growth : mackenzian

February 18, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Lorde and Morrison on identity and action

Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison were born on the same birthdate, February 18: Morrison in 1931 and Lorde in 1934.

Thanks to the good folks at Many Voices, I’ve been listening to Audre Lorde speaking to students at UCLA. The date of the lecture is unclear, but the video uploader places the session in the early 1990s.

She begins by inviting the audience to inquire of themselves, “Who am I and how do I use who I am in the service of what I believe?”

Then Lorde reads from her stories of her childhood and early adult in the East Village, New York City, learning to recognize her identity as Black, woman, and lesbian, and how each of these components of what made her her also differentiated her life experiences from those of the people around her.

The talk is about an hour long and includes an extended Q&A session with UCLA’s students on seeking and building community and being courageous.

Some of the highlights:

“We recognized oppression as oppression no matter where it came from. It is not the function of a woman—any woman—to love or to accept the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.”
“As we identify who we are, we begin the journey to use that power. It is what empowerment is all about. Power that is not used is dangerous because power is never quiescent; it’s never neutral. If I do not use my power, however relative it is; if I do not find out what it is and learn how to use it, someone else is using it. The power you do not use, is being used against us.”
“We get strong by doing the thing we need to be strong for. So there’s always that little risk. And yes, you’re afraid. We’ll always be afraid. If we wait until we’re not afraid to move, not afraid to act, [then] we’ll be sending little messages on the Ouija board… I started out like we all started out: like a coward.”
“You must have a group where you feel articulated and accepted. And if it doesn’t exist, you have a responsibility to create it.”
“Isolation is corrosive and it is dangerous. It is anti-revolutionary, too, which is why so many of us exist in isolation. Get together. If there are two of us doing something, maybe next week, there’ll be four. You need to know you are not alone. And you have a responsibility to make whoever you identify with know that they are not alone either.”

I wonder how Toni Morrison would respond to Lorde’s concept of collective courage: Morrison draws strength from a more solitary generative process.

She describes writing as an act of creation that connects her with the external world and gives her the tools to interpret the world and reinvent it. Morrison has said that the artist and writer have the power to challenge tyrannies and that they do that work by persistently creating and writing.

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear,” she wrote.

I first quoted that statement in March 2015. Six years beforehand that, Morrison explained to UC-Davis’ Pam Houston how writing allows her to experience the good news that we can continue to grow: wherever we start in our understanding of ourselves or our sense of connection to the wider world isn’t the end of our story. We can, as Lorde said, grow more courageous through disciplined action. We can perceive others more clearly as we attend to the world around us.

Toni: I feel more friendly when I am writing, nicer to people, much more generous, also wiser. I am full of a kind of tenderness toward people and all they have to hide, all they have to construct. Not pity, not sympathy, just tenderness. Knowing that the job of being a human is so hard, and it is the only job there is left—though we keep on pretending otherwise. If I am in that good place and I run into someone I dislike, I feel more human and they seem more human…

There are all sorts of ways people try to stay connected, try not to live in hate. Religion may be one of them, but for me the central thing is the writing. The art itself. Putting my intelligence and my humanity to the best possible use, and I get better because I am doing it. The writing teaches me that I can’t just reach some little plateau and say that’s it, this is the place. It is always a search.

Pam: And that is the good news.

Toni: That is the good news.”

Read the rest.

December 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Expect error

My generation, the children of West Indian immigrants, didn’t learn to look kindly on imperfection, even when it was all we had.

My mother’s mother trained perfectionism into her children by scrunching up inattentively ironed shirts and requiring the poor unfortunates to iron them again. My mother once punished me for not starting a summer project, an assignment from a teacher I’d never see again at a school I’d already left: many things were possible in this world, but her child missing an assignment was not among them even if the assignment was obsolete.

Perfection, defined as a state of flawlessness, was a good.

But researchers who study wrongness and those who study error have lots to say about how little “perfection” and “real, live people” overlap:

In the 1980s, sociologists like Charles Perrow pored over institutional documents and concluded that however uniquely horrifying, glitches were not exceptional events. They were “normal” accidents; things that were bound to go wrong when people started doing and applying science and engineering on a complicated scale. In Perrow’s account, accidents were normal because they happened with enough regularity that any institution of a sufficiently large scale could practically count on one. They happened through tiny errors in routine activities that became magnified with tragic consequences. To ignore the probability of accidents, Perrow suggested, was to live in a fantasy world.” —Joanna Radin, December 12, 2016

Accounting for errors as you plan projects isn’t about being sloppy. It’s about being wise.

Perhaps you underestimate the time it takes you to complete a task. Maybe you overestimate the contributions other team members can offer. Something comes up, and whatever the error, you have to adjust.

