Desert Storm, the first Persian Gulf War.

After graduating from West Point in 1956, Schwarzkopf served as an Instructor there teaching mechanical engineering and mechanics. He also served in Vietnam as battalion commander, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry, 19th Light Infantry Brigade. Because he believed that the men he commanded needed to know he wasn’t asking them to do things he wouldn’t do, he was wounded in combat and received two Purple Hearts and three Silver Stars.

I first came to know Gen. Schwarzkopf at a leadership conference in the mid-1990 where he was one of the instructors. He caught my attention in his opening statement when he said “Leadership is a potent combination of Strategy and Character. If you have to be without one, let it be Strategy”. I setup and paid attention.

In today’s climate of leadership education, you will learn a lot about Leadership Strategy and Business Strategy. We leave out the one thing Gen Schwarzkopf spent the rest of our time together covering and thought was the MOST important thing. The part current our mainstream leadership education process almost entirely drops the Character side of the General’s leadership definition.

A great example of this problem popped into my In-Box this morning. It was a Harvard Business Review, September from October, 2026 titled, “5 Ways to Wield Influence When You Lack Authority” by P. Meyer. The article outlines the differences between influence and authority. It describes the “highly strategic behaviors” leaders use to build influence in five subtle ways.

Become an Influence Spotter

Use Back Channels Wisely

Act as a Precision Mover

Read the Pulse

Build Genuine Connections

Only 20% of these strategic behaviors even approach working on your character, that being Build Genuine Connections. Even this is described as a strategic act of building trust towards the goal of bridging cross-functional silos and linking the right people to solve problems. It reduces the act of building relationships to collecting tools, gathering resources, so you can accomplish one of your goals.

We need to begin our journey to becoming our best leader with working on ourselves. I have introduced you to the teachings of Peter Anderton before and his 2 Rules of Leadership. Rule number #2 is “It’s Not About You”. The ancient Chines philosopher Lao Tzu taught that:

A leader is best when people barely know he exists,

when his work is done, his aim fulfilled,

they will say: we did it ourselves.

How do you get to these two very different people’s ideas of working on ourself?

In the Cherokee Leadership Model, I propose the East is the direction where we identify and begin the work of becoming a better self. In the East, we can begin building the Character that Lao Tzu. Gen, Schwarzkopf and Anderton all believed was essential for a leader. I find it interesting that three very different people, living on three different continents and over two millennium apart, express the same idea about character and leadership. That’s call a clue.

Character building is a lifelong pursuit to be the best you can be. Every day those we would like to lead are observing us. They are having an internal conversation about whether or not we are living a congruent life, “Walking oour Talk”. They are judging our character. (see above the fifth step in building your influence) Young people are very good at this. If you are working in any youth development program, you must be aware that, at this life stage, their bovine excrement filter is still fairly clean. It works very well and they see clearly how we walk our talk. Adults can do this too. It may just take us longer because life experience may have clogged part of our filter.

These teen-age years are also prime time for young people to begin building their character. This is why many parents and grandparents stear their youth into Youth Development Programs like Scouting America and 4-H. The High Ideals espoused by these two programs are essentially the same. The Twelve Points of the Scout Law and the 4-H Pledge cover the same key points, service to others. In Cherokee we say ᎦᏚᎩ (GaDuGi) which translates to: “the people coming together to work for the benefit of the community.

As adults, we can and must work daily on building, repairing and strengthening our character. As I explain in Lead With Your Own Medicine, the Going to Water ceremonial practice cleanses Cherokees mind, body and spirit. Whatever practice you choose that fulfils that goal, is worth the effort as you become ᏗᏓᏂᏙᎯ (DiDaNiDoHi), Leader, or more completely translate - The one who takes them around holding them.

Let us hold each other as we journey around the Medicine Wheel together. ᏩᏙ (WaDo)

This week I going to plow some ground that I first plowed in my January 14, 2026 post Why a Leader Needs Diversity. The reason I think we should re-visit this topic is because it was in the news this past week. That why this title is much blunter.

In January, I talked about living in the Ecotone, a place where 2 different ecosystems collide. I wrote mostly about the Mangrove Swamps because they are the classic ecological example. Through tides, the sea invades the freshwater lowlands twice a day. This creates a huge amount of diversity in plants and animals. They provide not just ecological stability but also economic stability to the human activity guarded behind the Mangrove. I used ecological examples because those are the ones I’m most familiar with and I know all yall can extrapolate the ecology examples to sociology and economics.

Ecotones can be much more subtle than the Mangroves in the ecosystem. In most of my work in the rangelands of the Northern Prairie, they can be as small as an intermittent stream that may only flow for a few weeks as snow melts in the spring or for a few days after a summer thunder storm. These riparian areas can provide critical habitat for elk and deer as well as many Passerine birds that make up almost half of all bird species and are often called perching birds. Riparian ecotones can also supply an abundance of grazing plants for livestock when managed properly.

It is this type of subtle ecotone that is most often encountered in the human landscape. This type of community needs a leader that understands the importance of diversity and the connections throughout the human and natural ecosystem.

Let’s look at last week’s news.

On August 2, 2026, CNN’s, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen reported that that a senior intelligence branch officer at US Central Command (CENTCOM) sent an unusual email to military analysts asking for “creative and unconventional” ideas to pressure and punish Iran. When they broke this news, CENTCOM spokesperson, Captain Timothy Hawkins, issued a statement defending the message. Captain Hawkins sighted the long history of innovative thinking and that leadership frequently encourages fresh input. Some news organizations derided that statement as misleading.

Because I have no personal knowledge of any military issues, I tend to listen to folks who have that experience. Folks like fellow Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award Retired Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling who have lived experiences that I cannot even imagine.. Among other assignments, Gen Hertling was the operations officer of an armored cavalry squadron in Iraq. Gen Hertling has said that this type of communication within the Army’s intelligence community was not unusual and, in his experience, was encouraged and happens often.

In several of these posts, I’ve discussed the importance of your mindset. I’ve written how our reductionist thinking education has disconnected the way we think with the way living systems tend to actually work. I’ve advocated for a Holistic mindset. This mindset allows you to clearly see that the sum of anything is much more than the sum of its parts. It is the trap of believing that everthing needs to be broken down into its component parts that had many people believing that the CENTCOM emails were much more important than they actually were. A more Holistic view sees the email as humans maintaining connections, sharing ideas and resources. These are the same connections and processes as we saw exhibited by the trees in the German forest and the ecological community in the Pacific Northwest that I wrote about in Darwin Got It Wrong (Part Two), December 23, 2025. The trees work together sharing resources for the betterment of the community. The Intelligence Officers were maintaining the same type of ecosystem in their community. Surely, humans can be just as smart as trees.

The danger comes when we build human systems that look more like our industrialized agriculture model than the forest or even prairie community. We have constructed, unstable, monoculture communities like the farm my wife is visiting this week to appraise 2700 acres of corn for a crop insurance claim.

Following the reductionist model, we have created huge office buildings, departments and entire organizations with people that have the same lived experience, thought process and mindset as our industrialized food system. Whether you are planning the destruction of another country or just how to get your family to the end of this month in the midst of our current economic conditions, you need “creative and unconventional” ideas.

As a leader you need folks around you that have many different experiences. You need people who see the world differently than you, who’s brains work differently than yours. You do not need 2700 acers of the same ideas you grew up on.

Some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley actively recruit new employees who are on the autism spectrum because their brains work differently. It can take effort on your part to seek out and find folks that are different. Sometimes that effort can mean going against the traditional power structure in an organization.

.As a leader, it is an effort that will pay off in innovation and progress. New innovative ideas rarely come from doing the same thing the “way we’ve always done it”. By reading these posts you are listening to one of those weird people and I thank you. You need diversity. WaDo

Leading From Your Own Medicine is grounded in Cherokee culture. Our journey around the leadership model begins in the ᎧᎸᎬ (KaLvGv) – East. In the book, before we start the journey, I introduced you to the Going To Water Ceremony. From the beginning of our Nation, we would gather at the river that was adjacent to our town to begin the day with this ceremony. This ceremony was an outward display to the people that you were cleansing your body, mind and soul to begin a new day. Starting the day with a total cleansing of our spirits prepared us for the challenge to be a more and better you today than you were yesterday. The prayer to the East is giving thanks to ᎤᏁᏢᏅ UNeTlvNv Creatore, or the one who provides. That prayer ends with “Help us to be the bearers of your light”.

It is a great way for a leader to start any day. Your clean. You mindful are starting this day in an effort to be a better you. You are giving thanks for that opportunity.

A long time ago, I was given the privilege of spending several days with Cherokee elder and spiritual leader Hastings Shade. He taught us that to live a good life one must live in ᏙᎯ (ToHi) peace or flow with the people and creatures around you. He also shared a reflective practice he called ᎠᏰᏞ ᏥᏙᎦ (AYeTli TsiDoGa) Standing in the middle or Center. It is a way of relating to the center or middle of yourself and maintaining balance in a modern world through living in ToHi in body mind and spirit.

Former Principal Chief Chad “Corntassel” Smith said leadership is a “Humbling experience, a self-assessment designed to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges”. That is the work we do in the East as you work through the personal values worksheets. (I have posted the worksheets and instruction on Substack if you need them)

Chief Smith taught that seeing your self in relationship to the world all around you and the history that brought us all to this point as well as any future we might imagine is definitely humbling. It also lays the foundation for building confidence in your abilities.

