When I first started this blog almost three and a half years ago, I had a lot of pent-up energy around thoughts that I really wanted to express.  Many of those early essays came from coaching lessons that I’ve given over the years and/or real hot button topics for me.  Now that those urgent thoughts have been shared, I’ve settled into a pattern where my writing is driven in large measure by what’s currently going on in my life. Those daily observations always connect back to “deeper thoughts”, so I get to fulfill my desire to share those ruminations in the context of what I’m experiencing today. 

What is sure to dominate my writing for months to come is the major renovation work Trish and I are undertaking on our home.  We love this house.  Trish has lived here for almost 30 years.  It’s a modest house in a fabulous neighborhood, conveniently located, and with great neighbors.  Trish has watched all their kids grow up.  I have been slotted into the crowd.  No one seems to be leaving.  We toyed with moving into one of the new 55-and-older communities popping up but decided instead to invest in this house and stay put.  I’m getting the kitchen of my dreams.  We are getting the second full bath that Trish always wanted as well as the master suite that she didn’t know she wanted until I told her she did. It’s a big project and neither one of us has undertaken anything like it in the past.

Originally, the title of this essay was going to be “Decisions, Decisions, Decisions” because that is what is going on right now:  a thousand decisions, big and small.  Fortunately, we’ve worked out a system that is helping this process go fairly smoothly.  I’m a Big Picture kind of gal and have focused on the layout of the kitchen and the choice of appliances.  I also am very comfortable with a wide range of decorating styles, as long as whatever is done is in good taste and put together well.  Trish has a genetic eye for design and, while not someone to lose herself for days in a tile shop, doesn’t get paralyzed by choice like I do.  We have agreed that she’ll take that first cut at design choices, aided by her brother who has an absolutely amazing eye for design and experience building from scratch, and I will provide any needed input at the end.  This means I’ll provide a tie-break vote if needed and generally agree with her choices because they are fabulous.  And they are!  I am so thrilled with how this is coming together!

I am enormously grateful for how this process is playing out because, as noted above, I get paralyzed by choice.  Give me two or three choices and I can make a decision.  And I will come to that decision quickly.  Give me a blank sheet of paper and say, “Design a kitchen, soup to nuts” and I will get nauseous.  This got me thinking back to a tool I used in my working days called the CARE profile.  Well, it was called the CARE profile back in the day.  Now it’s called the Team Dimensions Profile and is offered by a company called Training Solutions.  Find out more about it here.  I’m not shilling for the company and, in fact, may get sued for talking about it without permission but it has real merit.  The tool is used to help leaders put together balanced teams.  Understanding where you are in this CARE profile, though, is pretty useful regardless.

The basic concept is that we can’t all be good at everything from ideation through to completion of a project.  Everyone has different strengths.  The key is to understand your own strong points and then surround yourself with people who have abilities where you do not.  The acronym, CARE, stands for: Creator (generating the idea); Advancer (building on an idea to increase the possibilities); Refiner (winnowing down the choices); and, Executor (working out the details and implementing). 

I am a combination of Advancer and Refiner.  I have the occasional brilliant creative idea, but more likely that vision is a synthesis of other things I’ve seen that I put together in a new way.  Our kitchen design came out of tours of our neighbors’ houses, seeing what they had done and picking out what would work best for us.  Our final design is actually a tweak on one neighbor’s kitchen that we really like.  And while I’m pretty good at building on someone else’s ideas, or encouraging others to do such, I am best at narrowing down the choices by working through how something would function in real life.  Executing?  Yeah, best leave that to someone else.  Not a detail person, here, and too much of a perfectionist.

At one point in my career, we moved a number of our labs into a new building.  Labs are complicated beasts, yet the ability to plan the layout is a rare opportunity to really improve workflow.  We had a team in one of the labs who always worked well together and this move was no different.  One, a highly creative scientist, took a blank sheet of paper and produced a very clever layout.  The other, a detailed execution-focused scientist, made it practical and do-able.  We needed both.

Even choosing the appliances nearly did me in.  Wow, are there a LOT of choices!  I searched on line.  I asked friends for their thoughts.  I was afraid that I wouldn’t make the BEST choice and I’d have to suffer with the result.  Finally, I sat down and did two things.  First, I made my list of “threshold” requirements.  Any appliance in a given category that met those requirements would be good enough.  I didn’t need “perfect”.  Second, I chose two brands (GE and Bosch) that got high marks from my trusty Consumer Reports across the board.  We went to our local appliance retailer, list of threshold requirements in hand, and toured around.  I took his suggestions and dug into the websites to look at cousins of his picks to make the final choices.  Then I slept for a week.  Meanwhile, Trish and John were touring through granite shops, tile shops, faucet web sites, you name it.  I simply could not have done it.  The results, however, are amazing. 

For some reason, all of us tend to think that we need to be able to do everything equally well and we beat ourselves up if we fall short in even one area.  That’s just nonsense!  If we look honestly at those around us, we’ll notice that no one is truly strong in every part of that CARE profile.  I’m an Advancer/Refiner and proud of it!  Be proud of what you are, too.  And look to surround yourself with people having strengths in other areas.

The summer season is upon us, now, in the Northeast.  That means trips up to Poconos on a more regular basis and that means hours in the car to talk.  I am amazed at how much Trish and I always seem to find to talk about.  It’s not like we never have time to talk.  We are almost always together.  But get us in the car and amazing conversations ensue.  This, of course, is one of the reasons I love her.  But I digress.  A recent trip up to Lake Wallenpaupack gave us one of those “let’s see what comes up” conversation moments and we had a really interesting discussion around toxic people.  So, more than usual, Trish is my co-author on this essay.  Celebrate or blame her, equally.

Now, before we go any further, hear this, Dear Reader:  YOU ARE NOT IN THIS ESSAY IN ANY WAY!  It is natural to see yourself in things you read but I want all my friends and family to know that we have gone to GREAT PAINS to not use anyone we know as an example in this essay.  Just STOP IT.  You are not in here!  If anyone is used as an example in this essay, it’s me.  And we’ll get to that in a moment. If you happen to see something of yourself in this essay—since reading and thinking are a good way to hold up the mirror—then take this to heart:  truly toxic people rarely see themselves as toxic.

