Make Another Choice

A recent podcast about the five senses, introduced me to Isaac Lidsky, who at age 25, completely lost his vision. He was interviewed on the podcast and snippets of his Ted Talk were interspersed throughout the interview (link below). At the time of losing his vision completely, he recalls that he felt his life was over. He would never be able to do the things he wanted to do. Life as he knew it, was forever changed, and not for the better. Years later, with a law degree, law practice, and countless other achievements, he talks about how resolute he was in the belief that nothing good could arise out of his blindness. And how very wrong he was.

"To me, it's more about choosing what reality you want to live for yourself. So this really was the profound insight that really made losing my sight a great blessing in my life. I felt I was living a race against the clock, a race against time, a race against blindness until I decided to really take control of my own reality."

What I found most profound or enlightening about his insight was this: 

"whenever I felt afraid, I'd ask myself two questions - what precisely is my problem, and what precisely can I do about it? You know, I knew blindness was going to ruin my life [at 25], but that was a reality that I was choosing, that my mind had created for me, and I was choosing to believe. And I decided to make another choice."  

He decided to make another choice. Rather than following the pathway that places blindness as a deficiency, as something that is wrong or less than in comparison to having sight, he turned away from that narrative and chose something else. He identified his problem, and developed a solution. Sometimes, fear of the unknown controls us. We invent, speculate, and/or presume a variety of horrors will befall us when let fear reign. In our minds, fear of X is powerful and we give it credence over any other possible reality or outcome. We miss the less gloomy side of the coin: that the event, behavior, situation, or activity that we fear may actually bring us new insight, experience, and knowledge.

For Lidsky, going blind gave him vision, as he understands it. It allowed him to live with his eyes wide open in ways he had not been able to do when he had his sight. He shared his learning:

"See beyond your fears, they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. Choose to see through them, choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility. I chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined."

His words and sentiments resonate with me personally as I continue on my journey of starting my own business, believing I can be a research and evaluation project lead, or being a competitive triathlete. The what ifs, fear of failure, and associated worry sometimes pushing me closer to giving up than I would like to admit. 

What Lidsky outlined about fear and choice is also relevant right now, today, in our current social, political, and cultural climate. Powerfully relevant. Fear of the "other" and its explicit reification in policy is at a peak. This fear is largely directed at non-white Americans, immigrants, and refugees. In particular, the fear (white) people have of individuals from Muslim countries, and Muslim Americans is taking over. Many, many people are choosing to believe that all Muslim people are a threat to their safety. They are not choosing to see through those fears to a reality that doesn't support this claim. They are invested in the bogeyman story in this context because it's easier to give in to a fear, than it is to make a different choice, as Lidsky suggests we do. This hyper-exaggeration of a perceived threat and the resultant narrative of fear, is leading to heinous and oppressive initiatives that many argue are indisputably unconstitutional. 

We each have choices. Our choices are different and complicated, and nuanced based on our identities and how we move through the world. And we still have choices about how we want to treat other people and be remembered. Choices about how and what we communicate or how we embrace challenge and change or eschew it. Lidsky ended his Ted Talk by quoting/paraphrasing Helen Keller: "the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." I think right now, many of us who can see, lack vision because we are blanketed in our fears of something we don't truly understand: "terrain uncharted and undefined." Embrace difference, make different choices, and open yourself up to alternate possibilities.



Ted Radio Hour, "The Five Senses" (Jan 19, 2017). Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=510624029

The Incompleteness of Words

I have started and stopped writing a blog post on the recent U.S. election several times over this week. I have largely hesitated to write something on the results because I don't even know how to write something that captures the magnitude and nuance of what transpired. I also have nervousness in sharing my thoughts as a woman, business owner and non-citizen. However, this blog is about my observations on culture and communication in an effort to provoke thought and in some cases change. To be silent is to be complicit; separating myself from those who voted against the civil rights of others denies my culpability as someone who benefits from whiteness. As a budding blogger committed to social justice and social change, I have to say something, however lacking or insufficient, to address the enormity of what happened.

