0011 | The Boss's Boss (a warranted apology)

Once upon a time in another blog--www.billytakesthesouth.blogspot.com--I made a big fuss and ruckus about unwarranted apologies and how I was done with all that and was living my life and speaking my truth and yada yada blah blah blah.

It's not that the rant doesn't still hold, but this morning I have a fully warranted apology to work. Last night Ben and I had dinner with our boss's boss. And his lovely wife. And we stayed over at his guest house. And we're going hiking with him today. And we listened to each other's bands. And we talked for hours and hours about cool ideas and work and cool ideas about work. And I called a colleague a dick. And I woke up with a stone in my belly about it. 

True or not, that's not really the point. The point is that I used my powers for evil instead of good, and I woke up feeling in my gut that I have been unfair and graceless, neither of which are qualities I want to develop in myself. 

I will, of course, take this apology with me to breakfast, hopefully better crafted during a vigorous tooth-scrubbing and my daily morning chat with Ben. 

This is such a series of joys and embarrassments that is me growing up after a lifetime of childhood. Some people have parents for this. For the sake of the world at large, I sure hope your kids do. 

0010 | Dear Management (you know who you are)

The case for employee engagement is not in the hundreds of Gallup and Deloitte and Gartner’s polls that tells us with metric tons of data that your business will continue to suffer unless you make connections with your people. You already know that by building trust with the people who work for and with you increases productivity, sales, safety, retention, attractiveness to top talent, and everything else that makes winning 202% more likely. You already know that according to most human capital polls, employee disengagement is the number one issue facing global companies for the last four years running. The numbers are not the case for paying attention to employee engagement. The case for caring about whether or not your employees are engaged is standing right in front of you. Hi, my name is James. Don’t look behind you, because according to all those polls, I am one of the 75% of your people who are either beginning, or have already decided, to stop caring about your business. It’s not that we don’t care about your business. We just don't really care about you anymore. We didn’t start out that way. We started out ready to engage, ready to share ideas, ready to solve problems together.

And then after a few conversations a pattern emerged. When I leave a conversation with you, after being interrupted countless times, I feel as though you have asked few or no questions about what is important to me and you have spent your conversational efforts asserting your own value rather than collaborating to understand how I can help you in ways you may not have already thought of. You enter conversations with assumptions that you make no attempt to dispel, and so you leave conversations no more enriched than when you entered. It seems like a terrible waste of your time. Mine, too. In the time you have spent aggrandizing your own experience, your own expertise, your own credentials, I have been observing that you lack inquisitiveness, imagination, and the ability to connect. 

It is conversations like these that make me not want to work on your team. When I leave your team, it will not be because of the pay, the travel, the career path, the work, or employee satisfactions scores that can be measured or quantified. I will leave because of the gut feeling that my time is better spent working with people who care to understand what is important to me, just as I care about what is important to them. I will leave this job because the conversations I have with you are one-sided and ultimately unfulfilling.

I am enthusiastically engaged right now in spite of you, not because of you. Like most of your best and brightest, I will eventually take my brains, my energy, and my new-found experience elsewhere in search of an organization that is guided the basic business principle that people are almost any company’s greatest resource. No amount of focus on the numbers and metrics—the symptoms of organizational health or sickness—will change the core values and practices that drive those metrics. I will leave your team because I want to be on a winning team, and—among other things—winning teams have great conversations.

0009 | Forty-two. Forty-two. Forty-two.

It's a mantra for today. A reminder. I am working in a world in which the qualities of the creative are openly diminished. There is an explicit demand for talent, and creativity, for insight into what people will respond to, for an enhanced experience, and then an implicit demand for conformity, insensitivity, and relative disengagement. And corporate management wonders why their projects go sideways and people are so terribly unhappy and sick. It is a world full of lies and posturing, and for some reason, I have knocked on its door, it has invited me in, and I have strolled willingly into the the muck.

