Per my previous post, as of the end of November, I was clear on one of my two core values: compassion.
 
But the second was proving elusive. “What am I prepared to struggle for,” kept playing on a loop in my mind.
 
The answer came, as is so often does, while I was rocking-out to some favourite music (Loreena McKennit) in the shower.
 
Play.
 
Yes, the obvious kind. And also much more than that. Play for me is not a simple value at all. It’s a wonderful yummy mash-up of rest, creativity, curiosity, learning, growth, exploration, not-taking-myself-too-seriously (one I reeeaaaly struggle with), goofiness, vulnerability, experimentation, down-time, relaxation, rest…etc. Play for me is both purposeful AND purposeless. It is both, at the exact same time. Just like it is with kids.
 
Why is play so important to me that I would list it as one of my two core values?
 
Precisely because it is the one where a whole lot of other behaviours and patterns of thinking get tested. Taking myself too seriously, for one, as I've already mentioned. When I was a graduate student the head of the Leadership Scholarship program I was a part of told me “Sue, you’re far too wound up, you should really just smoke of doobie”. As this was an Ivy League MBA program you can image how off the wall that suggestion was to me!
 
Yet I had been on the receiving end of variations on this theme for some years: A a short-lived boyfriend had told me in my twenties – “Your walls are raised so high I can walk in right underneath them”.  Another friend at a similar time : “You’re strung so tight I can play you like a guitar”.
 
So play would hardly seem to be a value I was embodying. True, and yet....
 
It is was precisely because I was so deeply uncomfortable with vulnerability, and  - truth-be-told, downright insecure - that I was armoring up and trying to project a certain image. But it was precisely in the moments when I wasn’t armored up, when I felt truly comfortable to be me, that I could be goofy, ridiculous, relaxed and chilled out. Earnest, task-focused, highly productive, taking-things-seriously Sue is a part of me yes. And it’s a part of me that, when left to run rampant, quickly leads me into a quagmire of shame, blame, judgement, resentment and unhappiness.
 
“The opposite of play is not work, it is depression” write Dr Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play. Drawing on his own research, as well as latest advances in biology, psychology, and neurology, Brown explains that play shapes our brain, helps us foster empathy, helps us navigate complex social groups and is the core of creativity and innovation. Play is as essential to our health and functioning as rest.

All of this is so incredibly true for me. When I lose sight of play in my work, all the uglier, sadder and more depressive parts of myself quickly start running rough shod over my energy, my relationships, and my mood.
 
When I am honoring and living by play as one of my two core values I am me at my best. As a decision-making filter it guides me to decisions and choices that honor what I actually need, not what I think I need to prove myself to myself or to others. It is achievable, internal, conscious and socially-constructive (using the tests of good values from my previous post). When I bring an attitude of play to something I am open, curious, learning and growing. It keeps me out of defensiveness and armoring up. It helps me lean-in compassionately even with those with whom I really struggle.
 
So, compassion and play. There you have it. 

In the next post I will (vulnerably, playfully and compassionately!) share how I am working to operationalize these two values, what tends to lead me to walk away from my values, and what support systems I have put in place to help me protect and nurture my values. ​

​Harsh words. And yet we know they are true. As I mentioned in my previous post on the importance of identifying our core values, every day and all around us we see the evidence of people and organizations espousing high-sounding values and then, ostensibly in the name of those same values, behaving abominably. Consciously living by and holding ourselves accountable to our values, rather than just professing them - that's a whole different thing. It takes heap of commitment and courage to actually practice our values. 
 
So how in fact, does one do that.
 
The answer is deceptively simple to describe. Much, much, much harder to actually work through.
 
In this week’s resilience tool, I describe the process to get clear on how to actually put your values into practice, identify when you are most likely to be challenged to show-up and behave in accordance with your values, and how to identify and put in place the support systems that will help you to stay true to your values – as we are human and we will be tempted to put down our values from time to time.
 
In next week’s entry I’ll share my own results of applying this process to my two core values: compassion and play.  

