Category Archives: leadership

For Real — Go High

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

Four years ago I started experiencing contempt from some people.  “Trumped That Bitch” and other pejoratives reverberated.  Daughter asked earnestly if we, natural born citizens, would be deported.  Random people asked me if I speak English, and people who look like me all across the country were yelled at, by total strangers, to go back to China.  We have been verbally and physically assaulted with escalating frequency since then.

Today, my phone vibrated with celebratory text threads.  Friend Unicorn labelled the experience a collective catharsis.  That made me consider… “I hope we can be less vindictive than the other side was last time,” I replied.  Friend Pegasus wrote back, “I believe we will be because the person leading will promote it.”  Exactly.  Leaders set the example.  Character really matters.  My friends and I feel soothed already, like we can finally take a breath and a pee break, refreshed for the next leg on the race toward progress.  Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s speeches tonight further lifted our hopes and enthusiasm for healing and reconciliation.

I thought of my conservative friends throughout the day and evening, wondering how they’re doing.  I checked in with a few.  Some expressed disappointment and grief.  I can relate.  I also remember worrying about and praying for the Obamas’ safety immediately after the Grant Park celebration in 2008, and still do today.  Flashes of fear for Biden’s and especially Harris’s safety flared tonight. 

74 days until transfer of power.  Will it be peaceful?  I believe we each have more agency over this than we think.  Ignore agitators—give them no platform.  Amplify and uplift the peacemakers.  We’ve got serious work to do, together.  Stay focused; allow no distractions.  Go High—really—for all our sakes.

Postmortem as Prenatal

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

Feedback and root cause analysis:  If you’re like most people I know, you love neither.  I relish the former; my friend revels in the latter.  We make a great team!  We conducted a series of both recently, and yet another complementary relational phenomenon occurred to me:  These are not concluding activities; they are initiating.

Many of us procrastinate and dread feedback—both the giving and the getting.  On the other side of dread and gnashing of teeth, we sigh with relief when it’s ‘over.’  For more complex issues, just one session may not suffice—we must dig deeper—ask more questions, really dissect out the nerves, vessels, and tumors.  A good postmortem requires patience, curiosity, and a nimble beginner’s mind.  We never know what will emerge, and we follow clues with a balance of enthusiasm and realism.

So many times in the past week someone has told me, “This is very good information,” when I have either given or described feedback I received.  Very good indeed, and sometimes painful and humbling.  I did not sigh with relief and closure.  I inhaled deeply and prepared to contemplate longer—to gestate.  The figurative autopsies I assisted in this week served as developmental studies of our paths to current state. They shed light on the potential anatomy of better processes, understanding, and collaboration.

We dread the hard conversations.  We think if we can just get through them, we can be free and slink away.  But the joyfully ironic truth is, hard conversations are exciting and inviting beginnings.  If we both steel and soften ourselves to pass through these jagged archways, myriad new possibilities beckon.  We get to be the architects, together, of a much healthier new future.

Count Higher Than Two

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

I’m starting to hear echoes of 2016, when a friend posted, “Well, now we know where the dumb people live.”  To some, if you voted this year to re-elect the president you are wholly and irrevocably:  stupid, ignorant, racist, misogynist, monstrous, evil—and more.  You are judged and defined solely by this one action.  Nothing else need be known about you; you are garbage. 

It’s us vs. them, good vs. evil, either/or, with us or against us.

This profound yet effortless oversimplification, this refusal to acknowledge, let alone explore, the inherent complexity of any given individual, poisons us all too easily.  It is the venomous root of polarization.  David Blankenhorn, co-founder of Braver Angels, describes it so well in his 2016 essay, “The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People”.  He asserts that “binary thinking—the tendency to divide everything into two mutually antagonistic categories”—is the most dangerous habit of polarization.

It’s to the point where I myself feel unsafe to raise any nonconforming perspective among liberals, lest I’m attacked for upholding the toxic patriarchy I profess to oppose. How ironic that the movement of tolerance and inclusion, that claims acceptance and diversity as core values, not only cannot tolerate but violently rejects even benign and earnest internal dissent.

Can we see our political opponents as more than a malevolent monolith?  Can we allow for complex experiences we don’t understand?  Can we withhold judgment long enough to recognize and honor our shared humanity, before we respectfully condemn each other’s wrong-headed ideas?

Can we ‘count higher than two’ in our attitudes and interactions?  Our mutual survival may depend on it, and I know so few people willing to try.

Our voting choice was binary.  Our thoughts, emotions, speech, actions, and relationships should not be.