Manipulation

I’m compelled to look this word up, much hangs on its connotation and it’s important for my heart that I get this right.  When vocabulary.com reveals two definitions, it’s not that I don’t know they exist, but they coexist so surreptitiously in what I consider to be a sacred space.  That one can be extraordinarily skilled in this dichotomy ambushes me; that I’m able to recuse myself from intoxicating, inimitable splendor in order to shield myself from an inevitable, insalubrious erosion of my soul makes walking away a testament to the power of sheer will.

Anthropomorphism

It’s a cold Sunday afternoon and I’m glued to the television watching “March of the Penguins”; a documentary film recounting a year in the life of the Emperor species, endemic to Antarctica.  To me the fascinating part of this story is the degree to which the male penguin participates in caring for the chick, acting as an incubator and present when it hatches, as the emaciated female must embark on a slow journey in search of food not long after she lays the egg. Before taking off she transfers this precious cargo to the feet of the male, a process so delicate they must practice many times before actually doing it; if not done properly, the embryo dies.

 

This is probably 8 years in the past, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.  As I’m watching, all I can think is that if my mate and I are Emperor Penguins, our chick will surely perish; we are incapable of the level of cooperation required to keep the embryo alive. And even more sadly, when the female returns home devastated to discover the baby she has never met has died, I know in my heart we are incapable of forgiveness, too; I would be no less fierce with my admonishment of the male.

What is it that allows some couples to work so well together and others not so much? 

Fast forward to today, and maybe I’ve discovered the answer in a heated debate I find myself in at dinner.  I call myself a feminist, to which he retorts we don’t need them anymore.  We’ve made tons of progress since the days of Mad Men, he says this is enough.  Life’s pretty much unfair all the way around, even to the white male; this he believes strongly; pounding his hand on the table as punctuation, launching into a diatribe on affirmative action.

I’m stunned by the fire in his belly fueling a diametric response so intense I can’t believe I’d missed his position on this before.  I want desperately for my point of view to be heard, and my attempt to express it calmly causes his head to turn the other way. Frustrated and a little disillusioned, I’m on the brink of tears and walk out of the restaurant.  Not my proudest moment.

We’re all entitled to our opinions; this I believe.  So when I think about what really bothers me in this situation, it’s not that we disagree (although this is a hard one for me to swallow). While his position is unfathomable to me, and I can hardly see how we should stop talking about equality for women now that we’ve tackled the low hanging fruit of feminism and are no longer groped in the office, I do know this:  He believes in his viewpoint as strongly as I believe in mine.

What bothers me is that in this moment he refuses to let me be heard.

 

No two people ever agree on absolutely everything.  Solid, fulfilling, unbreakable relationships are built on collaboration and compromise. But to get to those, you need to listen.   Listening is a form of respect.  We listen to learn.  It’s not about shifting someone to your opinion; it’s about understanding why they believe in their own.  When you take the time to understand where the beliefs of another are rooted, you can get to common ground, that space where we all live, that space where collaboration and compromise can move in and make themselves at home. Equanimity in this world comes only from a relentless desire to understand.

  

The documentary still fresh in my mind, I find a set of four vintage penguin ornaments, in beautiful red and mercury colored glass. I hang them on the tree.  And when it’s time to put the decorations in storage, one penguin lands on my mantle, instead;  a symbol of hope for better days ahead. The truth is, that chick that belonged to my Emperor Penguin mate and I did perish in our inanition.   He was too busy pushing his own agenda to hear me, and I got tired of fighting to be heard.

   

Although it’s been many years and I’ve healed and moved on, I think it’s time to put the penguin back on the mantle after the holidays, this time to remind myself not only that I deserve to be heard, but there’s always room to be a better listener, too.

Umbra

Their kisses suck out your very soul. The room goes cold when they are near. They steal your positive energy, your happy memories. You can’t see them, but feel them acutely.  They are the Dementors, phantoms of doom and gloom from Harry Potter fiction, but we’ve all run across them in real life.

 

Their power is in the disguise they wear, for these individuals appear happy and confident on the outside, like they have it all together.  Yet when we’re around them, we feel inexplicably uneasy, in a constant state of inanition.  We quail, questioning our capabilities, querying our confidence, quavering over our conclusions, as if we are somehow less than qualified.  Surely, it must be us, something we’re doing.

 

It can take some time to realize that they’re casting onto us the shadow of doubt and deficiency they wear upon themselves. The give-away is that in no other arena do we feel this inadequate, sapped of all of our strength. The moment we’re away from them we’re resuscitated.

