Written by: Martin J. Schreiber
Some teachers arrive through a door someone else opens. For me, that door was opened by our friend Everett Ogawa, who one day said, simply, "You need to meet Ginny." Everett has a way of knowing which people belong in the same room. He was right.
Ginny Whitelaw had been a NASA scientist before she became a Zen teacher and a guide to leaders around the world. That combination fascinated me: someone who had worked with the precision of rockets and then given her life to the precision of attention. Through her Institute for Zen Leadership, I found myself one winter sitting on the cold floor of a dojo, talking with her about what I most wanted to carry forward in my life. What came out of me was this: I wanted the Healing Stories work to outlive me. Ginny didn't hurry past that. She sat with it, and with me, and in that cold room I felt something I have tried to give leaders ever since: the experience of being fully met.
We recorded an episode on the Healing Stories Podcast
I have gone back to that moment many times, and to her book The Zen Leader, more times than I can count. In nearly two decades of healthcare leadership, few voices have stayed with me as steadily.
What Ginny teaches is not exotic. It is embodied. Leadership doesn't begin in the strategy deck. It begins in the body: in the breath, in where we place our attention, in whether we are standing on solid ground when the pressure arrives. In healthcare, the pressure always arrives. A grounded leader is not one who feels no storm. It is one who knows how to come back to center in the middle of it.
She also invites a harder question: what is actually driving me? Each of us carries habitual energies, patterns that served us once and now sometimes run us. I have come to think of this as our leadership song. Every leader is playing one, whether we hear it or not. Some of us play urgency. Some play pleasing. Some play control, or proving, or rescue. The work is not to silence the song but to listen to it, to notice when it has become a loop, and to choose, with some freedom, what we play next.
I have used this teaching again and again in forming leaders, especially those who come to us depleted. The nurse manager who has given everything through a hard season. The physician who no longer remembers why she chose medicine. The executive who is excellent and exhausted. What they need first is not another skill. They need a way back to themselves: practices of stillness and presence that let them find balance again, and, underneath it all, recognize the Spirit that has been within them the whole time.
This is where Zen and my own Ignatian formation meet for me. Both ask us to pay attention. Both trust that the present moment, entered fully, is where we are found. Ginny would put it in the language of the dojo; I learned it in the language of the Exercises. The invitation is the same: come home to what is real, and lead from there.
I remain grateful to Ginny for her teaching, and to Everett for knowing we needed to meet. Some gifts keep giving long after the conversation ends. I still hear hers every time I sit with a leader who has forgotten their own song, and help them listen again.
Siempre adelante.
Martin J. Schreiber Ed.D is currently the Vice President for the Mission Leadership Institute at Providence. He has had extensive experience in education, leadership, and healthcare both domestically and globally.
He hosts the Healing Stories Podcast series, an exciting journey into the audio power of story. Each episode features a conversation that engages the meaningful questions of our lives.