There is a lesson for me here. In a world of people with an authority that I can either recognize or not, I can choose not to believe their devaluing of the qualities that they desired in the first place. I am sensitive. I take things personally. I am very personal. I am actually extraordinarily sensitive. These traits are intrinsic to my intelligence, not in spite of it. This is a time for me to learn to articulate the value of what I bring and not let myself be convinced that somehow I am less for being a different kind of brilliant. This is a chance for me to learn a mindfulness that I have not had to learn yet. To be self-aware when I find myself morphing into something less myself, less beautiful, more base. I have to find kinder, clearer ways to communicate with people who function at a lower EQ. Those words I conjure cannot be simply words: calm, clear, kind, inquisitive. I have to live them, especially when the world is pressing on me to be otherwise. I'm going to find a punching bag now. (What? This shit doesn't just go away because I looked at it. I still have to do the work.)

0008 | Monday means Monday again

I have a feeling Ben is awake, but in case he is getting even the tiniest bit of rest, I'm writing here instead of texting him. It's not quite 5:00am. I'm at the airport on my way to Dallas and my one week old job at which I am pretty sure I will suck for at least another week or two. Ben is in Salt Lake City with his brother. His brother's little girl was struck and killed by a car on Saturday night, and if I keep typing, I will start crying in the airport. I can't seem to stop feeling the family's heartache.

Last night I talked to Lindsey on the phone. About senseless death, the new job, Ben being away, everything frightening me. It is astounding to me how the overwhelm of life can be so easily mitigated by the simple act of speaking your fears aloud. All of a sudden, when I heard my troubles as words, they seemed smaller and more manageable. Lindsey reminded me that everything is temporary. Very Stoic of her. Or zen. And even the temporal act of speaking to another human being is a way of adding the dimension of time to--and thus limiting the power of--whatever vexes me. 

Also, I had a drink of gin, which turned out to be a soothing tonic for the nerves. Only a few days to get through until I see Ben and the world has a chance at making sense. It's 5:15am. A good night's sleep would go a long way toward sanity. 

0007 | New job = new corporate bio!

I just started my first week at a new consulting job. It's been a year since I have set foot in an office, and I can't say I love it. What a bundle of bad habits, unchecked impulses, and imbalance most people are. I may start sitting on a tack just to remember to keep breathing--corporate is not the healthiest of environments. However, I crave engagement, and this is engagement at a fairly high level. I enjoy that. Sitting on a tack will only work for so long, though. Like any human, I will grow accustomed to any amount of chronic discomfort if I don't pay attention.

First silly task: write my own bio for my introduction to the team. Like a fresh tack in the keister. Here we go, corporate America. I'm ready for you this time. Let's not fight... I'm so far beyond that now. Besides, I'm killin' it in the pencil skirts.

I’m delighted to join the K2 Services Organization as a Business Analyst. With a background in the fashion retail and health & wellness industries, I come to the team with experience in national merchandising and supply chain, enterprise business analysis, and multi-channel business process architecture, as well as an incurable inquisitiveness and a strong predisposition to excellent and meaningful work, fearless engagement, and a general insistence on things making sense. My mission in life is to increase joy, decrease suffering, and learn incessantly. I live with Ben Hillman, my wild-maned husband, in the Sonoran desert, where we write, stitch, hammer, contemplate, photograph, and pickle things, and collectively lose more hair in a single day than you have on your entire head.

0006 | Article notes on hiring

It occurs to me that the discipline of writing about that which I am exploring is largely lost when I don't write anything. It suggests I am an not exploring anything. Sometimes that's true. I spent a good deal of yesterday watching Netflix and eating snacks. After Ben returned from his first trip to Dallas last week, I spent most of the weekend giddy that he was home and we could have conversations about everything. Why write when I can chatter ceaselessly? Yesterday we woke up at 3:30am to have breakfast together before his flight back to Dallas. I didn't sleep much the night before. I do this to myself. I was remarkably useless the rest of the day, functioning only well enough to get through a typical day in a typical office.

0005 | Letter to my cousin, the writer

Jeffrey shared with me read a deeply personal and wildly beautiful essay that he isn't ready to publish, and sent this note:

I don't know whether I will publish the essay I wrote or not—there are upsides and downsides. I've spent a bunch of time revising and rewriting this weekend. Probably it's fear that inhibits me most. Ugh. xox

In typical fashion, I sent back a metric boat ton of words. Sometimes it is absolutely mortifying being me. 