​Have you ever taken the time to discern what your real values are? Or sat down and determined if your values are setting you up for happiness and fulfillment, or for pain and suffering?

And why do values even matter? Especially when all around us we see people and organizations espousing high-sounding values and then, ostensibly in the name of those same values, behaving abominably.

Many of us talk a good game about our values. But consciously living by and holding ourselves accountable to our values, rather than just professing them - that's a whole different thing. It takes heap of commitment and courage to actually practice our values.  

Simply put, if it's easy to list our values, they're probably not our real values. 
 
If I had been asked what my values where a few years back I could have rattled off a nice list of good sounding ones: financial security, responsibility, honesty, generosity, community, work-ethic blah blah. But if I looked at my actual behavior there would have been quite the gap between what I professed vs. what my behavior revealed. At my best my behavior pointed towards values of kindness, consideration, and integrity, among others. At my worst: arrogance, intolerance, the need to believe I was right, power, rigidity. 

Like an iceberg, it is our behaviors that lie above the water line, visible to ourselves and to others.

Our true values lie below the water line – typically hidden both to others and, more critically, to ourselves.

Whether we are conscious of them or not, values drive our behavior.  

And getting clear on our values is not the simple exercise you may think. It takes some serious deep diving into the cold, uncomfortable, and murky waters of looking at what our behaviors, prejudices and judgments, thoughts and feelings, fears and dreams really reveal about our values – rather than what we profess them to be. And then doing the hard work of re-prioritizing them (if that is needed). And the even harder work of actually putting them into practice. 

Why even bother to do this hard work?
 
Because it makes for much greater resilience, confidence, happiness and fulfillment. Even more, values are a protective factor when it comes to a concept known as "social contagion." Social contagion is the phenomenon by which behaviours become normalized and adopted. For example, as Susan David illustrates,  take this scenario: You’re on an airplane, cramped and tired, eager to reach your destination. The flight crew is passing by with the snack cart. You’re not feeling particularly hungry—perhaps you availed yourself of an overpriced sandwich back in the terminal—but you notice that the gentleman sitting beside you is treating himself to a bag of M&M’s. You’ve never met this person before and exchanged only a cursory nod as you took your seats. Still, research shows that you are now 30 percent more likely to spring for some candy of your own. 

This is social contagion. Where the choices of someone you don’t even know have may have sway over your own decisions.  Large scale epidemiological studies show that if someone in your social network puts on weight or gets divorced, your likelihood of doing the same increases substantially. This is the case even if you don’t know the person. They might be the friend of a friend of a friend, but their actions have far-reaching ripple effects.

However, the research also shows that not everyone is equally susceptible to social contagions. People with a clear sense of their values have proven to be more resilient to the pressures of their community. Susan David gives another example. Women in professions with a high degree of gender bias are more likely than their male colleagues to quit when faced with setbacks. Without even realizing it, they can internalize the messages snaking through their work environment, the ones telling them that they don’t belong. But when these women are asked to perform a simple exercise in which they clarify why they are in their career—why it is of value to them—they become insulated from the toxic social contagion. They are more likely to hang in there when the going gets tough.

This is why it’s so important to know our values. They are more than nice-to-haves that make life more pleasant. Our values help to inoculate us against making decisions that are not our own. ​
 
Coming back to Brené Brown. One of the very first things we did as part of the Living Brave was to identify our values.  She used the image of a lantern to describe what values do for us. 

Values are what we take into the arena with us, she said. Values light our way.
 
The exercise was to discern our two core values. Yes, just two (I will come back to that). Her test was “without these I am not me”. Values, in her terms are "the organizing principles of our lives." Her suggestion was to think back to a time when we were most alive, most daring greatly in our lives, being our most authentic selves. And then think about what values we were living into at that time.
 
I did the exercise and felt good about the clarity I got to. My top two were vision and belief in self.

