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Dorothy Allison: “Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I’ll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.”
I was struggling to explain coaching, struggling to explain why it was that, to help people lead well, I was pushing to help them know themselves better.
“But, really, they need to understand the ‘why’ of what they do, and ultimately, who they are,” I continued, racing across the board, scrawling out, “Radical Self-inquiry.” “And when they do that, when they look in places they’ve avoided, they often get stuck,” I continued. “They get scared. They get lost in their fears and in old patterns of self-loathing. So, mired in their self-criticism, they think they’re the only one who hasn’t a fucking clue as to what they are doing or how to live. “Worse,” I continued, “they’re too damned afraid to admit that they’re making shit up. And they stay
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As you read this book, I’d like you to hold these questions in your heart: How did my relationship to money first get formed and how does it influence the way I work as an adult? What was the belief system around money and work that I grew up with? (Chapter 1.) How can I lead with the dignity, courage, and grace that are my birthright? How can I use even the loss of status and the challenge to my self-esteem that are inherent in leadership to grow into the adult I want to be in the world? (Chapter 2.) In what ways have I depleted myself, run myself into the ground? Where am I running from and
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When I was a boy, I wasn’t often seen. I was looked after, cared for. I was held and comforted, especially after some painful experience. But I wasn’t often seen. I was a good boy when inside I wanted to rage. I tried hard, all the time, when inside I wanted not to care. I was compliant, and therefore complicit, in not being fully appreciated.
Success and money—and even more important, the busyness needed to create those—became proof of my worth as a human.
These paradoxes, these secrets, continue to shape us. But who we choose to be is awakened by the truths we choose to tell.
“I am not what has happened to me,” taught Carl Jung. “I am what I choose to become.” But choosing requires knowing. It requires knowing how what happened to us influences the choices we made and continue to make. Again and again I ask my clients, “How are you complicit in creating the conditions of your lives that you say you don’t want?”
“Who hired the sales guy?” He looks around sheepishly. “I did.” “And who promoted him?” “Me,” says the camper. “There is nothing to be ashamed of,” I tell him. “The problem isn’t his greed. He’s just doing what you hired him to do. You outsourced your need to never be cold and hungry again to someone more acceptable. And he’s doing a great job at that.”
“What if you took back your greed,” I ask him, “and instead see it for what it truly is: a desire to be safe, warm, and happy?”
Take back the wish, take back the promise you made to yourself, leave aside the shame and own the fear not as something to deny but as something that fuels you. He brightens. I continue: “Let’s expand that view now. Let’s go beyond making sure that you and your family are never hungry again. Let’s see the ways you and your company have made it poss...
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Great leaders look unflinchingly in the mirror and transform untamed hungers and unruly compulsions into moments of self-compassion and understanding. In doing so, they create the spaces for each of us to do the same, turning our organizations into places of growth and self-actualization.
I sat until I began to realize that acknowledging these things within myself was the first step to really being seen—to having the thing I’d wished for all my life.
Between the thing that triggers us and our unconsciously chosen action is a tiny bit of space. We grow in such spaces. We radically inquire within in those spaces. Sitting still, we get to see the spaces between the frames of lives speeding by and, as a result, see the whole movie with an unattached eye.
“Take your seat.” “Sit like royalty in your leadership seat,” I say. “Sit as if you’ve the right to be there.”
His desire for radical self-inquiry had enabled him to ask (and to answer), “What kind of leader am I?”
“Some magic takes place in the crucible of leadership. . . . The individual brings certain attributes into the crucible and emerges with new, improved leadership skills. Whatever is thrown at them, leaders emerge from their crucibles stronger and unbroken.”
Learning to lead yourself is the hardest part of becoming a leader. That’s one of the things new CEOs and aspiring entrepreneurs come to me for.
One of the most profound teachings I’ve ever received came from a simple sutra from the Buddha: we are basically, unalterably good. We are born that way. (And, as evidence, the Buddha pointed to our humanity. Only humans, he taught, can achieve enlightenment and so, simply because we are human, we are essentially good.) But each of us grows, seeking love, safety, and belonging. We seek to love and be loved. We need to feel safe physically, spiritually, and existentially. And we yearn to belong. Learning to lead ourselves is hard because in the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we lose
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The Buddhists teach that for the steadfast warrior to emerge, we’ve got to break open our hearts to what is.