Lucky you--I'm not very good with consistently writing, so you'll not have missed anything if you check in every six months or so. Besides, knowing there is an audience is very inhibiting for me. You and Ben are the only ones, and you terrify me (in the good way that makes me use the spell-check function).

On fear: you published a book about being a gay Christian before telling the family you're gay. You underestimate your own courage. I think the inhibiting factor this time is that you are an editor and a storyteller, and this story is incomplete. To me, this feels like the beginning of something, as though you have chipped the surface of something extraordinary inside yourself. This essay feels like an announcement that you are breaking new ground on some ongoing archaeological dig, but you haven't really uncovered the treasures beneath all the dirt. Excavate! There is so much to uncover in there. It will be filthy and unintelligible at first, but there really are remarkable treasures and entire civilizations just waiting beneath. If you fear that this essay is what it appears to be--a start--and that you will be committed to further exploration of these raw pieces of yourself, you are rightly afraid. 

This shit is not for the faint of heart. You will either find that you are unworthy of love (terrible, and terribly unlikely), or you will find that you are as rare and wonderful as everyone who knows you believes you to be, in which case you will recognize the weight of your own responsibility in this world (terrifying, but in a powerful, change yourself and your world sort of way). What you won't find is that there is nothing in there worth looking at. You will come across ugly things that you can choose to ignore, transform, or destroy. You will come across beautiful things that you can choose to honor and cultivate or let atrophy. That's the scariest thing, taking responsibility for choosing, the idea that the person you end up becoming is the one you chose to become. Yikes! Did I just write a letter to myself and squeeze it into your email? Oopsie.

Not that you asked, but I have absolutely no opinion on whether or not you should publish (swallow your shock!). My guess is that you will publish at some point, in part because you already know the power of reading your own voice into being. Not suggesting that it is your responsibility to write so that other people who do not have the words to voice their own truths can learn the words from you, but I don't think there is a much better reason to do work than to help people.That said, it's your inner life. I just feel lucky to have had a peek; it's lovely.

Okay, time for a pedicure!
xo

0004 | Pew pew

Not all of these entries will be worth a damn. Sometimes I'll just have to get something off my mind. Some days looking outward takes up the space that looking inward took the day before. Or I don't want to record the most honest thing for posterity. That shit's private, man.

I haven't reached anything that's too precious to examine out loud yet. Even still, sometimes I hit a rich vein, sometimes I'm just digging. I think today I'm just showing up and working the program. Not that program. Ben and I will probably enjoy a yummy bourbon this evening and watch the sun set behind the western mountain range.

I had a third phone interview with K2 today. My brain is fully engaged. I am on fire. I might throw up. Just considering going back to work in corporate America sends me into a spin. I'm vibrating and having a difficult time pinpointing whether it's fear, excitement, or a visceral reaction to the idea of re-entering a world that largely resists beauty and soul with all of its might. Maybe it's a combination of all three.

Reading my list of what would drive me to accept a position in corporate America, I decided it was too silly and full of corporate propaganda to publish. Tucked among some really good and some terribly stupid reasons for wanting to go back to work, I am unable to deny the fact that I, in my love of shape-shifting, look forward to a new professional wardrobe. A pencil skirt and classic, pointy heels make me feel invincible. I'd feel differently if I was being chased down a dark alley in such an outfit, but in front of a whiteboard, the world is my oyster.

And among the reasons I wouldn't go back? It's too embarrassing. Don't make me say it. I really hate this part.

Fear. The dumbest reast reason in the world not to do a thing that isn't going to kill you or cause you harm. Do I fear that office life will suck my soul? Not in the least. My soul is enormous. I fear failure. The part in the beginning when you don't know anything. The looking like a fool part. Is this a realistic fear? I don't know. I don't know in situations where you're supposed to know is generally yes. I have ridiculously low self-confidence in a world that measures people by their external ambitions and quantifiable achievements rather than the juicy, sticky stuff like curiosity, creativity, compassion, capacity for love. I am not at all arguing that there is no place for ambition and achievements--I just get a litlle freaked out in a crowd, especially when I'm in the minority. I take responsilibilty for my own feelings about it.

