Hold on tight, folks, because it appears we are about to embark upon another multi-essay arc of indeterminate length.  The last arc, inspired by my recent weight loss journey and begun over the weekly chore of chopping carrots, was on the topic of creating sustainable personal change and growth. That topic began with a discussion on Authenticity.  This arc is inspired by my apparent inability to get a good night’s sleep.  These thoughts were begun in my journal, either late one night or early one morning or both, trying to understand why I can’t seem to fall asleep or stay asleep.  As of now, I’m not sure what the overriding theme or goal will be of this essay series.  I just know that there is something I need to figure out and I’m bringing you along for the ride.

Being the Scientist and Problem Solver that I am, I will apply the Scientific Method to figure all this out and start sleeping like a champ again!  Let’s see.  First step is to make sure I’ve identified the right problem: I can’t consistently fall asleep and stay asleep without the aid of chemistry.  Is that the problem or a symptom?  Let us now do a Root Cause Analysis to figure that out.  (Isn’t being a Scientist FUN?!)  WHY can’t I sleep well?  It could be that I’m a Woman of a Certain Age—there could be physiological reasons.  It could be that I’m retired and am not spending my days and nights totally stressed and frustrated with work which tended to make me fall into bed exhausted every night.  It could be that our cat, Bridget, likes to jump on the bed as I’m trying to fall asleep, take a mouthful of blanket and then start walking awkwardly back and forth over me in what we’ve taken to calling The Dance of Her People.  It could be that 2020 has just been a s@*t storm mash up of a global pandemic, civil unrest and an exasperating political climate that has me wound tighter than a two-dollar watch.  I’m guessing there are contributions from all those factors.  Now, how do I fix it?

I will start with an observation:  I have zero patience these days.  It is stunning to me how quickly I snap.  I snap at Trish for interrupting me when I’m trying to concentrate on something important, like reading the daily Comics.  I snap at cars on the road for doing the same sorts of things that they are probably yelling at me about.  I snap at the TV for not having something on that I want to watch.  And I snap at poor little Bridget who just wants some attention and really wasn’t biting me that hard.  I just snap.  I go from perfectly fine to a monster in an instant.  I have a level of crankiness just below the surface that I feel constantly.  And it keeps me from sleeping well.

I have also been thinking about Patience after last week’s webinar on “The 10 Things They Never Teach You in Leadership Training.”  (Insert shameless plug to view this webinar for free here.)  One of the learnings I shared is that, when you are a leader (be it in a business setting, community setting or even family setting) it is critical that you show a consistent countenance to the people in your organization/family. You may be going through a roller coaster of emotions daily, but you don’t want to take others along with you unless there is something they can do about it.  If your business is tanking and you need extra effort or your family is going through a crisis that requires all hands on deck, by all means share the information and the emotion.  But if what you really need is for people to focus on doing their jobs or your family to just live their lives because that is what they can control and they can’t really help with your issues then you must keep a steady presence.  They look to you, as the leader, for cues on how they should be feeling.  If you are calm and confident, they will be, too.  You need to be able to think before you react or speak; listen and understand before you respond; take in the world around you calmly, if critically, and think things through before you next act.  I don’t want those around me to be so affected by my ever-changing moods.  It’s not healthy for those relationships or for me.  But being able to do that takes, among other things, Patience. 

Patience, I’ve determined, is a choice in behavior, not an immutable characteristic.  And that kind of sucks.  If something is a choice, then I must own the decision that I make and the outcome.  It is much easier to play the victim, but we’ve discussed before what a bad idea that is.  OK, fine.  I own it.  I know how important it is, for my own sanity and those around me, to take in information and process it clearly and calmly.  I want to be more patient, but I seem to have limited capability to achieve that steadiness these days.  And clearly it is related to my sleep issues because I lie in bed and ruminate over the day’s Crankiness Triggers until I either start listening to a podcast, get up and start reading, or take a sleep aid to knock me out.  Anything to stop my brain.

