Auspicious

My body has not a drop of Irish blood coursing through it, yet last night I found myself celebrating with my favorite Irish couple at their annual gathering, grown women and men shooting chocolate-flavored liquor from dainty green miniature plastic mugs.  My intention to drink water and retire early; the reality is awaking in the guest room, bleary eyes and a tumbling mane of tangled tresses announcing to the world a stilted and truncated sleep.  Of course it was all worth it because we solved world hunger, conversing, debating, consoling and debunking until well after 4 AM.  I’m sure the birds were chirping somewhere underneath the din of our laughter and my tears. 

Talk somehow manages to turn intensely personal in the wee hours of the morning, and you’re never quite sure how you get there, but before you know it, you’re in it, and there’s no turning back.  This friend in particular always manages to usurp brutal honesty from me.  Even when I’m feeling really great about my situation, he makes me look into the dark corners that scare me, outing the demons preventing me from realizing my greatest desires. He pulls off their masks, grips my shoulders, turns me around so I’m standing squarely in front of them in a penetrating standoff.  Sometimes what I see makes me laugh for it’s obvious I’m being ridiculous. Other times I weep for the enormity of what I need to overcome.

When I evaluate my personal situation through the lens of my business world, I appear to be covering everything:   I’m coaching and developing my charges, increasing my revenue and watching the bottom line, even tending to my own personal growth. But I’ve got an open position on my team, the requisition languishing long past any acceptable fill-rate metric.  Instead of taking action to remedy, I’m taking on most of the responsibilities myself. Inevitably, critical components fall through the cracks, those which are clearly impossible for me to handle for obvious reasons.  It is this Achilles heel my perceptive and persistent friend seizes.

I pride myself on my team building skills, in fact shaping teams is a beloved aspect of my job. I believe in a measured balance when addressing openings.  To me it’s most important to find the right candidate, even if it means the position might be vacant a little longer than I’d like.  Because, after all, I’m going to invest in this person, and long after he leaves my assignment, I expect he’ll remain with the organization. I remember a request a while back to bring someone new on to my team.  Granted, it’s tough to find talent with the skillset in the geography we were targeting, but even when a qualified candidate surfaced, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.  When I consider that my inaction may be telling me something, what unveils is the awareness that I don’t believe we need to fill this role, that it’s already being done well by another, adding to the team seems redundant. 

Applying this line of thinking to the open position in my life brings the admission that I’m being undone by my own hesitation.  I notice I’ve been holding my breath for a really long time, shoring up the business of my life with limited resources, refusing to even ask for a new slate because past experience tells me filling this role will bring more work and little joy, still feeling bad that I had to choose to manage out the predecessor, an individual I was responsible for bringing on to the team in the first place.  Ouch.

Lucky girl.

This particular section of my glass ceiling is not coming down easily. I count myself lucky to have friends who care enough to go to this scary place with me, a place I expect I’ll need to revisit before I am looking at unfiltered blue skies.  It was Carl Sandburg who said “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”  Maybe I can start to breathe again.