It would seem simple enough to begin by defining what I mean as “toxic person,” but that has turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of this discussion.  In general, Trish and I have defined a “toxic person” as someone who sucks the air out the room.  Not helpful?  A toxic person is someone who drains your energy.  Also not helpful?  A toxic person is someone who, when you see their name on caller ID, inspires you to groan and debate whether or not to pick up the phone.  I think you see where I’m going here.  It’s like the definition of porn:  you know it when you see it, but it’s hard to give a precise definition.

I will use myself as an example.  I look back to when I was in college.  I was a hormonal teenager, away from home for the first time, struggling mightily with understanding and coming to grips with my sexuality.  I knew I was gay.  I’d known since I was, what, 5 years old?  But in the 60’s, ‘70s, and even the ‘80s when I was in college, this was not a good thing.  Our culture taught me that what I felt was wrong and evil and must be purged.  I hated and feared this side of me.  I did my best to try and change it (fortunately, unsuccessfully).  I embodied angst and moodiness and unpredictability and I cried a lot.  A LOT.  I send a deep bow of gratitude to my dearest college friends who stuck by me through all of this.  I cringe, now, thinking about how toxic I must have been.  And the worst part of it was that I never (rarely?) explained WHY I was struggling so much since my deepest fear was coming out!  Thank goodness they did not abandon me or purge me from their lives.

I say that because I have gotten to a point where I have slowly purged toxic people from my own life as a self-protection mechanism.  This is not uncommon and there is much popular literature on the need to do so.  Toxic people drain your energy.  They bring you down.  You run the risk of spiraling right alongside them.  Let them go, the common wisdom says!  But.  But where is that line between self-preservation and selfishness?  When do you cross over from compassion for others to compassion for yourself?  This is where I hold up Trish and her family as models.  She and her siblings are some of the most compassionate people I know.  (This is the part of the essay she did not co-write and I’m guessing there will be battles during the editing process to see what remains in the final post.)  Each one of the four siblings has this amazing ability to talk with anyone, anywhere, anytime and make them feel like they are the most important person in the room.  I know it comes from their parents.  I never met their father, but the stories they tell (and, wow, can this family tell stories!) demonstrate his compassion.  And I had the extraordinary fortune to know their mother well, so I know for sure her influence.  There are people in this family’s orbit whom many would consider toxic, yet they continue to keep them close without falling into the spiral.  I think they are able to do this because they come from a place of love.  When you come from a place of love, there is always love to share.

There need to be limits to this compassion, and this is what Trish and I talked a lot about on the car ride.  We both get fed up when someone’s toxicity is somewhat self-imposed—by choices they have made, by lack of personal accountability, by lack of personal awareness.  Somewhat tied to this is the time arc of toxicity.  Is this person going through a defined tough time or does this toxicity just seem to be a component of who they are?  Let’s be honest, we all know people who seem to thrive on negativity.  And we all know people who thrive on trying to “fix” people in chaos, so they don’t see it as toxic. 

I still don’t have a good answer to my basic question of when I am smartly distancing myself from someone who is toxic and when I am being selfish and lacking in compassion.  I thought writing this essay would help me work that out, but it has taken me to totally different places than I thought it would.  There are no hard and fast rules, here, as with most of life.  Sometimes I have greater capacity for compassion than at other times.  Sometimes, I fear getting involved.  I can fear that toxicity may be contagious.  I guess where I need to leave things is with this thought:  Life is a series of choices.  Choose love and compassion as often as you can, and remember when others choose compassion for you.

My regular readers will be very happy to know that I continue to keep my lack of motivation, discussed last time, at bay.  I even made it to a spin class this week at the Y and have the sore legs to prove it.  Today, Trish and I got up and out early to make the 8:00 Stretch and Balance class.  Nothing could be less intimidating than this class.  It is an hour of long stretches, a bit of core work, and a bit of balance work.  Consider it pre-yoga.  And, yes, it is focused on those of us of a certain age who might consider real yoga “a bit much”.  As we were going through the class today, I paid attention to where my mind wandered.  It occurred to me that “Stretch and Balance” is a fabulous metaphor for life.  I’ll take you through the class and explain what I mean.

Let’s start with the fact that we got there.   Woody Allen once said, “80% of life is just showing up.”  We all know how true that is.  My motivation issue was driven almost entirely by a need to just get started.  Basic physics.  Getting over inertia.  That’s why experts on “getting things done” tend to recommend breaking a big task down into smaller chunks.  That lowers the activation barrier and improves the probability that you will overcome inertia and get started.  Once you get started, things flow.

The class begins with a focus on the breath and some short meditation.  There is a story I remember hearing that I think is attributed to Einstein but I can’t find a reference for it.  This person (let’s say it was Einstein) had a daily half hour meditation practice.  It’s how he started his day.  Upon hearing about how busy his schedule was going to be the next day, Einstein said something like, “Well, I’m going to need to meditate twice as long tomorrow morning.”  There is a general feeling that meditation is a luxury.  It’s something you do when you have the time to devote to it.  The reality is that meditation is something you should do to create mental space for everything else in your life.  I have not been successful at making a daily meditation practice a priority.  Yet every time I do it—and the start of the Stretch and Balance class is a good example—I find myself incredibly grounded and with greater capacity to handle whatever is in front of me that day.  The instructor also asks us to set an intention for the day, like “clarity” or “focus” or “peace” or whatever pops into your head.  I almost always land on “focus”.  Those who have worked with me over the years and suffered with my short attention span understand why that is important.

We move next into really gentle movements.  We sweep our arms up overhead as we inhale, then sweep down as we exhale.  We’ll hold our arms in “goal post” position and gently twist to the right and then to the left.  We’ll drop our right ear to our right shoulder then our left ear to our left shoulder.  These beginning movements are slow and almost seem like they aren’t doing anything.  But we are focused on timing our breathing with the movements, which allows us to stretch longer and deeper as the class proceeds.  I noticed today that when we did the “goal post twist” at the end of the class, I was able to twist so much further!  That meant my muscles were cold and tight at the beginning.  Those slow, gentle stretches started the warm up process and without them I probably would have hurt myself.  How many times in life have I jumped into something new (a new job, a new project, a new activity, a new relationship) and just took off without doing those metaphorical gentle stretches first?  Taking the time to mentally connect your breathing to the new movements of whatever you are taking on allows you to see what’s ahead of you more clearly.  And seeing what is ahead of you more clearly dramatically improves your chances of success.

