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Samantha A Thomas

@lovebyst

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Convening The Love Summit @justchooselove
On what it means to live and lead with love.
Essays, conversations, and my coaching, all below.

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Most of us know the voice that tells us to stay on the safe road. The greatest love story ever written begins when we step off it, and it’s about the people who walk beside us when we do.

David Howitt told it at our very first Love Summit in 2015, through The Wizard of Oz, and it’s one of my favorite talks of all time. By the end, it isn’t only Dorothy’s story. It’s yours, and it’s all of ours.

He closed with a teaching he learned as a boy, tikkun olam, the repair of the world, and with three words: love one another.

Without David, so much of that first Summit wouldn’t have been possible.

Thank you, David, and everyone at @meriwethergroup.

Please read it, and I hope you’ll find your own love story in it. Link in bio.

#JustChooseLove #TheLoveSummit by @lovebyst

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9 days ago

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10 days ago

Just home from two weeks in Australia and Tasmania, and catching up on the two essays I published while I was away.

The first, The View from the 16th Floor, I wrote on a rainy day in Sydney. It’s about the seasons of life that feel slow, and the places and people that lift us through them. The flag on Pyrmont Bridge is so heavy, rolled up, that it takes two people to lift it. We’re not so different.

The second is about Dan Wieden, the man who wrote @nike’s ‘Just Do It.’ In 2015 he hosted the first Love Summit at @wiedenkennedy with us, but first he asked me, ‘Are you sure you want to call it the Love Summit?’ I told him the name was the one thing I couldn’t change.

September 30th marked four years since we lost Dan. I’m still grateful he went from questioning the name to standing behind the whole idea, in his own building, in front of all of us.

Back in Nashville, I’m editing the first new Love Summit conversations and gearing up to record more next week. They’re conversations with leaders from business, government, and civil society about making love a practical way of leading, building organizations, and governing. I’ll be sharing the first ones soon.

Wherever you’re reading this, I hope you have people and places that lift you.

You can read both essays on Substack - link in bio.

Thank you for being here. 🤍

#JustChooseLove #TheLoveSummit taken in Australia by @lovebyst

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14 days ago

Perhaps you’re the one waiting for the call. Perhaps you’re the one who hasn’t made it. Perhaps you’ve been both.

I’m on the first leg of our journey to Sydney, and this morning I published an essay about a story that feels especially relevant as we get ready to go to Australia (I’ll come back to why in a minute): a man who went twenty-five years without calling his father.

His name is Andrew Sykes. Andrew is a longtime friend, and returning to his talk from the 2017 Love Summit this week reminded me of something I already knew but needed to hear again.

Andrew grew up twenty miles from Soweto. He was twelve years old in June 1976, and it took fifteen years for the news of what happened there to reach him. He told that story from the stage, and then he told a much more personal one.

In 2007, he worked out why he had no relationship with his father. That night, he called South Africa, waking his father at six in the morning.

Twenty-five years of silence. Thirty seconds of quiet on the line. Then his father, who had been waiting through every one of those years.

They got five more.

We go on to Tasmania after Sydney. I didn’t expect that to have much to do with an essay about South Africa, and then I learned that in 1997, the Tasmanian parliament apologized to Aboriginal families whose children the state had taken. Nine years later, it became the first Australian state to pay them.

A hundred and six people received a payment. Forty-five applications were refused.

An apology, a commission, a fund. None of it fixes everything, but each one makes room for something that wasn’t possible before.

A country needs a commission, a fund, a decade, and a great many people willing to say what happened to them.

A person needs a phone call and thirty seconds of quiet on the other end.

And one of those things is still possible for any of us.

Hang On Mandela, the seventh essay from the Love Summit archives, is on Substack now. Link in bio. by @lovebyst

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a month ago

Last month in Minnesota, after my niece’s wedding.

That was the third family wedding this summer, which has had me thinking about commitment more than I have in a while, maybe ever. Less the romance of it, per se, than the devotion. The choosing of one person, over and over, and proclaiming that in front of a group of people.