We are now about 900 words into this essay and so far, I have done a lousy job trying to frame a discussion.  I’ve done a lot of whining and made a sorry attempt to define a Problem to Solve but if you are still reading this essay, it is probably to see if I have any insight on how to improve my Patience Quotient.  This is where I realize we have a lot more work to do and why this discussion is going to spill into a few more essays.  I am well aware that things that keep my brain churning at midnight and later suddenly seem less patience-sapping in the morning, even if I didn’t get a full night’s sleep.  And that means that my ability to be patient, to maintain perspective, is related to my reservoir of coping energy.  Since exhibiting Patience is an active process, it takes energy.  If my level of coping energy is low, my patience is strained.  So, how do I effectively refill that reservoir when there is a big old drain from it all day long?  That is what we will take up next time.

We’ve made it!  For the past several essays we’ve been on a journey discussing personal growth.  Making change stick is a very difficult and long process, requiring real commitment.  But before we could tackle the subject of Commitment, we had to first discuss Authenticity, Vulnerability and Priorities.  Your own commitment to this journey (or is it persistence?) has finally paid off!  At least, I hope it will.  I was talking with Trish the other day about my writing process.  Sometimes, I write an essay almost totally in my head and it comes out on paper with very little effort or editing.  Sometimes I have a bullet list of points I want to make or stories I want to tell and I work off of that outline when I sit down to type.  And sometimes, like with this topic, I have the topic alone when I sit down and have no idea what might come out.  I’m as interested as you are to see how I’ll tackle this subject!  To be honest, these often become my favorite essays because I really learn something about myself or find new ways of articulating a concept that brings me clarity.  And these days, clarity on anything is a good thing.

I’ve been using the example of my recent weight loss journey to illustrate the difficulties in creating real change within yourself.  It’s an example that most people can connect with and one that has been on my mind constantly since I started the journey (with intention) on New Year’s Day of this year.  In fact, that is part of the commitment process: keeping the topic front and center.  Our family and friends can certainly attest to our keeping this topic front and center!  I am acutely aware of how often something regarding weight loss and food works its way into most conversations we have.  Let me take this opportunity to apologize, then, for talking your ears off about this (since family and friends make up the bulk of my very patient readership).

In the previous essays in this series, we discussed that you can’t create lasting change until you get to real commitment.  You can’t get to real commitment until you honestly assess your priorities and ensure that they are aligned with your commitment.  You also cannot honestly assess and then change your priorities until you can be honest with yourself about what your priorities truly are, as shown by your actions.  Once all that is lined up, you need to take a few minutes to differentiate in your mind “will power” vs. “commitment”.  I touched on this earlier, but it deserves a bit more air time.  Will Power is involved when you choose not to have a third piece of pizza on Friday night.  Commitment is involved when you choose not to have pizza every Friday night, but to make it an occasional treat.  Will Power is involved when you choose to not honk and flip a finger at the idiot who just cut you off.  Commitment is involved when you choose to almost always recognize that while that person may indeed just be an idiot, they also may have honestly not seen you or are preoccupied by a serious issue in their family or just need a little grace—so you take a breath and ease off the gas.  Will Power is staying at work late to finish a project that got away from you.  Commitment is making a more regular effort at planning so that it becomes rare for that to happen.  In short, Will Power is short term effort that gets you a prize but has a defined time limit.  Will Power is holding your breath.  Commitment is an ongoing effort, made consciously such that the effort becomes habit, to create the prize of permanent change.  The process of Commitment will certainly require Will Power now and then.  Reliance on Will Power without an eye on Commitment will just burn you out.  Unfortunately, our American culture does not help us here.  We reward Heroic Effort that Solves a Big Problem (Will Power) instead of Steady Excellence that Keeps Big Problems from Happening to Begin With (Commitment).