As Radin explains, accidents and “glitches” allow us, if we’re willing, to learn and reshape our context: “The glitch provides us with an opportunity to make a bridge between what doesn’t make sense and what could turn into knowledge… an opportunity to begin considering how things could be otherwise.”

The gift of non-attachment

A touching moment as a tiny Piping Plover chick snuggles into its parent on a sandy beach in the early morning sunlight. — Photo credit: Ray Hennessy

Recently I talked with a former colleague about the gracious way our community had held space for both of us to outgrow and leave it.

“It’s been like an incubator,” she said.
“Like an eggshell,” I said.

If you’re a growing chick, there’s no point in getting attached to your shell. It nourishes you, makes you strong, and then you have to break through it to live a mature life. If you never push against your shell, you don’t become strong. If you never break your shell, you actually die.

And if you’re the person who’s called to care for growing chicks, there’s no point in getting attached to any of them. They eat your food, soak up your heat, break their first boundary, and will fly away if unhindered. It’s not that they’re flying away from you; it’s that when they do what they’re designed to do, they will fly.

Non-attachment, then, is a gift. It isn’t indifference but rather full and non-grasping presence. It keeps disciplining tools like rules, forms, and organizational structures in their place—secondary to people. And it also applies these tools as much as they’re needed to hone and amplify people’s contributions for wider benefits.

A shell serves its chick, and not the chick, the shell.

It’s non-attachment that allows a grounded, healthy mentor to teach, guide, and counsel mentees without becoming bruised by mentees’ choices or learning process. We learn to invest in our groups and peers without being overly bonded to their outcomes; we practice giving our best without trying to wrest others’ stories away from them.

“Non-attachment” can be deeply challenging to live when all our brains want to say is “Please don’t change anything!”

But as I talked with my colleague, I realized that this was the leadership mode that has had the best consequences for me and other real people who still have growing to do.

How does non-attachment show up in your work? Send me a note to tell me about how you’ve seen it in action.

September 30, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Comparison and benchmarking: related, not identical

Four bright red balloons to the right of the shot. A building name and part of a palm tree trunk to the left. The building is cream/off white. — Photo credit: Tatiana Niño

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” so the proverb tells us.

This saying discourages us from side-eying others’ accomplishments and minimizing our own. It also warns us against envy, the kind of attention to others that corrodes our ability to embrace them and share in their joys without suspicion or spite.

There are great reasons to be careful with comparison: we don’t always see what precipitated the outward advances others make, and as Lisa Nichols says, success often involves incredibly hard, un-glamorous work and a lot of inconvenience.

At the same time, as humans, comparison is one of the basic ways we learn. Small children mirror the expressions, gestures, and language of those around them. They learn from others how to respond to and interact with their environment. And being able to distinguish between this and that, to compare similarities and contrast differences, is a life skill.

Benchmarking, a form of comparison, is a core technique of fact-based management and quality improvement. The Malcolm Baldrige quality improvement community defines benchmarking as “identifying processes and results that represent best practices and performance for similar activities, inside or outside your industry.”

So we search out people and organizations doing similar work to ours, so that we can learn which of their practices, approaches, and outcomes work really well and which we might adapt to our own situation.

We’re looking at others, not from dissociative envy or to minimize our own contributions, but so that we can make more progress more quickly. In short, benchmarking is a way to take the stairs two at a time and rapidly build on others’ success.

Who we compare ourselves to and who we benchmark our work against are important decisions, and neither of them wipes out our need to do our own work!

Apply this to your own situation and see what changes. Do you have colleagues in a similar environment? Competitors to learn from? Does your industry have expectations of or performance standards for your work? If there aren’t industry standards, are there any fair expectations for your geographical region? Use these standards to assess yourself and plan for progress of your own.

September 25, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

When good doesn’t want to be great

When I first heard Maya Angelou teaching Oprah Winfrey, “When people show you who they are, believe them,” I said amen with the rest of the viewers.

Believe them! They know themselves much better than you do.” —Maya Angelou

Just as Winfrey said, though, it’s a lesson that can be easy to affirm and challenging to apply.

People and organizations set the level they’re willing to operate at. And in both subtle and unsubtle ways, we all let others know what our level is.

A corollary to this principle is that sometimes what’s good doesn’t want to become great, and we don’t necessarily gain by trying to cajole it into wanting to.

Jim Collins‘ From Good to Great was one of the standout business management books of the mid-2000s. It highlighted eleven companies that had by then significantly outperformed their competitors for a decade and a half. Collins argued that they achieved this success metric by focusing on their most profitable skills, ensuring that their team included the right people playing the right roles, and facing up to “the brutal facts of [their] current reality, whatever they might be.”

Whether we’re in the personal sphere or doing business, we have to allow facts to supersede our preconceptions and shape the decisions we make. We can’t approach our own greatness, whatever that means for us, unless we allow that.