With hindsight it's embarrassingly obvious how those two values could lead me astray. There were certainly true, in that they felt true to who I was/was striving to be and to the moments and events in my life when I had felt most alive, most myself, most in my integrity and passion.  They were not the complete picture, however. I hadn't dived deeper, to see what, if anything, might be underneath them. And frankly, it was both too easy and too feel-good, self-congratulatory. My understanding was at the intellectual level. I hadn't challenged myself or worked with a partner to think through what behaviors those values were driving and where those values may set me up for falls, heartbreak and disappointment, rather than resilience, grounded confidence and success.
 
The next step came from an unlikely source: Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A counterintuitive approach to living a good life. His basic argument goes as follows: 

• Happiness comes from solving problems. Happiness is therefore a form of action, not something that is passively bestowed upon us. True happiness occurs only when we find the problems we enjoy having and enjoy solving.
• Asking ourselves “what do we want from life” is a stupid question – everyone wants to be happy. It’s an easy want.
• The more interesting and important question is: What pain do we want in our lives? What are we willing to struggle for? Because who we are is defined by what we’re willing to struggle for.
• Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.
• Our values determine what kinds of problems we have.
• Getting at our values requires us go through a series of “why” questions. The questions – and their answers – are difficult and uncomfortable. E.g. take something’s that really bugging you. And ask yourself why it bugs you. Maybe it involves some fear of failure. Now you ask yourself “why do I fear failure”. Or “why do I define failure this way.” And keep on going until you get to the values that are driving these feelings and thoughts.
• Some values are better than others.
• Values like pleasure, success, being right, staying positive, popularity/likeability, power and status are examples of “bad values”. They rely on external events. They lie outside of our control. They often require socially destructive means to achieve. And they are often fear-based i.e. unless we achieve them we are not “good enough” or “worthy enough”.
• Good, healthy values are reality based, socially constructive and immediate and controllable. They are achieved internally, regardless of what others are doing. Good values engage us with the world as it is, rather than how we wish it were. They are consciously chosen, rather than being based on fear. Examples of good values are honesty, innovation, curiosity, creativity, humility etc.  
• Values are about prioritization. What are the values that we prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence our decision-making more than anything else?
• Happiness and fulfillment are a by-product of prioritizing better values. Better values give us better problems. And a better life.

 
Since reading this some months back I haven’t been able to get Manson’s approach out of my head. Reading the “Living into our values” chapter of Brené Brown’s latest book, Dare to Lead, had me flipping back to Mark Manson, trying to see how I could tie Manson’s approach with Brown’s. 
 
I’ve landed on not following Brown’s approach to focus one which values “resonate deeply” with me. Rather I’m marrying her suggestion to identify what fills me with a feeling of purpose with Manson’s question of “what am I prepared to struggle for”.  What “resonates deeply” with me can feel like an exercise in self-congratulation. “What am I prepared to struggle for” requires some good hard self-awareness.
 
Manson and Brown do agree on the need for prioritization. Whenever we are presented with a list of values, most of us will want to pick 10 to 15 of them. But that’s not helpful. Brown’s research has shown that those who are most willing to wrestle with vulnerability and practice courage tether their behavior to one or two values, not ten. Channeling Jim Collins (of Good to Great fame): “If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities”. When we identify a whole lot of values as important to us, we’re not getting real or honest with ourselves – we’re choosing easy, comfortable and a list of feel good words over integrity, courage and self-awareness. When we limit ourselves to two, we start to get really clear on what is truly driving us - and what we want to drive us. And we usually find that is those two where all the other values that we wanted to pick truly get tested.
 
In this week’s resilience toolkit there is an exercise to get clarity on your values. If you’ve read this far, why don’t you take it? The exercise forces some hard, and illuminating choices.
 
I’m clear on one of my two values: compassion.
 
Compassion sets me up with the kind of problems that make my life harder in many respects (darn it, I can’t just judge, blame and shame people; I can’t hold onto grudges or resentments) but better in all the ways that are meaningful and matter to me. It tempers my reactivity and defensiveness. It leads me towards connection, belonging, community, resilience, confidence, hope, perseverance, and joy. It’s also where a whole lot of other values get tested, like integrity, honesty, and knowledge. In particular it shines the light on where those other values of mine can be used  as weapons to defend myself or hurt others.
 