In the wake of November 8th, I, like many others find myself at a loss for words. I am unsure what to say, what I can say, or what I should say. I don't profess to think I can say anything that will make the result better or less painful. I have felt a complex fabric of emotions, ranging from emptiness to disgust to disbelief. Trump's election impacts me directly as a woman and (aspiring) ally and impacts many people I care about in devastating ways.

The pain I have experienced, absorbed and witnessed from, and through, other people online and in person is indescribable over the past six days. The President-elect's campaign rhetoric, woven deeply with racist, sexist, classist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic sentiment, exposed a deep divide in this country. Because of this, many people, particularly those most marginalized are legitimately scared about what comes next. They see and feel danger and risk in our new President-elect's policies and ideals. And those feelings are absolutely legitimate. The language of exclusion is a "normal" experience for immigrants, folks of color, trans people, LGB people, folks with disabilities, and women in this country and that reality goes a long way to explain the "how" of why we find ourselves in this place. For many, Trump's election was not surprising. As I scroll through the various Facebook posts and news articles, as I speak to friends, and hear from students, the fear of what is next is palpable. I am at once numbed and enraged by it.

My fear about the totality of what may come next is punctuated by my deep disappointment at the fact the USA couldn't bring itself to elect a woman president. I feel an immense sense of sadness over this. I don't think I realized just how invested I was in seeing a woman in the highest office in the U.S. until I woke up to the news it wasn't happening. That Hillary Clinton was not elected is unsurprising in the most pedestrian of ways, and yet I find myself ping ponging back and forth between this acknowledgement and the shock of it all. It feels like a bad dream that I desperately hope to wake from. I have worked for years to support women and girls, to break down gender and gender stereotypes that restrict and inhibit all of us from achieving our potential, and in particular to end violence against women. I cannot shake the fact that millions of Americans of all gender identities heard Trump's multiple comments about women and decided that it wasn't enough for them to cast their vote elsewhere. Women's value in contemporary U.S. society is so insignificant that voters just passed over his disdain for 50% of the population. They heard his comments and simply explained them away, were indifferent, or worse, acknowledged they were problematic and still voted for him. This is also true for his comments on Muslim people, refugees, and Mexican immigrants. His racism and misogyny was not a deal breaker for the 60 million people who voted and the many million more who did not.  

The undercurrent of sexism was, and is, so very apparent. One young woman interviewed on NPR about why she either didn't vote or voted for someone else was as follows (paraphrased): "Hillary is really smart, really experienced and she can absolutely get the job done...but she isn't as charming as Barack Obama." Charming? Really. That is the key qualification you look for over and above smarts, experience, and ability to do the job? Another person shared that while Trump is "clearly crazy" (recognize the ableist language here), he voted for him anyway. I don't even know how to respond to these kinds of sentiments. How do women compete in a culture that minimizes sexual violence against them and thinks "volatile," "reckless" and "erratic" are more compelling qualities in a man, than electing a smart and vastly qualified woman?

As John Oliver stated in his last show of the season, we must constantly remind ourselves that this reality should not become our new normal. Years ago, at a multicultural retreat I was facilitating, a colleague shared that "we (those with privilege) must smell the air, even when it doesn't smell for us." I have never forgotten his statement. This could not be more vital right here, right now, particularly for men and for white people. If we explain this election away by saying well, Hillary wasn't charming, or Hillary had too much baggage, we legitimize a culture and a system that endorsed and elected an openly bigoted man by (in part) blaming the woman who ran against him. If we try to persuade ourselves that everything will be okay, that should be our sign that we have lost sight of the abnormality of what just happened and of our own privilege.

I acknowledge that my experience of the result is mediated by my own identities, my own lack of voting power, and the reality that I am tied deeply to those who voted for Donald Trump through my social identities (in particular, white women). I am ashamed and embarrassed but neither of these feelings will slow the tide of bigotry that has been uncovered during this campaign. As I mentioned earlier, racism and sexism are normal experiences for millions of people in the U.S., but we cannot let that continue. We must not get complacent as the days turn into weeks and weeks into months and the election fades from our view. As incomplete and imperfect as these words are (because there is just.so.much), I hope they are helpful, even minimally, for anyone who reads this blog. In peace.

