“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -JRR Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring
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Native Wisdom Part 1: If you do something long enough, you must like it
My Father used to say, “If you do something long enough, you must like it.” These were wise words from a part Cherokee truck driver, born in the hollers of Western North Carolina. His belief was that life is full of mysteries and paradoxes, and that people inevitably did what they wanted. He also believed that people’s behavior spoke louder than their words and that while free will was everyone’s right, few took advantage of it.
The paradox he was speaking to was the difference between people’s professed intentions and their actions, or more clearly stated the difference between what people said they wanted and how they acted. He was fascinated by this observation and so came up with his own explanations of human behavior, independent of psychology or any other academic schooling. For these nuggets of Native Wisdom, I’m eternally grateful and I’ll share them in this blog.
Let’s take an example. A friend of mine was upset about how her children and their families have come to dominate her life. She repeatedly complained about this dynamic and conveyed dismay at how they routinely took advantage of her. While her children, now in their 20’s, are able to manage their own lives, they instead relied on their mother to care for many of their wants and needs. She took care of their pets, fixed lunches, and loaned them money. They also repeatedly come and go from her house at all hours, with the expectation that she take care babysitting, washing their laundry and making them meals. She claimed that she disliked her children’s behavior, yet when observing her actions, the contrary seemed to be true. Her actions shouted that she loved being involved and relied upon. According to my Father, though she claimed that she was unhappy with the situation, it was obvious she didn’t want things to change because she liked things as they were.
Since she had known my Father and his many insights, I quoted him one day, during a visit. In the middle of one of her complaining sessions, I imitated his Southern accent and his wry sense of humor to provide some gentle teasing about her dilemma. She laughed, thankfully.
While, she loved her children and deeply wanted to be connected with and involved in their lives, being intimately connected on a daily basis was proving to be stressing for her. Both her and her children had learned behaviors – habits that had been developed years ago that met the needs of the times for everyone in the family. But now, though she had evolved, and her children had evolved, both still lived their lives through the behavioral system that each had outgrown.
My friend knew that change in the family dynamic was needed, but changing is hard. Why? The behaviors people learn, are learned for a reason. Behaviors develop because, even if only temporarily, they work to provide an answer to a problem. Then, new problems are encountered, and we try to force fit an old solution on a new circumstance. When we become conscious of this, it forces us to confront the fact that what was once the best that we could do, is no longer good enough. This causes pain, so we avoid it be letting the awareness of this go unconscious again. The paradox is that it’s the pain that provides the space for growth. If we are aware of what no longer serves us and could sit with the pain just long enough, we can change our behavior, so that we can create better alignment between what we say and what we do.
Working through her behavioral system was tough, but she was up for it. She spoke with her children and has re-contracted behaviors and boundaries and unexpectedly positive changes have enriched all their lives. All thanks to gentle Native Wisdom from my Father, “if you do something long enough, you must like it.”
How about you? What is no longer serving you well? What actions are not aligned with what you love? What can you change today to bring you closer to your real potential? It might be painful to examine, but you’re up for it, right?
Inside out, change your scripts, change your world
We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted t0 change, you’re the one who has to change. – Katharine Hepburn
The Forest and the Unconscious Realm
“I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with the luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.” -Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver
The Truth About Executive Psychological Assessments
At the most senior levels of leadership in organizations, psychologists often perform psychological assessments to do two basic things:
- Selection: To glean understanding of a leader’s ability to fit within the role, context and culture of a new organization or to ascertain whether a promotion will be successful or not.
- Development: To help leaders deepen understanding of their leadership impact through what we call “developmental” psychological assessments.
Assessments themselves vary from in-depth intensive one to one interviews, to full blown – multiple day assessment centers, to online survey tools, or various combinations of these. There is a proliferation of business speak and intellectual debate about the viability of some of these tools, including which are better and which are worse. I’m not here to reflect on the merits of the innumerable different methodologies or tools; rather, I want to discuss why you should do them and how you begin. This leads to who should do them which solves your methodology questions, because in the hands of the right professional, the process and tools become less of an issue.
