Author Archives: Sherri

Motivation Part I

I started thinking about motivation during spin class last week. It was at that point in the class when I was no longer in a state of flow and was just trying to get through the last 15 minutes. The instructor began an 8 minute journey of pain that involved 40 second sprints followed by a 20 second “rest” period during which you increased your gear so that the next 40 second sprint would be tougher. I was thinking to myself, as I turned up the gear for the fourth time in as many minutes, that I really need an instructor. I could never motivate myself to do this on my own. My memory went back to the time that I was working out twice weekly with a trainer. I was always amazed that I would just do whatever he told me to do. There was one time he was late to our session.  I had done my warm up and thought, “Well, Sean often starts me off with burpees so why don’t I do a set a burpees?” But I hate burpees. So, I didn’t do them. Just as I was trying to decide on some exercise less unpalatable to do while I waited, Sean came in the door and said, “Burpees.  Go!”  And I immediately started doing burpees.

Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s wrapped up in priorities, which we have discussed at length before, but is a separate beast. When I asked Siri to define motivation, she returned this from Dictionary.com: “The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.  The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.”  Reasons, desire, willingness.  Alright, that resonates. So, when you really want to do something (priorities) or HAVE to do something (responsibilities), how do you summon that desire and willingness? And if you are trying to motivate someone else, how do you find those triggers that summon desire and willingness in them?

First, let’s talk a bit about types, or sources, of motivation.  Sources of motivation are either intrinsic or extrinsic.  “Intrinsic” means the source comes from within you.  “Extrinsic” means the source is external to you.  Ideally, extrinsic motivation awakens some source of intrinsic motivation.  Afterall, you still need to make the choice to act.  No one can MAKE you do anything you don’t want to do.  They can, however, provide a stimulus that causes you to CHOOSE to do something that, without that stimulus, you would not choose to do.  Based on that external stimulus, you run a quick cost/benefit analysis and decide that the consequences of not responding to that extrinsic motivator are not worth it (negative consequences) or that the benefits of responding are indeed worth it (positive consequences).  Regardless, you are making a choice to act or not act.  Own that.  (See:  Hot Button of Personal Accountability/Not Playing the Victim.)

Back to exercise as an example.  We have established that I am basically a lazy person.  When it comes to exercise, I need extrinsic motivation.  There are some things I will do on my own, like long walks listening to podcasts or moderate treadmills stints watching videos or reading eBooks.  However, these are rarely very strenuous workouts.  If I want to work out hard (spin, lifting) or go through a routine (stretching, yoga) I need an instructor or at the very least a workout partner.  I just do.  It is not a failing that I am not one of those people who motivate myself to workout hard.  It is an understanding of what type of motivation I need to do strenuous workouts.  Afterall, I can motivate myself to put myself in front of that instructor.  I just prefer to have them make the decisions of what exercise I do next, or the accountability of keeping up with a workout partner.  It’s taken me years to figure this out about myself.  Yet, while I have figured out the exercise thing, I’m still figuring out what kind of motivation I need to do other things that I want to do—or at least things that I want to have completed.

Even writing, something that I really enjoy, requires some type of motivation.  What works for me is a deadline.  This is why I will never write a book, unless I can motivate myself to break down that enormous task into a zillion little deadlines (or find an editor who will do that for me).  I write to a deadline, whether it’s my self-imposed every-two-week blog post deadlines or publishing deadlines for the articles I write for Lab Manager Magazine.  I rarely sit down to actually type until a few days before said deadline, which is why my writing is usually limited to 1200-1500 words.  Oh, I’ll compose in my head for days or weeks, but the actual task of writing doesn’t happen until that date-driven motivation pops up.

What I have a really hard time with is motivation around small personal or household tasks.  This drives Trish absolutely nuts.  Take a guess at how long I’ve been “promising” to organize the stacks of recipes I’ve been collecting?  Or organizing the shelves lining the wall beside our basement steps.  Or any number of little tasks around the house.  It’s not like I don’t have the time.  It’s not like I haven’t made a zillion lists (and I do love a list).  It’s not like I don’t get enormous satisfaction when I complete one of those tasks—when I take Trish on a tour through some little task I’ve completed, I’m like a child showing off an “A” on a class assignment.  I haven’t found the right intrinsic motivator yet for those things and I don’t think it would be good for our marriage if I asked Trish to be the source of extrinsic motivation.  I know that my activation barrier is around my paralyzing perfectionism.  I know that when I DO actually start something that I finish it to reasonable satisfaction.  But I just.  Can’t.  Get.  Myself.  To start.  It’s important to note, here, that Trish does not have this issue.  In fact, one could say she has the opposite problem.  When she gets a task into her head, she cannot sit still until it is done.  She will drive herself to exhaustion.  And there is usually an injury involved, a bandage or two, and some blood.  That is not my goal, either.  There must be some happy medium.

This had been an issue throughout my working life as well.  I’m sure my former co-workers who are reading this are rolling their eyes.  They could probably comment on the techniques they developed to motivate me to do things they needed me to do, be it a capital expenditure justification document or a conversation with someone or a phone call.  I probably should not let Trish know this, but I think what worked best was putting me in a position of personal and/or public embarrassment if I didn’t complete the task.

What’s super frustrating is that I know all the tricks.  I know that if there is something you are dreading that you should do that FIRST.  Get it out of the way.  I know that I do my best work of any kind in the morning hours—I’m writing now at 9:30 am.  I know that allowing myself some time to do something fun and/or mindless will absolutely keep me from ever tackling whatever it is that I want to motivate myself to do.  And I know that sometimes I just need to give myself a little grace and try again tomorrow.  No epiphanies, here.  No fancy wrap-up sentences that describe how I’ve tackled this issue.  Like most personal growth, it’s just going to be a forever journey, a daily battle.  What I can commit to is to keep trying to get better.  Writing about it like this will help me for a little bit.  I now, at least, feel a bit of public accountability over those recipes and those shelves.  I will NOT share with you what else is on that list!

I’m not sure which is tougher:  motivating yourself or motivating action in others.  I will tell you that I’ve found it a lot easier to motivate others within the structure and hierarchy of the work environment than in my personal life.  Incentives help sometimes.  Simply applying what works on you usually does not.  We’ll tackle that next time.

Coping Energy III

Yes, this is the third time that I’m writing about coping energy.  It’s been quite the humbling month, as evidenced by the fact that this essay is posting a week late, after the one before it was half a week late.  Anyone who knows me knows that I really don’t like missing deadlines or being late—even if no one but me cares.

Ever since I retired and then started this blog, I’ve been very proud of myself.  Thinking about all these life and leadership lessons as I’ve been writing about them had gotten me feeling something like a mountain climber summiting a peak.  The peak, in this case, is Maslow’s hierarchy and I guess I convinced myself that I had reached that rarified air of self-actualization.  At the tender age of 59 I had reached enlightenment and could now calmly pontificate from the top of the mountain and spread my wisdom.  My life was now a joyful string of days full of calm, happiness, rainbows, and unicorns.  Yeah, no.  My humbling lesson over this past month is that I have not reached some enviable skill of managing life’s stressors.  It’s that I had managed to remove a good number of the stressors I’d dealt with throughout my life through a combination of good fortune, retirement, and a life partner that I thank the Universe for every day.  And when a series of unforeseen and uncontrollable stressors came flooding back, I found that my ability to roll with the punches just wasn’t there.  So, we’re going to talk about coping energy AGAIN.

