Boundaries

Washington is in the middle of a week of brutally hot weather, exceeding 100 degrees and shattering long-standing records.  With the humidity, our heat indices have been even more relentless. Yet this morning I've been quite comfortably luxuriating on my north-facing balcony with a slight breeze. I breakfasted outdoors, a guilty pleasure I've enjoyed most of my adult life.  As I did so, I found my mind drifting back to several patios, decks, and balconies on which I had breakfasted and to the friends with whom I had  shared stories and laughed as we ate.

Before eating, I had finished a novel that I started a month ago on my staycation. In it the main characters started the book as boys, and by the end, they had become old men with failing eyesight. The book left me in a reflective space, which may have spawned my breakfast reverie.  I've been thinking about this post for some time. For once I am not going to use the excuse of no time to write. If you had asked I wouldn't have known why I hadn't written, but this morning I know that I just hadn't had enough perspective.

I believe the expression "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear" came from the I Ching, but I also believe that a number of Eastern philosophies hold something similar to be true. During my outdoor breakfast contemplation this morning, the pieces began to fall into place for me.  I, as the student, must be ready because lots of opportunities to learn a similar lesson have appeared.

During my four-month detail last fall and early winter, I became keenly aware that my life had spun totally out of control in recent years--to the extent that my physical and mental health were being compromised and my relationships were back-burnered, awaiting that precious "time" for nurturing. Certainly, time for writing, which really nourishes my soul, had become a low priority. I fell asleep from exhaustion when I tried to meditate. I had to be away from my long-standing, abusive work environment to get the perspective to recognize that.

In those treasured four months, I was able to see what had evaded me for so long. In my situation I had lost either the self-respect or the self-confidence to set and stick to my boundaries.  When I returned to my permanent job, I wrote in big block letters with a box around them on the whiteboard behind my desk, where I looked at it every time I entered my office, "boundary clarity."

In a matter of days, I was tested.  An unsustainable level of dark work again began flowing at me from very high places. Encouraged by my "boundary clarity" reminder, I began telling my clients that I would work with them, but it would be three months, four months, and even five months later.  I brought in a contractor to do work with one client organization, which had needs that wouldn't wait. Still, the darkness and the volume of the work were too much.

Within a month I knew something had to change.  After several conversations with my new boss, it became clear that the organization was more concerned about keeping my very senior customers happy than in keeping me healthy and happy. No relief would be coming, but I was assured that I was very good at this work.  After an unusually frightening dream about the same time, I knew I had to leave.  I began the process of planning for an end-of-the-summer departure.  I was quite transparent with my boss and his boss about planning for an August separation.

I had no other job from which to make money, and I really need serious income for several years yet I knew I needed to take care of myself. My friends worried a bit more than I did about how I would live, but as soon as I got very clear about needing to move on, I had faith that something would work out.  My big focus was on getting my clients, most of whom I'd worked with for years, to a good transition point. I learned about a month ago that the boss didn't really think I'd go, but he obviously doesn't know my courage when my spiritual path has become clear to me, and it had become very clear to me.

As soon as I had become very clear, out of the blue I received a call from a potential employer.  Job announcements began falling into my email inbox with regularity.  Even USAJobs, which has seldom had appropriate jobs, sent me a promising vacancy announcement. I am now just five weeks from my departure date, and I have two very strong prospects, each of which allows me to work in my "sweet spot," and each of which will be a significant increase in income.  Perhaps as encouraging is that along the way as I networked with former bosses and colleagues, I found great sources for independent contract work.

In parallel, I realized how my work situation has made me unavailable for time with friends and even to pursue a primary relationship.  In fact, for the first time in a long time, I added up how many years it had been since I'd had more than a date or two with someone.  It wasn't an acceptable number.  I began focusing my intention on at least meeting some men.  I had first dates with people I would have just checked off my list a year ago.  Most of them weren't serious prospects, but I was at least getting out and sending the Universe a message that I was serious.

Along the way, something else happened.  While I just didn't have much in common with most of these men, there was another category.  The only way I can describe them is "Really?!"  The one who pronounced that he had two other women in his life but would like to add others. "Really?!" There was one who was married but said his wife was OK with him dating others. "Really?!"  Last week, there was one who seriously treated me like a child. "Really?!"  I wanted to add, "What do I look like?" but the truth is, I probably looked like a doormat, both at work and in my personal life.