So let’s go back to weight loss.  Many people choose some sort of restriction diet to lose weight.  If they have sufficient will power, the weight will come off.  But without the recognition of, and changing of, whatever the habits were that put the weight on, we all know what will happen: once you relax the requirement for will power and allow the return to previous habits, the weight comes back.  Now that I have reached my goal weight, my journey is not over.  It will never be over.  And that’s because the goal was not really weight loss.  The goal was to change my relationship with food so that I stay at a healthy weight.  Weight loss was part of the benefits of the initial stages of the journey.  I smile when people congratulate me on reaching my goal weight and then say, “Now you just need to keep it off!”  They say this as if the hard part was the weight loss.  The hard part is just starting:   making sure these new habits that led to the weight loss actually stick.  The hard part is the commitment, but the hard work was around embracing reordered priorities.  Of course, this whole process is applicable well beyond weight loss.  Whether you are examining your job or a relationship or how you handle money or how you keep your house, the process to create lasting change is the same.  Keep being honest with yourself; keep assessing your actions against your priorities; continually recommit to those priorities, and the commitment to lasting change will be there. 

I started this essay series just after I reached my weight loss goal.  As of this writing, I have maintained that goal weight for six weeks (even lost a couple more pounds) and earned my Lifetime Membership in Weight Watchers.  Yes, that’s awesome and I’m very proud of myself (and of Trish, since we are on this journey together) but my sense is that now the real work begins.  What gives me hope is that I don’t feel deprived, that I really enjoy how we eat now.  We have “treat nights” when we ignore the points and just enjoy “less nutrient dense” foods because they taste good, but now I really want those point excursions to be worth it!  That food had better taste good!  And, honestly, my body craves the more nutrient dense diet the next day.  But I also know how easy it is to slip into unhealthy habits because Big Food has created a really unhealthy ecosystem all around us.  It actually pisses me off that I had to become a person of leisure and means to create a healthy lifestyle and that it takes incredible conscious effort to maintain it.  Everything from highly processed foods in the grocery stores and overly engineered produce and meats designed for shelf life and low cost instead of nutrition, to the size of and what’s in fast food and restaurant meals have normalized a diet that is killing us.  So, I’ve got one more essay in me on this whole topic:  the danger of accepting normalization of “bad things” and the need to fight back on that acceptance!  Stay tuned for a rant next time!

Welcome back, Intrepid Reader!  If you’ve been following along recently you know that we are in the midst of a multi-essay arc (of still indeterminate length) around personal growth—principally around making a change that will actually stick.  (If you need to catch up, read the first essay on Authenticity and second on Vulnerability.)  These musings began over the repetitive activity of chopping vegetables.  Some people think in the shower or on a “run”.  I think when chopping vegetables, although not deeply enough to cut off fingers.  It’s a balance.  The thinking began as I ruminated over my effort the last 8 months or so to lose weight.  I am successful this time (present tense purposeful, Trish, so do not change it) and was thinking through why.

The process of creating change that truly sticks is not an easy one, or we’d all be perfect creatures.  It requires true commitment based on honest priorities which in turn requires being truly authentic and vulnerable with yourself.  We’ve tackled Authenticity and Vulnerability.  It’s now time to discuss Priorities.

I will begin with a pet peeve.  If someone ever says to you, “I really wish I could [go somewhere, do something, donate to your cause], but I just don’t have enough [time, energy, money],” they are lying to you or themselves or both.  What they are really saying is, “I don’t place a high enough priority on that.”  People always always always ALWAYS have enough time/energy/money for those things they place at a high enough priority.  (OK, yes, there are always extreme situations.  I’m talking about normal everyday life.)  I had a friend who would constantly poke me about how I “threw my money around” going out to eat.  My love for Chinese food was a particular trigger for this person, for some reason.  I would go out to eat maybe once or twice a week with friends.  Let’s say I’d spend $50-75 a week going out.  This same person who loved to dig at me about throwing my money around at restaurants would go through at least a carton a week of cigarettes.  Similar expenditure, according to my research partner Google.  It wasn’t the money.  It was the relative priority she placed on going out to eat.  I placed a WAY higher priority on going out to eat than on buying cigarettes.  For her, going out to eat was a waste of money.  At least while there were cigarettes to be bought.  Regardless, we both had enough money to do what we wanted.  We just had different priorities.  I shouldn’t have been judged on my choice to spend money on restaurants any more than I should have judged her for spending money on smoking.  Where I draw the line is when people say that something is important to them, but their actions make it clear that whatever that something is, it’s not a high priority.  People don’t like to be confronted about where their priorities actually ARE versus where they would like to THINK they are.  And that goes for discussions with yourself as well.  In fact, we are probably most disingenuous with ourselves.

