On Gratitude

 

I hope your Thanksgiving week is tying up with ease, and that you'll have an opportunity to spend time with people who feel like family to you during this time of reflection and gratitude.

 

I am reaching out as I am listening to Strong Ground by Brene Brown.  It's the book club book for the LiveYinsa Collective this month.  There's a quote that keeps coming up throughout the book, and it is resonating with me in a lot of ways.  

 

If your organization's values are not expressed in your operational behaviors, then your values are meaningless.

 

As I am wrapping up 2025, I wanted to ask you to think about the values that you believe are inherent in Yinsa, and whether I, or we, are expressing those values in our behavior. The Yinsa team has grown a lot in 2025, and there are few people on it with institutional memory of the brand values we agreed upon back in 2018.  After 2 years of merging our digital platforms from Mighty Networks and Wordpress over to Kajabi, we are finally a fully functioning digital platform while maintaining our focus on in-person experiences.  By the beginning of 2026, my goal is to have an operational structure that reflects not just our values as a company, but is reflected in how we work together.  I spent MANY years running this business like a lemonade stand, but this year's retreat and back-end team in particular is what inspired me to get my shit together.  I respect each of their work so much, and I am grateful that we have been able to survive quite a few organizational challenges while still maintaining our integrity as a company.  We are now, and have always been, committed to non-judgment, inclusion, and accountability.  As we move toward holidays and end of year celebrations, please know that we are working behind the scenes to make sure that our values continue to be on the forefront of all of our work, not only with our clients, but with each other on the Yinsa team.

 

Please know that I am grateful for every single one of you who read these letters, respond with kind words, and remind others that the work we do at Yinsa matters.  We have survived separations, divorces, estrangement, loss of life, loss of career, loss of mobility, a pandemic, a Fascist takeover, and somehow, someway - we are still here.  That is because of you; your discipline, commitment, willingness to forgive, and desire to be better today than you were yesterday is what keeps us going at Yinsa.  For that, I am grateful.

 

I pray that you end this week, and this year, with more peace in your heart than you had last year.  Just keep going.

 

With All the Love in the World,

 

Daniele