I like to be nice to people.  If I have ever been rude, it was either because I was tired or didn't realize what I was doing.  In each of these cases, I just walked out.  The last one in the middle of dinner at a famous-chef restaurant that I really love. As a serious foodie, that should have been hard, but it wasn't. Following each of these, someone more interesting followed.  I'm still not there yet, but...progress.

In the 2006 movie "The Holiday," one of two female leads, Iris, played by Kate Winslet, has also been down on her confidence and has allowed her former boyfriend to walk all over her.  In the movie, she meets an octogenarian, who is former screenwriter.  He begins "assigning" her movie viewing of classic films, all of which have strong women leads.  After said boyfriend crosses the line yet one more time, she kicks him out of her life.  He is incredulous.  "What's gotten into you, Iris?" he asks.

After a pause, she replies, "I think it is something resembling gumption." And, away she sends him.

As I've been contemplating this post over the last few weeks, that scene and those words have played over and again in my mind.  Where did my gumption go, and more importantly, how did I let it go. I have been a strong woman most of my adult life.  Anyone who has known me before this century would certainly have laughed at the thought that I didn't have confidence.  A former dance partner once remarked (paraphrased for the general audience) "You have more moxie than any man I know."

"Where did it go?" is still a question I ponder, but mostly, I don't care. What I am passionate about is sustaining it into what feels to me like the next phase of my life--one that promises to be the best ever.

While both personally and professionally my life has been about helping others, I now know that I can't sustain my help for others if I don't take care of my first.  How many coaching clients have I reminded that the airlines always warn us to put the oxygen mask over our own faces before attempting to help children around us. On this turn of the hero's journey, I've gotten this lesson differently than I had before.  Saying "Sorry, I can't help me, I need to take care of myself," really is uncomfortable to even consider, but, whatever comes next, that is a clear boundary that I must enforce.

Not being who I thought I was...really...

In my March 12 post, I wrote about converging forces, demanding that I know more about who I am.  ("What's Going On With Me?") I shared how while watching the "Finding Your Roots" television series with Harvard professor Louis Henry Gates in parallel with the "Outlander" series, set in Scotland, a place from whence many of my ancestors embarked upon their journeys to North America, I suddenly became extremely curious about my own ancestry.  So, I swabbed my mouth and sent it off for information about my DNA.

A couple weeks ago, the results arrived.  I was shocked.  I felt like that man in the commercial, who had spent his whole life thinking his ancestors were German. He had learned German customs and dances and even acquired traditional German costumes.  Then, his DNA determined that he was Scottish.

My results weren't quite that different.  I have a very Irish name, and quite accurately, I knew that I was Scottish and Irish with a little Dutch and French.  The DNA tests confirmed all that with a bit more broad representation from the British Isles.

I also learned that I have 7% ancestry from Northern Spain, a place that I've gravitated to over the last half dozen years, and I've said many times that I could retire to Barcelona in a heartbeat. Walking the riverfront in Bilbao on a Sunday afternoon three years ago felt like home. Who knew that there might have been an ancestral attraction to the region?  Certainly not me.  Perhaps even more shocking was the 7% from the bridge between Finland and Russia and Scandinavia.  Really? Never heard anything about that before.

The real shocker, however, was not in these surprise pieces that are part of my ancestry, but in what is not in my ancestry...at all.

For generations of my family, the mythology has been about my Native American great-great-grandmother. I have been curious about it since I was a little girl.  One of my favorite dolls as a child was a Native squaw with a papoose strapped to her back.  As I matured, my grandmother told me how I had the Native cheekbones of her grandmother, as did my father. When sorting through photographs after my father's death, I asked my great-aunt (my grandmother's sister) who the woman was in a very old photograph. She reported it was her Native great-grandmother.

As I grew older, I have been intrigued in learning about Native customs and have even incorporated some in my coaching and consulting practice.  On occasion, I've made a traditional Indian pudding, and I've loved reading and occasionally presenting on the foods of the first Thanksgiving.  I've even had going to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian to work with their genealogists to learn more about my Native ancestry on my to-do list for several years.