I just reread my first two essays on this topic.  You can find the first part here and the second part here.  I could have benefited from reading them these last few weeks.  What happened?  Well, it started on September 1st when the remains of Hurricane Ida, smashing up against a cold front, spawned a number of tornados in our area, including an EF2 that spun 130 mph winds right through our neighborhood.  RIGHT THROUGH.  That’s what my last essay was about.  The disruption was more than the power outage and the debris.  It was the constant irritation of the sound of the generators and chain saws and wood chippers.  It was the PTSD of going around the area and seeing everything changed.  It was the Y being closed and not wanting to do any other type of exercise and eating takeout and being thrown totally out of our routine.  It was trying to celebrate both of our birthdays and being happy and joyous but feeling exhausted the whole time while trying to hold it together.  It was navigating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in the middle of all that, which had me reliving all the horror, distress, and disorientation of those days.  All of this messed with my sleep, which is messed up enough as it is, and just aggravated the whole situation.  I had a hair trigger moodiness.  I was exhausted.  And I couldn’t really explain why I was feeling so off balance.

Then I had to get on a plane and fly to Atlanta for a family visit.  I love seeing my family!  What I dislike is the travel to Atlanta—on a good day.  This time, I had to deal with my stressed-out mood which meant a pit in my stomach every time I thought about any aspect of the trip.  Tropical Storm Nicholas had decided to park its tropical self west of Georgia, which meant a rainy forecast the whole time I was there.  That meant I was going to have to navigate “driving” around town in the rain—“driving” around Atlanta being some cross between the Indy 500 and a demolition derby.  To top it off, my sister’s car had taken in some water during a recent flash flood, so there was always the little concern in the back of my mind that something electrically kerflooey might happen at any point. 

There were other things going on, too, that I just don’t want to share.  The details are not important.  What matters is that I kept getting pinged by one stressor after another combined with a change in my schedule that kept me mentally and emotionally off balance for the first three weeks of the month without a break.  I did not handle it well.  Stuff that normally did not bother me much turned almost incapacitating!  I was teary all the time and had to keep going off by myself to let that emotion out.  I just wanted to sleep all the time, but I couldn’t sleep at night.  I wasn’t exercising.  I ate Very Bad Food and lots of it, which also left me feeling lethargic.  I slid very far, very fast.  I had no coping energy and was not able to regain any reasonable amount until these last few days.  That humbled me big time.

I thought I had conquered the coping energy challenge!  I thought I had developed the skills to catch myself, to maintain perspective, to practice effective self-care, and keep my coping energy reserves full (or at least not totally empty).  Instead, I found myself back in those old patterns of short temper, thinking only about myself and my own needs, making poor choices, and just feeling like I was drowning.  I disappointed myself and that made everything worse.  I felt like a failure.

Trish, members of my family, and friends who have seen me during this time were all kind of puzzled by this behavior.  It just didn’t seem that bad to them.  None of the stressors by themselves were enough to knock me off kilter.  Driving around Atlanta is never fun but I used to be able to do it without feeling like I was going to throw up when I got behind the wheel.  It was the combination and the unrelenting barrage—sort of like a boxer weakened by blow after blow.  He could withstand any individual hit just fine, but after so many so quickly, he went down for the count.

So, here’s what I’ve learned though all of this.  When someone tells you about things that are stressing them and sapping their coping energy, don’t try to fix it.  If they want your suggestions for solutions, they will ask you.  What they want is for you to listen, to really hear them, to validate that the situation sucks, and to know that you care.  Look, I’m a problem solver.  Most of us are.  We’ve spent our careers doing that and it’s hard to resist the urge to fix something or someone.  I’m telling you, resist that urge!  I did not want all the well-meaning suggestions that came flooding in.  I knew I could right the ship.  I just needed to vent about the storm and hear from others that, yeah, the storm is rough.  I am reasonably good at asking for what I need, although sometimes I need to reach a breaking point and that ask comes with tears.  (Very effective for getting what you need, by the way.)  Others may indeed need a little prodding, but ask gently.  Ultimately, if the person feels safe and supported, they WILL ask for what they need.  And if you are the one struggling, let yourself struggle a bit and then take one little step forward.  Don’t beat yourself up but don’t get stuck.  And ask.  For.  Help.  Just having Trish take me to the airport instead of driving myself made a world of difference.

I’m mostly out of the storm, now, as evidenced by the fact that I can write about it.  A visit from a dear friend helped to fill me back up.  The bathroom scale has fortunately not moved appreciably and my eating is reverting to the mean.  I’m still looking forward to getting back into regular exercise.  I’m going to work on the hubris.  I’m not invincible.  I don’t have all the perfect techniques to avoid a crash.  I learn a little more each time I go through a difficult period, which is why the difficult times are so important.  This time, I am reminded of the importance of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone a little more frequently so that I am better able to handle unexpected upsets more easily.  And I will work even harder to have that compassion for others whose coping energy is sapped for whatever reason.  “We are here to get it right, not be right.”

Prayers and Chainsaws

This essay is posting a few days late and you’ll understand why when you read it.  My last essay, When Plans Change, was an unintended precursor to this one.  Last time, I wrote about rolling with the punches when someone else gets punched.  That essay was about compassion and empathy.  This time, I’m going to talk about when you get punched yourself.  It’s an essay about resilience, gratitude, and so many of the topics I keep writing about.  Life sure tries to teach you the same lessons over and over again.  And what’s my mantra?  All together now:  We’re here to GET it right, not to BE right.

Our story begins last Wednesday, almost a week ago, when I was still noodling on what I wanted to write about for this essay.  I still have that more humorous one buzzing around in my head and I WILL get to it, but for some reason it just didn’t feel right.  We were anticipating the residue of Hurricane Ida coming through that afternoon and I was thinking about the impact that 3-5 inches of rain might have.  “Don’t forget to check the sump pump,” I thought, “to make sure it’s not cockeyed and won’t kick on.”  I was thinking about the potential of losing power and maybe not being able to make my biweekly Zoom call with my college friends.  I was thinking about cooking dinner.  I was NOT thinking about a tornado.

The TV was off around 5:00 because I was just reading and Trish had gone upstairs to take a nap.  My BFF, who lives a half hour south and east of us, texted that they were under a tornado warning and were heading downstairs.  Now, tornados are NOT common in this corner of southeastern PA.  We’d had a surprisingly strong one just a few weeks before and some straight-line winds that did damage the week before that.  But tornados are just not a thing here.  I turned on the news and started cooking dinner.  I saw that the “cone of danger” emanating from Beth’s warning was heading in our direction.  I chopped potatoes and put them in the oven to roast.  In minutes, my phone went off with a warning of our own.  I honestly wasn’t worried, but I’m a person who follows directions.  I turned off the oven, went upstairs, woke Trish up, we grabbed the cats and my iPad and headed to the basement—only the second time in the five years I’ve lived here.  Bridget was upset to be separated from her food bowl.  It was raining fairly hard, as expected, but we still had power so I started streaming the news.  Two meteorologists were tag teaming at this point since there were three of four warnings at once.  Very unusual.  Then, they both gasped and pointed to a slowly moving white feature on the radar.  That, they said, was a debris field.  This was now a confirmed tornado.  And guess which warning that was associated with?  Then, for dramatic effect, the power went out.  We looked up at the small basement window.  We could see absolutely nothing.  Just sheets of water and an occasional glimpse of trees swaying like paper caught in a fan.  We were barely breathing.  After a couple of minutes the power flickered back on, to our amazement, and we watched the radar with Adam and Cecily (the meteorologists) until the storm was past us.  Then wandered upstairs.  We didn’t see any daylight above us when we opened the basement door, thank goodness.  The rain had slowed to a drizzle.  Trish went outside as the neighbors all gathered.  I, like the conductor of the band on the Titanic, finished cooking dinner.  I didn’t know what else to do!  We never ate it.

