by Heather Plett | Feb 28, 2011 | change
I’ve been thinking a lot about chaos lately.
The brave people who’ve protested in Tunisia, Egypt, and eventually (hopefully) Libya, have impacted significant change for their countries. Those changes won’t come without chaos, however. There will be many days when people will be asking “When will we finally see the fruits of our labour?” or “Was all of that risk really worth this frustration?” There’s a good chance it will take months, maybe even years for things to settle into a new normal and for the real results of the change to arrive.
With change of almost any kind comes a period of chaos. Years ago, I heard David Irvine
make a presentation in which he talked about the change curve. It looked a little like this:
That diagram has stuck with me for about fifteen years, and it’s served as a great source of comfort whenever I’ve made a significant change in my life. Almost every time, I get excited about new possibilities and I expect things to go smoothly and get better right away and then BAM, I’m thrown into chaos. When that happens, I remember the diagram and think “Oh yeah, I’m right on track! It’s the chaos period. I’ve just gotta persevere and get through this.”
It’s been that way in my self-employment journey in the last four months. It’s been a welcome change, and the stress in my life has gone WAY down, and I’m oh so happy, but there’s been lots of chaos as I wonder how the bills will be paid, how I’ll get the word out about the work I want to do, and how I’ll even figure out just WHAT work I need to focus on. Chaos. Just as I should have expected.
The good thing about the change curve, though, is that after you commit yourself to chaos, work through the resistance and transformation, and spend lots of time with the new ideas, things do get better. They get even better than they were before the new idea was introduced. In the end, the chaos is worth the effort.
In what ways have you experienced the change curve and (in particular) the chaos? Are you in it now? Have you worked your way through it?
My prayer for the people of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is that they will be patient and hold on to hope during the chaos. That’s my prayer for myself, and for you as well.
Note: Credit to this site for the diagram.
by Heather Plett | Feb 21, 2011 | change, Passion, practice
As my children will attest, some days it takes only a minor stimulus to illicit a rant from me. Today it was this booklet that made its way to the top of our piano – How to Get Good Grades, in Ten Easy Steps.
Easy? Really?
Now, let’s be honest, if you’re not academically inclined, there is nothing easy about getting good grades. And if you ARE academically inclined, well then you wouldn’t be picking up this little booklet, would you?
Do you think the publishers of this book are doing the students any good by putting the word “easy” in the title? I don’t think so. You’re not going to fool a kid who’s ready to give up on school by telling them there’s an easy fix. If they’ve failed a few courses and their self esteem is in the toilet because of it, setting them up for one more failure by calling it “easy” is just cruel rather than helpful.
And here comes the rant…
Most of the things in life that are worth their weight in gold are most definitely NOT going to be easy.
Let’s stop trying to pretend they are. Let’s stop trying to sell ourselves on the idea that there’s such a thing as “easy weight loss” or “easy relationship fixes” or “easy steps to physical fitness”. Let’s toss “ten easy steps” out the window for once and for all, shall we?
The marketers who are selling you those easy fixes? They’re lying to you.
Good things take work. And practice. And perseverance. And blood, sweat, and tears.
My oldest daughter was struggling through her first high school math class last term. After a disappointing start, she was determined to improve her grade. After weeks of studying, extra homework, meeting with the teacher, re-doing her homework, and studying some more, she did just that – improve her grade. Was it easy? Not a chance.
Several years ago, my husband decided that, after 22 years in the transportation industry, he wanted to become a teacher. He’d never even finished high school, and yet he had this dream. Five and a half years later, he had two university degrees and a teacher’s certificate. There was very little about that journey that was easy, not even for those of us who supported him through it. But was it worth it? Of course!
I’m in the midst of becoming a runner. This morning I was very proud of the fact that I ran six miles. That accomplishment couldn’t have happened, though, without nine months of practicing and sweating and hurting and practicing some more. Yes I may love it and want to keep doing it, but… easy? Not one minute of it.
I am also writing a book. Sure there may be some days when the writing flows and it feels like it requires no more effort than breathing, but there are other days I feel like l’m slitting open a vein and letting the blood pour. And even those pages that showed up without much effort will still require hours of editing and rewriting and agonizing before they’re ready for prime time. Nope, nothing easy about that either. I want it more than almost anything else in the world, though, so I’ll stick with it.
Anyone who’s developed a meditation practice or yoga practice or dance practice or any other kind of practice can tell you that it requires years of dragging yourself to the mat or cushion or floor, working through heaps of resistance and pain, and persevering through all of those times when it just feels like nothing is happening. Easy? No way. Worth it? Oh yes.
