Building influence with your sacred bundle

In the 1990s, organizational consultant Peg Neuhauser began talking about the concept of the sacred bundle. 

By her own confession, the idea of the sacred bundle didn’t spring from her own brilliance.

Rather, she borrowed it from the Native Americans who knew that if you weren’t intentional about building and preserving your culture, your culture wouldn’t survive. 

For many Native American tribes, the sacred bundle was (and still is) a highly revered and protected collection of objects that represented something significant about the tribe’s identity. 

The bundle would include feathers, bones, bowls, stones, and more, and when the tribe would travel from place to place, the leader would carry the sacred bundle and treat it as one of the tribe's most holy possessions. During celebrations or other special moments, the tribal leader would gather everyone together and unwrap the bundle, telling the stories that reinforced the tribe’s values, worldview, and shared identity. 

The sacred bundle became a way for the tribe to preserve itself – and part of that is because sharing the stories that belonged to the bundle was never treated as a one-time event. It was a ritual that happened on repeat because the tribes knew that the consistent retelling of the tribe’s most sacred stories was the only way the tribe would survive across generations. 

Today, when I teach leaders and organizations how to create their own sacred bundles, I start with the same driving question that Peg Neuhauser did in the 1990s. 

If you had to start your organization over again, what stories would you take with you? 

When you think long and hard about this, it’s not a question most of us can answer immediately. 

For many founder-led brands, our stories, our values, and even our identities feel deeply inherent.  

We intuitively know our defining stories, and we show up every day, rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard work needed to build and sustain our culture.

But too often, in the midst of all our doing, we fail to stop long enough to ask ourselves: What happens to all of this when I'm no longer here to drive it all forward?

My answer? A long list of friction points:

• sales and marketing teams playing tug-of-war with opposing messages
• employees who aren’t bought into the mission
• expensive marketing campaigns that miss the boat on expressing who you really are (or worse, misidentify you completely)
• audiences who aren’t sure why they should do business with you
• team members who feel unseen and unheard. . . 

While plenty of leadership experts will turn to frameworks and tools and assessments to help you solve those problems, few of those solutions really help you address the friction points at a systemic level. 

And this is where the sacred bundle shines best. 

When you take the time to create your own sacred bundle, you find and identify the stories that invite others into the world you’re building. Even more, you compel them to stay in that world because they can now see themselves as a central character in it.

In short, a sacred bundle allows you to codify the most important parts of who you are.

It becomes a roadmap to your shared identity, and as you share and reshare the stories from your sacred bundle, anyone who enters into your brand or organization relies on those stories to understand who they are and who they become when they join you.

When I work with my clients and help them create their own sacred bundle, I teach them to consider 4 main storylines: 

Belief: What are the non-negotiable values you live by? What stories prove we live these out?

Legacy: What stories will people share about us when I’m no longer here?

Calling: What are we doing that no one else can do?

Community: Who do others become when they join us?

Their answers to these questions become the stories that they'd use if they were to start their organization all over again, and when they add those stories into their sacred bundle, they are doing something few other tools know how to do: Tethering their entire culture to a collective identity.

I’ll share more on this next post, but until then, you can head over to storyhousefifteen.com and grab my free guide How to own your calling and grow your impact. It's a free, no-download read and comes with a companion journal to help you to create and activate your own sacred bundle. 

And of course, if you’d like help creating a sacred bundle for your own business, reach out and let’s talk. 

***********************

I'm Lindsay Hotmire, and I partner with small business owners and do-good organizations who want to build strong brands and even stronger cultures. Through clarity coaching, brand positioning, and story strategy, my clients learn how to boldly step into their calling, chase new endeavors, increase revenue, and grow their impact. Learn more at storyhousefifteen.com.