As for my second, it’s taking a lot more wrangling.
 
Vision still keeps yelling for my attention. But I am not quite certain about it. It still feels too easy of a value to have - at least for me. And as I look back, I can see where it set me up with “bad problems” as well as “better problems”. I'm not ready to chuck it out yet though. I'm letting myself  mull on it, trusting that if I just sit with this, and let myself be curious, rather than looking for an easy answer so I can just call this exercise done, my truth will emerge. 
 
Joy is also calling to me. I know the struggle involved in joy. There is nothing passive or easy about joy. It’s a whole set of values, practices, and attitudes that challenge me on multiple levels, as so beautifully and joyfully elucidated by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in The Book of Joy. And each of those values and practices set me up for “good problems”. But precisely because joy is such a complicated value for me I’m having hard time feeling it’s the best choice. I am also of the view that joy is the result of the intentional practice of other values, rather than a value in and of itself. Intentionally seeking or cultivating joy usually results in its opposite. So, joy doesn’t seem to fit either.
 
And so I'm still doing the work on identifying my second core value. And that's OK with me. I would rather be patient, and spend the time with this, than rush to an answer. 
 
How about you? What are your two core values? What kinds of problems do they create for you? And are those problems "good" ones, or "bad" ones? 

Part 2 will be on "operationalizing" our values. Our values are just feel-good sentiments unless and until we move beyond professing them to actually practicing them. That takes courage. And thought. So more to come. 

Intuition is a pretty hot-topic. Google it and hundreds of searches come up. Most of them are around the theme of “how to tap into your intuition” and “trust your intuition”.
 
I get it.
 
The world is so complex - and getting ever more so. How are we supposed to navigate through it all? If we were to slowly, deliberatively, calmly and rationally sort through the hundreds of decisions we need to make each day, we would never get anywhere. There is simply no time to do that in today’s crazy world. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (an awesome read, I highly recommend it) he writes powerfully to the ability to just know or understand something, seemingly immediately, and without any awareness of conscious thought or effort. Why wouldn’t we want more of that in our lives?
 
In our everyday language we venerate phrases like “I went with my gut” or “I just knew it was the right thing to do”. Note though, that these are always said after the fact – where whatever it is that we went with or did has turned out well.
 
Intuition is supposedly the font of all things wonderful and good: creativity, inspiration, better decisions, happiness, fulfilment. It would appear to be like some magical power, like the Force in Star Wars. “Use the Force, Luke” exhorts Obi-Wan Kanobi, and Luke goes on to successfully take out the Death Star, where all others have failed.
 
But the Force has a dark side – and, sorry to rain on the intuition parade – so does intuition. Chiefly because much of what we call intuition, really isn’t intuition at all.
 
In my previous blog post I wrote about System 1 vs. System 2 thinking, as researched and defined by Daniel Kahneman, the Noble Prize-winning psychologist, in his seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow. In  Blink Gladwell uses the phrase “thin slicing” to describe System 1 thinking in action. Thin slicing is the ability to find patterns in events based only on "thin slices", or narrow windows, of experience. The term means “making very quick inferences about the state, characteristics or details of an individual or situation with minimal amounts of information. Brief judgments based on thin-slicing are similar to those judgments based on much more information. Judgments based on thin-slicing can be as accurate, or even more accurate, than judgments based on much more information.” (Source: Wikipedia).
 
In other words, thin slicing – which is System 1 in action – looks a lot like intuition.
 
And it is, in a way. But critically it’s also not in another way.
 
Because this kind of intuition is based both on data AND on thousands of hours of learning, dedication and practice of a skill or craft. It is intuition based on deep expertise. And it truly breath-taking to watch in action. Some of the memorable examples Gladwell cites are of firefighters who just “know” that there is something wrong with a fire, and by this “knowing” avert disaster and save lives. Or a master chess player who can scan another chess game in progress for just a second or two and immediately blurt out the next three moves that will win the game.
 