In our culture and language, confidence and humility are closely connected. We use the Cherokee phrase ᎤᏓᏙᎯᏳᎯ (UdaDoHiYuHi) to convey the idea of confidence. But like you have already learned it is much deeper than just the one word. It fully translates to “Have confidence in yourself and do not doubt your abilities, but temper all with humility”.

Preforming some type of daily practice that cleanses your body, mind and spirit is a way to creating a new mind set. Peter Anderton’s 1^st Rule of leadership is “It’s not about you”. To become a better you and develop more empathy for AYeTli TsiDoGa, we need to actively listen to the voices from All those around us, the living world, the lithological world and the spiritual world.

Remember the 1982 song “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills & Nash and

“Think about how many times I have fallen

Greater spirits are using me, larger voices calling”

As Steven Stills also reminded us that, “When you see the Southern Cross for the first time, You understand now why you came this way.” I remember when I saw my Southern Cross and understood the Promise of another day was Big. Maybe you remember yours as well or maybe you haven’t seen it yet.

What I have described is a way of working toward that service centered mind set. Elder Shade taught us to Stand in the Middle in peace with those people, animals, plants and things around us. I wish I could tell you that I accomplish this every day. But I often fail. However, because I wrote this and you are reading this, we both have a chance to be better today.

As I begin writing this, I think this is going to be short post. I want to drive a single point home and I’m not sure how many different ways I can or should put this. What I would like you to get out of this is in the five words of the title.

It is my opinion that one of the biggest problems with our leadership pipeline is the way we think about learning leadership. We seem to want to take a class, attend a seminar or read a book. Although I’ve written a book and give workshops on leadership, this is only a beginning not an end.

Our youth organizations claim to instill values in the youth they work with and teach them the “skills” of leadership. Some of these organizations even claim to give youth opportunities to “practice” the skills they teach. I have volunteered in two of the largest youth programs in the country, one for over 40 years and the other for 30 years. One of those lists it’s 15 High Ideals and has the youth memorize those ideals. The other hides it’s ideals in what they call “The Ritual” and has the youth recite it at the beginning of every meeting.

It is rare, in both cases, where the words being recited are explained to the youth. Even more rare is the occasion when an adult takes the time to explain the meaning behind those words. We don’t take the time to explain that these are the standards they are to measure their own life against as thy strive to live a Good Life. One local organization even went so far as to try and band the teaching of the meaning of the symbolism in their ceremonies.

Leadership is NOT skills, techniques or memorization. It is LIVING your values. That also means leadership is not from a book, class or workshop. It comes from within you. It comes from you striving to live a life that incarnates your values into this world.

In Leading From Your Own Medicine I introduced you to Peter Anderton. He is a teacher who lives in the village of Measham in the United Kingdom. I like him because he comes so close to making Leadership education real in his 2 Laws of Leadership. Rule #1 is: It’s NOT about you. This echoes the teaching of Roman Senator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Rule #2 is: It’s ONLY about you. Anderton goes on to explain that leadership comes from you doing the heavy lifting of working on yourself. That ideal is incapsulated in this quote from Anderton:

“The hardest thing for some leaders to say is three simple words… I admire anyone who has the wisdom – and humility – to do it. And it’s the leaders who are willing to say ‘I need help’ that I admire the most. Sometimes it takes a while to get there. But when they do, it can be life-changing… not just for them, but for everyone around them. And always for the better”

Former Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chad “Corntassel” Smith equated leadership to a math problem. Going from Point A to Point B. Taking people from A to B requires leadership. The Cherokee language describes things. We do not label them. ᏗᏓᏂᏙᎯ (DiDaNiDoHi) is one of the was we say Leader. It literally translates to “Taking them around holding them”. Chief Smith’s description clearly shows the leader taking the people from A to B. But, determining Point A includes understanding your relationship to place, time, economics, spirituality, family, hometown, community, and friends, etc. It can be a humbling experience when you locate your Point A in relation to the world around you, your history and any possible future. He called this an “exercise in humility” and the first step in building your confidence. In the Cherokee language the phrase we say that most often is translated to Confidence is ᎤᏓᏙᎯᏳᎯ (UDaDoHiYuHi). It’s complete meaning is “Have confidence in yourself and do not doubt your abilities, but temper all with humility”. In our culture Confidence and Humility are the 2 sides of the same coin.

Learning leadership is a lifelong pursuit. I think of it as a lifelong journey. It’s trying to be a better you today then you were yesterday and leaning something today that will help you be a better you tomorrow.

In Leading From Your Own Medicine we begin that journey in the East. It was here I first asked you to work on identifying and quantifying your values and belief system, Anderton’s Rule#2. It is here where you also start checking off Chief Smith’s list that defines Point A.

In our stop in the South, you begin to identify your personal Point B. I asked you to ponder the questions, where do you want to go and what will it take for you to get there. Chief Smith answered those questions for the Cherokee Nation with the Declaration of Designed Purpose, a detailed outline of what our Nation would look like in 100 years. Yours doesn’t need to be that expansive, but it can be. You decide.

In the West. You were asked to start filling in the planks in your personal origine story. As Chief Smith pointed out, this is integral work in defining Point A for you. How did you get here? Who where your people and where did they come from. As Cherokees, that side of the family was easy to document. Yours may not be that easy. For my children’s maternal side, I had to go digging. On their maternal grandmother’s side, Nicholas Cady arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s. Fleeing England because he had helped foment a revolt against the King, he joined the Puritans in the “New World”.

As you can see, Leadership is not an event, it’s a Life Long Journey. It’s a spiritual exercise of discovering who you are and how to be better at being you.

I will close this with another quote for Peter Enderton. As you read this, remember the story of how the little Water Spider brought fire to the Cherokee people:

“You don’t actually have to be a politician, or a four-star general, or some sort of chief executive to be a leader. Actually, every single one of us can make a difference. Every single one of us is a leader in some way or another, because leadership isn’t actually about position. Leadership is about who you are”

It was with Taylor that we began to confuse Leadership with Management. Taylorism was an improvement on Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. Although Taylor dehumanized the workforce, seeing them as simply another cog in the machine. It was an improvement over The Prince because it did not openly call for lying, cheating and even murder if it kept you in power.

A century later, Taylorism eventually led the way to a more modern view of leadership that became known as the “Rockstar CEO”. This was the Hero who came in with all the answers and brought companies back from the cliff of ruin.

But, all yall know that one person can’t know everything and have ALL the answers. My friend, Dr. Rob Sheehan, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Smith School of Business announced in his blog that “The old school model of the leader as Hero is dead. And in today’s complex environment, no leader has all the answers.” I’m always happy when academic instruction catches up to the Original Teachings the Cherokee began passing down to us thousands of years ago.

Harvard Business Review online, January 14, 2026 published an article by T. Chamorro-Premuzic, and A. Edmondson, “The Best Leaders Are Great Followers”. In this article they boil things down to five key capabilities of exemplary Follower-Leaders.

· Active Listening – Listening to understand instead of listening to prepare your response, protect your ego or validate what you already “know”.

· Prioritizing Results Over Credit: Listen with the intent of finding what works best for the group’s mission and subordinate your need for individual applause.

· Reliable Execution: Ground yourself in reality of how and who actually gets the work done by maintaining a relationship with those on the frontlines.

· Critical Dissent: Welcome constructive pushback. I’ve always said that Good Friend is the one who tells you what you Need to Hear, not necessarily what you Want to hear. This feedback gives you early warning of red flags and risks, protecting you and the organization from the dangerous echo chambers when authority goes unchallenged.

· Coachability: Actively seeking feedback, communicates to your group that you value them and their ideas. It helps you avoid the traps of complacency and obsolescence that often come with a senior level title.

Let’s look at these capabilities of exemplary Follower-Leaders that Chamorro-Premuzic, and Edmondson listed. Do these sound familiar or have you seen these before?

Thousands of years ago, the first teacher of leadership revealed how a true leader behaves across the sky for everyone to see and learn. ᏌᏌ(Prounced – SaSa) the Great Goose taught us these lessons as they formed their V and flew great distances on their annual migrations

.In Leading From You Own Medicine the journey around the Cherokee Medicine Wheel takes us to the South. Because I take the time there to site the “Modern” scientific research I will only summarize it here without the proper attributions. In the Original Teachings SaSa told us to go as a group. As I explained in the journey around the Medicine Wheel, SaSa gathers in groups and forms a V to increase the distance they can fly. To maximize the energy savings, they talk to each other all the time to keep the group as close as they can to the Optimum Wingtip Spacing. What looks like chaos in the point of the V is them sharing leadership so as not to overly work one leader. (“Precision and Dynamics of Positioning by Canada Geese Flying in Formation,” By F.R. Hainsworth and October 2001 Nature; Energy Saving in Flight Formation, by Henri Weimerskirch)

Chamorro-Premuzic, and Edmondson used other words to express the same ideas on communication, giving and receiving feedback and being coachable. SaSa learned these lessons centuries ago and shared them with humans for us to learn. It’s just taken some of us longer to catch up.