Since your actions tell you and everyone else around you what your priorities truly are, if you are not happy with your actions then you must change your priorities.  Do you understand, now, why we had to first dive into authenticity and vulnerability?  Being able to be honest with yourself about what your priorities truly are is a pre-requisite to being able to change them.  And stop beating yourself up!  Often, people label themselves as “bad” or “worthless” or even “irredeemable” because of some action they took based on screwed up priorities.  You are not fundamentally a bad person because you chose poor actions based on priorities that you didn’t realize you’d embraced.  Focus on the actions and priorities, not the fundamental human being.  (“I’m here to GET IT right, not to BE right.”  Remember who said that?) 

So let’s look at sustainable weight loss as an example.  I wanted to lose weight.  As I noted previously, my weight had been creeping up a pound or two a year for a couple of decades.  Losing weight is not rocket science: you simply need to consume fewer calories that your body burns for energy.  The devil is in the details of consumption.  We need food to survive, but food consumption is wrapped up in so many other things.  Food can be comfort.  Food can be a stress management tool.  Food can be something you simply enjoy a lot.  Food can be a boredom reliever.  And food can be deceptively caloric.  For me to lose weight, I had to understand why I was putting it on in the first place.  What were my priorities around food and eating that led to the weight gain?  What about my priorities needed to change?

My “why” around weight loss was simple.  Yes, I wanted to look slimmer and fitter but my real concern was that I was putting on a lot of belly fat.  I KNOW how unhealthy belly fat is.  I also have my Dad’s blood chemistry, which has had me taking statins for more than a decade already.  And my Dad had a triple bypass at just about my age now, barely avoiding a heart attack that would have killed him.  I was scared, but I was still gaining weight.  When I was really honest with myself, the issue was that I enjoyed food and simply didn’t want to put in the work.  I was scared of the medical repercussions, but apparently not enough to prioritize weight loss over laziness and not wanting to deprive myself.  This realization did not mean I was a bad person!  It meant my priorities were off.

I knew I ate a lot of healthy things, but I ate A LOT.  I enjoy food and portion control was a real issue.  And I snacked a lot.  If food was in front of me, I ate it.  I swear must have had a food insecurity issue in a previous life!  For me to lose weight, I needed to force myself to track what I put into my mouth—every morsel.  Some of my favorite foods needed to become occasional treats and not regular consumption.  And I needed better data to know where those hidden calories were.  I needed to fundamentally change the way I ate and change it for good.  That sounded like a lot of work and I didn’t want to do it.

Admitting that to myself was really hard.  At first, it was easier to just accept that “it is what it is”.  It took the better part of a year to go from “I understand what’s keeping me from losing weight” to actually taking action.  The reason for that is that taking action required commitment.  I understood what my priorities were and how they needed to change.  I’ve used the example of weight loss, which is a common frustration/goal, but this thought process can be applied to anything about your life that you are not happy with.  Begin, of course, with making sure you focus on things that you can control, but each of us controls a whole lot more than we think (see: Personal Accountability).  If you’re not happy in your job/relationship/home/whatever, what is keeping you from making a change?  If you truly do want a change (meaning that what you would have to give up to make the change happen is worth it), what about your priorities is keeping you from moving forward to commitment?  Getting to commitment is what we’ll tackle next time.