Trish came back in and told me to come outside.  The first thing I noticed was the massive branch from the neighbors’ tree lying in our driveway, right where Trish normally parked.  For some reason, she had been driven to pull her car back to the end of the driveway before the storm, wanting the rain to clean mud out of her spot.  Her car would have been totaled.  Then I looked across the street.  The large, dense tree line behind our neighbors’ houses was gone.  Just gone.  I could see sheared off trunks peeking out a few feet above the roof line, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and snipped them off.  The trunks were just bare.  Ripped of all foliage.  The street was flooded.  Some neighbors lost siding or had other damage from flying debris.  Everyone was just milling about; some were collecting garbage cans flung a couple hundred yards away.  I was stunned but had no idea the extent of the damage.  The rain came back so we headed inside.  I don’t remember turning the TV on.  No one really knew the extent of the damage then, anyway.  I started the call with my college friends and the power went off promptly at 9:00.  Trish and I worked from 9:00 pm until 3:00 am bailing out our sump well to keep the basement from flooding.  Eight inches of rain puts a bit of hydrostatic pressure on a foundation!

Many of you reading this know what happened.  An EF2 tornado with 130 mph winds ripped through our neighborhood.  The tree damage I saw when I first poked my head outside was repeated across a path that stretched several miles.  At some points the tornado bounced down and took out some roofs.  It had a particular appetite for power line poles.  And the trees!  So many big, old trees ripped out of the ground or sheared off and stripped!  Trees across roads.  Trees into houses.  Skeletons of trees standing alone in what used to be solid wooded areas.

After a restless three hours of sleep, we awoke to a beautiful day.  Why is it always a beautiful day after a horrific storm?  Is there just nothing left in the atmosphere or is it a way of giving hope?  The first thing I noticed was the drone of the generators.  I like some white noise, but there was something about those generators that was like nails on a chalkboard to me.  It grated on your nerves like a tooth ache.  That was quickly drowned out by the chainsaws and wood chippers.  The streets were filled with crews, dozens of them.  Our power was only out for two days but it felt like forever.  We were so fortunate.  No damage to the house.  Minimal tree and limb loss.  We spent most of the day helping neighbors and walking around.  Everything looks different.  I have this vision of my guardian angels (Dad, Grandma, Trish’s parents) lifting that funnel cloud up and keeping it above the roof line for us and Trish’s two sisters (we all live in a line that defined the tornado’s path).

The disruption wasn’t so much the power loss or even the road closures.  Trying to get out of the ‘hood was like figuring out the Hogwarts staircases—every time you went somewhere, different roads were shut in different spots as they first cleared the roads, then pulled out enough of the downed trees to assess the utility damage, and then fixed the damage.  These guys are freaking heroes.  All I could think of, though, was that feeling of powerlessness, of being totally at the mercy of Mother Nature.  I also thought about the earth’s power of renewal and how all those stripped wooded areas would lead to new growth, new habitat.  Even the deer are thrilled at all the yummy leaves now within reach!  But us humans, we are fighting entropy to put things back the way we like it, the way we need it, as quickly as possible.  It feels futile and comforting at the same time. 

As I write these words, it is the first day of Rosh Hashanah—a time of introspection and assessment.  Fitting that life has given us this reality check.  It sounds trivial to relate this, but I think about how I felt that first morning.  We had no power; the roads were blocked; I wasn’t clear headed enough to realize that we could still use our gas stove and that we still had water.  I just thought, “I can’t eat breakfast.”  I was panicked for just a minute wondering where my next meal was coming from!  It’s been a long, long time since I’ve found myself on that bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy, worrying about basic safety and needs.  I’ve been so busy anguishing over those upper levels of the pyramid, with not enough gratitude about not needing to worry about those lower foundational levels; not enough compassion for those who do.  Trish and I are still mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted, sentiments echoed in the eyes of our neighbors.  We know we skirted a disaster and so many others were not so fortunate.  I’m still serenaded by the sounds of wood chippers and the roads are still clogged with repairmen, but I’m feeling normal enough to write.  “Prayers and chainsaws” said the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer; gratitude and resilience.

When Plans Change

This is an essay about empathy, compassion, and roasting vegetables.  I had been working up a funny essay for this weekend, but my plans have changed.  Oh, I still intend to write the lighthearted one, probably next week, but oftentimes life just whispers what needs to be said.  Something happens and I just start noodling on it and then I start discussing it with Trish and then, well, I have to write it down to get it out of my head. Buckle up, reader, because this is going to be a deeply personal essay.  Then again, most of my essays are.  A by-product of embracing authenticity and vulnerability is that I just don’t know how to write any other way anymore.  I know I am not discovering new deep thoughts or breaking new philosophical ground.  Writing helps me work things out and by sharing this writing, I hope that I can help you put words to similar thoughts that have been swirling in your head.

Last time, I wrote about intentionality—choosing to act consciously and on things that I decide are important to me.  I wrote that Trish and I are both struggling to differing degrees with a sense of purpose these days and that embracing intentionality has helped me find meaning in things that used to be somewhat mindless activities.  That’s all well and good but I knew there was more.  The “more” has really come out over these last couple of weeks as I’ve worked to put “intentionality” into conscious practice.  As I wrote last time, I’ve started taking a couple of minutes in the morning to write a few lines in my journal to “set my intention” for the day.  I put that statement in quotes because it really does sound like loosey-goosey, crunchy-granola-spirituality that cries out for quote marks.  But it actually works.  Until it doesn’t.  It’s the “until it doesn’t” part—when your plans change—that I want to write about today.

I’ll start with a simple example.  One night last week, Trish and I sat down after dinner to watch the evening news, to be followed by my nightly call to my Mom.  Then I got a text from a friend.  She lives a few hours away and her son had recently moved to the area to start his first post-college job.  She was asking me if there was a pharmacy that delivered because her son had a terrible migraine and didn’t have any medicine.  I could have ignored the text.  Or I could have given her the number of the local CVS.  And I am embarrassed to admit that not too many years ago I would have chosen one of those paths.  Instead, I did a quick mental calculation.  The nightly news bums me out anyway and I could afford to skip a night; I could text Mom and tell her I’d call a few minutes late; and he lives five minutes from my house.  When I added into the calculation a few seconds of imagining being a Mom, several hours away from my son who was in pain, feeling helpless and wanting to help my child…well, it became a no-brainer.  I hopped in the car and brought the kid some Excedrin Migraine.  And a chocolate bar. 

I’ve often heard the advice that if you are feeling down or sad, go do something for someone else.  For most of my adult life I had not been able to embrace that because, honestly, I was just too self-centered.  But, man, is it true!  I felt so good after running that errand!  And I realized what a gift my friend had given ME by giving me the opportunity to help her son out.  I’ve beaten myself up regularly over the years because I’ve felt like I did not give back enough to the community.  I wrote checks, which certainly were needed, but I hadn’t given much of my time.  I’m not sure what made me so hesitant to volunteer.  Maybe it was reluctance to making an open-ended commitment, since I tended to go for one-off “day of caring” events.  Maybe it was fear of an emotional commitment—either making one myself or feeling compelled to make one by someone else’s needs.  This has torn at me for decades.  I tried to assuage the need and the guilt by writing bigger checks but even giving away my whole net worth wouldn’t have been enough.  I wanted the feeling of doing good without having to put in any effort.  I still don’t know from what I was protecting myself.  It was really only when I wrote that last essay that I realized, to paraphrase myself, that I was looking for meaning EVERYWHERE without realizing I could find meaning ANYWHERE.