Last week I wrote about how we’re all more idealistic than we let each other see. A wedding is one of the few places where we let that part of ourselves show. Someone stands up and says what they most hope for, before they know how any of it will turn out, and everyone there agrees to remember it.

Reading, listening, and writing about other people have been taking up most of my days lately, and so has thinking about what we’re devoted to. The Love Summit archives, the new Summit conversations I’m recording, coaching. I keep hearing some version of the same promise in all of it, made to a company, a community, or a country rather than to a person, though a person is usually where it starts. Being truly devoted to someone is how we learn what devotion is like for everything else.

What devotion asks of us, in any of those places, is some forgetting of the self, which is the part we’re least practiced at. We’re taught to keep our attention on what we get, and a vow turns it outward, toward what we’ve chosen and what it needs from us.

I don’t have a practice for this yet, beyond noticing when my attention has drifted back to myself, which it does a lot. What helps is being in a room full of people who came to watch someone make a promise.

Lots of love, and devotion, to you all. taken in Wayzata, Minnesota by @lovebyst

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a month ago

What if the thing you’ve been afraid to say is the thing everyone else is waiting to hear?

It takes very little to find out you were never the only one.

Often, it starts with saying something you believe before you know who else might agree.

We do this everywhere. In meetings, around the dinner table, in conversations with people we think we know. We hold back the more hopeful version of what we think because we’ve already decided where the other person stands. And often, they’ve decided the same thing about us. So we both stay quiet, each believing we’re the only one.

Nathan Hendricks said the hopeful version from the stage at the second Love Summit. Then he spent the rest of his talk talking about what happens next.

An idea doesn’t usually fail because someone disagrees with it. More often, it gets rescheduled.

What lasts gets built into something. A promise. A structure. A room where the people it affects are present. But it all begins the same way: with one person willing to say it, and everyone else finding out they were never the only ones.

From Love With a Vengeance, the sixth essay in my series from the Love Summit archives. Link in bio. by @lovebyst

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a month ago

Worth isn’t something you earn your way into. It’s the ground you’re already standing on; believing it changes what you’re willing to reach for. taken in Nashville, Tennessee by @lovebyst

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a month ago

We’re each carrying three relationships at once: our relationship to our work, to the people in our lives, and to ourselves. Most of us tend one of them carefully and let another go.

Someone can be patient with everyone at the office and impatient with the people at home, forgiving of others but unforgiving with themselves, or able to name their values without hesitating and then live a week that reflects none of them.

How we relate to one another shapes what we’re able to build together. I’ve come to believe that’s as true of a marriage as it is of a company or a country.

Underneath all of it is a more private question, and that’s where my coaching lives. Not in how a leader should communicate, but in whether the person doing the leading recognizes themselves at the end of the week.

Aligning those three relationships is the work I do one-to-one, and I call it the Congruence Partnership. Three months, two private sessions a month, with access in between for the questions that can’t wait. We don’t begin with what’s going wrong. We begin with what you love and what you’re for, and from there, the harder things become clearer, along with the way through them.

You don’t need to be in a crisis to begin. Some of the best conversations I’ve had have come from a feeling that things are mostly fine and still not quite right. Often, that’s the best time to start, while things are still whole and there’s room to change course.

When your work, your relationships, and the way you treat yourself stop pulling in different directions, the people around you often feel it before you do. That’s one of my favorite parts of coaching someone: the work rarely stops with them. They start showing up differently, and the people in their lives feel it and meet them differently in return.

If any of this sounds familiar, there’s more at congruencecoaching.me, including information on how to schedule an intro call. Single sessions are available, too, for those who’d rather work that way. Link in bio. 🤍 taken in Athens, Greece by @lovebyst

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a month ago

Around this time last year, we were in the Rocky Mountains.

I’ve been thinking about change lately. About how fast and how much things change, and how little we notice while it’s happening.

We tend to imagine big changes happening all at once, in one grand sweep. But more often, they happen through small shifts that add up over time.