However when most of us mere mortals use the word intuition, and when we are exhorted to tap into and trust our intuition, it is based on no such solid foundation of expertise. Rather, it is intuition that arises from System 1’s heuristics (rules of thumb). And this is its flaw. Because System 1 heuristics evolved to deal with relatively straightforward, survival- type situations – not with the complex, no-clear-right-or-wrong decisions and situations that predominate modern life. And when this type of “intuition” is applied to modern life its propensity to lead us astray and jump to conclusions that are riddled with errors in judgement, biased thinking, and stereotypes is well documented and researched.
 
Worse, much of what we venerate as intuition is not only System 1 thinking, it’s actually self-rationalization and self-deception masquerading as intuition.
 
How often, for reasons we typically can’t verbalize or explain, have we really wanted something or to do something. We just know it. And so we do it. And it works out. And we praise ourselves for listening to our intuition, for going with our gut. But the truth is, if we had slowed down and really looked at where that feeling had come from, and what the feeling was really telling us, it was almost always coming from a place of wanting to be right, of wanting to have confidence in ourselves, and wanting to believe that it will all turn out for the best. Because being wrong, lacking confidence and embracing the uncertainty that is life and living feel neither good or comfortable or easy.
 
And if whatever we wanted or whatever we did doesn’t turn out well, we don’t tend to say “my intuition was wrong” or “I shouldn’t have gone with my gut”. Rather we tend to say “I should have thought it through more”.
 
This is not to say I don’t believe in intuition. Not at all. I do. Very deeply. But I’ve come to learn (the hard way, of course) that real intuition is a much harder and more elusive thing entirely than what we typically call intuition. But while harder and more elusive, it is also so so so much more valuable.  
 
For me, I’ve come to understand that my real intuition is actually a very soft, quiet voice. I have to be still and patient and intentional (yes, that is intentionally paradoxical! ) to hear my intuition. She is a gentle voice, and I have to cultivate space and safety for her to be heard. And, contrary to what I always thought, I find that my real intuition is never a feeling, rather she is a hearing. I have to listen for her. And to create the stillness and space so that I can hear her I need to be quite deliberative and intentional. For me that looks like sustaining as close to a daily meditation practice as I can. It means journaling regularly. It means making time to be alone, going for quite walks, doodling, sitting idly drinking my morning tea while I watch the birds and survey my garden, and listening to quiet music. It means pausing to reflect and process. It means, most of all, building “time out” and rest and relaxation into my schedule and my life.

So that when intuition speaks, I can hear her.  And when she speaks, she truly is my higher power. Because with true intuition, my head, heart and gut are all aligned. I am truly “in synch” with and “in truth” with myself. For me, true intuition is not a feeling. It is a knowing. A deep knowing that my actions, choices and behavior are truly grounded in my values and my purpose. And it brings a deep sense of empowerment, inspiration and calmness as all my doubts fall away and my confidence soars.
 
True intuition’s soft, quiet, gentle voice is well worth sitting in stillness and patience for. She is my North Star – shining the light of truth and authenticity into the darkness of self-deception and self-rationalization. If I will but be quiet and listen. 
 
*******
 
For more on intuition, see Maria Popova’s marvelous blog Brain Pickings and in particular her summary of Kahneman’s contribution towards Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, a thought-provoking collection of essays edited by John Brockman.

In Buddhist meditation the concept of the “monkey mind” refers to our mind’s incessant chatter. Like a monkey swinging through the tree-tops from branch to branch, so our thoughts chatter on, endlessly. This isn’t necessarily a problem, except that so much of our thinking is ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future in an unhelpful monologue that takes away from the present – where we are most capable of impacting our happiness and well-being.

Things turn darker when we get started on the self-criticism band-wagon. Here an incidental comment or event can cascade within seeming split-seconds into a full blown beating-ourselves-up session. For example, I was a few minutes late to pick up my son the other day from camp. As I walked in, ready with my apologies, all it took was one look – not even a comment, mind you – from one of the other parents and within seconds and without any conscious awareness on my part, I was in “I’m so self-absorbed, I really need to make more of an effort to put my son first, I’m the world’s worst mother” mode.