Part of that realization was opening my eyes to what Trish and her posse of friends have brought into my life.  Every one of them, but especially Trish, has shown me the value of doing something that makes someone else’s life a little easier.  Trish seems to always go that little extra step to do something nice for someone.  She isn’t afraid of the effort; she isn’t protective of her vulnerability.  My bestie, Beth, is the same way.  They are both very aware of the needs and preferences of those around them and look for ways, large and small, to address those needs.  Little by little, I’ve started putting that into action myself.  Seriously, Sherri, you never were aware of that before?  Well, yes and no.  During my working years, especially, I just ping-ponged from one reactionary activity to another.  I rarely stopped and asked myself, “What (and who) is really important here?”   While I have always had a strong sense of empathy, it tended to just make me anxious and sad for others.  Or angry.  What it rarely did was inspire action on my part, as it does for Trish and Beth.

So, this week there was another change in plans.  One of our best friends is the only child of a really feisty 95-year-old woman, whom we all adore.  She has continued to insist on living alone with only help from her daughter.  Earlier this week, our greatest fear was realized when she fell at night and wasn’t found until the morning, her hip broken.  The wagons have quickly circled and when the posse says, “We’ll be there” you can take it to the bank.  Today, Trish and I were asked to go to her Mom’s house and gather up trash for garbage day tomorrow and take care of a few other tasks.  There was no question, no hesitation, just asking ourselves, “What else can we do?”  Since my love language is cooking, I immediately went to the grocery store and roasted a tray of vegetables and grilled some chicken breasts.  Our friend needs healthy food when she gets home at night from the hospital!  We looked around her Mom’s house and did everything we could think of that would help.  No matter what happens next, the posse will be there.  Not out of obligation.  Out of empathy, compassion, and love.

I realize that I am much more aware of little things that will make life easier for people around me.  Sure, I try to do lots of little things for Trish, as she does for me.  But I also pulled our trash cans out from the curb this morning because it would be hard for the trash truck to get around the vehicle parked there and I didn’t want the guys to have to get out of the truck.  And I hold the door for people at the Y.  And I ask if I can cook when I go visit people.  (OK, I’m still a little unsure about my cooking but I’m going to trust that Trish would tell me if it’s not really that good.)  I don’t do these things out of obligation or because I expect something in return from them.  I do it simply because I have made the conscious decision that doing these things is important to me.  And it just feels good to do something nice for someone, especially when they don’t expect it.  All this sounds so obvious as I write it, but this has truly been revelatory for me.  Oh, I still write checks to charities that can reach many more people.  But the real meaning for me comes from those acts that I choose to do for those I care about, or who just cross my path. It’s been conscious.  Purposeful.  And it has meaning.  Even when—or especially when—it requires a sudden change in plans.

Living the Second Quadrant

Trish and I have both been struggling lately with a bit of angst around a sense of purpose.  When you are working, a sense of purpose is not difficult.  Nor is a sense of futility, but that’s another essay.  Anyway, when you are working you have a job description and a business goal and all kinds of things banging at you requiring your attention.  While a TRUE sense of purpose might get buried under feelings of urgency, you rarely find yourself at a loss for what to do.  On the contrary, you probably find yourself ruminating on a list of things you’d RATHER be doing if all these other demands on your time and attention would just go away.

When you retire, those work-related demands do indeed go away.  All at once.  And sometimes you might find yourself at a loss for a sense of purpose.  I wrote about that a bit in my three-part series on transitioning to retirement (here are links to parts one, two, and three).  I have a friend who was so busy with other purpose-driven commitments that he retired because he didn’t really have time to work anymore.  Neither Trish nor I had that issue.  I was fired (thankfully) and just decided to retire.  She retired for her sanity.  After my detox period, I did a year’s worth of contract consulting and then settled into this blog.  It gives me a pretty decent sense of purpose but I’ve still felt nudgy.  Trish had to detox quite a while and now “purpose” is really nagging at her.

I had an “Aha!” moment a couple of weeks ago during a walk, listening to a podcast.  It was Brené Brown’s “Dare to Lead” podcast (naturally) and she was interviewing Charles Duhigg.  He is a journalist and author who has written a couple of bestsellers on habits and productivity.  They were talking about choosing to work on only what is important to you and about how to figure out what actually IS important to you.  OK, that makes sense.  Then Brené asked the question that I wanted to ask: “I get all that, but HOW?  HOW do you actually get yourself ignore all the noise and work on what’s important to you?”

Before I answer that question, I must take you back in time a bit and explain the title of this essay.  We all have probably read Stephan Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  It’s a classic and has been read by something like 3 billion people (maybe a slight exaggeration).  Lots of good stuff in there but there was one concept that really hit me and stayed with me.  He showed a two-by-two matrix, that old standby of corporate America.  One axis was labeled Urgent; the other labeled Important (This is the picture that accompanies this essay).  There were four quadrants in the grid.  The first was things that are both urgent and important—things that can and should be done and usually do.  The second was things that are not urgent but are indeed important—things that should be done but often aren’t.  The third quadrant was things that are urgent but not important—things that shouldn’t be done but often take up a lot of your time.  Finally, the fourth quadrant was things that were neither urgent nor important—things that shouldn’t be done and rarely are.  The challenge, of course, was to resist Third Quadrant activities and prioritize Second Quadrant activities.  Simple in concept.  Horrifically difficult in practice.

There are tricks galore out there to help you focus on Second Quadrant activities.  I had a mentor/boss who, whenever I would come in for a discussion with my list of topics, would invariably ask, “What’s the last item on your list?  Let’s start there.”  He knew that instinct usually encourages us to put the item we consider most difficult or unsavory at the bottom of the list, unconsciously hoping that time will run out before we get to it.  This habit of doing first the task you most dread is a staple of productivity training.  That worked for me only occasionally—usually when I was well rested and had gobs of energy.  It rarely worked when I needed it to work.  My tired brain, my sapped coping energy, my frayed nerves all found themselves soothed, more often, by tackling Third Quadrant work (email, anyone?) as a way to build up energy for the Second Quadrant work.  More often than not, time ran out that day before said energy was sufficiently mustered.

Which brings us back to the podcast.  Charles answered Brené’s “how” question with a discussion that almost stopped me in my tracks.  The method (not trick) to getting yourself to work on what you know is important instead of what is just urgent is….intentionality.  Seems obvious, no?  But it’s not the knowledge of the concept that is so earthshattering.  It’s putting it into practice.  “Intentionality” means, to me, making conscious and active choices instead of reacting.  It means be wholly present most of the time and being very purposeful in the choices you make—and owning the consequences of those choices.  Often it’s around your own Second Quadrant activities vs. Third Quadrant and that battle is difficult enough.  Other times, other people are involved.  You see, sometimes a need is important to someone else and not to you.  Whether or not you choose to do that thing requires thoughtful assessment of a number of factors, such as “Is there some benefit to me if I do this?” or “Is there some repercussion to NOT doing this that I want to avoid?” or “This person is important to me, so I’m going to do this to help them out.”  That takes energy when just DOING the thing often seems easier.  And if you choose to NOT do the thing?  Then there is the energy-sapping activity of confronting this person making demands on you.  Again, it is often easier to just do the thing.  But.  If you consistently spend your time on things that may be important to someone else and not to you, guess what?  You never get to YOUR OWN important things.  If you CHOOSE to do that—if you act with intention and purpose—so be it.  You’ve also chosen the consequences.

