Category Archives: relationship

Your Best Self Reflected

Posted on by
Reply

I share below a message to my friend who requested my stories of when I have seen them at their best, as part of a leadership program they have begun. I hope my response serves their puproses and goals. I share here because reflections like this, between friends, nourish our souls mutually. The experience makes me consider others for whom I might do this exercise, so that I may deepen my own appreciation for them, and thus present more openly, humbly, and lovingly to them. There are definitely relationships in my life that could benefit from this boost of connection.

My question for you, Dear Readers:
Whom would you ask to tell their stories of you at your best, and how would those stories affect you, them, and your relationships?
I have only now asked myself this question, and I look forward to what emerges hereafter. Maybe I’ll even write about it sometime. 🙂

Onward:

—–

My Dear Friend,

Thank you for your patience for this feedback.  I apologize for the delay—I wanted it to be worthy of your review! 😜

On 21 May I wrote my thoughts stream-of-consciousness style, wanted to get the notes down before writing them out for you formally.  I’ve done this more lately with writing to others—like a first draft.  Then I find that after I’ve gotten it out, I’m less motivated to go back and edit/polish.  Fascinating!  I bet this is a part of my process that will require management if I’m actually going to write a whole book—so THANK YOU for helping me discover it! 😜  But this message is supposed to be about YOU… 😉

Please find below photos of the journaling.  They are not stories, exactly, but they are honest reflections of the time I have spent with you since we met back in 2017.  I hope the descriptions in ink serve the purpose and goals of the exercise—telling you stories of when I have experienced you at your best?  

What a GIFT our relationship is to me, because my only​ experience of you, I realize now, is you at your best– it’s you in friendship.  ​​It’s you in Agape loving connection, for no other purpose than that, for its own sake… Well, for the sake of living a life of meaning, in accordance with your core values and integrity…  My story of us, of our friendship, is that we are here to uphold each other.  We serve each other as pillars of validation, exploration, curiosity, learning, and growth.  It doesn’t matter what we’re dealing with in our lives, what’s happening in our other relationships—our friendship is both separate from and closely tied to all of it—does that make sense?  

​I write below about your caring, your patience, your trust.  I see now that I left out your practice of judgment.  I value withholding judgment, especially the kind that makes us closed to new information and experience in our relationships.  I also recognize the value of judgment in a different sense—the reconciliation and navigation of our observations and perceptions with and against our values and goals.  You don’t judge people and their actions/behaviors as good or bad.  You don’t label people and categorize them, write them off—like EVER!   Rather, you continuously observe, assess, and attune.  You actively seek both the consonance and dissonance that lead to insight and right action!  ‘Discernment’ keeps coming up for me now, as I attempt to summarize my ‘story’ of you at your best. 

sigh​

So lucky, so thankful.  Exercises like this, if they benefit you, the receiver at all, definitely also benefit us, the ‘givers.’  Reflection on relationship nourishes my soul—OMG I just live for it!

It’s raining outside today, and I feel positively lit—from inside and out, the fire of connection burning slow and bright, tended and stoked consistently with love from all around.  Going now to meet (Friend), another bright light like you.

Wishing you everything good, everything you need to keep your own fires lit and burning bright, my dear friend!!  Can’t wait to see you again and continue the conversation!

Blessings and peace, and love to you and all of yours–

❤️ Cathy xo

Giving the A

Posted on by
1

What grades do we give one another in life?

It seems like a silly question, right?  I don’t often think in these terms.  Maybe we give ourselves and our loved ones A’s, our professional rivals and competitors C’s, and folks in opposing political parties F’s?

I wrote recently that I have gifted The Art of Possibility to multiple friends lately.  I just did it again this week.  One of you, dear readers, started reading it because of that post, and invited me to a self-development book club to discuss!  I am so honored and grateful, thank you!  This post is inspired by you and our ongoing Instagram conversation—thank you again!

I thought I had well and truly integrated this practice already.  As always, there is still room to learn and grow, and I just love how this continuing discovery emerges from sharing the book with people!