Huh?

THAT is monkey mind at work for you.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the Noble Prize winning psychologist, lays out our two modes of thought. System 1 thinking is fast, instinctive, automatic and emotional. System 2 is slower, more deliberate and logical. It’s not that one system is better than the other. Our survival as a species depends on System 1 thinking. System 1 is the system that causes us to act within milliseconds to threats and dangers. This doesn’t apply just to the age-old man-meets-saber-tooth-tiger scenario. When was the last time you slammed on the brakes in your car, averting disaster, with your System 2 mind only catching up a few seconds later that what you saw out of the corner of your eye was a car that wasn’t stopping for a red light, or brake lights going on in front of you, and you weren’t even aware of them until after you’d hit the brakes?

System 1 computes problems like “war and ….?”, and “2+2 = ?” effortlessly and quickly. System 2, on the other hand, is involved in solving problems like “17*24 = ?” or parking in a tight space. It is also System 2 thinking to realize we are thinking, and to evaluate the quality and validity of our thinking.

We spend most of our time in System 1 mode. It’s efficient, it conserves energy, it’s fast, and its short-cuts and rules of thumb do a really good job most of the time of getting us through the day with the least amount of effort possible. Which brings me back to our monkey minds. Precisely because System 1 thinking is so effortless, it can chatter on, seemingly without pausing for breath, all day long…and night. Trying to shut System 1 up is like trying to stop yourself from breathing. It may be possible, but you may die in the attempt.

But the untamed and out of control monkey-mind can ruin our lives. It can cause us to react emotionally and out-of-all proportion to actual circumstances. I’m a few minutes late to pick up my son and I’m the world’s mother? I don’t think so.

It was at my first Refuge Recovery meeting in Malibu, California last year that I head the phrase “You question everything, but do you question your thoughts” for the first time. And it pulled me up short. Because that was me in a nutshell a few years back. My monkey-mind System 1 narrative had a basic re-occurring theme of “you’re a failure, you’re a failure, you’re a failure”. It’s no wonder that that lead to my eventual collapse.

Are we our thoughts?

No, no and again no.

Have you ever had a thought that – if you had carried it into action would probably have been illegal? Or have you ever idly noticed as you were speeding down an interstate that it would only take a split-second yank on the steering wheel and kaboom, crash, that would be you gone?

We all have these thoughts. They are perfectly normal. And they say nothing at all about who we are as people. It is our values and our behavior and our choices that determine who we are, not our unruly and uncontrolled and often highly unreliable monkey minds in System 1 thinking mode. Or, in the words of of Dumbledore "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." 

It is us, the thinker, not the thought, who is in control.

Can our thoughts define us?

Yes, if we let them. If we take them as truth. If we let our System 1 thoughts rule too many of our choices and our behavior. If we don’t take the time to sit still and tame our monkey minds.

“Cognito, ergo sum” goes the Latin phrase ascribed to Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” But this is not true to Descartes's actual intent. That is better summarized as “Dubito, cognito, ergo sum”: i.e. “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”. One word. And that word is crucial. Doubt your thoughts, question them, hold them to the same standard as you would a dearly beloved friend berating herself.

Monkey mind is with us – it’s a fact of our existence and of our brains. We can no more stop ourselves from thinking than we can from breathing. But we can tame our monkey minds. All it takes is a simple doubt: “Really? How true is that”. That’s all it takes to bring our System 2 mode online. And just like first learning to drive required all of your focus and attention, to now being something you can now do seemingly without thinking, so too does the practice of taming of our monkey minds by asking this simple question become effortless.
​
Just as quickly as I was saying to myself “I’m a terrible mother”, I was thinking “Screw that, I’m just a mum juggling three-bazillion balls – like every other mother on this planet.” And I reached down and gave my son a huge hug and the camp leader gave me a warm smile of welcome.