And that means “confronting the facts” and believing others when they declare who and what they are, even and especially if the facts are unpleasant.

August 8, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Allowing yourself to change

Allowing yourself to change is a complex thing if only because it’s as easy to become attached to our own work as it is to become accustomed to our daily routines. Just as others come to have expectations of us, we also come to have expectations of ourselves, and so when we find ourselves growing and changing despite those expectations, it can be hard to adjust and embrace the new us that’s emerging.

This morning, I came across an old advice column from one of the humanist Patheos blogs. A former Christian songwriter wrote in with some distress about hyper-religious fan praise for his oldest work, work he has since outgrown himself.

Because I recorded a couple of Christian albums, years ago, both certified gold, I have a following; people recognize me and assume I’m still a Christian. I have a Facebook fan page, where I can let fans know what I’m up to. But so many of them are devout Christians who post messages like, ‘Continue to do the Lord’s work!’ and ‘We thank the Lord for your ministry!’ But I don’t have [a] ministry! If they merely write ‘God bless you’ or something, that’s fine. But I’ve been deleting the more sanctimonious messages, because I just can’t stand them.”

This was the columnist’s response:

For centuries, artists and composers have been producing both secular and sacred art and music. For many of them, it is impossible for us to know how devoutly and sincerely they believed in the religion they were glorifying. Certainly many did, but it is likely that some did not. For some perhaps, it was never more than a gig; they did it for the money. They had to paint landscapes or saints; they had to write quartets or hymns. They had to eat.

But that makes no difference. Regardless of their private thoughts and innermost feelings, by their talent and their hard work they produced great things. Their creations give both believers and skeptics experiences of awe, astonishment, inspiration, insight, and sheer pleasure…

You don’t have to refute their beliefs or reinforce them. Take a couple of deep, slow breaths, and thank them just as you do the less overtly religious ones. Allow everyone to admire any work you have done for whatever reason they have, in whatever terms they use.” —Richard Wade

Creating steadily for years and having a rapid growth process means outgrowing your own stuff sooner or later. In fact, one of my mentors has said that should be the goal: to be at least a little strange to your Five-Years-Younger Self. I’m sure I’m winning that game!

Creating steadily for years also means generating entire audiences of people whose responses to your work you can’t control. I’ve been writing on the internet for at least a decade now, and while I closed my original weblog, there are still traces of it and my forums phase online. And I’ve been writing and speaking offline for more than twice as long. I gave my first sermon when I was 18 years old so there are still people whose perception of me is fixed to that event.

A funny thing happened with that sermon. I wrote it for oral delivery and, with some encouragement from relatives and friends, revised it for print and submitted it to a religious journal. The editor at the time took pity on me and paid me for it, but it didn’t actually run for another five years.

By the time it ran, I’d forgotten about it: it had simply become That Time I Wrote A Thing And Got US Dollars In Return. I was on my way to a congressional internship when the journal’s office asked me for an updated bio, and when it ran, I reread it.

I was mortified. It was, I thought, facile. And hokey. And the theology in the last two sections was dead-wrong.

But that wasn’t what the publication thought. It wasn’t what readers around the world thought. It wasn’t what a reviewer thought.

I wanted to hide, and my audience wanted to send me flowers.

Shortly afterwards, the same office asked me to contribute to a new project, so I was able to express some of my new wine in a wine-skin that was less stale. But if they’d never done so, I would just have had to make my own peace with an old version of myself showing up in the mirrors of Google.

Even today, I still run into people who associate me with the first article and not the second, or with congregational work I did in England, Jamaica, or West Texas, not anything I’ve contributed to in the mid-Atlantic over the last few years. There are people in the first group who don’t follow my work now, and others who actively resent my growth arc over the last decade and a half.

There’s a generosity that’s necessary to get through this. This morning I called it “grace,” but I’m not sure that’s right. It’s not unmerited. It’s not disproportionate. It’s not arbitrary or unfair.

Instead it’s truly a generosity of heart, an openness and spaciousness we can offer ourselves and therefore also offer others. There is room enough in this world for me to grow and for others to experience. I not only can’t stage-manage their experiences; I also don’t need to.

What a relief!

The energy I might invest in being embarrassed about past work is energy I don’t have to create something new for today that fits my values and communities more effectively. The attention I might spend on others’ limited perceptions of me is attention I can’t devote to audiences who appreciate and trust my voice and perspectives.

And more: focusing on what no longer fits can undermine our ability to acknowledge and build on the good our past or current contributions have already brought to the world. As Wade wrote to his correspondent, “by [artists’] talent and their hard work they produced great things.”

That good is not diminished because we grew up. And we get to be generous with others who are (sometimes despite themselves) growing up too.