Founder and Chief Steward of Synona™

In my retirement years, I am finally giving a lifetime of work its fullest name. Since around 1986, I have been living inside two connected questions:

What is the better use of my lifetime—of my work, my living legacies, and my impact?

And then:

How do I help you discover the better use of yours?

The order matters.

Synona™ did not begin as a theory I designed for other people. It grew from the continuing work of learning how to use my own lifetime, work, living legacies, and impact more deliberately—and then asking how I could help other people do the same without directing their lives for them.

In 1999, after living, consulting, and experimenting with those questions for more than a decade, I founded Maverick Center. Through teaching, speaking, private conversations, entrepreneurship, and a great deal of lived experience, I helped people think more independently, recognize what mattered to them, and make choices they could genuinely own.

The work appeared under many titles. I spoke about business, entrepreneurship, home business, education, parenting, adulthood, changing work, original future paths, balance, getting-it-all, and the development of the individual. Those subjects may have looked separate, but they were doorways into the same larger search: how to make better use of a lifetime—and how to help another person discover what better use means for theirs.

I did not yet call this Lifetime Development. Synona™ did not yet have its name. But the questions—and the work growing from them—were already shaping my life.

Read Before Synona™ Had a Name →

Why I founded Synona™

I have watched people create lives that look responsible, accomplished, generous—even good—and still feel that something essential is missing. They have learned to hear expectations, obligations, experts, traditions, fear, and the needs of everyone around them. What they have not always been helped to hear is their maverick center (their inner guidance and sense of what is genuinely theirs).

That inner guidance should not govern alone. We also need clear thinking, trustworthy information, earned wisdom, and the perspectives of other people. But none of those should quietly become the authority over a life they do not have to live. Synona™ exists to help people practice Lifetime Development: discerning, designing, developing, and stewarding lives that genuinely belong to them.

I am not here to tell you what your life should be. That would violate the work.

I am here to help create places, practices, and conversations in which you can hear yourself more clearly, engage your mind, receive useful perspectives, and own your next step.

The life behind the work

Nothing I teach was developed at a safe distance from living.

My life has included marriage to Mark since 1979, raising a family, becoming a grandmother, building businesses, teaching, caregiving, creating work before others could see what I saw, watching some efforts flourish and others disappear, and beginning again more than once. It has taught me that a life is not designed once. Relationships change. Children grow (and leave). Work evolves. Bodies alter the terms. Loss rearranges the landscape. New possibilities appear after we thought the plan was complete.

We need practices that help us stay in an honest relationship with our own development through all of it.

Today, much of this work has a physical home at Maverado in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Asian inspired gardens (created by Mark Carroll) are also the home of Synona™ World Headquarters—an intentionally audacious name for a movement beginning on 1.24 acres. Some things deserve to be named for where they are going, not merely where they began.

What I believe

* A lifetime should be developed continually. 

* A person can belong deeply with others without disappearing from their own life.

* No decision truly belongs to us until we have owned it.

*People need one another, but no one should become the unquestioned authority over another person’s life.

* Questions should come before opinions. Permission should come before perspectives. Ownership should come before influence.

* The measure of a lifetime includes not only what we accomplish, but who we become and what we set in motion.

The deeper aim

Beneath all of this is a larger aim: unconditional love. To me, that means helping life become more fully itself while remembering that it is not mine to direct. Synona™ is the practical vehicle I have chosen for moving toward that aim. When people learn to know themselves, own their choices, respect what belongs to others, and advance one another without taking over, love becomes more than a generous intention. It begins to shape how we listen, decide, relate, repair, and live.

This season of my lifetime

In my seventies and onward, I am not winding down. I am becoming more exact about what my lifetime is for.

My work now is to establish Synona™ faithfully, offer its principles freely, steward its name carefully, and help create something that can continue serving people beyond my own lifetime. I do not need your life to resemble mine. I want your life to belong more fully to you.

If something in you recognizes this work, there is a place for you to begin. I’ll meet you there!

Continue with Synona™ →