A true leader follows these teachings, striving to improve daily. I’ll borrow a phrase from the great Blues musician Lead Belly who in 1938 urged his listeners to “Stay Woke”. He wanted them to pay attention to their surroundings, be aware of the systems in which they operated and how their actions can and do influence their environments. I’ve seem to be coming back again and again to one idea. If you want to be a great leader, you must do the hard work of improving your state of mind. A true leader is also a great follower because they practice the teachings of SaSa which is backed up by the research of Chamorro-Premuzic, and Edmondson.

Back when I was doing mostly grazing management work, I would attend different conferences across the country. I still recommend that practice, especially to younger folks. Whatever your specialized field, these are the places where folks on the cutting edge gather to share ideas, discuss difficulties and gain new insights. This is where you want to be. It’s also where I found my wife, but that’s s story for another time.

At these grazier meetings I would often visit with Amish gentlemen about how they managed their pastures. The first thing you notice when in conversation with an Amish grazier is that any question that might give you an idea of how big his operation was, got the same answer, Enough

.How many acres do you graze? How many beef or dairy animals, sheep or goats do you graze? Enough was always the answer.

I can be slow on the uptake sometimes, but I do finally catch up. They had enough animals and land and time to do the important things in their lives.

So, lets quickly look at the origin and meaning of this word Enough. It seems to have come from the Old English around 1300 and is from the word “Genog”. That word meant “sufficient in quantity or number”. It is used today to mean, having or requiring an adequate, sufficient, or satisfactory amount of something. Geoffrey Chaucer is credited with putting together “Enough is as good as a feast” in his The Nun’s Priest’s Tale about 1395. It was to mean that having exactly what you need is just a satisfying as overindulging.

The Amish concept of “enough” is called Gelassenheit. It is the idea of having just what you need to live simply, rather than wanting more. This mindset values community, humility, and family over wealth and greed.

This is not significantly different than the Cherokee values governing economics. We built a successful economy from ruins in 1838 to a flourishing Nation in the 1880’s on the question, “What can I give this other person?” I’ve told you the story of MA Senator, Henry Dawes and his description of the Cherokee Nation in 1883. I won’t retell that story here but you can find it at this link: Basis of Civilization

I’m talking about a mind set that is focused on values. The Amrish live a life where their values come first. That’s the way a true leader lives their life. You don’t have to ask what a true leader believes. All you have to do is watch that person. Their actions speak so loudly that you don’t even need to hear their words.

Just liked the Amish a leader focusing on People, Not Things. Without modern distractions like televisions or smartphones, the Amish focus their time on deep relationships. They believe human connections and faith are what truly matter. As you strive to be your best leader, remember what Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote to us in the last Century BCE. The only way to achieve anything is through other people. Leadership is about working WITH people.

Just like your values, you get to define enough for yourself, your family and your community. It’s up to you.

The world recently created our first Trillionaire. I don’t even understand how much money that is. So, let’s walk through this little exercise. Let’s put our $1Trillion in a bank for 2% annual return. We go on a spending bender or $10Million a day. We would never run out of money. We would have to jack spending up to $1Billion a day to run out in almost 3 years. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t need that type of money. That’s WAY beyond enough for me

There are a couple of other things that go along with this mindset that we can learn from the Amish. The first is “Being intentional about what you let into your life”. The Amish don’t shun all technology. They are simply very intentional about what they allow into their lives. Remember that Time is the most important AND valuable thing we have. Someone may come along and take your money. You can work hard, like you did to get it in the first place, and make more money. Someone comes along and takes your life. You are done. Don’t trade your life for the latest toy.

Be intentional about how you use that time. Spend this resource on the MOST important things in your life. Build deep relationships with family, friends, community, the team you lead at work. All of that makes you a stronger leader.

Another things we can learn is to Celebrate Everything and keep the celebration simple. The Amish I know don’t even wrap presents for any occasions. The celebration is in spending time with friends, family and community.

Imagine what effect you could have on your team and company of you stood up in a large group gathering and said, “Did yall see what Pricilla did this Month/Quarter/Year? She reduced our waste materials cost / increased our quality percentage by / reduced our transportation costs by. Pricilla is a Rock Star for our organization.” Eat a meal together and watch folks talk. Do that and watch Pricilla grow, the team grow and your organization prosper. I’ve seen that result on manufacturing assembly lines and in a group of sheep herders. Do it consistently and get out of the way.

The Amish put First things First. They live by their values. Again, I’m preaching to know what you believe and then walk that talk. What are the pivotal points in your life? For the Amish it is simple - Family, neighbors, friends, faith. They are not interested in a newer car, the latest phone, or another promotion.

It all starts with your mind set. Because you are a Leader, you make the decision on what ENOUGH is for your situation. You get to recognize family/team members who are excelling and celebrate with them. You get to decide what are the FIRST things in your life.

Last week I introduced you to an individual that I have never met in person, Boyd Varty. I have, however, read much of his writing and find his mind fascinating. What I admire most is that he has spent his life watching nature and absorbing the life lessons nature wants to teach us. He has studied everything from the soil to the lion and all the different ways those two things are connected. I’ve called those teachings, “Original Knowledge”. The natural world was our original teacher. Because of where Mr. Varty grew up, he has taken that to a higher level than most of us ever will be able to achieve.

This week I want to discuss Varty’s idea of the “Village”, a “rural, self-sustaining, and community-oriented village is the ideal of how we all should live”. I have had some experience living in a village in both rural and urban environments. It is that experience that makes be believe Varty is probably correct.

For a number of years, I lived in eastern Montana. This is a beautiful country of table top flat farm fields along the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers to the ridge of the Big Sheep Mountain dividing the two watersheds. The most densely populated county I lived in was Richland. It bordered North Dakota and had both river systems running through it. It also had oil and gas development that brought in people. It has a population density of about 5.6 people per square mile. For reference, the mean population density for the US is about 45 people per square mile. The last two counties I lived in both had population densities of 0.6 people per square mile. The joke during Covid social distancing was “6 Ft, that seems awfully close”.

What I loved the most of these communities, was that everyone understood that they depended on everyone else for survival. That’s not hyperbole.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1985 the official temperature in Glasgow, MT was -60 degrees. The official thermometer only went to -60 degrees. Folks in that part of the world count days below Zero like everyone else in America counts days below freezing (32^o F).

The land will kill you if you can’t get to help. Remember, help is most likely more than 2 miles away. Factor in a 10-mph wind and -20 now feels like -41 and your bare skin freezes in 30 minutes. You will need your village to stay alive.

The folks that live in those kinds of places understand all of this. They grow up knowing they need each other. In Prairie County from about the first of April until the 4^th of July Your weekends were booked. Each Saturday morning you knew who’s ranch you were going to work calves, brand and doctor all their new calves. One of those weekends, everyone would be at your place. Everyone worked together to make sure everyone had a chance to make another season.

The other side of that is Tulsa, OK. My folks bought a house there when I was 2 years old. The family still owns that house. Although there was hay being cut within a half mile of the house when they bought it, this was not a rural community. Our street was a city block long. The street T’d at both ends to get out of the neighborhood. There were 20 houses on that block. At one point there were about 45 kids on that block with ages spanning less than 10 years. My mother would tell a story of me coming home from kindergarten one day and announcing I wasn’t going back. She asked me why? According to her, I responded, “I’ve been going to that school for a whole week and haven’t learned to read or nothing. I could play with all those kids at home.”

Today all of us kids would be labeled “Free Range Children”. We just thought we were having fun together. We made up our own games, designed the rules and settled any disputes on our own. When I did something mean, dumb or stupid, which was often, news of my act got home before I did. Families cared about ALL kids and helped raise all of them. It was a “Village”.

We understood we needed each other. When my friend from across the street and 1 door south’s father was sent to Vietnam, all the adults made a point to check on his well being daily. One day his mother got a call. My friend’s father wasn’t coming home. I saw a village come together to help a suffering member. It was in this personal disaster that the reason for all the work of making a village became obvious to me as a young person.

Varty teaches that in this time of fractured communities, “pockets of coherence”, are essential. He defines a thriving Village this way:

· Self-sustaining (economically, socially, and ecologically)

· Maintains harmony between people and the environment

· Builds resilience to challenges

· Can become self-replicating, inspiring others to adopt the model

Like me, Varty believes you can build a village wherever you live that embracing the idea that living is part of a new consciousness that can not only restore humans but also restore the planet.

I really like that he expands his Village Model to running a business. A business should be more than place that employs people and sells some product. It should be a place that has a Shared Vision, Strong Culture and gives Individual Purpose.

Fore communities, the Village Model is about creating a place that is more than just a place to “come home to”. A community should be a place that supports both people and the planet.

In the small town in which I reside, we are building a new 198-year-old “Village”. With support from the Cherokee Nation, the Southern Cherokee Helpers is once again building a Cherokee “Village”. Many Cherokee families have lived here since the Removal. Some famous like Rich Joe Vann, the Elon Musk of the early 1800’s. Most of us were not as well known.

We have a first of its kind Community Center in Muskogee County. We are holding Cultural Workshops on everything from preserving food to make culturally appropriate clothing. We have Language and History classes in the planning process. We are building human connections between our families.

You can do this in your community. Find your people. Share with them Varty’s Village Model. Get to work wherever you are NOW.

We all just have to look outside and see that the world is in chaos. Costs for everything are going up. Food, energy, housing, health care, education and transportation have all gone up. It’s been faster in some places and economic sectors than others. But, everything is going up. “Natural” disasters are occurring more often and at larger scales than at any time in my life. Governments across the globe are brutalizing their citizens and the citizens of their neighbors.

