We were lucky to catch up with Lorca Smetana recently and have shared our conversation below.
Lorca, appreciate you joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.
The defining moment of my career happened when I was 16. One day I was a happy, busy junior in high school, loving languages, on the climbing and ski and fencing teams, and the next day I was a survivor of one of the worst mountaineering accidents in U.S. history, a climb of Mt. Hood that took the lives of nine of my fellow students and teachers. It was chaos, trauma, grief, and the realization that my new job for a while was going to be climbing out of the pit we all found ourselves in. And since I was not alone in this, I became fascinated with all the ways people around me had of coping, of hiding, of healing. And I knew I wanted to be one of the beautifully resilient ones, the ones who moved forward with a whole toolbox for a return to wholeness, even though nothing would ever be the same again. This resilience toolbox forms the foundation of all of the ways that I feed and teach resilience in the world today.
Lorca, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Today I provide consulting, teaching, and speaking, guiding the understanding and experience of what it is to live as a generous and regenerative ecosystem. It’s easy to blame burnout or depletion or struggle on a job or circumstances or the world, but it is more accurate to say that it is the evidence of an ecosystem — you, or your organization — that has less support than it needs, and that is emptying more than it refills. The brilliance of this discovery lies in the immediately visible options for adding space, adding health, adding lightness, and thus adding longevity. I work often with leaders committed to making our world healthier, with educators, and with front-line responders. I work across borders both in triage situations and in leadership growth, and will take any opportunity to move things outside into nature, where we often learn better. And I bring people here to our regenerative farm in Montana where the land and creatures here teach alongside me and offer serenity and healing in their own right. My students now form the community of learners that is the Resilience Guild, where we all move through apprentice, journeyman, master and adept levels of the muscles and crafts of regenerative leadership, resilience skillfulness, and joy.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I’ve had several significant crashes (so far) in my life, times when there was a system collapse. The first was the grief and trauma from the mountain accident. The second, many years later, came when I had founded a non-emergency aviation non-profit. We helped a lot of families coping with cancer, among other things. I had developed tools in my toolbox for my own grief, but this was an invitation to add tools that helped me be with the grief and stresses of others, and how to support caregivers in consistently nourishing themselves. I burned out and had to come back from there to develop a way to be persistently refilling myself so that I could give as much as I was wanting to. The best thing about trusting resilience is that even when you don’t know the answers, you have confidence in your process of crafting the way forward.
If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?
I did choose it, way back then, but more than that, it leapt at me, and re-chooses me every day. Even most hours of each day. It is the prism that makes everything fascinating, turns every personal and professional and planetary challenge into a potential game or practice, makes me love my brain and my heart and my human body and the spirit that holds them. It lets me be the parent I know I am, the community anchor, the change-lover, the world-inviter, without sacrificing myself to arrive in it. It is the persistent vessel for joy that arises beyond conditions, and the persistent re-invitation into this life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lorcasmetana.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lorca_smetana
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lorca.smetana
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorca-smetana
- Twitter: @lorcasmetana
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/lorcasmetana/