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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

brené brown

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Leadership as the assumption of risk

Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light. —Yogi Bhajan

I completed my last Sunday service shift as a staff member at Unity of Gaithersburg today. The senior minister, Rev. Sheryl Myers, allowed me to talk to the community about my time with them and what’s next for me.

I thought back to the first book study group I facilitated there: Brené Brown’s 2013 book on wholeheartedness in workplaces, relationships, and families, Daring Greatly.

Toward the end of the book, Brown offers an anecdote about her daughter’s struggles with swimming. Brown encourages her daughter, explaining that winning races and getting the best times doesn’t have to be her goal. There are benefits to winning, of course, but there are also benefits to participating in life experiences with an open mind and a soft heart regardless of the outcomes.

“Sometimes,” Brown tells her daughter, “the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.”

“Showing up” isn’t just being a body in a room. It means actively choosing to bring your best wherever you are, accepting the risk of risk and the possibility of creating and failing, and moving forward rather than hiding out in what’s familiar  and “safe,” even if you come in last.

As I learned more about that congregation and the spiritual tradition it’s part of, I noticed how the tradition encourages members to practice the “impulse to go forward.” Unity’s co-founder Charles Fillmore wrote decades ago, “A person without zeal is like an engine without steam or an electric motor without a current.”

These forward movements can be both purposeful and healing; it doesn’t follow that we have to accept cavalier or inhumane behavior just because ambition is socially acceptable!

As we participate more fully at home, work, and in our local communities, we can demonstrate care by pursuing action that’s aligned with our values and supporting other people who are living integrally.

My next opportunity gives me a chance to do all of that, and so I’m deeply grateful to the community at Unity of Gaithersburg for encouraging me to leap into it!

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The truth is enough.

"Mean what you say. And don't embellish or go beyond it. The truth is enough." —@mackenzian | Matthew 5:33-37

Matthew 5:33-37, part of the gospels’ summary of Jesus’s teachings, challenges the way we handle the truth.

And it’s a necessary challenge. Truth, embellishments, hedges, and avoidances all make business and interpersonal relationships that much more complicated. We’ve learned to distrust marketers and their advertising claims, and “Just give it to me straight” is a thrown gauntlet: Should I really tell them what I think? How will things change when I do?

Insecurity unsettles us, and so we embellish our speech. We lie. I’ve texted, “On my way” before I’ve been on my way because I expected disappointment for leaving later than expected. I’ve talked in circles about my beliefs on politics and religion because I don’t trust the motives of the people asking. I’ve lived and worked and loved as if my Yes and No are insufficient.

In this space between two people comes the Wise One, teaching: “Say ‘Yes’ when you mean yes, and ‘No’ when you mean no, and ‘I don’t know’ when you really don’t know. Anything beyond that is an attempt to exert power and control.”

There’s no need for fancy mess. The truth is enough.

It can also be terrifying, if vulnerability is involved. The truth might be “I don’t think this role fits for me anymore and I need to step down.” Or “Yes, I do want us to work together on money. I’m tired of trying to figure it out on my own.” Or “I know you don’t understand who I am. I’m sorry you’re missing out on my life, and I wish things were different. But they aren’t.”

The truth being true doesn’t imply anything about what others might do or say in response. But it does let you shed unnecessary weight: all the footnotes and explainers and explain-away-ers that you need to prop up embellishments and dodges. It does allow you to choose the simplest words, the ones you don’t have to memorize in advance because they are true.

The good news? The good news is that we can begin again. Wherever we are—at home or at work or on the streets—whenever we notice insecurity rising, whenever our tongues curl around an extra word or story, we can swallow gently and choose a different way. Because a world we build on any other ground than the truth is not worth living in.

Take a moment: self-check. Where has insecurity guided you lately? What beliefs have you been building your relationships on? Are those beliefs worth switching out for more honesty more often?

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The Horror of Grace

Her church dean read the parable of the vineyard. And the children at Vacation Bible School protested the rules of the game.

“Grace is not attractive,” she thought. “It’s not fair!” [Watch the video.]

Once upon a time, I shared Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability and shame with some relatives. The blowback I got in return was epic.

I may never know whether these relatives were reacting to the content. Or to her casual self-effacement. Or to her language (the Work of the People site flags this clip with a “language warning”).