As the class goes on, we move into deeper and longer stretches.  I particularly appreciate the “hip opening” exercises because my hips are always so tight.  I wrote before about the need to push outside of your comfort zone and used stretching of muscles as an analogy.  I’m always amazed at how quickly my hips tighten up when I’ve missed a few classes.  Similarly, if you don’t stretch yourself out of your comfort zone, you’ll find yourself more hesitant and fearful of trying new things.  Or you stop doing things that used to be easy and natural for you when you were doing them regularly (like driving on the highway or public speaking).  You’ve got to stretch!

Even though we move gently from pose to pose, all of a sudden, I noticed that I was shaking a little and I could hear the quiet (or not so quiet) grunts of strain from my classmates.  This usually starts when I’ve been in downward dog awhile and my shoulders are starting to fatigue, and accelerates when we transition from downward dog to a plank.  I felt it again when we moved into balancing core moves that involved keeping my legs extended and above the mat.  Funny how those gradual transitions suddenly catch up to you and you find yourself struggling a bit.  You want to drop the pose and get relief.  Just when you need to hear it, though, the instructor tells you to breathe into it and reminds you of the importance of a strong core.  How many times in my life has a steadying voice come to support me just when I was about to crack?  I think back to when friends or mentors or sometimes even strangers have appeared in my life with just the right words at just the right time to get me to focus on why I was doing what I was doing, instead of keying in on my discomfort.  I really value the times I have been able to be that steadying influence on others.  That’s why I have always loved teaching and coaching.  The opportunity to give someone the nudge to return to a healthier, more productive focus is a gift to me.

Speaking of “nudges”, let’s talk about the balance portion of the class.  These are predominantly standing movements on one leg (like tree pose) that involve additional movements to confuse your brain.  Sometimes for good measure we close our eyes.  No one gets through the balance exercises without falling out of the poses multiple times to catch themselves.  And that is a GOOD thing.  The goal is not to be rock solid in these poses.  Our instructor reminds us that you only improve your balance skills if you are forced out of balance 25% of the time.  If you are not challenging yourself enough to fail 25% of the time, you are not going to improve.  There are a zillion life lessons wrapped up in that one statement.  First, of course, is the importance of “failure”.  Second is the importance of learning and improving from failure, not beating yourself up over it.  Third is the recognition that balance is rarely a steady state.  Balance involves gentle but constant nudges and adjustments.  I have used the concept of a pendulum before in discussing balance, instead of a set of scales, for exactly this reason.  Balance (in all things) requires constant attention and constant adjustment.  Getting out of balance occasionally is just an opportunity to get better at getting back into balance again.  Embrace it.

We end the class with a short meditation again, lying flat on our backs.  I love this part.  My muscles are all warm and tingling a bit.  My mental state is calm yet really focused.  I feel like I could take on anything!  So, yes, “stretch and balance” is a darn good philosophy as well as a good physical activity.  Challenge yourself on that—every day.

I’ve been staring at that blinking cursor for a minute or two, debating how to open this essay.  It began on the treadmill this morning, thinking about coming up to the office to write.  My plan had been to try once again to rewrite an essay I’ve been working on for literally months.  Just can’t get it right.  I normally look forward to this task.  Writing is a joyful experience for me, albeit sometimes immensely frustrating.  While I usually need a deadline to actually get myself to put fingers to the keyboard, I am always thinking about writing and I look forward to those times I actually do it.  Not today.  When my mental response to thinking about working on that essay was, “ugh,” I knew I had an issue.  I’ve been struggling with a lack of motivation in general for weeks now.  I’m not sad or depressed (I don’t think).  I’m not sick (I don’t think).  I’m not just sitting around doing nothing.  I get done what I need to get done and I still can laugh and have fun.  I’m just not feeling motivated.  So, I’m going to do what I often do when something is eating at me.  I’m going to explore it through writing and hope to understand what is behind it by the words that end up on the page.  Knowing that dealing with periods of low motivation is something everyone faces at one time or another, I thought sharing this thought process might help others, too.

I wrote about motivation this past fall.  (Read part one here and part two here.)  It was helpful to go back and read those essays, but they weren’t really addressing what is nagging at me.  What does this lack of motivation look like?  I haven’t been going to the Y more than once a week, which means few vigorous workouts.  I’ve been going on long walks outside or on the treadmill, but these are more opportunities to catch up on podcasts or read emails than elevating my heartrate.  I’ve had trouble focusing on reading, which is also uncharacteristic.  My mind has just been wandering too much.  I’ve been playing a lot of games on my iPad.  I haven’t even been motivated to watch recorded TV shows.  I haven’t been writing consistently in my journal.  I’ve been allowing myself “high WW point” treats a little too often.  Let’s just say I’ve been giving myself a LOT of grace.  I am a champion grace giver.  And, honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. 

I think what bugs me the most is that I don’t feel like I’m living in the present.  Throughout much of my adult life, I was living for the future:  “I’ll be happy when….”  I was getting through each day, each week, each month working toward getting to some milestone—completing a big work project, getting through a difficult personal time, doing some project on the house, finally getting to go on vacation.  But once that long anticipated event happened, there would be something else in the future that I would focus on that I thought would bring relief.  Ever since I met Trish and especially once I retired, I have been living in the present.  I have everything I could possibly want and feel extraordinarily blessed.  I am truly grateful every day.  The problem right now is that I feel like instead of living in the present that I am more…existing.  (Before you start to comment, I know it sounds like I’m depressed, but stick with me a bit here.)

