Over the past few days several friends of mine have blogged pieces that capture their vulnerable moments. I don’t know what it is about the timing of things, but here are a few posts that talk openly about daily struggles that people face. It is a litany of honesty and thoughtfulness from people who otherwise need to project a more solid image to the world.
Laurie Kingston, an old friend from university days has been blogging for years about her life with cancer. A couple of weeks ago, she published a letter about where she is in her journey which is powerful in its confronting of fear and uncertainty.
Charles LaFond is the Canon Steward of the cathedral of St. John’s in the Wilderness in Denver Colorado. Our friendship and colleagueship has blossomed over the years as we have served congregations together and explored the applications of the spiritual resources of hosting. He keeps a daily blog on the cathedral’s website. He writes today on despair.
Back in 2002, I kept a blog about the Toronto Maple Leafs, and through that writing I met Jordon Cooper who was the editor of a blog called The Hockey Pundits. I wrote there for a couple of years until the NHL lockout destroyed my interested in hockey in 2004. Jordon’s writing ranges from spirituality to sports, culture and to his family and personal struggles with health and the medical system. Today he shares a peek under the hood of struggling with a chronic health condition and being in relationship.
Lesley Donna Williams is a colleague based in South Africa. We met once, but I feel like we know each other better from our social media connections over the years then from the one time we met! She works as an entrepreneur and documents her experience as a mixed race woman living in a country that struggles everyday with integration. It’s a fertile, bewildering, energizing and anxiety provoking context, and so it’s not surprising that once in a while she will experience burnout. This post today captures what the journey with burnout is all about.
Tenneson Woolf is one of my closest friends and professional colleagues. We tumble through the world together in mutual admiration of each other’s gifts, and we bring so much that’s different, that we complement each other beautifully. It’s easy working and hanging out with him (we’re doing both this weekend in Salt Lake City and next week in New Mexico!). Tenn writes his heart at his blog called Human to Human, and today he writes about those days when you just have to put one foot in front of the other.
Rebecca Contant and I know each other because we are both Vancouver Southsiders, devoted supporters of the Vancouver Whitecaps Football Club. The Southsiders are a group of a couple of thousand of us that sing, chant, cheer and create art together in support of our team. It is a participatory and inclusive activity, and we actively embrace social inclusivity in our activity. Rebecca uses this awareness opening as a jumping off point for how to create inclusive spaces for gender identity issues to be considered in the craft of teaching physical education. The post is a vulnerable exploration of what it feels like to confront these issues with compassion and thoughtfulness.
And finally, here is a Storified twitter exchange I got into last week with two gun-loving, anti-gay Americans as we discussed a recent bill in North Carolina that would force transgender people to use the gendered washroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate, despite the situation that would put people into. This discussion is at turns alarming and terrifying and funny and it ends with a major surprise and a crack of vulnerability.
These kinds of posts illustrate the parts of social media that I love. For many of us, writing is the way we explore our hearts to the world, and the nature of social media – whether through blogging, twitter, facebook or instagram – means that we can engage with each other’s writing and vulnerabilities. Revealing these insecurities makes for a more empathetic and honest world.
A couple of years ago – back when I had long hair – I was doing some work in Estonia, where I was part of a team of people that were leading a week long workshop learning about leadership, complexity, dialogue and belonging. I was interviewed under a tree one afternoon about some of the concepts and the deeper implications of what we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops, which itself is, at its simplest, a set of practices to help facilitate participatory meetings better. I talked a bit about what the Art of Hosting means, the need to dance with chaos and order and the learning from the deeper patterns of how life works.
A lot of what I have learned about living with change has come from living on Bowen Island. The bulk of this ten minute interview is basically my operating principles when it comes to living in my community, dancing between chaos and order, welcoming change and bringing helpful form and cultivating the belonging that the heart truly desires. This quiet reflection, spoken out in a period of my life when I was wobbly and reflective, captures something of how I see the world deep down. It’s a bit sentimental, especially at the end, and I don’t apologize for that. It’s from my heart.
Every year I am reminded that the work is never done.
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work. For me and everyone I work with.
I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new. And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure. A lot of it. Much more often than not.
Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail? How many of you have said to your staff, it’s okay to fail? How many of you have given permission to yourself to fail?” No surprise. No hands up.
There are many reasons for this, the least of which is that people equate failure in this system with the actual death of a human being. When that is the thought you associate with failing, of course you will never put yourself in a position where failure is an option, let alone likely. And yet, it’s impossible to create new things that work right out of the box. You need to build testing and failing into strategy if you are to build new programs and services that are effective.
This is where understanding the scale at which you are working helps: hence probe, prototype, pilot, program, process…five incrementally more robust and more “fail-safe” (in terms of tolerance) approaches to innovating and creating something new. But just having a process or a tool for innovating – whether it is Cynefin, design labs, social innovation, agile, whatever – is still not going to give you a resilient mindset in which failure is tolerable or possible. And this is as true for leaders as it is for people working on the project teams that are supposed to be delivering new and better ways of caring for children and families.
In our programs and in our teaching, we double down on working with improvisational theatre and music techniques and especially The Work, which Caitlin teaches and leads. That process is the primary tool we use with ourselves and others to work on the limiting beliefs, patterns, thoughts and cognitive entrainment that impedes our ability to embrace failure based approaches. Without addressing patterns of thinking, it is just never safe to fail, and when a change leader is hidden behind that block, there is no way to truly enter into strategic, innovative practice.
How do you sharpen your failure practice?
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
This. And a small vignette.
In our circle yesterday, Caitlin arrived a little late, and took a seat on the outside of the rim.
The one who noticed was a Chinese-Vietnamese woman who had come to Canada as a child refugee in the 1970s, stuffed into a dangerous boat with hundreds of others fleeing war and fear. She turned and saw Caitlin and moved her chair to make room for her in the circle.
She knew intuitively how to fit one more person in, how to welcome, how to alleviate the feeling of being outside. How to bring wholeness. It was a moment in which our threaded hearts were stitched together.
In these days, when a cultivated fear of the other is what passes for politics, this quote and this story landed.