Last time, we began a multi-essay arc inspired by my recent weight loss.  I was not actually digging for kudos by using my weight loss journey as the example to frame this discussion, but thanks for the encouragement!  (Blush)  The discussion is really about how to create lasting change, which involves real commitment driven by clear priorities, which in turn begins with being truly authentic with yourself and others.  Last time we discussed Authenticity and I said that this time I’d start in on Priorities.  I lied.  As I read your feedback and thought more about this whole arc over the last week, I realized that there is one more topic closely tied to Authenticity that we must discuss and that is Vulnerability.

Even the word “vulnerability” can make people cringe.  The words “vulnerable” and “vulnerability” have a connotation of “weakness”.  It brings to mind some scene in a drippy drama where the protagonist, having just experienced some loss or break up or serious setback, weepily begs a love interest or friend through averted eyes, “Don’t hurt me!  I’m so vulnerable right now!”  Even the online dictionary definition of “vulnerability” reads “the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally”. 

I don’t subscribe to that definition, though, in this context.  To me, allowing yourself to be vulnerable is one of the singular most courageous acts a person can undertake.  Being vulnerable is making a decision, taking an action or just committing to who you are even though that choice might leave you exposed to being hurt, taken advantage of or just embarrassed—but doing it anyway because the benefits of doing so are worth the risk of the downside.  None other than my spirit animal, Brene Brown, says, “Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”  (I highly encourage you to invest 20 minutes and watch her TED talk on Vulnerability.  It is one of their most popular ever, will help you understand what I stumble through in the rest of this essay, and I hope will turn you on to one of our greatest contemporary thinkers.)

It’s counter intuitive to think that embracing vulnerability can make you a stronger person and leader.  How else, though, can you truly improve upon your already wonderful self if you are not willing to recognize and embrace those traits of yours that need changing?  Or if not truly “changed”—since in many ways we are who we are—then balanced with other traits?  But first you have to “see” those traits.  A real and effective leader does not believe she has all the right answers nor knows more than anyone else in the room about everything.  NO ONE has all the right answers or knows more than anyone else in the room about everything!  It is not a weakness to say, “I don’t know much about (fill in the blank), but XXX does and I want her in on this discussion.”  Traditionally, leaders in the workplace would have a very small group of people with whom they could admit “I don’t know”—the people with whom they could be vulnerable.  However, keeping that admission too close to the vest means that the circle of knowledge they relied upon was too small (and probably inbred).  That, my friends, is what has led to the downfall of many a large corporation and not a few small countries.  (I’m not saying get up in front of everyone and say, “I don’t know nuthin’!” with a smile.  Jeez, people, there is something in between!  I’m saying seek counsel more broadly than just your two or three best buds and when you don’t know, SAY you don’t know and that you’ll find an answer.  Don’t make stuff up.)

Certainly vulnerability and authenticity are pre-requisites to healthy human relationships of all kinds.  Think about relationships with pets.  Most of us have had a cat and/or a dog.  Those animals are so special to us because their love is unconditional.  They just want us to love them and they love us without judgement.  OK, so maybe cats judge, but that judgement is OUT OF love.  And when a cat chooses to sit in your lap it is the highest compliment!  Which is why people will not move for hours if a cat is sleeping on them.  Anyway, the unconditional non-judgmental love we get from our pets allows us to be fully authentic and vulnerable with them.  We don’t put on airs, pretending to not be upset or proud of ourselves or bored or whatever we are feeling.  They get the true US.  We tell them our deepest darkest secrets and most important thoughts because they won’t judge us or answer back or argue.  They just listen.  And love us.  This is why we are so unbelievably broken up when they die.  Not because they hurt us or abandon us or even betray us, but because we love them so purely.

