by Heather Plett | Jun 30, 2010 | Leadership
This morning I rode my bike to work for the first time in about a week. Soccer schedules and grad dinners and ceremonies kept getting in the way, and so I road the bus for a few days.
Yesterday, on the bus ride to work, I found myself filled with all kinds of sadness and worry – a lousy way to start the day. When I stepped off the bus at the office, I knew exactly what I was missing and why I felt so ill prepared for my work day. I needed movement. I needed fresh air. I needed to pedal my concerns away and spend a half hour in meditative motion before tackling the things that were stressing me out.
This morning, I cycled, and it was good – very good.
I started out this morning feeling stressed out, worried about the annual performance reviews I have to do with my staff this week. It’s no secret that I detest the annual cycle of filling out performance reviews, meeting with each of my staff, going over the same things year after year, and then seeing no significant changes in the staff or in my relationships with them. I’d spent most of yesterday afternoon wrestling with the template and forms I was supposed to use, and I’d finally gone home in defeat. This morning at 8:30 sharp was my first meeting, and I was seriously ill-prepared because I hadn’t gotten my paperwork done.
As I cycled, I tried to give myself the annual pep talk. “Just get through it. Do the stuff you need to do, have the dreaded talk, submit the forms to the HR files, and move on. You can do it! Just like last year and the thirteen years you’ve been a manager before that!”
But despite the pep talk. I was miserable. This wasn’t working. Nobody was gaining anything from this. WHY did I have to “just get through it”?
And then I heard a little voice that sounded a lot like my very own wisdom… “It’s not working, so don’t do it. Scrap the old way. Ignore the HR rules. Do it YOUR way. Make it work for you and your staff.”
What? Do it MY way? Surely this was foolishness! How could I ignore the “right” way to do things? And what could I put in its place?
“Just have a conversation,” wisdom whispered. “Just admit to your staff that you don’t trust the old way of doing things and let them set the tone. Just ask them how things are going and how they’d like to see things go and see what happens when you leave an open space for them to speak.”
It felt like a cop-out – a lazy way out. Just a conversation? No forms, no templates, no agonizing over a prescribed process? Buck the system? Ignore the “right” way to do it?
But… because I’m working harder and harder at trusting the wisdom voice when it pops up, I decided to go for it. At 8:30 this morning, I began the first new version of the “annual conversation” with one of my staff. “The old way’s not working,” I began. “I have very little to say, and no form filled out. I just want to know how you’re doing, how you feel the year has gone, what some of your hopes are for next year, and how I can help you get to where you need to go.”
And then we talked. And talked some more. It was open, it was relaxed – it was truly one of the best conversations I’ve had with this employee in six years. We wrestled with some things, I did some deep listening when he admitted some of his hurts and struggles, I admitted where I could have managed things better, I coached him to see some new paths for some tough relationships, and we never once wrote anything down on a form. It was brilliant, easy, and constructive.
What did I learn today?
- Move! When your body moves, your mind clears and things click into place the way they should. Wisdom likes to show up in an active, engaged body.
- Trust the wisdom that comes from your own experience and your own truth. Don’t let the negative voices over-rule it. (For a truly inspiring post on this, visit Julie Daley.)
- If you need to, overthrow the “rules” and the “right way to do things” and replace it with the way that works for you. In the long run, everyone wins.
- Just because something feels too easy or downright lazy doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do! Sometimes the best results come from the easiest solutions.
- Listen. Don’t fill all the silences with your own words. Just listen deeply and wait for what needs to emerge.
p.s. This is the kind of thing I’ll be writing more of when I launch my new big idea… SOPHIA LEADERSHIP! Watch for it at the end of the summer.
by Heather Plett | Jun 29, 2010 | Creativity, parenting
(Well, at least MY 14 year old girl. I can’t vouch for yours.)
1. Encourage her to begin living out her “I want to be a fashion designer when I grow up” dream a little early by designing her own junior high grad dress.
2. Offer to sew it with her.
3. Don’t change your mind, even when she shows you a sketch of a dress with about a thousand individual petals on the skirt.
4. Encourage her to make bigger petals that will have less chance of leaving your hands irreversibly crippled and your shoulders permanently hunched.
5. Take her shopping for fabric and STILL don’t change your mind even when she picks satin (every sewer’s worst nightmare).
