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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

personal development

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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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Allowing yourself to change

"Allow everyone to admire any work you have done for whatever reason they have, in whatever terms they use." —Richard Wade
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.

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Building resilience

"Abundant life: Building resilience, strength, and hope. Keisha E. McKenzie | @mackenzian

I’m speaking about resilience toward the end of this week at a conference in Maryland and have been completing my talk and presentation for the group.

I’ve integrated several sources into my plans for the session and can’t wait to share it. Sources include womanist theology, critiques of conventional “death-surrogate” atonement, personal narratives, self- and community-care strategies, and a wellness audit I’ve used to keep myself grounded over the years.

One of the articles I quote from this time round is a 2014 edited version of an interdisciplinary research panel on resilience. Each researcher in the article has conducted longitudinal studies of populations that have experienced and responded to significant trauma.

Why, these researchers ask, does one person respond to trauma with balance and another develop post-traumatic stress disorder? Why does one person with PTSD recover from it and another struggle life-long? What do these varying responses teach us about what resilience is, what it’s not, and which interventions are helpful?

The article, “Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives,” is available to the public on PubMed and I highly recommend it.

Here’s one of the best anecdotes (CN: democide references):

Minnesota is a refugee destination, where we have had an influx of Cambodian men and women, as well as many other war refugees from around the world. In recent years, we have seen a great many refugees from Eastern Europe and African countries. Observing their trauma symptoms and recovery has influenced my thoughts about resilience (see Masten, 2014b). The Cambodian refugees who came to Minnesota as young people were children when they were exposed to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. In Minnesota, we have one of the largest, if not the largest, concentration of survivors in the United States from that tragic period. Many of these young people would have periodic flare ups of PTSD symptoms. To echo what Dr. Yehuda said, they did not leave their traumatic experiences and symptoms behind, yet I believe everyone would describe them as a remarkably resilient group of people. These were true survivors. When people asked us if we had a comparison group, we could find only one person in our region of the United States who represented a reasonable comparison, because he left Cambodia just before the killings began. That individual was a foot taller than any other person in our sample, likely due to the advantages in nutrition and protein intake he experienced. In other words, the comparison group did not make it out of the ‘killing fields.’ The Minnesota refugees were all survivors, and many of these young people were getting on with their lives.” —Dr. Ann Masten

Sometimes people discuss trauma recovery and imply that the best way to respond is to feel little and change nothing, to dig in and deny impacts. That approach, while very Stoic, is unlikely to help most people, who feel a lot and for whom great pain transforms everything.

With some of my deepest traumas, I’ve learned to practice the principle that some experiences will so disrupt my world that they’ll come to mark the start of the rest of my life. Because of these experiences, I’m changed and I have to change.

Change might mean I handle certain people and relationships differently. It might mean I come into a new relationship with a part of myself that was in shadow until light dawned. And it might mean more simply that I free myself to imagine new futures, set new goals, and meet new people.

What I never want it to mean for me is that my heart hardens against the world and I become rigid or cruel. It happens. I just don’t want it to happen to me.

I now accept that as much as I offer others compassion for their “periodic flare ups of PTSD symptoms,” I also need to offer myself compassion during mine. Self-compassion needs to be every bit as much a part of my wellness routine as the “real food” I insist on eating.

Making mutual compassion standard for all of us could make recovering from traumas and challenging experiences so much easier: when community wellness depends on individual wellness, being well shouldn’t rise or fall on individual grit.

Don’t underestimate the influence of the social.