There are three reasons why you absolutely need to do assessments in the first place:
- People lie. To themselves, to their colleagues and to their families. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes because they do not understand what great looks, sometimes on purpose. Assessments attempt to get to the reality about an individual that goes beyond perception.
- Leaders have personal agendas. It is difficult for leaders to distinguish between reality and what they perceive to be true. Leaders project their own fears, dreams, or issues onto those around them if they do not understand this about themselves. Frankly, most do not. It is because of this that it is difficult for leaders to objectively judge the merits of those around him or her.
- People are extremely complex. People that think they can uncover everything during a brief interaction are delusional (see points 1 and 2 above). Additionally, online tests and surveys at best capture just a few dimensions.
Here’s how you begin:
- Find a business psychologist with a PhD and significant experience working with and within organizations. This is important! There are numerous inexperienced professionals who are well intentioned but have never faced the intricate dynamics of organization life themselves.
- Uncover what’s important for your organization to achieve its business strategy. Then marry these criteria to a vetted leadership model. If you must, build your own that speaks to the organization’s unique culture, but ground it in the current best thinking.
- Conduct assessments against the criteria developed in the previous step for those entering the organization, for those you promote and for those that you think have a chance to be leaders.
- Do this for yourself and your employees. Lead by example, which should be a no brainer, but sadly, it is not.
- Craft developmental plans that help people engage in gaining additional insight into their impact. Help them uncover their purpose. Follow up, follow up and follow up. Make it fun.
- For a kick, step back and look holistically at your results to determine trends and areas of strengths and weaknesses in your leadership pool; plan accordingly.
And that’s how it’s done. Who knows what might be lying underneath all those smiling faces (or yours)? Having an objective external view of your talent gives you a clear picture of how to manage risk as it relates to executing your strategy. Everything thing else is lies, agendas, and delusion.
Soul Annihilation
“Work is a soul sucking experience,” I mulled during my few moments of eating breakfast this morning. Despite devoting years to trying to understand exactly what this work thing is we do, why we do it, and how to make it less soul sucking, I found myself at ground zero once again.
What event had placed me here? The day before, I had been in yet another corporate meeting where a decision to move forward was in the process of being reversed. It was as a result of a theoretical argument made by non-operations people about how operations “should” be done. There was merit in their view, but it ignored the day to day reality that our operations people had vetted with clients. We were on the verge of postponing a decision that would enable us to put a stake in the ground and to do something different to engage our customers and beat the competition. It was a commitment to change. But people were waffling. Systems theory would have predicted that all systems try to retain homeostasis, so I understood intellectually what was going on in the organization; the organization was attempting to maintain its own center of gravity, that is, protecting itself from change.
But what was really going on with me, personally? Why had this de-energized me? Frustration? Yes. Chagrin? Maybe. But it went much deeper.
When had I been happiest recently? The answer was clear: when I was painting a potting bench my husband had hand-made for me. At the time, I had found my joy curious. With complete and utter wonder, I watched the paint that I had chosen glide like silk over the bench. Side by side we painted, silently caught up in the spell of accomplishment, awed by the results of our efforts and the simple peace of being with one another. There was evident progress and satisfaction from a job well done.
I thought about my draining corporate experience and how something as simple as painting could be so rewarding. Then it occurred to me that what I was experiencing during my breakfast mull was alienation. Karl Marx described alienation as the result of living and working in a world based on social classes. The idea goes that the average person in this complex web of social classes loses the ability to lead their life and chose their own destiny. By working “for” someone, something, (not ourselves) pursuing our own destiny – life, is at best secondary. Many times it is not thought about at all. Thus, we cannot determine the character of our own actions or those of others, define how we relate to others, or own the things and use the value of the goods and services we make with our labor.