If only we could be like that with PEOPLE!  But that’s hard because people DO judge and they DO talk back and argue.  And they sometimes leave.  And say horrible things on their way out the door.  So we save that vulnerability for our pets.  Avoidance of pain is probably the principle reason behind lack of vulnerability—hence the courage involved in being vulnerable.  I could go on and on about the importance of vulnerability and authenticity in your relationships with other people, both at work and more broadly, but what I want to focus on is that openness turned toward yourself.

Vulnerability is a pre-requisite to authenticity—only by allowing yourself to feel hurt and fear and anxiety can you accept those difficult things about yourself and only then can you start to change them.  So what keeps us from being honest with ourselves?  Maybe we can be vulnerable with pets because they just keep looking at us with love, no matter what we say, yet when we try to be honest with ourselves our brains talk back.  We judge ourselves.  We hold ourselves to a level of perfection or achievement or constancy that we would NEVER hold anyone else to (except maybe politicians of the opposing party).  I will admit that I have a really hard time being as honest in my journal as I know I should be because it’s all written down and someone may read it someday.  But isn’t that the point, Sherri?  Your flawed self is still pretty awesome.  Not perfect.  Not totally constant.  Certainly not lacking in contradiction.  But awesome nonetheless.

So back to the example of my weight loss journey over the past several months.  To be able to make the commitment that I needed to create a permanent change in my relationship with food, I had to begin with an honest look at the reasons why I had the relationship with food that I DID.  (No, I’m not going to get into that here!)  Understanding and accepting why I had gotten to the point that I had gotten to was that first critical step toward change.  It’s that way with any change, be it weight loss, a job change, a relationship change, any change of habit.  Weight Watchers starts the process by having you define your “Why?”  WHY do you want to lose weight?  Once you have the true “why” you can move on to looking at your priorities and what is keeping you from supporting that “why”.  I promise we’ll pick up there next time!

We are about to embark upon a multi-essay arc.  This arc will explore some areas of personal growth that I’ve wanted to plumb for quite a while.  And like all good multi-essay arcs, this one begins with chopping carrots.  I went to the grocery store early this morning, as has become my custom on a Friday.  Not too many folk are there before 8 am and stocking is usually good.  I got home, put the groceries away and decided to go ahead and cut up the carrots and celery.  I am, afterall, a Morning Person.  (This does not mean that I am necessarily pleasant to be around in the morning, as my college friends will emphatically tell you.  Just that I get more things done in the morning than in the afternoon or evening.)

As I chopped the carrots and celery, I was thinking about Things.  The thing most on my mind this morning was a major achievement from yesterday:  I weighed in at Weight Watchers at over 30 pounds total weight loss and reached my goal weight.  This is a Big F-ing Deal, folks!  For my entire adult life, my weight has been steadily moving in one direction.  I knew what I needed to do.  Losing weight isn’t rocket science.  It is a matter of commitment.  Not willpower; commitment.  Willpower is following a bizarre restriction diet for a period of time until you lose a pre-determined amount of weight.  Once the goal is reached, you relax said WillPower and the weight comes back on.  No, true sustainable weight loss requires commitment to a permanent change.  And commitment requires making a choice around priorities.  Making a change in your priorities requires first an understanding of what your current priorities truly are, which requires some honest introspection.  And honest introspection requires you to be authentic, first with yourself and then with others.  And so we begin.

Authenticity is not an easy thing.  Being truly authentic requires seeing yourself as you are, warts and all, and embracing what you see.  Not pretending faults aren’t there.  Not hoping some less than desirable traits will just change.  Not seeing yourself as you want to be but as you are.  Only then can you change what you want to change.  I have one of those snapshot memories with a co-worker from my Air Products days.  I was in a management role by this time and navigating through my naiveté about how The System worked vs. how I thought it worked or how I thought it should work.  It was exhausting.  This coworker was also a relatively new senior manager and put forth an image of steady perfection:  never a hair out of place; dressed to the 9’s; ramrod straight posture.  I made some comment about some common failing, like having days when you just didn’t feel like coming in and dealing with the day’s bullshit or something like that.  I laughed.  She looked me right in the eye and said, “I’ve never felt that way.”  I tilted my head sideways and looked again.  This time I saw the fear in her eyes—the kind of fear that most of us had every day that showing the littlest chink in your armor would cause the lions to pounce.  I don’t think she saw that in herself, though.  It was scary to admit that vulnerability to yourself, much less others.  But without embracing it and realizing that almost everyone else carried that fear somewhere, it would eat you up.  Remember that Mandela quote, “Courage is not the lack a fear; it’s rising above it.”