Some respondents thought her talk profane, as if there is anything in the universe more sacred than the vulnerable, intentional connection of two made in the image of God.

And dismissing her could even have been a proxy for dismissing me, the niece who refused shame and preferred integrity. I don’t know.

From Susan Morgan Ostapkowicz's Painting "The Outsider"
From Susan Morgan Ostapkowicz’s Painting “The Outsider”

But listening to “Grace isn’t attractive” today made me wonder if the blowback wasn’t about any of these things; if instead it was a kind of resistance to what Brown points to here: what’s “fair” and what’s “just,” who earns rights to be “in the circle” or defined “out,” and who gets to “own” the group and keep others from messing it up…

Fundamentalist religion has very strong ideas about this—about fairness, justice, and the boundaries of good and deviant. It also resists and shuts down challenges to those ideas, regardless of their source. It can’t stand the idea that maybe it isn’t the gatekeeper and maybe its understanding isn’t the measure.

If you’ve ever read one of the parables attributed to Jesus and completely disagreed with the punchline of the story, you’ll understand what Brown is talking about when she says: “It’s not fair! I still don’t get it; I still don’t like it! I like stuff you can earn.”

Grace is polarizing. It’s horrific. And it’s exactly what we need in a culture that’s been stripped of it.

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On Dodging Grief

My friend J Mase III, poet, writer, and co-founder of the weekly #qfaith Twitter chat, wrote an article about grief this week. He’d asked his followers about how others react to grief, what they say, and what we wish others said.

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine died. We met at our church 4 years ago; he was an usher and deacon, and his wife often sat in our row. The two of them were and are among the sweetest and most grounded people I know; easy-going, open-hearted, travel-lovers, and wonderfully matched as a couple. While she recovered from breast cancer, he developed a terminal disease, underwent a series of conventional and experimental treatments, and then, about a week and a half ago, went to sleep and never woke.

We all knew it was coming. We just didn’t know when. We saw his suits hanging more loosely around his shoulders and a shadow form in his cheeks—but it was easy to deny impending death because he so thoroughly distracted us with a life that he lived the hell out of. His smile was perennial and his capacity for graciousness, kindness, and other-centeredness was undimmed by either declining health or increasing pain.

I can’t imagine anyone who knew him and won’t miss him. I also don’t know anyone who knew him who’s not glad he’s now beyond the reach of cancer.

Grief is a sneaky thing at times like this. Mainstream culture gives us a straightforward protocol for grief: for family, you get this much time to deny, cry, or pout. With friends, that much. For people with whom you had a social network in common, maybe a little. With celebrities like Nelson Mandela or Paul Walker, follow the news cycle without being maudlin, and then move on.

Who makes up these rules? They don’t fit for me. They don’t match my relationships and I don’t live by them.

Shame and belonging researcher Brené Brown has a gift for explaining how our responses to the vulnerabilities of others can open up our relationships or abridge them. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) animated part of a talk on empathy in which she describes how sympathy falls short, can be dismissive, and is often about assuaging the discomfort of the speaker rather than the person in grief, sadness, or pain:

One of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that’s very difficult, I’d rather you say, “Phew! I don’t even know what to say right now; I’m just so glad you told me.”

Because the truth is rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection. —Brené Brown

So here are 5 things I told J that I wished folk said when I was grieving:

“I don’t know what to say, so I’m going to be quiet. I love you.”

“I’ll only tell you my grief story if you ask—and you don’t have to.”

“Wanna play some pool? Can pick you up at 8.”

“Doesn’t matter that you’re not grieving a relative. It doesn’t hurt any less.”

“You can feel whatever you feel around me. I’m listening.”

Sometimes, I said, people fill the silences and the space with their noise, awkwardness, and fear-projected-outward, missing opportunities to just be. Not everyone can stand the light of vulnerability or loss or hope, and so when they can’t, yet show up in your space anyway, managing them while managing your own grief becomes an unnecessary and burdensome mission.

There are also some who can stand that light, who can bear it, who will sit with others through sadness without fixing, meddling, or minimizing. Are they rare souls? Does it matter?

I appreciate those I know. And I hope this year to be more of one for the people around me.

Check out J’s article at the Huffington Post: Rules for grieving in the New Year—or Grieving like it’s 1999. What grieving rules or customs do you live by? Share in the comments below.