So, I’ve been noodling a lot on intentionality and how it relates to a sense of purpose.  Everyone knows someone, or has been that someone, who searches endlessly for a sense of purpose or happiness.  Maybe it’s the right job or the right partner or the right house or town.  The list of requirements is usually undefined; the person only knows when something is NOT what they are looking for.  It took a long time for me to understand that you don’t need to search for purpose or happiness EVERYWHERE; you can find it ANYWHERE—if you choose to live intentionally.  It is around how you choose to spend your time and energy each day.  It begins, of course, with the authenticity to embrace what is important to you and what might be keeping you from spending time on those things.  We’ve discussed before the steps required to make a change in priorities and a real commitment.  And now I understand the final piece: once you’ve truly aligned your priorities with what’s important to you and made that commitment, action and purpose come from intentionality.  Every day.

How is that working for me?  Well, I’ve started spending a few minutes most mornings capturing a few lines in my journal about what my intentions are for the day.  It’s usually a combination of tasks and mindset.  Reminding myself what’s important.  Sometimes I need a little reset, like today when our cat Beau inoculated the living room with breakfast trying to get out a hairball.  But I did indeed reset.  I took a deep breath and said, “What’s important to me today?”  At the top of the list was getting these thoughts out on a first draft.  Your sense of purpose does not have to have a big societal impact, although that’s wonderful if it does.  Your purpose can be to live honestly; to be kind and compassionate to everyone who crosses your path, stranger or friend; to be the kind of person people can depend upon; to spend the majority of your time on things that are important to you, even if some days that means reading an issue of the New Yorker cover to cover or helping good friends split wood from felled trees.  It’s about living consciously, not mindlessly.  My goal is to live that, with intention, every day.

What’s Your BATNA?

We spend our entire lives negotiating, and for the most part we hate it.  I, personally, hate negotiating for a variety of reasons.  For one, it always seems combative and I dislike conflict.  Related, I always fear that I’m being taken advantage of or that I’m leaving something on the table.  And finally, if I want to avoid those first two feelings, I need to do a lot of homework.  Since we’ve already established that I’m a basically lazy person, it is understandable that I dislike negotiating.

You can’t get away from it, though.  You negotiate terms of a job.  You negotiate to buy a car.  You negotiate ALL THE TIME with your partner on everything, including “little” daily things like chores around the house, what’s for dinner, and what you watch on TV.  Back in the day when I used to travel a lot for business, I regularly paged through those inflight magazines they used to put in seatback pockets.  Those magazines were riddled with advertisements geared to the business traveler and invariably there were several on negotiating skills.  A famous one had in bold letters across the top:  You don’t get what you ask for; you get what you negotiate.  The inference, of course, is that blindly just asking for what you wanted or needed was a fool’s errand.  You must get confrontational and NEGOTIATE—take them for all they’ve got!  It’s not surprising, then, that most people treat negotiating like a war game.  Or just a war.  It is about winning.  It is about getting what you want and making the other guy give up more than he really wanted to give up.  And then I learned about BATNA.  The concept is not revelatory so much as being intentional about applying it.

BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.  Your BATNA is the minimum you will accept.  Your walkaway point.  It’s what you will have if you can’t come to an agreement with the other party.  By definition, you’re ok with that outcome.  Maybe not happy, but you can live with it.  Let’s say you are at a street fair and you walk up to a vendor selling windchimes.  You love windchimes.  Who doesn’t?  You select a set, look at the price tag and think, “Yeah, no.  Too expensive.”  You have a price point in your head.  If the seller agrees to it, you have yourself a new set of windchimes.  If not, you walk away.  Your BATNA, in this case, is “I don’t have a new set of windchimes.”  That’s acceptable to you.  Now imagine that your best friend, who has a big birthday coming up, tells you about this FABULOUS set of wind chimes she saw at a street fair a while back and she is kicking herself for not buying them.  She had even snapped a picture and sent it to you and you could see it was the SAME vendor and SAME set of windchimes.  Now your BATNA is different.  You REALLY want to get those windchimes.  You will probably accept a higher price because the value to you (to please your friend) is much higher.

I learned about the concept of BATNA at a mini-MBA intensive short course that was geared toward R&D managers.  It was revelatory for all of us.  Now there was a logical approach to negotiating that we could navigate and it was not a war simulation.  You “just” had to understand your BATNA and the BATNA of the person you were negotiating with!  If there was an overlap, then you could find agreement.  If not, you both accepted your respective BATNAs and moved on.  Simple, right?  Well, we’re only halfway through the essay so of course it’s not that simple!

Let’s start with understanding your own BATNA.  Sometimes it can indeed be simple.  When I bought my last car, I had to decide if I was going to trade in my old car with the dealer or sell it separately.  I didn’t want to deal with a private sale, so I went to a couple of those places that buy your car and got a quote.  Both gave me EXACTLY the same quote.  After I had negotiated the price of my new car (that’s another, longer story) we discussed a trade.  I had decided that if they matched the quotes I had gotten, I would trade in my car with them.  Why?  My BATNA was not about maximizing the value I could get from my old car.  It was about minimizing hassle.  I’m sure I could have gotten significantly more money if I pursued a private sale, but I didn’t want the bother.  If the dealer wouldn’t match the other offers, then it was minimal additional hassle for me to go to one of those car buying places.  If the dealer DID match their offer, then I would get the same monetary value with even LESS hassle.  They matched.  I drove my new car home that day. 

Other times, knowing your BATNA is not so straightforward and this is why being intentional about understanding your BATNA is so important.  In the example above, I could have tried insisting on a retail price for my trade because I might have felt that I should get the Blue Book price.  Anyone who is a car dealer has, I’m sure, dealt with the “but my car is worth so much more than that” customer.  I didn’t do that because I understood the trade-off between the price I could get for my car and the hassle associated with getting that price and I intentionally chose to value low hassle over high price.  Deciding on a new job or moving to a new home are good examples of more complex BATNA calculations.  There are a lot more factors to consider than just the salary or the housing costs.  There are many, many factors in determining your BATNA that have to do with what truly makes you happy or at least content.  Teasing out those factors requires a really authentic look at yourself and honestly accepting what you know works for you and what doesn’t.  How many of us have made unfortunately bad choices because we established our BATNA based on what we wished represented our true desires instead of accepting what we really want?  That doesn’t mean you can’t make a bold choice aimed at broadening who you are, but you need to make that choice purposefully and accept the work it will take to make that happen.  If you are not purposeful about it, you end up putting yourself in the situation and hoping that you will suddenly find yourself happy in a context you’ve never been happy in before.  How well does that usually work?  This theme of authenticity is so critical!  Yes, Brené Brown seems to work her way into all of my essays.

The other, even tougher, part of the BATNA equation is understanding the BATNA of the negotiating party.  In addition to forcing yourself to take an authentic look at the situation from your own perspective, you now need to put yourself in the shoes of the other party and tease out what is truly important to THEM.  In a business setting, this involves sleuthing around the other party’s business model and financial position.  If you are negotiating project deadlines with a co-worker from a different function, you have a much better chance of finding agreement if you take the time to understand their business function and how their needs intersect with yours.  If your idea of negotiating a timeline is, “This is when I need it.  Period,” then don’t expect a lot of cooperation. 

While business negotiating often involves personal agendas, negotiating with the people in your private life is ALL about personal agendas.  When you are negotiating a vacation with your spouse, it involves understanding what they like to do and not do, as well as knowing the range of their travel preferences and what their breaking points are.  Surely there will be negotiating room between your two BATNAs.  If not, you have a different problem.  Understanding someone’s BATNA is synonymous with expressing empathy.  And expressing empathy means being able to be non-judgmental and accepting that someone else’s preferences are just as valid as your own.  It’s pretty easy, though, to forget about diversity of preference when we’re negotiating with someone.  Our way is the way that makes the most sense for us, therefore it should be the right way for everyone, right?  Your BATNA should never be everything you could possibly want.  Compromise is not a dirty word if you can be honest about your BATNA and keep an open mind about someone else’s.  So, the next time you’re negotiating with someone or arguing righteously about some topic, take a moment to step back and ask not only “what is my own BATNA” but also “what’s your BATNA”.  You just might find some common ground.