What do I have to prove? What do I have to gain? What do I have to lose? Where does my ego fit in to all this? Hopefully not right smack in the middle of everything. I'll be interrogating myself for the answer to that on my walk this evening.

I had to meditate for a few minutes before my phone call because my heart was racing and my mind was wandering at high speeds, a sure way to get into an accident. I gave myself a little mantra for the call: I seek clarity; I desire nothing. It helped. And I'm still working on that one three hours after the call ended.

I should really choose to focus my attention where it is required. I'm pretty sure that in the bigger picture, my anxiety over sucking in a corporate setting is both unfounded and ridiculous. It's ridiculous because it doesn't really matter. There are more important questions to be asked and answered. What is my super power? My secret weapon? What is my life's work? What do I enjoy? What do I love? What's important? What really, really matters? It seems that asking questions might just be my life's work. It is what I appear to do best, what I most enjoy.

So, where do I want to point this ray gun?

0003 | Self-destruct (that didn't take long, did it?)

Remember how yesterday I said I need people? What I really should have said was that I need person.

I am historically terrible at being alone. I have done the therapy to prove it. Love, specifically oxytocin, is my drug of choice. And Ben has been traveling for work this week. Today is day 4. It is no coincidence that today is Day 0003 of the blog. Ben is in Dallas getting high on fast-paced, high level engagement. I am here in the desert quietly looking into the infinity of my own soul and trying to capture some of it in writing before I drown it out with some other, less optimal drug like alcohol, hyperactivity, TV, or anxiety. I know why writers drink and housewives pop pills.

We live next door to a sweet and frantic flurry of nerves, worry, and a life generally fraught with frustration. When I picture her in my mind, I see a drowning person kicking and clawing at still water, fighting wild-blindly to stay afloat when all she would have to do is be still enough to take a breath and the whole struggle would cease. Ironically, she was once a competitive swimmer and still swims daily for exercise. She and her husband are logistically co-dependent but emotionally estranged, presumably tethered to each other by the resentment and daily battle of raising the brilliant child they made together a decade ago, a child who is unexpectedly gorgeous and not unpredictably caught between their two clashing cultures and personalities. Since we moved in, I have imagined that her uptight, white lady energy is at least partially responsible for their marital distress. I see through a different lens today. Whatever the reason they no longer choose to listen to each other, it is quite possible that her palpable anxiety--the painful frequency of the psychic hum in which she exists--is not only a cause, but also an effect. I suspect that her frustration is a mask. I suspect this because I do it, too. My favorite flavor is slightly different, but I get the gist of self-destruction, either slowly or dramatically, to avoid grappling with the real thing, whatever that is. Ben says there's always a thing before the thing. My thing is loneliness. That's not the thing before the thing. It's just the thing before the bourbon.

We have no bourbon in the house. This week, instead of following my first impulse to drink a cocktail first thing in the morning because I wake up and reach over and can't feel Ben's toes with my toes or smile at him or tell him about the most recent in a series of crazy dreams, I postpone my fix and opt for sleep deprivation, shunning the empty, Benless bed in favor of binge-watching prison television drama from the sofa and snacking without the benefit of inhibition. Salted butter on rice cakes tastes like popcorn! I do not function gracefully on fewer than eight hours of full-on, deep, yummy sleep. I prefer nine. Last night I stayed up until two a.m. drinking iced decaf lattes and watching inmates plan their escape. I knew I would hurt this morning. I do. I still woke up as the sun was rising and went for my morning walk around the basin, cranky and contemplating what I'd done to myself and why. (See above)

Here's what I came up with. This self-destruction--however it takes shape--is an old, bad habit, a rusty tool that has outlived its usefulness. It needs to be thrown out to make room for tools that actually work. It, like everything else, warrants interrogation. So I walked around the basin asking myself questions and listening for the answers that feel true.

What if I just sat with the loneliness for a minute and didn't avoid it? Would it be so bad? What if I found that the real thing wasn't loneliness, but fear of loneliness? What if it wasn't even fear of loneliness, but fear of abandonment, of being left alone? What if it was more than that? What if it was some old, terrible suspicion that people who have left (Oh, yeah... I'm lookin' at you, Dad), left because I wasn't worthy of love? (Ah ha! The thing before the thing!) But what if I am worthy of love? What if I always was? What if being alone and being worthy of love can both be true at the same time? Can't it be true for other people? Then why couldn't it be true for me? (Why can't I just take a walk and enjoy the sunrise without blowing up my own brain and smashing all my precious ideas to bits?)

