February 9, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The hardest thing

The hardest thing to do in moments of deep distress is to stay fully present.

It’s hard because the human brain and body learn quickly how to answer attacks they can’t escape: they help us survive by taking us somewhere else, anywhere else but here.

As I’ve mentioned, my brain recently took me away from the current administration by reminding me about The West Wing‘s Jed Barlet. This is a great thing. It’s just not the only thing.

When navigating difficult relationships, what's the difference between neutrality and numbness? It's easy to confuse neutrality with non-variability. Non-variability is often achieved by developing a thick skin—becoming less reactive by keeping more out. And we may become increasingly numb in our quest to never let anything that anyone says get to us. But a higher expression of neutrality connects us more, not less, with the difficult situation. And we may experience intense emotions, or even abrupt and wild swings. But we always return fully to the moment, releasing any hooks to our recent experience. From this position of neutrality, we are able to write the best next chapter. We are fully alive! Fully feeling. And able to fully experience what's happening right now. — From the Execudeck series, on the difference between neutrality and numbness.

“When navigating difficult relationships, what’s the difference between neutrality and numbness?

“It’s easy to confuse neutrality with non-variability. Non-variability is often achieved by developing a thick skin—becoming less reactive by keeping more out. And we may become increasingly numb in our quest to never let anything that anyone says get to us. But a higher expression of neutrality connects us more, not less, with the difficult situation. And we may experience intense emotions, or even abrupt and wild swings. But we always return fully to the moment, releasing any hooks to our recent experience. From this position of neutrality, we are able to write the best next chapter. We are fully alive! Fully feeling. And able to fully experience what’s happening right now.”

We won’t lack opportunities to practice this insight over the next four years. Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll wake up, get on the train to the office, and parse how the administration’s latest orders on crime affect my communities.

I can respond to this challenging now by taking a breath before I begin, interrupting the reflex to tighten up and lock down, insisting on a pause to feel, and disrupting the bio-neurological default to flee the present.

I don’t want to do my work numb, and I don’t want to get to 2020 carrying a hard heart.

Full presence is the hardest thing, and it’s also a gift. As we work to build solutions for the world, I hope more of us will give this gift to ourselves.

January 6, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Communities brave enough to feel in

two children walk away from the camera on a gravel path. The taller has their arm around the shorter. The shorter has their hands by their sides. — Photo credit: Annie Spratt

Justice work can be exhausting.

No one who has worked on an intractable social issue for any extended length of time would be surprised by that statement.

As much as it’s common knowledge that social activism can mean feeling sorrow or pain over suffering, it isn’t at all common to have teams that will hold space for people to feel. When change-makers grieve calamity and trauma, it may well be that they’re grieving alone.

This society tell us when and where and how and with whom it’s appropriate for us to feel and express our feelings, and “in public” is usually not among the right answers. That’s a problem.

It is challenging to engage in the ongoing work of opening fully to despair, dread, and other emotional responses that arise in response to what is happening in the world. In the absence of doing this work, many people, including those working for social change, tend to numb out or suppress the depth of their feelings and find it hard to operate based on visionary passion rather than anger or despair…

Unless we engage with our despair, we are likely to remain disempowered, numb, or angry. When we engage with it deeply enough, we unleash the power of our care and passion as the fuel that motivates our work.” —Miki Kashtan, Reweaving our Human Fabric

We need healthy peer groups to get the psychological room to feel through difficult experiences and recover enough to regain our center. Groups that don’t allow members the psychological room to feel, but encourage repression or shallow acceptance, especially in the name of productivity or grace, are setting those members up for dysfunction.

It’s not virtuous to stay on the doing treadmill for so long that you don’t have the time to pause, marvel, commiserate, or cry. These responses to social events are just as righteous as table-flipping and general outrage, and also merit respect.

Watch how your own groups and teams respond after tragedy. Do people rush to create meaning and reinforce their common narrative about a world in decline? Do you or your peers ever cover pain with fury? Do leaders exhort you to forgive before you’ve had time to reckon with the offense? Do your group members ever mourn with each other, and if so, how?

As I see a steady stream of news about death and cruelty and natural disaster and domestic abuse and airport shootings, I can’t help but think that what we need, to ground a future that’s substantively different from the horrific present, is communities that are brave enough to feel in and compassionate enough to help people when they hurt, no matter who they are.

October 5, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Your shadow precedes you

Photo by Tertia van Rensburg: A fuzzy humanoid shadow holds its open palm up to a frosted glass pane. A light source backlights them. — Photo: Tertia van Rensburg

According to Carl Jung, a person’s “shadow” represents those parts of their selves that they’re unaware of, especially facets that they might recognize in others and find repulsive.

Our shadows accompany us. They’re also often like the second quadrant in Joseph Luft’s and Harrington Ingham’s Johari Window: perceptible to others, but not obvious to us.

“We carry ourselves wherever we go,” Amma Matrona writes, “and we cannot escape temptation by mere flight.”¹

Moving to new locations means migrating our unconsciousness as well as our awareness, our unclaimed parts as well as the traits we’re most proud of. We don’t get to escape who we are, no matter how deliberate we are and no matter where we go.

