Dactylographic

At an executive leadership roundtable I attend, the conversation is about the challenges we face promoting women in our organizations.  I can’t help but think about how often I now find myself in all-women meetings, or the fact that every one of my direct reports is a woman, the speakers on my calls are women, and every candidate I consider for any position I am filling is a woman.  At first glance I think "Wow, we’re really making progress;” I say things like it’s great that my organization is so forward-thinking, how lucky I am to work in a corporation where leadership values diversity.  And then I read this post and I stop myself; hmmm, maybe it’s me?

I like to think I do a decent job of documenting the results I deliver for my organization.  I can find the data, do the analysis, and spout the metrics showcasing the value I bring.  So when he observes I’m leaving on the table credit I should be taking I have no choice but to put my hands to my face, groping for the blinders I didn’t know I was wearing. What am I missing?  It never dawns on me that I’m surrounded by smart, ambitious, passionate, dynamic women leaders because I’m a lodestone for the change I want to see in the world.

We spend an inordinate amount of time weighing how much of ourselves it’s safe to put out there.  We’ll temper our messages and our actions to the degree of discomfort we feel in our situation or environment.  We often have a distorted view of how much of ourselves we allow to leak out.  But all we need to do is look around with fresh eyes to understand the impact we’re making:  When we are truly authentic, we’ll see reflected back at us the values and beliefs we are most passionate about.  And so how can I not take credit for the plethora of women leaders I’m working with when I have so much conviction around the value these individuals bring to my business?

Maybe our success is so hard to acknowledge because it’s uniquely ours, because we need to express our individuality in order to truly claim it, because admitting it means we need to embrace the irrefutable evidence that we really are catalysts for greatness, and deep down our greatness scares us.

I’m sure if I had piped up at the leadership roundtable with my observation that I’m suddenly surrounded by a bunch of great women leaders, I would have been the only one in the room who couldn’t see that the accomplishment belongs to me.

I submit we need to overcome our fears around being great and own the success we create if we’re ever to feel like the leaders we are.  Take a good look around and soak in what you see.  Your fingerprints are everywhere.

Sophistry

We meet over lunch at this little restaurant on the water in Charleston, our table facing a wall covered from floor to ceiling with orange life jackets hung in perfect rows.  I don’t know him well, but he holds a significant position in my organization, one of those select few with a “C” in his title.  He intimidates me just a bit, but we’re among friends unwinding from a hectic conference, connecting on a personal level.  He’s telling stories about his past employment; they cause us to blush and laugh out loud at the same time. He’s human after all.

The following week he’s in my in-box, thanking my colleagues and I for allowing him to sit at the “cool kids’ table”, fulfilling, apparently, a dream he’s held on to since high school when he longed to drink his chocolate milk with the in crowd.  I couldn’t help but think when I read his words that here I was concerned about the impression I was making on him, and all the while he was worrying about how we’d receive him.

 

Seth Godin writes about the cool kids today, pulling the memory of this encounter out of the vault in my head.  The point he makes is thought provoking:  In our insatiable quest for affirmation and acceptance, we can spend a ton of time comparing ourselves to everyone else in the room. And when we do, we undoubtedly come up lacking, choosing to see only those traits we wish we possessed, forgetting about everything wonderful we do possess.  The irony is while we’re residing at the bottom of these hierarchies in our heads, we sit squarely on top of the hierarchy of another, we’re that person someone else aspires to be.

When we go looking for places to fall short, the best we can find is comfort in knowing this is a natural part of the human condition.  When we strive to transcend this game we are rewarded with something infinitely more precious:  The power to be who we’re meant to be.

Keel

To move through life is to experience a multitude of losses.  This is not the brightest of perspectives, nor is it a viewpoint today’s society spends much time socializing, contemplating or marketing.  We are all about winning.  To lose is somehow humiliating, shameful and should be moved through quickly lest we lose focus on our goal to win.

 

As kids we played “The Game of Life”, the Milton Bradley board game where the roll of the dice determines your fate.  The definition of winning is a big family and lots of money.  “Life” is all about landing on the right spaces so you are victorious in the end.  I remember vividly how I’d sweat through the small stretch of road offering the opportunity for a spouse and babies.  Much cheering ensued if you happened to land on a husband and a visit from the stork, condolences if you suffered the misfortune of skipping over these spaces.    I was conditioned to believe a full car and bursting coffers are my right by the time I rest in the coffin.