February 2018

(Read the companion post on my personal blog: "Feelings-Real: Processing Loss")

Over the last week, Iain, our 7 year old son, mourning the absence of his father who is away was sitting vigil at his father’s bedside has, at various times come to me to say:
“I feel like my windpipe’s being crushed.”
“On a 1 to 10 scale, it’s a 10. I feel awful.”
“My head feels all hazy and fuzzy.”
“I feel like I have daggers in my head.”
“Why is it so painful?”
“My whole body hurts.”

And, “Is this all just feelings?”

​To which I replied “Yes, and what you’re feeling is still real. Not medicine-needing real, but feelings-real.”

He had asked for a Tylenol or an Ibuprofen. And only as I write this now do I realize: this is where it starts. Popping a pill will not make you feel better. Because this is not illness-real, it’s feelings-real. And the only way to change feelings-real, is to change the feelings behind them. And the only way to do that is to accept that we DO control our feelings - by what we think, what stories we tell ourselves. No pill or bottle or drug can solve that.

It starts here. Resilience. Emotional fluency. Listening to our bodies. Honoring our bodies. And not looking for quick fixes. Feel the pain, the hurt, the despair, the loneliness, the heartache. Feel all of of it. Let it wash over you. Let it cleanse you. So that you can also feel joy, hope, clarity, serenity, purpose, love, openness, gratitude. “Numb the dark and you numb the light” says Brene Brown.  Wade into the dark water, the mire and the muck. It’s the only way to cross to the other side, to the light. Otherwise you stay where you are. On this bank. Looking across to the other, wishing you could be there, but not knowing how to.

The only way out is through.

​

So, what does my story evoke in you? And what might that say about how you view the world and your place in it. How you view yourself?

Am I weak? Am I a failure? Am I “less than” any of you who are reading this?

Only you can answer that.

Friends admire me for me strength, my resilience, my grit, my determination. But the fact that I have those is no accident. They are, largely, a product of my privilege. They are not some innate personality characteristic. I have the mental, emotional, and intellectual resources - due to my education, upbringing, race, culture and work experiences - to find a way to argue and fight for myself. To plan a new future. To retrain as a coach and become self-employed. If I were a poorly educated single mother-of-color in a developing country, would this be the case?

My experience has taught me, more than anything else, that leadership is never about the exercise of authority or power over someone. Leadership is about compassionately, and with a motivating principle of loving kindness, seeking to lift up everyone we can to be their best selves. To hold them accountable for their actions from that basis, not from a basis of blaming and shaming them for what they’re not. Leadership is about focusing on possibility, not scarcity - and yet that is so much what we tend to do. We measure people against metrics, not being aware that the very metrics themselves are usually rooted in privilege, in the perpetuation of the status quo, and a system of winners and losers.

These questions go to the heart of living, loving and leading. Wrestling with them is the work of our lives, so that we can become the best selves we can be. It is a brave, vulnerable and authentic act to look at these questions. It is profoundly uncomfortable. It is also an act of true leadership.

Leadership and authority are vastly different things. It is vital that leaders question authority, and resist its attempts to normalize and perpetuate the status quo. Leadership is about seeing all human beings as inherently whole, inherently worthy and doing the best they can given the tools and resources that they have.

And if we think they could be doing better, then leadership is about helping them to gain new tools and resources. That may mean letting them go so that they can pursue opportunities that are more aligned with where there are at. But is never about putting them down, or blaming or shaming or judging them for what they’re not.

The more authority and power are used, the more it is to be questioned and resisted. It is an act of profound bravery and courage - and therefore of leadership - to be willing to ask the hard questions of those in authority, of those with power over us. The personal price for doing so may be very high - as I well know. Whether or not that price is worth paying is a question only you can answer.

For myself, it was not a price I sought to pay. And yes, at the time, the price felt way too high. Way, way, way, way too high.

But now I don’t.

Because I would have paid an even higher price if I had capitulated to their definition of me, and in so doing I had continued to avoid wrestling with the question of who I really was. It would have been the price of my soul.

Feeling worthy, just as we are, is not in the least the same thing as feeling you deserve what you have, or that your are entitled to it. A sense of worthiness is routed in humility, gratitude and an awareness of how much of what you have is not due to anything you have done to earn it.