6. Spend endless hours cutting, stitching, ironing, cutting, stitching, ironing… about a hundred petals.
7. Take her shopping again for the accent around the waist and STILL don’t change your mind even when she chooses glitter that you have to stitch in place.
8. Spend a few more endless hours stitching, seam-ripping, cursing, stitching, seam-ripping, cursing the blasted zipper that just won’t go in properly, especially by the sequined waistband.
9. Rue the day you thought an invisible zipper was a wise choice.
10. Finally emerge victorious having conquered the myriad of enemies that took the seemingly innocuous shapes of pink satin, flower petals, silver sequins, “boning” (to keep the top rigid), and an invisible zipper.
11. Dance around the living room with her when she puts it on and both she and the dress look stunning!
12. Take her shopping again and let her pick her shoes.
13. Cringe a little, but smile and pay the bill when she picks the most impossibly high-heeled shoes this side of Sex and the City. Brace yourself (and her) for her father’s less-than-pleased reaction. Justify the purchase by saying “at least it’s only shoes she’s obsessed with and not drugs!”
14. Buy her some fancy jewellery as a surprise, just because you can’t resist helping her complete the picture. (And admit to yourself that this has been more fun for you than you expected.)
15. Keep your promise not to share any photos of The Dress online until after she’s had the Big Reveal to her friends at grad, even though you’re bursting with pride and desperately want to show off all over Twitter, Facebook, and maybe even some random street corner.
16. Consider googling “fashion design competitions for teenagers” because you’re convinced your daughter would SMOKE the competition.
17. Beam with pride all evening at the grad dinner and then the next morning at the school ceremony as you watch her postively glowing when her friends, teachers, friends’ parents, and maybe a few random people on the street ooh and aah over her dress.
by Heather Plett | Jun 24, 2010 | Uncategorized
My apologies to the beautiful creatures who have been killed, covered in oil, or forced to watch their habitat be destroyed by this massive oil spill.
My apologies for being complicit in a system that is so tolerant of an addiction to oil that we allow oil companies to rape and pillage your habitat.
My apologies for all of the times my own greed, laziness, or assumption of entitlement have contributed to this broken system that forgets that all of creation relies on each other for survival.
My apologies for neglect, for turning a blind eye, for giving in to the ease of consumption.
My apologies for not challenging the system, for allowing it to move in this direction, for valuing “things” over life, for putting my own comfort and ease of living over your well-being.
My apologies for not trusting my own ability to have even a small influence in the radical change that is needed to help this planet be healed from the hurt we have caused.
My apologies and my deepest regret.
May your hurt serve as a beacon for us in this darkness of greed and self-indulgence.
May your suffering not be wasted.
May we reach deep in our hearts and learn from this massive mistake.
May we all find better ways of co-existing on this amazing planet crafted by the Master Artist.
Thank you, beautiful creatures, for teaching us the value of the fragile yet vibrant eco-systems we so often take for granted.
by Heather Plett | Jun 23, 2010 | parenting
When we birth our children, we also birth a protective instinct that bubbles up in us and can nearly consume us in those dark times when our children may be in danger. It’s the Mama (or Papa) Bear gene. Mostly it lays dormant until the tiny seed of a child begins to grow in us.
I remember a time early in my pregnancy with my first daughter. I was about to dart across the street, dodging traffic, when I stopped myself short. I couldn’t budge. The Mama Bear instinct forced me to stand on the sidewalk waiting for a more safe opportunity. It caught me by surprise to realize that I couldn’t do it quite as carelessly as I once did. Suddenly I was responsible for someone other than myself and that felt serious.
As the children get older, it becomes more and more clear that we cannot protect them from everything. They will get hurt, they will fall down and skin their knees, they will be betrayed, they’ll have their hearts broken – and all we can do is offer them a safe place to land. It tears your heart out when you watch it happen. Sometimes, in fact, it feels like the pain is deeper than if you were the one getting hurt or betrayed.
This week, we found out that the soccer coach that was supposed to be coaching our daughter’s team was arrested for child molestation and child porn. He allegedly took advantage of one of the girls on the soccer team – quite possibly someone we know. We are all heart sick about this.