Anyone who’s worked through depression or eating disorders or anxiety disorders or mental illness of any kind will tell you there’s nothing easy about that either. Worth it when you’ve worked through to the other side? Yes. But easy? Don’t ever insult them by implying that it is.
Anyone who has committed themselves to social change – protestors in Tahrir Square, people committed to peace and justice working in Darfur, front-line workers in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods all over the world – will tell you that it’s terrifying and hard and discouraging and only occasionally exhilarating, but easy? Never.
You get my point. Growing, learning, changing, improving, transforming – all of those things take years of effort and pain and frustration and surrender and practice and agony.
Sure, there are things that fall within your gifts that might feel easy from time to time (eg. I once had an article published in the Globe and Mail that took no more than 15 minutes to write and not a single edit), but perfecting anything – even if it comes naturally – is hard work. Just ask any Olympic athlete or world class musician.
Let’s stop trying to fool ourselves. It’s not going to be easy.
Worth it? Most definitely. But easy? Not a chance.
by Heather Plett | Sep 27, 2010 | change
My father-in-law, teaching Julie how to use his homemade seeding contraption
There’s a little ball of stress knotted up in my stomache this morning. It doesn’t feel huge or insurmountable, but it’s big enough that a vigorous bike ride on a glorious fall morning didn’t manage to untie it.
It’s not hard to find sources of stress in my life. This is my last week of work in this employment. Tomorrow is my father-in-law’s funeral. And today would be my son Matthew’s tenth birthday, had he lived past birth. It’s a big, messy week.
On top of that, I’m stressing out about a few tasks that need to be completed soon but are feeling a little insurmountable right now. A new website that I was hoping to launch before leaving work, a curriculum for the course I’ll be teaching in November, a couple of reports that my boss wants me to complete before I leave, transition planning for my staff, cleaning out my office – the list feels a little endless.
Unfortunately, overwhelm tends to come hand-in-hand with inertia, so I’m stuck in a place where all I want to do is wander around cyber space, or sit by a river somewhere watching the geese fly south.
September seems to be a month of transitions in our family. Deaths, job changes, going back to school, moving – almost every year something new shows up in September. This year we got an extra dose.
Part of me just wants to be selfish and go off on my own somewhere for a time of “dream-shifting” or “vision-questing”, but life needs to carry on. There are family members who need to be supported through this loss, children who need to be fed, bills that need to be paid, etc., etc.
I am struck by what William Bridges says about transitions. He talks about how, in other times and places, people in transition went out into an unfamiliar stretch of forest or desert where they would reman for a time, removed from the old connections. He calls it “The Neutral Zone” and says that one of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for the gap in the continuity of existence.
What he says resonates for me this month. We don’t really know how to transition gently. We rush into big changes and expect our hearts and bodies to keep up. As Bridges says, we treat transitions as a “street-crossing”, just trying to rush to the other side of the street to avoid getting hit by a car.
I’m not sure where I’ll find the space for a decent transition (I’ve accepted contracts that mean I’ll have to jump into new work right away), but I am at least aware that I need it and will make a point of finding it. Perhaps it will be in October when I go away for a few days to a retreat/workshop with a woman I’ve dreamed of studying with for a long time. Until then, I carry on and try to take deep breaths and go for bike rides when I can..
by Heather Plett | Jun 17, 2010 | art, beginnings, change, Creativity, fearless, journey, Leadership
I don’t remember the question that we were supposed to discuss at our table group, but I remember where it lead us. One of the women at the table was the newly appointed head of a women’s program at a university. She was wrestling with where she needed to lead the organization after the departure of its founder.
She’d had an a-ha moment that week and had come to realize that what was ironically missing in the program was a truly feminine approach to leadership. It was modeled too closely after traditionally masculine styles and needed to evolve into something new. I think it was during our conversation that she had the even deeper realization that she had, in fact, been hired because her background in engineering made her well skilled at thinking like a man.
What she said touched me in a place so deep I didn’t even know it needed touching. “Yes!” I said. “YES! That is a systemic problem! I see it everywhere! It’s the major flaw of the feminist movement – that it poured so much of its energy into getting us access into men’s role and teaching us to adopt men’s wisdom and leadership styles that it forgot about what it SHOULD have put energy into – raising the value of women’s voices, women’s roles, and women’s wisdom and leadership styles.”
Spilling out beneath my words were so many memories of the times I’d tried to introduce things like “feeling checks” into staff meetings, or clay molding into annual visioning exercises – the many times I’d intuitively felt compelled to introduce a more feminine style of leadership. BUT almost all of those times I’d been met with so much resistance that I’d simply given up and fallen back on old models. Oh, I could write a book about the times when I let the fear hold me back from what had always come so naturally. Too many times I saw those things dismissed as frivolous, or “just a silly girl’s ideas”.
