I am because we are! · InnerDevelopment@Work

I am because we are!

That's Ubuntu — an African concept that doesn't translate cleanly into most professional development frameworks. And yet, when we brought it into this week's Skill Builder session, something opened up.

The prompt was simple. Draw your Ubuntu tree.

Leaves for the people in your life. Leaves for nature, for ancestors, for the books and therapists and quiet influences that shaped you. The roots for what holds you. The branches for what you're growing toward.

What happened in the room was interesting.!

Some trees were palms. Some were ancient oaks with ancestral roots. One captured the ecosystem itself — water, light, soil. Another held self-love and therapy alongside family, as equal parts of the canopy.

And when we shared them, something shifted. The abstract became visible. Interconnectedness stopped being a concept and became something you could point to.

What I noticed is how different our trees looked on the surface — and how similar they felt underneath. The threads of resilience. Of being held. Of carrying others while being carried.

One participant reflected that her tree only made sense as part of a forest. No single tree sustains itself.

That's the IDG skill of Relating — not as a soft skill, but as a structural truth.

We are not independent agents who occasionally collaborate. We are nodes in something larger. And the health of that larger thing — the forest — depends on the biodiversity of what each of us brings.

A question to sit with:

When you draw your Ubuntu tree, what's in your canopy — and what have you been treating as background that actually belongs in the foreground?

P.S. I'll host this session again in June. Stay tuned.

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