Dementors have ways of tricking us into being untrue to ourselves.  They fill us with the insatiable need to visibly prove ourselves; announce we’re making progress, take all the credit for getting the work done.  They can cause us to raise our voices to make a point, reduce us to tears as we attempt to claim our worth. They can drain us of all passion we possess to do the work we absolutely love.

Luckily, you don’t need to know the Patronus Charm in order to break the spell of the Dementor.  He maintains his hold over you only until the moment you recognize him for who he is. He never really disappears, but you win back the power to quell your own feelings and return to your authentic self.

The irony is the Dementors in our lives can bring out unexpected brilliance within us.  As we fight to retain our sanity and our souls, we develop a sophisticated, almost stealth-like approach, allowing the Dementor the dignity he so desperately needs to maintain with his disguise, bringing a new level of humility to our leadership. 

That's the kiss I'd like to receive.

Kindle

Leadership is not a hierarchy.  From the vantage point of the ranks; however, it looks like one. Logic says survival of the fittest, the most talented ascend to the top, but this isn’t always the case.  The most senior leaders in any organization are not necessarily the smartest people in the room. The truly brilliant know they are surrounded by others who are, in fact, smarter, and relish the opportunity to rub shoulders and learn.

The irony in my leadership journey is that I thought I’d get to a place where I knew the answer to every question, could solve any problem, and at that point I’d be on top.  Now I know that the journey never ends, and no one ever has every answer.  It doesn’t mean I can’t be a great leader. It just means I will always be discovering.

What we learn in any given day crosses the spectrum from the mundane to the momentous, as evidenced by this sampling of insight coming my way in the last 24 hours:

My super cute, waterproof fashion boots really serve no functional purpose in snow.  As I push my cart to the car, it's apparent I would have been better off in the ski boots I warily eyed a woman in the grocery store sporting.

It is possible to listen to my iPod in my rental car.  All that’s needed is the right cable, available courtesy of Nate’s room, which is a warehouse of auxiliary cords for any electronic product you could ever dream of juicing. Who knew?

Despite the precision required for baking, it doesn’t have to be curtains for the batch of cookies when you accidentally add one more tablespoon of cocoa powder than stated in the recipe. In fact, these types of missteps make the delicacy uniquely yours. This, I believe, is how that nebulous ingredient called “extra love” came into being.

Nelson Mandela knew that if he was ever going to do the work of freeing an entire people, he needed to first free himself.  “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.”  Makes me wonder where in life I’m holding myself back.

When a teenaged boy wants to walk to a friend’s house in the snow, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s up to no good.  It could be he needs a little time with himself to re-chart his course. Sometimes it is good to let him be; he’s going to need to get to know who he is on his journey to becoming a great leader.

Respire

The last line of her message reads “Wine soon?”  I’m up to my eyeballs in holiday preparations; it’s like she’s thrown a life preserver to a drowning woman.  I ask if she can meet tonight.

Yes, it’s true; I haven’t yet cracked a single egg for cookie dough. My tree is a nightmare of cords fueling white light bulbs of all shapes and sizes, with an alarming number dead or dimming as they await last rites. The ornaments are in a box, save for the handful of ill-placed giant, personalized, shiny globes hanging at the precise height of the narcissistic teenaged boys rifling through for anything eponymous.  So much for elegance and balance.  Of course I need a drink.

A few years ago at my church, the pastor was so taken with a homily presented by one of our priests that he requested a repeat on a subsequent Sunday.  It’s one that resonates the very first time he speaks it.  The highlight is this:  If you’ve got time to pray, pray for 15 minutes.  If you don’t have time to pray, pray for an hour.  It’s such an awesome reminder that we all just need to slow down, to focus on what truly matters. And so I tell my beloved friend that the last thing I have time for is a night out, which is exactly why I’m pushing all my work aside to go out.

Dinner (and wine) with my friend is cathartic. She is exactly what I need as I take a well-deserved time out from the rush of the season.   The sparkle and splash of my holiday cards and cookies is a labor of love, but a labor nonetheless. And the demands of ordinary time often can’t be held at bay while we get our jingle on, which means we’re squeezing more into already packed lives.

The few remaining days between us and the holidays are guaranteed to race by faster than those coursers pulling the sleigh. To have any hope of actually enjoying them, we need to take some time for ourselves.  So I delegate all tree decorating to the teenagers.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist the urge to relocate a few (well, many) ornaments, but the heavy lift is done.  And while the mercury glass-colored glitter glue is drying on my stacks of handmade greeting cards, I’m taking a moment to sit by the fire and pen this post.  No, I don’t have time for it.  That’s why I’m doing it.