Fiction.  All fiction.  Like the guy, who needed to trade in his lederhosen for a kilt, my DNA proves that our family mythology was complete fiction. Zero percent.  I am more than a little curious about how such a story could have passed along for several generations, even through those like my great-aunt and grandmother, who actually knew this mystery woman.  But, I can't dispute the science.

This shocking news arrives at a time when I am really trying to figure out who I am on a more existential level, The combination has left me feeling like I am in the midst of a hurricane with everything I've believed about myself spinning around me, and most of it blowing away.

For most of three decades, I have either been passionate about preparing for or having a career in organization development (OD) and coaching.  OD is a broad enough field that my career has morphed in a number of directions since finishing graduate school: putting together a joint-venture in China, taking a corporation global, leading communication and change management for a project across the whole federal government, leading a culture change that dramatically improved satisfaction in the organization, and even facilitating a 20-year roadmap for an organization.  I particularly enjoyed several years during which I helped executives as they sought to spiritually align the work lives and businesses with their spiritual purpose.

My coaching work has gone in as many directions as the people I've coached.  Writing has provided a rich means for processing what I've learned about myself and others along the way. How could I not love this work that made the lives of people at work so much more satisfying?

How could I not, indeed?  But like my mythical Native ancestry, when I work in OD these days, it feels like I've put on someone else's clothes that neither fit nor suit me anymore.  While I still love to write, and when I have the bandwidth, I love writing this blog, I no longer have no passion for writing books.  I have at least eight or nine that I've started over the years, and I can't even muster the interest to finish an hour's work that would be needed to finish publishing The Game Called Life electronically.  One hour! And it has been on my desk for 18 months awaiting a handful of edits.

It is a very dark and rainy day in Washington, so I decided to skip church this morning and have an extended time of prayer and meditation about what's next.  To say the things that floated through my meditations were all over the map is an understatement. Working on a political campaign, working with a non-governmental organization (NGO), especially with refugees, doing something artistic, developing gluten-free foods...

The next wave took me deeper in my core existence.  I wrote: feels like home, service, positive, helpful, resourceful, solution-focused, learning, solid relationships, and using my significant experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities.  In many ways, the shocking DNA results seem like a message to me to just give up anything I've thought before and just make myself available--like stripping away everything I've thought about work and making myself available for what God wants me to do next.

I've been in similar situations before, and one time I packed my house and moved across the country. What followed over the next few years was amazing--totally in flow with the divine.  Another time, I dillied and dallied for 30 months.  Eventually the transition has worked out, but not nearly as easily. I've often wondered what would have happened if I'd followed 30 months earlier.  That is a mystery of time.

I truly hope that this transition will not require a move--I love my home and Washington. However, I do know that I will be available when and where I am guided. I will let God be God.

High tech? High touch?

Probably 20 years ago, I remember listening to an interview with Jean Houston, Ph.D., scholar, philosopher, researcher, and author on human capacities.  She said something that has stuck with me ever since. Not stuck with me in the sense that if someone brought it up that I'd remember, but stuck with me in the sense that I ponder it...often...sometimes daily.

What she said that was so riveting to me was that over the course of human kind, any time there has been a major breakthrough in whatever the technology of the era was, there has been a parallel breakthrough in our ability to connect as human beings.  If I recall correctly, she talked about balancing "high tech," whatever "high tech" was at that time with "high touch." If she didn't say those words, that is what my brain did with what she said.

I have played with this idea for so long that I really don't recall if the next idea was hers or one that I came up with, but in my mind's eye, over the years I have seen the early technology breakthrough of fire being balanced with the human connection breakthrough of campfires and campfire stories. 

When I first heard Houston talk about this concept, she was talking about what was then the explosion of computer and internet technology, although at that time email was still pretty new.  She was questioning what the human/high-touch breakthrough would be to balance it.  This is what makes me ponder.  What is the balance?

I love my smartphone, and I wouldn't want to be without it.  Yet, as I've written before, the world seems to be drawn into one-on-one relationships with devices.  When we could be more connected than ever, we seem to be connected to technology rather than to other human beings.  I own that we can Skype with friends on the other side of the world as easily as vastly different time zones will allow.

When I recall lining up for a weekly call home on a single pay phone during my college days, reaching out to touch loved ones is definitely easier now, but when I've heard some of the drivel that substitutes for real conversation, I suspect that I made more connection in my once a week calls home than today's coeds do in thrice-daily calls with their mums.

