Heather Plett - The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership

Heather Plett brings so much grace, care, and accountability to this book and her teachings. She leaves us with hard-earned lessons and skills intended to support people and help lead us toward repair.

Desiree Adaway, trainer, facilitator, and principal of The Adaway Group

The Art of Holding Space provides the missing link for those of us who do any kind of transformational work. Heather Plett has done a great service by writing this book, which should be required reading for anyone who does work with other human beings.

Pamela Slim, author of Body of Work

Reading this book will teach you to engage in the possibilities for transformational listening and speaking as they appear in daily life. Read it. Trust yourself. Show up. Repeat.

Christina Baldwin, author of Lifes Companion and Storycatcher

This beautifully written book will give you a reason to discover your authenticity, and hold space for yourself and those around you. As our world continues to change, The Art of Holding Space is a road map to negotiate the future.

TuBears, author, poet, and artist

What I love about Heather Plett is that she brings so much compassion to her own mistakes and traumas, which she shares with deep honesty and courage. This book is a great gift to the world in this time of turmoil and crisis, and is exactly what we need.

Dr. Robin Youngson, author of Time to Care: How to Love Your Patients and Your Job

I recommend this book to anyone who is seeking to foster connections and conversations in a world that often feels fractured. It will help restore your faith in what is possible.

Dr. David Drake, author of Narrative Coaching: The Definitive Guide to Bringing New Stories to Life

There is deep and timely wisdom in these pages. With uncommon tenderness and care, Heather Plett has managed to write a book that seems to be the very thing it is pointing us toward.

Steve Bell, singer-songwriter and author

Building on the foundation of her own grounded authenticity, Heather Plett has offered us a floodlight to illuminate our path through the dark spaces of human exchange. Plett walks us through academic as well as historical and cultural roots within the practice. We cannot help but be left with the impression that as we were reading The Art of Holding Space, we were being artfully held.

Francesca Mason Boring, facilitator and author of Connecting to Our Ancestral Past

The Art of Holding Space will transform your relationships with friends, family, colleagues, strangersand yourself. Here you will find insightful and practical guidance, elegantly illustrated through Heather Pletts personal experiences, research, and professional path, to bring more kindness, curiosity, and meaning to all your interactions. I cant think of an art we need more right now.

Christa Couture, author of How to Lose Everything

This wise and compassionate book has the potential to forever change the way we show up for each other as individuals and in community. Read it, absorb it, practice it. Repeat.

Alana Sheeren, documentary filmmaker of Listen Closely

T he first time I heard the term holding space was at Authentic Leadership in Action ( ALIA ) Summer Institute in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June 2010. I arrived at this gathering feeling a complex mixture of brokenness, despair, fear, longing, and hopefulness. I was hungry for healing, connection, inspiration, and relief.

At the time, I was the director of resources and public engagement for Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a national non-profit whose byline was A Christian Response to Hunger. I ran a national team of seventeen staff and volunteers responsible for the fundraising, communication, education, and public engagement work for the international development organization. It was a challenging and demanding job with a team that was equally complex and (sometimes) challenging. I was burnt-out and on the verge of quitting.

A month before I attended ALIA , my husband and I had decided it was finally my turn to quit my job and launch my business. Years prior, when he quit his job to go to university, we had made an agreement that once he had stable work, it would be his turn to be the major income-earner. It took him longer than expected to find a stable job, but he was finally in a term position that looked as if it would lead to something more permanent.

However, only a week after making that decision, my husband went into an emotional tailspin because of something that happened at work. Depression and anxiety set in and he couldnt work. Hed dealt with mental illness throughout our marriage, and this was a repeat of an episode that had taken place earlier, just before I gave birth to our first child. As then, it ended with a suicide attempt that landed him in the psych ward at the hospital.

As a result, he lost his term position and we went back to where wed started, with me stuck in a job that had begun to suck the energy and optimism out of me. With a mortgage to pay and three kids to feed, I had few options.

Thats how I arrived at ALIA . I convinced my boss to let me attend, partly because I needed to go somewhere that would take my mind off my overwhelming life and partly because, if I had to stay in this job after all, I needed something to inspire me so I could recommit my energy into good leadership.

At the dinner on opening night, Michael Chender, one of the founders of ALIA , got up to speak. His opening words were, This is the kind of place where you bring your fears, your pain, and your brokenness. I started to cry. With those words, he opened a release valve on the pressure cooker that my life had become. I could finally breathe. He went on to say that ALIA was a place for vulnerability and truth telling, where each of us agreed to do our best not to sit in judgment of each other.

I dont know if Chender used the term holding space in his talk, but he was certainly describing what later became my understanding of it. I do know I heard the term elsewhere that week, and it cracked my life open in a way I could never have anticipated. Those who spoke of it were talking about something Id craved my whole life but didnt know how to express. Id even offered it to others but didnt know how to give it to myself.

I made a lot of friends that week who remain some of my favourite people. These were people who spoke my language, wrestled with the same questions I wrestled with, and chose authentic, open-hearted lives. It was an environment like Id never experienced before, where people were intentional about how they hosted conversations, how they asked big questions, and how they sat with brokenness and discomfort. I felt as though I had finally come home.

Before I left that gathering, I knew I had found the kind of workand the kind of peopleI wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to.

Four months later, I finally walked away from that job. Our life was not yet stable (my husband still didnt have a permanent job), but I couldnt wait any longer. I cashed in my retirement savings, hoping and praying that the new work I was about to create, which felt closer to a calling than anything Id ever experienced, would eventually sustain me and my family.

A week after I left my job, I travelled to Ontario to learn The Circle Way with Christina Baldwin. When Id read her book ten years earlier, Id felt as if she lit a candle in a dark place for me at a time when I was in an even more soul-destroying job with the federal government, coping with a toxic leadership environment. As I told her when we met, I knew that the circle held a key to the work I needed to do for the rest of my life.