Wraith

Dreams are anything but sweet these days. No sugar plums in sight. The wee hours of every morning arrive in the same way for me:  The hazy recollection of a business presentation in a perpetual state of reform. The message we need to convey is always just out of reach. I’m searching for the right words.  As my consciousness rises, the criticality of this work plunges. Tell me again why we need to communicate this information?  Haven’t we been here before?  What feels like non-fiction in this nightmare becomes fiction as I wake. And yet, there’s no relief because there’s something I’m trying to solve for. I know it.

It’s all about him.  He needs something and I don’t know what it is.  I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know either.  But it consumes him. It drives him, this quest for the missing piece to the puzzle of himself, the one that will allow him to love who he is, to shape who he becomes.  In order to find it he’s willing to break my rules.  In the process he’s nearly broken me.

I’m thinking of my favorite line from Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”:  “If you can’t fix it, you got a stand it.”  My head tells me I can’t fix him.  My heart tells me to be for him the one who stands him.  But in my brokenness, I can’t see how it’s possible to give him the love he desperately needs because I’m caught up in my need to exert my authority, to call out every infraction of the rules, every act of defiance in vain attempts to salvage my own dignity.

This is where it gets hard.  In order to love him completely, to give him exactly what he needs from me, I need to stop thinking about myself.  My demands for respect and obedience not only weaken me, but act as the bellows fueling the fire of shame and disappointment that’s already raging in his soul. When I put my pride on the shelf, I’m able to clearly see that yes, in fact, he knows everything I’m saying is true. I’m able to see how much he is hurting. When I suppress the need to let him know I know, those flames he’s unable to reconcile in himself die back to smoldering.

While I’ve spent years trying to solve for him, to head him off at the pass, we’re at the crossroads anyway.  Here my power is in being wordlessly watchful; my weapon is love. By invoking some selective aphony, I’m able to foster euphony. And it is possible to love and maintain my dignity at the same time. It’s possible to stand it.

As we move into the holidays, it’s in heavenly peace that I should be sleeping. So I’m emancipating myself from the demons inside me (or trying to anyway) and watching what happens. 

He can only break me if I let him.  

Gramercy

A postcard of a girl perched high on her tip-toes with arms outstretched as if ready for flight, long, blond hair and a cape whipping in the wind stirs me.  Pushing the holiday cards aside, I tell myself I don’t have time for this creative diversion, it should wait until ordinary time, but I can’t help myself.  The caption I see in my head is “sometimes I wish this world didn’t need so much saving.”  My superhero tendencies, blended with the pure exhaustion I feel over some of my futile capers means this spark must be stoked to life.

 

I start with pencil on paper and painstakingly line her out.  When I think I’m ready for ink, I find four black pens for varying line width, and go over my graphite.  I’ve captured her, but I’m not satisfied.  Out comes the tracing paper.  Hours slip by like minutes. I lose track of how many times and ways my pens travel over her silhouette.

 

The new wisdom we’re speaking around learning is that the best education comes from failures, although I don’t think this is really news.  Maybe we’re just becoming courageous enough to say it out loud. Asking the right questions, I’m told, is more powerful than having all of the answers.  So if it’s becoming more than okay to try and to fail, to be wrong, why are we still rewarding perfection and being right? 

The best students at the top of the class are the ones who have all of the answers, those who get the perfect papers.  The business leaders deemed most successful have the happiest clients and bring in the most revenue. Yet, when I think about the optimal training ground for any leader, where it is they find their grit, it’s in those challenging places where the unhappy clients live, where growing the business seems impossible, and where sometimes the only resolution is to sever the relationship. It’s where we fall down, pick ourselves up, and keep moving on without any expectation of ever seeing a reward.

In a world filled with opportunities to start over, to correct an error, right a wrong, to ask forgiveness, I wish the shroud of unspoken aversion around admitting mistakes and imperfection would fall away, so that we all can feel the freedom and relief that comes with accessing the escape hatch into next time. Instead, our kids still feel really vulnerable admitting to a bad grade, adults fear for their jobs acknowledging bad outcomes in the workplace and lots of us agonize over admitting shortcomings to those we love.

Me, I don’t know who I am without second chances, the opportunity to trace over those same lines again and again until I get it right, or right enough.  Without the option to try again, I wouldn’t be living the life I’m living today.  I’ve experienced failures in every possible arena and I’m still standing, poised for flight.

And so on this feast of giving thanks, I’m grateful that every minute of every day offers the opportunity to learn from each step I take to get me to where I stand.  I’m grateful that my flaws can be forgiven, that my course can be corrected, that my actions can be amended.  Because when there are second, third . . . hundredth chances, we’re free to take the risks we need to in order to fully live.

She’s still not perfect, my girl of the flowing curls and flapping cape.  And she never will be, no matter how many times I draw her. But with every refinement, I become a better artist.  I become a better me.  For this I am grateful.