Giving the A is:
“an enlivening way of approaching people that promises to transform you as well as them.  It is a shift in attitude that makes it possible for you to speak freely about your own thoughts and feelings while, at the same time, you support others to be all they dream of being… An A can be given to anyone in any walk of life—to a waitress, to your employer, to your mother-in-law, to the members of the opposite team, and to other drivers in traffic.  When you give an A, you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves.  Your eye is on the statue within the roughness of the uncut stone…  This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.” (paperback, page 26)

It’s a practice akin to making the most generous assumptions about people—a priori–that we are all here doing our best, that we are not out just for ourselves, that we want one another to do and be well.  And it’s also more than that.  It’s more active, takes more initiative on behalf of the other person.  Giving the A assumes not just that people are doing their best, but also that their best can be something great.  I think of it as approaching people as if the light of the world shines within all of us, and all we must do is uncover it for one another.  It is a way of being together that unlocks the greatest potential for us all to be our best.

New Friend and I compared encounters we had standing in line at a lunch place and checking out at the grocery store.  We shared how we caught ourselves feeling annoyed, defensive, and judgmental (not giving A’s to our respective strangers), and were able to shift our attitudes and put down our judgments and negative assumptions.

Something made me think about those assumptions—the default settings in which we walk mindlessly through life.  If I like you, admire you, and want you to like me, I will likely give you an A automatically.  I am primed to see everything you do as golden.  If I dislike you, then I’m likely to judge any behavior of yours negatively.  Whatever default I automatically set for you, confirmation bias reinforces that original grade I gave you, the label I assigned. So, is the ‘grade’ we give someone (or any given group) simply based on our existing relationship with them?  What if we have no relationship, as with strangers?  I think we grade people then based on heuristics—mental shortcuts that may include stereotypes, prejudices, and other biases.  Consider the risks here, and the harm this can do to us all.

I also think the grades we give can be fluid.  I messaged New Friend that they depend on “so many things–intersecting variables—our baseline relationship, its context, the circumstances of any given encounter, our mind state at the time… So mindfulness, as it so often does, comes back to me over and over as the practice on which to center myself. If I’m present in the moment, I’m more likely to notice what grade I’m giving the other person, and to myself as well.”

Aaah, the grade(s) I give myself–my default self-beliefs and -talk!  Off the top of my head:
As parent: B, maybe B+ overall… but in my high stress moments, C-… Or maybe it varies between certain aspects of parenting? I blame myself for many of the kids’ struggles–F! I have written that my greatest regrets in life are all relational; if I’m honest, they all occur in my closest relationships.  When I think of my ‘grade’, it’s a judgment.  And that is not the point of the practice.

The ‘grades’ we give, both to ourselves and others, are limbic, subconscious, automatic, and context driven.  But what do they really mean; how do they affect our relationships?  I think of them now as markers of possibility—ceilings of potential connection.  The letter ‘grade’ simply expresses concretely the abstract, insidious limitations we unconsciously put on one another’s potential as fellow humans.  It’s not that we go around actually assigning grades to people we know and meet.  ‘Giving the A’ is a mindfulness practice—an intentional way of being that honors maximal relational connection potential in and among all people, ourselves included.  So, when I think of myself as parent, giving myself an A does not mean I think I’m perfect or infallible.  It is not meant as a judgment of performance.  It means I give myself the grace to continually attend, assess, adjust, and show up by best; it holds loving space for my aspirational self to emerge and blossom, without pressure, obligation, or requirement.  I feel physical relief just realizing this distinction. 
Where do you need to give yourself an A?

Why practice Giving the A?  I do it to live in peace with myself and other humans–to see us as we all wish to be seen–with kindness, compassion, acceptance, and love.