The next question I have for myself is, “What’s happened?  What moved you from ‘living’ to ‘existing’?”  Honestly, I think the cause is getting shoved out of my routine.  Chalk this one up to the long list of “pandemic impacts”.  We have established that I am a homebody and, due to my fortunate life circumstance (retired, financially comfortable, enjoy cooking, like spending lots of time with my wife), the pandemic restrictions have not really been a hardship on me.  Don’t get me wrong!  I very much enjoy traveling and being with friends!  I’m just not used to it right now and restarting these activities has been, frankly, disrupting.  Our two week trip to Utah in March was fantastic (except the journey home) and a true bucket list experience.  But it threw me out of my routine and I can’t seem to get comfortable again.  Of course, I’ve allowed myself to get a little too busy.  I went to see my family in Atlanta a few weeks after coming home from Utah; I’ll be going to Baltimore for a long weekend to hang with college friends between penning this essay and publishing; and, the following weekend I’ll be going back to Atlanta for Mother’s Day.  In between all of this, Trish and I are kicking off some serious renovations on our house, including a big redo of the kitchen.  I am super excited about this, but talk about disruption!  We plan to move out of the house in the fall when the work begins and we have about three million decisions to make before then.  Interestingly, it’s not the decisions that are disturbing me.  I’ve been having fun researching appliances and annotating the designs.  It’s thinking of going through the process—packing up half the house, moving out, moving back when it’s all done—that has me overwhelmed.  It’s like climbing a mountain to get to the valley on the other side.  You know that the valley is worth the effort to climb the mountain, but all you see in front of you is that big hill.  There’s a lot more.  I cut out a whole discussion about the progression of my glaucoma and the things I am doing to save my sight and how I obsess about that.  I cut out some family issues that have me distressed.  I cut out lack-of-sleep stories.  Trying to keep this to under 1500 words!

The final question is, “What do I DO about this situation?  How do I get myself back?”  Writing, of course, helps.  It helps me better define what’s nagging at me.  Once it’s defined, I can face it.  Writing also gives me the accountability.  I’m not just talking about putting this out there for those who read my work, or even the fact that now my mom and sister will probably keep checking in on me until I can report progress.  It’s mostly about creating accountability within myself.  I don’t just want to exist.  I’ve worked too long and too hard (both at my career and on myself) to not take better advantage of every day in front of me.  It’s a conscious choice every day—do I allow myself this moment of low energy or do I push myself to take that first step?  I am acutely aware of the activation barriers I need to overcome to do something.  Those barriers can be easy to overcome (“Get up and cook dinner if you want to eat at 6:00.”), a little more challenging (“Put make up on every day again, even if just to cover the dark circles under your eyes from the glaucoma meds.”), or significantly challenging (“Go to spin class.  You know you’ll feel awesome afterwards.”)  Go back to those first steps around personal accountability and intention.  What is important to you today?  Just today.  You know those little successes build.  Pick one thing that is important for you to do (or not do) today.  Getting this first draft done was my one thing today.  That felt good.  Maybe I’ll pick another.

Stopping yourself when you slide into a motivational dip is important.  No one is going to do it for you.  Own up to what is causing it.  Writing does that for me.  What works for you?  Give yourself enough grace to take the pressure off but not so much that you don’t take that first step.  I think I’ll be bookmarking this essay for future reference.

CODA:  I’m editing this essay after the trip to Baltimore for a college reunion.  It was three exhausting days of overeating, overtalking, and overenjoying life.  It was also just what I needed.  I thought I’d come back and pick up my struggling just where I left off.  But, after a couple of days of sleeping excessively and eating oatmeal and beans, I am raring to go!  So, here’s a good message:  feeling a lack of motivation?  Go spend time with people outside of your daily bubble who love you.

An anecdote is really just a story, focused on a particular person or situation.  Merriam-Webster defines an anecdote as “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident”.  I do love storytelling—I am, after all, a writer of sorts.  And I’ve used storytelling all my life, particularly during my work years.  Nothing helps sell a customer or a business plan or a job like a good story.  So, anecdotes have a strong positive side.  But they also have a negative side.  Anecdotal information can be misleading or, worse, misdirecting.  Since I recently spent a lot of time on airplanes and in cars, I’ve had time to ruminate on anecdotes a bit and we’re going to unpack that a bit today.  (This is why Trish rarely asks, “What are you thinking about?”)

What better way to start a discussion on the power of anecdotes than with a story!  I’m sure you’ve all seen the commercials for Prevagen, a supplement sold as a way for those of us “of a certain age” to improve our memory and mental sharpness.  When I first noticed the commercials (it’s been on the market since 2007), the manufacturer made some pretty specific claims about the clinical effectiveness of the pill.  Then I started reading about claims that the product didn’t work, that the company was being sued for false advertising, and that the FDA had come down on them pretty hard.  The product is still available, of course, but the commercials no longer refer to clinical studies that prove efficacy.  Instead, the commercials show folks from various walks of life giving testimonials as to the benefits they ascribe to taking Prevagen.  This is not false advertising.  I have no doubt that there are people who firmly believe that there is a causal connection between taking Prevagen and improvements in their mental function.  They can tell their stories.  But their experience does not prove a broad, scientifically valid clinical effect of the product.  (Brace yourself.  There is probably an essay on the Scientific Method coming.)  These stories are just that—anecdotal information relevant only to the storyteller.  But it can encourage others to think, “Well, maybe it will work for me, too.”

In a situation like the story about Prevagen, it’s pretty harmless if someone accepts an anecdotal testimonial as being broadly applicable, or at least applicable to themselves.  As long as the supplement is safe to use (not guaranteed by the FDA, by the way), then the biggest harm is parting with a bit of money and pride.  It’s also mostly harmless when you are providing examples from your own experiences to teach a lesson, such as all the stories I tell when I’m coaching someone.  The key, of course, is to keep in mind that these are examples and, as the disclaimers on all those commercials remind us in teeny, tiny print:  individual results may vary.  When I launch into my story of the random walk that was my career progression, I always provide the disclaimer that these were my experiences associated with my particular situations at the time I was going through them.  The idea of telling the story is not to say, “This is what I did, so if you do the same things, you’ll have the same outcome.”  It’s to start the conversation to dig deeper to understand what may have led to the outcomes I had and what is relevant to the situation the listener finds themselves in at the moment.

Anecdotes run rampant within our news media, of course.  I subscribe to a daily news digest called The Flip Side.  Each day, they pick a current topic and then present a sampling of commentary from the conservative right and the liberal left.  The two sides rarely disagree on the same statement.  Rather, they choose anecdotes that support their view and ignore anecdotes (and data) that support a different view.  Neither is wrong, really.  They are choosing to focus on different aspects of a topic.  A conservative might focus on the fraud and waste of our social safety net programs.  A liberal might focus on the success stories of how these programs brought families out of poverty or gave people a chance to pull themselves up with the support of basic assistance.  They are both right.  There are many examples of both waste and success.  These programs are never going to get better and more effective, though, if we only focus on the stories we prefer.