What if, one at a time, every destructive, useless, diminishing belief to which I cling can be named and interrogated and rendered powerless so that I can go about my life and quite literally stop losing sleep over it? Doesn't that sound like increased joy, decreased suffering? What if I look at everything square in the face as though either changing it or being changed by it is part of my reason for being alive? Wouldn't that look like evolution?

0002 | Beautiful people

People are enormous when you unzip them.

In the past week, since reading Fierce Conversations, I have had the incredible fortune to have an amazing conversation with my friend, Lindsey, no fewer than several dozen wildly fantastic conversations with Ben, and a heart-swelling 90-minute FaceTime with my cousin, Jeff. The last conversation was so raw and searching and unbridled that I hung up sobbing, not out of sadness, but because I couldn't stop expanding. This also happens with Ben. I get full and I have to get bigger just to know these people.

In these most recent conversations, I am discovering that I already have in my life the most beautiful beings, and I may be just now meeting them for the first time. While I am sitting with them, listening, inquiring, wanting more of them, they are unfolding right in front of me, and in turn I am expanding to accommodate the depth and force of their beauty.

I forgot to thank Jeffrey for our conversation. I will go back to him and do that. He was so open and so real. He trusted that he could show me the parts of him that he judges the most harshly and that I would still love him. And I do. And here's the thing of it: in that moment of simply listening and letting my heart expand, the significance of my existence also expanded.

Ben and I are re-engaging with the world after nearly a year of quiet isolation in the desert. It occurs to me that doing so is necessary to our very survival. In some cosmic way we are like ants. To an ant no colony means no purpose. With no purpose, life has no significance. They just die. If my purpose is to learn unceasingly, to perpetually evolve, to increase joy, and to decrease suffering, I need engagement, people, a connection to the world around me, generally one person at a time. The cost of it all seems so simple. I am required to show up and listen, to--as much as is possible between humans--see people as they really are. It is in listening and the seeing that I become important.

I have never kept a gratitude journal. While I don't think this log is necessarily that, writing a little bit of all this down feels like the start of a good practice.

0001 | Soooo, about this meditation...

This is a retrospective and continued documentation of my journey inward. Predictably, there are very few photographs.

Let's level-set. I know exactly or nearly nothing. This is pure discovery all day, every day. This is my attempt to lay aside ego, challenge my own truths to see if they hold up, and become a better human being. 

I want to unhinge my rusty, stubborn, useless beliefs, habits, assumptions, practices, and ideas. These antiquated tools do not serve my purpose: To increase joy. To decrease suffering. Mine and others'. I want to be changed. I crave transformation. I require evolution, perpetual development. I supposed by that definition, I may never really mature. So be it.

I've been exploring new tools. A scalpel here, a hammer there. Trying not to let myself get away with too much. I meditated today. That's new as of this year. On the whole, I don't find this itchy business of being still and listening and looking within particularly comfortable. But the joy--the sheer, elemental, unadulterated, raw, pulsing joy of digging around and inside and finding something beautiful and good and worth the space it takes up in my chest--this joy seems to merit the squirmy discomfort of silence, a discomfort I have been unlearning one day at a time.

I am reading Susan Scott and delighting that in one little giant book, in her one little giant lifetime, she has managed to pack in so many lifetimes of wisdom and a clarity of perspective that turns a short list of principles for deeper, more meaningful conversations into a thrilling page-turner. Perhaps this is because with every page I find myself discovering more and more about myself (a subject I deem infinitely fascinating to myself). I am especially struck by Scott's ideas on developing an awareness of one's emotional wake.  

