The Weekly Three: November 6th, 2023
What’s real and what’s not? It takes intentional stewarding of resources for our leadership to emerge.
Welcome to The Weekly Three! Each Monday, I share a three-card Tarot spread to help you focus your intuitive energy in real life, and take action with intention inside your business.
I pull these cards with the collective energy of my community in mind, but if you want a custom spread of your very own, you can get it right here.
Know someone who might like this newsletter as much as you? Hit the button below to share—the more, the merrier!
In The Cards: Creating stability requires balance and daily leadership.
New deck alert! If you’re an Over The Garden Wall fan, I know you’re as excited about this deck as I am 🤩
The X of Pentacles says “hey, we’re ok!” when it comes to all things physical resources. You can also look at this card as a representation of legacy, security, stability and vitality. The whole family is taken care of, and everyone is well-provided for, safe and healthy.
The fourteenth card of the Major Arcana is all about the middle path. Temperance asks us to exercise moderation in creating the perfect blend of the whole. This is about a balance of ingredients that work together rather than any one part being the star of the show.
The III of Wands reversed says there may be something amiss with the way you’re building your empire. It’s not a total disaster, but there’s a lack of planning—or maybe more to the point, OVERplanning—that’s derailing your best intentions. Something needs to be adjusted, dialed back, or made more realistically attainable in order for you to proceed successfully.
In Between: Leadership happens even when no one is looking.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what leadership looks like in today’s always-on environment, especially in light of the many horrors occurring in Gaza and across the globe.
Not only are we always aware of these happenings, we are also often asked to state our stances. “Pick a side,” we’re commanded, as if a single social media post can somehow guarantee action. As much as I believe that social media can be a tool for activism and community building, I also know that it can be a tool for propaganda and the destruction of critical thought.
While I clearly haven’t quite gotten the hang of what works for me yet, I don’t see social media entirely as an evil.
What I do see as insidious is how much we rely on social media to encompass ALL of life. I don’t think it can. I think it’s a tool that can support or supplement real life. I don’t think it can carry the weight of ALL things.
I see this in Temperance, where a blending of all things—earth, air, fire, water—creates the harmony we seek. If you look closely at the imagery of the card, you can see that all four elements are represented. There’s no heavy emphasis on one or another, there is a balance, integration and unification of parts to create the whole.
When I think of leadership as the whole, I see ways in which it requires things of us, hard things, even in places where no one is watching us or checking our work.
It makes me wonder: if social media didn’t exist, would people still be looking to lead right now? Or is the fear of being “cancelled” creating performative statements that begin and end in a small collection of bits and bytes on the internet?
I sometimes wish we were more disconnected from technology so that we could be more connected in tangible life. And, you and I both know that there’s no way to completely disconnect from technology. It IS a part of “real life” and there’s no way to entirely extricate ourselves from our reliance on the internet. And I also don’t think that’s a requirement in order to also remember to intentionally exist in the tangible reality of Earth.
There are real human beings struggling to survive every minute of every day in Gaza, and I don’t think it comes down to any one social post to bring about a ceasefire. And-but-also, it gives me so much hope to see, alongside the single social media posts, that there are people marching for a ceasefire, people sending aid, people calling and writing to their representatives. And even on social media, I see people who are using their platforms for education and to create complete and nuanced (at least as much nuance as can exist,) conversations about our humanity and how we can help one another.
There’s so much life that has happened, will happen, IS happening outside of our screens. The technological tools we have access to in daily life are truly amazing. Our parents could not even have imagined that we’d be living in a world with this kind of access, ease, connectedness.
But I also think it’s important to remember that these tools were created to support human life, not to BE human life. And there are a lot of ways these tools have evolved to actually interrupt human life and derail it from what’s real.
We get distracted, overwhelmed, obsessed with what we see on our screens and it can often pull us away from real, tangible action. The answer in my (maybe not super important, but still existent) opinion is intentional stewardship of our time, attention and resources.
In Your Business: What does leadership require of you?
What is the true daily requirement you need to fulfill in order to stand in your own leadership?
The III of Wands is such a card of process to me. It feels very much like learning to cultivate and care for a thing you’ve brought into this world. It’s like being at the very beginning of your own civilization and actively creating structure from scratch.
What does it take to nurture something into full fruition? What does it take to adjust and course-correct in real time? What does it take to respond to the new terrain rather than reacting to it?
The resources that are present in abundance in the X of Pentacles makes me think of the aspect of leadership that requires us not only to create the resources, but steward them as well. If abundance and security exist, how do you then manage those resources? How do you distribute them? How do you tend to them?
These concepts of leadership, stewardship, creating structure can be so large and abstract. It’s easy to get caught up in the pressure to rush to act first and think later. But larger goals, especially goals that involve intentional ways of being, require us to serve those intentions in small, daily, tangible, consistent ways. That service is often incredibly mundane, under-appreciated or completely unacknowledged by others.
You are a leader whether you’re in the public eye or not. You’re a leader in your own life, you’re a leader in your business. Only you can know what is being asked of you on a daily basis in order to realize your vision. It takes more than manifesting, more than laying plans, more than making lists.
It takes work, often work that feels like work—the kind of work that actually isn’t that fun or exciting or instagrammable. But it’s worthy and it’s worth it and it’s what makes the intangible into something real.
Until next week,
Zoha
PS - The Ownership Method is a reader-supported publication. Did you find this post helpful or valuable in some way? Consider becoming a paid subscriber or leave a one-time tip to show your support:
About The Author:
Zoha Abbas is a writer, Intuitive Tarot Reader and Business Coach who aims to explore the small business conversations around self-trust, critical thinking, reality checks and forging your (not so straight) path to success in the grey-area of real life. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners do business better through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems.
For inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com