What is going on is rightly called a “Polycrisis”. This is a term coined by French theorists Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern in the 1990’s and became widely used in the 2010’s to describe multiple crises (economic, environmental, geopolitical, social, or technological) happening at the same time and that amplify each other.

Now that we have a label to paste on what’s going on, what do we do about it. The old saying about when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging comes to mind. There is much more work than just to stop making the hole deeper. One of my teachers always told us that when we found ourselves in a mess, after stopping doing what got us there, we should turn 180 degrees and start doing the opposite. The first question to help us solve this polycrisis is simply “how did we get here?”

Early in my use of this platform, I explained how Darwin got ecology wrong. I don’t get to blame Darwin for this one. Our thinking about how the universe works got messed up in 1687 by Sir Issac Newton. He gave us the Three Fundamental Rules of Motion and Gravitation. Newton gave us the “Clockwork Universe”. We learned to reduce things down to their fundamental parts to learn how they work and then make them more efficient.

This worked well for around 200 years. Using his teachings, we are able to fly and even go to the moon. We can build huge buildings and massive bridges. We can build fast and safe cars. It doesn’t help us when things move at extremely high speeds (Special Relativity). Think about my writing on the Direction In on the Medicine Wheel Model. Newton falls short when we deal with extremely small scales like subatomic particles (Quantum Mechanics) and huge gravitation forces (General Relativity). All of these ideas start to fall apart when we try to move them from mechanical systems (machines) to living systems (ecology and psychology).

Fullerton explains how conventional economic theory is based on Newton’s machine logic. Even the foundation of modern management theory, as brought to us in 1911 by Frederick Taylor, aims at maximizing efficiency. We have seen the rise of giving purpose to the workers is a means to control those workers. The machine logic implies we are in control. We may not be supporting the leadership philosophy of Machiavelli, murder is okay as long as you stay in power, but, we are trying to optimize efficiency and control for our own ends. Fullerton recently wrote, “This naïve desire to control and optimize, as I have written, is rooted in the myth of separation, the idea that we are separate from one another, and from Earth, our home.” Fullerton just drew a straight line to Smuts.

Jan Chruatiaan Smuts’ taught us that Holism is the fundamental principle that living systems are small wholes that come together to form new larger unified wholes and exhibit properties and behaviors not present in the smaller wholes (individual parts). You cannot break things down into the individual parts, as Newton suggested, and learn how and why they behave.

Pope Leo XIV writing’s urge us to orient technology for the common good of the people and the planet. He warns against the “trap of falling back into the old “technocratic paradigm”. It lets the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions”. He goes on steeped in the rich Catholic tradition of social justice, the dignity of the human being and the need for doing things for the “common good”. Ideas like everyone is mutual responsibility of all others. “Social justice is the capacity of a social, economic and political order to allow everyone, particularly the weakest, to live a truly dignified life, without leaving anyone behind” That sound a lot like a large whole connected to all other wholes working together for a common good and a straight line from Smuts to Pope Leo.

This line brings us from the Pope to the Lion Tracker. Boyd Varty, grew up on the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa started by his grandfather, Charles Boyd Varty in 1926. The word Lomdolozi is Zulu and means ‘Protector Of All Living Things’. Varty sees the “Village” as one of the best models for how people can live in harmony with each other and the natural world. His newest project is the creation of a Village Blueprint for a better life for people in a rural, self-sustaining, and community-oriented village with a clear mission.

Varty’s vision is built on “The Two Pillars of the Village”.

Hardware the integration of sustainable technologies and practices that enable living in balance with nature.

Heartware the “technology of the human heart,” the shared values, care, and intention that unite people into a living system of mutual support.

Varty’s message is both practical and philosophical: Begin with your hardware and your heartware. When you do, the village will form where you are. Think about what I wrote in the Direction of North, about how we need to behave.

Crosslin Smith was the Cherokee Nation’s Spiritual Leader. He past on just over a year ago. Outsiders would often ask him, “What do you believe in?” His reply was always the same, “I believe in the Old Ways.” This is exactly what Varty is doing in his family’s home. His Village is built on the things he was taught as a boy as he walked through the bush with the indigenous trackers, learning not just to track lions, but also how to track a good life.

Mr Smith told us a story about his time at Chilocco Indian Boarding School. As we walked toward his class building, he saw a flock of birds on the ground. As he approached, they flew away except for one small bird. His first thought was that the bird must be injured and in need of help. Mr Smith picked it up and gently carried it along his path. He thought about what he could do to help the bird. As he started to open the door to the building the bird flew away. He concluded that because his thoughts were those of help for another, the bird received the healing he needed and flew. We are to care for the others with who we share the planet human, other animal, plant or soil. The Old Ways.

All of these ideas, from Mr Smith through Varty, Pope Leo, Fullerton and Smuts tell us that we are connected to everything everywhere. Holism is the mind set we need to address the world of polycrisis we are facing today. To some of you, this may be a new way of thinking. To others it may be clarifying some things you’ve been wrestling with in your mind. Maybe it’s just reaffirming what you already knew. Your current state doesn’t matter.

We’ve identified and named the hole we’ve dug. We have acknowledged the reason we are in it. We know the direction we should go to get out of that hole. Let’s walk together in that direction.

This is a question I’ve thought about for a long time. It is not a question that I take directly on in the Medicine Wheel book. I never come right out and address the issue. So, take a deep seat, measure your rien and I’ll open the gate on the issue of motivating others.

So much of what we’ve been taught about leadership is basically learning more effective methods of coercion of other people. How do I get you to behave in the manner I want?

When I was around 5 years old, I went to a friend’s birthday party. As party favors we all got one of those flyback paddle toys. At that time the paddle was wooden and had a rubber ball attached to it by a big rubber band. I cried all the walk home with that thing. I knew that at some point that rubber band would break and that paddle would be used on my butt. By the time I was in Jr High, my mom had polished that little piece of wood to a glossy shine on the seat of my Levis. I was really good at pushing the limits of what was acceptable behavior in her house. Now don’t get me wrong. My mother loved me deeply and protected me all her life. She had been raised by working cowboys in an environment where wrong behavior could get someone or some animal killed quickly. So, when I wouldn’t stop, she would get my attention.

Modern leadership training has a lot in common with my mother’s approach of improving behavior and has not changed much since 1513. Niccolò Machiavelli finishing his book The Prince that year and it was published in 1532 and remains an influential thesis on leadership and politics. The bottom line of this book is whatever it takes to stay in power, do it. It is okay to lie, steal, cheat even commit murder as long as you can stay in power. It is my belief that real leadership training in European based societies stopped on this date and was stagnate for around 450 years.

Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in WWII and later the 34^th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower told us that, “You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault – Not leadership.” I think Ike knew something about leadership that was lost after the 1500’s.

Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in WWII and later the 34^th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower described what leadership is not. “You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault – Not leadership.” I think Ike knew something about leadership that was lost after the 1500’s.

Why did men literally storm beaches for Eisenhower? Why did a country elect him to the highest station in that land? The answer to those questions are in my Medicine Wheel model of leadership. They Trusted him. They had seen him “Walk his Talk”. In the East you identified the values that are most important to you. You can motivate others by simple living your belief system.

The Duke University Fuqua School of Business breaks it down like this. The old models of what motivates humans, like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, do not describe today’s world or the humans in them. After a person gets past survival, I’m not sure that those models ever fit any world

Duke Professor Jack Soll’s work on the power of collective intelligence highlights the “wisdom of select crowds.” He demonstrated that “aggregating judgments from a diverse group can lead to more accurate decisions than relying on individual expertise alone.” In the South, I discussed the importance of finding your people, “aggregating judgements from diverse groups”, in building trust within yourself and with others. Aaron Kay’s research, also at Duke, indicated that “clear frameworks and expectations” can foster motivation in goal-oriented teams. In the West, we discussed moving forward even in times of chaos to achieve the purpose you identified in the South.

Duke’s Fuqua School listed what they called, “Actionable Strategies to Inspire and Motivate Teams”. They listed seven points to increase motivation.:

· Communicate the relationship between the work at hand and the greater good for the team, company and the community.

· Invest in those you lead. Be a mentor, help them grow into the person they want to be,

· Trust them and show it daily. Admit your mistakes. Ask for input and listen,

· Individualize each interaction with the people you lead, get to know them as an individuals.

· Celebrate everything., small wins along the way to success, birthdays, company anniversaries, EVERYTHING.

· Encourage Peer Recognition for the things their peers do that help them in small and large ways,

· Remove Barriers Get your people the tools they need to do the job you/re asking of them and get out of the way.

Each one of these points could have come directly out of the Medicine Wheel Leadership Model. Communicate and get to know your people and let them know you. Invest in their present and future. Trust them or they will not trust you. Build a community of your people. Celebrate together and often. Help them build bonds between each other.

I always remember what one of my granddad’s friends told me. “A good hand knows how to get the work done. I top hand knows how to get out of the way.” Be a top hand. Get out of the way so your people can shine.

We started with the question, Can you really motivate other people? The true answer to that question is one of my favorite answers to any question. It Depends. If, you are doing the work to make yourself a better leader, the answer is yes. Your life will inspire others to follow, just like we followed Eisenhower into the hell of war and into the prosperity of peace. Be part of those that are doing the work.