But in all cases, allowing yourself to be eaten by the demon that remains—acknowledging how you have contributed to the problem without descending into pointless self-flagellation—turns up the heat beneath the crucible. Without heat, there is no alchemy.
know I’m a pain in the ass, because I have to be right, all the time. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stop myself.” With that, we had something to work with. I pressed her: Given this tendency, what do you really believe? What values do you hold? What kind of company do you want to build? And what kind of adult do you want to be?
Over the next few weeks, on guard for her need to be right, we carefully went to work changing her approach to the co-founder.
It’s a lesser-known teaching from the one of the Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Saint Thomas: “If you bring forth what is in you, what is in you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what is in you will destroy you.”
That’s the greatest crucible of all: Learning to bring forth not only what is in you but the whole of you, the glory of you as well as the mess of you. Taking your seat, putting your head into the mouth of all the demons of your life and challenging them to eat you if they wish.
One of the ways I’d coped with my childhood and teen years was by doing. I perfected the art of doing. I was busy—always busy. In addition to doing well academically through most of my school years, I was involved. I was involved in plays, student government, local politics. When I ran out of things to do, I’d take on more commitments.
But producing a weekly magazine with daily deadlines was the perfect job for someone who mistook motion for meaning. Everyone thought I was thriving but, on the inside, I was dying.
The non-occupation of my body was obvious to those who cared to look closely. I was busy, I was alert and active, but I wasn’t really present in my life. My eyes darting from one person to another, listening without hearing—I wasn’t really attending to my life, and I wasn’t really connecting to the people who mattered most to me.
When I moved fast, when I spent my days not truly occupying my life, not standing still, not being real, I found it easier to live in accordance with other people’s expectations. By not standing still, I was able to be the object of everyone else’s projections of who and what I should be. Too busy to live my own life, I took direction from the affirmations of others.
But panting through work is a lousy strategy. It feeds the anxiety of never enough; it gets in the way of thinking clearly; and it convinces you to mistake motion for meaning.
A deeper look shows that the view is also fed by a tendency to merge what we do with who we are. “We are nothing,” we tell ourselves, “unless we are doing.”
Think of the many, many jerks in business whom we admire precisely because they have a single-minded focus on execution, causing everyone around them to pant their way through the workday.
The lure of losing oneself in work is immensely seductive. What’s more, great and impossible things are often achieved through this kind of merging of self with a larger purpose. Yes, yes, yes, there is a power in reaching for that larger-than-the-self purpose;
It’s not just the material world, she noted. All things. All. Things. Our wishes, our dreams, our conceptions of who and what we are supposed to be, our sense of self, our sadness, our joy . . . all of it. Falling apart. All the time. Right before our eyes.
Keep opening. Stand still. Keep opening and stand still. Open up, get curious, and inquire within.
Slow down. Stand still. Breathe. Let the forest find you. Then you can begin to ask yourself the hardest questions: Who am I? What do I believe about the world? What do success and failure mean to me (and not to everyone else)? What kind of adult do I want to be? And, most helpful, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions in my life that I say I don’t want?
I remember her writing about her wish that the people at Chewse, the company she cofounded and where she serves as CEO, could be “just like software.”
Encoded in the operating systems of our minds, such ghosts unconsciously determine who gets chosen as our partners and precisely the ways they drive us nuts.
Her impulse, like the impulse of nearly all my clients, was to analyze the Irrational Other to figure out what was wrong with them so that they could be fixed, changed, made better. That was often a cover for another impulse, which was to figure out what was wrong with the Other so that they could justify the ending of the partnership, overcoming guilty feelings.
“If only they worked harder/smarter/longer, then I wouldn’t be so stressed.”
How, indeed, have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? More to the point, what am I willing to give up to stop being complicit?
But doing so demands realizing and accepting that even between the closest people, infinite distances exist.
Questions that drive us toward that insight are endlessly helpful: “What parts of me are being projected onto the other person?” “How do I reclaim those parts of me?” “What do my reactions say about me?” “Why do I do what I do?” “Why do they do what they do?” “What need for love, safety, or belonging might they be trying to meet with their irrational
Later, in a joint session, I asked each of them to lean into their awful, spiky pain; those ancient tender spots. “Stay with the bodily sensations,” I told them. “Notice but don’t board the train of the thoughts that pulls into the station. “See the stories you’re telling yourself about the other,” I continued. “What do those stories reveal about the stories that you might have been holding quietly, silently, for all your lives?”