Life isn’t about vigilant, careful choices that bring about a prize in the end; rather it is a series of opportunities and circumstances to be managed with the goal to be as happy as possible no matter what happens.   Knowing and embracing this concept is kindred to harnessing power.  When looking back at the trials and tribulations adolescents endure becoming adults, we can’t help but use the phrase “he turned out okay”, like there is some magical point in life when we have arrived; we cease to evolve.  My mother died when I was 38.  If she thought at that point I “turned out okay”, she would have been doing both herself and me a disservice.  I often wish she could know me now.  In the last seven years of my life I have reached into my soul and pulled out the real me.  And I’m probably not done yet.

 

I believe in the chance aspect of life.  As much as we try, as much as we think we are controlling what comes our way, so little of it really is up to us.  What I don’t believe is that there is an end game.  Life is not meant to be finished; it’s simply extinguished at a point along the continuum.  We are not cheated if we haven’t had the chance to build our families and amass our fortunes, to win by society’s rules; these are blessings not entitlements.

 

 “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis is the journal of a man consumed by despair after the death of his wife.   She was more than a wife by today’s standards.  Too many marriages are on paper only.  Instead of nurturing a cherished intimacy as Lewis and his partner did, the ever-present pursuit of winning distracts us into believing we should expect to lose our passion, that it is normal to settle into languid content, and that the distance brought about by business commitments and raising children is to be expected, tolerated so that we can someday retire in wealth and splendor.  But what about right now?   Are we sacrificing too much today, banking on a finite tomorrow we really don’t control?

Lewis talks about how faith is not really tested until we lose something so important to us that we really need our faith to get through.  And for a portion of the grief process, we question our faith.  I have yet to experience the death of a loved one as profoundly as Lewis documents in the book.  But I have experienced a multitude of everyday losses.

 

“Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst”. Lewis describes the drowning man, so consumed by his fear and panic that he flails recklessly and thwarts the very rescue he is desperate for.   His theory is that when engulfed in grief, we believe God has abandoned us, when the reality is we’ve created such chaos within ourselves we’re unable to hear Him.   The endless pursuit of winning and society’s definitions of success exert tremendous chaos within our hearts and minds.  So much in fact we sometimes can’t drink the sweet elixir of our soul, that internal life preserver demanding stillness to be caught.

Life is not a prescription to be filled.  Are you on the journey to collect dividends, check victories off a list?  What if we handled winning and losing with the very same grace?  I think we might find happiness every day. 

Expository

His voice booms.  He puts a stake in the ground when everyone around him hesitates to weigh in. He asks the kinds of questions we’re all thinking; the ones we’re wishing we had the courage to pose, and he leaves them hanging thick in that painful, interring silence, the dead air where our minds are furiously whirling for a reply to somehow justify and validate all the effort we’re putting forth debating the “how”.  He’s simply asking why.

It’s a question we’re familiar with as parents, prompted by the innocence and curiosity of our toddlers and young children; an incessant game of escalating proportions, often culminating in a completely exasperated “because” when we can no longer find a plausible response to the chain plummeting to hadopelagic depths. If only “because” was an acceptable response in the life of a grown adult.

 

It’s easy to get caught up in continuing to deliver on the rote commitments we think our work and life demand because we’ve always done them or because they show up on the calendar or because we somehow feel obligated.  What if you were brave enough to ask yourself why?  And what if the response to the question pointed toward not doing that which you are programmed to do?  Could you actually stop?  Could you say no?

“Why?” can make us uncomfortable.  “Why?” can force us to look within, to not only understand but articulate an opinion or our purpose.  Conflict, dissention, hesitation, and debate:  These are the queues to hit the pause button and ask why.  This is how lives change; this is how the world changes.

I aspire to be him, to put my questions on the table for discussion, knowing I may occasionally need to eat my words.  When we challenge the group to think differently, we shape our organization into the place we want it to be; when we challenge ourselves to live life differently, we shape ourselves into who we are meant to be.