Leadership doesn’t depend on where in an organizational chart we stand. If, during conflict and uncertainty, we can practice claiming our whole selves, we can be oases of wholeness in communities where it’s much more common for people to live fractured.

Shadow work includes receiving feedback from others on what they’ve noticed about us. It also involves learning from life events and treating them as data that can increase our understanding of ourselves and our part in our experiences. Most of all it requires that we as we become more aware of who we are, we also grow willing to share more with the wider world.

We don’t have to stumble from conflict to conflict, repeating the same lessons in different costumes. We can choose awareness.

Read more about Amma Matrona in Mary Earle’s The Desert Mothers. [Back to text: ◄]

July 12, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Simplify: Heart First

Photo: Elaine Casap — Photo credit: Elaine Casap

“Just look through the microscope.”

It’s a phrase based on now-mythic stories about Galileo’s unsuccessful debates with the religious leaders and church-governed philosophers of his time who, he said, refused to look at the natural world’s evidence because of their presuppositions about it.

Particularly in times of stress and conflict, one of a leader’s most important skills is the ability to simplify, to strip down premises conventionally taken for granted and so make room for observation.

By being aware of what is happening, I begin to sense how it is happening…To become aware of what is happening, I must pay attention with an open mind. I must set aside my personal prejudices or bias. Prejudiced people see only what fits those prejudices.” —John Heider

The challenge is that we’re all prejudiced in some regard. Implicit bias isn’t just something that influences how Those People Elsewhere read the world and engage us; it’s also something that influences how we read the world and engage them.

I find meditation helpful, but not because it is as Heider supposes a way for me to “set aside” my biases. Instead I find it simply gives me a little more room to recover from stings and slung barbs, to keep walking through life heart-first rather than junk-first.

Especially these days when the world is wearying and people are presumptuous, I need that. Perhaps we all do.

June 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Leadership means accepting authority

Look at the relationship between the English words authority and author. It’s almost as if this language conspired to remind us that authority is about intrinsic power to write one’s way into new realities, interpretations, and ways of being.

Authority: Origin (Latin) auctor - originator, promoter > (Latin) auctoritas > (Old French) autorite [and] (English) author > (Middle English) authority — Etymology chart via Google and Douglas Harper.

What I didn’t know until recently is that there’s also an etymological relationship between author and authentic. To be authentic means to be real and genuine; authentic also implies the first instance, source, or origin of a thing. No imitation. No down-the-assembly-line model. The authentic instance is the original.

Leaders don’t necessarily invent: we don’t all need to become an Edison or a Walker. As leaders, we do get to cultivate the prime instance of an approach or experience. Whether we create something entirely new or redevelop something old in unique ways, the one thing we’re sure to have authority over is ourselves.

Who teaches the acorn that it’s allowed to grow into an oak tree? Who approves the transition of the panther cub into an adult big cat? Who gives you permission to write, or design, or make music, or launch a business? While there’s bureaucracy in registering companies or publishing books and music, there’s no bureaucracy involved in you accepting yourself and whatever it is that you uniquely bring into the world.

There’s no need for you to seek permission or approval for whatever you are or will become. It’s not a matter of consensus.

How you work with others given who you are is a matter of consensus and respectful negotiation. But who you are is not.

Sometimes we ask for peer permission to do things we know we’re called to do. It seems humble and deferential but it’s more often a way to delay and deny our own truth. It’s a stalling tactic, and it’s also extremely effective!

Should others encourage us despite our own resistance, we can play coy and dismiss them. If others mirror our resistance and discourage us, we can treat their doubt as fact. Either way we get to dissociate from what we know and we externalize the authority we already have to make it real.

This can go on for our whole lives if we want it to: we have the authority to do that. The good news is that we also have the authority to give up the game whenever we’re ready.

Nothing’s as unnerving as a forerunner who isn’t sure they wish to race, and nothing more compelling than a leader who has committed to becoming themselves and therefore can support you in your own personal and professional unfolding.

May 31, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Leaders use their superpowers on themselves first.

A leader’s primary superpower isn’t their ability to persuade or inspire or mobilize others.

Mobilizing others is essential to leadership. Mobilizing others is co-creating space where other people can motivate themselves to take aligned, constructive action.

Mobilizing others is secondary to a leader’s ability to transcend internal resistance, work around interior shadow, and recognize that most other people are walking through life trying to do the same.

A leader’s superpower addresses, stretches, and enlightens them first. When people who have a compelling vision, are convincing, and know how to motivate others to take action nevertheless stumble over their own shadow, take it as a sign that they’ve skipped a step or two.

All the gifts and abilities we have yet fail to use for good in our own lives pile up like wood and newspapers in a hoarder’s garage. Self-awareness, self-auditing through reflection, and acting on what we learn are ways to clear space within us. That cleared space means room to acknowledge our gifts, claim our power, and use that power in the outer world with consciousness, kindness, and minimal interference.

It takes all of my energy to resist.
It takes none of my energy to surrender.” —Lench Archuleta

Resource

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Steven Pressfield).

emotional intelligence

Resource