I wonder if we are experiencing a spike in the collective experience of alienation. Perhaps the surge and pull for “organic,” moving back to small farms, getting “off the grid”, disconnecting, etc. is reflective of our collective unconsciousness of alienation. Additionally, there is more marketing on how to simplify your life, some examples of which include a venue called the “Container Store” and a magazine called “Real Simple” that has as its mission how to help you simplify every aspect of your life. (I find it curious that month after month the magazine is quite thick, making me think it is really not so simple to be real simple.)
We all feel this alienation pull at us from time to time, but especially when we experience a disconnection between our destiny and how we make our money. The literature abounds with research and self-help books that proclaim that success comes from doing what we love. Perhaps doing what we love is what helps us also to avoid the abject despair of alienation, too.
I write about perception, hopefully with depth, that helps us more clearly capture our individual purpose. By making the unconscious conscious we ensure we can more closely align what we love with what we do and avoid the feeling that we are mere cogs in a machine someone else created for us.
What makes you happy? When were you last happy? These questions must be mulled over so that we are not lulled into giving up our time and energy for “the other.” Otherwise, where does that leave us at the end of our short precious life?
The Gravity of Shame
With the May snow swirling outside my window, I watched a newly emerged spring green leaf fall helplessly to the ground, as if to say, “too much! I can’t bear being exposed any longer and I want to die.” As I watched the drama, I imagined the full life this leaf might have lived. She would have enjoyed a warm summer with the pleasurable feeling of energy being pumped through her veins. She might have lived out her purpose of turning sunlight and water into a magnificent tree all the while dancing with her sisters and brothers in the calm breezes as well as storms. At the end of her life, she might have turned into a bright orange blaze in the hush of fall before winter brought her death.
This thought lingered with me, and as a staunch friend of both projection and anthropomorphizing, I began relating to this. What can make us shudder from exposure and make us wish we were dead? What makes us fall from our true purpose? “Shame is a soul eating emotion,” Carl Jung once observed. Shame makes us feel vulnerable and exposed to the harsh elements of other’s cool judgment real or perceived, or worse, our own cold judgment of ourselves. We hide from it and avoid situations where it might, like some ever present menace, be provoked.
There is a price to this hiding and avoiding. We miss out on some of life’s joys and avoid experiences that would make our lives richer and more complex. For many of us, it is not the abuse that others do to us that causes our shame; it is our own internal scripts that are reflective of our self-perception and our perception regarding how the world perceives us. From the smallest of self talk to something bigger, we gut check ourselves moment by moment each day to avoid risk, humiliation – shame. Often these scripts go unexamined as they are part of our belief system, and we are as sure about them as we are sure about gravity.
Whether coaching leaders, teams or individuals, part of the real work is helping them to uncover what holds them back from their highest purpose. There are many theories about this including limiting belief systems, fear of failure or even fear of success, but I believe that at the root of these resides shame. Shame that we might be unworthy, shame that we are inadequate, shame that others might see who we “really are” and that might not be good enough, smart enough, or tough enough.
What holds you back? What makes you hide yourself from others? When do you do a gut check before speaking your mind? Find a friend or sounding board and talk it out, or write, draw, or create the emotion so that it sees the light of day. Shame survives best by being hidden, unexamined, and by the belief that you are the only one feeling this way. Ignoring it will not make it go away and can make it grow. Becoming conscious of your own shame and sometimes, just sometimes, merely asking and answering “what makes me feel shamed?” can help shame defy gravity and float away like the May snow.
The Real Indian Experience
When I was offered the opportunity to work and live in India for a couple of years, it was the proverbial offer I could not refuse. I had been seeking professional and personal transformation, and what better place? The exotic, colourful, and transcendent images that had been built in my mind’s eye over the years about India danced before me – it was like a visual siren call. I had to go.
Reality is almost always different than our dreams, especially when it comes to personal transformation. Sometimes we seek it, sometimes it seeks us. Most often we meet transformation someplace between what we thought we wanted and something quite outside our comprehension.