Several years ago I read the autobiography of Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court Justice.  It had a huge impact on me. Not just because she overcame a very difficult childhood and young adulthood—so many accomplished people have had to overcome so much.  In fact, that is often what pushes them to such high achievement.  No, what struck me about the book was how she did not shy away from discussing all the ways she screwed up along her journey.  She made some serious mistakes along the way and STILL became incredibly accomplished!  What a revelation!  You don’t have to be perfect.  You just have to keep trying to get better.  One of Brene Brown’s favorite lines (yes, Brene AGAIN) is “I’m not here to BE right, I’m here to GET IT right.”  Sotomayor’s book spoke with an authentic voice I had never heard before and it inspired me.  When I am self-deprecating in my writing, it’s not really about injecting humor and certainly not about patting myself on the back for overcoming something difficult.  It’s about authenticity.  And hopefully encouraging others to not be afraid of finding their own true voice and embracing their whole selves—stupid mistakes, annoying traits, trials, all of it.

So, what is the journey to authenticity like and how do you get on it?  Well, I can only share my own journey.  And it is a long and painful one.  Mine required several rounds of therapy over the years made more difficult by first having to accept and embrace myself as a gay woman.  I also had to learn to accept parts of me that, while having improved over the years, are probably never going to go away.  One is a fear of being blindsided and the related paranoia that I’m doing something or not doing something or not seeing something that is going to result in my being shunned.  This came out of one of those traumatic grade school experiences that rocked me to my core.  I know that fear is still there.  But you know what else is there?  A profoundly developed sense of empathy that has served me very well, if irregularly, over the years.  See, that’s the key to authenticity.  When you embrace your whole true self, when you accept those things about you that probably won’t totally change, then you can find ways to compensate for those traits.  You can find ways to turn them into strengths; you can surround yourself in the workplace and in all aspects of life with people who have strengths that you lack; you can put voice to those traits with others AND constantly work to improve (remember: explanation is not excuse).

Back to my weight loss journey.  It’s now a week later and I’ve maintained for the first week.  Good start!  The journey began not with me listing what I had to do differently but with understanding what was keeping me from doing those things differently.  And THAT begin with authenticity—seeing myself as I am.  The next step:  identifying what my priorities truly are and what I then want them to be.  We’ll pick that up next time.

The picture that accompanies this post is of a wild morning glory flower from a vine that popped up in an outdoor pot a couple of years ago.  Trish and I both love morning glories and every year she diligently nurtures plants from seeds or we buy young plants from a nursery.  We plant them indoors, in our sun room, and the vines wind up a series of drift wood pieces and trellises.  The delicate flowers bloom for just one day each, opening with the sun and closing by dusk.  The vines bloom from midsummer until early fall when they die back.  They never seem to regrow, so we start over each year. 

We have never been able to grow these plants outside, but wild vines do of course exist.  The vine in our outside pot probably originated with a seed in bird poop, deposited by one of the hundreds of birds that come to our feeders.  We were stunned when the flowers started to appear one year.  Not just that the vine grew and flowers bloomed, but that the vine was so prolific!  One day we counted five blooms on the one small vine!  And it punched out those flowers daily for months.  And it came back the next year.  And the next.  That, my friends, is resilience.  I marvel at that vine.  How does it not just survive but thrive under such difficult conditions?  And that thought, of course, got me to thinking about resilience in general.  It’s a struggle to be resilient under normal times; it is nearly impossible to find resilience these days.