To really dig into what I mean, I am going to share an anecdote from our recent travels.  While we were in St. George, Utah, for a week, we found a little sports bar that we really liked.  We liked it enough to go there two nights in a row and we liked our server enough to ask for her table when we came for the second night.  So, let me tell you a little about Sandra.  We were asking her about life in Utah and she told us a bit of her story.  As part of that, we learned that, as a server, she earns only about $2.10/hour in wages since there is an expectation that she’ll make up the difference between that and the minimum wage through tips.  But she needs to share her tips with the bar staff and the bus staff.  She works six days a week and just can’t make ends meet.  She and her partner lost their house in the housing bust in 2009, they can barely make their rent payments now, and they are expecting a rent increase when their lease renews shortly.  She plans to move into her Mom’s house, renting a basement apartment from her.  She has no idea if they will ever get any further.  Her attitude was fairly positive, considering.  She is a very hardworking, nice person who just can’t get ahead in this world today.  We left a nice tip on the credit card check and then gave her some extra cash to put directly into her pocket.  When we did that, she looked a bit horrified and said, “I didn’t…I wasn’t asking for…” but we wanted her to have it.  So, what are we to do with this information (besides having this blog post go viral and everyone in Utah patronizing Guru’s in St. George and giving Sandra huge tips)?

One temptation is to say, “This is what’s wrong with our economy today!  Hardworking average people just can’t get ahead!  We must increase wages and reduce housing costs.”  Another response is to think, “Clearly, she’s made some poor choices and made her bed.  Hardworking honest people can get ahead if they work hard enough.”  My response?  Ask more questions.  Thanks to Google, I know that the Federal requirement for tipped workers is indeed $2.13/hour with an assumption of $5.12/hr in tips, taking the presumed wage up to the current Federal minimum of $7.25/hr.  Besides Utah, 15 other states hold to this minimum and another 15 states don’t crack $5/hr in wages before tips.  Let’s say that Sandra works 50 hours/week and manages to get that average in tips to bring her wages up to $7.25/hr.  That’s $362.50/week or $18,850 per year, before taxes.  A 2 bedroom apartment in St. George rents for about $1000/month.  It’s a pricey place.  But they still need servers who can afford to live there.  Even if Sandra’s partner brings in the same wages, they barely clear the recommended hurdle of 30% of gross wages on housing.  

The data tell us her situation is tight.  But we know no more than that, and that she seems like a good person.  I can’t tell you anything more about Sandra’s situation and history.  I can’t tell you what she could have done differently.  I don’t know if she makes good choices or not.  I’m not going to pass judgment on her or the large number of people in her situation.  But this anecdote reminds me that there are a lot of people in her basic situation and struggling.  You can choose to believe her story is representative or that it’s an outlier.  You can call up any number of anecdotes to support whichever solution you prefer to these and other problems.  And you know what?  Everyone is a little bit right.  Our world is complex enough that multiple solutions will be required to address the range of situations in which people find themselves.  All we can do is this:  ask questions to understand how representative is the anecdote you are hearing.  Is this situation wide spread or rare?  Regardless, remember the humanity and uniqueness of the persons involved.  Everyone needs a little understanding and often a little help at times.  We’ll talk about judgment next time.  And, of course, always tip your server well!

Many years ago, I heard some relationship advice that stuck with me.  The advice was simple:  Always try to give more than 50% in any relationship.  I took that to mean that if both people tried to give more than 50%, there was a good chance you’d end up pretty even.  And if both people felt that the relationship was “even” then it had a better chance of succeeding.  I tried hard to put this into practice, particularly in romantic relationships.  I found it wholly unhelpful, though.  Be it a romantic relationship, a friendship, a work relationship, whatever, I found that if I consistently worked to give more than 50% then I started feeling resentful.  I was waiting for the kind of reciprocation I expected and I was often disappointed.

My “aha” moment came only over the last few years.  I finally realized the true meaning behind that advice:  Always try to give more than 50% in relationships because there are always things the other person does that you just don’t notice.  The goal, then, is not so much about doing more; it’s about noticing more.

Before Trish and I moved in together, I had been living alone for 10 years.  She had been living on her own for at least that long.  When you live on your own for an extended period, you quickly internalize that if anything is going to get done, you need to do it yourself.  Once we were in the same house permanently, I began to notice little things.  I’d go to empty the bathroom trash can and it would already be empty.  I’d go to scoop the cats’ litter boxes and they’d be clean.  I’d go to unstack the dishwasher and the dishes would have been put away.  Maybe not where I would put them, but put away nonetheless.  It started to become a bit of a competition in my head:  dang it!  She got to the trash before me AGAIN!  I started to get a little worried:  Does she feel that I’m not pulling my weight?  I don’t want Trish to get resentful toward me the way I’ve been resentful toward others in the past.

When I first moved in, I would walk by anything that Trish put on the stairway to upstairs.  She put it there, I figured, so she’d do something with it.  Finally, she calmly (but with an edge in her voice) said, “If something is on the steps, please take it upstairs.  If you don’t know where it’s supposed to go, put in on the couch in the office.”  So noted.  Similarly, we’ve established that I hate talking on the phone, particularly to people I don’t know.  So, when a call needs to be made, it’s usually Trish who makes it.  While this has been a consistent source of strain, she kind of accepts it.  She reads my body language and picks up the phone.  I will occasionally “make the call” during a time of duress, but I typically save it for when heroics are required.  And there are so many little things that one or the other of us just does, like the trash and the litter boxes and putting things back in the fridge or taking Costco purchases down to the basement. 

Like most couples, we’ve worked our way through a reasonable division of labor.  She gets enjoyment out of working the yard, so that’s HER thing.  I guess I should put “enjoyment” in quotes because there is often crankiness, exhaustion, and (this being Trish) a bit of blood, but anytime I suggest we hire a yard service I get a bit of side eye and, “I like doing it.”  Well, ok, then.  Similarly, I like doing the laundry.  More specifically, I prefer the way I do laundry to the way Trish does laundry.  Instead of trying to push “my” way on her, I just take responsibility for it.  Those things can be easily negotiated, yet once they are worked out, it’s still important to NOTICE when they get done.  There are a lot of “thank you”s flying around this house, not out of a sense of obligation or a recognition of extraordinary effort or even being overly polite.  It’s because we both notice when the other does something.  As I noted above, when you’ve had to do it all for so many years, you really notice even the little things.  The added benefit is that I’ve gotten incrementally better at resisting procrastination.  I don’t want to put off doing something that I see needs doing in case she beats me to the punch.