My last essay started with me being surprised that other people were thinking along the same lines as I had been pondering. Well it happened again this week. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical Magnifica humanitas on this world. In it Pope Leo points out that we are “facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

Before we go any farther, let me point out that I am not a great fan of the Catholic Church or most of the folks who have held the position of Pope for historical reasons. I have some very good friends who are Catholic. I admire anyone who grabs hold of a set of values and then tries hard to live by those values. As we discuss in the Medicine Wheel book, staying on your path is very difficult. You need friends to help you. Your best friends will tell you when you are straying from your path. Cling to those people.

The last few Popes have seemed to be trying to walk their talk. To this outsider, it seems as if these Popes have been moving away from the Church’s dark past and moving into the light. Something we should all strive toward.

I have a hard time getting past Pope Nicholas V and his 1452 Dum Diversas (While Different). It bound Religion, Economic Growth and Militarism into one entity and moved the European Christian to run rampant over this world.

Let’s get back to this century. The good folks at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program did a great job of connecting the dots between what the Pope wrote and their cause for humans to flourish.

Pope Leo’s concern is how we orient this technology for the common good of the people and the planet. He warns against the trap of falling back into the old “technocratic paradigm”. It lets the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions”.

In your journey around the Cherokee Medicine Wheel, the South, ᎤᎦᎾᏭ (UGANAWU), I introduced you to Mickael Jones and his 2014 book, “The Soul of Place” he tells of the “Worldview dominated by economic, quantitative model of leadership constructed around a set of beliefs.” He called that set of beliefs “Four Great Myths.” Does that sound like what the Pope wrote?

The first of Jones’ myths is that we must not trust our natural instincts. We must act in deference to those with credentials and experience, especially those in places of authority. I think you can see the problem with trusting a machine that does not experience events, feel joy or understand what it is producing. As the Pope told us, AI only “imitates certain function of human intelligence.”

The second of the myths was that the “other” is a threat to us and must be objectified. We must separate ourselves from nature and the world around us, as well as those who are different in some way from us. From my earlier essays on Darwin I think you know my thoughts on our need for diversity.

His third great myth was that efficiency and control were essential to a good communal life. If we do not hold everything together through planning, logic, and control, our world will spin out of control, and all will be lost. The Pope called this type of thinking a Trap. Don’t fall into it.

The last of the myth is that life is a zero-sum equation. There is just not enough to go around. This myth wants you to believe that there is a winner and a loser in every human encounter.

The encounter must equal 0. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Cherokee economy was not based on the question, what can I get from that person? Rather, it was grounded in the question, what can I give to that person? This economic system led Henry Dawes, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, to state at the Lake Mohonk Conference in 1883:

“There was not a family in that whole nation that had not

a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation,

and the nation did not owe a dollar. It built its own capitol,

in which we had this examination, and built its schools and

its hospitals.”

Seminary Hall Northeastern State University - Sequoyah

Dawes explains why this is bad for the Cherokee people. We were not learning to be greedy. In Dawes’ opinion this was so bad that the U.S. government should disrupt our economic system so we can advance as people. This presentation by Senator Dawes is an example of the myths in action.

As Mickael Jones points out, these myths have been the basis for the harm leadership has inflicted on people for a long time. Here in the South, we can reconnect to our source of strength. We can reengage our emotions and listen to our instincts. We can begin to tell a new story about our lives.

The Pope’s writing goes on steeped in the rich Catholic tradition of social just, the dignity of the human being and the need for doing things for the “common good”. Ideas that a machine cannot understand. The Human Flourishing review goes on to say that “material goods are to sustain the lives of all, subsidiarity commending the cultivation and administration of those goods as locally organically as possible and solidarity identifying the mutual responsibility of each person for all others. Social justice is the capacity of a social, economic and political order to allow everyone, particularly the weakest, to live a truly dignified life, without leaving anyone behind”

That brings to my mind the Cherokee Community Value of ᏕᏣᏓᏟᏴᏎᏍᏗ (DeTsaDaTliYvSeSDi)

Struggle to hold on to one another or cling to one another.

When I addressed the Artificial Intelligence working group at Cal Poly Humbolt this spring, I stressed the need for AI to be designed by ethical people working for the common good of the people and the planet. In a previous essay, I shared with all yall the story of the Cherokee experience with the Printing Press and the Train. Will we choose to control AI as my Cherokee ancestors did with the printing press, or will it choose the Train example and let it destroy our government and our ability to self-govern? We will get to answer those questions in the very near future.

I have always found it interesting when the world jumps up and tells me this is how it works. The world did it again last week while I was writing to you about why our leadership pipeline seems to be drying up. I tried to tell you how complicated we have made leadership and concocted these complicated models for understanding and teaching leadership.

Then, the day after I posted that essay One of my teachers, Dr Rob Sheehan, sent me his weekly newsletter. For those of you who may not remember Dr Sheehan, he is a faculty member at the University of Maryland, teaching for the Smith School of Business and the Do Good Institute. Over the last decade or so, I’ve come to know him and admire his work.

The first sentence of his newsletter was, “We often overcomplicate things”. This is from a person who has written books and teaches university classes on business strategy. He takes a complete University semester to explain strategy. He then goes on to introduce the “Strategic KISS” model. Keep It Super Simple

In this model, his first step is answering these three questions:

1. Who are we?

2. Where are we going?

3. How are we going to get there?

Those questions could have come right out of my Cherokee Medicine Wheel Leadership model. In the East, ᏗᎧᎸᎬ, we address Dr Sheehan’s first question. The worksheets help you give that answer weight and a tool for you to use for making decisions based on who you are.

Many years ago, I was able to sit in on a leadership seminar conducted by then Ret. Army General Normal Schwarzkopf. He told us that, “Leadership is a potent combination of Strategy and Character. But, if you have to be without one, be without Strategy.”

By asking the question Who are you, Dr Sheehan, is asking you to define your character. The answers to his next two questions are the strategic part and come only after you have answered the character question.

That is one of the reasons in “Leading By Your Own Medicine” we start your leadership journey in the East. It is the direction of personal Renewal. If you don’t like who you have become the East is the direction for you to begin again. The Going To Water Ceremony was begun to give us a fresh start each day. Maybe you need to just cleanse yesterday’s mistakes. Maybe it goes deeper than just the surface. It doesn’t matter. The East is the place on renewal and you can do that here.

Dr Sheehan’s second question is Where are we going. This is answered in the South, ᏧᏕᎾᏮ ((UGaNaWu). As you will recall, South is the direction of healing. This is the direction where you decide what and where we want to be. In Dr Sheehan’s question he is asking the exact same thing. Where are you and your business going? Who and How do you want to be?

I asked you to find a place, preferably in a natural setting, where you feel safe and calm. This is to help you center your thoughts and calm your spirit for the work in the Medicine Wheel’s South. You were asked to write your mission statement. Mission statements are as varied as the people who write them. They can be as simple as Walt Disney’s four-word mission; “To Make People Happy”. They can also be quite long. I worked with a family business that wanted to have a statement that included all their diverse businesses. These included a large family ranch as well as a business that published more Bibles than any other company in the world. Their statement was several pages long.

Yours needs to be long enough for you. No one else has a say in its length. Whatever you decide will be just right. Design your statement with the size and content of the smallest whole you manage. It may or may not include the natural environment. The people who live and work in this whole and anything else you see as integral to the life you want to live.

Dr Sheehan’s third question is “How do we want to get there.” The answers to this question will come from the work you did in the West, ᏭᏕᎵᎬ (WuDeLiGv), as well as the North, ᎤᏴᏢ (UYvTlv).

In the West, you will decide how confident you are that the direction you are going will lead you to your desired goal. Rember the teachings of ᎠᏫ (AWi), the Deer. When in doubt, take small, elegant steps as you move in uncertainty. Your steps will become bolder as your path becomes clearer.

In the North, you were encouraged to show up for what is. It may not be what you expected. It may be something you don’t want. Show up anyway. Once my business partner, Rick, and I drove the 175 miles from Circle Montana to Malta, Montana to give testimony on a Bureau of Land Management hearing on a proposed integrated land management plan. We were the only people to show up. We got heard by the planners. So, I will repeat myself. Show Up. Do the work that is yours to do and move courageously toward the world that you want. As I wrote last week, Incarnate your vision, Give it life.

As Dr Shehan wrote in his newsletter, Answer the three questions. Be who you are. Decide where you want to go. Go there. That is as simple as I have ever heard my ideas for the Medicine Wheel Leadership Model ever explained - Keep It Super Simple.

There are over 57,000 books on Amazon with “Leadership” in their titles. That’s across all their formats. LinkedIn has over 1,000+ jobs listed for Leadership Coaching. Glassdoor as of May 2026 had approximately 4,671 remote leadership coaching jobs available. The executive coaching and leadership development market is estimated to be a $112.98 Billion industry for 2026.

In April of this year, Havard Business Review published an article titled “How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach.” Gallup’s Workplace Engagement Data shows that in the US only 31% of employees feel highly involved, care about their company and are passionate about the company’s goals. The other end of that spectrum is Actively Disengaged employees. The data shows that in the US 17% are not only unhappy but actively undermine the company’s performance and morale.