At the same time, our technology has speeded life up to the extent that almost everyone I know feels like they are racing through life.  It takes weeks of advanced planning to get together for an afternoon or evening with my closest friends.  A more distant friend and I put a standing phone call on our calendars months ahead...and even then, we sometimes miss it. 

While I fully realize that nostalgia for other times often reflects one-sided memories, and we forget how things really were, I have completely been bitten by a recent Chinet commercial during which a woman is able to slip back in time to a block party.  The lead up to the time travel is that "back then," people more often connected in homes than on home pages.  I really actually remember a time in my adult life when we got home at a reasonable time and could have a drink before or coffee after dinner with a neighbor.  Even spontaneous "Why-don't-you-drop-by-for-dinner?" invitations were not unheard of. 

Maybe what I wrestle with is the lack of spontaneity.  I loved the days when  I could decide after work that I wanted to call a friend for an unplanned dinner or movie.  But that is an aside. 

The real question is how to we make equivalent strides forward in deepening relationships that we have made in technology.  I really have an idea, and fifteen years ago I felt it was a coming reality.  I've written before about the ribbon of love that I believes connects all of humankind, heart to heart to heart.  I used to feel an openness to that...maybe even a readiness for it.  Yet, I almost feel like the attention to devices and the 24 x 7 news cycle has focused us on the negative side or life--what separates us rather than what brings us together.

Maybe asking what the high-touch breakthrough to balance the high-tech advances is the wrong question.  Perhaps the real question is how can we break through barriers to the potential of connecting through the ribbon of love.  That will be a breakthrough at least equal to the technology of the internet and connecting devices.

Not-knowing as a Way of Life

Most of the time I sit quietly before writing this blog, and a topic gently floats into my awareness.  Then I write. Not so today.  Sometimes it feels to me like the Universe is beating me over the head with a topic that I need to revisit.  So it is with not-knowing as a way of life. I've been writing about it for at least two decades, and I am still a student of its wisdom.  Everywhere I've turned in the last couple of weeks, I have found myself talking about this topic. I can really tell it is serious when I start nervous eating when I think of it.  I am going to save myself a few thousand calories and explore it more.

There is a relationship between chaos, complexity, and spiritual growth.  I've observed it in individuals; I've observed it in groups.  The simplified, I'm-not-a-physicist explanation of chaos theory says that chaos is always implicit in order.  The easy way to explain this is that no matter how much we think we know how things are in our lives, every now and then, the Universe sends us a learning moment.  This happened to me when my husband came home from his run and told me he wanted a divorce.  He was showered, shaved, packed, and gone in 30 minutes!  Wow! I really didn't see that one coming.

I had a client once who came home to his "happy" home at the end of his normally long work day to find an empty house.  I am not saying no one was at home, although that was true.  I am saying it was empty.  Not a lick of furniture...or anything else. Four walls: that was it. He says he had no clue.  Someone else was awakened in the middle of the night with a call from the police, saying that his teenager had been arrested. One of the most fit 40-year-olds that I have known was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease. You get the idea: we are coasting along in la-la land, and something is hurled at us with no warning.  That creates a moment...or many moments of chaos.  If we are honest with ourselves in the moments that follow, we really are clueless about what is real.

In that period of exploration--for purposes of chaos theory, let's call it complexity--we know that the world is certainly not what we thought it was, but we are in the figurative "wilderness," trying to figure out what is true.

I have observed two ways in which people explore the "wilderness."  The unconscious way takes many forms, but in short, this approach uses whatever will numb the reality that our life isn't as we thought.  Drugs, alcohol, sex, food, starvation, purging, the three-gallons of ice cream break-up...you get the idea.  Inevitably, if we take that journey, weeks, months, or years down the line, knowing nothing more about what is real, we will have another wake-up call, telling us that our world isn't as we thought it was.  Normally, a succession of wake-up calls will continue until the Universe has our full attention.

For those of you who have read my book The Game Called Life, this is the space where Lizzie found herself when she fell across her steering wheel, sobbing for help, "There has to be a better way."