Empathy and Power

I listened to an interesting podcast the other day on the issue of power. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who teaches at UC Berkeley, shared his research that found those who are generous, kind and empathetic are typically people who don’t hold much power in society. This didn’t much surprise me, I think it makes intuitive sense. His research also demonstrated that those employees, people, and leaders who experience the most respect from others, and thus social power, are those who are emotionally intelligent, kind and generous. Displaying empathy therefore is a force that can lead you to acquire social power. This was interesting to me because I have heard time and again that being “too kind” or “too empathetic” can lead you to be either taken advantage of or left behind. Gender constructions position women most often in the “kindness” box and we see that few women acquire extensive, large-scale social or structural power. Indeed, if they are perceived as too kind or too empathetic then society judges them harshly as weak.

What was most fascinating about Keltner’s research however, was that when folks acquire power, they tend to lose their capacity to be empathetic: “once we feel powerful, we lose - or our capacity to empathize and to know what others are thinking really is diminished.” In gaining power within whatever system a person exists, they can become less invested in others and their empathy networks in the brain are actually quieted (research by Keely Muscatell and Supvindeer Obdea shows this). Folks who hold a lot of power and privilege, the research shows, have inactive empathy networks in their frontal lobes. Keltner on Muscatell and Obdea’s research: “if you come from a position of privilege and power, the classic empathy networks in the frontal lobes of your brain are not even active when you're thinking about another [person]. So this is a very deep effect of what power does to our empathic capacities.”

I am not a scientist nor do I know much about the brain, however, I found this to be pretty interesting. The interviewer asked about billionaires who are also very philanthropic but the researcher’s response was to point out that the philanthropy might actually be a very small percentage of their actual wealth versus someone with less who gives a greater percentage of their income/assets. If someone only gives a tiny percentage of their wealth, even though this figure might be enormous, does that actually make them particularly generous or empathetic to other people’s needs?


When I think about leadership, I think fondly of those leaders I have encountered who truly seem to care about those around them and their communities. Sadly, these people I can probably count on one hand. Most leadership lessons I have experienced have been lessons in how not to treat others. Individuals I have known in workplaces who I might categorize as empathetic and generous, when rising in the ranks and acquiring more (structural) power within that system, have been unpredictable in how they have then continued to maintain connection with their colleagues and continued to exercise empathetic and generous leadership. Power corrupts, we have all heard that phrase, but research is showing that corruption isn’t just a selfish desire to maintain one’s power per se, but instead a dampening of the parts of the brain that oversee empathy. Gaining power creates a physiological reaction that diminishes our actual ability to be empathetic to others. What does this mean for leadership in general? How do we each maintain a connectivity to kindness and generosity when our brain changes as we gain power – social, political, structural, financial or otherwise? We can see this playing out right now in the U.S. presidential election.


Hidden Brain podcast on power: http://www.npr.org/2016/09/06/492305430/the-perils-of-power

Morning Running

For the longest time, I have wanted to be a morning person. More specifically, I have wanted to be a morning runner. I absolutely see the benefits of running in the morning:

1. You get your run done, and so as you fatigue from working all day, the workout isn't hanging over your head, glaring at you from its perch at 5pm.

2. It sets you up for the day. Running in the morning feels good. You accomplish something before 8am and it can put a pep in your step for the rest of the day.

3. Depending on where you run, it is beautiful - particularly if you see the sunrise.

4. It is cooler. This is very relevant right now as we edge into the summer months in Colorado.

And yet, despite these wonderfully compelling benefits, I have yet to maintain any kind of morning rhythm with running. I can get up early to swim and I have managed it with cycling, if I head downstairs to ride on my trainer indoors or if I am cycling to work. In both cases, I feel good, sometimes even great, after achieving an athletic goal that early. I know I will feel the same way with running as on the rare occasions I have run before work, I have felt awesome and accomplished.

I am not a "just get up and run" kind of runner. I need to eat something, and running 8 miles on coffee alone does not cut it. If I need to eat something, then I need to give myself time to digest said food before heading out for my run. That's at least 45 mins that I need before heading out the door, by which time I can usually convince myself to stay in bed. Then there is the stiffness I feel in the morning, and shaking that out into some kind of rhythm takes a fair number of miles. This adds more time to the run, which inevitably I never have because I snoozed too many times. And so I persuade myself that I won't have time anyway, and I might as well just stay in bed. You can see the cycle of excuses and justifications I can give for why morning runs don't work for me (unless it's a race, and then miraculously I can manage it).