Gift giving is another area where you can tell how much attention someone pays to others.  Trish is a great gift giver.  I was stunned those first few years when I opened gifts that were just, well, perfect.  “How did you know?” I’d ask.  “I paid attention,” she replied.  Conversely, my gift giving tends to be like the little kid who gives Dad a baseball cap—in kid’s size.  In other words, I would tend to give people gifts that I liked myself.  I considered it sharing my joy.  It really was more assuming that if I liked something that the other person would (or should), too.  Not always on point.  I’m finally learning to pay attention better, to notice when someone expresses interest or joy in something and note THAT as a gift for them.  Although, honestly, how many pairs of socks or Penn State branded clothing does one person need?  (EDITOR’S NOTE:  Never question the merit in socks or PSU gear.)

My argument with all this relationship discussion is that I’m finally learning how to “notice”.  This is really important in a work setting, particularly if you are a manager of people.  I wish I had understood this sooner.  I know that there is so much I just didn’t notice every day, particularly when it came to job roles I was less familiar with.  Nothing is more demoralizing at work than feeling that your efforts are not seen or appreciated.  As I look back on how I’ve interacted with a range of people throughout my life, I cringe when I think how self-focused I was.  And still am, to a slightly lesser degree.  I am a work in progress.  As Brené Brown reminds me on my coffee mug every morning:  I’m here to get it right, not be right.  (One of the most on-point birthday gifts I’ve ever received, by the way!)

So, yes, the advice is to always try to give more than 50% to make up for all the little things another person does that you don’t notice, but the real goal is notice more.  I try to “notice” more with every contact I have.  It’s important in friendships.  It’s important in family relationships.  It’s important at work, for sure.  It’s important with random people you interact with throughout your day.  It makes people feel seen and valued.  It deepens connection.  And it will help others to “see” you better, too.

Americans love a good hero.  Heroes are central to our mythology as a young nation.  There’s the American Cowboy, a lone guardian of the range who saves settlers from a wide array of dangers.  There’s the Action Movie hero, who saves the day against all odds by fighting off the villain—usually, again, on their own.  And my favorite—the mild-mannered hero who rises to the moment from obscurity, like Clark Kent becoming Superman.  We love an individual, particularly an underdog, who is able to achieve great things in the heat of the moment.

Today, I want to talk about the hero vs. the…what IS the opposite of a hero?  Not coward, since being a hero isn’t just about being brave.  Ordinary citizen, maybe?  Or foot soldier?  Maybe it’s best to give an example.  In the workplace, there is always that person that “saves the day”.  Perhaps there is a production issue and you need an engineer who can get into the plant, figure out the root cause and put a fix in place as quickly as possible.  Or maybe there is a problem with a customer and you need a salesperson or technical expert who can both solve the problem quickly and manage to keep the customer happy before the whole situation blows up.  Or maybe there is a short deadline to get a project finished and you need someone who can dig in to bring it over the goal line, working night and day to get it finished.  You need a hero.  Heroes usually bring tremendous energy and stamina to a crisis situation and are able to just keep going in the face of a myriad of obstacles to save the day.  They are celebrated when they succeed.  They are not usually blamed when they fail.

I love a good hero as much as the next person.  I was rarely the hero myself since I’m not sure I have the intestinal fortitude.  But the question that always nags me is this one:  Why did we need a hero in the first place?  If there was a production upset, for example, did it come down to a maintenance issue or was it a poorly designed process?  If there was a customer issue, was the supply chain not effectively managed or were the needs of the customer not well understood?  If a critical deadline is looming, was there not effective program management to better ensure that the deadline could be met without heroics?

The issue, of course, is that it is easy to see when a hero saves the day.  It’s not easy to see when good, solid performance avoids a potential problem.  And those people—the “ordinary citizens”, the “foot soldiers”—who simply do the right thing every day, rarely get the kudos they deserve because “lack of a problem” is not visible.  As a manager, I really tried hard to remember to give recognition to those who always got the job done—not with heroics (although these same folks would often step up when needed) but with consistent conscientious effort.  And while you always need heroes since crises do arise, a good manager will do a post mortem to understand why the crisis happened in the first place.  In many cases, it could have been avoided if something else had been done correctly.

Our public veneration of heroes can have tragic consequences.  Beware the “hero” who creates a problem so they can solve it.  Everyone knows a story of a volunteer fire fighter who sets fires so they can put them out.  Or the person who ignores simple maintenance of a situation and has to deal with a much more complicated solution.  We applaud them for their heroic actions, but should we?  The heroes in action movies always seem to leave a lot of collateral damage that, when it happens in real life, is not so invisible.  Where there are heroes, there is pain for someone else—either physical, fiscal, or emotional.

One curious aspect of our “hero complex” is that we seem to be ok with waiting for a situation to get so bad that it can only be addressed by heroics.  Take water main breaks, for example.  To proactively go into our communities and replace aging water mains would take a fair amount of money and create a fair amount of disruption.  We never seem to have an appetite to budget the funds or accept the disruption.  But what happens when one breaks?  Well, we find the money to have crews do whatever they have to do 24/7 until it’s fixed.  I can almost guarantee you it costs more and creates even MORE disruption than if the main had been replaced proactively, but people accept the situation.  They aren’t happy about it, to be sure, but they accept it because “it had to be done”. 

I contrast this situation with the efforts last summer by our local electric company to proactively replace the buried 30-year-old electrical mains in our community and upgrade the transformers for more reliable service.  Was there disruption?  Sure.  But they also did this work by using horizontal drillers to avoid messing up lawns and driveways any more than necessary.  I, personally, think they did an awesome job and made an effort to tell them so.  Those poor guys were yelled at all day every day by people who didn’t want ANY disruption.  Yet, had there been a catastrophic failure of the electric main, we would have had to deal with a power outage lasting for days instead of a couple of hours, and they would have come in with a trench digger and just destroyed everything in their seven-foot abatement in the name of speed.