The State of “Flow”

Everyone experiences the state of flow now and then.  What is it? The guy who literally wrote the book on the topic, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes this state of “optimal experience” this way:  “Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.  Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted.  An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous.”  (Quoted from Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience)  Full disclosure: I have this book and have skimmed but not studied it.  What follows is my own take on “flow”.  If you want the full scholarly treatment, I encourage you to read the book.

The example of flow that inspired me to write this essay is the experience I achieve during spin class.  I can achieve flow in other ways but it’s most consistent when I spin, so I’ll use that as my primary example.  I’m sure you can think of your own.  For some people it’s a hobby like playing a musical instrument or gardening or building furniture or model airplanes.  For Trish, it’s painting.  Flow is achieved with some activity that so totally absorbs you that there is nothing else but that activity.  It can last for hours for some people.  For me, I’m lucky to achieve flow for half an hour.  I just can’t still my mind long enough to stay engaged in anything for hours.  I have the attention span of a gnat.  But that is what makes even a half hour of flow so precious to me.  It’s rewarding.  It’s rejuvenating.  It is profoundly satisfying.

For me, the ideal activity to achieve a state of flow is something that requires precision and concentration yet also contains a bit of repetition.  Maybe that’s why I love Baroque music so much and fractals make me weak in the knees.  My mind enjoys patterns yet also needs variations on that theme.  Spin class is clearly in that vein.  It’s not that complicated; you are pedaling on a stationary bike.  You don’t have to steer or avoid potholes or watch out for cars.  You don’t even have to balance!  You just get on the bike, clip into the pedals (yes, I spent an insane amount of money for shoes with the clips in the soles), and move your legs up and down.  Spin class does, however, require a bit of skill and intense concentration.  The skill part comes with understanding how to properly balance your weight in the different positions so you can push hard without injuring yourself.  It does not take years of schooling and an advanced degree to attain this skill, but there is some pain involved.

When I took my first tentative steps toward spinning a few years ago, I had to work up to that threshold skill level.  I started with “Gentle Cycle for Seniors” which was anything BUT gentle.  I needed several sessions just to figure out the optimal settings for me on the bike: where to set the handle bars, seat height, seat depth.  There was figuring out what the right baseline gear was for me so I didn’t peak in the first five minutes of the class.  Then there was figuring out how to “run on the pedals” when in a standing position without killing my knees.  And I won’t even get into the “seat pain” issue.  This is the first lesson:  flow rarely happens the first time you do something.  You need to develop that threshold skill level that allows the activity to become comfortable, pleasurable, and gratifying.  I kept going because there was just something about spinning that looked like I would like it.  Eventually, I got there.

I wish I could be one of those people that can sustain a state of flow for hours.  The closest I come is when I get absorbed in a good book, but I more consider that losing myself in a good story and excellent writing than achieving a state of flow.  I have actually sort of achieved flow working on spreadsheets.  I get some weird pleasure from spreadsheets where I can set up formulae and—be still my heart!—pivot tables.  During my later work years, it was actually calming for me when I worked up my weekly business performance numbers and our scorecard measures.  I got so efficient at it that at times I would actually be disappointed when I finished.  It was a sad day when I was forced to give over that task when my job role changed and I no longer had direct responsibility for day-to-day business management.  I had trouble letting it go because I never really saw it as a burden.  I am embarrassed to admit that I complained about it because I felt I SHOULD consider it a burden!

I also can achieve short bouts of flow when prepping for cooking.  With a good sharp knife and some clever assistive devices, chopping vegetables can be a meditative experience.  It has all of my requirements for a state of flow:  repetition with variation, a need for skill and precision, and a requirement for concentration.  What limits me is that standing on my feet for long periods is tiring and, well, you only need so many chopped vegetables for any given dish.

But let’s get back to spin!  Here is the anatomy of experiencing flow during a typical 45 minute spin class.  During the first five minutes, I am warming up my body and settling into position—becoming “one with the bike,” if you will.  I have my water bottle and my sweat towel but don’t need either yet.  There’s music.  There’s the instructor running down what the upcoming challenges will be.  I’m focusing on that feeling of my legs moving up and down, up and down, getting into that rhythm.  After that first few minutes of warm up sprints and a small hill, we get down to business.  I’m feeling the music, usually timing my strokes to the beat.  I’m hearing the instructor’s directions on gear and position and just responding.  I know what my body can take and for how long and I work to get to that point where I just can’t do any more.  For the next 20-25 minutes, I am in a state of glorious flow.  My mind is totally focused on my body and the commands from the instructor.  I feel the exertion, know when I am approaching my limits, and push right up to the edge until we back off that particular challenge.  I feel the pain of the exertion and it’s almost addictive.  I want more!  Until I don’t.  THAT point usually comes with 10-15 minutes to go.  Flow is done.  Now I’m getting tired and the concentration is focused on doing the best I can and getting to the end.  The relief when that last song is over combines with the endorphins from the workout.  I’m basically worthless the rest of the day and it’s awesome.

Mihaly says you can purposefully create the conditions to achieve a state of flow.  I won’t disagree, since I haven’t studied the book nor tried to put his recommendations into practice.  I can only spin so many days a week, so I would like to find a few more sources.  Sometimes I get into flow for a time when I write and I’m trying to nurture that by finding the right conditions (usually time of day) to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).  However, I will say this:  achieving a state of flow is good for the soul. We could all use a little more of that.

Inclusion is an Active Process

Earlier, I posted my first essays directed at discussing Diversity and Inclusion.  I started by defining the touchy concept of Unearned Privilege and then got into Unintentional Bias.  I wanted to wrap up this first go-round on D&I with a discussion about the “I”—Inclusion.  If you haven’t read those first two essays in this series, I encourage you to do so.  These concepts all flow together and reinforce each other. 

First, I need to define what I mean by “inclusion”.  I’m not necessarily talking about including people of all types and backgrounds on teams or in the room.  Don’t get me wrong—I think we SHOULD do that whenever possible, because you theoretically get a broader set of ideas and inputs from a group of diverse people.  It also makes your life richer to know and embrace people different from you.  That sort of representational approach to inclusion is the part that everyone is aware of and tends to be what people focus on initially.  What I’m speaking to in this essay is the more difficult part of “inclusion”—inclusive thinking.  “Inclusion” in this respect means asking yourself, “what am I assuming about this situation that’s borne from applying a broad brush to a whole group of people and do I need to take a step back for a second and challenge those assumptions?”  In the workplace, this often takes the form of dismissing ideas different from your own without really thinking through them or not considering someone for a role because they are different from what you envision in the job.  In your personal life, it could take the form of judging someone’s behavior and intent based on some defining characteristic (like race or age or accent), projecting your own interpretation on their actions. 

Remember that a couple of themes fell out of those first two essays: first, that people are usually unaware of their own privilege and biases; and, second, that developing an awareness of both is an active and on-going process.  Similarly, inclusive thinking is itself an active and on-going process.  Before I go further, let me remind you that we often spend a lot of time pointing out privilege and bias expressed by others; I’d rather we take that righteousness and first turn in inwards.  While it is indeed important to hold others accountable for the impact of their biases on other people, we all have way too much work to do on ourselves to have so much time available to “correct” others.