In an effort to curb my morning snooze routine and the "I'll just do it later" voice in my head, I have read numerous articles from running gurus to personal blogs about tips to get up and out the door early. I have tried:

- laying my running clothes out at night
- getting my breakfast out and ready to reduce prep time
- determining a route the night before
- setting the alarm 15 minutes earlier so that I have time to snooze
- going to bed earlier
- gradually setting my alarm clock 5 minutes earlier over a period of several days so that I gently and incrementally get to the time I need

Yeah, even with these efforts, I have had minimal success. So what am I missing? I don't agree that some folks just aren't morning people, because I think it is all about shifting your lifestyle and making different choices over time (caveat: sleep disorders and other physical issues will factor in to one's capacity to rise early). I have clearly demonstrated I can get my butt out of bed for other forms of exercise and to race, and when I go to bed early, I am getting a good 7-8 hours of sleep. I am thinking it really is about my attitude and mental fortitude and perhaps, a socially constructed dislike of mornings. What did mornings ever do to me? 

Since tenacity is something I have been told I possess, I am going to try this whole morning running again, this time with feeling. And to reference my previous blog post, I am going to try and act "as if" I am a morning runner. I don't run every day but I do something most days, and I am going to endeavor to get all workouts done before 8am in the next month and report back in July as to how it went and what I learned. I will call it the "5am Project" and David, my partner in running and life is going to do it with me (actually it was his idea). Misery loves company, right? Although, this is going to be great, not miserable. Absolutely great! Positive attitude. Check. Got it. #icandothis...?

Wish us luck!

As If...

I just read an article in The Guardian about the need for us to stop looking for ourselves. Specifically, that we should spend less time trying to find ourselves and more time aiming to behave and engage with the "as if." The article argued that our incessant need to find ourselves is ultimately self-centered and simply keeps us stuck in one place. If we try to find ourselves, what we may find is ultimately fleeting, intermittent, and "real" only inasmuch as the self we find exists in that moment. There are so many products marketed around this need for us to find ourselves - retreats, books, meditation sessions - that it is easy to fall into step with the rhetoric. I need to know who I am, and there is always someone ready to charge me to assist me on my journey.

Capitalism and financial exploitation of our lost selves aside, I found The Guardian article thought provoking. The "as if" trajectory the authors discussed is intriguing. Basically, as I understood it, we should work to look forward, versus within, and engage with the world through an "as if I were ______" mentality or ritual. This perspective helps us transform into perhaps what we would like to be, or perhaps uncovers who we really are without looking internally for it. The example in the article was that of hide and seek with a child. In that game, the adult often pretends to be inept at hiding as a means to make it easy for the child to find them. The adult in this example is behaving as if they are fallible so the child can be triumphant, an experience children rarely have. Both adult and child know it's a game, but "by taking on these roles, you have both broken from your usual patterns." (Puett & Gross-Loh, Stop Trying to Find Yourself, pub'd 5/8/16).

It is in the pretend, in the untruth, that you are able to break any negative patterns you have developed. We can work to change those patterns "as if" things were different in that moment. I don't interpret their argument to mean that we should lie to ourselves daily, or ignore struggles we are having in the moment, but rather, we should not focus on finding ourselves internally as a means to break our negative patterns. We should look beyond ourselves and perform, pretend, behave as if we were something else. In so doing, we open up opportunities for discovery and transformation, for change, that cannot be achieved by looking inward. I really like what they said, drawing on Chinese philosophers some 2000 years ago:

"Consider the self the way that they did: there is no true self and no self you can discover in the abstract by looking within. Such a self would be little more than a snapshot of you at that particular moment in time. We are messy, multifaceted selves who go through life bumping up against other messy, multifaceted selves. Who we are at any given moment develops through our constantly shifting interactions with other people" (Puett & Gross-Loh, Stop Trying to Find Yourself, pub'd 5/8/16).