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." -Maya Angelou

(Off-topic: I had a funny little dream in which I was taking a drawing class with easels and colorful sticks of pigment and everything and Susan Scott was the teacher. In my dream she was this spunky, tiny, old-as-the-hills, white-haired sage who somewhat resembled Penny Simkin, the legendary doula, activist, and teacher after whom Bastyr's Simkin Center is named. It had occurred to me earlier while awake that Susan Scott is somewhat of a doula in her own right. Her perspective and principles around fostering meaningful conversations are deeply aligned with the principles of being a birth doula. Among other functions, a doula facilitates an environment in which the mother is empowered and safe to make her own choices about her birth experience. In natural childbirth with little or no pharmaceutical intervention speeding or slowing the process or alleviating physical discomfort, the mother and baby are free to chemically "converse"--they exchange hormonal signals, sometimes with lengthy pauses--and work together so that the baby can be born with maximum joy, minimal suffering (not to be confused with pain), and a deep connection to the mother. All of this is discussion for another day.)

The recognition of my own emotional wake has been one of my meditations over the past two weeks; the idea that during each interaction with another human being, no matter how brief, we imprint upon each other feelings that we and they may carry around for minutes or a lifetime, either consciously or not. It is as though our instruments ring out into the world and, without trying and sometimes without knowing, we tune each other to our own frequencies. I suppose meditation (or reflection or prayer, depending on your faith and how you choose to go about these things) can be a form of tuning one's instrument. I am trying to observe my own frequency before I step out in to the world, before I engage, much as I might check the mirror to make sure my hair isn't, well, too enormous and I don't have some bit of leafy green vegetable stuck between my teeth. It feels important. Also new. This one is pretty clunky, really, so I might as well get started already. We have so very little time and so very much to learn and unlearn. 

Incidentally, people will mostly tell me quite nicely when I have a teensy bit of uncomely something stuck in my teeth, but it is so rare that when I'm being a little bit of an asshole anyone will come right out and just tell me so. Ben does, and he does it with such love and humor and patience that it's hard not to laugh at myself and throw my arms around him in gratitude. I want to be a jerk even less than I want to walk around grinning with broccoli in my teeth.

People are our mirrors, and we are theirs. I am sitting with that thought today. Some of the fairly decent and not entirely boring people I enjoy least are those who reflect back to me something of myself I don't much care to see. It's in their faces, in their reactions to my words or tone or expression, hackles rising, or a wall going up, or avoidance, or indifference, or fear (I can be relentlessly "helpful"). I've shown them something ugly--generally some judgement or a jagged, crusty piece of ego--and they are showing me with their response that I'm doing it. I have made the space around myself unsafe. Maybe they have done the same. Maybe I need to check my frequency, in some cases offer an apology, start over with better intent. For better or worse, most people can't seem to help themselves but react to what they encounter in others. And they generally respond with their best stuff when I am giving them my best stuff. At the most basic level, it happens at the grocery store all the time. I smile, people smile back. Oversimplified, it's very often true that you get what you give.

And then there are people I absolutely adore. The people who radiate their best selves like beacons and we reflect and amplify their beauty with our best selves. The people who make it safe to unfold, to ring out. You are the rare and precious people in this world who change the rest of us by making yourselves a safe place to evolve and grow and get it wrong sometimes. You increase joy. You neither invite nor harbor suffering. You reject fear and you embrace the gritty discomfort of work and silence, which are sometimes the same thing. You let love change you. You leave the most beautiful wake. You do it on purpose. Thank you. Thank you every day. I'm watching. I'm listening. I'm reading. I'm learning from you. (No pressure.)

Please help me become better at these conversations that are our relationship. Hold me to this commitment, and tell me when I miss:

I will engage fully, with loving intent, and with gratitude that we are here right now, together. I will make a sincere effort to bring you my truest, best self and make the space around me a safe place for your truest, best self to visit; I will expect the same in return. I will make mistakes (and for the love of God, please let me in on them when I am too dull to see them myself!). I will apologize. I will be patient with your mistakes and open to your apologies. I will be honest about what I feel, and honor my feelings. I will listen to what you feel, and honor your feelings. I will listen to what you say and seek to understand it. I will try to hear what you are not saying. I will ask questions. Oh, will I ever ask questions. I will respect that we have chosen to engage one another in meaningful conversation, even when we disagree with one another's ideas. I will seek to be positively changed by our conversations, rather than to change you. I will leave our conversations richer for what I have learned about and from you, and about and from myself. I will appreciate you and what you bring. I will say thank you.