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that you are well on your way to detangling which aspects of your life reflect unearned privilege and which reflect where you have been in the subordinate position (i.e. where you are a “fish” and where you are a “scuba diver”, using the analogy we’ve discussed before).  You have also started catching yourself in unintentional bias.  All of this navel gazing is a prerequisite for being able to navigate the world around us with a mindset of inclusion.  Your work, however, is just beginning.  Remember that we are hard wired to naturally trust those who are like us.  “Like us” can mean many different things: it could be race, religion, educational background, where you grew up or where you live now, work experience, and a zillion other things.  We simply gravitate toward those with whom we feel we have something in common.  It’s comfortable.  It’s easy.  It’s a nice shortcut.  And it’s what’s gotten us to our current environment in which we default to tribalism.

I am going to come right out and say something many might feel uncomfortable articulating: it is ok to feel more comfortable with people you share common traits or experiences with and, in fact, it is ok to seek out time with your “affinity” groups.  When I reaffiliated with a synagogue in the 2000’s after not having really engaged with the Jewish community for decades, I found a comfort in community that I hadn’t realized I’d needed so much.  I was very isolated as a Jew at work and while I never felt overt anti-Semitism, I always was aware of my difference.  Going to synagogue, building that Jewish community and feeling enveloped by it was just good for my soul.  Similarly, when I am with a group of gay friends or in a predominantly gay environment, THAT is good for my soul.  In neither situation am I with people who are just like me in all ways.  They just happen to share one trait that, in that moment, makes me feel less alone and more comfortable.

When is it not ok to seek out just your “peeps”?  It is when that group is in a power position and when they are together, they are making decisions and allocating resources in a way that highly favors people in the group and excludes people outside of the group.  A group of white men playing golf and having a good time is not a bad thing.  It would be a bad thing if, during that golf game, they made decisions on who should get the next promotion or worked out business deals with each other without realizing the narrowness of their inputs.  I’m not saying golf games should be banished.  I’m not saying friendships and relationships between members of affinity groups should be de-emphasized.  We’ve already established that we feel more comfortable around people we share key traits with.  My thesis is that big decisions and important discussion should not be happening so casually in a homogeneous group.  There needs to be more intention in those discussions about inclusion.  What I am saying is that if you are in a power position or any position of influence, you need to ACTIVELY seek out perspectives from people outside of your group, ACTIVELY embrace the exclusionary character of your own comfort zone, and ACTIVELY pursue ideas and options that include people and ideas different from your own.  Inclusion is an ACTIVE process.

This is not just a business issue.  It’s not even primarily a business issue!  The flip side to feeling more comfortable with people “like us” is that our lives become limited and narrow.  If you stay within your comfort bubble, pushing away people and ideas and experiences different from what you have known then you are missing out on a whole lot of richness in life.  As I discussed in the title essay to this blog, living for a few years in Mexico really drove that home to me.  I never realized how many aspects about how I lived my life were not universal.  Opening myself up to different living patterns, different ways of thinking and seeing the world, different ways of navigating daily life has made me a much happier person.  But you don’t need to go live in another country for a few years to get this benefit.  You just need to embrace an active curiosity about the people around you.  Purposefully resist instantly applying stereotypes and judgments.  Challenge yourself to treat an individual as a whole human, worthy of your interest.

I’m walking a fine line here.  I don’t want to sound punitive; however, all of us in some way, by accident of birth and circumstance, find ourselves to be comfortable fish in the ocean barely aware of the various scuba divers struggling around us.  Being aware of their struggle is just not enough.  Encouraging them to throw off their scuba gear and just be like fish will not eliminate their struggle or burden.  We need to actively work to understand people different from us; we need to actively embrace that “different” does not mean better or worse, just different; and, we need to actively hold ourselves and others accountable for the impacts of unintentional bias borne from unearned privilege. Inclusion is an ACTIVE process.

A Note to My Younger Self

This feels like a time of new beginnings.  We are emerging from the pandemic and facing what used to be very common activities as if they were brand new experiences—going to out to dinner with friends, family gatherings, grocery shopping without wearing a mask.  It’s like emerging from a dark cave.  At the same time, a number of “young” people in my life (they are in their 20’s and 30’s) are at really big “adulting” inflection points—getting married, buying first homes, starting new careers.  It has gotten me thinking about my own new beginnings all those decades ago and how much I just didn’t know about what was ahead of me and challenges I would face.  So, this week’s essay is a nostalgic note to my younger self.  And twenty years from now I hope I will look back on this essay with a bit of nostalgia, reflecting on how much I didn’t know when writing this very piece.

Dear 26-year-old-Sherri,

You have accomplished so much already in your young life!  Take a moment to be proud of yourself.  You navigated some tough emotional times growing up.  You got a college degree and then a PhD in Chemistry.  You landed a good job in R&D with a good company and you are about to start your “real” life.  As your retired 58-year-old self, I am proud of you.  I’m also excited and a little scared for you.  You see, I know what’s coming.  You are going to face challenges you never dreamed of and opportunities you never thought would be open to you.  You are going to face incredible highs and successes and debilitating lows and failures.  You will have time periods of extreme confidence and valleys of extreme self-doubt.  As you face this new beginning, I want to offer you a few gentle thoughts to consider.

Be humble.  You are on a real high right now and you should be!  You feel like you’ve got the world by the tail!  Outwardly, you appear supremely confident.  Inwardly, you are scared to death.  There is so much you don’t even know that you don’t know, but you sense it’s there.  Everyone around you seems to have it all together.  The truth is that they don’t.  And they think that YOU do!  There is a happy medium between arrogance and self-doubt and that’s humility.  Remember that you’ve already shown you can do great things.  Remember, also, that there is and always will be so much more for you to learn.  Start with that humility and always search for growth.  Everyone can teach you something.  Look for that within everyone you meet.

Find and be true to your authentic self.  Unfortunately, it’s going to take you until your 50’s to really embrace this truth.  I wish you would have understood the importance of this earlier, but better late than never!  You have some serious headwinds ahead, to be sure.  Accepting yourself as a gay woman will not be as easy in the 1980’s and 90’s as it will be in 2021.  Remember the first time you walked into a gay bar and you were so afraid that you almost fainted?  The first time you go to a Pride Fest will be even worse.  You will be scared of being attacked and beaten.  The first time you come out to someone at work, you will be afraid of being fired.  But you will keep moving forward because you have to.  Something deep inside you will push you toward authenticity because you know it’s critical for your mental health, happiness, and even professional effectiveness.

That part of your authenticity journey will absorb you for a good 20 years.  An equally critical part of your authenticity journey is finding your true self as a friend, partner, and leader.  I will tell you now that your instincts are right on target.  It’s going to be hard for you to be true to those instincts because the behaviors of those around you will make you feel like you are wrong.  You will second and third and fourth guess yourself all the time and for many years.  Little by little, time and experience will show when your instincts were right.  It’s a good thing one of your instincts is to find a wide array of mentors and role models.  That certainly helps.  Along with authenticity, you will need to embrace vulnerability—admitting when you don’t know something and owning your mistakes.  Both are really hard but absolutely required for growth.  Vulnerability takes courage and people will ultimately admire you for it.  What really matters, though, is finding the courage to embrace who you really are, flaws and all, and to give yourself the grace to be who you are.  That’s when you will become a truly happy person who lives in the present instead of always waiting for something good to happen.  That is also when you will meet Trish, because until then you won’t be ready for her.

It won’t all be good.  Intellectually, you already know this is true because it hasn’t been all good up to this point.  There is a part of you, though, that thinks you’ve paid enough dues.  You haven’t.  What you will ultimately realize is that the tough times are when you will grow the most.  None of us, though, eagerly seeks out pain.  You will beat yourself up for bad decisions.  You will flush with shame when you have to confront your failures.  You will doubt that you will ever achieve ultimate success and happiness.  You will want to get out of what seems like a bad situation as quickly as possible.  And, for the most part, you will not be aware that everyone around you faces the same struggles.  It will feel lonely.  And all of that is ok as long as you keep moving forward.  Some days it will be the tiniest of steps; other days it will be big leaps.  But you will, you MUST, continue to move forward.