Finally, there is our cultural approach to health care.  Honestly, it’s not health care.  It’s sick care.  We have THE BEST emergency care in the world, hands down.  If you are really sick or hurt and need emergency attention and medical heroics, you want to be in this country.  But if you want to live a long and healthy life with less medical intervention, you might want to live somewhere else.  With our individualistic culture, we like to do whatever we want, eat whatever we want, sit on our couches and watch as much football as we want (not that there’s anything wrong with that one), and have a surgeon heroically by-pass four blocked arteries.  Other countries have a much stronger focus on prevention and early intervention.  Not only is that better for the individual, it’s less expensive.  We spend more per capita on “health care” than any other country yet have only middling health outcomes.  If you are in need of heroics, you are very grateful for our capabilities.  But we are not asking ourselves enough, “Why do we need the heroics?”

All of this rambling is meant to raise a little awareness in you, Dear Reader.  If you are a leader in an organization, in addition to celebrating the heroes, make sure you look for and reward those foot soldiers who keep the lights on every day.  As an average citizen navigating our complex world, keep your eyes out for those folks who are doing what needs to be done to avoid the next crisis.  Thank them, even if they are causing you a minor inconvenience.  As an individual, ask yourself “what am I not taking personal responsibility for that, if I did, could avoid a crisis down the road?”  Hero worship is fun in the movies.  In real life, the true heroes are the ones who kept us from needing the heroics.

Everyone knows the popular myth about frogs and boiling water:  If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it senses the danger and gets itself out of there pronto; if you put a frog into cool water and slowly raise the heat, the frog will allow itself to be boiled to death because the slow change does not seem alarming.  Fortunately, this is indeed a myth.  Frogs are smarter than you think and will jump out of that water as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.  In fact, in some ways frogs are smarter than humans.  They don’t sit there ruminating on the increasing temperature, rationalizing that they just have to accept it.  (No, this is not an essay about climate change.)  We humans run the risk of metaphorically letting ourselves get boiled to death because it seems mentally easier to normalize a slow change than it is to push back.

I wrote about Normalization before, mostly ranting about how Big Food has normalized really unhealthy eating habits, to the detriment of us all.  I’ve been thinking about Normalization again as we move into our third year of this pandemic and watch as the Omicron variant wave sloshes over us.  I have been as guilty as anyone else of normalizing the impact of this virus by saying, “Well, the data indicate that Omicron is less vicious than the previous variants so there will probably be fewer serious cases and deaths.”  I am also as COVID-weary as anyone else, even though this pandemic has not been a severe financial or even mental strain on my life (sometimes it’s good to be an introvert who likes to shut in at home).  It’s like we think it’s ok that “just” 1500 people a day are dying from complications of COVID.  How did we get here?  I remember at the beginning of this whole thing, people throwing around the number of the 12,000 people who died from Swine Flu in 2009 as a number so horrific that we couldn’t even contemplate that happening again.  We pass that in less than 10 days, now.  And barely blink an eye.

I started keeping a more rigorous “COVID journal” a couple of months into this pandemic and captured daily numbers of infections and then deaths.  Levels that horrified me 18 months ago would give me comfort today (“It’s getting better!”).  I remember an interview with an infectious disease physician maybe a year ago.  The interviewer asked, “We typically lose 20-40,000 people a year in this country to seasonal flu.  Should we be ok with that?”  The doctor responded, “No!  We shouldn’t be ok with that!  It doesn’t need to happen!”  Nor should we be ok with losing approximately 650,000 people a year to heart disease, or 600,000 to cancer.  But we kind of are.  Certainly not every death is preventable, but we all know many of us engage in socially normalized behavior that helps to push that number up.  We are sad when someone we know dies from a preventable cause that they chose to not control, yet we sue when someone dies from a negligent action by another.  Why don’t we hold ourselves to the same account to which we hold other people?

I’m not trying to depress you.  I’m asking a serious sociological question: why do we allow ourselves to normalize behaviors in ourselves and others that lead to negative outcomes?  For me, it comes back to Thermodynamics:  It takes energy to resist the expansion of chaos.  And I don’t have infinite energy, so I have to pick and choose when to fight.  I am also in a fairly privileged position of being way up at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  I don’t need to worry about my basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter) or my basic safety (I live in a low crime suburb and am financially secure).  I am surrounded by love from my family, friends, neighbors.  Continuing to work our way up the hierarchy, I constantly work on the self-esteem part and am working toward self-actualization.  So, my mental efforts are luxuriously focused on my own development.  Like all people, when I choose to fight, it’s because of something that threatens my own physical or mental well-being, but I am incredibly fortunate that I’m not threatened much.  My angst tends to be around things I see that just don’t feel “right”, yet the negative effect is mostly on others, not on me.

Where am I going with all of this, you ask?  Let go back to the pandemic.  Early on, I was incredibly fearful for my own safety and, of course, for that of those close to me.  We knew so little about how the virus worked and had no natural protection.  Every day was driven by angst-ridden personal fear for basic physiological safety—right back down on the first rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy.  Each infection and death recorded felt personal.  It felt like the Grim Reaper was circling and coming for me.  Over time, as the numbers rose yet I stayed safe, the edge came off.  You can only hold your breath for so long and after a while, the negative impacts of the mitigation efforts started to overwhelm my fear of COVID.  We all started to rationalize and normalize the risk, as we do all the time.  How many of us think about the risk of serious injury in a car accident every time we decide to get behind the wheel?  It’s higher than we’d like to think but if we fixated on it, we’d probably never get in a car.  So, we make the choice to accept that risk, do our best to control what can control, and head to the grocery store.  The same seems to have happened with COVID—a combination of rationalizations (some of which are indeed appropriate) and normalizations.

The problem, of course, is that each time we accept a risk and nothing happens, we are tempted to accept a little more risk.  It’s kind of like a toddler testing the boundaries of his parents’ patience.  He will push until he hits that boundary and there are consequences.  For us adults, though, normalizing those risks and consequences can ultimately have devastating long term impact.  Once we realize that those negative impacts are real and consequential (meaning they impact us directly), changing course can be really difficult.  I talked last time about how long term normalization of unhealthy food and eating habits has led to a really unhealthy population.  Chronic underinvestment in our infrastructure has led to a normalization of addressing things like water mains and bridges only when they fail.  The people fighting hard for change are usually the ones negatively impacted by whatever the rest of us have chosen to normalize.  Must we wait for the impact to hit us before we insist that something isn’t right?  I’m being intentionally vague here since I want each of you to think about what YOU have allowed to normalize that maybe you shouldn’t accept.  Is it something about your own behavior or choices?  It is something societal, like access to healthcare or food insecurity or education?  Is it some policy or strategic or even social norm at work?  Find something that is important to you and decide to just not accept it anymore.  The frog is smart enough to jump out of the boiling water.  Are we?