When I give myself the A, I show up to you differently, and I’m more willing to give you the A. My energy is light, open, welcoming, inviting, accepting, validating, encouraging, and connecting.  When you feel that from me (and it is a feeling–intuitive, subconscious, non-rational), it affects how you show up to me, also.  It is both subtle and profound, incidental and transformative.  Our interaction and dynamic goes a certain way, any one of myriad possibilities, depending on what we each bring in the moment.  And it can change in a heartbeat–hard left, deep dive, instant bond or severance–if we’re not paying attention.  Maybe the hard times and disconnect happen more when we’re mindless, and the loving, connecting times when we are mindful?  Or maybe it’s just that we see the potholes coming and can navigate around them more easily in the latter.

Imagine if we saw one another as loving works in progress, every one of us, no matter what our circumstances, past experiences, and fears?   What if we held mutual possibility for all of us to step into our own full potential in any domain?  That’s a world I’d like to inhabit, and practicing Giving the A makes it a lot more likely.

Me with Ben Zander, 2009

Love Letter to My MD Classmates

Posted on by
3
My first stethoscope, retired now after 29 years.

Congratulations, Pritzker School of Medicine Class of 1999! It’s been 25 years.

Look how far we’ve come! Many of us were babies when we started–in our early 20s, brains not even fully formed, enrolled straight out of college, innocent and arrogant at the same time. Now some of our own children are that exact age, and we look at them hiding knowing smirks. Oh, they’ll learn life in good time, these kids.

Being with so many of you this weekend, some not since we graduated, filled my heart with such expansive warmth and joy. We are all now still who we were then–same smiles, postures, mannerisms, quirks. And we have all definitely ‘matured.’ Some of us now sport lighter hair and heavier bodies. Others, damn you, exhibit no observable physical changes. Our greatest acquisition, however, is our hard-earned wisdom and character–that which can only come with lived experience. Med school was no joke, and residency a trial by fire. We have all witnessed life at its first and last breaths, and among all of us, everything in between. We listen, watch, palpate, percuss, incise, excise, medicate, compress, intubate, ventilate, inject, evacuate, saw, cauterize, staple, and suture. We research, write, present, teach, and lead. We are the experts in our fields. And yet, our age and work have taught us humility, made us reverent, lifelong learners first. As technology accelerates and we increasingly inhabit a world of human creation, with which we are not physiologically equipped to cope, we, the Class of 1999 and our colleagues of other years, persist in our oath to care for our fellow humans to the best of our ability. We commit to Helping however we can, to comforting even when we cannot relieve or cure.

I feel a kind of double vision, seeing us as we were then when I look at us now. The playful comaraderie, the stories, the shop talk–it’s as if no time has gone by–we are still us, Pritzker ’99. This is how deep, bonded belonging feels. How many of us marveled repeatedly this weekend over tacos, drinks, snacks, and dessert at the special-ness of it all? We are a tribe within a tribe, a cluster of diversity unified over time, experience, and age. Differences between and among us in youth feel almost irrelevant now, frictions dissipated, shared memories cemented. Interdisciplinary stereotypes and tensions evaporate among us as classmates. We knew and know one another first as whole people, in the same boat from the outset, rowing together, ever forward. HA! We grew from undifferentiated, pluripotent stem cells into fully functioning end organ tissues, now differentiated and still attuned to one another–like a nascent, then seasoned orchestra playing an ever larger and more complex repertoire.

OH, how I reveled in the hugs, the smiles, the recollections, reflections, and communion, the hopes and plans for future sustained connection. It felt honest and vulnerable, soft and strong, professional and personal–safe–one of you said it felt like coming home. Yes.

*sigh*

I had no idea 25 years ago that it would feel this way now. It’s the best, most heartwarming surprise. I wrote about our 20 year reunion, which I only just now remembered. Clearly, these events move me immediately and deeply, this time even more so than last.

My greatest wish for us all, my dear classmates, is that we may continue bravely, wholeheartedly, generously, joyfully, and humbly, on the mission of our esteemed profession, for many years yet. My greatest hope is that we maintain and tighten our bonds, holding one another up in spirit across the miles and over the coming decades. My greatest joy is that we may stay connected, no matter what happens in our careers and lives.

Peace, love, and light to you all. May our collective affection and bond call forth the best in us, for ourselves, our patients, loved ones, institutions, and all of humanity that we have the privilege to touch.