Perhaps the worst abuse of privilege is when privilege aligns with a position of power and authority over others and a feeling of entitlement to that position. The narrative then becomes that they deserve this position of power and authority and have earned it by their own hard work. That can come together in a really toxic brew, because now the privilege/power combination is completely self-justified and self-righteous. People with this outlook (and, let’s face it, they are mostly, but by no means exclusively, white males) are completely blind to - or simply don’t care about (they are effectively the same thing) - the effect of the use of their power and privilege on others. Because in this position they truly think they are better than the other person.

For this is what privilege and power seek to steal from us: our dignity, our worth, our agency, our humanity.

And as a leader I refuse to let that happen to me. And I also refuse to stand by and let it happen to others. So that is why I am now a workplace bullying coach, helping professionals of all ages and genders stop feeling disempowered and move forward in their lives  and careers with unshakeable confidence.

There are many ways to fight this fight. But ultimately it boils down to how we each, as individuals, choose to show and be seen everyday. And how we choose to see others: as whole and worthy, or as flawed and needing to prove themselves. I choose the former. I choose empathy. I choose compassion.

Leadership is about owning our own privilege and prejudices. Defensiveness is a natural response to us being called on our privilege. But it never helpful. And it blinds us to the work we need to do on ourselves, for ourselves. There is only one sure way that I know to breakthrough the disconnection of privilege - and that’s empathy.

The stories we tell ourselves about our identity, about who we are, where we are from, and what we deserve and are entitled to are so powerful. And yet we are, most of us, blind to them. I certainly was. These stories are like the glasses that you are born with - and which you don’t even know are there - because they’ve been part of your ever since you can remember.

I’ll end with a quote by Brené Brown:

The first time you become aware of the cliff edge you want nothing to do with it. No way are you getting close to that abyss that is the whole “vulnerable, authentic self thing”. That’s just marshy woo-woo swampland, a place you get lost and bogged down in. And really, you tell yourself, you’re doing ok. Sure, you could work on a few things, but who couldn’t? 

But it’s like a siren call. Once you know its there, you find yourself drawn back to it. And life, and circumstances and events seem to conspire against you. Slowly, over weeks or months or years you find yourself being nudged closer. Until comes that first day when you are close enough – but not too close! – to peer over the edge. Your partner, your children, your coach, your mentor, your god, your inner widsom, your higher self  - who or whatever it is that has brought you here, dammit, again – points out the scenery. You can see its beautiful over there, in that other country that is your real, authentic self. You’re free down there. Free to be yourself, to dare greatly, to be who you want to be, to be seen and heard for who you really are.

You want to get down there. But it’s a long way down, the jump looks terrifying and the journey impossible and scary. And you have no idea how to do it. In the meantime, you have all these things that keep you in your life now. Work, family, the need to earn an income, parenting, expectations – from others of you, of you of yourself. They are loving ties that bind you. And some are less loving, yes, that too.

And so you approach and retreat. As many times as it takes. As long as it takes. A little closer every time.

And then one day, you find yourself closer to the edge than you’ve ever been before. You realize that you’ve come a long way. That the country this side, this self that you keep on trying to be, is starting to feel more and more like a dead country. A “country of your skull” in the words of Antjie Krog. But down there is a living country. Lush, beautiful, alive.

And your companion voice, inside of you or next to you, shows you that you are ready, that you are not alone, and that you will have the tools and support you need to make a safe landing and bravely explore this new wilderness that is you. You will be able to walk chin up, shoulders broad, head high in that country. In that land you will not fear who or what you might meet, as on the journey there you will collect all the tools you need to flourish and thrive in this rich, verdant place.

And you find yourself right on the cliff edge, toes hanging over. Taking one breath after another. Just waiting until you are ready to take that one last step.


​When you do you will be soaring, gliding. A little wobbly at first, but getting the hang of it fast. The freedom will be exhilarating and terrifying. You will feel boundless. You will be supported by the air. The wind is beneath your wings.

You take another breath in.

You jump when you’re ready. ​