There is SOOO much out there to help us become effective Leaders. It is an industry with a market over $100 billion. There are 10s of thousands of books, thousands of coaches to help us. Why are we failing so badly

There are a number of places in our leadership education system that are failing. Those all boil down to How We Think of leadership. Let’s talk about a few of those choke points.

First is this idea that there can only be one leader. We built whole systems on this idea that there is only one person at the top that does all the leading. In the last couple of centuries, we have adopted the military model of command and control for almost all forms of human organization. It is a pyramid. All the foot soldiers at the bottom with the Supreme Allied Commander at the top. The same design runs ramped through business, education, medical systems and many more. Having no personal experience in the military I can only say that it appears to work well when war breaks out.

All systems do what they are designed to do. In this case it is to find THE leader that can achieve whatever goals they may have. It excludes other people and places them into subordinate roles. It chokes off any pipeline to the top of the pyramid. We bemoan the “fact” that there aren’t any leaders anymore. It’s because we’ve quit giving people opportunities to lead because of the model we have chosen.

However, this model is just the opposite of the original teachings we received on leadership from SaSa, the great goose. I’ve shared this teaching and the modern science that supports the ancient ways in several places in my book and here in these essays. The only space I will take up here is to say, Go with Like-Minded People and SHARE.

Another choke point is our educational system and how it models and teaches leadership. Just look at the leadership models our university systems are using.

This example is from the good people of the University of Minnesota Extension Service and used in the Community Leadership program. Most of the points they emphasize in their quadrants are actually ways to improve the manipulation of people below you in the organization. It emphasizes “Acting” courageously, ethically and leading with empathy. It does not say BE courageous and ethical or having empathy for others. The Minnesota model wants you to Explore Differences, Exhibit Self-Awareness, Recognize Statues and Power and Adress issues. Instead let’s Celebrate Differences, Be Sefl-Aware, Discuss Issues and Dissolve Status and Power in our Organizations.

Looking at the marketplace, the answer seems to be to get yourself a Coach. After all, companies are looking for almost 5,000 people to fill those roles. So where do these coaches come from. The vast majority of them come from the same system that has created this mess. What you end up getting is better acting skills and more efficient ways to manipulate other people.

I highly recommend you read Jerry Harvey’s 1988 book, “The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management” The Title essay is a story about how groups collectively agree on a course of action that no individual member actually wants. My second favorite essay is, ”Organizations as Phrog Farms”. It examines toxic work environments, using the metaphor of a “Phrog” Farm, it’s spelled phrog because most frogs don’t want to know, that’s what they are. A Phrog Farm is an organization that has created an environment that is degrading and dysfunctional and turns people into phrogs, but leaders and employees are too comfortable to leave. This 1988 book explains why we haven’t advanced in our leadership training for almost 40 years.

You don’t need more training. You don’t need more coaching. What you need, to become a better, more effective leader is to become a better version of you.

As I reminded you last week, Peter Anderton is on target with his 2 Rules of Leadership:

· It’s not about you.

· It’s all about you.

I wrote Leading From Your Own Medicine to help you become the leader that is already in you. Because we paid attention to our original teachers, we’ve known what Anderton is teaching today for at least a millennium.

One of our earliest stories is about how Cherokee were given fire. What follows is the abridged version.

Cherokees lived near a large body of water, with islands out in the water that surrounded our home. The animals noticed that we had no fur or feathers to keep us warm and were often cold during bad weather. The animals held a Grand Council to discuss these poor beings and their plight. During the Council, a thunderstorm blew into the area. Lightning struck a hollow tree on a nearby island. A flame could be seen coming out of the old tree trunk.

The animals discussed how they might get the fire from the tree and take it to the Cherokee. Yona the leader of the Bear Clan, said it would be his honor because he was the largest and strongest of the animals. He failed burning the hair off his paws in the process. Horned Owl said he would be next because he was the largest and strongest of the Winged creatures. He also failed, burning his face and eyes in the process.

After many failures the Council finally listened to ᎧᎿᏁᏍᎩ KaHnaNeSGi ᎠᎹ Ama, little Water Spider. She could not swim, but, because of her small size she could walk on water. She had no paws, but she could spin a web. She walked to the tree, spun a small basket, put an ember in the basked and took fire to the Cherokee people.

The smallest of the community brought the Cherokee a gift that continues to give after thousands of years. As a leader, who are you discounting as a possible leader for your next big project?

You don’t need more books or a coach to become a better leader. You need to become a better you. You can do that simply by taking a Journey around and into the Cherokee Medicine Wheel. The path is there to follow. Visit each direction. Do the work while at that direction. Grow into who you want to be. That person is already inside you.

A wise mentor once told me that the answers to the most complicated questions were often the simplest. I have been a member of AEA for the biggest part of two decades. We just celebrated our 40^th year of existence, so, I’ve been a part of this organization for almost half of its life. It was formed in 1986 with the merger of two existing organizations, to bring together professionals from diverse fields to advance the theory, practice, and methods of evaluation. AEA has roots deep in our system of higher learning and government policy. It was founded by mostly men with European heritage and grounded in the ideas of reductionist thinking (Break everything down to its part to study it.).

The 2025-26 Cohort is brighter and much younger than me. None of us hold positions with power within the AEA society. How do we De-Colonize an organization with over 6,000 members?

I look back at our journey around the Cherokee Medicine wheel and remember our very first stop, ᏗᎧᎸᎬ (KaLvGv) East, the doorway to a new day. I think of the Cherokee Prayer to the East:

From the appearing way Merciful Creator,

Thank you for the Sun which purifies.

It brings light into the world,

Enlightenment into the darkness,

And understanding to the ignorant.

Help us to be the bearers of your light..

At its core, de-colonizing anything is bringing light to purify, enlighten and foster understanding. We must each be that light and that starts with working on ourselves.

Peter Anderton got it right with his Two Rules of Leadership:

Rule 1: It’s NOT about you.

Rule 2: It’s ONLY about you.

Rule 1 could have come right out of Cisero’s writings. It is only through working with others that anything in Government gets done. Rule 2 is what I’ve used so many words to try and describe. To lead, we must strive o be the best person we can possibly be. Now that’s HARD work.

In the East we work on clarifying our personal belief system. The questions are, What do I believe and Why?

In the South ᎤᎦᎾᏭ (UGANAWU), is the direction of healing. In the Cherokee Prayer to the South we give thanks for the blessings we have received. The last line goes a little farther:

For blessing us and enabling us to be a blessing to others.

In de-colonization work, East is for renewal of ourselves and a re-visioning of what can be. In the South, that re-visioning is expanded to our world, healing the pain of our pain as well as that of our community members.

I have written before about how when we move through this world, we leave a wake behind us, just like boats. Those wakes can be destructive. Like when we move too fast, leave a giant wake and capsize someone else’s boat. Or we could move slower, more carefully and gently rock that other person’s boat. It’s our choice to be either a blessing or are we a curse.

At this point we’ve clarified our belief system and made decisions about how we will walk our talk. How do we move that into the larger world around us? How do we de-colonize any of our institutions?

For this important step we will move to the NORTH ᎤᏴᏢ (UYVTLV). This is the place of acceptance. Now, stay with me here. Acceptance does not mean giving up and surrendering to the Colonizers. Surrendering is walking away. What I am suggesting here is that in the face of the unacceptable, show up anyway.

The Cherokee Prayer to the North holds great teachings for us.

From the way of the cold Great Creator,

Thank you for the cold, the snow that winter brings.

It brings purity to the earth and renews your creation.

Thank you for the seasons of winter in our lives.

It is our facing of such trials that allows us to renew our lives.

Grant us the strength to endure.

Be thankful for Winter. It purifies the earth and renews all of creation. It reminds us to be thankful for the Winter in our lives because it also renews us as we ask for the strength to endure.

One of the GEDI students I met with asked, “How do you find the courage to move forward?” Until recently I had forgotten about Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech in Paris France. This speech encourages all to have courage in the face of criticism. It’s called “The Man in the Arena” speech. I wish I had thought of it when this GEDI asked her question. This is just a small portion of it:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spend himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fail, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I spent several holidays riding on Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch near Medora, ND. It is one of the few places in NoDakLand that I would describe as beautiful. It’s now called Theodore Roosevelt National Park and just off Interstate 94. You should go. It turned a sickly New York kid into a Cowboy as he learned more about courage.

Many times, in my life I have shown up to a situation that was not what I was hoping for. It was not what I wanted. I showed up by acting. living and working as if the world I wanted and dreamed of, was already in place. I made changes in my management of the physical ecosystem as well as the human ecosystem that favored the results in my dreams. I was scoffed at by experts, laughed at by community members. I had folks explain in great detail why what I was doing wasn’t going to work. I would calmly reply that they were probably right, it probably wouldn’t work. But, I was not smart enough to know that. So, I was going to try and see what happened.

More often than not, what I tried came about. My vision was realized. I had “Incarnated” the world I wanted. We can De-Colonize any institution by becoming the best person we can be, blessing those within our community and behaving like the world we want already exists. I as tried to explain in a previous post, as we get closer to The Center, time does some really strange things. Perhaps the world de-colonized world we dream of, already exists in another dimension in the “Spooky Entanglements” Einstein wrote about.

Together we can De-Colonize the world. The way is simple. Live our values. Behave as if the world is already the way we want it to be. Show up in our most courageous way. I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was simple.

