THE GRATITUDE SERIES — Episode 6: LEADING & LIVING WITH PATIENCE

Welcome to THE GRATITUDE SERIES with Blake Leath of Leath Group.

EPISODE 6, "LEADING & LIVING WITH PATIENCE," is the first installment in a tiny trilogy (a “mini-series,” if you will!) within the broader GRATITUDE SERIES. EPISODES 7 & 8 explore PERSEVERANCE & PERSONAL DISCIPLINE respectively, whereas today’s focus is PATIENCE and serves as a tribute to the memories of Peter, Auguste, and Hermann van Pels; Fritz Pfeffer; Margot, Edith, and Otto Frank, and their mighty writer-in-residence, Anne.

Blake views PATIENCE, PERSEVERANCE, and PERSONAL DISCIPLINE as three parts of one logical whole, the common denominator being SELF-CONTROL... self-control even in the face of separation, potential personal disintegration, incalculable familial loss, cultural chaos, societal dissolution and ruin, religious persecution, 'ethnic cleansing,' racism, genocide, identification by tattoo number only, ceaseless physical deprivations, torture, death, and being discarded in not just an unmarked grave, but a mass grave.

If you are moved in any way whatsoever by young Anne’s personal testimony as “a girl who loved to write,” and who, in so doing, lent her voice to the countless multitude who have been silenced throughout time—not just in Anne's, but before and forevermore—then please join us next time, as well, for EPISODE 7 about a bookworm who loved to read and then EPISODE 8 about a boy who loved to run.

Our team’s hope is that EPISODES 6-8 inform not only one’s re-calibrated sense of self and ['woe is me'] perspective, but also afford leaders and followers alike a really meaningful moment to pause, reflect more deeply, take stock of life post-pandemically, and then move forward with a renewed and more integrative, purposeful, appreciative, and hopeful call to live. To, as Thoreau put it, “live deep and suck out ALL the marrow of life; to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was NOT life.”