Authenticity

The last few weeks have been interesting ones – for a good chunk of March my husband and I took a vacation with my parents to Africa to go on safari.  I’ve been in a reflective place since then, thinking about the fun and excitement of the trip, but also thinking about how far I’ve come in my relationship with my parents, particularly with my father.  Family relationships can be tough, especially parent – child ones, and then there’s the added aspect of how we as children tend to put our parents on a pedestal.  It’s hard not to, when you think about it.  I’ve lived it, many of my clients have lived it, and while well intended, there are several unintended consequences in doing so.  It manifests in a lack of decisiveness when it comes to things like career choices, life choices, increases codependency and can really muddy the waters where clear thinking is concerned. When I think about the impact this had on my life, it’s profound.  It’s hard to just “be,” when you’re so busy trying to be someone else’s version of you.  Inadvertently and unconsciously, we give our power away and when we do we grow increasingly resentful of the other person.  Why can’t he see me for who I am?  Why can’t he appreciate me for the person I’ve become?  We feel pushed or compelled to do things out of family obligation and anger and resentment builds and builds.  Left unchecked it can completely poison the relationship.  I thank God it didn’t in the case of me and my dad.  When I truly think about it, for many years I was playing the part of the victim who had to do what he said without any choice in the matter, and my dad was the persecutor in our dynamic.  The more the anger built, the more I distanced myself from him – my tactic was to isolate myself rather than fight.  Over the years I’ve worked hard to pull him down from the pedestal I created.  And it’s important to note that I was the one that created it. Pedestals keep us from being able to truly love Putting others on a pedestal isn’t fair in two ways.  It’s not fair to yourself, because in effect what you’re doing is giving your power away as you seek approval and validation from the person on the pedestal.  But it’s also not fair to the other person.  It puts pressure on them, it creates unrealistic expectations that they need to live up to.  It creates a sense of division, of separation.  And the greater that sense of separation, the harder it is for love to enter the equation.  The harder it is to see that person for the truth of who they really are – a flawed, messy, beautiful human being, doing their best, worthy of unconditional love all the same.  That’s how I see my Dad now.  And I appreciate him for who he is, just

We are often told we need to be assertive.  Assertive, but not aggressive.  And that can be a tall order for many of us, especially those of us that learned to make our way through life as the pleaser/appeaser.  For those of us that fall or have fallen at some point into this category (myself included) when we try to make a conscious shift, we may find ourselves over correcting and drawing a much harder line than we intended.  Imagine a pendulum swinging all the way from the left to the right.  We feel guilty about it, and may find ourselves going back and forth in our heads thinking – “Did that come across as rude?  “Did I overdo it?”  “Do I need to apologize?”  Maybe we do end up apologizing, maybe we’re not sure, but things are awkward.  This assertiveness thing is too hard, too sticky.  And maybe we’re better off just doing what we do best – going along to get along. Or maybe the shift is an unconscious one and perhaps the resentment we have shoved down for so long finally boils to the surface and we blow our top like a fiery volcano.  This explosion becomes another mess we need to clean up and we find ourselves full of shame, guilt, we over apologize, maybe we beat ourselves up about it and punish ourselves and we double down on trying to be the pleaser, because good people don’t do things like this, right?  If I was a better person, I would have been able to keep my cool and wouldn’t have reacted that way, right? In my opinion, assertiveness is one of the hardest things to get right, mainly because we have so much baggage around it.  When I really started looking at the roots of this for myself, I had to go deep.  Find the root cause If you’ve never met me in person, outside of the virtual world of zoom, there is something about me you will notice instantly.  No, not my dazzling smile or my bright blue eyes, as lovely as they may be.  I’m 6 foot 1.  If I were male, you probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid.  But even though humans are getting taller and taller these days due to better nutrition and living standards, 6 foot 1 for a woman is still really tall.  And I didn’t shoot up like a weed later in life.  I’ve always been tall.  All my baby records were off the charts.  I was always in the top 1% of height for my age, since about birth. So you can imagine that when I started elementary school I definitely stood out in the room, pun completely intended.  And I bet you can guess what happened.  I got teased.  Bullied is the word we would probably use now.  And it was relentless.  It was every day, so much so that in the mornings I’d be nauseous and never want to go to school, because I knew what

