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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

self-awareness

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Respecting the evidence

Learn something. If an action or a pattern doesn't work or isn't healthy, stop. And then don't start again.

Once upon a time (last year), after I’d moved to yet another state (NY) and found a place to live in a tough market in a rather unreasonable amount of time (three weeks), someone who loves me very much called me “determined.”

I translated that affirmation as “willful,” and I laughed as I thanked her for it.

Willfulness involves a strong intention, the ability to drive from concept to act, and the power to push through resistance. It’s a trait I inherited from all branches of my family tree, and so no one who knows my people should be surprised that I’m good at it and only improving with age.

As I type this, I’m mostly laughing at myself. Willfulness can mean drive, and it can also mean fact-resistance. I have the capacity to keep on pushing despite jeers and storms, and I also have the capacity to be stubborn and stuck.

Determination and willfulness are both ways to honor purposeful commitment. I only offer the full force of my intentions when I believe something is worth committing to, and I think most people are similar to me in this.

In other words, one of the things that irks me most about my fundamentalist brethren—doggedness—is a trait I have too.

It means I’ll almost never give up on a course too soon: I’m more inclined to turn my ship a little late. Because I know that my default is Hanging In There™, I use all possible evaluation tools to disrupt my default, to keep me strategic and “on time.”

I’m learning from my own experiences and my observation of others’ experiences that nothing thwarts progress so easily and so thoroughly as failure to rightly read the data and integrate it into new action.

If something doesn’t work or isn’t healthy, a teacher told me to my face last year, don’t do it again. 

I reread that line this week and felt exposed. Because it’s really that easy to self-delude: to imagine there are more degrees of flex in a rule than there are, to perceive a wider span of openness among relatives than exists, and to assert greater freedom in an organization than actually goes to participants at my level.

After my face flushed, though, I was able to swallow the wisdom again.

In every context where my choices matter, it’s up to me to pay attention to the outcomes of my assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors. And if those outcomes aren’t up to snuff, it’s up to me to change something.

Ultimately, the thing that proves learning is changed action.

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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.

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

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Shadow-boxing

When we see others as evil, unable to care, or in some fundamental way immune to transformation, then, if they can’t be ignored, the only available strategy is to overpower and vanquish them.” —Miki Kashtan

During the spring and early summer when the birds in this region are nesting, a few things happen.

First, we invest extra money in seed. There are more than eighteen bird species that live around our house, and they eat everything by the pound.

Second, the male birds become extra territorial.

Most of the birdfeeders are near windows so that anyone in the house can watch the birds from indoors. But this also means that birds sometimes see their reflections in the glass as they fly up to eat.

For some reason, smaller birds seem especially prone to the illusion that another bird is just a glance away, looking at them, staring them down, and menacing.

Every so often at this time of year, we hear the thunk-thunk-thunk of a bird ramming itself into a window with wings extended, trying to play chicken with its mirror image.

Thunk. That’ll teach him!

Thunk. Who does he think he is, flying up on me like that?

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. 

And a bird can easily thunk himself unconscious doing this.

I empathize.

Two small red-and grey-feathered birds eat sesame and sunflower seeds from a blue plastic birdfeeder. Behind them is a large lawn with criss-crossing mower lines. Toward the back of the photo is a road.
Two finches at breakfast. Photo © Keisha E. McKenzie

If I’d like to eat from life’s buffet in peace rather than bash myself unconscious, I need to come to terms with my own reflection. I can’t make progress if I can’t recognize and accept myself, if I catch glimpses of myself as I navigate the world yet render myself a threat to be overpowered and vanquished.

The biggest danger to the nesting bird is not the external predator or competitor. It is his own reflection.