Last time I wrote about my current difficulties in letting go of petty annoyances (some not so little) when I used to be able to let things roll off of me like proverbial water off a duck’s back.  That’s all about coping energy, something I have coached about often over the years.  And coping energy is strongly tied to resilience.  “Resilience” has a couple of useful definitions.  The first reads, “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”  The second, “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”  The second, of course, can apply to a human as well.  Much has been written on the topic of resilience and my thinking has been formed by lots of different thinkers (ok, mostly by Brene Brown, but you knew that).  What follows, though, is not a scholarly treatment.  They are my own musings.

When I was working, I often coached people on coping energy when the stress of the work environment got to someone.  This activity picked up in frequency when we moved from Air Products to Intertek, the former a comparatively slow paced R&D environment and the latter a fast-as-lightening contract lab.  I had to do no little amount of coaching on myself as well as others!  At first, my approach was to find out what seemed to be causing the most stress on someone and then see if I could find a way to reduce that stress by removing the stressor.  It could have been a project, a lab responsibility, a customer, or even a working relationship.  After a while, I realized that approach just didn’t work.  First, the same stressors did not have the same effect on other people.  Second, once I removed one stressor, another one took its place.  It wasn’t the environment, I realized, it was something about the person.

In some cases, the person’s temperament was just not suited to the environment.  No matter what we did, it just wouldn’t work.  Those people needed to move on and find an environment in which they could be successful.  But in most cases, the issue was resilience tied to a lack of coping energy.  When I wrote last time about how I seem to have lost the capability to keep certain stressors from getting to me, I put that in the context of having had, in the past, so many high impact stressors going at once that the more minor ones were easy to deal with.  That’s not exactly the right way to put it.  The reality was that I had developed some pretty impressive levels of coping energy along with some serious resilience—and I mean that in both definitions of the word.  The question for today is: how?  How did I build that resilient nature, how did I nurture it in others, and how can I get it back today?

As I’ve noodled over this for the last week or so, and listened to Brene’s podcasts, what crystallized in my mind was something that should be painfully obvious (but instead is just painful):  resilience comes from looking within, dealing with what you find there, embracing both your weaknesses and strengths, and paradoxically allowing yourself to not be resilient from time to time.  I remember some of those days while at Intertek.  I felt like the world was just caving in around me.  As the GM, I had to be careful to not show that to anyone else except a couple of trusted co-workers.  But I certainly would go into my office, put my head in my hands, and just shake for a while. 

The key is to not get stuck there.  You should allow yourself to feel, to absorb the difficulties and even to wallow in it for a bit.  But then realize that it’s not all hopeless; that there is a way out; that there ARE things you control; that you CAN do something and make progress.  “Courage is not the absence of fear,” said Nelson Mandela, “but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”  Similarly, resilience is not the absence of despair but the triumph over it.  Resilient people do not ignore a bad situation or act as if it’s not as bad as it truly is.  Resilience is recognizing the difficulty, being a little afraid, and plowing forward anyway, staying focused and knowing you just have to keep going.  You have it in you!  I know you do!

But you have to want resilience; you have to work for it.  Coping energy and resilience don’t just happen.  Sometimes, going through something really difficult shows you that you are stronger than you thought you were.  Sometimes experience alone teaches you the same lesson even if the situations were not dire.  Regardless, you have to do the hard work on yourself to accept who you are or who you have become and then put in the effort to change those things you don’t like so much about yourself.  And THAT comes down to Personal Accountability, one of my favorite hot buttons.  Resilient people have taken the time to do that navel gazing, understand and accept their flaws, and lean on their strengths and those around them to make things happen.  Believe me, I have learned all this stuff the hard way.

So, now each morning I look out the window and I see that wild morning glory vine punch out another flower or two and I marvel at the simple beauty and strength.  And I remember that resilience is hard won but worth the effort.  Especially these days.