 Let's call that the second way, what I call "not-knowing." In this approach, we can engage the wilderness. I would like to distinguish "not-knowing" from "I don't know."  "I don't know" is passive.  It is the shrug of the shoulders of not caring. 

"Not-knowing" by contrast is active.  Instead of coasting through the wake-up call, we engage in self-exploration, attempting to know self and the world around us in a new way.  "Not-knowing" embraces this transition as an opportunity to grow in wholeness.  This is where Lizzie found herself after Helen answered her call for help.

If we kick around in "not-knowing" long enough, an Aha! moment inevitably burst into consciousness.  Suddenly one day when we least expect it (walking down the street, and it hits you,) you will see the world in a whole new way. Almost always this new world offers rich possibilities we had not considered before. 

For those who dislike uncertainty, I hate to relate that life is a sequence of wake-up calls: they cannot be avoided.  "Not-knowing as a way of life" is an attitude toward life that assumes the chaos as a given.  If chaos is always implicit in order, why not just accept it, embrace it, and flow with it.  Life becomes a series of opportunities to learn and grow into ever expanding possibilities.

I am not a surfer, but this is how I imagine it must be life to go for ever bigger waves.  What might once have been intimidating can become a real rush...without drugs, alcohol, sex, or any of those numbing agents...a natural high that leads higher and higher.  Stepping into our potential by growing regularly, not just when the Universe grabs us by the scruff of the neck and says, "Hey, dude! Listen to me."

During a webinar that I took today, the facilitator teaching about improving communication and listening said, "Just assume you don't understand."  She may have been talking about "not-knowing as a way of life."  Just assume you don't understand, and embrace the adventure of learning and growth.  What else is there that is really important?

Hanging On To What I Don't Want

I rarely give advice when I am coaching.  I prefer to let the session be a self-discovery process.  On those occasions when I do give advice, however, what usually happens sometime between instantly and five minutes later is that I realize the advice I gave my coaching client is advice I should have given myself.

Today the advice was to be wary of hanging on to things that my client doesn't really want just because they are hers now.  Almost as the words were coming out of my mouth, I thought, "Kay, you should be listening to this advice yourself."

Over the years, there have been others that have tried to hang on when they shouldn't.  One pattern that I have experienced is the person who has a job they've never really liked or wanted but they've had it so long that they are terrified of leaving it or losing it.  One executive that I coached needed to tell his CEO something, which he knew would anger him.   I asked him what the worst thing that could happen would be.  He sat quietly for a few seconds and said, "I'd be fired."  He smiled, shook his head gently, and continued, "from a job I never really wanted.  Freedom: that is what would happen."  Hanging on to his own personal prison.

A heart surgeon was oppressed by the stress of the job.  When I asked him why he continued, "Because my father wanted me to be a heart surgeon, and my brothers are heart surgeons.  It's the 'family business': my father wanted me in the family business."  Hanging on to what he never wanted.

In the work I do, it is really quite common to have a new manager with functional expertise to micromanage their staff because they don't want to let go of what they are "expert" at doing in order to grow into a new role.  Unable to step up to what they've wanted because they are hanging on to what they had been yearning to leave.

There are lots of other examples, but in both my own life and in those of the many clients who have wrestled with letting go of something with which they are finished.  In many ways the leap of stepping into what we want and letting go of what we don't is one of faith--faith that the other side will be better than where we are and not some the-grass-is-greener illusion.

After I gave my client advice today, I pondered: what am I hanging on to that I don't want.  A laugh-out-loud moment followed: let me count them. It seemed for a bit that every thought passing through me brought another and another. 

A couple weeks ago I wrote about feeling like I was pregnant--about to give birth to something new, maybe even a whole new life. (11/2/13)  A woman about to give birth becomes something new: she becomes a mother.  That role doesn't come with an instruction manual.  She must risk moving into a totally new world with no assurance that she will do well...or even can do it at all.   The baby can't wait for her to calculate her odds for success; it will be born. 

In the instant that she becomes a mother, she lets go of who she was before the birth.  Unless, of course, that she decides that she can't do it.  Well, of course, that is crazy.  She can't decide when she is going into labor that she isn't going to have the baby.  I think that is where I am.  Yet my hands are locked in a white-knuckled grip on what I don't want.  Tonight I will ask for help--help letting go of what I don't want, so that I can give birth to this new life.