We Can Do Hard Things | Glennon Doyle to Keynote at Linkage’s Virtual and Face-to-Face WIL

This week, Linkage made an exciting announcement: Glennon Doyle has been added to the keynote speaker and faculty lineup for our Women in Leadership Institute™ (WIL) this November 9–12, 2020.

I am thrilled to bring Glennon and her incredibly impactful insights to the hundreds of women leaders who will join us this fall for a life-changing leadership development experience.

As our teams worked to develop this year’s program, it has been hard to keep this exciting news under wraps—especially since we have heard from many of you on the personal and professional impact Glennon’s work and insights have had on you.

Here’s why I am so excited that Glennon is part of this year’s WIL: She totally gets it. In her latest book, Untamed, which is a New York Times best seller, she describes the experience many women have: We overcommit, overproduce, and overwork with the goal of serving others. “We believe all this striving will make us feel alive,” she writes—and she’s right, but this striving comes at a cost. As women leaders, we need to break out of the cycle of supporting, and instead empower ourselves to delegate, manage and empower our teams to thrive.

 
At Linkage, we have more than two decades of experience partnering with leading organizations to develop and advance women leaders. Our work with more than a million leaders has identified the hurdles to advancement that women experience in the workplace, and the ability to avoid “over-rowing our boat,” or overcommitting to the point of burnout, is one of these skills.

As we all deal with the negative impact of an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, the struggle between caring for ourselves and caring for others—often at the detriment of our personal health and professional careers—has never been more pronounced. In fact, new research from LeanIn finds that women are experiencing physical symptoms of stress and burnout at up to twice the rate of men during this COVID-19 crisis.

Burnout is real—but we have the power to rise to the challenge of not only surviving but thriving in this uncertain time by making upskilling a priority. For women leaders, that means setting aside time to thoughtfully reflect and focus on their own professional development. For organizations, that means providing women leaders the opportunity to do this in a guided and supported environment.

I look to Glennon’s teachings to empower me to do just that, and I am thrilled that she will be able to reach our audience of high-potential women leaders this fall. We just launched two brand-new, lower-priced packages—Virtual Keynotes and Virtual Keynotes PLUS—that allow women leaders to experience the insights from speakers like Glennon, Soledad O’Brien, Carla Harris and others in a condensed format.

I’ll leave you with some inspiration from Glennon, from her latest book, Untamed:

“‘We can do hard things’ becomes my hourly life mantra. It is my affirmation that living life on life’s own absurd terms is hard. It isn’t hard because I’m weak or flawed or because I made a wrong turn somewhere, it is hard because life is just hard for humans and I am a human who is finally doing life right. ‘We can do hard things’ insists that I can, and should, stay in the hard because there is some kind of reward for staying. I don’t know what the reward is yet, but it feels true that there would be one, and I want to find out what it is. I am especially comforted by the We part. I don’t know who the We is; I just need to believe that there is a We somewhere, either helping me through my hard things or doing their own hard things while I do mine.”