India is so intense that people believe they get her quickly. This is because she overwhelms the senses so utterly and completely, even on the shortest of trips. I listen to other business travellers talk expertly about her, as if though they know her intimately, all the while staying at 5-star hotels and working with the best and the brightest of the Indian business world. And I also listen silently and somewhat proudly, because of the knowledge that the sliver of shimmering heat, pulsating energy, eye stinging aroma and multi-tiered chaos that they sense through the hotel window or while being driven from meeting to meeting is only the beginning of understanding the depth of diversity -and the difference- that is India. Visiting India is much different than living in India. And I lived in Mumbai, which is India on steroids.
I am profoundly grateful for my time in India and for the person I am as a result. I am, at my core, different than the woman who went there. What follows are the critical lessons that I learned that affect how I view the worldnow. To me, this was the real “Indian Experience.” It is not a story of spiritual transcendence, or a story of developing a razor sharp commercial edge through working in the emerging market. It is more a story of easing into myself and the world, beyond how I defined myself as a person or as a citizen of the US and western world. Paradoxically, this did indeed lead to somewhat of a spiritual awakening and heightened my commercial edge. These are some of the lessons I learned:
- Relax, it will come to you. Our real estate broker said this when he sensed I was particularly frustrated with trying to execute my western style, lengthy to-do list. I wanted everything done, as you can imagine, now. So I tried to relax and this is what I learned: In India, merely talking to others about what I needed would set a social network in play whereby the things you needed found you. This is how we found our maid, got our car fixed, the mold in our flat removed, found French Vanilla Coffee Mate, and taco shells. I found this process mysterious and amazing. I now employ it everywhere in the world and it works.
- Nurture your entourage. Most people who work in what is traditionally called “the middle class” and higher in India have an entourage that consists of at least two people: your head maid and your driver. The maid controls your household and can save your life. Your driver controls your “outside-the-house” experience and can save your life, too. This can be the beginning of a empire enabling you to accomplish and acquire most anything available in India, legal or not. One important tip: choose a really good maid and make sure she, your driver and any other person you hire permanently, or temporarily, knows she is in charge. There is a hierarchy that it is best to work with and not fight against. At times, I felt the chain of the command in our flat was Maggie, our maid, then Jim, my partner, then me and then our driver Michael. Our entourage increased by 20 sometimes depending on the task or project. We were brought in to solve major and minor conflicts over roles, processes and outcomes and were seen as benefactors to a slew of family members, activities and holidays. Being American, it was hard for us to position ourselves in a hierarchy, but the learning was that it really was not about us, but about how we could make life easier for those around us, and thus, we found our lives were easier, too.
- Getting things done is about setting critical priorities. Activity and getting things done can be seen as the same thing in India. Many times, we had to follow up innumerable times to get things completed. Often we would get a lots of running around, people quickly walking to and fro, looking intently at the water heater, the electrical socket, the mold, etc., and then more talking and explaining. Yet often things never quite got fixed. Our conclusion was that people honestly thought they were doing their best to help us, but did not know how. Saying “no” was not an option and even considered rude. Thus the continued swirl of activity without resolution until we eventually gave up on things that were less important. These things were taken off the to-do list. And that was getting it done.
- Structure is a good thing. Agreement does not necessarily mean something will happen. I had many intense conversations with people and it would seem we would unanimously agree on what to do and the next steps. I was use to everyone immediately beginning to work on our agreed task and next steps. What I learned was that I had to set clear timelines, boundaries and schedules, and inject rigorous follow-up into the process. In other words, I had to work to get things to work. Otherwise, these commitments seemed to be tossed out to the vast social network to get done by other means. If at all.
