The Four Principles of Emprise
Emprise is a framework that gives women the opportunity to design a pathway forward that puts us in a position of leadership of our own lives. It enables us to find our next calling, be it big or small, and to use that calling to live our biggest, most fulfilling lives, personally and professionally.
Emprise is built on four leadership principles: Authenticity, Abundance, Courage, and Ownership. Pursuing Emprise means making a conscious decision to use these principles to inform decision-making processes, major life choices, and the way we show up in the world.
Authenticity
To find and pursue your Emprise, you must first locate your true authentic self. To do so, you’ll have to do two things: 1) uncover hidden assumptions you may be carrying about how you’re supposed to live your life, and 2) redefine your measures of success so they accurately reflect your values.
Pursuing an Emprise calls upon us to redefine what success means to us as individuals, instead of letting someone else’s notions of success determine it for us. For women, this is especially important. For generations, we’ve been chasing an image of success that was very male-oriented. But we have the opportunity now to create our own image of success. To do that, we need to be in the practice of placing greater value on the things that are truly meaningful and bring us a sense of wholeness and fulfilment.
Abundance
The next principle of Emprise is Abundance, which means living in the faith that we have plenty to give, and plenty to receive. We’re going to ask a lot of the world, and we’re going to give a lot back.
To access this abundance, you’re going to have to tap your community. None of us can make a go at pursuing our Emprise on our own. Our existing network alone isn’t going to be enough -- we’re going to need to expand our community.
To pursue your Emprise, you’ll need to meet people you haven’t yet met. You’ll have to be in relationships with people who are different from you; who come from different backgrounds, have different life experiences, and hold differing perspectives. This leads us to the next principle of Emprise: Courage.
Courage
Many of us are taught implicitly or explicitly that we need to say and do things to please other people. This is especially true for girls and women. We’re taught it’s not polite to talk about politics, race, religion, sex, or money, and yet, these are some of the most important things we should be talking about now.
These conversations are hard. But living a life of Emprise calls upon us to speak our mind, live our truth, and engage in conversations that may be uncomfortable. To pursue an Emprise, we must start to embrace the discomfort of courageous conversations. Courage is like a muscle. The more we use it, the stronger it gets.
Ownership
Finally, Ownership. It’s the concept that you alone are responsible for your own life experience. It’s about maintaining an awareness that your job is to play a leadership role in your own life.
No one is going to create your Emprise for you. This is your one precious life, and if you don’t take the reins, someone else will. If you allow yesterday’s standards to dictate the way you design your life, you’ll never feel you measure up.
This doesn’t mean that things are always going to go your way, or that you’re going to be able to do everything you want to, when you want to do it. But even when we are living in a more restricted fashion than we’re accustomed to, we still have choice, and we still have opportunity. We just have to find it.