One thing that have noticed as my years in retirement march onward is that my comfort zone is continually shrinking.  By “comfort zone” I mean tasks and activities that I pursue with no dread, no hesitation, and that do not tax my coping skills much at all.  When I was younger—particularly during my working years—I clearly had a huge comfort zone.  I think back over some of the things I did regularly and know that those same activities today would push me into heart palpitations.  Back in the good ole ‘90s, I would routinely fly out to cities I’d never been to before, armed with only an Avis map and handwritten directions from the customer, and drive all over creation looking for their site.  Today, if I leave the house without my cell phone to go one mile to the grocery store, I feel ridiculously vulnerable.  When I had responsibility for a business in New Jersey, I used to drive out there a few days a week traveling with morning commuting traffic heading into NYC.  Talk about a harrowing drive!  Now, if need to drive a four mile stretch on the Turnpike in the middle of the morning on a Tuesday (when there are maybe three other cars on the road), I stay in the right lane and grip the steering wheel for dear life.

What has happened to me?  What happened to the single 35-year-old woman who said an enthusiastic “Yes!” to moving by herself to Mexico?  I spoke no more Spanish than “Hola!” and “Dondé está el baño?”  The job was horrifically ill defined and the best I could expect to do was to only disappoint everyone a little.  And yet, off I went!  Today, I freak out navigating a direct flight to Atlanta to visit my family.  Maybe the real question I need to answer is not “What has happened to me?” but “Why does it matter?”  So that’s what we are going to explore today.

This whole topic has been on my mind lately because Friday I gave a lunchtime webinar for ALMA (The Association of Laboratory Managers).  This was the first time I’d give a seminar in about a year and, believe me, the couple of webinars I did last fall for Lab Manager magazine were equally horrifying.  I am well aware that for most people, giving a public presentation is more fear inducing that the prospect of dying (seriously!), but I had gotten really comfortable with public speaking.  I spent my whole career giving presentations.  By the time I retired, I could get up and spontaneously give a 45 minute seminar on something I knew virtually nothing about using slides someone else put together.  The audience would shed tears of joy and throw flowers at my feet.  I was that good at public speaking! 

By comparison, let me describe for you what these last couple of weeks have been like preparing for this on-line seminar.  To start, I am a very linear thinker and when something is weighing heavily on my mind, I can think of nothing else until it is done.  I know this about myself, which is why I didn’t sit down to draft the slides until a couple of weeks before the presentation date.  I was completely incapable of doing any other task on my To-Do list because all of my energy was consumed by thinking about this seminar.  It’s like if I took the time to call McAfee to negotiate a renewal of my anti-virus software that I would somehow have no capacity left to do an effective job on the webinar.  I continued to bathe regularly and call my Mom every night, but that was about it.  Trish was extremely patient, even when she knew I was sort of using the webinar as an excuse. (“I can’t cook dinner tonight.  You know, webinar in 10 days and all.”)  DDay-2, I sat myself down to do a dry run.  I stumbled awkwardly through my slides, although I did hit my 40 minute target.  For the next 24 hours, I played games on my iPad while I thought through slide transitions.  DDay-1, I did another dry run and this time it went quite smoothly.  I managed to sleep that night without pharmaceutical intervention but did manage to bite my tongue (imagine that), raising a nice painful ulcer.  Yay. 

On the Big Day, I was bundle of nerves.  What if I lose my place or forget something important that I want to say?  What if I start to ramble or, worse, rush along and finish too quickly?  I remembered my first public presentation very early in my career.  I was so nervous that I motored through a 20 minute presentation in 10 minutes.  I think I only took one breath during the whole thing.  Well, spoiler alert, it went fine.  I settled in quickly, made a few good jokes, told a bunch of stories, and only forgot a few things or snubbed a few transitions.  Since this was a webinar, I was speaking into the Great Void so I can’t tell for sure how the seminar was received.  However, I did get some positive feedback through chat, had a whole bunch of hits on the blog site and even picked up a new subscriber (my personal measure of success).  The sense of relief I felt that afternoon was like having successfully defended my PhD thesis!

So why does all this matter?  Well, I accepted the invitation to do this seminar for two reasons.  The first being that I was flattered to be asked and wanted to say yes.  The second is that I instinctively know how important it is to push myself outside of my comfort zone.  This was effortless when I was younger!  I just did what I needed to do.  There was no fear or at least fear didn’t stop me.  I don’t want to get more and more fearful as I get older.  I don’t want my sphere of activity to get narrower and narrower.  Your comfort zone is like a muscle.  If you don’t stress it regularly, it gets weaker.  And a weaker comfort zone means that your range of experiences and richness in your life gets weaker, too.  No, I didn’t work this hard for so many years to let my world close in on me.  So I push.  Probably not often enough nor hard enough, but I have been trying to say “yes” more often than “no”.  This is how I learn.  This is how I grow.  This is how more wonderful people and experiences and general richness come into my life.

Trish, bless her, kept her mouth shut throughout all of this.  She didn’t say, “What is wrong with you?  This should be a piece of cake for you!”  She knew instinctively to not judge someone else when they are pushing outside of their comfort zone and that’s an important message as well.  No one should be ridiculed or shamed for struggling with something that you may find easy to do.  If someone is uncomfortable, they are truly uncomfortable and they are not going to get past it through shame.  What they need from you is validation, encouragement, and, if needed, help finding a workaround if the trigger is just too much.

I will leave you with this thought:  don’t let the fear of being outside your comfort zone stop you.  If you don’t push back against those walls, they will continue to close in on you.  Don’t let that happen.  Make yourself drive downtown every now and then.  Do something that you dread—you will most likely feel very glad you did so and find that it wasn’t really all that bad.  And, sure—say “yes” to giving that presentation!