What’s love got to do with it?
By Lauren Cook, Founder + LEAD Strategist
When I launched Connecting Our Stories in August 2023, I thought carefully about the accompanying LinkedIn post. LinkedIn is supposed to be the place for “thought leadership,” but for a long time, that description has troubled me. Are some leaders’ thoughts more valuable than others? Who is a designated leader and who isn’t? Or, are we all leaders of our own thoughts? Shouldn’t we value the thoughts of every human as a leader of their personal experience and expertise?
As we ponder these questions, I’ll return to my LinkedIn launch post. I knew, above all, I wanted the post to be authentically me. That meant I would have to push myself beyond typical “thought leader-y” language and be more vulnerable.
So I wrote about love.
At first, I worried it may be too reputationally risky to frame my newly-founded company as an act of love. What would potential clients think? What would LinkedIn colleagues who don’t know me very well think? Does “love” sound too soft? Not productive or innovative enough? Not thought-leader material?
In the end, I decided to stick with the “authentically me” approach. I wrote about how I created Connecting Our Stories from a place of love for fellow humans. I described it as the “bell hooks kind of love.” bell hooks was an amazing scholar and writer about love. In her 2000 book, All About Love, she describes love as an “active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world.”
Greater communion—what a thought! When I eat the bread and drink from the cup at my church’s communion, the idea is that I’m reconnecting with the divine, week after week. What an amazing idea that acts of love can lead us to connection and reconnection with each other and the world.
bell hooks also cites other thinkers and their descriptions of love in her book. One of my favorites is M. Scott Peck’s notion that love represents “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Love as will. Love as extending. Love as nurturing growth in another. How powerful!
Connecting Our Stories is about the business of communications strategy and content creation. But, at our core, we’re about love. We’re about providing opportunities for communion. We’re about doing work that reaches and extends to nurture growth and inspire connection.
We believe in the worthiness of our clients and their work. We value the humanity in every person we interview, write about, photograph, or feature. We believe everyone we meet is a leader of their thoughts, expertise, and experience.
When we do our work, we are doing the work of love.