Judith Butler, a philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist to name just a few, has written extensively on the concept of performativity as it relates to gender. She argues that gender is constantly reinforced through our daily iterations and performances of it. Performativity is not the same as performance. Gender is not something we "put on" or "act" out in the sense of the theater. It is iterative and we all engage daily in rituals and behaviors that create, re-create, and propel the construction of gender forward making it seem or feel natural and "real." It is complicated to say the least. I bring it up because thinking about behaving as if something else were real as a means to break unhealthy or negative patterns reminds me of it. While gender performativity isn't about breaking a pattern, but rather creating and reinforcing one, in the context of engaging in as if rituals (we are happy instead of sad, or calm instead of angry), we can transform ourselves and move into that state of being. The connection I make here is messy and definitely imperfect, but I think it speaks to the fluidity of our identities and reinforces how looking within does not hold all the answers marketers and our social mileu would have us believe. We must overcome the self to be able to move away from any negative conceptions of manifestations of the self. The self then, is performative, and we can re-create it (or the negative patterns that haunt us), through the repetition of as if rituals. By entering "an alternate reality in which we draw on different sides of ourselves...each time we do so we come back slightly changed" (Puett & Gross-Loh, Stop Trying to Find Yourself, pub'd 5/8/16).

To read the full article, visit: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/08/stop-trying-to-find-yourself

Motivation: In Work, Training, and Life

For several weeks earlier this year, I struggled with motivation, particularly motivation in my training. Up until a few months ago, I was missing workouts or finding ways to limit them. My ability to manage my job, life, and training felt out of balance. About a month ago, I made a conscious choice to commit to do every training session. As my coach told me, I “get” to exercise; it is never a “have to.”

Many of us don’t think about or don’t respond to the reality that we are all temporarily abled bodied. We are temporarily able to engage in rigorous activity and that ability could be lost at any time. The risk that one day our mobility might no longer be as it is today, is real. Yet, even when we know folks who have struggled with physical changes to their bodies, if it’s not in our immediate foreground, it lacks any power to change our own behavior. We know it could be, perhaps, maybe, kind of, but it isn’t right now, so why think about it? I have endeavored to remind myself of this when my motivation is slipping away to re-orient myself to my training as a choice and as something I get to do. It isn’t an obligation, it isn’t something I drag around with me like a ball and chain. It is something that has positive benefits and gets me outside and away from the pull of the sofa.

Motivation is of course a complex matter. Sometimes we just cannot motivate ourselves to get up and outside into activity and there are very real cognitive and biological reasons for that. I think about this inner struggle I have experienced with training – the “should I/shouldn’t I” conversation that happens almost daily in my head – and compare it to my professional life. Motivation at work is a real issue for many of us. I believe it is connected to the need for change, intellectual stimulation, or something new and interesting. However, I don’t think folks experiencing a lack luster work environment or a lack of interest in their work always see it as such. Blah becomes the new normal and ceases to be noticeably problematic. I have talked a lot about stagnancy in the professional realm before now. In particular, how employees lacking in professional cultivation by their employer stay at organizations for years and cease to grow personally and professionally. This stagnancy impacts organizational culture over time and slowly puts the brakes on innovation and opportunity. Stagnancy can impede the forward momentum of your business as much as stagnancy in training can impede progress toward your athletic goals.

Stagnancy and motivation are linked. When motivation is waning among employees or there is a lack of energy about the future and what could be, that’s an indicator that stagnancy has, or is about to take hold. The responsibility lies with the employer to remove the collective hand from the brake and inspire something different. Employers should encourage a culture of constant professional development so that folks don’t fall into low-risk, uninspired ruts. That is not to say that employees don’t have some responsibility here. They have to pick up what their conscientious employer is throwing down. Much like I have to work with, and listen to my coach as I struggle through periods of low motivation. This body of mine is not invincible, it is permeable and it is vulnerable despite what I can make it do. I work hard to make it strong, but I must remind myself not to take it for granted, not to get stagnant. In work, as in training, I must check in with myself and be honest about when I am stuck. We should all strive to not take work life for granted and simply sink back down into our sofas instead of rising to the challenge and opportunity of something new. Put another way, I must resist the urge in work and training to choose comfort over possibility. *

*credit for that last line goes to my fabulous work friend, Trish.