DoNaDa GoHvE

For an agriculturally based business those three things are essential. But, if you sit down and think about it, those three things are essential to any business. What quality of life do you want for those folks that work for your business? What are you going to produce? What type of environment do you need around the business, both physically and societally for it to flourish?

As a leader, those are important questions to ask and even more important to answer. As we’ve already discussed, the answers must be rooted deeply in your values. Before I run down that trail again, I want to talk about the word Flourish. What does it mean to “Flourish”? How does someone go about flourishing?

Governments and institutions of higher learning measure and study Standard of Living. That term is used to describe the level of wealth, comforts, material goods, and necessities available to folks in a certain class in a certain geographic area. most often used to compare peoples across political boundaries. It measures things like income per capita, Gross Domestic Product, and life

expectancy. Those measurements are used to deduce the well-being of people across nations and regions.

On the other hand, flourishing gets us into the realm of Quality of Life. Flourishing and your Quality of Life goals concern all aspects of your life. It deals with your relationships with others and how well you feel about those people and your relationship with them. It’s about striving for an “Ideal”. But, it also includes the ‘relative attainment’ of that ideal.

Most of us don’t think of the word “Good” is a culturally loaded term. But, it is. Depending on what culture you come from or live within, “good” can vary greatly across cultures and context. However, there is also a considerable amount of common ground giving us a reasonable place to start.

The Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science has already begun that start with the Human Flourishing Program, Directed by Dr. Tyler J. VanderWeele. In their April 2026 newsletter, they reported that’ “while overall life evaluation and financial security are higher in high-income countries, other aspects of well-being, such as meaning, pro-social character, and relationships, are often higher in middle-income countries”. To me that means that a high Standard of Living does not equal a high Quality of Life.

When we look at the Holistic Three Part Goal, the quality of your life rests on the things you produce. That leads us to the same question that Dr VanderWeele’s team called critical – “How we can carry out economic development without compromising life meaning, character, and relationships”.

On my Substack page I recommend following the work of John B. Fullerton, Founder, Capital Institute and author of Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis. I was amazed when I found out how much this Wall Street guy and I have in common. He sits on the Board of what I knew as the Center for Holistic Management and is now the Savory Institute. He has walked the same grasslands and visited with the same ranchers I knew in Montana. I do not pretend to understand economics. But, I do have an understanding of Holism and how everything is connected. Mr. Fullerton understands that as well. I understand his work through that lens of holism. A holistic world view is also what the Dr VanderWeele is encouraging with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard.

Standard of Living calculations do not look at the connectedness of people, places and things. It does not recognize the holistic view point. Standard of Living is something a government measures and thinks about. It has very little to do with a person’s Quality of Life. To be a flourishing human being we must include the context in which we live. That context includes our human communities and the ecological environment. Flourishing, or a high quality of life includes relationships with other people and the land we inhabit.

As Leaders, we must remember the eudaimonia teachings of Aristotle. He defined eudaimonia as flourishing and wellbeing. He thought it was the highest human good, representing a life well-lived. Aristotle saw this as a lifelong journey striving to be the best each of us can be.

Which brings us back to living a virtuous life. From the work you’ve completed in the East, you should have a good handle on what you believe and how to use the Decision Matrix to help you make choices that are congruent with your beliefs. General Norman Schwarzkopf told us that leaders always Know the “Right” thing to do. Then he asked, “Do you have the courage to do it?” Using a phrase I learned in a class last month, we incarnate our values. Bring our values into to life. More simply, we walk our talk. Lets flourish together.

This week I want to start at the point we left off last week. Then, I hope to connect some dots with some of the things we’ve covered so far on our journey.

We must travel in this world leaving a wake that shows all our community members, Human, Animal, Plant and Spirit that we hold them as sacred/important beings. ᎤᎵᏍᎨᏗ ᏕᏣᏓᏰᎸᏎᏍᏗ (ULiSGeDi DeTsaDaYeLvSeSDi)

In communities all around us, people we care about keep falling behind. Our friends and neighbors are falling deeper into poverty, they are struggling with living paycheck to paycheck, and many are falling out of what we thought was the middle class at an alarming rate.

Let us go back and look at the Original Teachings and see what they can tell us about how to live today

.One of the things I love about our Cherokee stories is that the hero at the end of a story is often the one seen as the least capable at the beginning. This theme is repeated often. In our origin of fire story, AMa KaHnaNeSGi, Water Spider, is too small and too weak to bring fire to the Humans, but, she did, after the bigger stronger animals failed. In the Crooked Faced Boy story, the city tried to shun the boy because of his deformity, but, he befriended the Monsters of the forest. Together the boy and the monsters brought the people the knowledge of the forest they needed to prosper. The least among us is the one that provides the community what we need.

In modern community development there is a school of thought referred to as ABCD, Asset Based Community Development. In 1993, at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research. John L. McKnight and John P. Kretzmann co-authored, “Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing A Community’s Assets”

In their book they brought forward the idea that

1. All members of a community had gifts and talents that the community needed.

2. Relationships build a community: For a community to be sustainable, all had to be in relationship with everything.

3. Citizens at the center: Community members had to be Actors in, not Recipients of development.

4. Leaders involve others: it involves a broad base of community action. The More the Merrier.

5. Care, Listen, Act: to the community and in that order.

6. Institutions serve the community: The traditional institutions in power create opportunities for community-member involvement, then “step back.”.

As I wrote that list, I could not help but remember the Teachings of SaSa, the Great Goose (Darwin Got it Wrong Part1). Go together. Communicate constantly with one another. Take turns leading.

Rember what Cicero the Roman Senator taught us. To accomplish anything in government, it is only accomplished with the people.

Even before Cicero there was the Chinese philosopher Laozi who wrote the Tao-Te-Ching, “The Way of Integrity”. He told us, “But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, His aims fulfilled, they will say: We did this ourselves.”

I thought of the work of Peter Wohlleben and his wife Miriam in Germany and the studies of Dr. Suzanne Simard and her students in British Columbia (Darwin Got it Wrong Part2). The forest cooperates and shares resources with each other and across species. Trees grow taller and live longer when they cooperate. They reproduce most often in stable healthy forests. This is why they have evolved to help each other.

ABCD is a great model for community development. It is also a great model for moving through this world. In kindergarten, we learned that when we go places, we hold hands with our friends and classmates. We communicate with each other so that everyone understands why we are going this way. We share our lunch because some of our friends may be hungry. We take turns and don’t leave anyone out.

My dear friend Dr Bob Stilger wrote, “Seff reliance and interdependence work together. It takes many people with diverse perspectives, skills and strengths to make a community. A community itself is stronger when it is consciously nested in a weave of reciprocal relationships.”

By treating all our community members with dignity and respect, they realize that THEY are sacred to us. Just like SaSa and the trees of the forest, we need to be connected to all of our community. We need that connection for the exact same reason. It makes us more resilient, and we are able to better weather the turmoil that will occur around us.

Sequoyah was born around 1770 in the Cherokee Overhill Town of Taskigi, along the

Lower Little Tennessee River to Wut Teh and a white trader named Nathaniel Gist. Near his home was the former site of the British Fort Loudoun. This fort was built in 1756 through 1757. This little fact gives some explanation for Sequoyah’s hate of white people.

In late 1758, a group of Cherokee warriors joined the Forbes Expedition. They had been tasked with fighting northern Indians who were allied with the French. This was the final attempt to take Fort Duquesne, in present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After many disagreements with the British officers the Cherokees left without the payments they had been promised.

Traveling through Virginia on their way home, they took what ever property they came across in replacement of the British payments. This act was seen as stealing by the Virginia Colonists and precipitated a period of raids by both sides burning farms and villages.

One of those raids burned Sequoyah’s mother’s house. During this “Anglo-Cherokee War” the British took several Cherokee headmen as hostages. These Cherokees were eventually killed by the British and a full-scale war began. Fort Loudoun was placed under siege by the Cherokee and fell August 8, 1760. The Fort’s garrison was marched away to be ambushed by the Cherokee latter killing three officers, twenty-three privates and the Fort commander.

These stories lit a fire of hate in the young boy that never was put out. With that background, I find it interesting that although Sequoyah hated the white people, he still observed them and looked for ways to improve Cherokee lives.

One of the things he saw were the British officers and merchants passing pieces of paper between themselves and then knowing what someone who wasn’t presented wanted them to do. Whether in Business or battle, he felt this gave them an advantage over the Cherokee.

Over a 10 to 12 year period Sequoyah developed our writing system, the Syllabary. He faced considerable resistance to his work. His wife burned his workshop and his work twice. However, 1821 he started teaching Cherokee how to write and then read our language. By 1825, the most Cherokees were literate in our language. In just nine years, literacy rates exceeded 90%. The literacy rate for our American neighbors was much lower.

The Cherokee Council approved $1500 for the purchase of a printing press and the creation of the custom-made type that was required for the Cherokee syllabary in 1825. The first Cherokee Phoenix was published February 21, 1828, by Editor Elias Boudinot. This gave not just Cherokee citizens the news of the day but gave our people a voice heard across the United States.

Today the Cherokee Phoenix has a circulation of over 136,000 people. The syllabary is the center of our language revitalization program, and we are creating Fluent Cherokee Language speakers on purpose for the first time in almost 100 years.

Technology can be used to build a resilient community. But, there is another side of that coin. A new technology can also be used to tear a community apart.

