Before Synona Had a Name

The larger picture was already there. I was giving people the doorway they might be ready to enter.

I recently found an old list of talks, speeches, classes, and interviews I had given through the years. At first, I saw a speaking history. Then I saw something more revealing: a record of how I had translated a much larger picture into talks people might be ready to hear.

There they were:

• How to Wrap Your Work or Business Around Your Changing Lifestyle

• Building YOU: Self-Careering at U University

• How to Raise Your Child to Think Like an Independent

• Preparing Your High School Junior or Senior for an Independent Life

• Carve Out and Design Original Future Paths

• The New School of Business: Dramatic Changes in the Way We Work and Live

The titles sound as though I was speaking about separate subjects: Entrepreneurship. Parenting. Education. Work. Independence. The future. But the titles were never the whole of what I saw. They were entrances. I was trying to reach people where they were with a question they might be ready to hear. I spoke to entrepreneurs through their businesses, parents through their children, and young people through the future directly in front of them.

Beneath those particular conversations was a larger question: How does a person develop a life that genuinely belongs to them? I was not yet handing audiences the whole map. I was helping them enter through one door. I was not hiding the larger vision. I was pacing the invitation. A person cannot walk through a door they cannot yet recognize.

The larger picture behind the titles

When I spoke about wrapping work or a business around a changing lifestyle, the visible subject was work. The larger concern was whether the structures we create to support a life eventually begin governing it. I may not yet have called it stewardship or asked, “Who is serving whom?” But I was already trying to return authority to the person living the life. When I spoke about Building YOU and self-careering at U University, the visible subject was career. The larger picture was an education that does not end with a degree, job title, or someone else’s permission to continue learning. I did not yet call it Lifetime Development. But I already believed adulthood needed an ongoing form of education for the development of the person living it.

When I spoke about helping young people think independently and prepare for an independent life, the visible subject was preparation for adulthood. The larger concern was how we raise people who can think, choose, recover, learn, and gradually take ownership of their lives.

I would use somewhat different language today. Independence can sound like needing no one, which is neither realistic nor especially appealing. We need other people. We need wisdom, companionship, challenge, help, and somewhere safe to admit that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing. What I was reaching for was not separation from others. It was self-ownership within relationship. Together—and more fully ourselves because of it.

When I spoke about carving out original future paths, the visible subject was the future. The larger concern was freedom: whether people could trust themselves to create possibilities for which no established path yet existed. Some possibilities do not arrive with a degree program, job description, established category, or helpful directional sign. Sometimes a person has to discern what fits, test a possibility, learn from experience, and create the path while living it.

I did not yet have the larger work gathered publicly under Synona’s four practices:

1. Discern what your lifetime is asking of you.

2. Design your next season with intention.

3. Develop the wisdom, character, and judgment to live it well.

4. Steward your lifetime through principles you have consciously chosen to live by.

But I can now see how often I was already teaching their beginnings.

A body of work can exist before it has a public name

We often imagine that meaningful work begins when we announce it. We choose a name. Create a logo. Write the mission. Tell people what we are building. But some work begins much earlier—and may be understood and ready privately long before it can be introduced publicly. It appears first as a question that will not leave us alone.

We follow it into one testing, then another. We teach it under different titles. We recognize it in the lives of clients, students, friends, children, and strangers. We argue with it. Refine it. Occasionally attempt to abandon it and discover that it has followed us home. Sometimes we do recognize the larger work. We simply do not yet have the language, container, audience, or moment that can hold it whole. So we translate. We offer the piece that belongs in this room. We begin with the concern already alive in the people before us. We do not make the doorway smaller because the larger vision is unimportant. We make it recognizable enough for someone to enter.

The title reflects the readiness of the audience—not the perimeter of the vision. That is what I see in this old list. Synona did not suddenly appear in a garden in Chapel Hill. It had been gathering its pieces for decades.

What the years added

Younger Diane placed enormous value on independence. I still do. But the years have made the idea larger. I now understand more deeply that a life can genuinely belong to a person while also containing commitment, interdependence, care, responsibility, and love. Ownership does not mean arranging a life in which no one needs you. It means participating consciously in what you have chosen and what has been entrusted to you—without disappearing from your own life in the process.

I also understand that designing a life is not a single heroic act. You do not create the correct life at thirty-five and spend the next fifty years admiring your excellent work. Life keeps changing. Relationships change. Children grow. Work evolves. Bodies alter the terms. Loss rearranges the landscape. New possibilities appear after the former plan was supposedly complete. We need practices that help us remain in relationship with our own development through all of it. That is the larger work I can finally name.

Lifetime Development is the continuing practice of developing a life that genuinely belongs to you.

And Synona is where people help one another do it.

Perhaps your life has been leaving evidence too

At seventy, I am not beginning Synona from nothing. Nor am I only now discovering that these ideas belonged together. I am finally giving the larger picture a public name, a home, and practices people can enter through many different doors. That matters because we can mistake naming something late for beginning it late. We can look at the work emerging now and assume we are behind. But perhaps we have been gathering the materials for years. An interest that kept returning. A problem we repeatedly helped others solve. A question that appeared beneath several careers. A way of seeing that became clearer each time life gave us another angle. The pieces may have looked unrelated while we were living them. Looking back, we may discover that they have been in conversation all along.

This does not mean every old project must be revived. Some ideas completed their work in their own season. Some belong to an earlier version of us. Some should be thanked warmly and allowed to remain in the filing cabinet. The invitation is not to drag the past forward whole.

It is to ask what understanding has been trying to deepen across the years.

What did you keep noticing?

What did you keep teaching?

What did people repeatedly seek you out to help them understand?

What question has followed you through different jobs, relationships, seasons, and versions of yourself?

You may not be starting something new.

You may finally be seeing what has been becoming through you.

One question

What larger understanding was I carrying beneath the particular subject I chose to share?

One practice

Gather five pieces of evidence from your past: old projects, talk titles, jobs, classes, journals, volunteer roles, ideas, or problems repeatedly brought to you. Do not begin by evaluating whether they were successful.

For each one, ask two questions:

What doorway did I offer because it met people where they were?

What larger understanding was I carrying behind it?

Circle the words or intentions that repeat. Then complete this sentence:

I may have been carrying a larger understanding of __________ for longer than I have said it aloud.

One way to experience Synona™

Bring the unfinished sentence to A Meeting with Your Lifetime™—a private, one-hour conversation with me, offered at no charge in Chapel Hill or by FaceTime. We will look for the thread without forcing it into a conclusion before it is ready.

Apparently, your life may have been leaving meeting notes. It would be polite to read them.

-To the success of you and yours, MaverickDiane

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