Of course, we can also decide to wake up one morning and start over. I’ve done that too. But as I get older, I’m more drawn to the slower changes, the ones that ask for patience and a willingness to tend to something day after day.

There are people and places that have been part of our lives for years, and new ones that weren’t there before. Relationships change. We change. The places we live, the things we care about, the way we see the world, all of it moving and becoming something else.

There’s such beauty in that. We don’t always see it while we’re living through it, because we’re changing right along with everything else.

I think that’s what makes slow change feel so much like love. Love grows through patience and attention, and the small choices we make to keep caring for something. Often, the things that last and mean the most to us are the ones that take time.

This time last year, we were in the Rocky Mountains. A year later, so much is different, and some of it still feels the same. We’re still here, carrying all of it with us.

I hope wherever this finds you, you can see some of the ways your own life has changed, even the ones you might not have noticed along the way. And I hope you can trust that the things still taking shape have their own timing, too. taken in Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre by @lovebyst

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a month ago

We can care about someone, share a deep sense of what matters, and still struggle to hear one another.

Sometimes that can go on for years. The care is there, the shared purpose is there, and yet something keeps getting lost between us. Often, all that’s needed is a simple shift in how we relate to and speak with each other.

The Words We Carry is the fifth essay in the Love Summit archive series. It’s about Sarah Severn and Darcy Winslow, two former Nike executives who spent seven years trying to move the company in a direction they both believed in. Their story is a reminder of how much can change when we feel truly seen and heard.

On the fourth card is an exercise they shared with the Love Summit audience in 2015. It takes a minute, and it’s best done with one particular person in mind.

And if you’d like to read The Words We Carry, you can find the essay on Substack. Link in bio. by @lovebyst

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a month ago

Writing this week’s Substack essay got me thinking about how easily two people can miss each other, even when they’re committed to the same purpose.

This one’s called The Words We Carry, and it’s about Sarah Severn and Darcy Winslow, who spent seven years at Nike trying to move the company in a direction they both believed in. But along the way, they struggled to hear each other.

The problem wasn’t the idea. It was how Sarah was saying it. Darcy heard something Sarah never meant to say, and once she heard it that way, she couldn’t hear the rest.

Years later, Sarah found a different way to say the same thing. The message hadn’t changed, but this time Darcy could hear it without feeling that the work she loved was being dismissed. She felt seen and heard.

Their story made me think about how often this happens between people who care about each other. It really isn’t about who is right. It’s about whether the way we say something makes the other person feel they have to defend what matters to them, or gives them room to hear what we intended to say.

This is the fifth essay in the Love Summit archive series. Sarah and Darcy, both former Nike executives, spoke at Love Summit 2015 at Wieden+Kennedy.

You can read it at the link in my bio. taken in Grand Egyptian Museum by @lovebyst

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a month ago

A couple of weeks ago I ended up in a hotel I hadn’t planned on, walked into this room, and stayed much longer than I meant to.

I could hear it already. Music under that ceiling. Art along the walls. Strangers who walk in and don’t leave as strangers. Conversations that inspire.

This morning I copied something into my notebook, from Teilhard de Chardin:

‘To know that Life has an objective; and that the objective is a summit; and that this summit, towards which all our striving must be directed, can only be attained by our drawing together, all of us more closely and in every sense.’

He wasn’t writing about an event, but about the mountain each of us is dealt to climb, and the one we’re all climbing at once; neither one is climbed alone.

The Love Summit comes back in 2027. I’m rebuilding it now, in rooms I don’t have yet, with people I’m still asking. I set it down for a long time, and choosing it again is starting to give me back one of my purposes.

Most of us have set down work we loved, or some part of what we’re here for. In my experience, it waits.

If you want to look at your own more closely, I wrote about Dr. Vic Strecher last week. He’s spent his career researching what purpose really is and what it does to a life. The essay is on Substack.

Thank you for being here while I find my way back to this one. If you’ve lost sight of any of yours, I hope you find your way back to them. by @lovebyst

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2 months ago