I stopped making new year’s resolutions a while back.  I could never see the point, especially considering the statistics that surround them.  Just this morning the news was mentioning by the end of January, 43% of Americans will have already given up on whatever it was they resolved to do.  But if not a new year’s resolution, then what?  I think it’s human nature to gravitate towards the future.  To think about things like goals and plans.  I’ve been pondering this conundrum lately, as I’ve spent the last month taking a much needed and long breath.  And I use the word breath very intentionally, rather than break.  I closed my practice down over the holidays, something I’ve never done before.  I went hiking with my husband out in the southwest – we visited Zion, Bryce Canyon, White Sands and many other desert hot spots.  The breath gave me time to ask myself some questions, and to do some deeper reflection on what I really want.  But the questions I was asking myself were different than the ones I’ve often asked myself in the past.  In the past it tended to center around goal setting.  What goals do I want to set for myself this year?  What do I want to accomplish?  Then a logical jumping off point from that question is to then think about how to make those goals SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.  We are starting with the wrong question. I tried asking myself these questions over my break this year, but no dice.  I really tried.  The answers just weren’t coming, and I did something that was hard to do – I resisted the urge to just come up with something and put it in a spreadsheet.  It was really tough because the feeling of restlessness came up.  I had a feeling it would come, and it was overwhelming.  It was pushing me to sign up for a million different things and to try to fill my schedule with a million different activities.  Restlessness is a feeling I’ll do anything to escape.  I decided to sit with it instead.  I looked deep into that feeling, and the patterns it can often create in my life.  I asked myself what was really going on, what was sitting under the restlessness.  I asked again and again, I resolved myself to feel it, and it eventually passed. And from the bottom of that well, a different kind of question emerged.  This year, I stopped asking myself, “What do I want to do?”  And I started asking myself instead a different question, “How do I want to be?”  Being versus the doing The answer was one single word that kept coming to me over and over and over again.  In conversations, in dreams, in everyday life interactions.  Depth.  It’s become my word now for 2024, an intention that I’ve set to define my year. Interestingly I’m feeling very differently about 2024 having gone through this reflection and

I’ve often mused that that trick is life is figuring out what you want, especially in this world that is overflowing with options and opinions.  After all, it was the Cheshire cat in the story of Alice in Wonderland who wisely said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”  It’s not enough to know what we don’t want, which is the less than powerful place we often navigate from.  The question is what do you really want?  What does your heart long for?  But cultivating a direction requires some careful thought and often some courage.  Without it, we can end up living someone else’s version of our story, rather than the one we were meant to create. Navigate from a place of what you want, not what you don’t I’ll share a personal example to illustrate this point.  For the last couple of years, I’ve been figuring this out for myself, as I further refine my idea of my business, my calling in life and my priorities.  I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions – What do I want my business to be?  How do I want it to grow?  Do I even want it to grow?  What do I want my life to look like?  Who is my ideal client?  How am I meant to serve?  And the answers are not often super straightforward because life will test us on this path.  Charismatic colleagues and friends will show up with exciting business opportunities, saying things like, You need to introduce more products into your business so you can generate passive income!  Or – I’ve got an idea or dream of creating something large and scalable where we’ll hire other coaches and build a coaching powerhouse of a business.  Think big, think Lencioni and the Table Group.  Think Kornferry.  We can charge big money, travel the world, farm out the work and live high on the hog!  Or – You’re such a talented coach, you’d be crazy to define your niche so narrowly and just work with women.  Options and possibilities are a wonderful thing indeed, but there is a dark side.  When you don’t have a clear direction for where you want to go, it’s easy to get seduced and swept away by someone else’s vision.  And I can be just that person, considering I’m a natural enabler and want to see folks that I care about be successful and achieve their goals.  Plus, sometimes it’s just easier frankly to ride someone else’s wave.  You don’t have to think too hard.  You don’t have to do your own heavy lifting and your own deep work.  And we also get seduced because you don’t have to take accountability when you’re riding someone else’s wave – if it’s not a success you can always point the finger and blame them instead. Serve your soul, not your ego I’m realizing there’s something so powerful in recognizing who you are and putting a stake in the

