SPRING 2022 / REAL-LEADERS.COM 17 “IF WE ONLY HAVE A FEW MONTHS LEFT, HOW CAN WE MAKE THE MOST OF THEM IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OTHER, OUR KIDS, AND COMMUNITY?” — Claire Nuer CHANGEMAKERS Learning as Leadership: Humanizing Business Lara and Claire Nuer / San Francisco and Paris LARA NUER WAS AN ORDINARY TEENAGER living in Paris with her family. Behind the appearances, however, she was resentful. “I was in the throes of a teenage crisis. I was easily annoyed by anything my mother said and felt oppressed by her sense of responsibility and sacrifice. I was shy and introverted, so most of my rebellion was internal rather than voiced. She knew it, and it hurt her.” Then, one day, everything changed in an instant. Lara’s mother, Claire, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. “When this happened, my teenage crisis vanished overnight,” Lara says. “I immediately became determined to help her conquer this cancer. It was a very pure, naive sense of hope and possibility. I was only 14, but I was on a mission to keep her alive. My father, Sam, and I became her co-pilots on her quest for healing.” Claire knew what it was like to lose a parent. When she was nine years old, her father had been deported to Auschwitz, never to return. When Claire was only seven, she had been sent into hiding, away from her parents. She had faced hunger, abuse, and disease during the dark years of the Holocaust. Now she ferociously wanted to see her children grow up — and to be there for them. Claire and Sam became obsessed with this thought: “If we only have a few months left, how can we make the most of them in our relationships with each other, our kids, and community?” While battling cancer, Claire’s life’s calling was born: to give people the tools to discover this kind of selfawareness and give it back to the world. So she started a series of seminars and speaking engagements, and Lara decided to join her. Soon, she was invited to speak at major conferences and offer her programs in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Because Lara was fluent in English, she became Claire’s translator, and she worked feverishly to translate her work and coach business leaders around the world. Leaders like Deepak Chopra, Willis Harmon, and George McCown wanted to meet her. They were all curious how this petite woman who spoke only French and barely had a sixthgrade education could have such a powerful impact on so many people. Claire lived for 17 more years after that auspicious day that changed her life when she was told she had only three months to live. She would come to call cancer her “dear friend” because of the changes it had brought about in her life and the lives of so many others. By the time Claire passed away, Lara was 31 years old. Her brother Noah, for years inspired by his parents’ journey, gave up his film career to devote himself full-time to continue their work. Since Claire’s passing, under Lara and Noah’s leadership, Learning As Leadership has become a leadership training program for Fortune 500 companies and has helped many organizations shape a more humane culture. n Marianne Larned is the founder of The Stone Soup Leadership Institute, a non-profit organization that invests and trains young people around the world to become leaders in their communities. These stories are from her latest book, Stone Soup for a Sustainable World: LifeChanging Stories of Young Heroes. StoneSoupLeadership.org Top: Lara Nuer with her mother, Claire. Above: Claire Nuer. LEARNING AS LEADERSHIP
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY3Mjcw