During the course of our conversation, something rather magical happened. I don’t think I realized just how magical it was until it was done. There were markers at our table and a paper tablecloth. As I so often do when I’m sitting in a meeting, I picked up a marker and started to doodle. The man at the table asked “can I add something to your art work?” and I said “oh certainly!” And then, with a gesture, I invited our other two tablemates to join in the fun.
It seemed innocent enough, but it was transformational. Soon, we were all animated and energized in both our conversation and our art-making. Each of us added our unique flare to the tablecloth and each of us built on something the other had done. At one point – though I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it – the man at the table tried to put a square black border around the area where we were making art. Something bubbled up from within me and I resisted, scribbling all over his border as he drew. The other women joined and soon we had spilled over the border into every direction. Defeated, but with a good sense of humour, the man happily added to the “outside the box” art. (To be fair, at another point, I ruined a sun that the man was trying to create by prematurely drawing a line around it.)
By the end of the discussion, we’d filled the whole tablecloth with art, and we’d helped the leader of the woman’s program realize some of the steps she’d need to take when she got home. On top of that, I think each of us at the table had a unique a-ha moment that emerged from both the art and the conversation.
Mine didn’t fully evolve until later. I knew that something significant had happened, but I didn’t at that point know just HOW significant. Some day I think I will look back at that collective doodle art and remember that it represents the moment my life changed.
Because, my dear friends, that moment was the culmination of so much wrestling, so much thinking, so much struggle to find my focus, my truth, my place of belonging. Remember the necklace metaphor – how it wasn’t the struggling that untangled the necklace but the slipping from my hands and dropping to the floor? Well I think that moment was the “dropping to the floor and untangling my truth.”
What am I talking about? I’m talking about THE VERY THING that I’ve been grasping for. For years now I’ve known that my greatest energy comes from sharing wisdom – through facilitating workshops, writing, public speaking, etc. – about the things I’ve learned about creativity and leadership. I’ve known that somewhere in all of that lay the nugget that would lead me into the next phase of my vocation. Only… I couldn’t seem to find the right shaped nugget to fit me. It all seemed too general, too vague – too unfocused. I thought I found a few times, but it never felt quite right.
And now, after a week at ALIA, and especially a remarkable moment of doodling, I have clarity that I’ve never had before. The purpose that is evolving for me is TO TRANSFORM LEADERSHIP THROUGH FEMININE WISDOM! There it is! Bringing more creativity, compassion, art, soul, and holistic truth to leadership. AND helping those people who think their feminine passions and gifts – art, spirituality, motherhood, body wisdom – do not make them qualified for leadership recognize that the world needs them to help in its transformation.
It’s simple and yet it makes so much sense. Look around you – wars, oil spills, climate change, oppression – isn’t it clear that we have a leadership crisis on our hands? Isn’t it clear that the old models aren’t working anymore? It’s time for a new model and I believe that new model includes a much bigger space for feminine wisdom. I’m not saying that all the male leaders need to be replaced by women – I’m simply saying that both men AND women need to learn to trust their feminine wisdom more.
It’s an idea as old as the Bible, and yet as often forgotten and marginalized as so many other truths in the Bible. Sophia. Wisdom. FEMININE wisdom. It’s what Solomon wrote so many sonnets about. It’s the feminine wisdom of God.
THAT is the power I’ve been called to stand in, the wisdom I’ve been called to share. It’s time to get busy sharing it!
How will this evolve? I’m not quite sure, but I am excited. I know this… I am not really “fumbling for words” anymore. This is something new and it will need a new space. Maybe it’s “leading with your paint clothes on” or maybe it’s “sophia leadership” or maybe it’s something else I haven’t thought of, but I’ll be spending the summer thinking about it and hopefully by September something will have emerged.
Hang on for the ride, because it will most definitely be colourful and exciting!
by Heather Plett | Jun 14, 2010 | change, journey, Leadership, travel
My head, heart and body are full of the memories of last week at ALIA. I have been changed.
I have been transformed by the many people who brought their vulnerability, their longings, their spirits, their truths, their hurts, and their gifts from all over the world to a common space in Halifax where all of us dreamed together of what the world could be like if we would put our heads/hearts/bodies together and work for transformation. I have sat with people from Sri Lanka, Brazil, Czech Republic, Chile, Poland, California, Alaska, Holland, Denmark, Ohio, Zimbabwe, and many places in between, holding space for beauty, wisdom, and goodness. I have moved my body with greater freedom than I have for a long, long time. I have sat quietly and listened to the wisdom of the earth. I have shed tears over the fears that have blocked me. I have stretched myself and delighted in the stretching of those around me. I have been comforted, inspired, encouraged, and changed.