- Now I really know what resilience means. The lack of infrastructure makes doing anything in Mumbai difficult. Going to and from work, running errands or even attending social events becomes a struggle. Yes, the roads are rough with holes. Yes, the traffic is horrible. People squeeze five lanes into a two lane road all while people are walking in the middle of the street, holding a hand out indicating they are going to walk in front of an oncoming car without even a mere glance. But there is also an emotional cost of being on the road in Mumbai that can tear on your soul. The sights, the sounds, the smells are riveting, startling, intoxicating and shaming. I would sometimes imagine what the power of India would be should all the infrastructure issues be magically fixed overnight. The power and resiliency that I saw on a daily basis to merely survive could be released into something quite powerful and transcendent.
- Health is everything. Since I had completed land and water survival courses in the military and travelled throughout the world, my belief was that I was physically resilient, and as a former naval officer, pretty tough. Yet, I had never lived daily within a crowded population with easy access to antibiotics. This environment creates new and highly resilient strains of some of mankind’s long-term diseases like the flu and TB. During my first six months in Mumbai, I had illnesses ranging from pneumonia to an atypical mycobacterium related to both TB and leprosy, along with numerous cases of food poisoning. I dropped 20 pounds in two months and at a certain point could hardly walk. Eventually, I figured out how best to live in Mumbai. Now, I seem super-resilient to whatever bug my American colleagues pass around to one another. My Doctor, who is Indian, says I could go any place in the world now because I have honed my immune system in one of the toughest places. I have a new found appreciation for healthy eating, thinking and existing that I devote considerable time to because I truly know what it means to be sick.
- American politics look even more ridiculous than I thought they did. Perspective and distance makes us look even sillier and small minded. Enough said.
Like most personal transformations, mine is not what I expected. Through my physical, emotional and intellectual changes, I learned from India in some way to be more myself and let other expectations I had about myself go. There was a sharpening of focus on what was most important and a releasing of things that were not so important. After having lived in an environment where many of my American friends would find horribly intolerable, I found myself truly appreciating, for the first time in my life, the gifts that had come to me merely by being born where I had been born. Without many creature comforts, I found comfort in my relationships. I cared less about anything in popular media save my FB account. I have been back in the US about two months and I still do not know the latest movies or television shows, and the recent rising stars all seem the same to me. The pressure to buy, buy, buy, is never ending, and I understand that I actually don’t need very much, just my health and my relationships. I had searched for peace of mind my entire life. For many, there is peace in this world anyplace you go if you know how to get it. For me, it was through the chaos, drama and the kaleidoscope of my Indian experience that I found peace for the first time in my life.
Written March 2013
The Battle for Alignment
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight Eisenhower
I think of this quote often. I live it daily and so do my partners and clients. Not only do I consult to leadership in a variety of different organizations, but I also lead within organizations in which I’m employed. I have made this choice, as opposed to being an independent consultant, because I think there is great value in the insight gained from being a leader in a complex organization when you consult to leaders within complex organizations.
Without fail, there is a time each week when this quote comes to mind. Although I’m someone who enjoys spontaneous and evolving conversations, I prepare in advance as much as I can. I do this through reading, talking to colleagues and in general, collecting and organizing a variety of points of view so that I feel I understand the landscape – as I think it is going to be – in an upcoming “battle.” In this instance, I liken gaining alignment between people to a battle as sometimes it can feel that way. I find this to be the essential requirement of leadership, to bring others together for the sake of getting something done in a certain timeframe. Underlying this is energy engagement, which I feel is what a leader “really” does, but that is a topic for another day.
Even after the alignment is created, which can be a battle in and of itself, the plans that are created don’t work. People change their minds, other priorities emerge, technology doesn’t work, one person is left off an email, or perhaps organizational priorities shift. Clausewitz once opined, “Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.” The same is true in getting things done in organizations.
What do I recommend to clients and what have I learned to do myself?
- Be clear about and “in love” with the effect you want to achieve.
- Maintain emotional distance and do not be “in love” with a specific way to achieve it. It is OK to shift and do things differently even if the decision has been made to do it a certain way. Consciouly chose the right path, not the default path.