As human beings we are masters at creating narratives.  We create colorful stories that have the capacity to stir up emotion.  And that can be very wonderful and inspiring.  I’ve often said that emotions are the elixir of life.  The problem with our innate gift for story telling is that we often tend to cling to the negative and painful narratives and replay them repeatedly in our minds.  If she just hadn’t said that.  If I just hadn’t done that.  Then the relationship wouldn’t have been ruined.  I wouldn’t be in such dire straits. We create headlines of negativity And off this rumination we create high level headlines, scripts that sound like:  I am always getting taken advantage of. I am estranged from this relative. I am always making bad choices. I am bad at leadership. I am horrible at relationships. I am not assertive enough. I am weak. I am not hardworking enough to pull that off. I am overweight. I am stupid. I am never going to get ahead in life. I am damaged. I am a victim. I am powerless to change anything. Just let it go, right? We’re often told by self help experts that we have to let go of these negative scripts.  Release the negative self talk, they exclaim!  But how?  Especially when they’re so ingrained.  Many of these stories have been kicking around in our brains for decades.  Maybe I’m crazy for saying this but “Let that sh%t go” sounds trite and condescending.  If it was that easy, I would have done it by now, is what I often think when I’m met with platitudes like that. I often speak about the power of language with folks I am coaching, and direct coaching clients to pay particular attention to anything that comes after the phrase “I am.” Why?  Because words are literally magic.  And they have the capacity to expand the possibilities in our lives or close them down for good.  Words, whether spoken out loud or spoken in our head, are incredibly powerful.  If you’ve ever read or heard of the book, The Four Agreements, Ruiz speaks to this when he addresses the first agreement – Be impeccable with your word, who says: “You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love.  How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word.” Beware of the negativity bait and switch So what would impeccability of word look like as it pertains to releasing negative self-talk?  Would it be the converse?  Instead of I am not weak, perhaps the answer lies in the reverse – I am powerful.  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  Just a simple bait and switch should be enough to do the trick, right? In my experience it’s tough to go from one extreme to the other.  We as humans also have an animalistic ability to sniff out the falseness of a message.  If

In many of the leadership courses I teach, I talk a lot about the difference between the being and the doing of leadership.  The doing is the day-to-day stuff we get caught up in.  It’s the systems or process, tools or models that we look to for guidance.  And being the task and accomplishment-oriented humans that we are, we often focus more on the doing side rather than the being. As a leadership trainer I often hear this question:  “What do I do when I need to x?”  X could be giving difficult feedback, a tough performance conversation, realigning expectations, inspiring and empowering my team to deliver, the list goes on and on.  And there are several tools and techniques out there that give advice on what to do relative to these challenges.  Tools and techniques are helpful and I’m not underestimating the value they can add.  But a participant of mine summed it up very well the other day when she said: “There’s no checklist for leadership.  And people can see straight through you when you’re just going through the motions.” She’s right by the way.  People ultimately respond to who you are being in that moment versus what you are doing or saying.  We have this uncanny knack to sense when someone’s intentions aren’t aligned with their actions, or they’re saying the so called “right” thing to manipulate or control.  So the leadership coaching question for today is, Who do you want to be as a leader? Who do you want to be as a leader? I often have clients write a leadership purpose statement.  A lot of times folks struggle with this, and I accept the fact that it can feel awkward.  But I’ve often mused that a mindful life is an intentional life.  So why should your leadership be any different? Step 1: What’s my personal purpose? One way to go about this is to have a think about your own personal purpose first.  This includes questions like: Maybe there is something that ticks all these boxes for you, or maybe some of the above.  There may be several things that you love, but you may not necessarily be able to prosper at them.  Perhaps you honor that by pursuing a hobby or volunteering your time to a cause you are super passionate about.  There’s no right or wrong way of responding to these prompts.  The key is to have a think about them and see what comes up.  See where you may be able to find the intersections. Step 2: What goals do I have for my leadership? And then link this to the act of leading by asking yourself:  Once you’ve had a think, time to put pen to paper and create your leadership purpose statement. Maybe your statement looks something like this: “I’m excited to work on the challenges of climate change and that gives me a sense of personal purpose.  I want to lead my team to innovate and tackle this challenge