Choose love.  This is a message that you will learn from Dad, but actually not realize until long after he has passed.  “Life is a series of choices.  Choose love.”  I cannot tell you how important that is!  Choosing love means dealing with people and the world and especially yourself with compassion and empathy.  Will people sometimes take advantage of you or treat you poorly?  Absolutely.  You can and should advocate for yourself and seek justice.  You also can and should believe in the goodness of people and choose to act and react in a way that reflects your true self.  There will be a time when you are in the Philly airport, coming home from a long business trip.  You are heading to the parking lot to get your car when a woman comes up to you, panicked, saying she lost her wallet and needs money for the train into the city.  Give her the money.  Could she be trying to rip you off?  Yes.  Could she be telling the truth?  Yes.  Give her the money.  If you were in the airport and had lost your wallet (and this will be before cell phones), you would hope for the kindness of a stranger.  Try not to judge others, although it is sorely tempting and you will definitely do it more than you wish you did.  You rarely know someone’s whole story.  And remember—just underneath the skin of most assholes is a hurt child who just wants a hug.  That realization can help you let go a little of the resentment and frustration those people can engender.

I could go on.  I know what the next 30+ years has in store for you and am tempted to give you some hints to see if some things could be different.  I won’t, though, because I know where you end up (at least at 58) and it’s pretty good.  I’m so excited for you!  You have such an amazing adventure ahead of you!  Try to savor at least a bit of it in the moment before plowing quickly into the next moment.  Be humble.  Be kind.  Be happy.

Love,

58-year-old-Sherri

Unintentional Bias

Last time I started in on a long-promised discussion about Diversity and Inclusion by introducing the topic of Unearned Privilege.  I had wanted to talk about the subject of this essay, Unintentional Bias, but found that I needed to talk about privilege first.  I’m starting to realize that this concept of unearned privilege is more foundational than I thought, so I encourage you to read that essay if you haven’t already. 

There is also one more thought I need to share before launching into today’s topic.  I implore you to not weaponize these concepts.  Discussions about unearned privilege and unintentional bias are meant to get you looking inward—not to give you verbiage to slam others.  The good Jew, here, is actually going to quote a translation of Matthew (7:5): “First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”  My corollary to this thought is that getting that log out of your own eye is a lifelong journey.  You should never get around to a righteous focus on the speck in your friend’s eye.  This is about you and your thoughts and your actions and your own journey toward virtue.

We touched on bias before when I made a first pass in A Less Punitive Perspective on Bias and The Danger of the Defining Characteristic.  In those essays, I focused on “tribalism” as being the source of bias. The Cliff Notes version is that our global society has evolved a lot faster than our internal hardwiring associated with building trust.  We still instinctively distrust The Other—meaning anyone who looks different than you do or acts differently than you do.  And the easiest way to navigate in our increasingly diverse world is to apply stereotypes and judgements to entire classes of people.  Unfortunately, in our hyperconnected world, that instinct is used against us through advertising and by those who play on our unintentional biases for monetary gain or for power and influence.  Hence the need to bring this discussion out into the open and get each of us to own our piece.

Building on this base thought, I’ve come to realize that unintentional bias is strongly connected to the unarticulated assumptions we make about others, which in turn are borne of our unearned privilege.  And since owning our unearned privilege is so uncomfortable, guess what?  Owning our unintentional biases is just as hard.  A good example from my working days comes to mind.  I have no idea why I know this story.  It seems like something I should not have been privy to, but I was.  Early in my career, a position opened up that would have been ideal for a good friend of mine.  She was just a few years older than me and very ambitious.  She was smart and a hard worker and passionate about the product line she was developing.  The position in question was a step up in responsibility and involved having the lead accountability on bringing this new product out to customers.  It involved strategy development and implementation and a more direct connection to the sale of the product.  Accountability for the “profit and loss”, or P&L, of a business was the holy grail of anyone looking to move up.  This role, however, required a lot of travel.  What I learned is that this friend of mine was not even offered consideration of the role.  Why?  Not because she wasn’t qualified.  She was the most qualified of the potential candidates.  It was because she had two small children.  The men around the table assumed that she would not want to travel so much because of her parental responsibilities so they didn’t even ask her if she was interested.  They actually thought that they were being sensitive to her situation!  That is unintentional bias based on an assumption drawn from unearned privilege.

Corporations have tried really hard to root out overt discrimination and their initial attempts at sensitization have had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing unintentional bias.  In the 90s, my company started holding Leadership Education sessions.  This program was really well thought out and developed.  It brought some important insights and verbiage into the organization.  And it was intensive!  Groups of participants, who stayed together throughout their training, were taken off site for a week at a time.  There was prework to create anticipation and the subject matter pulled no punches, particularly around awareness of Diversity and Inclusion issues (at least as they were understood at that time).  The benefit and problem were that these sessions were held in a bubble.  Participants had to truly focus on the matter at hand and leave their “day job” to their teams back home.  The focus was the good thing.  The bad thing was that they went back to their day jobs after this intense week away, thinking their awareness was all raised (we didn’t have “woke” back then) and they truly believed they were no longer the problem.  They then went back to their regular behaviors without realizing that they were bringing unintentional bias into every decision.  They were sensitized to the plight of the scuba diver, to use my analogy from before, and they may have even understood their privilege as fish.  But they still didn’t understand what water was.  They were either trying to encourage the scuba divers to just throw off that scuba gear and breathe the water or shunting them to the shallow end citing sensitivity to their plight.  Neither worked well to give people of difference, any difference, an equal shot at opportunity.

Changing bias, you see, is an active and purposeful process.  It follows Newton’s Law of Motion:  a body in motion will stay in motion unless you exert a force to stop it.  Similarly, unintentional bias will continue unless you exert directed effort to stop it.  Remember that, as with unearned privilege, unintentional bias in and of itself is not a bad thing.  What matters is your awareness of it and what you do with it once you are aware.  Our unintentional biases are often born of our circumstance.  For example, I was raised in the 1960s in the deep South.  I harbor unintentional racial bias.  I know I do.  I hate it.  I’ve been working to root it out of me for decades.  I like to think that I’ve been largely successful.  My goal is not to never have a biased thought.  It is to quickly recognize when a biased thought emerges and to immediately challenge it, think about both the source and trigger of the thought, and try to get out ahead of it next time.  It’s an active and purposeful process.  And while I use the example of racial bias, in this case with respect to African Americans, I am by no means limited to that bias.  Nor is it my most vexing bias.  I am catching myself all the time in snap judgements that reflect unintentional biases that I never recognized before.  That’s when my face flushes with shame and I begin the internal flagellation to try and beat it out myself.

It is exhausting when you think about it and that exhaustion leads us to fall back into old comfortable patterns from before we realized we were carrying a bias.  That leads to resentment of the work it takes to root the bias out and often lashing out at those who have been on the receiving end of that bias.  Often, it also leads to projection—applying your own motivations to someone else’s behaviors.  That’s a different topic altogether.   While I begged you to not weaponize someone else’s bias, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold someone else accountable for a bias they may not realize they are expressing.  It’s all in the “how” of making someone else accountable and that begins with your own humility.  Unintentional bias makes you human.  Everyone has it and always will.  Your job is to work on yourself, first and foremost.  Question those assumptions you are making about people different from you.  Learn about the realities of other’s lives.  Don’t assume.  Give them grace; share your privilege.  They will do the same for you.  We’ll be better off for it.