The Railroad is a prime example of a new form of transportation that can be a boom for some and a death nell for others.

The Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies completed the first transcontinental railroad on May 9, 1869. Abilene Kansas became the first Cowtown to boom in the late 1860s until 1871: The Kansas Pacific Railway began shipping cattle off the end of the Chisholm Trail to meat packers in Chicago and St. Louis.

The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (often called the MK&T or Katy) finished tracks to Muskogee and McAlister in 1872. Making these towns in the Muskogee and Choctaw Nations major hubs of commerce in Indian Territory.

The Cherokee Nation opposed the introduction of railroads in our Nation. In the Treaty of 1866, the U.S. government promised to remove all non-Cherokee citizens from our lands. Our leaders saw how the Muskogee and Choctaw Nations, our neighbors, were being flooded with white “Intruders” (Non-Cherokee citizens living in our Nation).

From 1870 to 1880 the population of Intruders rose sharply. By the 1890 census, approximately 70% of the people living in Indian Territory were Intruders.

The pressure on our Council to allow the rails into our country was tremendous. Ned Christy served as a Councilman from the Goin Snake District in 1885.Because he was adamantly opposed to trains, powerful white interested conspired to frame him. On May 4, 1887, Deputy U.S. Marshal Daniel Maples was killed along Town Branch Creek near Tahlequah the Cherokee Nation Capitol.

An informant told Marshalls that Ned had killed Marshall Maples. This informant had been a suspect before he named Ned as the killer. No other suspects were ever investigated; Ned WAS The KILLER.

On November 1, 1892, it took five years, 25 Men, a Cannon, and a Wagon of Dynamite to kill Ned Christie. After twelve hours of attack, thirty-eight rounds from the cannon, and some 2,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, the deputies were no closer to arresting Ned. They loaded a wagon with dynamite, rolled it next to Ned’s cabin and finally blew out a section of wall. Ned jumped through the hole and charged the officers, dying in a hail of rounds from the Marshall’s.

In 1922 another witness, Dick Humphrey a Cherokee Freedman (Former Slave), came forward clearing Ned’s name and placing the blame for of Maple’s Murder, on the informant.

The first train to serve Tahlequah arrived on August 2, 1902, by the Ozark and Cherokee Central Railway Company was in business shipping agricultural commodities. By 1907, Oklahoma Statehood, it was estimated that 90% of people in what had been Indian Territory were White Intruders.

Those are two more of the stories where Cherokee people interacted with new technology. One of the technologies we chose and advanced our culture tremendously. The other ended up tearing our culture apart. After decades of struggle, we were able to claw back our right to self-government in 1970. Again, we faced adversity, survived, adapted, prospered and excelled.

As the world looks at new technologies and the consequences of them, we must come together as a community, hold fast to our vales. We must ᎤᎵᏍᎨᏗᏕᏣᏓᏰᎸᏎᏍᏗ ULiSGeDi DeTsaDaYeLvSeSDi (Treat each other’s existence as being sacred or important). The Community must include ALL the people, animals, plants, whole ecosystems of where we live. Only when we treat them as important parts of our entire community will we be able to discern what technology will be useful to our culture.

When you think about the long arch of Cherokee History, we have faced massive upheaval many times. The first time we faced such strife was at least 13,000 years ago when the land we lived on sank into the water you could not drink. This event gave us the “Great Migration Story”. We faced it, again, during the forced removal, not quite 200 years ago. Everything we had and built was taken from us and we were driven into the wilderness. But, the legacy of the Cherokee Nation is that we are a people who face adversity, survive, adapt, prosper, and excel.

How did we always come back from the brink? Because we knew our culture and history. We knew our ancestors had made great sacrifices so we could move forward. We held tight to our Cherokee values and strived to live a life that honored our ancestors.

We face uncertainty in many areas of our lives. My Cherokee ancestors faced this type of uncertainty before. They told us stories to help us learn how to deal with these same obstacles. All we have to do is to go back to our original instructions.

Today the world faces huge challenges from massive climate warming to wars and rumors of wars and the rise of technologies that we are unsure if we can control them or become controlled by them.

Our ancestors told us of a time when the Cherokee people had stopped listening to the animals and stopped showing them respect. We no longer honored the sacrifice of the deer for providing us with food and hides for our material goods. As you can imagine, our behavior made all the animals mad.

Each kind of animal was called to their Council meeting to discuss how to deal with these ungrateful humans. The Bears were the first to convene. their Council. It was led by wise YoNa UNeGv (Bear that is White).

The assembled bears almost immediately began shouting WAR in unison. They decided to go to war against the humans. They then began to argue about the best way to wage war on humans. The bears had teeth and claws to fight. Humans had none of these.

In the back of the council house, a voice was heard asking, “What weapons does man use to accomplish our destruction?” In a chorus, the bears answered, “Bows and arrows.” The voice then asked, “What are they made of?” One of the bears replied, “The bow is wood, and the string is of our own entrails.”

The council of bears proposed that they make a bow and some arrows to see if they could use the weapons of men against men. One bear provided a piece of locust wood, while another sacrificed himself for the good of the rest of his community so that a string for the bow could be made of his entrails.

A brave bear stepped up to try to use the bow to shoot arrows. It was discovered that after drawing the bow and then letting it go, his long claws interfered with the arrow’s flight and spoiled the shot. It was suggested that cutting his claws would solve this issue, so that was tried. In the second shot, the arrow flew straight and true and hit its mark.

White Bear finally spoke in council, saying it was necessary for them as bears to have long claws. Without their claws, they could not climb trees or dig for food. “One of us has already died to furnish the bowstring, and if we now cut off our claws, we shall all have to starve together,” said White Bear. “It is better to trust to the teeth and claws which nature has given us, for it is evident that man’s weapons were not intended for us.” No better plan came forward to the council. White Bear closed the council, and the bears returned to their forest haunts. With no decision on how to confront the humans, the war between the bears and humans was over before it began.

The bears faced a choice. Would they sacrifice one of their own and deform their own bodies to adopt this new technology? Would they cling tightly to each other, being the bears, they had always been?

What will our society choose?

This article states that Trust lubricates every business deal. Without two parties trusting the other, no transactions would ever be agreed upon. I believe they are right. I buy from stores I trust and people I like. I chose brands that I have used for decades. I have doubts that I am unusual. I’ve seen it at our Famers Market booth for the last 26 years. People come back because we sell great products at a good value and they like the stories I tell.

Until very recently, it was thought that human brains had two unique brain patterns that allowed us to trust other folks we were not related to. The first of these involves the brain’s outer surface. This part of the brain handles insight, planning, and abstract thought for us. The folks who study brains call it the hypertrophied cortex. The cortex can perform an amazing trick by allowing us to think about how another person is thinking about us. This lets us anticipate another’s actions so that we can work with them. We see this in sports like Hockey and Basketball.

The second trick our brains can perform is empathy, the ability to share people’s emotions. Human brains have a high density of oxytocin receptors in the frontal cortex of the brain. Oxytocin modulates dopamine in the brain, our “that feels good” chemical. The bottom line of this, is that our social nature is hard-wired into our brains. This allows us to gather information and package it into understanding another person with amazing ease.

I said I had been taught that humans were the only species that could do that until very recently. July 8, 2023 was the day Shane Gero, Lead Field Biology, with Project CETI was off the coast of Dominica observing a Sperm Whale pod of 11 members and we realized we were not unique.

Gero and his team were able to record video and audio of a Sperm Whale birth. The 11 members were first thought to be family. But, after analyzing the recordings it was discovered that these were actually 2 unrelated pods assisting in this birth. Evan an unrelated adolescent male assisted in getting the new calf to the surface to breath. It takes a village, or at least more than one pod, to raise a Sperm Whale calf.

And now back to our brains.

Oxytocin reduces the anxiety we may feel when around groups of other people. It also modulates dopamine in our brain. Dopamine is the “Lets do more of this” drug our brain makes. Together these actions encourage us to be more social and cooperate with other people. We are constantly in a two-sided trust game  Should I trust you? and How much do you trust me?

Because we are pack animals there is often a third person thrust into the middle of this Trust Game, The Leader. As a leader you can sabotage this game in two important ways, by stoking fear or by wielding dominance.

Both of these behaviors is destructive to you and the folks you want to lead. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII and 34 President of the US, said of this type of behavior, “that’s assault, not leadership”.

Paul J. Zak is founding director of the Center for. Neuroeconomics Studies and a professor at Claremont Graduate University. His work shows us that when a person is the center of attention, the Boss, their testosterone rises. This is true regardless of their gender. This happens from winning a chess match, so, think about how your testosterone spikes if you close an important deal for your business or family. Zak found that when this hormone is elevated that person demands more from and gave less to others. He also reported that folks in this state “greatly exaggerated their abilities and were quick to punish those who crossed them”.

Zak sent a survey team to several business and asked the employees, “On a scale from 1 to 7, how much do you enjoy your job on a typical day?” This question gets to the Oxytocin-dopamine interaction. Higher dopamine indicates more satisfaction and trust. According to Zak’s research, if you get 5’s and 6’s your organization has an effective culture. If you get 2’s and 3’s, you’ve got work to do

If you fall into the second group, you need to revisit the South. Your healing can take place there. Reflect on how you are reacting to the stuff that fills your day? Maybe you, like the Sperm Whale, just need to have trusted friends to tell you when you’re getting off track.

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