At the beginning of the season, when we went to the meeting to be introduced to the coaches and team members, this particular coach took the parents aside and said “if you’re ever in a pinch and need someone to give your daughter a ride to a game or practice, give me a call and I’d be happy to help out. Especially if you’re a single parent and you just can’t juggle everyone’s schedule – I know what it’s like to go through a divorce. I’m there for you and your daughters.” At the time I remember thinking “he’s either a really nice guy or he’s a little creepy – I’m not really sure which.”
It’s sickening now to think that he was setting us up to trust him with our daughters. He seemed sincere at the time and though I found his offer a little odd, there was nothing that screamed “child molester” about him. (He left the team shortly after that meeting, so that was the only time I encountered him.)
Every day we have to make decisions and help our children make decisions – is this person trustworthy? Is this activity safe? Mostly, I tend to lean toward trust rather than fear. I don’t think it does anyone any good to be forever living in fear of everyone we meet. But there are those times when trust is the wrong choice, and for that girl, who was (allegedly – I have to remember “innocent until proven guilty”) molested when her dad had to leave the soccer field early and she’d gotten rides home from the coach, trust may never feel like an option again.
And even for my daughters, who are very aware of what’s going on, trusting adults in positions of authority has become less of an automatic assumption.
Oh, sometimes I wish the world were a simpler place.
by Heather Plett | Jun 21, 2010 | journey, Leadership
Michael Chender, ALIA
“Bring your vulnerability, your tenderness, your fear. Bring your questions – bring the things that puzzle you. Be prepared to hold ambiguity – to sit with the ‘not-knowing’. Open your heart and your mind to yourself and to the other people in the room.”
That may not be exactly what Michael Chender (one of the founders of ALIA) said in his opening speech, but it’s the way that I remember it. I wrote this in my notebook: “Wow! An opening speaker who welcomes our vulnerability!” His speech has stayed with me ever since.
How often have you sat in any workshop (especially one focused on leadership) and been told that your vulnerability is a valuable place to start? The leadership training I’ve received in the past tends to focus on strengths, confidence, vision – certainly not vulnerability. That’s for weaklings.
I think it was about that time at ALIA when I felt the tears well up in my eyes and they stayed pretty close to the surface for the remainder of the day. In the past, when I’d followed my intuition and used my vulnerability as an asset in my leadership, I had almost always been faced with resistance and blocks and my own fearful gremlins. And almost every time, I’d tucked my courage and convictions away and gone back to putting on my “confident and unshakeable leader” face.
The challenge didn’t stop with Micheal Chender. Later that same day, at the beginning of our “Leader as Shambhala Warrior” workshop, Meg Wheatley’s first question to us was “What breaks your heart?” Really? What breaks my heart? This is the starting place for a journey toward warriorship? Indeed it was! The things that break our heart are the things that drive us forward – that give us purpose, vision, and strength to carry on.
During the week at ALIA, the term “strong back, soft belly” came up often – especially during meditation practice. When you sit in meditation, you are taught to sit with your back straight and strong and your stomach relaxed and vulnerable. This is not just a statement about posture – it’s a statement about how we are encouraged to live. Every day. Our strong backs remind us to have courage and strength in the face of adversity and fear – to hold firmly to our values. To be warriors. Our soft bellies remind us to make ourselves vulnerable to each other – to show compassion and extend understanding and forgiveness to ourselves and others. To open our hearts.
Today was one of those days when my “strong back and soft belly” were put to the test. In more than one situation, I was in the position to extend compassion to people who needed it, and yet at the same time was required to establish boundaries and to maintain an unwavering commitment to protecting and serving as a warrior for other people who were being negatively impacted by the same difficult situations. If I said I was completely successful, I would be lying (I had to fight hard not to let fear and anger play the parts they wanted to play), but I did my best and, with a combination of prayer, meditation, and turning to other people for support, I made it through the storms to the other side.
Sometimes, we choose either strong back OR soft belly and forget that we can hold both at the same time. Sometimes we treat people with too much kindness and forget that they also need us to hold firm to the boundaries in our relationships. Other times, we put up strong walls to protect ourselves or others and forget that compassion is also necessary.
I say this to you… Bring your vulnerabilities. And bring your strength too. It’s what every good warrior (and a true “Sophia leader”) does.
(Yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m thinking that the next step in the journey is taking me toward “Sophia Leadership”.)
