Stories From

Bozeman & Beyond

Lorca Smetana

how to cultivate resilience

Lorca Smetana teaches resilience in leadership to entrepreneurs and professionals as well as to students and faculty at Montana State University, helping them design for high levels of energy, innovation, compassion, and recovery.  A survivor of the 1986 school mountaineering tragedy on Mt. Hood, Lorca has been teaching and learning for over thirty years about risk, personal sustainability, recovery from tragedy, and joy

Lorca Smetana is a wayfinder — an educator and creative consultant in the development of resilient leaders, helping them design for high levels of energy, innovation, compassion, and recovery. A survivor of the 1986 school mountaineering tragedy on Mt. Hood, Lorca has been teaching and learning for over thirty years about risk, personal sustainability, recovery from tragedy, and joy. She holds an MA in diplomacy and is on the faculty in Human Leadership Development at Montana State University. A TEDx and keynote speaker, a celebrant, a writer, and a farmer, she has helped leaders better understand what it is to be a resilient ecosystem.

“I pull resilience to the surface of your life, teaching you to hone and tend it until it is a force that fills you, letting you meet each next thing with presence and capacity and generosity. We tend compassion and embodiment, explore boundaries and blind spots, embrace unknowns and time, and engage in an abundance of resilience games that keep us awake, alive, and growing in grace, fluidity, and power. With me, you design for ease, grow in wholeness, and become a beautifully vibrant human ecosystem. This is resilient leadership.”

Resources:
Lorca Smetana
Compash-Imagination – Lorca Smetana
Design for Resilience

Lorca’s book recommendations:
The Bed Book (Sylvia Plath)
Time and the Art of Living (Robert Grudin)
The Book of Qualities (Ruth Gendler)
The Songlines (Bruce Chatwin)

Recent Podcasts

EPISODE #100 - JOHN MCPHEE

on writing, teaching, exploring

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. After seven years at Time magazine, he moved to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. A Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was awarded in 1999 the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (Annals of the Former World).