It will take me weeks to fully distill all of what last week was for me. It will take even longer to let the changes and wisdom sink fully into my being. These things I know for sure: I felt like I was coming home, and I knew I had found “my people”.
There are lots of posts to be written and many conversations to be had, but none of that needs to happen quickly. For now, I am mostly just sitting with it and letting it seep into the deepest parts of me.
For now, while words feel inadequate, I am playing with images. Last night I put together this simple video of photos I took during the week. The words come directly from my journal – notes I took from workshops, presentations, and conversations.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nPAuZwW6cw]
Photos are available here.
by Heather Plett | May 19, 2010 | birthday parties, change, fearless, growth, journey, things I've learned, Uncategorized, women
I’m having a hard time putting into words what yesterday meant to me. None-the-less, I want to share it, even if the words fall short of the truth.
First there was the conversation with a coach/magician
After a full day of meetings (Aside: What the heck is going on? Meetings seem to have exploded all over my calendar lately! I can barely catch a breath!), I had a coaching call with Randi Buckley.
Honestly? I’ve been a little skeptical of the whole coaching movement. Any time anything becomes too trendy, I start sniffing it for snake oil and I tend to distance myself somewhat. Not that I don’t believe in coaching – I’ve taken several “coaching for leaders” workshops and have found them quite helpful – it’s just that trends often bring out the people who like to jump on the bandwagon and aren’t necessarily the genuine article. On top of that, hiring a life coach seems to have an element of narcissism that doesn’t sit well with me. (My apologies to my friends who are coaches or who hire coaches! You are all wise and wonderful, so I’m not talking about YOU!)
Needless to say, I’ve never worked with a coach, even though I know people who swear by it. But when I won Randi’s free sessions, I thought “why not approach it openly and welcome whatever might come of this?” Since it was free, I had nothing to lose.
Well, it turns out that Randi is the real deal. Seriously? I think she’s part magician. Or at least mystic. It wasn’t very long into our conversation that she started voicing things that she picked up in my words and energy that were so dead on they were scary. And with only a few well placed questions, she had me digging into demons, identifying the places where I deal with “imposter syndrome”, and voicing big crazy dreams I’d never dared whisper to anyone.
One of the things Randi encouraged me to do (which, I admit, I resisted at first) was to examine some of the negative voices in my life to find the truth hidden behind them. I didn’t realize how powerful that was until this morning when the real live negative voice (not just the ones in my head) I talked to her about made a significant energy shift and actually paid me the FIRST EVER compliment I have heard coming out of those lips – and all because I’d started the conversation with an acknowledgement of the wisdom that person had put into an email the day before.
Then there was the “Sisterhood of the Burning Bra” party last night.
Again and again, I am blown away by the incredible energy that a group of like-minded, open-hearted women can welcome into their space when they gather in a circle. There were fewer people in that circle last night than I expected, but they were the RIGHT people. (The gremlins wanted to convince me that people don’t really like me and hence hadn’t made my party a priority, but I banished those gremlins from the party pretty quickly and they had no choice but to whimper on the other side of the gate.) More importantly, they were MY people – the women who I know will always come into my circle when I need them, to share their warmth, strength, wisdom, and energy.
I felt a little silly about following through on my desire to burn my bra, but Michele built a lovely fire and the women who were there held me in such a safe space (not to mention cheered me on!) that I couldn’t resist. Before the bra was committed to the flame, I talked about what I was releasing and how I was newly committed to treating my body as a sacred space. And then we all watched it burn until there was nothing left but the underwire.
What came afterward was more than I could have dreamed of. Each of the women in the circle wrote whatever they wanted to release on a piece of paper and committed it to the flame. Fear, procrastination, regret, past hurts, and ego were all swallowed up by the fire. (Yes, there were pictures taken, but the files seem to have corrupted themselves in the downloading process, so you’ll just have to trust me.)
At the end of the night, I shared a little story of the necklace that hung around my neck that I’d just purchased. It’s a silver lizard. Martha Beck talks about the “lizard brain” – the part of our brains that lives in a world of “lack and attack”, where we are always tempted to focus on what we are lacking and what is attacking us. I am determined, in this next year of my life, to get better at the practice of silencing the lizard brain that keeps lying to me about my shortcomings and attacks – hence the reminder I wear around my neck.
Tomorrow marks the end of another year of gathering wisdom along this journey, and the beginning of another year of practicing to get it right.