- Take your own emotional pulse – if you fall “out of love” with what you’re trying to achieve, others will too and maybe your intuition is trying to tell you something. What is shifting your focus?
- Be prepared for wildcards and the unpredictable, something unplanned will happen. Knowing this can take the emotional edge off when things go astray.
- Be open to new information to build or shift your vision
The battle for alignment is an ongoing process that requires renewal and revisiting as the twists and turns of execution unfold. Eisenhower had it right, planning is necessary while plans go astray. And they always will. How we adjust to it is what organizational life is all about.
The Frog, the Dolphin, and the Giraffe
This past weekend, I found three stuffed animals in a storage box that I had kept since I was three years old. Now 50 some years later, I pondered why I had kept them so long. There was a Frog with a crown, a silvery yet furry Dolphin and a speckled Giraffe with a little red tongue dangling outside its mouth. Presently, they were sewn together piles of dust that “should” be tossed. In the middle of a cold, wet Lake Michigan day in April I could not bring myself to do so, despite my sense of urgency to get my spring cleaning done. As I stood pondering, struck by the fact that they were still with me and wondering why that might be. Remembering that Socrates was attributed with saying “the unexamined life is not worth living,” I continued to reflect. I realized I had not examined the difference between the lifeless artifacts in front of me and the life-filled archetypes they had represented to me as a child. They had somehow remained one in the same, my childhood imaginings captured somehow in these dull lifeless forms.
What is an archetype and why is it important? In Jungian psychology an archetype is a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, or image which is universally present in individual psyches. For instance there is an archetype of a Mother, Father, Hero, and Victim that are well known to most of us. Literature uses these archetypes through their fictional characters to speak to us about their greater truths that lie beyond fact. The media uses archetypes to create connection with their ideas and views beyond what might come about with an interaction with a simple product or consumer item. Individually, we have archetypes which are generalities or stories about ourselves and the world. These stories form scripts that we often follow unconsciously, whether they are correct or not. Many times they operate out of our awareness, guiding us without our knowing. The more closely we examine our stories and scripts, the more we will have examined our lives. My hope is that we all move away from “living a life of quiet desperation” (Thoreau).
To what archetypes did my dust balls speak? It was easy for me to understand the Frog – he was the smart one who could be relied upon for logical, practical and straightforward advice. He was wise and kind, a natural and benevolent leader. He saw things as they were, made things happen and had a realistic view of the world. The Dolphin was equally easy to understand as she was at the opposite end of the continuum, a free spirit looking for adventure, love and laughter with a sweet sense of humor. She had a good nature and was supportive and loyal to her friends. She strived to make her impact positive on those whom she met.
But the Giraffe, named “Baby Giraffe” was a mystery. What had he represented? He was awkward looking, could not stand on his own even when he was new and had big soulful eyes too large for his oversized head. His neck was too long, even for a giraffe, and his back too short, his tiny feet were incapable of holding his weight, his legs too weak. Through the years his long neck had buckled under the weight of his head and his tail had been chewed apart by a dog. Yet, he had been my favorite of the three despite his apparent imperfections. Baby Giraffe had been the joyful one, who ran about getting into mischief, going places he was not supposed to go and saying things he was not supposed to say.
My realizations when I looked at what each represented was that I was all those things, but had let the Frog dominate most of my life and only recently had I reacquainted myself with my dolphin self. She had reentered my life as I tried to free myself from issues that held my energy down. This had occurred through several significant life changes that still have me reverberating. Yet, they had set me off on adventures of travel and love I had only dreamed of. Now, perhaps it is time for me to acknowledge that the frog and the dolphin were really servants of the flawed, fragile, beautiful yet ugly giraffe I had always felt I was underneath it all, but was afraid to acknowledge. Baby Giraffe, the playful, wounded mischievous one, is fully formed as the archetype I adore most in my life, now that the Frog and the Dolphin have made it safe for him to come out and play.
Purple Mandala 
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